Neocons think of the world as a giant game of Risk. This world view is narcissistic, simple-minded and dangerous. But here it is, exemplified by a CIA director:
Glenn Greenwald offered this detailed description of what it means to be a neocon.
Have you ever wondered about the horrors the U.S. (through its CIA) has caused to the people of Syria? 500,000 dead and 10 million people displaced. Jeffrey Sachs explained this on Morning Joe:
I think we have to step back and not put this in partisan terms. This is a US mistake that started seven years ago, and I remember the day on on your show, when President Obama said, Assad must go. And I looked at you and Joe, and I said, how is he going to do that? Where is the policy for that right? And we know they sent in the CIA to overthrow Assad. The CIA and Saudi Arabia, together in covert operations, tried to overthrow Assad. It was a disaster. Eventually, it brought in both ISIS as a splinter group to the jihadists that went in. It also brought in Russia.
So we have been digging deeper and deeper and deeper. What we should do now is get out and not continue to throw missiles, not have a confrontation with Russia. Seven years has been a disaster under Obama, continuing under Trump. This is what I would call the permanent state. This is the CIA. This is Pentagon wanting to keep Iran and Russia out of Syria, but no way to do that.
And so we have made a proxy war in Syria. It's killed 500,000 people, displaced 10 million. And I'll say predictably so, because I predicted it seven years ago, that there was no way to do this and that it would make a complete chaos. So what I would plead to President Trump is get out like his instinct told him, by the way, that was his instinct. But then all the establishment, the New York Times, The Washington Post, the Pentagon, everybody said, no, no, that's irresponsible, but his instinct is right, get out. We've done enough damage seven years, and now we really risk a confrontation with Russia that is extraordinarily dangerous, reckless.
Fascinating discussion about Ukraine, censorship and the insanity of the neocons (of the U.S. and western Europe). Here's an excerpt from a much longer conversation titled "Gambling with Nukes" by Matt Taibbi and Walter Kirn.
Matt Taibbi 0:16
There's a gamble implicit in it. You are firing missiles at a nuclear power and you are gambling that they are not going to fire them back, right? And there was, there were actually quotes from American officials talking about how, you know the real irresponsible people were the Russians. They were the ones you know, who were being irresponsible. Let's see what was the quote? The EU foreign policy chief Joseph Burrell said it's not the first time that Putin plays the nuclear gamble, okay? And this was before the launch of the British missiles, and after the launch of the of the ATACMS missiles. And then, and then this guy, [British Prime Minister, [Keir] Starmer, who comes out, and he looks like a cross of Max Headroom and Noel Coward. I mean, like, I can't even that the whole presentation is so disturbing. This like kind of blinking creature who speaks in that bizarre accent, just repeating catch phrases over and over again while he talks about firing missiles at Russia. It just seems crazy, right? And then that is succeeded by new news that came out that, apparently, the French are going to be next, and they're going to, they're going to be sending something called SCALP missiles into Russia. And, you know, then we get the ICBM fired back.
Walter Kirn 1:59
Well, they're, they're all they're all making themselves targets, aren't they? I mean, they're lining up. Should there be any doubt about the legitimacy? Who cares about legitimacy? Who cares about all the rules anymore these? Who cares about the norms? Dude, they just broke the biggest norm in history, which was to send our missiles into a nuclear state to land and explode. That's the biggest norm in American or world history, since those kind of things were invented, frankly, so the rules based international order--that's out the window. Norms are out the window, not shooting missiles into the home territory of the greatest nuclear power next to the United States is out the window. All of this being led by a lame duck American president who is all week in South America, while his vice president, who just ran for president, is vacationing in Hawaii. Well, Aloha. The whole mask is off.
The thing that scares me is how these people ever expect that they and their party will be taken seriously for five seconds should they ever try to float a peace message or a humanitarian message. Again, the party of social justice, and in England, the left wing party, the Labor Party, to which Starmer belongs, are at a moment when we have actually, in the United States, the center, the crown, of this power structure, voted out our executive It is beyond insane, and it will not end well. Matt, just as I was upset on Monday, I can tell you that next week we will be even more upset. Things are going to happen, and things are already happening every day, when this missile went off this morning. Every power in the world that has modern warning systems had an alarm go off right for the first moments after its launch. The United States had to assume that it was under nuclear attack.
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What follows is an excerpt from a Nov 20, 2024 discussion between Glenn Greenwald and Tucker Carlson. This is a critically important discussion regarding recent developments in the Ukraine War and related U.S. Propaganda:
Glenn Greenwald [00:18:53] Tucker, there's nobody I'm certain of this in the United States, just an average, ordinary American voter who believes that their life is affected in any way by the question of who rules various provinces in the Donbass in eastern Ukraine. Nobody thinks about Ukraine, let alone the Donbass, let alone eastern Ukraine. It's an incredibly complex situation there in terms of the people's allegiances, which are far closer to Moscow than they are to Kiev. The question of what that territory should be, should it be somehow autonomous, should it be used as a buffer against the West? The whole framework, as you well know, and as other people have pointed out, when Russia agreed to the reunification of Germany, which was obviously an extraordinary thing for the Russians to agree to, given the Russian history in the 20th century with respect to Germany, when they opened, the Berlin Wall fell and they allowed the eastern and the western parts of Germany to reunite and to become part of the West and become part of the EU. The only concession they extracted in exchange for that was with reunification. NATO's now moving eastward, closer to our border in a country that has devastated our country twice in two world wars, invaded Russia twice, killed tens of millions of Russian citizens. The only thing we need as a security guarantee in exchange for allowing that is that NATO will never expand one inch eastward beyond what was East Germany and the United States agreed to that. And immediately in the 90s, an administration, the administration started talking about it and implementing NATO's expansion eastward toward Russia. Exactly what was promised to Gorbachev the United States would not do in exchange for them agreeing to reunification. And why? Why? Why did we need to expand eastward toward Russia. And now it's not just eastward in general. It's going directly up to the Russian border on the part of their border that has been invaded twice in Ukraine to destroy Russia. And both of those world wars, we also participated in the change of government. We removed the democratically elected leader of Ukraine before his constitutional term was expired in 2014 because we perceived him as being too friendly to Moscow, which is what the Ukrainians voted for and replaced him. [U.S. State Department's] Victoria Nuland constructed a government and they was replaced by a government that was more pro-U.S.. Imagine if the Russians engineered a coup in Mexico to take out the government because they were too friendly to us and put in a hard line, pro Russian, anti-American, anti-NATO president. Imagine how threatening we would regard that as. And that's exactly what we did in Ukraine. The question is, though, this has nothing to do with the national security of the American people. No American is threatened by who governs Ukraine. What they're threatened by is what the United States is doing in Ukraine, including this most recent act.
... This is not a lame duck decision and it's not like there was any emergency to it. It wasn't there was no emergency to it. They just wanted to escalate it because they thought Trump wouldn't. And so they did.
Tucker [00:27:52] It puts us in this remarkable moment where the only adult is Vladimir Putin. This person, we've been told, is Hitler and deranged, crazy, dying of nine different kinds of cancer can't be trusted like the only reason we're not. I mean, we're all relying on his restraint. That's just a fact right now. How weird is that?
I just I hate them so much and I really think they deserve it. And it's not just that they lie about everything. It's like they lie about everything and then they have the nerve to morally judge us. If you just watched even just the last few weeks of the Trump election, they're not in the business of reporting the news. They're totally just in the business of making you feel like you're a bad person if you don't fall in line with the regime.
America has this giant war machine, right? We're always at war. We're the most war-hungry country in the world. Even if we're taking a little bit of a break from a war, we'll fight two more proxy wars while we do that. America looks back at the 90s--Bill Clinton--as the time of peace and prosperity. We call it peace because we only fought a war in Serbia and had a blockade around Iraq, and we're bombing the crap out of Iraq, with a few other military interventions in there too. You know, the UN estimated that Bill Clinton's sanctions and bombing regime of Iraq--everyone just thinks of George H.W. Bush's war and W's war--but Bill Clinton was bombing Iraq and he had a full blockade around the country. The UN estimated that 500,000 children died of starvation or malnutrition due to the blockade. Now, I've heard people argue, by the way, that that number is exaggerated. Maybe it wasn't 500 that maybe it was only 100,000. So that's the time that we consider "peace" when we were just starving 100,000 children to death in Iraq. And everybody in the corporate media are in the business every single one of those wars. You've sold them. Everyone. My entire life. The media sold those wars and you're gonna morally look down on me. You're gonna judge me, motherfucker? You're in the business of baby murder. Get the fuck out of here. You're looking down, judging an American because maybe I'm going to vote for Donald Trump? Or maybe I dare to question the results of the last election? Fuck you!