Entries associated with the tag "Rick Perlstein":

Former CIA Middle East officer Robert Baer in Time:

"Strengthening the Administration's case for a strike on Iran, there's a belief among neo-cons that the IRGC [Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps] is the one obstacle to a democratic and friendly Iran. They believe that if we were to get rid of the IRGC, the clerics would fall, and our thirty-years war with Iran over. It's another neo-con delusion, but still it informs White House thinking. And what do we do if just the opposite happens — a strike on Iran unifies Iranians behind the regime? An Administration official told me it's not even a consideration. 'IRGC IED's are a casus belli for this Administration. There will be an attack on Iran.'"

Somewhere along here the Bush administration has gone from wilfully ignorant to batshit crazy. The lesson going back at least to World War II is that bombing doesn't make the bombed population love the bombers, it unites them behind their leaders, no matter how evil.

Speaking of wilful ignorance, Rick Perlstein corrects some right-wing lies about Vietnam here. More here if you need a refresher course.

Of course, the spectacle of a right-wing president tying his foolish war to a liberal president's foolish war is bound to make one look around for alternatives. I have said, and will say, a lot of harsh things about dogmatic libertarianism, but one question libertarians -- unlike conservatives -- can be counted on to ask is, "Is this war really necessary?" The other day the Cato Institute's Jonathan Logan put it this way:

"President Bush's strategy for Iraq amounts to playing for time and hoping for a miracle. Bizarrely, the president has now invoked the Vietnam analogy in an effort to shore updomestic support for the war by reminding us that bad things happened after we left. This is true. It is also worth remembering that U.S. soldiers stopped dying after we left, and that the 'dominoes' that were to have fallen didn't fall. The United States won the Cold War just a decade and a half later. Our defeat in Vietnam did not prevent victory in the Cold War, and defeat in Iraq will not ensure defeat in the struggle against terrorism."

A couple of snapshots, from the reinterpreted past and the ghastly present.

* Chicago's excellent Rick Perlstein, author of Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus, argues that fraud, deception, and lawbreaking are essential to modern-day conservatism, and calls to witness what happened when he made his case at a conservative conference in New Jersey in 2005:

"How did this roomful of 'conservative intellectuals,' including those beside me on the dais, respond to my argument that Richard Nixon loved conservatives specifically for their willingness, nay eagerness, to break the law? One of them, another YAF [Young Americans for Freedom] founder, M. Stanton Evans... quipped, 'I didn't like Nixon until Watergate.' Everyone laughed. Because it was - you know - a 'joke.'"

* Having failed at warmaking, Republicans are trying their hands at metaphor, with predictable results, collected by the Center for American Progress. You've probably heard Indiana Rep. Mike Pence's notorious equation of his heavily guarded trip to a Baghdad market to shopping at "any open-air market in Indiana in the summertime."

CAP also found downstate Illinois Rep. John Shimkus: "Imagine my beloved St. Louis Cardinals are playing the much despised Chicago Cubs. Who wins? We know it's the team that stays on the field." ("He's stealing second -- here's the throw -- it's in time -- he's dead!")

And Ohio's Rep. John Boehner likened Iraq to a small plastics and packaging company he used to run: "I have benchmarks every month, but if I didn't meet the benchmarks and if I missed the profit margin, I didn't shut down the business." (CAP: "100 U.S. soldiers weren't killed every month if Boehner couldn't sell enough bubble wrap.")