Know Your NeoCon Attack Dogs

“His presence here has never contributed to Turkish-American relations, and it never will. If we want to address the reasons for anti-Americanism, Edelman must be issue one. As long as Edelman stays in Turkey, the chill wind disturbing bilateral relations will last.”

In his March 17, 2005 column, Turkish journalist Ibrahim Karagul also called U.S. Ambassador Eric S. Edelman “the least-liked and trusted American ambassador in Turkish history” and a man who “acts more like a colonial governor than an ambassador.”

It is this same Eric S. Edelman who recently took it upon himself to overstep Secretary of Defense Robert Gates and reply personally to Senator Clinton’s letter to Gates requesting information on contingency plans for the U.S. withdrawal from Iraq with such an attack that she felt it necessary to take his reply to the press.

Back in 2003, Edelman, who had spent the previous two years in Vice President Cheney’s office as Principal Deputy Assistant for National Security Affairs, developing the reasoning for invading Iraq, was sent to Turkey, arriving shortly after Turkey had decided to not allow the U.S. to attack Iraq from the North through Turkey.

Turkey had spent decades in battle with Kurdish rebels, a party called the PKK that demanded Kurdish independence, with close to 40,000 dead. But their leader, Abdullah Ocalan, had been captured and tried in 1999, and had undergone a change of heart, apologizing for the violence and calling for peaceful solutions. Turkey did not want to be a part of the U.S. war.

With the U.S. invasion of Iraq, and its support of the Kurds, Turkey soon found itself again in battle with the PKK, whose members suddenly were re-armed with weapons made available by the U.S.

Today Turkey has 140,000 troops at the border of Northern Iraq and has the United States’ commitment to help fight the PKK, backed up by Lockheed Martin contracts for more weaponry for Turkey.

And Edelman and the other Neocons state these wars will not end soon. It is just as they want it. After all, Edelman, like Scooter Libby, was one of the very special group of Neocons who were commissioned in 1992 by then Defense Secretary Cheney to write the infamous Defense Planning Guidance with Paul Wolfowitz and (now U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations) Zalmay Khalilzad. This document proclaimed a change in U.S. foreign policy, moving away from containment and towards preemptive strike of potential rivals for world power.

It was a response to Bush 1's retreat from regime change in Iraq, and while Clinton was President, the group of intellectual warriors reappeared as the Project for the New American Century in 1997, complete with a periodical, The Weekly Standard, edited by William Kristol, and think tanks, The American Enterprise Institute and The Heritage Foundation.

Meanwhile, Lockheed Martin, the world’s largest manufacturer of weapons, provides sizeable incomes for its investors and friends, whose political theories conveniently require wars without end, rearming and rearming. And so there are men like Edelman who thrive by stirring things up.

Bush Commutes Libby (And Hopes Someone Will Do the Same for Him)

Well, so much for "Rule of Law."

Scooter Libby deserves prison. He is no scapegoat.

Though it's clear that Libby didn't act alone with the Plame leak and in thwarting its investigation, he is no innocent who made the mistake of following orders rather than listening to his better nature.

Those "years of excellent public service" were spent plotting and acting on undemocratic, world-domineering policies.

Is there no one is Washington with any historical perspective?

I. Scooter Libby has always been at the forefront of aggressive neoconservative policy.

In 1992, Libby, along with former Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, and the current U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, Zalmay Khalilzad, wrote a “Defense Planning Guidance” report, commissioned by then Defense Secretary Dick Cheney.

This DPG called for the U.S. to claim its authority as the world superpower, to intimidate rivals for power, to bypass the United Nations as needed, to build more weapons to ensure global military dominance, and to strike pre-emptively against those who threaten U.S. interests anywhere in the world.

It was shockingly unethical, bullying and began the end of Americans-as-good-guys. It was supposedly shelved after its embarrassingly heartless approach to the world was leaked.

But in 1997 it resurfaced, only slightly edited, as the Statement of Principles of the Project for a New American Century, signed by Libby, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Jeb Bush, Elliot Abrams, Zalmay Khalilzad and more.

Though PNAC officially closed in 2006, its personnel and policies are still at work, though less visible, through such organizations as the American Enterprise Institute, Heritage Foundation, the Weekly Standard and, yes, throughout the Bush/Cheney White House and Cabinet agencies.

P.S. From David Corn's response: "The foundation of a democratic judicial system is that the sentence fits the crime. In this instance, the commutation fits the administration."