Neocons: Heart Of Darkness

Yesterday I listened to a quite interesting two part interview with Doug Macgregor. The interview was conducted by Maike Hickson for LifeSite News. You can find both parts (each close to an hour long, with some brief ads interspersed) plus Hickson’s summary here:

Colonel Macgregor shows how neocon foreign policy has thrown the world into chaos

Colonel Douglas Macgregor gave LifeSite a historic interview. In a 1.5-hour conversation with Maike Hickson, he presented a tour de force of U.S. military, political, and financial history through the last seven decades since World War II and beyond.

Hickson is actually German, as you’ll quickly realize. She runs an intelligent interview, but her summary, while generally good, doesn’t quite do entire justice to Macgregor’s presentation in one crucial aspect. I want to focus on that part of the interview. I’ll work from the summary, but I’ll add more of Macgregor’s observations as well as other materials. Follow the link for the two part interview as well as the full summary—what I include is only a part. I’ll reverse my usual practice. Hickson’s summary follows, with my additions indented.

We begin with Macgregor’s experience in the Balkans during the Clinton regime, for a very practical reason that Macgregor himself makes clear: The Clinton years marked the beginning of the Neocon takeover of the US NatSec establishment and the ongoing process of “weeding out” dissenting voices, meaning, voices that counseled restraint in the use of force around the world.

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The colonel has here first-hand experience, having been asked to be involved in mapping out the future Balkans to help avoid future conflicts. But, as he showed, American leaders lacked sensitivity and an understanding of the culture and history of the region. As he stated at some point, “Washington plays God,” thus implying that U.S. leaders showed arrogance as well as “self delusion.” It always seems that the tendency is to solve conflicts immediately with the help of military interventions, instead of first seeking peaceful means.

This concept of violence first as an approach to foreign affairs was noted by Alastair Crooke recently (Why are Israel and the West unravelling in tandem?) Crooke quotes Israeli diplomat Alon Pinkas, writing in Haaretz, who points to the takeover of Israel by a “hard edged” (a characterization that Macgregor will use later) ideological mindset: “a Jewish-supremacist, ultranationalist theocracy with messianic, antidemocratic tendencies that encourage isolation”. Israel, captive to this ideological mindset, has boxed itself into a no win position.

Crooke connects that to the US, which was also taken over by a hard edged Neocon ideological movement, a movement that is more secular than the one found in Israel while still ultra-nationalist in its devotion to Jewish supremacy. This ideological mindset has, similarly, boxed the United States—as the dominant partner in the Anglo-Zionist Empire—into multiple no win situations, attempting to wage multiple containment operations around the world and driving much of the world together against the US and Israel:

“So why are Israel and the West unravelling in tandem? Well, it is firstly because they have become so inter-connected at the level of power structures (in both U.S. and Europe) to a point that it is difficult to know who has more heft within these power and media structures: Tel Aviv or the White House.

“This means interdependency in terms of each’s international standing, and by extension, vulnerability to any collapse in Global standing.

“So, whilst the West today ostensibly eschews literal settler colonialism (other than that practiced by Israel), it nonetheless has pursued a form of rent-seeking, financialised colonialism since WW2. That process also has become a permanent framework to the western political and geopolitical ecosystem.

“The consequence is that as settler colonialism in Gaza moves starkly and darkly into view, the global majority sees both Israel and the West as explicitly colonial. No distinction is made – the Rules-Based Order is seen as just another iteration of the colonial eco-system. Thus, events in Gaza, amongst other things, have sparked a new wave of anti-colonial sentiment across the globe.

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“Finally, the close integration of the two linked ‘structures’ has overflowed into the West’s foreign policy zeitgeist: Just as Israel’s answer to the October 7 has been to lash out at ‘Hamas’ and Gaza, so the West, viewing its own ‘hegemony ecosystem’ challenged by Russia and China, emulates Israel in seeing military force as the key to its own deterrence and global primacy.”

Macgregor saw all this coming, from his vantage point helping to run Balkan policy in the 1990s. He cites, specifically, the role played by Neocon godmother Madeline Albright, as recounted here by Kelly Beaucar Vlahos: in the perfect capsule description of the Neocon mindset:

“My constant, unwelcome message at all the meetings on Bosnia was simply that we could not commit military forces until we had a clear political objective," Powell wrote in his memoir, “My American Journey.” Albright, he wrote, "asked me, 'What's the point of having this superb military that you're always talking about if we can't use it?' I thought I would have an aneurysm." 

“Powell also said Albright, who once said the death of 500,000 Iraqi children due to U.S. sanctions was "worth it," was treating American GIs as "toy soldiers to be moved around on some global chessboard."

“But that is exactly how the Clinton administration later saw NATO peacekeepers in the Balkans, and how the subsequent Bush and Obama administrations treated U.S. forces in the Global War on Terror.”

We can see that same mindset in the current Israeli genocide in Gaza, as well, of course, as our smug destruction of Ukraine as our proxy against Russia. Macgregor sees all that, too.

The 1999 Kosovo conflict followed the Bosnian war. And it is here that the U.S. developed the concept of a “humanitarian intervention,” that is, the NATO bombing of Yugoslavia. That bombing, according to Macgregor, “was wrong.” Already then, as he shows, certain U.S. circles were convinced that the plan should be to establish a “democratic revolution from Belgrade to Moscow,” as he was told at the time by a high-ranking official. The plan was, he added, to establish “a New World Order.” That is to say, not many years after the fall of communism in 1991, there existed plans of encroaching Russia militarily and politically.

It is at this point in the interview that Macgregor draws a very important and revealing comparison, which Hickson’s summary omits. He delves deep into military history to discuss a very important but largely forgotten (in the West) war: The Polish - Soviet War. Macgregor recalls that that the Soviet decision to pursue the war into Poland proper (having driven the Poles out of the eastern territories—now parts of Belarus and Ukraine—that Poland had occupied) came after a heated disagreement between Trotsky and Stalin. Lenin sided with Trotsky, the proponent of perpetual revolution”, believing that the working classes of Poland—and then Germany—would rise up to welcome the Red Army. Stalin warned that they failed to understand the nationalism of the working classes. As it turned out, the war turned into a disaster for the Red Army (it also nearly became the graveyard for Stalin’s career, due to his failure to follow orders at a key moment).

The point that Macgregor is making here, which is crucial to his presentation, is that Neocon ideology is an extension of the Trotskyite concept of a “perpetual revolution”, only this time in service of the “democratic revolution from Belgrade to Moscow”—and much, much more, as Macgregor also makes clear. Just as the Marxian proletariate is a transformation of the Zionist concept of Israel as a Chosen People, so also the Neocon concept of American Exceptionalism is no more than a secularization of the same concept of a Chosen People, suitable for gaslighting goyishe kops into mindless support for Forever Wars to spread “democracy” around the world—with ”democracy” understood as submission to the Rules Based Order. Perpetual Revolution, Forever Wars, a Democratic Revolution—is simply a conceptual fantasy of the Neocons that harkens back to their own Trotskyite roots.

Macgregor’s argument should be apparent. Just as the Soviet drive on Warsaw in 1920—in pursuit of “perpetual revolution”—ended in catastrophe for the Red Army, so too our Forever Wars to spread the Rules Based Order of American Exceptionalism around the world (not just to Moscow) is leading America to catastrophe.

The fault is with the ideology. And Macgregor goes on to point out that the Neocon ideology that drove our wars—and still does—is framed in explicitly Trotskyite terms.

But then, and still now, the military expert insists that the U.S. should only intervene where its borders are “attacked” or where “vital strategic interests” are concerned.

Macgregor, the author of five books and president of a patriotic organization called Our Country Our Choice, explained in our interview how already back in the 1990s the neoconservatives (such as Paul Wolfowitz, Irving Kristol, Robert Kagan, Richard Perle, and others) were pushing for military interventions and regime changes. He quoted Paul Wolfowitz, whose motto then was to foster “perpetual revolution” and the notion that the U.S. will “go everywhere” and “reshape everything,” in the colonel’s words.

Next Macgregor goes on to point out that Israel always held a central point in all these fantasies of “perpetual revolution.” The actual sentence, as spoken by Macgregor is this: “You have to go back and understand Israel and its position, because part of the Wolfowitz strategy was to build a strategy regionally in the Middle East around Israel.” In other words, the strategy revolved around a foreign country’s interests—not American interests. America and its military was no more than a means to an end.

Speaking about the 2003 Iraq War, Macgregor also referred back to Wolfowitz, who worked “strategically around Israel.” At the time, Macgregor did not see the military leaders of the U.S. being interested in occupying Iraq. “No one was prepared to occupy anything,” he expounded, referring here to General Tommy Franks. But then “we destroyed it,” he went on to say, and Iraq “was in ruins.” All of this happened to “help Israel’s position strategically.”

Macgregor recounted how one day, during the Iraq War, Wolfowitz took Scooter Libby (Vice President Dick Cheney’s chief of staff at the time) to the Oval Office and proposed that, since Iraq was weaker than expected, there was a chance to establish a “first democratic Arab country in the region friendly to Israel,” in Macgregor’s words. The neocons’ idea of rebuilding a historic nation such as Iraq was a “folly, a disaster,” the expert added.

Overlooking many of these wars of the last decades, Macgregor observed an “unwillingness to look at reality,” and the fact that the U.S. “disrupts regional dynamics.” For example, one “has to understand the dominant force” of a region and see how to collaborate with it.

But, in his view, the neocons that have been now driving U.S. foreign policy for decades are “hard-edged ideologues.”

“They are internationalists,” Douglas Macgregor went on to say.

It’s worth providing this exchange from the second part of the interview in more detail:

Mac: You're with us or you're against us. Remember, that was George Bush's statement that came from this man, from another Neocon maniac: You're with us or against us. ... That's the way they do business. These are hard edged, hard-nosed ideologues that believe they are right, everyone else is wrong and everyone must conform to what they want.

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Hickson: Would you agree that it's time to tell these elites, these Neocons reemerging under Biden with Blinken and Nuland ... to tell these neocons and their allies: This is enough! we want to take care of our own country, we want to rebuild this country and not go further. Keep funding Ukraine, keep funding Israel--where is this going to end?

Mac: Well, see, the problem is that they're internationalists. They're not nationalists. In other words there's no sense of America First: What are America's interests, what are America's strategic interests, what do we need to do to preserve the United States, its power, its influence, it's standing in the world?

The colonel sees that the U.S. is being “overextended” by all these wars, adding that “we are a shadow of the power that we were in the past.” We are “squandering our wealth.”

This was, to my joy and surprise, exactly the same language of my late husband who, while teaching at the Special Operations University in Florida, had opposed the Iraq War in 2003 because he did not see a just cause for that war. He always had cautioned his country against overextending itself and turning into an “emerging American imperium.” My husband spoke in 2005 of our “thoroughly irrational involvement in unjust aggressive wars, such as the current war against Iraq, while we are overextended throughout the world and ‘strutting to our confusion.’”

Colonel Macgregor himself stands by the general principle of non-intervention in non-crucial conflicts. “If we are not under attack, why are we going there?” he asked, revealing that he himself had written in 1995 a two-page memo about the then-ongoing Balkan war with that same theme. At the time it found his superior’s support and was sent over to the White House. Since then, many officers were “weeded out” when they tried to speak up against this attitude of interventionism.