Neocons and the Truth: Bitter Enemies to the End, By Glenn Greenwald [View All]

[Echo In Light]

Neocons and the Truth: Bitter Enemies to the End
By Glenn Greenwald

08/05/08 "Salon.com" -- In a July, 2006 article in Rolling Stone — entitled “Iran: The Next War” http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/story/10962352/iran_the_next_war — the superb journalist James Bamford detailed the shady activities of numerous neoconservatives inside and out of the U.S. Government to plan an attack on Iran. Bamford focused on the role played by Michael Ledeen of the American Enterprise Institute and National Review, who created and began implementing an attack scheme in coordination with the Pentagon’s then number-three official, Doug Feith, and Feith’s deputy, Larry Franklin (subsequently convicted of felonies for passing classified information to AIPAC).

A couple weeks after Bamford’s exposè was published, National Review enlisted former federal prosecutor Andrew McCarthy and talk show host Mark Levin jointly to author a defense of Ledeen and, more importantly, to savage Bamford for writing what they claimed was a pack of lies. The McCarthy/Levin article was entitled “Rolling Smear,” sub-headlined “James Bamford writes a fiction about our Michael Ledeen,” and accused Bamford of being “the latest in a growing crowd of hacks to smear our friend Michael Ledeen.”

McCarthy and Levin specifically attacked Bamford’s disclosure that Ledeen “had arranged a covert meeting in Rome with a group of Iranians to discuss their clandestine help” in attacking Iran. Said McCarthy and Levin:

Bamford, to the contrary, wants to turn the meeting into a nefarious plot by Ledeen and the neocons to push the nation into war with Iran. Yet, anyone even vaguely familiar with Michael’s work knows that he has opposed military action against Iran — notwithstanding that he was years ahead of most experts in accurately portraying Iran’s role as the terror master at the center of the jihadist network.

So Bamford’s claim was “embarrassing” because “anyone even vaguely familiar with Michael’s work knows that he has opposed military action against Iran.” Got that?

Here’s Ledeen yesterday, writing in National Review’s Corner (h/t sysporg):

Time to Attack Iranian Terror Camps? {Michael Ledeen]} So says John Bolton, and he’s right. As you know, I have been proposing this for years. I always thought it was only a matter of time before we were compelled to take this action, which is a legitimate form of self-defense. And while we’re at it, we should do the same thing to the Syrian camps as well. It isn’t “sending a message,” it’s acting to protect our guys by fighting back in the proxy war the mullahs have been waging since 1979. Faster, please?

More amazingly, a mere two weeks before McCarthy and Levin wrote that “anyone even vaguely familiar with Michael’s work knows that he has opposed military action against Iran,” Ledeen himself wrote at The Corner that “I would insist that my soldiers have the right of ‘hot pursuit’ into Iran and Syria, and I would order my armed forces to attack the terrorist training camps in those countries.”
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...The neoconservative war-lovers behind this effort have not changed, nor have their tactics. They realize, as many of them acknowledge { http://nitpicker.blogspot.com/2008/05/kaplan-confirms-obvious-mccainbush.html } that they will have four more years in power if John McCain is elected. But they also realize that he may not be, and that their last hope for their long-desired attack on Iran lies in convincing the current administration to provoke one before its tenure ends. As much as one wishes it weren’t true, as much as the fixation on petty election issues might obscure it, the truly depraved extremist group that brought us the invasion of Iraq still exerts substantial influence and is quite busy trying to exert it.

UPDATE: It isn’t just the American neocons, but also the Israelis, who are escalating the “Attack Iran” campaign. The Jerusalem Post yesterday “reported” that { http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?cid=1209627027461&pagename=JPost%2FJPArticle%2FShowFull } “with Iran racing forward with its nuclear program, Israel now believes the Islamic Republic will master centrifuge technology and be able to begin enriching uranium on a military scale this year” (h/t quick strategy) http://letters.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/2008/05/08/ledeen/permalink/d4e53a97dd6911dfd462e47999339e03.html and:

The new assessment moves up Israel’s forecasts on Teheran’s nuclear program by almost a full year — from 2009 to the end of 2008. According to the new timeline, Iran could have a nuclear weapon by the middle of next year.

Continued:
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article19886.htm