Alex Christoforou
The Duran
US Senator Rand Paul recently urged President Trump not to choose neoconservative Elliott Abrams to serve in the No. 2 spot at the US State Department.
In an op-ed published in the libertarian website Rare, Paul argues…
“Elliott Abrams is a neoconservative too long in the tooth to change his spots, and the president should have no reason to trust that he would carry out a Trump agenda rather than a neocon agenda.”
“Congress has good reason not to trust him — he was convicted of lying to Congress in his previous job.”
Paul added that Abrams’s “neocon agenda trumps his fidelity to the rule of law.”
“He is a loud voice for nation building and when asked about the president’s opposition to nation building, Abrams said that Trump was absolutely wrong; and during the election he was unequivocal in his opposition to Donald Trump, going so far as to say, ‘the chair in which Washington and Lincoln sat, he is not fit to sit.’”
If you look up neocon at merriam-webster.com, you are sent to the definition of neoconservative:
1: a former liberal espousing political conservatism
2: a conservative who advocates the assertive promotion of democracy and U.S. national interest in international affairs including through military means
Here are 8 neocons that are gunning to take Trump down, and force America into more illegal wars and regime change operations.
1. Max Boot – Pushing to create a Syria “no-fly” zone…
- Max Boot is an American author, consultant, editorialist, lecturer, and military historian.
- He once described his ideas as “American might to promote American ideals.”
- Worked as a writer and editor for Christian Science Monitor and then for The Wall Street Journal in the 1990s.
- He is now Jeane J. Kirkpatrick Senior Fellow in National Security Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations.
- He has written for numerous publications such as The Weekly Standard, The Los Angeles Times, and The New York Times, and he has also authored books of military history.
- In September 2012, Boot co-wrote with Brookings Institution senior fellow Michael Doran a New York Times op-ed titled “5 Reasons to Intervene in Syria Now”, advocating U.S military force to create a countrywide no-fly zone reminiscent of NATO’s role in the Kosovo War.
2. Robert Kagan and Victoria Nuland – The family of neocons…
- Victoria Nuland was Obama’s Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs, married to the top imperial Neocon Robert Kagan.
- Run a neocon family business that had Vicky Nuland engineer a hot war in Ukraine, and ramp up Cold War 2.0 with Russia.
- Robert Kagan works outside of government lobbying Congress into jacking up military spending so America can meet “Nuland created” security threats.
- An inside-outside team that creates the need for more military spending, applies political pressure to ensure higher appropriations, and watches as thankful weapons manufacturers lavish grants on like-minded hawkish Washington think tanks.
- The Kagan clan includes Robert’s brother Frederick at the American Enterprise Institute and his wife Kimberly, who runs her own shop called the Institute for the Study of War.
- Kagan openly supported Hillary Clinton during the US elections.
3. John McCain and Lindsey Olin Graham – Congressional war hawks…
- McCain and Graham are lifetime US Senators who sponsor American aggression and interventionism at every turn.
- A ‘husband and wife’ team that were leaders in pushing the Iraq WMD invasion on George W. Bush.
- Supported the dismemberment and destruction of Libya.
- McCain has been photographed meeting with various ISIS and Al Qaeda leaders in the run up to the destabilization of Syria.
- Both men worked closely with neo-nazi elements in Ukraine to overthrow the democratically elected government of Viktor Yanukovych, and place in power a far-right oligarch puppet regime in Ukraine.
- Both men are never shy to voice their disdain for Russia and Russian President Vladimir Putin.
- Highly critical of President Trump and his desire to build bridges with Russia.
4. Bill Kristol – Started the Project for the New American Century (PNAC)
- Bill Kristol recently said: “Decadent, lazy, spoiled, white working class” Americans should be replaced by immigrants.
- He is the founder and editor at large of the political magazine The Weekly Standard and a political commentator on several TV networks.
- He was chairman of the New Citizenship Project from 1997 to 2005.
- He co-founded the Project for the New American Century (PNAC) with Robert Kagan.
- He is a member of the board of trustees for the free-market Manhattan Institute for Policy Research,
- He is also one of the three board members of Keep America Safe, a think tank co-founded by Liz Cheney and Debra Burlingame, and serves on the board of the Emergency Committee for Israel and the Susan B. Anthony List.
- Kristol supported the Bush administration’s decision to go to war with Iraq.
- In 2003, he and Lawrence Kaplan wrote The War Over Iraq, in which he described reasons for removing Saddam.
- Kristol predicted a “two month war, not an eight year war” during a March 28 CSPAN appearance.
- In the 2010 affair surrounding the disclosure of U.S. diplomatic cables by WikiLeaks, Kristol spoke strongly against the organization and suggested using “our various assets to harass, snatch or neutralize Julian Assange and his collaborators, wherever they are.”
- In March 2011, he wrote an editorial in The Weekly Standard arguing that the United States’ military interventions in Muslim countries (including the Gulf War, the Kosovo War, the War in Afghanistan, and the Iraq War) should not be classified as “invasions”, but rather as “liberations”.
- Kristol backed Obama’s decision to intervene in the 2011 Libyan civil war and urged fellow conservatives to support the action.
- Kristol recently said that President Trump treats Putin ‘with more respect’ than John Lewis.
5. Elliot Abrams – The neocon’s Trump insider…
- Elliott Abrams is reportedly under consideration to be deputy secretary of state.
- Politico’s reports that Abrams is meeting with President Trump on Tuesday, and that Secretary of State Rex Tillerson supports him for the job.
- His first big job came in the Reagan administration, where he was assistant secretary of state.
- The independent counsel investigating the the Iran-Contra affair considered charging Abrams with several felonies, but Abrams agreed to plead guilty to two misdemeanor cases of withholding evidence. He was later pardoned by President George H.W. Bush.
- When Bush’s son became president eight years later, he appointed Abrams deputy assistant to the president and deputy national security adviser, supervising U.S. policy in the Middle East.
- Abrams was a supporter of the Iraq war and took a lead on Israeli-Palestinian issues.
- He’s now a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and writes for a variety of outlets, including items posted on The Atlantic.
6. Michael Weiss – The next generation, hipster, neocon…
- Weiss has served as co-chair of the Russia Studies Centre at the Henry Jackson Society (HJS).
- Weiss currently serves as the editor-in-chief for the online magazine Interpreter, which translates and analyzes Russian news.
- He is also senior editor of The Daily Beast, a regular columnist for Foreign Policy magazine.
- In 2015, he co-wrote the book ISIS: Inside the Army of Terror with Hassan Hassan.
- In November 2014, Weiss published a special report in his online magazine the Interpreter that accused Russia of waging “propaganda and disinformation” campaigns.
- Went on CNN and proclaimed that Trump a fascist; like Stalin.
- Advocates placing “small but effective U.S. garrisons indefinitely in eastern and northeastern Syria and western Iraq.”
7. Eliot Cohen – First neocon to advocate for war against Iran and Iraq…
- Eliot Asher Cohen was a counselor in the United States Department of State under Condoleezza Rice from 2007 to 2009.
- Cohen is the Director of the Strategic Studies Program at the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies of the Johns Hopkins University.
- He is a specialist in the Middle East, Persian Gulf, Iraq, arms control, and NATO.
- Cohen was one of the first neoconservatives to publicly advocate war against Iran and Iraq.
- Cohen wrote an op-ed piece in the Washington Post on 3 March 2014, between the ousting of Viktor Yanukovich on 22 February and the Crimean referendum on 16 March. In it, he maintains that “Putin is indeed a brutal Great Russian nationalist who understands that Russia without a belt of subservient client states is not merely a very weak power but also vulnerable to the kind of upheaval that toppled Yanukovych’s corrupt and oppressive regime.”
- Fiercely critical of President Trump and Steve Bannon.
8. Hillary Clinton – A top neocon dressed in liberal left clothing…
- Several neoconservatives have spent years admiring Hillary Clinton’s penchant for supporting every foreign war or military escalation in the last decade.
- Kagan said in 2014: “I feel comfortable with her on foreign policy…If she pursues a policy which we think she will pursue, it’s something that might have been called neocon, but clearly her supporters are not going to call it that; they are going to call it something else.”
- Hillary’s neocon résumé includes Serbia where she urged an initially reluctant Bill Clinton to launch what became a two-and-a-half month bombing campaign that killed many thousands of Serb civilians. In urging this carnage on the president, she used the false claim that lethal military force was required to stop Hitler-like “genocide” in Yugoslavia.
- Hillary’s neocon résumé includes a YES vote for an Iraq invasion as a U.S. Senator.
- Hillary’s neocon résumé a coup in Honduras with bogus claims that, then President Zelaya, had been trying to establish a dictatorship and that Hondurans had after the coup experienced “free and fair elections” that restored “democratic and constitutional government” in Honduras.
- Hillary’s neocon résumé includes the removal of Momar Gadaffi – “a hero to black Africa” because of his efforts to create a progressive pan-African Union and his decent treatment of Black Libyans – through U.S.-led Western force turned Libya into a jihadist nightmare zone.
- Hillary’s neocon résumé includes her staunch support for the removal of Syrian President Assad and the destabilization of Syria.
- Hillary Clinton has consistently sought to demonize and isolate Russia, blaming the Ukraine crisis on “Putin’s imperialism” and endlessly justifying Washington’s relentless provocation of Russia.
- Hillary’s close ally is top neocon insider and Ukraine coup architect, Victoria Nuland.