What did the country think of Neoconservative views Pre 911

[Klukie]

I have posted before that I am relatively new to politics so I ask this question with true ignorance. I would like to know what republicans, Democrats, and the country as a whole thought of Neoconservatives and their views prior to 9/11. I suspect that they were mostly viewed as extremists but I hope some folks out there could educate me a little on this.

[Vincardog]

1. During the reign of Bush the Elder NeoConvicts were viewed as the Crazies

[Klukie]

7. How in the world do we go from crazy to running the country..........

And even more than running it, redfining everything this country stands for. Oh I forgot 911. This is absurd. In a crisis the worst thing that can done is to panic but I think that is just what this country after 911 (in part to these crazies playing on fears). In turn we get an administration that just a few years back was considered crazy.

[Vincardog]

10. Well first they had their "Friends" try to cook the 2000 election

When that didn't work they had the SCOTUS unconstitutionally rule that the voters of Florida would do undo harm to George Jr. it their votes were counted.

When the country was starting to express its' disapproval they pulled 9/11 to shore themselves up.

Then they trotted out the Homophobic to make the theft of the 2002 and 2004 elections appear legit.

That bering us up to date.

Any question?

[BuyingThyme]

2. They masked their plans for global dominance with

social liberalism.

Because their leaders are getting old, they decided to go for broke when Cheney took the White House.

[The Velveteen Ocelot]

3. I think their views were almost entirely unknown, or at least

unexplored. When Boosh was "elected" in 2000 most Americans assumed he was a garden-variety, old-school conservative. He even pretended to be fairly moderate at first. The true neocons -- Cheney, Perle, Wolfowitz, et al. -- received little attention at that time; they didn't start crawling out of the woodwork until after 9/11. PNAC was around, but nobody paid much attention; they were considered an obscure bunch of intellectuals who amused themselves writing position papers and dreaming of American hegemony.

It wasn't until 9/11 that they had their chance. Draw whatever conclusions you want.

[Klukie]

6. You know...

when I showed the PNAC website to a couple of right wing relatives they were taken aback. Especially when they saw that damn near half of the bush administration had signed on. They were even more speechless when they saw the letter to President Clinton that was sent in reguard to invading Iraq. I think you may be right that the average Joe was not aware of them then but what about the politicians?

[Kerrytravelers]

9. No. They are not aware.

And they think you're crazy when you mention it.

[FatDave]

15. That's right, they were pretty much unknown

Bush campaigned as a moderate republican. I thought he was dumb, but had no idea what kind of horrendous policies he'd put in place. There was honestly a time where I thought that as republicans go, he wasn't that bad. All the PNAC people (with the exception of Cheney) were cabinet appointments, so they were unknown during the campaign.

For the first 8 months of his presidency, pretty much nothing happened. He laid pretty low, spent a lot of his time at the ranch, didn't do many speeches or press conferences. It was during this time that the first rumblings of "Cheney's running the show" started being heard. Some said his presidency was floundering. When he did make a speech, it was a joke. We laugh at his trouble speaking now, but the truth is he was far worse before he was forced into the limelight by 9/11. Afterwards he started to get used to acting like a president. Started to anyway. I still don't think the fool's used to it completely.

As he himself is so fond of saying, everything changed after 9/11. We went into Afghanistan, and the rest of the world supported us in doing so. Still, I don't think many people made the PNAC/neocon connection yet. I hadn't yet at that point. I hope that the "new pearl harbor" stuff they said is a coincidence, but I fear that it may not be. At any rate, it sure as hell worked to their benefit. To this day they continue to exploit our nation's greatest tragedy for purely political reasons.

But soon it was obvious that they were pushing for a war in Iraq. It was so obvious that The Onion was doing articles where Bush was asking Cheney "Can we attack Iraq yet, Dick?" long before the authorization to use force. I thought it was a ridiculous misdirection, just as many others did.

And that's when I first heard of PNAC and the neocons. During the Iraq buildup. And it was some seriously chilling shit.

[INdemo]

4. Bush's approval rating were low,low

and afer 9/11 happen ....well it saved his Presidency..It set the repubs up to steal the election with no question asked by repukes...

[TallahasseeGrannie]

5. I don't remember that

they were taken seriously at all.

[ComerPerro]

8. You mean the ones who bombed Oklahoma City and Olympic Park?

Those neocons? The terrorists?

[applegrove]

11. That they were crazies. That they were Utopians. That they kept

pretending they didn't exits. That they put out press releases but refused to be labeled. That their first line of defence was something called stereotyping.. that is accusing anyone who named them of being racist.

[Disturbed]

12. What sticks in my mind whenever I read the letters PNAC

is that they stated that they needed a "new Pearl Harbor" to get the USA to move to their agaenda. They got what they needed.

[applegrove]

13. IDEALOGY THAT DARE NOT SPEAK ITS NAME is what I knew

of them.

[Emit]

14. They are and were insidious. Read Rise of the Vulcans

and, contrary to the notion that they didn't have much power until recently, you can see their influence in our government, particularly our Foreign Policy, Arms control, CIA, etc. over the last 30 years or so. I think Wolfowitz held his first job in the Nixon administration in the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, and can be viewed as one of the first neocons who 'graduated' from academia (where the neocons studied Straussian philosophy and the like) to the US government and politics. They are and were insidious. (I think there is a distinction between the neocons and Cheney/Rumsfeld, where, although supportive of neocon ideology, the latter represent more of the Military Industrial Congressional Congress rather than a true neocon, and have used the neocon ideology as an effective tool to catapult their plans.)

Their influence in US Foreign policy can definitely be seen during the Nixon/Ford/Kissinger era, particularly later when Reagan was running for President against Ford in the Repug primaries, when the notion of detente with the Soviet Union graduated into a more aggressive approach and a desire to build up US arms and military power. Kissinger strove toward detente, durable balance of power, realism; Wolfowitz stressed moral and religious principles and the notion of good v evil.

Also, this graph shows their influence in the form of the many think tanks they've developed and worked for, some dating back many years:

Web of Organizations Involved in
Formulating U.S. Foreign Policy on Iraq



IASPS Institute for Advanced Strategic & Political Studies
EPPC Ethics and Public Policy Center
MEF Middle East Forum
AEI American Enterprise Institute
WINEP Washington Institute for Near East Policy

(Numbers on linkages indicate the number of persons with affiliations in both of the connected organizations. Only those with at least three members in common are shown.)

Analysis of the 5-member clique

Attention in this section will be restricted largely to the five identified formally as comprising the largest clique within the total network. However, the other non-clique members linked to JINSA also will be discussed, as they, together with JINSA, bring into play an element not otherwise considered, but generally thought to be a significant part of the development of U.S. policy towards the Middle East in general, namely the Israeli connection. Descriptions of the organizations linked to JINSA will help in understanding the Israeli connection.

Within the 5-member clique, henceforth referred to merely as the clique, some degree of specialization of roles is discernible, and acknowledged in part by the manner in which at least three of the members describe themselves. While there is still considerable overlap in functions, the major roles played by each of the 5 members of the clique might be described as follows:

PNAC Planning function
CLI Coordination function
CSP Information dissemination function
DPB Policy Action
JINSA Interface with Israel

~snip~

Continued here:

http://www.opednews.com/toenjes_IraqPolicyWeb_withTables_July19.doc

They were called the Crazies, and not many of them were household names, but they've been very influential in our government for some time.