Must See NeoCon TV by Publius Tacitus

Tucker Carlson is on fire. Gob bless him. He is taking on two of the more vocal, visible policy nerds eager to cheerlead the United States into a conflict with Russia and Iran. If you have not seen these verbal sparring events then you should carve out 20 minutes and enjoy.

The first is Tucker's interview with Lt. Colonel Ralph Peters. Important to note that Ralph Peters never made it to full bird Colonel. While treated by some media types as a 21st Century version of Clausewitz, I think that Peters is captive to a world view that will imperil America if implemented. Here is his interview with Tucker:

Next up, Max Boot. Boot is even crazier and more strident than Peters.

 

Tucker's position is very simple and wise--our support for certain countries and policies should hinge on whether or not a policy or relationship serves the interests of the American people. One of the lies that Max Boot pushes in his feckless attempt to best Tucker is the false assertion that Iran killed "hundreds of U.S. soldiers in Iraq." Iran did no such thing. Of the total U.S. fatalities in Iraq during our ill-fated time there, about 10% of the casualties were attributable to groups with ties to Iran. One of these Iraq Shia groups was led by Moqtada al Sadr aka MOOKIE. Those familiar with MOOKIE and his moods understand that he is anything but an Iranian puppet. He marches to his own drum beat and does not readily nor easily take instructions from Iran. Those familiar with the intel during this period know that Iran was discouraging attacks on Americans. Why? Because we were doing their dirty work for them. We were helping destroy the Sunni leadership and infrastructure. Everything we did in that regard furthered the interests of Iran.

Those insistent on demonizing Russia and Iran need to answer a couple of basic questions? First, what is our end game in seeking a conflict with both? Is it war? Something short of war?

Second, what would Russia and Iran need to do differently in order for us to find them acceptable as policy partners?

The World View of both Peters and Boot rests on the delusion that the United States is in control and can dictate the future. We have convinced ourselves that we are the GREAT OZ. We refuse to come to grips with the reality that we are like the doddering old fool behind the curtain. Yes we have nukes and a global military presence. But we are hanging on to this status by spending with the equivalent of credit cards while refusing to make any substantive  investments in human capital and infrastructure at home. In pursuit of our ambition for global dominance our leaders are allowing America to be hollowed out at home. Peters and Boot are prime examples of this rot.

 

Comments

[SteveSA]

Here's a very informative and short booklet on the subject written in the 1930's by Fr. Denis Fahey, C.S.Sp., an Irish Catholic priest and seminary professor. I recommend the PDF file (11 MB).

https://archive.org/details/FaheyDenisTheRulersOfRussiaNewAndEnlargedEdition_201609

[alaric]

I found those neocons scary. Are there a lot of people within the leadership of the US Military that think like that? I sure hope not.

[Chris Chuba]

Carlson did a great job with Col. Peters because he kept his composure making Peters look even more unhinged.
Carlson got a little too snarky with Max Boot. He didn't let Boot have enough rope to hang himself enough times for my taste.

1. These Neocons become furious when someone asks them normal questions because they are used to being pampered by the MSM.
2. They represent the very cream of the foreign policy establishment, yet they are so unprofessional. They are not alone. Even Gen. Keane will sometimes be steely eyed and sober but then degenerate into a spitting rage and use the same, 'Putin is a war criminal, intentionally bombing hospitals ...'. An editor for the WSJ is using the same line.

Regarding Iran supporting the Shiite militias, I don't know the true extent of their support but the fact that we broke bread with the Sunni militias during The Surge after they killed at least 2X the number of U.S. troops should put to bed the notion that we can never do business with people we fought. Emotionalism shouldn't be used to weaponize foreign policy.

Final note on Boot: my jaw dropped when he sneered at Carlson for admitting that his support for the Iraq war was a mistake. So let me get this straight, you should mindlessly stick with a position, regardless of the facts or be labeled a coward. This statement alone should discredit him but it won't.

[Willybilly]

You're absolutely right about Tucker and the shpeele behind the whole process ......

[Cape Cod Skeptic]

Well, Prof. Jordan Peterson (U of Toronto) says, you cannot know what a person thinks if you do not let him talk. AFAIK, Carlson is the only news pundit who actually counters the mendacity of neocon warmongers like Boot and Peters. They and liars like them are given free rein on Morning Joe and similar shows. And TC has taken on the far left/antifa/BLM element of society for their anti-free speech/multiculturalism/post-modernist claptrap, as well. I haven't seen anyone else on the TeeVee willing to do that. So I say, go Tucker!

[Anna]

Thank you for the link

[lally]

Tucker Carlson is interviewed in the following extensive article in The National Interest. IMO, a must read for those seeking more background on the evolution of his positions:

Tucker Carlson Goes To War Against The Neocons

excerpt:

".....It’s most important to parse whether Carlson has a long record of anti-interventionism, or if he’s merely sniffing the throne of the president (who, dubiously, may have opposed the 2003 invasion). “I think it’s a total nightmare and disaster, and I’m ashamed that I went against my own instincts in supporting it,” Carlson told the New York Observer in early 2004. “It’s something I’ll never do again. Never. I got convinced by a friend of mine who’s smarter than I am, and I shouldn’t have done that. . . . I’m enraged by it, actually.” Carlson told the National Interest that he’s felt this way since seeing Iraq for himself in December 2003.

The evidence points heavily toward a sincere conversion on Carlson’s part, or preexisting conviction that was briefly overcome by the beat of the war drums. Carlson did work for the Weekly Standard, perhaps the most prominent neoconservative magazine, in the 1990s and early 2000s. Carlson today speaks respectfully of William Kristol, its founding editor, but has concluded that he is all wet. On foreign policy, the people Carlson speaks most warmly about are genuine hard left-wingers: Glenn Greenwald, a vociferous critic of both economic neoliberalism and neoconservatism; the anti-establishment journalist Michael Tracey; Katrina vanden Heuvel, editor of the Nation; and her husband, Stephen Cohen, the Russia expert and critic of U.S. foreign policy.

“The only people in American public life who are raising these questions are on the traditional left: not lifestyle liberals, not the Williamsburg (Brooklyn) group, not liberals in D.C.—not Nancy Pelosi.” He calls the expertise of establishment sources on matters like Syria “more shallow than I even imagined.”

http://nationalinterest.org/feature/tucker-carlson-goes-war-against-the-neocons-21545?page=show

[Babak Makkinejad]

Thank you.
US made rapid progress in Afghanistan and later in Iraq due to Iran's aide. When US made it clear that Iran herself was a target, Iranians prepared for the worse - RG was reorganized ....

[Babak Makkinejad]

Thank you,I did know any of this. I will have to revise my estimation on who ordered his murder.

[Babak Makkinejad]

Khoei was murdered in March, Hakim in August. One was, as you say, US's man, the other was Iran's. Both murdered after the Axis of Evil speech.

[David Habakkuk]

TTG,

Of course ‘most of those NKVD thugs were Russian.’

However, the creator of the organisation was not. As his Wikipedia entry makes clear, Dzerzhinsky’s ‘aristocratic family belonged to the former Polish-Lithuanian szlachta (nobility), of the Sulima coat of arms.’ Ironically, the manor house where he was born was destroyed, and family members, including Dzerzhinsky’s brother Kazimierz, were killed by the Germans, because of their support for the Polish Home Army.

(See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Felix_Dzerzhinsky )

As to the incorporation of the Baltics, and other regions, in Stalin’s empire, not only was he himself a Georgian, but the NKVD chief who organised the policies used to quell dissent in the territories newly incorporated in the Soviet empire – and who originally proposed the Katyn massacre – was of course Beria, who was Mingrelian (a member of another ethnic group within Georgia.)

The decisive role played by members of non-Russian ethnic groups in the Revolution and the way that a myth that everything was the fault of Russians is now being deliberately created was discussed at length by Dr Armstrong in a May 2009 post entitled ‘Airbrushing History.’

(https://patrickarmstrong.ca/2009/05/27/airbrushing-history/ .)

It was, as he noted, particularly ironic that a Latvian government commission had been ‘working away to produce a monetary figure to put on the losses suffered by Latvia as a result of its incorporation into the USSR from 1940 to 1990.’ And he went on to point to some of relevant history now being conveniently forgotten:

‘Where did the Bolsheviks get the force that allowed them to seize power? The most reliable and potent military force that the Bolsheviks controlled was the Latvian Rifles: this force supplied the bayonets in the Petrograd coup and the dismissal of the Constituent Assembly. Without the power of these disciplined troops the Bolshevik coup might not have happened at all.’

And indeed, it seems worth fleshing out the history. At the time of the Left SR uprising in the summer of 1918, the Revolution could have been snuffed out – among other things, Dzerzhinsky was captured. The commander of the Latvian division, Colonel Vatsetis, was summoned to the Kremlin, and Lenin asked him ‘can we hold out until morning?’

In his history of the Russian Civil War, Ewan Mawdsley observes that it was the decisive action taken by Vatsetis which both saved the Bolsheviks and saw the beginning of the one-party state. He writes:

‘There was a parallel here with General Bonaparte and the Paris riots of 1795. The “whiff of grapeshot” that broke up the Left SR uprising also made General Vatsetis’s career; Lenin had found his “General Vendémiaire.” Three days later Vatsetis was appointed commander of the new army group fighting on the Volgar River; soon he would become the first Main Commander in Chief of the whole Red Army.’

And the Latvians were there at the end – storming the Iushin line on the Crimea in November 1920, one of the last battles prior to the evacuation of General Wrangel from the Crimea.

But then there is another irony. Decades later, a product of Eton and Oxford, a contemporary of our buffoon of a Foreign Secretary, Boris Johnson, spent the years 1989 to 1994 – when the Soviet system was collapsing – as a regular officer in British Army Intelligence.

When he went back into academic life, Paul Robinson chose for his thesis a subject which might have seemed utterly irrelevant to the present day – the history of the White army in exile, in which General Wrangel played a crucial role.

It turned out to be about the most relevant subject imaginable. In January 2004, an article by Robinson appeared in the ‘Spectator’ – then edited by Johnson – to which the title was given ‘Putin’s might is White.’

(See http://archive.spectator.co.uk/article/10th-january-2004/18/putins-might-is-white .)

A key paragraph from the article:

‘While Putin is indeed an autocrat, he is no Red Tsar. He is a typical Soviet radish – red on the outside but white at the core. He is the heir not of Lenin and Trotsky, but of the White officers who fought to save Russia from communism in the civil war of 1917 to 1921. Depending on one’s view of the Whites, that may or may not be a good thing. But, to most, White is undoubtedly better than Red, and Putin’s authoritarian rule gives Russia comparatively little to fear.’

In another article in the ‘Spectator’, in October 2005, Robinson reported from Moscow on the reburial of the remains of Wrangel’s fellow commander, General Anton Denikin, and the White émigré philosopher Ivan Il’in, at the Donskoi Monastery in Moscow.

(See https://www.spectator.co.uk/2005/10/the-return-of-white-russia/ .)

Explaining the significance of Il’in and Denikin in Russian history, Robinson wrote: ‘Together, they were the pen and the sword of anti-communism.’

Now a professor at Ottawa University, from that day to this he has been attempting to elucidate to anyone who would listen the nature of Russian ‘liberal conservatism.’

The fundamental points in this argument are critically relevant to the arguments about ‘Russiagate’.

It is a problem that we are dealing with a spectrum of opinions. However, a central strand in Russian ‘liberal conservatism’ – in which as Robinson has pointed out the 1909 symposium entitled ‘Vekhi’ (‘Landmarks’ or ‘Signposts’) is critical – is emphatically not hostility, in principle, to democratic ideas. What writers in this tradition very commonly argued was that there were institutional and cultural preconditions for the successful realisation of ‘liberal’ principles.

If one’s society was fortunate enough to possess these, then one was lucky. If they did not, and one did not face up to this fact, the belief that destroying an unsatisfactory authoritarian system would magically turn a society like that of Imperial Russia into a replica of that of England or the United States was a dangerous delusion. A likely result would be to empower people like Lenin, Dzerzhinsky, Stalin or Beria.

All this has an ironic result. Throughout the Cold War, the Soviets suffered from the fatal problem that their system depended for its legitimacy on an ideology which made it impossible to see the world except ‘through a glass darkly’.

The boot is now on the other foot. As a ‘perceptual filter’ through which to try to make sense of the contemporary world, Russian ‘liberal conservatism’ has a great deal to be said for it. The ideas of Francis Fukuyama – particularly when put together with those of John Lennon – are about as relevant as those of Marx, Engels, and Lenin.

And there is one bizarrely – and sinisterly – comic result of this. If one’s claim to power rests upon the claim to possess a monopoly of truth, two things characteristically happen. Commonly political actions generate unintended consequences. If however one is trying to make decisions on the basis of a ‘truth’ is grossly inadequate as a means to understand reality, these are even more unmanageable than they might otherwise be.

Moreover, if one has laid a claim to possession of ‘the truth’, once these unintended consequences materialise, to prevent the total collapse of one’s claim to truth, and thereby of one’s claim to power (which can imply a threat to one’s physical survival) one has to find people to blame.

Commonly, xenophobia becomes a handy tool. So it is perhaps hardly surprising that Western MSM coverage of ‘Russiagate’ more and more looks rather like the Soviet press, in the ‘Shakhty Trial.’

(See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shakhty_Trial .)

[Jack]

"The US federal government creates the currency, sole issuer."

That is wrong. Only the Federal Reserve can create the currency and it is distinct from the federal government.

"The Federal Reserve is an agent of Congress"

What is the definition of "agent of Congress"? Who are the other agents of Congress?

[Hunsdon]

During the run-up to Sandbox II I alienated a few friends by insisting that Dick Cheney must be a Persian spy, since only Iran was going to benefit from the "liberation" of Iraq. Later on, de-baathification only underlined my joking concern.

[different clue]

Croesus,

It appears to me that Carlson has put these two people on a well-lit slide and given his TV audience a microscope for taking a real close-up magnified look at them. In the case of Boot especially, what we see is what he is.

That seems rather different than giving them a sympathetic platform for them to launch their brain-bombs from.

[Thirdeye]

Why give Peters and Boot a platform? You know about enough rope. At least on this show the host points out when somebody is hanging themselves. I'll grant that Carlson's schtick is as much about entertainment ans information. But we're entertained, so what's the complaint? And seeing these apoplectic characters in action is educational as to what they are.

[DailyPlanet]

An internationalist Bolshevik ideology has aligned itself with industry and is entrenched in U.S politics. Tucker Carlson disassembled Max Boot. Max and the Gen are rabid and illogical. It is a form of McCarthyism.

[different clue]

David Habakkuk,

Several decades ago I went to a talk given by a defector from the USSR named Arkady Schevchenko. After the talk was the question-answer. One of the questions was something along the lines of the USSR being an ethnic Russian Supremacist empire at the expense of the non-Russian peoples and Republics. Schevchenko replied that in terms of brute exploitation and oppression, the Russians were the most exploited and oppressed people in the empire. The various non-Russian peoples and Republics were given or permitted various material favors ( greater investment etc.) and sometimes greater day-to-day freedom to live life. Russia was the most heavily taxed part of the empire, to pay for all these favors to the non-Russian areas. He suggested the questioner learn to understand the USSR as an ideology-based Communist empire established against all the peoples and Republics within its borders . . . and against Russia most and worst of all. ( I believe Schevchenko to be a Ukrainian name. If my guess is correct, I would suppose that Schevchenko would rate Ukraine as exploited and oppressed nearly as badly as Russia itself. And of course Stalin targeted Ukraine specifically for the Holodomorocaust. Though his forced-internal-exile of other ethnic groups and nations reached near-genocidal demographic attrition levels.)

I can't remember whether somebody asked Schevchenko about Soviet Jews or not, so I don't remember whether I heard from him at that talk or whether I read somewhere else the reason that the USSR gov was so determined to keep all the Jews in its possession within its borders. The reason for that retention of its possessed Jews was stated to be very specifically to keep them as a safety-valve displaced-resentment object, a sort of scapegoattery-vessel to recieve the unhappiness over the unpleasant aspects of life created for all the Soviet Peoples by Communist Party management of the economy and society.

And here is revealed yet another real difference between Putin's
approach and the Old Communist approach. Under Putin the Russian and etc. Jews of Russia are NOT held captive for use as a scapegoat object. Jews are NOT the target of a general propaganda hate-proppagation campaign. Any oligarchs who have been targeted for control or discipline or other management have been so targeted due to their own personal volitional behavior in the political-economic sphere, not due to their ethnic Jewish or Chechen or Other background . . . so far as I know.

(I remember reading somewhere decades ago in some very obscure offhand reference that during the very earliest years of the Soviet Union, when the Bolshevik Regime had defeated all armed opposition but when famine was widespread all over West-of-the-Urals . . . that Trotsky wrote some rules about who or what was a "social parasite" to be denied food rations. Trotsky wrote those rules in such a way as to target very nearly all the Jews within the Pale of Settlement area. As smart as Trotsky was, his rules appear to have been written on purpose to achieve near-Nazi thoroughness-of-extermination against all the Jews within that Pale of Settlement area. But famine got so bad that USSR had to accept some of the food aid that Herbert Hoover helped co-ordinate for starving Europe in general, and Hoover's rules were that anyone who needed food would get food. So Trotsky was not able to carry out the antiJew Starvocaust he wanted to achieve. I can't remember where I read the three or four sentences which described that in an offhand way. I read them decades ago.)

[turcopolier]

Daily Planet

Puhlease! R. Peters is a retired Lieutenant Colonel. Look up the ranks on wiki. pll

[turcopolier]

luxetveritas

Just to be nice to you I did not post the batshit crazy comment in which you credit some ass who says the CIA blew up the two towers. If I had would have to ban you as a nut. pl

[DailyPlanet]

My apologies to the Lt Col.

[Babak Makkinejad]

On strictly resource distribution grounds, Schevchenk - a Ukranian was right.
Many in the Soviet government were Jews; Lenin, Trotsky, Bukharin, Kagnovich...

[Croesus]

As explained some time ago, the episode from Croesus' life that I believe is important to recall is how, in the fulness hubris, he misinterpreted the Delphic oracle: The oracle said, "If you go to war against Persia you will destroy a mighty empire." Croesus went to war and, as you observed, lost -- the war and Lydia, his own empire.

Don't feel badly, tho, Eric; the Romans failed to heed Herodotus's parable also: One of the main themes of Edward Gibbons' "Decline and Fall . . ." is that the Romans foolishly provoked and failed to make peace with the Parthians. Combined with several other missteps, that mistake cost the Romans their empire.

Is the lesson "obvious" or "extraordinary"? Do you think our leaders will heed the words of the ancient historians?

[Fred]

ISL,

I like Germany too. Sometimes so much I wish there were still two of them.

[Green Zone Café]

Yes, the link that lux provided seems knowledgeable.

A recent discussion in Musings on Iraq about Sayyid Mohammed Sadiq al Sadr, with some of the history between the Sadrs and the al Khoeis:

http://musingsoniraq.blogspot.com/2017/07/legacy-of-ayatollah-sadiq-al-sadr.html

[Eric Newhill]

Croesus,
No they will not heed the words of ancient historians. Nor will they correctly interpret the oracle's words. They make their own reality and history has ended, they say.