Fair enough. Though it seems to me there isn’t that much to choose between the two…

But I prefer to think of them as chancers rather than neocons.

Yes, Steve, that’s actually a completely noncontroversial statement. Another time indeed.

Oh, dear me. Dear, dear me.

But never mind. This thread is off the front page now and therefore dead. Another time, perhaps.

All of whom were members of the signature neocon organization Project for the New American Century, IIRC. This is one reason why attempts to claim that the neocons weren’t ‘influential’ sound so absurd and naive to me, with all due respect to Steve.

I just can’t imagine Cheney or Rumsfeld giving a damn about whatever one could interpret as specific Israeli interests.

I can’t imagine them giving much of a damn about whatever one could interpret as facts or reality, let alone “specific interests.” But this is owing to the grand “history’s actors” indifference to real-world mechanics that has characterized the neocons more generally (and that dovetails nicely with the latter-day movementarian detachment from reality). It doesn’t indicate what they thought they were doing, the best guide to which, IMO, is what they said to each other they thought they were doing (in the form of various PNAC articles, studies and so forth).

Steve, you’re right that a large portion of the American electorate would have gone along with the war no matter what rationale was offered: we’re all familiar, after all, with the Rotating Carousel of Excuses that the rank-and-file pro-war lobby offered up prior to the war and has spent the last couple of years trying to justify. (Or, increasingly, simply blaming other people for failing to justify.)

As for “the real decision-makers,” Cheney and Rumsfeld were neocons. Bush is the kind of “real decision-maker” who used to outsource a fifth of his job on a daily basis to Karen Hughes, and frankly strikes me as a figurehead who doesn’t really know he’s a figurehead. Powell was hardly on the inside of the war-planning process, having been one of the most publicly abused and isolated Secretaries of State in recent memory (quite possibly of all time).

Doctor Slack, in this piece she’s attacking a group of neocons, identified by their names, she repeats it four or five times: ‘Wolfowitz, Perle, Rumsfeld and Cheney’.

I dunno, I could be wrong, but I just can’t imagine Cheney or Rumsfeld giving a damn about whatever one could interpret as specific Israeli interests. And I’m not so sure about Wolfowitz either, he sounds a lot like a genuine mentally disturbed megalomaniacal American technocrat, a-la McNamara.

That looks like the allegedly doctored ABC letter, yes. The latest I’ve seen is this:

Sheehan is also being accused of anti-semitism because of an e-mail she wrote to ABC’s Ted Koppel linking the war in Iraq with U.S. support for Israel.

Sheehan says, “I have said a lot of strong things… but I didn’t say that.” And she says the e-mail was doctored to make her look bad.

But the statement attributed to her is not on its face anti-semitic. Nevertheless on her Web page, conservative Ann Coulter writes, “there are plenty of other proofs of Cindy’s anti-semitism still available on the Internet.”

The search for a more convincing witness continues.

Dave, now that you have moved on from 3rd form, you can consult Webster’s:

http://www.webster-dictionary.net/definition/Cabalistic

Of the neo-conservatives’ influence there can be little doubt. Whether or not Israel was the “real” reason they promulgated their particular variant of Middle Eastern Bonapartism is something none of us can ascertain for sure, not being telepaths. However, that it was the most consistent and prominent factor in that ideology as argued—its security being virtually synonymous with the project of “democratizing” the Middle East—is an extensively-documented matter of public record. Naive and destructive though it may have been, and dishonest though the means of advancing it were, I don’t see any reason to believe that they did not actually believe it.

I am finding the following tirade posted around as Cindy Sheehan’s words on “Hardball”

Cindy Sheehan’s words on “Hardball” are directly accessible online. I don’t see anything remotely resembling that “tirade” in the transcript. Surprise, surprise.

That’s the REAL problem.

Bloody hell, this keeps coming up. It’s like “Whack-a-Mole”.

“Cabal” is perhaps the very earliest acronym.
Its meaning is “an inner cabinet” and its derivation is from the initials of Charles I of England’s most intimate advisers in the early 17th century. It was coined contemporaneously. I was taught this at school in the 3rd form, age 14. There is no Abrahamic connotation to the term.

“You tell me the truth. You tell me that my son died for oil. You tell me that my son died to make your friends rich. You tell me my son died to spread the cancer of Pax Americana, imperialism in the Middle East. You tell me that, you don’t tell me my son died for freedom and democracy.

“Cuz, we’re not freer. You’re taking away our freedoms. The Iraqi people aren’t freer, they’re much worse off than before you meddled in their country.

“You get America out of Iraq, you get Israel out of Palestine

“Am I emotional? Yes, my first born was murdered. Am I angry? Yes, he was killed for lies and for a PNAC Neo-Con agenda to benefit Israel. My son joined the Army to protect America, not Israel. Am I stupid? No, I know full-well that my son, my family, this nation, and this world were betrayed by a George Bush who was influenced by the neo-con PNAC agenda after 9/11.

“It was the unstated threat. Iraq wasn’t going to attack America or nuke America. But Iraq was a threat—to Israel. That was the real threat and had been for fifteen years. But for the US government this was the threat that couldn’t speak its name. Europe doesn’t care much about that threat. And the US government didn’t think they should lean too much on it, because going to war to protect Israel wouldn’t be popular.

“We’re not letting them intimidate us. If we get killed out here, know that the Secret Service killed us.

“I take responsibility partly for my son’s death, too. I was raised in a country by a public school system that taught us that America was good, that America was just. America has been killing people, like my sister over here says, since we first stepped on this continent, we have been responsible for death and destruction. I passed on that bull***t to my son and my son enlisted. I’m going all over the country telling moms: This country is not worth dying for. If we’re attacked, we would all go out. We’d all take whatever we had. I’d take my rolling pin and I’d beat the attackers over the head with it. But we were not attacked by Iraq. We might not even have been attacked by Osama bin Laden. 9/11 was their Pearl Harbor to get their neo-con agenda through and, if I would have known that before my son was killed, I would have taken him to Canada. I would never have let him go and try and defend this morally repugnant system we have. The people are good, the system is morally repugnant.”

Is this for real? If it is, the alleged ABC e-mail seems like rather a moot point.