If you ask the right question of a neoconservative you just might (admittedly, the odds are fantastically low) get an honest answer. In an absolutely bizarre Radio 4 programme repeated yesterday, entitled “Death To America”, Justin Webb, a very silly man who masquerades as the BBC’s Washington Correspondent, opined that “to be anti-American is to be anti-human”. Well, yes and no. Yes, because to be, say, anti-Palestinian is to also be anti-human. And no, because, evidently, Webb would not have thought of putting it in the same terms for, say, Palestinians, or indeed any other nation. American exceptionalism, again, or should that be acceptionalism?
Webb got a rather odd answer from Richard Perle, neoconservative Ayatollah and self-styled Prince of Darkness. Discussing U.S. support for the totalitarian Mubarak regime and the rise in support for the Muslim Brotherhood and the jihadi cause, Perle muttered, somewhat chastened in the realisation of what he was about to say, that American foreign policy is “a root cause of terrorism”.
Add to this the new policy of engaging with all but Al Qaeda in Iraq (that is to say, all the “fascists and Islamo-fascists” the neoconservatives and liberal imperialists have said constitute all of the insurgency and with whom there could be no negotiation). Incidentally, just in case you’ve been living under a rock since 2001 (or are neoconservative or liberal imperialist, which is pretty much the same thing), this is what the anti-war Left has been saying all along, but at which time was considered “fascist”, “pro-fascist”, “objectively pro-fascist”. At the time this was said the churchyard in the English village of Sutton Courtenay experienced an earthquake as Geoege Orwell’s grave shook.
Given that the only people in the Islamic world who support the neoconservatives liberal imperialists are the chauvinistic jihadis, it is a mystery why anyone in the liberal and democratic West would listen to these anti-American bozos.
Even in their own warped terms, especially as the number of U.S. deaths in Iraq rapidly approaches the 4000 mark, for the noconservatives and liberal imperialists to now accept what was allegedly “anti-American” as part of the solution in Iraq is, of course, not only “anti-American” but also “anti-human”. That it was “anti-human” was never a consideration as long as the humans dying weren’t the exceptional Americans.
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