Now that Anna Nicole Smith is buried, the corporate media has
adopted yet another tawdry spectacle—the gruesome dismemberment
of a Shelby Township, Michigan, woman. But if murder is not your
cup of tea, you can always perch before the plasma screen and
observe the disgusting pageant of Ann Coulter, once again dominating
what passes for news as she slanders presidential hopeful-selectee
John Edwards, calling him a “faggot,” a comment that
inspired Rev. Patrick J. Mahoney, Director of the Christian Defense
Coalition, to proclaim it is a shame Coulter did not instead remark
upon Edwards’ “radical agenda.” Of course, John
Edwards is no more or less “radical” than any of the
other contenders, one-worlders all—but never mind, we have
a false paradigm to uphold here.
Meanwhile, the corporate media deems the character and agenda
of Eliot Cohen not worth mention. As you may recall, as noted
here last week, Cohen was elevated to the enviable—or not,
unless you’re a neocon—position of handling Condi
Rice, the Secretary of State considered a dismal failure all around.
Cohen’s appointment gained a granule of notice in the CIA’s
favorite newspaper, the Washington Post, near week’s end,
and the San Francisco Chronicle and the neocon friendly New York
Sun noticed as well, but the spin was immediately sent into orbit,
as all around described Mr. Cohen as a “prominent writer”
and “academic” who “pulled no punches in his
criticism of the military occupation of Iraq,” as if the
guy is a stark raving peacenik casting about flower petals.
In fact, the guy is a stark raving Straussian, an Israel First
fanatic, avidly chomping at the bit to shock and awe Iran and
realize the remainder of the neocon plan in short order, that
is the methodical reduction of the Arab and Muslim Middle East
to a smoldering shell of death and misery.
“It is not hyperbole to say that Cohen is as extremist
a neoconservative and warmonger as it gets,” writes Glenn
Greenwald for Salon. “Unlike the more political neoconservatives,
who are very careful about what they say and go to great lengths
to conceal their ultimate goals, Cohen has been an academic and
thus more explicit about the theoretical underpinnings of his
worldview. “We are in the middle of World War IV,”
Greenwald summarizes Cohen’s “philosophy,” more
accurately a dangerous psychopathic obsession. “We have
numerous countries against whom we must wage war. The highest
strategic priority is to change the government of Iran, with whom
we can never negotiate. And the ultimate goal is to rule the world
with our military force as the Supreme Imperial Power.”
That is the neoconservative vision at its core. And the untold
damage it has wreaked on our country has not diminished their
influence in any way in this administration. They are still in
control, particularly in the area they care about most—the
Middle East. And they have dealt with their greatest fear—war-avoidance
with Iran prior to regime change—by installing one of their
very own extremists to scrutinize and check the State Department.
This is really the debate America needs most, but is also the
one we are furthest away from being able to conduct—is the
goal of the U.S. really to maintain and expand imperial world
domination? The dangers to our country from that pursuit are grave
and obvious. They are precisely the ones about which, among others,
George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and Dwight Eisenhower most
urgently warned, and Jefferson similarly emphasized continuously
that the most important obligation a country has is to avoid war
except when the nation’s security is directly attacked.
But that, more than anything, accounts for the current predicament
of America. We have ceased adhering in these matters to the principles
of George Washington, Thomas Jefferson and Dwight Eisenhower,
and have instead become a nation of Dick Cheneys, Victor Davis
Hansons, Richard Perles, and Eliot Cohens.
Unfortunately, Greenwald, like so many smart people, aims too
high, or maybe it is too low. It must be emphatically stated Cohen
and the neocons are not dismissive of the sort of values espoused
by George Washington and Thomas Jefferson (it is a mistake to
put Eisenhower in their league)—in fact, they are downright
contemptuous, if the truth be told.
Eliot Cohen was not a student of Leo Strauss, but he was the
next best thing—he was a student of Harvey C. Mansfield
Jr., as was another Straussian, William Kristol, the latter who
dons a boyish and disarming smile on Fox News, thus masking his
true nature, that is hankering for the destruction of life as
we know it (see Robert Howse’s Leo Strauss—Man of
War? Straussianism, Iraq, and the Neocons). Other neocons, namely
Abram Shulsky and Paul Wolfowitz, were taught directly by Strauss
(Shulsky currently heads the Iranian Directorate, tasked with
“cherry picking, manipulating, and even planting intelligence
abroad that would support a case against Iran in the minds of
the public,” according to sources cited by Larisa Alexandrovna).
From his perch at Harvard, Mansfield, fat on the meat of numerous
Guggenheim and NEH Fellowships, instructs his students on Machiavelli,
Hobbes, and the concept of “manliness,” a quality
obviously in short supply among effete, university and foundation-bound
chicken hawk neocons. Mansfield “is a self-described Straussian,”
according to Wikipedia, that is to say Mansfield is radically
opposed to liberalism—not the soft and squishy modern version
of liberalism, mind you, but classical liberalism going back to
the Magna Carta. “The hallmark of Strauss’ approach
to philosophy was his hatred of the modern world, his belief in
a totalitarian system, run by ‘philosophers,’ who
rejected all universal principles of natural law, but saw their
mission as absolute rulers, who lied and deceived a foolish ‘populist’
mass, and used both religion and politics as a means of disseminating
myths that kept the general population in clueless servitude,”
explains Jeffrey Steinberg. “For Strauss and all of his
protégés (Strauss personally had 100 Ph.D. students,
and the ‘Straussians’ now dominate most university
political science and philosophy departments), the greatest object
of hatred was the United States itself, which they viewed as nothing
better than a weak, pathetic replay of ‘liberal democratic’
Weimar Germany.”
Mansfield is a proponent of “extra-legal powers”
bestowed upon the presidency, or in Bush’s case, the unitary
decidership. “Mansfield argues that the U.S. Constitution
creates a strong executive because the framers understood that
the rule of law won’t suffice in an emergency,” writes
David Luban. “Unlike the currently notorious arguments of
John Yoo, based on (selective) use of founding-era history, Mansfield
defends the monarchical executive through philosophical abstractions,”
arguments hauntingly like those espoused by Carl Schmitt, the
“Crown Jurist of the Third Reich.” Strauss and Schmitt
“were once close professionally,” notes Alan Wolfe,
“Schmitt supported Strauss’s application for a Rockefeller
Foundation fellowship to Paris in 1932, the same year in which
Strauss published a review of Schmitt’s most important book,
The Concept of the Political.”
For Schmitt, the concept of “friend and enemy” makes
the world go around. In other words, for the sake of social and
political cohesion, a perennial enemy must exist, and it is essential
such an enemy present a serious threat, even a mortal danger,
and thus the Schmittian “power of the exception” must
fall to the executive. “Sovereign is he who holds the power
of the exception,” writes Hitler’s jurist. “Much
present-day thinking puts civil liberties and the rule of law
to the fore and forgets to consider emergencies when liberties
are dangerous and law does not apply. But it is precisely difficult
situations that we should think about and counsels of perfection
that we should avoid,” Mansfield wrote last year for the
Weekly Standard. “In Machiavelli’s terms, ordinary
power needs to be supplemented or corrected by the extraordinary
power of a prince, using wise discretion.”
Eliot Cohen, tutored well by the Machiavellian Mansfield, does
“not want to avoid war at all, but instead believe[s] that
it’s glorious and elegant and empowering,” as Greenwald
writes. Cohen and the Straussian neocons “want to ensure
a state of Permanent War, complete with all of the internal constrictions
of liberty which wars inevitably entail, because they view the
United States not as a republic, but as an empire which—in
order to fulfill all sorts of agendas—can, should and must
rule the world with superior military force. There is a temptation
to dismiss ‘those same people’ as irrelevant extremists,
but as Cohen’s Friday-announced appointment reflects, they
are anything but irrelevant.”
Indeed, they are hardly irrelevant—not that most of us
notice, thanks to a corporate media selling instead “Barbie
Bandits” and the prospect of Britney Spears committing “inevitably
weird” suicide while in rehab.
Unfortunately, on the day after “World War Four”
kicks off, thanks to Straussians in high places, we will be headed
to the same fate Schmitt’s Germany suffered, that is to
say a dreadful place replete with misery and hardship. In 1946,
after a short stay in an internment camp, Schmitt was allowed
to return to his home town of Plettenberg, where he continued
his studies, including lectures in fascist Spain.
No doubt our neocons will experience likewise—albeit minus
the internment camp, because here in America we love and laud
our war criminals and scoundrels, as Bush Senior, Bill Clinton,
and Henry Kissinger, to name but three, can attest.
