The Anythings They Say – Neoconservative Bill Kristol

by Michael Matheron · Published November 25, 2012 · Updated November 25, 2012

“I think Susan Rice has been a little more interventionist than John Kerry,” he pointed out. “John Kerry was a guy who loved the Assad regime in Syria. John Kerry has been against our intervening in every war we’ve intervened in, the first Gulf War. In Iraq, he was for it before he was against it.” Bill Kristol on FOX News Sunday, Nov. 25, 2012¹

Bill Kristol, all neoconservative all the time, had the misfortune of being unavailable for warmaking

during the Vietnam era. He was otherwise engaged in the vicious trench warfare known as Harvard College, from which he emerged victorious in 1973, just in time to miss any possibility of being cashiered into military service in foreign lands. Luck of birth.

He doubtless would have made quite a soldier, so eager is he to take on all comers. His support and cheer-leading for every suggestion of war has been pretty much absolute. Use of military power rather than diplomacy has been a primary theme. He even walked on the other side politically when he praised a Democrat, President Obama, for his policy during the Libyan uprising, calling the President “a born again neo-con,” (which, of course, he was not). ²

Just two weeks before that comment, though, Kristol had called the administration out for not taking the lead in intervention, suggesting this on, of course, FOX News:

“I think at this point you probably have to do more than the no-fly zone,” he said. “You probably have to tell Gaddafi he has to stop in his movement east and we are going to use assets to stop him from slaughtering people as he moves east across the country. We might take out his ships in the Mediterranean. We might take out tanks and artillery.”³

Oh, and by the way, he also proposed, on March 20, that we send in ground forces.⁴

Ultimately, of course, the six shooter “diplomacy” of the Bush years gave way in Libya to a more moderate policy, and in the end, it worked, the Ghaddafi regime fell, hard, and without U.S. ground troops.

To people like Bill Kristol, our military forces are simply “assets” to be used to police the world in their ideological interests. How’d that work out for them? The harm the Bush administration and neocons like Wolfowitz, Senor, Cheney, and Kristol did to our standing in the world is immeasurable, and will take many years to undo. The Obama administration is making a good start, in Libya, and in its measured course with Syria and Iran.

Kristol’s call for a more warlike Secretary of State than John Kerry is perhaps a trick on his part, i.e. he’s trying to nudge the administration towards appointing Kerry, who they can then take potshots at for being too soft on warfare for the entirety of his term. But if he’s serious about Ms. Rice with what Kristol asserts is her more interventionist nature, he once again is pushing the neocon appetite for warfare using “assets,” or what many of us call “human beings” to pursue more of their failed and discredited policies.

Recall that it was Kristol, on the eve of the Iraq “intervention” in March 2003, had this to say:

“Very few wars in American history were prepared better or more thoroughly than this one by this president.”

And this gem, in April 2003:

“The first two battles of this new era are now over. The battles of Afghanistan and Iraq has been won decisively and honorably.”

It is utterly confounding how Kristol and others like him – Cheney! – who were proved so wrong, so dishonest, and so damaging to the country are not yet banished to an assistant professor’s slot at some bible college. How many more neocon wars will it take?

They really will say anything. Welcome to the club, Bill Kristol!