The article discusses who is really the carrier of power in the US. Neoconservatives, or Neocons as they are often called have controlled the direction of the country behind the curtain. They are often war minded, and their strategies for these wars are mostly covert operations of irregular warfare.
The war analyst, Tatiana Gracheva, writes in detail about the birth and history of neo-conservatism. She compares today’s neocons’ endless wars strategy to Trotsky’s Permanent Revolution theory. The most recent target neocons have zeroed in on is Russia.
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This article originally appeared at Vpk-news, translated from Russian by Monna Lita exclusively for SouthFront
The Work of Trotsky is Alive and Winning in the US
Today in the US the largest influence in the structures of power are the neoconservatives. It is specifically this tight elitist circle that is directing the strategic course of Washington for escalation of war, the main target of which is Russia.
How did it happen that Neocons became the owners of such an exclusive power in America? Why are they so easily able to displace and appoint key government officials, including Ministry of Defense. Why is this political clique pushing the US on the path of endless wars?
In order to answer these questions, lets first refer to the history of success of one of the most influential Neocon reps Andrew Marshall.
The Ideal Husband
Marshall is indeed the most evident example of an American politician, who has immense influence and is not limited by either the Republican or Democratic Parties. He is a former director of the Dept. of Defense’s Office of Net Assessment – a producer of American strategy, who held that post from 1973 to 2015. He retired at the age of 93. Every each new president of the United States, regardless of his or her partisanship, has reappointed Marshall to that position.
“The real name of the game that has unfolded is not democracy, but a crusade against Russia”
So we have before us chief strategist of the current American political system of Security and Defense; one who determined the United States’ course and who you can not call anything other than militaristic, with the goal to escalate war. The principal targets of this policy were, first the USSR, and then Russia.
Marshall’s friends are a noteworthy bunch. Henry Kissinger, who is also a person of all-party influence, brought him to the Pentagon. After 20 years of working in an American strategic research center corporation RAND (Research and Development), Marshall became attracted to work as a consultant where he was supposed to handle questions of war with the USSR.
Among Marshall’s star protégés were Dick Chaney, who was the vice president to Bush Jr. and the Secretary of Defense to Bush Sr.; and Paul Wolfowitz, who was Secretary of Defense from 1975 to 1977 during Gerald Ford administration and Deputy Secretary of Defense from 2001 to 2005.
Marshall’s position has always remained immutable. A single person who did try to remove him from his position and eliminate the Office of Net Assessment turned out to be Chuck Hagel, who was appointed to the same post by Barak Obama in the beginning of 2013. Nobody could explain the reason behind Hagel’s decision, considering ONA reports for the Secretary of Defense are strictly classified. Several members of Congress from both parties sent Hagel letters expressing their objection. Former Pentagon Chief Donald Rumsfeld wrote, that the elimination of ONA will be a serious mistake, characterizing Marshall as a person who for 40 years was in the forefront of significant reforms. “Marshall worked with 13 different Secretaries of Defense,” remarked Rumsfeld, “and has trained generations of thinkers in the area of National Security”.
Collage by Andrei Sedikh
The conflict was resolved in November 2014 when the US Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel was unexpectedly and secretly made to resign, while Marshall and his ONA maintained their positions.
This is what an American publicist Bob Woodward wrote about the deeper reasons behind the occurrence of this happenstance. In 2009, Hagel visited the White House and in his personal conversation that he had with Obama, he warned him about the presence of dark subversive forces inside the Pentagon, that are not under control of the highest American power. “We entered a time that is called a New World Order”, Hagel supposedly said to Obama. “We do not control this. But you have to make our role clear. You have to ask the military, why are we using our armed forces”.
This is what an English publicist S. Watson writes regarding Hagel’s resignation from the post of Secretary of Defense: “Hagel lost his position because he stepped into battle with some shady global powers within the US armed forces, whom he warned Obama about. He was talking about the Neocons”.
“Weimar Russia”
American journalist M. Rosenberg, who called Obama the king of Neocons and a warring president, wrote: “The same people who contributed to the war in Iraq, now want the US to bomb Iran, and are demanding that action be taken against Russia. You may call them Neoconservatives or a gang that consists of Kristol-Lieberman-Dershowitz-Krauthammer-Pearl-Fate-Peretz.
After Hagel, a neoconservative Ashton Carter assumed the position of Secretary of Defense. In 1999 he co-wrote a book with a former Secretary of Defense William Perry called “Preventive Defense: A New Security Strategy for America”. It included a list of threats to the US. In first place, as expressed by the authors, was “Weimar Russia”, which is capable of applying aggression.
The fact that the neocons are afraid of the rebirth of Russian empire is also confirmed through memoirs of a former director of the CIA and Secretary of Defense Robert Gates. Particularly, this is how Chaney’s position is described in them: “When the USSR crumbled in 1991, Dick didn’t only want to see the Soviet Union and the Russian Empire to fall apart, but also Russia itself…”
Here is an opinion of an analyst Kevin MacDonald, “The real name of the game that has unfolded is not democracy, but a crusade against Russia… American Neoconservatives are the “permanent government” of the US”.
A publicist named Robert Parry thinks that these kinds of politics are spreading beyond Russia, including post soviet places. “American neocons”, writes Parry, “destabilized Ukraine and organized a regime change on the border with Russia. They brought fascists to power. They supported Al-Qaida in a war against Soviet troops in Afghanistan. During a period of the Bush presidency, they actualized an aggressive advancement of NATO to the east and supported anti Russian regimes in post-soviet spaces. These same neocons initiated the invasion in Iraq and an armed intervention in Libya”.
Prize Pool
In 2007 the neoconservatives created a Center for a New American Security – CNAS. Next to ONA, it became an influential intellectual power that determined foreign and warfare policies for the Obama administration. The Center’s founders Curt Campbell and Michele Fluornoy were offered important seats in the foreign policy and military departments of the US. Campbell is appointed US Deputy Secretary of State on East Asia affairs, and Fluornoy – US Deputy Secretary of Defense on political questions. Campbell is also appointed in advance to a position of Secretary of Defense after Ashton Carter. After all the staffing rearrangements, a Retired Colonel John Hagel was at the head of CNAS. He was a famous expert on irregular warfare, including insurgency and punitive operations related to rebellion and political repressions.
CNAS gathered all the famous strategists in the sphere of irregular warfare with an emphasis on such forms as the “colour revolutions” and subversive activities.
When Gates was Secretary of Defense, in union with neoconservatives, he begins to change the orientation of the American military strategy from traditional to irregular. He introduces a new definition – “hybrid warfare”, which is a combination of tradition al and irregular warfare.
General David Patreus makes irregular warfare as the chief American military strategy. And that is how Pentagon became a sponsor of the “colour revolutions” and other covert operations. Both, Gates and Patreus were strongly influenced by a neoconservative Frederick Kagan, who is a doctor in philosophy in the area of Russian military history and an active proponent of escalation in tensions.
His wife is Kimberly Kagan – president and founder of the Institute of the Study of War. She lobbies for the interests of transnational armies. Through her agents she plants an idea of creating a Private Military Contractor Group (PMC Group) on national lands, so then she can turn those lands into transnational PMC cells that will fight for neocons’ interests.
Frederick’s brother – a neoconservative Robert Kagan is an advisor on foreign policy to such well-known Russophobes as John McCain and Mitt Romney. Kagan founded a project “New American Century”, the basis of which was a militarist policy of Bush Jr. that pushed America into aggression with Afghanistan and Iraq.
He also became an advisor to Obama and Hillary Clinton. Kagan’s wife and ally is the notorious Victoria Nuland.
One of the most important tools in implementing nontraditional warfare in the form of a revolution is the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), which has affiliates all over the world.
This is what Robert Parry writes about the activities of the endowment in Ukraine: “With a budget of 100 million dollars NED financed 65 projects, including activist readiness, journalist support, business group stimulation, etc. That is how a comprehensive and affectively functioning net was created, which is aimed at destabilizing governments in the name of democratic progress”.
The president of NED, Carl Gershman noted in an article of a newspaper Washington Post published in September of 2013: “Ukraine – the biggest prize. The possibilities are great”.
The Strauss Demarche
We can consider Leo Strauss (1899-1973) as the founder of the philosophy of neo-conservatism. From the moment of creation, the Pentagon’s ONA under Marshall’s lead became the base for Strauss’ students and followers of his ideas.
In 1932 Strauss received a scholarship from the Rockefeller Foundation and was able to leave Germany. Having received an education in England and France, he arrived in America. Carl Schmitt – the sponsor of the scholarship, was a German philosopher and a political theorist, who was called a “crowned jurist of the Third Reich”.
Karl Schmitt complied with Göring who was the founder and the head of Gestapo. It was Schmitt specifically, whom Hitler assigned to bring all German laws in line with Nazi theory, made it possible to justify a all-out war against those were labeled enemies of the Nazi regime.
In the book “The Theory of the Partisan” Schmitt states that regular war waged by armed forces will continue to yield more and more to confrontations waged by irregular armed forces.
Schimtt describes the three types of warfare that this consists of: revolutionary warfare, guerilla warfare and subversive warfare, covert warfare. An example of the first sort of war, Schmitt takes us to the Russian revolution, showing how effective the actions of irregular underground forces can be in overthrowing governments.
Today we hear those exact ideas echoing in “Colour Revolutions”, with the help of which, American neoconservatives are changing regimes and sweeping nations away from the face of the earth.
As far as the second type of irregular warfare, there are battles of national partisan (rebel) forces on occupied territories, and as an example, Schmitt gives us the Partisan movement in the USSR: “During the WWII, Russian partisans (rebels), by expert estimation, drew to themselves about 20 German divisions and by therefore contributed significantly to the outcome of war.
The idea of strategy development to fight partisans (rebels), who rise up against the conqueror, is also mirrored in Strauss’ philosophy. Guided by it, American neoconservatives are composing a manual on how to carry out anti-rebel operations as an element of irregular warfare, which is being realized today in Ukraine by the Pentagon.
The third irregular warfare is subversive or covert and is directed toward undermining the potential and foundations of target states by acts of terrorism and sabotage of economic, political, spiritual, demographic and other means.
Accepting this idea as a guide to action, a neocon and a follower of Marshall, Donald Rumsfeld as a Secretary of Defense introduces the concept of “indirect approach” in warfare and “indirect (covert) operations”. Explaining it, Rumsfeld specifically stated, “We are trying to determine how to wage war against those who are not a nation state, and how to wage with those countries that we are not currently in a state of war”.
In the book ‘The Theory of a Partisan”, Schmitt makes a conclusion while comparing regular and irregular warfare in modern strategy: “The question arises practically from here about the proportion of which a warfare of a regular army in an open war is valued in comparison to other methods which are not openly warlike. Mao answers this question with figures: a revolution is nine-tenths irregular, undiscovered warfare and one-tenth it is an open military warfare. A German general by the name of Helmut Staedke isolated a partisan’s specification on this basis: a partisan is a fighter of the nine-tenths of those waging war, who presents only the last tenth of the portion to regular armed forces. Mao Zedong is not taking his eyes off the fact that for the end of war this last tenth part is the deciding one”.
Constructive Chaos
The Times magazine called Leo Strauss as one of the most influential and powerful figures in Washington, who because an inspiration for a conservative revolution in Congress and an intellectual godfather of a program that has an openly harsh Fascist policy.
Strauss’ philosophy marks a list of key ideas on which it is built.
1. To build a global unipolar world order, to establish a dominion of a world empire under the rule of a tyrant.
2. Imperialistic militarism and waging war, peace through perpetual war – the fundamental principle of neoconservatives.
3. A division of society into the elites (upper/superior class) and the masses (lower/inferior class).
4. Keeping secret the elites’ true ambitions from the masses, esotericism of the elite (the secret elite).
5. The ways in which the elites come to power – revolution, conspiracies among intellectuals, war.
6. White lies – constant deception that the ruling elite presents to their citizens.
7. Dominance of the free market
8. Liberalism
American neoconservatives aim to spread a liberal democracy globally. Strauss writes, “The multitude of Plebeian masses are leaning toward freedom” and thereby “they can not be completely ignored”. But since they are the Plebeian masses of the inferior class, everything that is done to create order among them is lawful. “If you can use democracy as to turn the masses against their personal freedom, it will be a big triumph”, notes Strauss.
From the ideas presented by Strauss, a Pentagon concept of war is developed by the neocons, in the center of which lies the population of the adversary.
Wars and revolutions are called to destroy nations and create chaos from which a tyrannical global empire will grow. Strauss praises ethnic cleansing and considered a slave owner to be the only one truly benevolent. By the way, Strauss is the author of the controlled chaos theory. “The secret elite come to power with the help of wars and revolutions”, he writes. “In order to retain and ensure their power, they need a constructive (controlled) chaos directed at suppressing all forms of resistance”.
There is another theorist who had a huge influence on the neoconservatives. That is Liev Trotsky. “A revolutionary ideology of neo-conservatism”, writes an American publicist Michael Lind, “is actually Trotsky’s theory on permanent revolution”. Trotsky formulated the notion of “Red Terror” itself specifically.
The Extreme Truth
As far as the idea of white lies, or the constant lying of the elite to its citizens, let us recall the following remarks of the CIA director William Casey; “We consider our disinformation program a success only when everything that the American society believes are those lies that have been instilled into them”.
“The level of the terrorist attacks that took place on September 11, 2001 were not attainable by Osama bin Laden and his hit men”
How can we not recall Orwell who said, “In a time of universal deceit – telling the truth is a revolutionary act”.
Based on a neoconservative principle of a lie, the false flag operation is an important component of the irregular war strategy. An example of this type of an operation was organized by the neocons and what some are calling acts of terrorism in America in September of 2001.
This is what an investigative journalist Jeffrey Steinberg writes in detail, “Strauss’ followers in the last 30 years are acting like an underground network inside and around the American government, waiting for that moment when they can create a coup.
They committed their neoconservative putsch on September 11th of 2001. The 9/11 terrorist attacks in the US could not happen without the participation of the leadership of the US national security system, which knows all the vulnerable subtle details. These attacks were a sophisticated operation of a covert irregular war. Osama bin Laden and his hit men could not have attained this level of terrorism. A declaration that this act is Osama bin Laden’s doing was perhaps the biggest lie in the style of Goebbels’ Propaganda. In order to find out who was behind this covert operation, we need to ask; who will profit from it and who won from this operation? The neoconservatives won from this operation”.
The global empire that the neocons are building originated in the US in the form of deep state. Now this empire is growing and unavoidably it will swallow the US, whose leadership being under the control of the neocons, has become citizens of this nation working against their own country. And the global neocon empire is turning into a new specific type of a global enemy that Russia will have to deal with it.
The US and Ukraine are occupied with the same net of the neocon global empire.
As far as we are concerned, well, we have to again be prepared to go into battle against Trotskyism and fascism, taking into account new strategic realities.
Written by Tatiana Gracheva, a War Analyst.