US: Neo-Con Ideologues Launch New Foreign Policy GroupIPS: The blandly-named Foreign Policy Initiative (FPI) has thus far kept a low profile... 'This reminds me of the Project for the New American Century,' said Steven Clemons... 'Like PNAC, it will become a watering hole for those who want to see an ever-larger US military machine and who divide the world between those who side with right and might and those who are evil or would appease evil.'...
RACHEL MADDOW: Why is it that people who are catastrophically wrong about big important things like foreign policy and war never, like, flunk out of that as a subject?...
MATT DUSS: There seems to be this special dispensation in American foreign policy that, as long as you are wrong on the side of more military force, then all is forgiven...
David Sirota, Truthdig: One in every three dollars the government spends goes to defense and security. The killing machine and adventurism that money manufactures have delivered 1 million Iraqi casualties, thousands of American casualties and an implicit promise of future wars -- indeed, of permanent war. Perpetuating this expenditure, bloodshed and posture... requires a culture constantly selling violence as a necessity... forwarding the assumption that killing is a legitimate form of national ambition and self-expression.
William Pfaff: The fundamental problem is the illusion of omnipotence: that America is and will continue to be omnipotent because the rest of the world expects this; it is America's Manifest Destiny... America's military power naturally invites excessive or irrelevant use... The United States has a level or military power that it doesn't need, has limited utility against stateless enemies and insurgents, and causes confusion between military strength and national power, the latter being the ability to actually produce a desired effect.
