Neocon Christmas List

Neocon Christmas List
by Jim Lobe, TomPaine.com Exclusive

They're making a list and checking it twice. And you won't be surprised that no one's been nice.

http://www.tompaine.com/articles/neocon_christmas_list.php

Beginning one month ago, when 'uber-hawk' Frank Gaffney, the president of the Center for Security Policy (CSP) and long-time protegé of neoconservative impresario Richard Perle, published what he called his ''checklist of the work the world will demand of this president and his subordinates in a second term,'' prominent hawks have been pushing their own favorite targets for regime change or simple confrontation—from Caracas to Pyongyang, not to mention the State Department and the CIA, where change is presumably already underway—on what sometimes seems like an hourly basis.

At the top of the list, as they have been for so long, of course, are Iran and North Korea, whose possession of nuclear weapons is simply "unacceptable," as the administration itself has repeatedly stated. But others—notably Syria, China, dark-horse Venezuela and even Russia, not to mention the United Nations (at least until the White House put the kabosh on that last week) and the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA)—are still seen as requiring policies of active containment, if not "regime change."

These calls to action have appeared in all the usual places—the editorial pages of the Wall Street Journal and the New York Post, the pages and websites of the Weekly Standard and the National Review, on FoxNews, and the Washington Times . Somewhat ominously, perhaps, they are also reprinted in the Pentagon's twice-daily 'Early Bird' editions—compilations of must reading for senior national security officials.

Common to almost all of these effusions is the sense that, while Iraq might not have gone quite as well as anticipated, the U.S. has somehow "turned the corner" in Iraq, presumably with its ''victory'' in Fallujah, and now has the situation well enough in hand to recast its net against the world's evil-doers, be it by military force, covert action, "support for the opposition," or simply intimidation.

--more--