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Post by Moses on Dec 31, 2005 10:58:15 GMT -5
In case anyone doubts that the Dem Party is nothing but a farm team for the neocons: [ DU] .... and it explains the similarities I found between PPI's statements shortly after 9/11 and PNAC's positions (PPI is the DLC's thinktank): www.ppionline.org/ppi_ci.cfm?knlgAreaID=450004&s... [/i] [/b] <snip> The attack on America has created some startling opportunities to realign global politics.<snip> Ultimately, the challenge facing the United States and the liberal democracies is to drain the global swamp[/ul] Realize that if both parties adopt PNAC strategies (if they haven't already) then we will have strong support for a form of "friendly fascism" guiding our government.
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Post by Moses on Dec 31, 2005 11:25:57 GMT -5
From Right Web, which publishes info on dangerous right wing extremists whose goals seem antithetical to US democracy and who tend to be members of cabals and such plotting against America: Will Marshall along with Al From co-founded the Democratic Leadership Council (DLC) in 1985. Four years later Marshall founded closely affiliated Progressive Policy Institute (PPI), a think tank that shares offices with the DLC. Marshall and From were both staffers for Representative Gillis Long of Louisiana, who was the chairman of the House Democratic Party Caucus in the early 1980s. Marshall served as Long's speechwriter and policy analyst. Marshall was senior editor of the 1984 House Democratic Caucus policy blueprint, "Renewing America's Promise". (1) Marshall helped establish the Democratic Leadership Council in the wake of Walter Mondale's landslide defeat. The DLC has aimed to create a "New Democrat movement" to move the party toward the center-right in domestic, global economy, and foreign policy issues. Part of the DLC's success can be attributed to the agenda-setting capacities of the Progressive Policy Institute, the DLC think tank that Marshall founded in 1989. Called "Bill Clinton's idea mill," the Progressive Policy Institute was responsible for many of the Clinton administration's initiatives, including the national service agency AmeriCorps. Will Marshall is editor of Building the Bridge: 10 Big Ideas to Transform America (Roman & Littlefield, 1997) and co-editor of Mandate for Change (Berkley Books, 1992), PPI's best-selling policy blueprint for President Clinton's first term. Marshall is also editor-at-large of Blueprint, the DLC's magazine of politics and policy. (1) The Washingtonian magazine described Marshall as follows: "A University of Virginia graduate and former Richmond-Times Dispatch reporter, the wily Marshall plots ideas campaigns the way Robert E. Lee mapped strategy for the Confederates. His small but nimble "New Democrat" think tank, an arm of the Democratic Leadership Council, has kept "Old Democrats" off balance with a fusillade of proposals to reform traditional party thinking on welfare and other issues." (1) Marshall was one of 15 analysts who wrote the Progressive Policy Institute's foreign policy blueprint, "Progressive Internationalism: A Democratic National Security Strategy". (2) Using language that mirrors that of the neoconservative Project for the New American Century (PNAC), in October 2003 PPI hailed the "tough-minded internationalism" of past Democratic presidents such as Harry Truman. Like PNAC, which warned of the present danger in its founding documents, the Progressive Policy Institute declared that "America is threatened once again" and needs assertive individuals committed to strong leadership. Its observation--"like the cold war, the struggle we face today is likely to last not years but decades"-- mirrors both neoconservative and Bush administration national security assessments. In its words, PPI endorsed the invasion of Iraq, "because the previous policy of containment was failing," and Saddam Hussein's government was "undermining both collective security and international law."Like PNAC and the Bush administration, the Progressive Policy Institute has a vision of national security that extends to fostering democracy and freedom around the world in "the belief that America can best defend itself by building a world safe for individual liberty and democracy." It's likely that PNAC itself would heartily agree with PPI's criticism of those who complain that "the Bush administration has been too radical in recasting America's national security strategy." In fact, in assessing the Bush administration's foreign policy agenda, the institute stated, "we believe it has not been ambitious enough or imaginative enough." (2) (3) Both in articles in the DLC's Blueprint and in media interviews, Marshall has struck out at Democrats who have either opposed the Iraq invasion or who call for the U.S. to pull out before it is commonly agreed that the "liberation" of Iraq is, as President Bush declared on May 1, 2003, "mission accomplished." On the "They Said It" part of its website, the Republican Party highlights Marshall telling the Los Angeles Times: "You hear way too much from the Democrats in this race about turning over the whole mess to the U.N. Well, that's not credible and most people know it. It doesn't have the power to achieve the only outcome we can accept." (4) (5)In a January 2004 article titled "Stay and Win in Iraq," Marshall takes a blithely nationalist view of body counts in a war in which all but a small fraction of the dead are Iraqi civilians. "Coalition forces still face daily attacks but the body count tilts massively in their favor," boasts Marshall, a leading voice for the liberal hawks in the United States. (6) The New Democrats insist on the urgency of establishing a "third way" that steers a middle course between "peaceniks" like Dennis Kucinich and "warlords" like Donald Rumsfeld. But when it comes to issues of national security their new progressive internationalism seems like a reconstitution of the old cold war logic. Marshall, for example, sees the war in Iraq as a counterinsurgency campaign that must combine the heavy deployment of U.S. troops with a commitment to winning hearts and minds. Citing neocon analysts at the Washington Institute for Near East Policyan Israeli front org], Marshall comes clean: "The escalating violence prompted facile and mostly misleading analogies between Iraq and Vietnam. But in one respect, the comparison is apt: The United States is once again waging a classic counterinsurgency campaign in a country whose culture seems worlds apart from ours. Like it or not, America is back in the business of winning hearts and minds." I n his certitude that the same old wars need to be fought again as part of the "third way," Marshall dismisses the unpleasant reality that the progressive wing of the Democratic Party does not agree that the United States has to fight, "like it or not," a new array of counterinsurgency wars in the Middle East. (6) Although Marshall calls himself a "centrist," he has associated himself with neoconservative organizations and their radical foreign policy agendas. At the onset of the Iraq invasion, Marshall signed statements issued by the Project for the New American Century calling for the removal of Saddam Hussein, advocating that NATO help "secure and destroy all of Iraq's weapons of mass destruction," and arguing that the invasion "can contribute decisively to the democratization of the Middle East." (7) Marshall's credentials as a liberal hawk have been well established by his affinity for other PNAC-associated groups, including the U.S. Committee on NATO and the Committee for the Liberation of Iraq. Marshall served on the board of directors of the U.S. Committee on NATO alongside such leading neocon figures as Robert Kagan, Richard Perle, Randy Scheunemann, Paul Wolfowitz, Stephen Hadley, Peter Rodman, Jeffrey Gedmin, Gary Schmitt, and the committee's founder and president Bruce Jackson of PNAC. (8) At the request of the Bush administration, PNAC's Bruce Jackson also formed the Committee for the Liberation of Iraq, which, with DLC chairman Joseph Lieberman serving as co-chair together with John McCain, aimed to build bipartisan support for the liberation, occupation, and democratization of Iraq. Marshall, together with Robert Kerrey (who coauthored Progressive Internationalism), represented the liberal hawk wing of the Democratic Party on the committee's neocon-dominated advisory board. (9) Other advisers included James Woolsey, Elliot Cohen, Newt Gingrich, William Kristol, Jeane Kirkpatrick, Joshua Muravchik, Chris Williams, and Richard Perle. On February 25, 2003, Marshall joined an array of neoconservatives marshaled by the Social Democrats/USA [such a similar name to the NAZI party of Germany]-a wellspring of neoconservative strategy-to sign a letter to President Bush calling for the invasion of Iraq. Marshall and others asked the president to "act alone if that proves necessary" and then, as a follow-up to a military-induced regime change in Iraq, to implement a democratization plan. The SD/USA letter urged the president to commit his administration to "maintaining substantial U.S. military forces in Iraq for as long as may be required to ensure a stable, representative regime is in place and functioning." Others signing the SD/USA letter included Hillel Fradkin, Rachelle Horowitz, Bruce Jackson, Penn Kemble, Robert Kagan, James Woolsey, Nina Shea, Michael Novak, Clifford May, and Ben Wattenberg. (10) (11) In the DLC's Blueprint magazine, Marshall wrote: "In addition to scoring Bush's unilateralism and the narrow approach of the neo-imperialist right, the proponents of progressive internationalism--including this author--take on the protectionist, pacifist tendencies of the non-interventionist left. We write: 'Too many on the left seem incapable of taking America's side in international disputes. Viewing multilateralism as an end in itself, they lose sight of goals, such as fighting terrorism or ending gross human rights abuses, which sometimes require the United States to act, if need be, outside a sometimes ineffectual United Nations.' With such a robust strategy, Democrats can take on President Bush in the area of his presumed strength -- if they have the courage to seize it." (12) In the same article Marshall takes Bush to task for his "my way or the highway approach" and for "riding roughshod" over allies and multilateral institutions, even though Marshall himself signed statements urging the administration to invade Iraq, even if it did not obtain UN approval or the consent of its main allies.
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