Looks like the Trilateralists are stepping in to put the brakes on the NeoCon‘s revolution. James Baker is head of a bi-partisan commission that is accessing the war in Iraq. The commission, The Iraq Study Group, is suspected to announce after the midterms that the mission to bring “democracy” to Iraq (and by extension the surrounding region) is an unattainable goal under current circumstances. The commission is expected to suggest some of the following: a possible carving up of Iraq along sectarian lines creating a confederation of provinces; a withdrawal of U.S. /coalition troops; negotiating amnesty for insurgents. These would-be plans fly in the face of NeoCon/Bush rhetoric and has Press Secretary Tony Snow saying these recommendations would be “nonstarters”.
The significance, I think, is that the NeoCons understood that Iraq and subsequent attempts at “nation building” would jeopardize U.S. interests and stability – risks that would not go over well with citizens here is the capitalist centers who have become accustomed to lifestyles that, in large and small part, have been built on the back of global looting, and who (generally) don’t wake up to the sound of bombs and machine gun fire. The NeoCon’s are not nationalists and they base many of their concepts on a global restructuring of political and social relations. This restructuring could well mean (and probably in fact does) that the U.S. and other leading capitalist metropolis’ will have to adjust and alter.
The NeoCon line as articulated by the present administration combined post-9/11 “War against Terror” with U.S. duty to spread so-called Euro-Enlightenment ideas of democracy. This combination was hoped to undercut any question that war and it’s subsequent price-to-pay would put stress on the national infrastructure. For the NeoCon’s, their course was no guaranteed success and they did not hold hegemony within the ruling class, they had an ear with the Bush administration. But their program was a gamble. As the war and occupation becomes for the public glaringly brutal and seemingly endless, now perhaps we will be seeing more open political conflict and dissention amongst the bosses.