The new Jacobins

After questioning the sanity of George W. Bush Paul Graig Roberts takes on the neocons - the 21st century Jacobins. Like the Bolsheviks in Russia and Mao in China the Jacobins of France were going to remake the society and culture of Europe - by force if necessary. They failed. The neocons of course dreamed of remaking the middle east into a Hamiltonian/capitalist utopia and they too are failing and threatening the region and the world in their failure.

In the face of the total failure of their plan to remake Iraq and Afghanistan, neoconservatives continue to say that America must deracinate Islam and put in its place a women’s rights democracy. On National Public Radio recently, neoconservative Joshua Muravchik reaffirmed that it was America’s job to remake Islamic society.

Neoconservatism is actually a more extreme form of revolutionary utopianism than that of the Bolsheviks and the Jacobins. The Soviet communist party was content with trying to remake Russians. The Jacobins ran out of steam early, and Napoleon reinstituted the old order, dispensing titles of nobility and crowning himself emperor. Only neoconservatives are sufficiently ignorant and delusional as to believe that America’s overthrowing an Arab leader will result in Arab states reconstituting themselves in the West’s image.

Neoconservatives have demonstrated an unrivaled ability to detach themselves from reality. Americans should be terrified that delusional neoconservatives were able to seize control of the presidency of George W. Bush and commit the US to two illegal wars that have been lost and that have isolated the US from the rest of humanity with the exception, of course, of Israel.

But the neocons continue to publish their delusional rants.

The lack of any connection to reality makes the neoconservative print media, such as the Weekly Standard, the Wall St Journal editorial page, and National Review so absurd as to be unreadable. The December 4 issue of National Review, for example, has a cartoon portraying a US soldier in Iraq pondering the 2006 congressional election results. An Iraqi kid is tugging on the soldier’s trouser leg and saying "say you won’t go, Joe!"

National Review’s editors are as lost in delusion as President Bush. And they are just as irrelevant. It boggles the mind that there could be a journalist anywhere on earth who is unaware that polls of Iraqis consistently show that large majorities of Iraqis are "strongly opposed" to the presence of US troops in Iraq, believe the US occupation makes them less secure, and approve of the insurgent attacks on US troops.

And Bush - not a conservative but the first radical Jacobin President.

When Bush says that the US will stay in Iraq and Afghanistan "until the job is done," what job is he talking about? The slaughter of civilians? The destruction of Iraq’s infrastructure and entire towns such as Fallujah? The incitement of civil war? Recruitment for al Qaeda and the provision of a training ground for Osama bin Laden’s followers? The fostering of Islamic extremism throughout the Middle East? These are the real results of Bush’s occupation of Iraq, but they are not what he means by "the job." In true Jacobin, Bolshevik, Cultural Revolution, neoconservative fashion, the job Bush wants to accomplish is the deracination of Islam and the recreation of Muslim society in America’s image. It is impossible to imagine a less conservative goal.

Bush has taken America far beyond the role of being the world’s policeman. Bush is America’s first Jacobin president. He is as far from a conservative as it is possible to be.

Move over Robespierre.

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Paul Craig Roberts, Jacobins, neocons, Bush