Johns Hopkins University -- SAIS

Washington, DC 20036

May 20, 2008

Eliot Cohen at IRC Right Web

http://rightweb.irc-online.org/ind/cohen/cohen_body.html

Ahmad Faruqui
TomPaine.com
November 29, 2002

A Triumphant Call To Arms

http://www.tompaine.com/feature.cfm/ID/6807

The Apocalyptic Agenda Of The Neo-Conservatives

Neo-conservative writers have become increasingly vocal about an apocalyptic conflict involving the United States and Muslim world.

Start with Norman Podhoretz, the former longtime editor of Commentary and now a Hudson Institute fellow. Podhoretz calls for en masse regime change in the Middle East, beginning with Iraq and Iran from the original "axis of evil" list, and extending it to Egypt, Lebanon, Libya, the Palestinian National Authority, Saudi Arabia and Syria. He wants the United States to unilaterally overthrow these regimes and replace them with democracies cast in the Jeffersonian mold...

...Rather than being dismissed as fringe thinking, these pronouncements frame the hard-right boundary for debates in conservative political circles..

...Meanwhile, consider these policy prescriptions for today's Middle East:

...Eliot Cohen is the most influential neo-con in academe. From his perch as a professor of national security studies at John Hopkins University (SAIS), Cohen refers to the war against terrorism by a chilling name: World War IV (citing the Cold War as WWIII). He claims America is on the good side in this war, just like it has been in all prior world wars; and the enemy is militant Islam, not some abstract concept of "terrorism."...

..Daniel Pipes of the Middle East Forum opines that U.S. academics are trying to sugar coat the true meaning of jihad, and thereby hide its violent and political character. In the November issue of Commentary, he cites numerous Islamic scholars -- most of them non-Muslim -- who state that jihad is confined to militarily defensive engagements, and its primary meaning is the attainment of moral self- improvement...

..In mid-November, the neo-cons quietly launched a bipartisan Committee for the Liberation of Iraq. One prominent members is George Schulz, now a fellow at the Hoover Institution...

...The Muslim world will view a string of U.S. military attacks on Muslim countries as the aggression of an oil-thirsty superpower on the Muslim world, not a march to liberate people from tyranny.