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well, if you want to connect the neocons to a logner-term historical backdrop, why not go with the formation of the "national security state" in the earliest phase of the cold war? this context enables one to make sense of iraq because positioning the nature and interests of the nss behind the project for a new american century highlights the extent to which the war in iraq was about both the suspicion of multi-lateral agreements as a way to shape globalizing/americanising capitalism (with the un as the signifier of all things multi-lateral therefore bad) and about the assertion of the americans as military super-power over and above such multi-lateral agreements. for example. behind that lay a project to make the post-coldwar world safe for radical nationalist by way of assertions of military power--economic activity might be transnationalizing, but with a military, you still have the basis for mobilizing around the notion of the nation-state, and without the nation-state there is no conservatism at all.
the nss is not elected directly. it is predicated on a military=style command system (the argument was--i cant remember who made it--that democratic processes were too slow, that an alternative mechanism had to be developed to enable fast decisive responses from authoritarian regimes--think stalin, for example--that were no "encumbered" by "democracy")--much of the policy of the bush people links to this command system, its assumptions, its logic.
so if the neocons are a faction of the right that is most directly beholden to the overall interests of the security apparatus--the network of contractors/suppliers and institutions that buy from them---it kinda follows that something like bushworld would be an outcome---with all its attending problems in principle--which are compounded by the mind-boggling ineptness of these particular people.
this is a potted summary of the way i would think about the question posed in the op--more on the lines of dc's posts, but tweaked in another direction.
as for the candidates and the bush redefinition of the role of the presidency--i find the ambivalences amongst these folk concerning maintenance of the bush terms for the office of president to be alarming on the one hand, but indicative on the other--indicative of a sense of class interest shared by these representatives of various factions within the oligarchy.
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a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear
it make you sick.
-kamau brathwaite
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