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What they really care about is foreign policy: for them, perpetual war for perpetual peace isn’t an absurdity: it’s a policy. From their days as the brain trust of Sen. Henry “Scoop” Jackson, who was known as the Senator from Lockheed, their agenda has been consistent: establishing and maintaining American military hegemony on every continent.

https://original.antiwar.com/justin/2018/12/09/the-end-of-the-weekly-standard/

by Justin Raimondo

The rumored demise of the Weekly Standard is yet another of Donald J. Trump’s achievements that will go uncelebrated by his liberal enemies: indeed, they are even now mourning the death of the neoconservative flagship as they never did when it was at the height of its maleficent glory.

And of course neoconservatism’s many fellow-travelers are out there with panegyrics. It “stood up for conservative principle” in the age of Trump, writes Meghan McArdle. What principle this might be, Ms. McArdle somehow neglects to say: perhaps it’s a penchant for perpetual war, the only known characteristic this famously eccentric and variable band hold in common. BothMcArdle and the editors of the Standard thrilled their readers with stories of the great danger posed by Saddam Hussein, who they told us had nukes hidden beneath his palace ready to launch at a moment’s notice.

Let’s take a look at the three important roles played by the Standard and its editors in the history of the post-9/11 era.

To begin with, Kristol and his neoconservative cadre served as the point men and chief agitators for the series of wars we fought, to disastrous effect, in the Middle East. Through a series of front groups and thinktanks, such as the Project for a New American Century, the neocons spread their propaganda with promiscuous alacrity, to Republican and Democratic lawmakers alike,…

Secondly, the magazine was key to getting out the disinformation that made the Iraq war possible. Supposedly based on leaked “intelligence,” and given the benefit of a doubt due to the magazine’s closeness to the Bush administration, the Standard told us with full confidence that al Qaeda was behind 9/11, that Saddam’s “weapons of mass destruction” posed a physical threat to the territory of the United States, and that the Iraqis would greet us as “liberators.” It was Kristol who infamously predicted that the war would last “two months.”

Most importantly, however, the Standard was the flagship of the conservative faction of the Right – a querulous group of intellectuals who originally identified as leftists, far leftists, in most cases – who gradually moved rightward until they became “leftists for Reagan” at the height of the cold war. Rejecting the pro-peace stance of Democratic party activists during the Nixon years, they crossed over to the GOP and have been ensconced in the party, especially its policymaking machinery, ever since – until now…

What they really care about is foreign policy: for them, perpetual war for perpetual peace isn’t an absurdity: it’s a policy. From their days as the brain trust of Sen. Henry “Scoop” Jackson, who was known as the Senator from Lockheed, their agenda has been consistent: establishing and maintaining American military hegemony on every continent. What Britain once was we have become, in large part thanks to their effort: the guarantor of a “liberal world order” that is neither very liberal nor all that orderly. It’s an empire in which everything goes out and nothing comes in – a “modern” sort of Imperium, which (ostensibly) benefits the conquered and costs the conquerors a pretty penny.

The imminent demise of the Weekly Standard is symbolically important to us paleocons – and, by the way, for anti-interventionists of every stripe and persuasion — for it instantiates and confirms our victory over the neocons. For at least three decades the neocons have pushed us aside, minimized our influence, and smeared us as “extremists” –­ and now they have been finally and justly repudiated by the movement they posed as leaders of and the party they controlled since the reign of Bush II. Trump made neoconservatism untenable, and effectively destroyed it as a viable political force, at least in the short term…

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