Creating Fantasy Enemies Could Lead to Self Destruction

The above is part four of the award winning BBC documentary: Power of Nightmares.

With the fall of the Soviet Union, and the mistaken belief that it was the result of American actions, the neoconservative movement needed to create a new phantom enemy.

This came ready made in Saddam Hussein, but George Bush Sr., while he fought against Saddam's invasion of Kuwait, had no desire to attack Iraq based on a personal vendetta.

Paul Wolfovitz would have to wait until his son, who had no moral compass, or desire for moderation; would assume power.

Bill Clinton Becomes the New Fantasy of the Neocons

Without an external threat to exploit, the neocons decided to challenge an enemy from within, and turned their attention to destroying Bill Clinton.

He was the epitome of everything their leader, Leo Strauss, had warned them of. He was a Liberal and therefore responsible for the country's moral decay.

And they found a willing ally in David Brock and the American Spectator magazine, that went about fabricating one scandal after another. Brock has since come clean about his involvement, and is no longer a supporter of the insanity of this extreme-right. In fact he has written two books on the subject: Blinded by the Right and The Republican Noise Machine, and has founded a group Media Matters for America, dedicated to "comprehensively monitoring, analyzing and correcting conservative misinformation in the U.S. media."

But despite the fact that every single scandal was a complete lie, Kenneth Starr, with the right-wing Federalist Society, went on the attack.

The Neocons had passed a motion at their 1997 conference to find grounds to impeach Bill Clinton. One invited speaker at this conference was a man by the name of Stephen Joseph Harper.

But despite their best efforts, Clinton was not impeached, further angering the Straussians, who really believed the country was going to hell in a hand basket. And they had the wacky Moral Majority, to relay that message.

Paul Weyrich, an influential molder of social-conservative opinion, wrote his followers that the public's disinclination to throw Bill Clinton out of office reflected "the collapse of the culture."

... Weyrich, who says he was the one who invented the phrase moral majority, has concluded from the recent unpleasantness that people who believe what he believes are no longer in the majority, and that their only choice is to drop out of a culture that has become an "ever wider sewer." (1)

But as journalist Calvin Trillin points out:

The Moral Majority was never a majority. A majority of Americans are unwilling to have Paul Weyrich or anybody else dictate to them what is moral and righteous in personal life. In 1992, when the morals police and gay bashers seemed in ascendancy at the Republican National Convention, the public response was so negative that George Bush had to spend the first couple of weeks of the campaign backpedaling. (1)

Meanwhile, in the Middle East; the radical elements of Islam, like their American moral majority counterparts; also blamed western liberalism for the corruption of their society and were determined to do something about it.

Things were about to get real ugly, real fast.

Footnotes:

1. Corruption of the Jean Pool, Time Magazine, by Calvin Trillin, March 08, 1999