Fear & Loathing in the White House

The neocon jackals howled their gospel of American empire, a fever dream of unipolar dominance peddled by deskbound warriors drunk on their own mythology. The Project for a New American Century, birthed in 1997, wasn’t just a think tank—it was a cult, a cabal of wild-eyed zealots convinced the US was destined to play Jesus Christ to a fallen world. They sneered at Clinton’s limp-wristed pragmatism, his self-serving dithering, and declared America the sole hegemon, a “benign imperium,” as that high priest of hubris, Charles Krauthammer, crowed just before the towers fell. Benign? Tell that to the ghosts of Fallujah.

These were no mere policy wonks, but ideological berserkers, ex-Trotskyites turned Reaganite crusaders, slithering from the ashes of Scoop Jackson’s Cold War bunker to the Pentagon’s fluorescent-lit war rooms. Their vision was of a unipolar world, remade in America’s image, with the Stars and Stripes as the new cross. Martin Jacques nailed it: they saw the Soviet collapse as a blank check to redraw the globe, with the US as its divine cartographer. Iraq was their Golgotha, their sacred sacrifice to prove the gospel of American might.

The Second Gulf war of 2003-11 wasn’t just a war—it was a hallucination, a neocon acid trip fueled by 9/11’s trauma and the outlandish lies of WMDs and Al-Qaeda links. Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld—they were the high priests, sure, but the neocons were the shamans whispering in their ears, conjuring phantoms of Saddam’s nukes and Bin Laden’s handshake. Regime change was their fetish, official US policy since ’98, long before George W. Bush swaggered into the Oval Office. And let’s not kid ourselves—these weren’t starry-eyed idealists. Bush and his daddy were oilmen, Cheney a Halliburton kingpin, Condoleezza Rice a Chevron princess. The hawks—Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Feith—had been sniffing Iraqi crude since the Reagan years. This wasn’t just ideology; it was a heist disguised as a crusade.

Lobbyists, those night flowers blooming in the swamp of D.C., greased the wheels. Money talks, and the neocons had buckets of it, their influence thriving in the shadows where democracy goes to die. AIPAC’s playbook was their template: work the dark, dodge the sun. By 2001, they’d hijacked the agenda, Iraq in their crosshairs. But the public wasn’t buying it—not yet. The Taliban’s quick fall in Afghanistan dulled the war drums, and the anthrax scares and color-coded alerts were starting to feel like a bad circus act. The neocons needed a bigger lie, a sexier casus belli. Enter the WMDs, the Al-Qaeda myth, the whole sordid fiction spun by Wolfowitz, Feith, Perle, and their flex-net of fanatics.

Iran was the real target, the one they’d been salivating over since the ’79 revolution. Iraq was just a stepping stone, a cheap rehearsal for the main event. “The road to Tehran runs through Baghdad,” they whispered in Washington’s war rooms, dreaming of a pro-US Iraq hemming in Iran with Gulf allies and a tamed Afghanistan. It was a geopolitical wet dream, a New American Century with Uncle Sam as the global pimp. Bush’s “Mission Accomplished” stunt on that aircraft carrier in ’03—pure theater, a cocaine-fueled victory lap for a war that hadn’t even begun to unravel. The media ate it up, the sailors cheered, and the neocons grinned like hyenas.

But the truth? There was no single truth, no tidy explanation. Oil, Israel, imperialism, democracy promotion—each was a thread in the neocon tapestry, woven by men with different motives but the same destination: power. Wolfowitz was screaming for invasion four days after 9/11, while Cheney and Rumsfeld played the long game, their oil-stained fingerprints all over the blueprint. And let’s not forget Tel Aviv’s shadow—Israeli leaders and their US lobby saw Saddam as a thorn in their side, a political enemy to be crushed, even if it meant bleeding American treasure and lives. The domino effect they promised? A liberalized Middle East, Israel’s security, and Bush’s doctrine all wrapped in a neat bow. What we got instead was ISIS, born from the wreckage of a war that never should’ve been.

The neocons weren’t just wrong—they were the dumbest self-described “smartest guys in the room,” a parade of ex-Marxists turned zealots for liberal democracy’s “end of history.” Irving Kristol, their godfather, swapped Joseph Stalin for Leo Strauss, preaching religion as social glue while plotting global revolution. Wolfowitz, Feith, Perle—they cut their teeth on Vietnam’s hawkish dreams, ditched the Democrats when they nominated peacenik McGovern, and carried their interventionist fever into Reagan’s Pentagon. They thought history was a straight line to American utopia, and they’d bomb anyone who disagreed.

Their legacy? A trillion-dollar graveyard. Afghanistan and Iraq, 6,000 American dead, not to mention the 151,000 Iraqis and 2 million whose lives were ruined, and for what? The Taliban’s back in Kabul, Iran’s running Baghdad, and the neocons are now skulking in think tanks, penning self-serving memoirs, or railing against Trump as “Never Trumpers.” Doug Feith, once the Pentagon’s resident idiot savant, still thinks Iraqis greeted us with “flowers in their minds.” Tommy Franks called him “the tucking stupidest guy on earth,” Joe Klein wanted to throttle him, and Samantha Power laughed out loud at him. And yet these clowns kept haunting the halls of power, their ideas recycled by McCain, Albright, and every beltway hawk who sees foreign policy as a morality pageant.

The neocons didn’t just fail—they broke the world. Their NATO expansion poked the Russian bear until it roared, turning Yeltsin’s olive branch into Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. They ignored Kennan’s warnings, dismissed Russia’s bloodless revolution, and pushed NATO to Moscow’s doorstep. Now we’re staring down a nuclear tightrope, all because these ideologues thought they could remake the globe in their image. And Trump? just a conman riding the chaos they created, Putin’s pawn, a wannabe dictator high on his own fumes, the lyingest liar our sad country ever produced. How did we get here? A chorus of neocon war hawks, defense profiteers, and media whores, all dancing to the tune of a bankrupt ideology. Fear and loathing, indeed.