In Hollywood melodramas, the bad guys are always revealed toward the end and more often than not, they get their comeuppance. Not in real life. The same bad old neocons are still at it. The Kagans, Feiths, Frums, Kristols, Podhoretzes, Ledeens, and Wolfowitzes, just to name a few, may not be working for the Obama Administration, but they are busy beating the war drums where it counts: on television and in the press. Their greatest supporter, the Israeli lobby, is also working overtime. Lone voices against an even worse folly than Iraq are Chronicles magazine and The American Conservative. Everyone else, it seems, has gone John Wayne crazy, including the Jewish-American community that sees a bearded ayatollah’s money behind every article extolling peace.

Neocons only looked dead when the Iraqi folly became obvious even to the thickest of all American minds. But they have more lives than the proverbial felines, and Americans are known for having short memories. Three million Iraqi dead is an old story. Just look at what Assad is doing to his people. The fact that it is the same people who recently murdered an ambassador in Libya that we are trying to help in Syria is beyond American comprehension, as is the fact that one theocracy in Saudi Arabia is trying to overthrow another theocracy in Iran. The code word is appeasement. That’s what did us in where Hitler was concerned. We should not let it happen again. I’ve heard it all before and am getting mighty tired of it: “America needs to fight Israel’s wars, otherwise we’ll be fighting on Fifth Avenue before we know it.” Can’t these clowns at least change their tune a bit?

I spent a lot of moolah underwriting the magazine, and we got it exactly right, if I do say so myself. We could run the same stories and headlines substituting “Iran” for “Iraq” today, yet very few people remember our warning. Victory did spell defeat, but the neocons couldn’t care less. In retrospect I should have bought myself a bigger boat.

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