Michael Scheuer sobre Podhoretz e Kennan

Michael Scheuer (22-year veteran of the CIA) e apoiante de Ron Paul:

"(...)Podhoretz's final con comes at the expense of the late George Kennan. Podhoretz takes some of Kennan's words and twists them in a way that makes him seem like a supporter of the neoconservatives' endless overseas interventionism and war-for-perfection agenda. At the end of his book, Podhoretz quotes Kennan: "To avoid destruction the United States need only to measure up to its own best traditions and prove itself worthy of preservation as a great nation." (215) With this passage he leaves the reader to believe that Kennan would have supported the neoconservative crusade "to beat back the 'implacable challenge' of Islamofascism as the 'greatest generation' of World War II in taking on the Nazis and their fascist allies, and as its children and grandchildren ultimately managed to do in confronting the Soviet Union and its Communist empire in World War III." (217)

This is an intolerable and deliberately misleading attempt to make Kennan appear to be an arch-interventionist. Toward the end of his long life, Kennan wrote something of a valedictory essay for his fellow citizens in Foreign Affairs (March/April 1995), "On American Principles." In this essay Kennan praised John Quincy Adams's noninterventionist foreign policy as a principle appropriate to America, and, more important, described how it was admirably applicable to the chaos and confusion of the post-Cold War world. The dangers inherent in U.S. interventionism after the Cold War, Kennan wrote, are roughly similar to those

"that clearly underlay John Quincy Adams' response to similar problems so many years ago – his recognition that it is very difficult for one country to help another by intervening directly in its domestic affairs or in its conflicts with its neighbors. It is particularly difficult to do this without creating new and unwelcome embarrassments and burdens for the country endeavoring to help. The best way for a larger country to help smaller ones is surely by the power of example. Adams made this clear in the address cited above. One will recall his urging that the best response we could give to those appealing to us for support would be to give them what he called 'the benign sympathy of our example.' To go further, he warned, and try to give direct assistance would be to involve ourselves beyond the power of extrication 'in all the wars of interest and intrigue, of individual avarice, envy, and ambition, which assumed the colors and usurped the standards of freedom.' Who, today, looking at our involvements of recent years, could maintain that the fears these words expressed were any less applicable in our time than in his?"

Does this sound like the warmongering of the neoconservative interventionists? I think not. It rather sounds like the words of a man who knows his country's history and traditions and its peoples' character far better than the obtuse Podhoretz and crew.(..)"

Why Does Norman Podhoretz Hate America? by Michael Scheuer review: "World War IV: The Long Struggle Against Islamofascism" Norman Podhoretz Doubleday, 2007240 pp.