Playing the Long Game on Iran The Neoconservatives, Benjamin Netanyahu, and the Republicans Game the System

Playing the Long Game on Iran
The Neoconservatives, Benjamin Netanyahu, and the Republicans Game the System
By David Bromwich
“We’re going to push and push until some larger force makes us stop.”
David Addington, the legal adviser to Vice President Dick Cheney, made that declaration to Jack Goldsmith of the Office of Legal Counsel in the months after September 11, 2001. Goldsmith would later recall that Cheney and Addington were the first people he had ever met of a certain kind: “Cheney is not subtle, and he has never hidden the ball. The amazing thing is that he does what he says. Relentlessness is a quality I saw in him and Addington that I never saw before in my life.”
Goldsmith did not consider himself an adversary of Cheney and Addington. He probably shared many of their political views. What shocked him was their confidence in a set of secret laws and violent policies that could destroy innocent lives and warp the Constitution. The neoconservatives -- the opinion-makers and legislative pedagogues who since 2001 have justified the Cheney-Bush policies -- fit the same description. They are relentless, they push until they are stopped, and thus far they have never been stopped for long.
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