Neocon Project Palin

Neoconservatives plan Project Sarah Palin to shape future American foreign policy

http://www.wvwnews.net/story.php?id=5616

http://www.wvwnews.net/story.php?id=5602

By Tim Shipman

Comments by the governor of Alaska in her first television interview, in which she said Nato may have to go to war with Russia and took a tough line on Iran’s nuclear programme, were the result of two weeks of briefings by neoconservatives.

Sources in the McCain camp, the Republican Party and Washington think tanks say Mrs Palin was identified as a potential future leader of the neoconservative cause in June 2007. That was when the annual summer cruise organised by the right-of-centre Weekly Standard magazine docked in Juneau, the Alaskan state capital, and the pundits on board took tea with Governor Palin.

Her case as John http://www.wvwnews.net/story.php?id=3298 thought – including the robust approach to foreign policy which spurred American intervention in Iraq.

In 1988, Mr http://www.wvwnews.net/story.php?id=2895 became a leading adviser of another inexperienced Republican vice presidential pick, Dan Quayle, tutoring him in foreign affairs. Last week he praised Mrs Palin as “a spectre of a young, attractive, unapologetic conservatism” that “is haunting the liberal elites”.Now many believe that the “neocons”, whose standard bearer in government, Vice President Dick Cheney, lost out in Washington power struggles to the more moderate defence secretary Robert Gates and secretary of state Condoleezza Rice, last year are seeking to mould Mrs Palin to renew their influence.

A former Republican White House official, who now works at the American Enterprise Institute, a bastion of Washington neoconservatism, admitted: “She’s bright and she’s a blank page. She’s going places and it’s worth going there with her.”

Asked if he sees her as a “project”, the former official said: “Your word, not mine, but I wouldn’t disagree with the sentiment.”

Pat http://www.wvwnews.net/story.php?id=5522, the former Republican presidential candidate and a foreign policy isolationist, who opposes the war in Iraq, the project most closely associated with the neocons, said: “Palin has become, overnight, the most priceless political asset the movement has.

“Look for the neocons to move with all deliberate speed to take her into their camp by pressing upon her advisers and staff, and steering her into the AEI-Weekly Standard-War Party orbit.” The AEI, or American Enterprise Institute, is a free-market think-tank with many neo-cons among its members.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/uselection2008/sarahpalin/2827217/Neoconservatives-plan-Project-Sarah-Palin-to-shape-future-American-foreign-policy.html

2008-09-18