Dismantling the Neocons

Senator Dick Lugar's arms-control work makes him a peacenik in the eyes of the neocons. No wonder John Bolton's nomination is in trouble before Lugar's Foreign Relations Committee.

I guess I'm kinda slow about this. But the blogger Stygius isn't. Read his dense, but interesting, April 4 analysis of how the neocons in general (and Bolton in particular) still lobby against the Nunn-Lugar Cooperative Threat Reduction program, which led to the dismantling and destruction of huge amounts of weapons in the former Soviet Union.

Lugar and former senator Sam Nunn collaborated on this legislation, which calls for us to pay to dismantle weapons overseas. But the neocons have always insisted that we're merely subsidizing the evil foreigners by allowing them to spend their own money building better and bigger weapons to be used against us.

Bolton has carried that water before, as Stygius notes. The putative U.N. ambassador has had nothing but contempt for arms control.

Lugar, on the other hand, is gloriously proud of his arms-control work. No wonder Desmond Tutu picked him for the Hands That Shape Humanity project—describing Lugar, by the way, as an "activist."

Now if Lugar will just dismantle Bolton . . .