Obama's mentor funded Pol Pot

Senator Edward Kennedy, brother to our most beloved political martyr, ran against President Carter in the 1980 primary. Although Kennedy had acquired only a few hundred delegates, leftists of that era urged him to fight to the end. And so he did.

The left now takes a very different stance. Even though Hillary Clinton will probably enter an undecided convention, progressives urge her to concede in the name of "unity." Paradoxically, the ones invoking "unity" have divided the party by spreading unforgivable lies.

(A Rove-style propaganda barrage has attempted to convince the public that the Clintons appealed to racism at a time when Hillary was well ahead in the polls and in possession of the black vote, the Hispanic vote and the working class vote. We are expected to accept the absurd proposition that racism was thought to have an appeal to Obama's base -- affluent liberals and the young.)

In 1980, Kennedy's delegate count didn't get him near the winner's circle, but it did secure him a prime-time spot for his big speech, which was a showstopper. (I recall seeing VHS copies prominently displayed in video stores as late as 1992.) The most intense moment occurred when Kennedy mentioned Carter's much-despised National Security Advisor, Zbigniew Brzezinski, toward whom many Democrats felt a revulsion exceeding their disdain for Henry Kissinger.

Upon hearing Brzezinski's name, the crowd did not just display antipathy -- they damn near gave a standing boo. He, not Reagan, was the man truly hated by that audience. Brzezinski was, in large measure, the reason why many liberals backed Teddy, and later turned to John Anderson or (in my case) Barry Commoner.

Carter's National Security czar was seen as a murderous reactionary -- what we might today call a "proto-neocon." Some of his associates of that time -- Daniel Pipes, Paul Wolfowitz -- are now infamous.

The neocon label may seem odd, since Brzezinski has, in recent years, denounced neoconservatism. During the Bush tenure, he has given himself the most stunning political makeover in recent history. To his credit, he has shown a refreshing willingness to criticize Israel. He has defended Mearsheimer and Walt, denounced the war in Iraq, and castigated George W. Bush.

I consider this makeover both superficial and calculatedly deceptive, and I still would classify Brzezinski alongside the neocons he now affects to disdain. Although this man hypocritically (and deceitfully) harps on Clinton's Iraq vote in 2002, he cannot escape his own past.

Back in the days of Scoop Jackson, the neocon movement was a much more bipartisan affair, primarily defined by cold war aggression and brinksmanship. Brzezinski's foreign policy outlook prefigured that of the Reagan administration. He certainly gravitated toward more "hard right" positions than did Kissinger or Nixon. Then as now, his tactic has always been to talk like a liberal and to act as an imperialist.

More than anyone else, Brzezinski bears responsibility for ending the policy of detente. Repeatedly calling for an aggressive military posture vis-a-vis the Soviet bloc, he sent Special Forces into Nicaragua to combat the revolution against the bloodthirsty dictator Somosa. His hopes for military intervention were stymied only by the memory of Vietnam.

To fulfill his grand geopolitical vision, he demonstrated a willingness to destabilize an entire region and to risk nuclear war:

In 1977 Zbigniew Brzezinski, as President Carter’s National Security Adviser, forms the Nationalities Working Group (NWG) dedicated to the idea of weakening the Soviet Union by inflaming its ethnic tensions. The Islamic populations are regarded as prime targets. Richard Pipes, the father of Daniel Pipes, takes over the leadership of the NWG in 1981. Pipes predicts that with the right encouragement Soviet Muslims will “explode into genocidal fury” against Moscow.

Brzezinski laid the groundwork for our present problems by initiating an alliance with Muslim jihadis in Afghanistan. In order to topple the closest thing to a functioning modern government that country has ever had, Brzesinski fomented a rebellion of thugs, zealots and terrorists, who later turned on the United States. Osama Bin Laden first came to prominence in Brzezinski's war.

An interviewer once asked Brzezinski if supporting the Mujahadeen might be a mistake. Brzezinski's answer:

"What's a few riled-up Muslims?"

His obsession with the Soviet Union led to Islamic revolution in Iran:

In November 1978, President Carter appointed George Ball head of a special White House Iran task force under Brzezinski. Ball recommends the US should drop support for the Shah of Iran and support the radical Islamist opposition of Ayatollah Khomeini. This idea is based on ideas from British Islamic expert Dr. Bernard Lewis, who advocates the balkanization of the entire Muslim Near East along tribal and religious lines. The chaos would spread in what he also calls an “arc of crisis” and ultimately destabilize the Muslim regions of the Soviet Union.

Few on either the right or the left understand that, until roughly a year-and-a-half before the revolution in Iran, the Socialist Tudeh party and the constitutionalist National Front commanded wide public support in that country and stood an excellent chance of gaining power when the Shah's tyranny ended. When the CIA learned of the Shah's precarious health, Brzezinski had the Agency covertly aid the exiled Ayatollah Khomeini, a Shi'ite theocract. The goal was twofold: Preventing a Socialist or nationalist government from taking power, and fomenting a jihad against the Soviets.

Brzezinski's "great game" compelled him to support Indonesia's murderous repression in East Timor. Some 200,000 East Timorese were slaughtered.

And then there was Cambodia...

IIn 1981 Brzezinski revealed that he encouraged the Chinese to support Pol Pot. This was part of a wider policy of forcing the Vietnamese out of Cambodia by funding anti-Vietnamese guerrilla groups that the U.S. helped create.[18] Between 1979 and 1981, the World Food Program, which was strongly under US influence, provides nearly $12 million in food aid Thailand. Much of this aid makes its way to the Khmer Rouge.[19] In January 1980 the US started funding Pol Pot while he was in exile. The extent of this support was $85m from 1980 to 1986.

Younger readers may not know that Pol Pot's regime murdered some 2 million opponents -- and that these atrocities had received wide publicity throughout the 1970s. Brzezinski did not care. His obsession with the USSR led him to support one of the worst murderers in human history -- though of course, that support was delivered by proxy.

Those who consider Iraq the sole issue have no sense of history. Barack Obama has allied himself with the man who funded Pol Pot. That fact can be neither denied nor excused.

I've not seen any confirmation for the claim that Obama first came into Brzezinski's orbit at Columbia University, although Obama did attend at a time when Zbig headed something euphoniously called the Institute on Communist Affairs at Columbia. Brzezinski has bragged about being the "onlie begettor" behind the 2002 speech made by the then little-known Barack Obama, condemning the decision to go into Iraq.

Don't presume that his current realism on Iraq signifies that Brzezinski is a leopard who has changed his blood-red spots. The man who succeeded Frank Carlucci as the head of Rand's Center for Middle East Public Policy has not morphed into Gandhi.

Few on the left understand the current splits within the neoconservative movement. Some neocons have argued that the Iraq invasion was an error, since it diverted the country from the more important task of conquering Iran. (Michael Ledeen appears to have arrived at this view; characteristically, he pretends that he has always held it.)

The Iranian revolution occurred on Brzezinski's watch -- indeed, it was largely his doing. I believe that, whatever his public pronouncements, he wants to see his great blunder undone. Just as only a Nixon could go to China, only an Obama could initiate war with Iran, if a suitable pretext or casus belli should occur. The public attitude toward Bush has become so cynical that any such triggering event would be instantly disbelieved by wide sections of the public. Obama can sidestep those credibility problems.

If this theory has any validity, and if Obama should win the White House, then the outline of future history is easy to prophesy: Zbigniew Brzezinski (or whichever of his creatures gets into a position of power under Obama) will first take great pains to re-establish American "moral authority." That would mean withdrawal from the Iraq debacle and a few superficial moves toward Israeli-Palestinian peace negotiations. These preliminaries will renew America's political standing in the world, and thus clear the way for aggression -- if not against Iran, then perhaps against Russia, Brzezinski's idee fixe.

And if not Russia, then perhaps Pakistan. Brzezinski is the force behind Obama's militaristic stance toward that nation. Any American incursion into that country would, of course, result in jihadis gaining control of a nuclear arsenal.

Of Hillary Clinton, Brzezinski has said:

Clinton's foreign policy approach is "very conventional...I don't think the country needs to go back to what we had eight years ago.

Of course not. We had peace under Bill Clinton. Brzezinski obviously has something different in mind.

Today, the "progressive" candidate is a creature of Zbigniew Brzezinski. And a naive generation who never saw Teddy's big speech will applaud the man who wants foreign policy to recapitulate the worst mistakes of the Carter years. The so-called "left" now backs the guy who once got a standing boo.

(This is the first in a series on Obama's strange associates.)