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"A comprehensive, collaborative elections resource."
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Lt. Col. Karen Kwiatkowski
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Issue
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| Contributor | RP |
| Last Edited | RP Apr 03, 2006 05:56pm |
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| Category | Interview |
| News Date | Sunday, April 2, 2006 11:00:00 PM UTC0:0 |
| Description | KWIATKOSKI: My retirement date was effective 1 July, but I left the Pentagon basically two days after we invaded Iraq, and I had moved my retirement date up specifically because of my experience in that final tour in the Pentagon at the Office of Secretary Defense Policy.
LAMB: Why did you come out against the war?
KWIATKOSKI: Well, I was actually against the war when I was in the Pentagon, and the reason had to do with what I felt to be lies, not so much lies told to the American people, but lies, in fact, promulgated on us inside the Pentagon. I worked in Near East-South Asia Policy. Doug Fyffe was our boss, over me and 1,000 other people in Policy. The Office of Special Plans had been formed from our office, staffed with political appointees, and they were producing, in the fall of 2002 and ’03, and the winter and spring of 2003, talking points for us to use in our own papers, and those talking points did not match the intelligence that we had previously used to put together our papers and our work. So, I felt that we were being lied to.
Now, it was made worse when I saw the president and vice president make speeches and heard what they were saying because it seemed as if they were also speaking from these same talking points. And so, that means, in my view, they were also lying to the American people.
KWIATKOSKI: Traditional conservative. I grew up in a Barry Goldwater household, OK, so what I thought Republicans were was Barry Goldwater. What I thought Republicans were was Ronald Reagan at his very first electoral campaign when he ran on a very Libertarian Goldwater and - Goldwater-type platform. That’s what I thought Republicans were, and I came from a Republican family, and that’s what I thought it was. And I held to that until the mid-’90s, and I realized that even then, even though I never had heard the term ”neo-conservative,” had no idea they’d been around for 40 years, I didn’t know, and I never even understood anything about it.
I did change parties to the Libertarian party, and the choice was either to become a Libertarian or a Constitutionalist because these were the two parties that most closely matched what I - the way I had been brought up. So, in a sense, I’m one of those boring people that don’t change their - they don’t - I didn’t really learn anything. I’m the same - I’m politically the same as I was when I was 14 years old, which is, I guess, sad in a way, but anyway, the party left me. The Republican Party left me.
Neo-conservatism does not have its roots in conservatism, and I think Bill Kristol would probably be the first to tell you that. He knows the story. It has its roots in more grand ideologies than traditional conservatism. In fact, you can go all the way back to Trotsky and some of the Marxist thinkers and find some of the roots of neo-conservatism. |
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