Disaster—political, social, and economic—is what the Straussian neocons want. It’s important to stress the Straussian aspect of the neocons. Not all neocons are Straussian but the guys pulling the levers for the next phase of the “clash of civilizations” agenda against the Islamic world and beyond are.

It’s not something you read about in the New York Times—or the Toronto Star, for that matter.

Hardly anybody writes or talks about the Straussian threat. I write and talk about it too much and probably bore many of my readers to tears with the repeated usage of “Straussian” in my daily diatribes here. I believe a modified version of the Straussian philosophy is at work at the very heart of the Bush administration and inside the Pentagon.

Shadia Drury is one of a few scholarly critics of Strauss and his philosophy. She does not get interviews with the New York Times—or, far as I can tell, they have yet to ask. “Leo Strauss repeatedly defends the political realism of Thrasymachus and Machiavelli,” Drury told Danny Postel. “This view of the world is clearly manifest in the foreign policy of the current administration in the United States.” Thrasymachus was a character in Plato’s dialogue and was an advocate of injustice (”injustice, if it is on a large enough scale, is stronger, freer, and more masterly than justice,” Plato’s Republic I, 344c). Niccolò Machiavelli basically epitomizes the saying “the end justifies the means” and his philosophy is one of deception and lies in the name of the monarch (Machiavelli was an advisor to Lorenzo di Piero de’ Medici, ruler of Florence from 1513 to his death from syphilis in 1519). “The people will not be happy to learn that there is only one natural right—the right of the superior to rule over the inferior, the master over the slave, the husband over the wife, and the wise few over the vulgar many,” Drury explains. “In On Tyranny, Strauss refers to this natural right as the ‘tyrannical teaching’ of his beloved ancients. It is tyrannical in the classic sense of rule above rule or in the absence of law.”

For the Straussian neocons, we—the people of the United States—are the “vulgar many,” chumps, dupes, and ciphers to be manipulated, poked, and prodded in the direction of the “Long War,” a new Hundred Years’ War, as spelled out by Rumsfeld’s latest Quadrennial Defense Review. “A policy of perpetual war against a threatening enemy is the best way to ward off political decay. And if the enemy cannot be found, then it must be invented,” writes Drury (Leo Strauss and the Grand Inquisitor). “Even though they are not hardcore Straussians, neoconservatives share Strauss’s view that wealth, freedom, and prosperity make people soft, pampered, and depraved. And, like Strauss, they think of war as an antidote to moral decadence and depravity. And this should make us wonder if they purposely launched the nation into a needless war because they were convinced of the salutary effects of war as such.”

Thus Tim Harper’s warning of toxic missiles, airliners blown out of the sky, and suicide bombers “in major cities, perhaps unleashing their deadly payload in a shopping mall food court,” is a blessing in disguise for the conniving neocons. It will be a double blessing if the inevitable fall of the economy occurs on a parallel timeline, reducing large segments of the population to a desperate pauperism and forcing them to turn toward the government for protection (a government unable—or unwilling—to protect a few thousand people during a storm in New Orleans, let alone millions impoverished during a depression more than a few economists predict will make the so-called Great Depression look like child’s play by way of comparison).

“With the neoconservatives and the Christian Right in power, Americans can forget about the pursuit of happiness and look forward to perpetual war, death, and catastrophe,” Shadia Drury continues. “And in the midst of all the human carnage and calamity that such policies are bound to bring, the Olympian laughter of the Straussian gods will be heard by those who have ears to hear it. In short, the Straussian elite makes the Grand Inquisitor look compassionate and humane in comparison.” Protestant Christian evangelicalism and fundamentalism, or Dominionism, especially Christian Reconstructionism (and also Christian Zionism), is a perfect fit for the Straussian neocons. Strauss “believed in, and proposed, a state religion as a way of reviving absolutes, countering free thought, and enforcing a cohesive unity. Strauss argued against a society containing a multiplicity of coexisting religions and goals, which would break the society apart,” argues Michael Doliner in a review of Drury’s Leo Strauss and the American Right. Under a regime of total and unrelenting war, economic disintegration, and terrorism from enemies foreign and domestic (with each nation invaded or shock and awed, the prospect of terrorism, or asymmetrical retaliation, increases exponentially), desperate people turn toward religion and spiritual explanations for their miserable plight. In this aspect, the Straussian neocons did their homework.

Drury: “Using religion as a political tool has two equally unsavory consequences. First, when religious beliefs become the guide for public policy, the social virtues of tolerance, freedom, and plurality are undermined, if they are not extinguished altogether. Second, the use of religion as a political tool encourages the cultivation of an elite of liars and frauds who exempt themselves from the rules they apply to the rest of humanity. And this is a recipe for tyranny, not freedom or democracy.”

The Straussian neocons are all about fascist totalitarianism enforced by social mores and religion—the more stringent, and inflexible, and cruel the better. In such a realm, the injustice of Thrasymachus is elevated as a virtue. For the neocons, the quasi-mystical philosophy of the Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt holds more than a grain of truth—in fact presents a diagram, a road map, master plan, a diabolical set of instructions. “Like Hobbes himself, Schmitt is pessimistic about the human condition,” writes Arthur Versluis. “Fascism represented for him, at least potentially, the re-unification of inner and outer life, a kind of modern re-unification of the mythic and spiritual with the outer public life. It at first seemed to conform to the Hobbesian notion that in exchange for obedience, one receives protection from the state; it represented a new form of corporatism as an alternative to the socio-political disintegration represented by parliamentary democracy.” For Schmitt and his heirs, the Straussian neocons, “totalistic state power” is both a curative and an elixir—and blended with a state religion it will become what the neocons decry Islam to be.

Richard Haass, representing the globalist view of the “non-partisan” Council on Foreign Relations, cautions moderation in dealing with Iran and its phantasmal, two week out nukes. “Iran would be sure to retaliate, using terrorist groups such as Hezbollah and Hamas and attacking U.S. and British forces and interests in Iraq and Afghanistan. What would begin as a limited strike would not remain limited for long.” Haass made sure to mention skyrocketing oil prices, “setting off an economic chain reaction that could lead to global recession,” Harper adds for the Toronto Star.

Or depression—and the Super Dome of New Orleans revisited on a far larger and more horrific scale.

As usual, the CFR crowd, basically kissing cousins of the daredevil neocons, are preaching the go-slow approach, as their long range plans (dry-nursed for centuries) dictate a frog-in-a-pot-of-water approach (the heat is increased incrementally, unbeknownst to the frog). However, for the Straussian neocons, time cannot wait—they are restive Jacobins, believers in the Trotskyian concept of “permanent revolution,” and glean a window closing as people come around, slowly but in numbers, to their scam.

It’s now or never for the Straussian neocons.