What neocons need to counter are narratives such as the one from Chris Hedges. Chris is very experienced, so when he calls their views naive and childish, there's some gravitas behind it. He also has a long memory and knows how to trace the lineage.
For now, the neocons have tricked the neolibs into an alliance, or maybe it's not a trick, just the logical extension of certain trends. Glenn Greenwald has been tracking this alliance, whereby Trump and Cheney policies get absorbed by the District as permanent programming. The march to expand NATO had no effective counter in the financial sphere, as the weapons makers held all the cards, and continue to.
What happens when the public decides the swamp includes those who cynically used the American people in service of their own narrow ends?
This is not a new story line. I'm helping catch people up if they haven't been reading or viewing much. Chris was a bureau chief for the New York Times and an experienced war correspondent, before turning himself into a full time professorial type. Glenn Greenwald is the one who flew to Hong Kong to interview Ed Snowden. He also knew what Julian Assange was up against, in terms of deep state interests.
The history so far shows a lot of resistance, in CIA circles, to neocon thinking. The assumption might be, given the career trajectory of Patraeus and Pompeo, that the agency had been conquered by their faction, but the bureaucracy was way too sprawling to narrow to the views of any one chief executive. The CIA of Ralph McGehee and Ray McGovern wasn't going anywhere either. You could see George Tenet taking on Richard Perle in the opening paragraphs of his memoir, At the Center of the Storm.
In my experience, the agency was spreading out away from the District as long ago as during Casey's tenure. This was not really a new development however, as the whole point of the agency was to be a global network, self informing.
