Reply #40: The whole just goes deeper and deeper: Richard Perle

[Tinoire]

In 1968 the neocons backed the late Senator Hubert Humphrey from Minnesota for president. In 1972, they mobilized their support behind the late Senator Henry Jackson from Washington. Both Humphrey and Jackson represented staunch anti-Soviet and pro-Israeli positions in the party...Senator Jackson's aides, Richard Perle and Elliott Abrams, who later became major figures in the Reagan foreign policy team, attempted to torpedo any effort by the Nixon and Carter administrations to improve relations with the Soviet Union or to launch peace efforts in the Middle East. From Jackson's office, the two led the campaign to use the issue of Jewish immigration from the Soviet Union to sabotage detente between Washington and Moscow...The neoconservatives formed the Coalition for a Democratic Majority (CDM) in 1973, aimed at rallying anti-Soviet and pro-Israeli Democrats in opposition to the McGovern liberals. That year also saw the beginning of the neoconservative drift toward the Republican Party, whose leaders saw in recruitment of the neocons an opportunity to improve Republican status in the media and in academic circles...It was the Carter administration's foreign policy agenda, including its efforts to improve the relationship with the Soviets and to accommodate the national interests of the Palestinians, that accelerated the political transition of the neocons from the Democratic to the Republican Party. Carter did not bring any members of the CDM into his administration...
The CDM, with the help of neoconservative columnists like Krautharnmer and Safire and of the New Republic, was the driving force behind a coordinated effort to weaken public support for Carter. For example, Michael Ledeen...whose name would surface later as one of the instigators of the IranContra affair (a note here - he was the Mossad-CIA link during the Iran-Contra scandal, and the man who got convicted spy J Pollard his Department of the Navy job) wrote an article in the New Republic which revealed ties between the late Billy Carter, the president's alcoholic brother, and Libyan government officials...At the same time, members of the CDM and other neoconservatives played a leading role in shaping the agenda of the Reagan administration...In addition to Kirkpatrick, who got her job as US representative to the UN after an article she published in Commentary caught Reagan's interest, other neocons occupied top positions in the Reagan foreign policy team. One was Max Kampelman, a former aide to Humphrey who was appointed to the position of director of arms control, and who was later replaced by another neocon, Kenneth Adelman. Richard Perle became the assistant secretary of defense. Richard Pipes, a regular Commentary contributor, joined the National Security Council. Elliot Abrams served as assistant secretary of state for human rights and later as assistant secretary for hemispheric affairs, where he played an active role in the Iran-Contra affair...it was the end of the Cold War that spelled disaster to the neocons, now at risk of being deprived of their favorite enemy...Enter the Middle Eastern bogeyman. - neoconservative intellectuals have focused on the need for the US to confront the new transnational enemy from the East, radical Arab nationalism and Islamic "fundamentalism," or what Krauthammer termed the "global intifada." The operational implication of this type of reasoning is that the original intifada can be forgotten. The neocons' main antagonists in the successful effort to get the United States to start shooting in the campaign to contain Saddam were the so-called "paleoconservatives," such as Pat Buchanan and Joseph Sobran, who since the end of the Cold War had been advocating a less activist American foreign policy...Most US proponents of sanctions, whether liberal or conservative, feared that a war in which thousands of Arabs died at American hands would, in the long run, increasingly isolate Washington in the region. Ironically, the only way to prevent such negative results of the neocon agenda would be decisive efforts by the Bush administration to follow up the rollback of Saddam with an Israeli-Palestinian settlement based upon land for peace. It is just such efforts, however, that the neocons can be counted upon to oppose..."

That was 1991 - the neocons kept on trying, and got their big chance after the G W Bush victory and 9/11.
A few more details about the main characters:

<snipped, you'll have to read the rest here:http://neoconconjob.blogspot.com/>