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CounterPunch
March 19,
2003
A Cheap Family Farce
This War is
Brought to You By...
By PEPE ESCOBAR
ALEXANDRIA, Egypt. They've won.
They got their war against Afghanistan (planned before September
11). They're getting their war against Iraq (planned slightly
after September 11). After Iraq, they plan to get their wars
against Syria, Lebanon, Iran and Saudi Arabia. Last Sunday, one
of them, Vice President Dick Cheney, said that President George
W Bush would have to make "a very difficult decision"
on Iraq. Not really. The decision had already been taken for
him in the autumn of 2001.
As far as their "showdown Iraq"
is concerned, it's not about weapons of mass destruction, nor
United Nations inspections, nor non-compliance, nor a virtual
connection between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda, nor the liberation
of the Iraqi people, nor a Middle East living in "democracy
and liberty".
The American corporate media are not
inclined to spell it out, and the absolute majority of American
public opinion is anesthetized non-stop by a barrage of technical,
bureaucratic and totally peripheral aspects of the war against
Iraq. For all the president's (sales)men, the whole game is about
global preeminence, if not unilateral world domination--military,
economic, political and cultural. This may be an early 21st century
replay of the "white man's burden". Or this may be
just megalomania. Either way, enshrined in a goal of the Bush
administration, it cannot but frighten practically the whole
world, from Asia to Africa, from "old Europe" to the
conservative establishment within the US itself.
During the Clinton years, they were an
obscure bunch--almost a sect. Then they were all elevated to
power--again: most had worked for Ronald Reagan and Bush senior.
Now they have pushed America--and the world--to war because they
want it. Period. An Asia Times Online investigation reveals this
is no conspiracy theory: it's all about the implementation of
a project.
The lexicon of the Bush doctrine of unilateral
world domination is laid
out in detail by the Project for a New American Century (as detailed
in an expose for CounterPunch by Jason Leopold) founded in
Washington in 1997. The ideological, political, economic and
military fundamentals of American foreign policy--and uncontested
world hegemony--for the 21st century are there for all to see.
PNAC's credo is officially to muster
"the resolve to shape a new century favorable to American
principles and interests". PNAC states that the US must
be sure of "deterring any potential competitors from even
aspiring to a larger regional or global role"--without ever
mentioning these competitors, the European Union, Russia or China,
by name. The UN is predictably dismissed as "a forum for
leftists, anti-Zionists and anti-imperialists". The UN is
only as good as it supports American policy.
The PNAC mixes a peculiar brand of messianic
internationalism with realpolitik founded over a stark analysis
of American oil interests. Its key document, dated June 1997,
reads like a manifesto. Horrified by the "debased"
Bill Clinton, PNAC exponents lavishly praise "the essential
elements of the Reagan administration's success: a military that
is strong and ready to meet both present and future challenges;
a foreign policy that boldly and purposefully promotes American
principles abroad; and national leadership that accepts the United
States' global responsibilities". These exponents include
Dick Cheney, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, Deputy Secretary
of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle, chairman of the Defense
Policy Board, an advisory panel to the Pentagon made up of leading
figures in national security and defense, Florida Governor Jeb
Bush and Reagan-era White House adviser Elliott Abrahms.
Already in 1997, the PNAC wanted to "increase
defense spending significantly" to "challenge regimes
hostile to our interests and values" and "to accept
responsibility for America's unique role in preserving and extending
an international order friendly to our security, our prosperity,
and our principles". The deceptively bland language admitted
"such a Reaganite policy of military strength and moral
clarity may not be fashionable today. But it is necessary if
the United States is to build on the successes of this past century
and to ensure our security and our greatness in the next".
The signatories of this 1997 document
read like a who's who of Washington power today: among them,
in addition to those mentioned above, Eliot Cohen, Steve Forbes,
Francis Fukuyama, Frank Gaffney, William Bennett, Donald Kagan,
Zalmay Khalilzad, Lewis Libby, Norman Podhoretz and Dan Quayle.
The PNAC, now actively exercising power,
is about to fulfill its dream of invading Iraq. In the PNAC's
vision of Iraq, the only vector that matters is US strategic
interest. Nobody really cares about Saddam Hussein's "brutal
dictatorship", nor his extensive catalogue of human rights
violations, nor "the suffering of the Iraqi people",
nor his US-supplied weapons of mass destruction, nor his alleged
connection to terrorism.
Iraq counts only as the first strike
in a high-tech replay of the domino theory: the next dominoes
will be Syria, Iran and Saudi Arabia. The idea is to carve up
Syria; let Turkey invade northern Iraq; overthrow the Saudi royal
family; restore the Hashemites to the Hijaz in Arabia. And dismember
Iraq altogether and annex it to Jordan as a vassal kingdom to
the US: after all, Jordan's King Abdullah is a cousin of former
Iraqi King Faisal, deposed in 1958. This would be one solution
for the nagging question of who would have any legitimacy to
be in power in Baghdad after Saddam.
Rumsfeld loves NATO, but he abhors the
European Union. All PNAC members and most Pentagon civilians--but
not the State Department--do: after all, they control NATO, not
the EU. These things usually are not admitted in public. But
Rumsfeld, the blunt midwesterner, former fighter pilot and former
servant of presidents Gerald Ford and Ronald Reagan, prefers
John Wayne to Bismarck: even Spanish Prime Minister Jose Maria
Aznar, a staunch ally of Bush, complained out loud that diplomacy
for Rumsfeld is an alien concept. Rumsfeld even has his own wacky
axis of evil: Cuba, Libya and ... Germany. If Rumsfeld barely
manages to disguise his aversion for dovish Secretary of State
Colin Powell's views, one imagines to what circle of hell he
dispatches the pacifist couple of Jacques Chirac and Gerhard
Schroeder.
Strange, no journalist has stood up and
ask Rumsfeld, in one of those cosy Pentagon spinning sessions,
how was his 90-minute session with Saddam in Baghdad in December
20, 1983. The fuzzy photo of Rumsfeld shaking hands with Saddam,
observed by Iraqi vice premier Tarik Aziz, is now a collector's
item. Rumsfeld was sent by Reagan to mend relations between the
US and Iraq only one month after Reagan had adopted a secret
directive--still partly classified--to help Saddam fight Iran's
Islamic Revolution that had begun in 1979. This close cooperation
led to nothing else than Washington selling loads of military
equipment and also chemical precursors, insecticides, aluminum
tubes, missile components and anthrax to Saddam, who in turn
used the lot to gas Iranian soldiers and then civilian Kurds
in Halabja, northern Iraq, in 1988. The selling of these chemical
weapons was organized by Rumsfeld.
Washington was perfectly aware at the
time that Saddam was using chemical weapons. After the Halabja
massacre, the Pentagon engaged in a massive disinformation campaign,
spinning that the massacre was caused by Iran. Cheney, as Pentagon
chief from March 1989 onwards, continued to cooperate very closely
with Saddam. The military aid--secretly organized by Rumsfeld--also
enabled Saddam to invade Kuwait on August 2, 1990. Between 1991
and 1998, UN weapons inspectors conclusively established that
the US--as well as British, German and French firms--had sold
missile parts and chemical and bacteriological material to Iraq.
So much for the moral high ground defended by America and Britain
in the Iraqi weapons of mass destruction controversy.
September 2002's National Security Strategy
(NSS) document simply delighted the members of the PNAC. No wonder:
it reproduced almost verbatim a September 2000 report by the
PNAC, which in turn was based on the now famous 1992 draft Defense
Policy Guidance (DPG), written under the supervision of Wolfowitz
for then secretary of defense Cheney. Already in 1992, the three
key DPG objectives were to prevent any "hostile power' from
dominating regions whose resources would allow it to become a
great power; to dissuade any industrialized country from any
attempt to defy US leadership; and to prevent the future emergence
of any global competitor. That's the thrust of the NSS document,
which calls for a unipolar world in which Washington's military
power is unrivalled.
In this context, the invasion and occupation
of Iraq is just the first installment in an extended practical
demonstration of what will happen to "rogue" states
alleged to have or not have weapons of mass destruction, alleged
to have or not have links to terrorism, and alleged connections
to anyone or anything that might challenge US supremacy. The
European Union, China and Russia beware: the Shock and Awe demonstration
that is about to be unleashed on Iraq is pure theatrical militarism,
a concept already analyzed by Asia Times Online.
It's no surprise that Bush, on February
26, chose to unveil his vision of a new Middle Eastern order
at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), a right-wing Washington
think tank. The PNAC's office is nowhere else than on the 5th
floor of the AEI building on 17th St, in downtown Washington.
The AEI is the key node of a collection of neoconservative foreign
policy experts and scholars, the most influential of whom are
members of the PNAC.
The AEI is intimately connected to the
Likud Party in Israel--which for all practical purposes has a
deep impact on American foreign policy in the Middle East, thanks
to the AEI's influence. In this mutually-beneficial environment,
AEI stalwarts are known as Likudniks. It's no surprise, then,
how unparalleled is the AEI's intellectual Islamophobia. Loathing
and contempt for Islam as a religion and as a way of life leads
to members of the AEI routinely bashing Saudi Arabia and Pakistan.
They also oppose any negotiations with North Korea--another policy
wholly adopted by the Bush administration. For the AEI, China
is the ultimate enemy: not a peer competitor, but a monster strategic
threat. The AEI is viscerally anti-State Department (read Colin
Powell). Recently, it has also displayed its innate Francophobia.
And to try to dispel the idea that it is just another bunch of
grumpy dull men, the AEI has been deploying to the BBC and CNN
talk shows its own female weapon of mass regurgitation, one Danielle
Pletka. Lynn Cheney, vice president Dick's wife, a historian
and essayist, is also an AEI senior fellow.
The AEI's former executive vice president
is John Bolton, one of the Bush administration's key operatives
as undersecretary of state for arms control and international
security. Largely thanks to Bolton, the US unilaterally withdrew
from the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) treaty. Bolton has
also opposed the establishment of the new International Criminal
Court (ICC), recently inaugurated in The Hague. The AEI only
treasures raw power as established under the terms of neoliberal
globalization: the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank
and the World Trade Organization. Its nemesis is everything really
multilateral: the ABM treaty, the ICC, the Kyoto protocol, the
treaty on anti-personal mines, the protocol on biological weapons,
the treaty on the total ban of nuclear weapons, and most spectacularly,
in these past few days, the UN Security Council.
The AEI's foreign policy agenda is presided
over by none other than Richard Perle. As Perle is a longtime
friend and advisor to Rumsfeld, he was rewarded with the post
of chairman of the Pentagon's Defense Policy Board: its 30-odd
very influential members include former national security advisers,
secretaries of defense and heads of the Central Intelligence
Agency (CIA). Perle is also a very close friend of Pentagon number
two Wolfowitz, since they were students at the University of
Chicago in the late 1960s. Perle now reports to Wolfowitz.
On September 20, 2001, Perle went on
overdrive, fully mobilizing the Defense Policy Board to forge
a link between Saddam and al-Qaeda. The PNAC sent an open letter
to Bush detailing how a war on terrorism should be conducted.
The letter says that Saddam has to go "even if evidence
does not link him to the attack". The letter lists other
policies that later were implemented--like the gigantic increase
of the defense budget and the total isolation of the Palestinian
Authority (PA), as well as others that may soon follow, like
striking Hezbollah in Lebanon and yet-to-be-formulated attacks
against Iran and especially Syria if they do not stop support
for Hezbollah.
The Bush administration strategy in the
past few months of totally isolating the PA's Yasser Arafat and
allowing Israeli premier Ariel Sharon to refuse as much as a
handshake, was formulated by the PNAC. Another PNAC letter states
that "Israel's fight is our fight ... for reasons both moral
and strategic, we need to stand with Israel in its fight against
terrorism". The PNAC detested the Camp David accords between
Israel and the Palestinians. For the PNAC, a simmering, undeclared
state of war against Palestine, Iraq, Syria, Lebanon and Iran
is a matter of policy.
Perle, a former assistant secretary of
defense for international security affairs under Reagan, is also
a member of the board of the Jerusalem Post. He wrote a chapter--"Iraq:
Saddam Unbound"--in Present Dangers, a PNAC book. He is
very close to ultra-hawk Douglas Feith, who was his special counsel
under Reagan and is now assistant secretary of defense for policy
(one of the Pentagon's four most senior posts) and also a partner
in a small Washington law firm that represents Israeli suppliers
of munitions seeking deals with American weapons manufacturers.
It was thanks to Perle--who personally defended his candidate
to Rumsfeld--that Feith got his current job. He was one of the
key people responsible for strategic planning in the war against
the Taliban and is also heavily involved in planning the war
against Iraq.
David Wurmser, former head of Middle
Eastern projects at the AEI, is now special assistant to PNAC
founder John Bolton, the undersecretary of State for arms control
and a fierce enemy of multilateralism. Wurmser wrote Tyranny's
Ally: America's failure to defeat Saddam Hussein, a book published
by the AEI. The foreword is by none other than Perle. Meyrav
Wurmser, David's wife, is a co-founder of the Middle East Media
Research Institute.
In July 1996, Perle, Feith and the Wurmser
couple wrote the notorious paper for an Israeli think tank charting
a roadmap for Likud superhawk and then-incoming Israeli prime
minister Benjamin "Bibi" Netanyahu. The paper is called
"A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm".
Perle, Feith and the Wurmsers tell Bibi that Israel must shelve
the Oslo Accords, the so-called peace process, the concept of
"land for peace", go for it and permanently annex the
entire West Bank and the Gaza Strip. The paper also recommends
that Israel must insist on the elimination of Saddam, and the
restoration of the Hashemite monarchy in Baghdad. This would
be the first domino to fall, and then regime change would follow
in Syria, Lebanon, Iran and Saudi Arabia. This 1996 blueprint
is nothing else than Ariel Sharon's current agenda in action.
In November last year, Sharon took the liberty to slightly modify
the domino sequence by growling on the record that Iran should
be next after Iraq.
Bush's speech on February 26 at the AEI
claimed that the real reason for a war against Iraq is "to
bring democracy". Cheney has endlessly repeated that Iraqis--like
Germany and Japan in 1945--will welcome American soldiers with
wine and roses. For Bush, Iraq is begging to be educated in the
principles of democracy: "It's presumptuous and insulting
to suggest that a whole region of the world, or the one-fifth
of humanity that is Muslim, is somehow untouched by the most
basic aspirations of life." But this very presumption is
seemingly central to the intellectual Islamophobia of both the
AEI and PNAC.
The AEI and the PNAC shaped the now official
Bush policy of introducing democracy--by bombing Iraq--and then
"successfully transforming the lives of millions of people
throughout the Middle East", in the words of AEI scholar
Michael Ledeen. At his AEI speech, Bush did nothing else but
parrot the idea. Many a voice couldn't resist to point out the
splendid American record of encouraging native democracy around
the world by supporting great freedom fighters such as the Shah
of Iran, Sese Seko Mobutu in the Congo, Augusto Pinochet in Chile,
Suharto in Indonesia, the Somozas in Nicaragua, Zia ul-Haq in
Pakistan and an array of 1960s and 1970s Latin American dictators.
Among newfound American allies, Turkmenistan is nothing less
than totalitarian and Uzbekistan is ultra-authoritarian, and
among "old" allies, Egypt and Saudi Arabia have absolutely
nothing to do with democracy.
Chalmers Johnson is president of the
Japan Policy Research Institute, based in California, and author
of Blowback: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire. A
war veteran turned scholar, he could never be accused of anti-Americanism.
His new book about American militarism, The Sorrows of Empire:
How the Americans lost their Country, will be published in late
2003. Some of its insights are informative in confirming the
role of the PNAC in setting American foreign policy.
Johnson is just one among many who suspect
that "after being out of power with Clinton and back to
power with Bush ... the neocons were waiting for a 'catastrophic
and catalyzing' event--like a new Pearl Harbor" that would
mobilize the public and allow them to put their theories and
plans into practice. September 11 was, of course, precisely what
they needed. National Security Advi Condoleezza Rice called together
members of the National Security Council and asked them "to
think about how do you capitalize on these opportunities to fundamentally
change American doctrine, and the shape of the world, in the
wake of September 11th". She said, "I really think
this period is analogous to 1945 to 1947 when fear and paranoia
led the US into its Cold War with the USSR".
Johnson continues: "The Bush administration
could not just go to war with Iraq without tying it in some way
to the September 11 attacks. So it first launched an easy war
against Afghanistan. There was at least a visible connection
between Osama bin Laden and the Taliban regime, even though the
United States contributed more to Osama's development as a terrorist
than Afghanistan ever did. Meanwhile, the White House launched
one of the most extraordinary propaganda campaigns of modern
times to convince the American public that an attack on Saddam
Hussein should be a part of America's 'war on terrorism'. This
attempt to whip up war fever, in turn, elicited an outpouring
of speculation around the world on what were the true motives
that lay behind President Bush's obsession with Iraq."
The Iraq war is above all Paul Wolfowitz's
war. It's his holy mission. His cue was September 11. Slightly
after Rumsfeld, on September 15, 2001 at Camp David, Wolfowitz
was already advocating an attack on Iraq. There are at least
three versions of what happened that day. As a reporter, the
Washington Post's Bob Woodward (remember Watergate) used to bring
down presidents; now he's a mere presidential public relations
officer. In his book Bush at War he writes that Bush told Wolfowitz
to shut up and let the number 1 (Rumsfeld) talk. The second version,
defended by the New York Times, says that Bush listened attentively
to Wolfowitz. But a third version relayed by diplomats holds
that in Bush's executive order on September 17 authorizing war
on Afghanistan, there's already a paragraph giving free reign
to the Pentagon to draw plans for a war against Iraq.
Former CIA director James Woolsey, a
certified five-star hawk, is a great friend of Wolfowitz. Woolsey
is also the author of what could be dubbed "the high noon"
theory that defines nothing less than Bush's vision of the world.
According to the theory, Bush is not a six-shooter: he is the
leader of a posse.
That's how Bush described himself in
a conversation last year with then Czech president Vaclav Havel.
As film fans well remember, Gary Cooper in High Noon plays a
village marshal who tries by all means to convince his friends
to assemble a posse to face the Saddam of the times (a lean and
mean Lee Marvin) who is supposed to arrive in the noon train.
In the end, Cooper has to face "Saddam" Marvin all
by himself.
It's fair to argue that the Bush administration
today is enacting a larger-than-life replay of a high noon. The
posse is the "coalition of the willing". The logic
of the posse is crystal clear. The US first defines a strategic
objective (for example, regime change in Iraq). They propagate
their steely determination to achieve this objective (an awesome
worldwide propaganda and disinformation campaign combined with
a major military deployment). And finally they assemble a posse
to help them: the coalition of the willing, or "coalition
of the bribed and bludgeoned", as it was dubbed by democrats
in Europe and the US itself. A devastating report by the Institute
for Policy Studies in Washington has detailed a "coalition
of the coerced". Whatever its name, those who do not join
the coalition (the absolute majority of UN member-states, as
well as world public opinion) remain, as Bush says, "irrelevant".
With missionary fervor, Wolfowitz has
been pursuing his Iraqi dream step by step. In late 2001, James
Woolsey roamed all over Europe trying to find a connection between
Saddam and al-Qaeda. He couldn't find anything. But then in January
2002, Iraq was formally inducted in the "axis of evil along
with Iran and North Korea. Rumsfeld went on overdrive: he said
that Saddam supported "terrorists" (in fact suicide
martyrs in Palestine, who have nothing to do with al-Qaeda).
He said that Saddam promised US$25,000 to each of their families.
The neocons embarked on a media blitzkrieg, and Wolfowitz's mission
finally hit center stage.
During the Cold War in the 1970s, Wolfowitz
learned the ropes laboring on nuclear treaties, the endless talks
with the Soviets on nuclear armament limitations. At the time
he also started a career for one of his better students, Lewis
Libby--who today is Cheney's chief of staff. For three decades
Wolfowitz has been involved in strategic thinking, military organization
and political and diplomatic moves. Even former Jimmy Carter
national security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski, the author of
The Grand Chessboard--or the roadmap for US domination over Eurasia--allegedly
allows Wolfowitz to figure alongside Henry Kissinger, McGeorge
Bundy or Zbig himself: that select elite of academics who managed
to cross over to high office and radiate intellectual authority
and almost unlimited power by osmosis because of close contact
with an American president.
Wolfowitz routinely talks about "freedom
and democracy"--with no contextualization. His renditions
always sound like a romantic ideal. But there's nothing romantic
about him. During the First Gulf War, Wolfowitz was an undersecretary
at the Pentagon formulating policy. Cheney was the Pentagon chief.
It was Wolfowitz who prepared Desert Storm--and also got the
money. The bill was roughly $90 billion, 80 percent of it paid
by the allies: a cool deal. It was Wolfowitz who convinced Israel
not to enter the war even after the country was hit by Iraqi
Scuds, so the key Arab partners of the 33-nation coalition would
not run away.
But Saddam always remained his nemesis.
When Bush senior lost his re-election, Wolfowitz became dean
of the School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins
University in Baltimore. Later, he was fully convinced that Iraq
was behind the first attack against the World Trade Center, in
1993.
Wolfowitz and Perle, though close, are
not the same thing. Perle is virtually indistinguishable from
the hardcore policies of the Likud in Israel. Perle thinks that
the only possible way out for the US--not the West, because he
despises Europe as a political player--is a multi-faceted, long-term,
vicious confrontation against the Arab and Muslim world. Wolfowitz
is more sophisticated: he has already served as American ambassador
to Indonesia. He definitely does not subscribe to the fallacious
Samuel Huntington theory of a clash of civilizations. Wolfowitz
even believes in an independent Palestine--something that for
Perle is beyond anathema.
Wolfowitz, born in 1943 in New York,
is the son of a Polish mathematician whose whole family died
in Nazi concentration camps. It was Allan Bloom, the brilliant
author of The Closing of the American Mind and professor at the
University of Chicago, deceased in 1992, who steered Wolfowitz
towards political science. Wolfowitz had the honor of being cloned
by Saul Bellow in the novel Ravelstein: the Wolfowitz character
shows up under a fictional name in the same role he occupied
in 1991 at the Pentagon. Messianic, and a big fan of Abraham
Lincoln, Wolfowitz is a walking contradiction: his fierce unilateralism
is based on his faith in the universality of American values.
Wolfowitz and his proteges's are hardcore
"Straussians"--after Leo Strauss, a Jewish intellectual
who managed to escape the Nazis, died in 1999 as a 100-year-old
and was totally anti-modern: for him, modernity was responsible
for Nazism and Stalinism. Strauss was a lover of the classics--most
of all Plato and Aristotle. His most notorious disciples were
Chicago's Allan Bloom and also Harvey Mansfield--who translated
both Machiavelli and Tocqueville and was the father of all things
politically correct in Harvard.
Strauss believed in natural right and
in an immutable measure of what is just and what is unjust. Thus
the Wolfowitz credo that a vague "democracy and freedom"
is a one-size-fits-all panacea to be served everywhere, even
by force. Plenty of neo-hawks followed Bloom's courses at the
University of Chicago: Wolfowitz of course, but also Francis
Fukuyama of "end of history" fame, and John Podhoretz,
who reigns over the editorial pages of the ultra-reactionary
Rupert Murdoch-owned tabloid the New York Post. As to Mansfield,
his most notorious student was probably William Kristol, the
editor of the also Rupert Murdoch-financed magazine Weekly Standard.
In Kristol's own formulation, all these Straussians are morally
conservative, religiously inclined, anti-Utopian, anti-modern
and skeptical towards the left but also towards the reactionary
right.
Ronald Reagan, because of his "moral
clarity" and his "virtue", is their supreme icon--not
the devious realpolitik couple of Richard Nixon and Kissinger.
This conceptual choice is absolutely essential to understand
where the neocons are coming from. Take the crucial expression
"regime change": there's nothing casual about it. Strauss
used to say that "classic political philosophy was guided
by the question of the best regime". Here Strauss was talking
specifically about Aristotle and his notion of politeia. The
"regime"--or politeia--designates not only government,
but also institutions, education, morals, and "the spirit
of law". In the mind of these Straussians, to topple Saddam
is a mere footnote. "Regime change" in Iraq means to
implant a Western Utopia in the heart of the Middle East: a Western-built
politeia. Many would argue this is no more than a replay of Rudyard
Kipling's "white man's burden".
Perle, also a New Yorker, is much, much
rougher than Wolfowitz. No Aristotle for him. A dull man with
a psychopath gaze, he recently accused New Yorker reporter Seymour
Hersh of being "a terrorist"--because Hersh, in a splendid
piece, unveiled how Perle set up a company that will profit immensely
from war in the Middle East. Perle has repeatedly declared on
the record that the US is prepared to attack Syria, Lebanon and
Iran--all "enemies of Israel". One of his most notorious
recent stunts was when he invited an obscure French scholar to
the Defense Policy Board to bash the Saudi royal family. He casually
noted that if the invasion of Iraq brings down another couple
of "friendly" Arab regimes, it's no big deal. At a
recent seminar organized by a New York-based public relations
firm and attended by Iraqi exiles and American Middle East and
security officials, Perle proclaimed that France was no longer
an ally of the US; and that NATO "must develop a strategy
to contain our erstwhile ally or we will not be talking about
a NATO alliance". This hawk, though, is no fool, and loves
la vie en rose: Richard Perle spends his holidays in his own
house in the south of France.
If you are a Pentagon senior civilian
adviser, saying all those things out loud, they pack a tremendous
punch in Washington: it's practically official. As official as
Perle musing out loud whether the US should "subordinate
vital national interests to a show of hands by nations who do
not share our interests" by seeking the endorsement of the
UN Security Council on a major issue of policy (that's exactly
what happened on Monday). Perle has been saying all along that
"Iraq is going to be liberated, by the United States and
whoever wants to join us, whether we get the approbation of the
UN or any other institution". And Bush repeated these words
almost verbatim. As for the tremendous unpopularity of the US,
"it's a real problem and it undoubtedly diminishes our ability
to do the things that we think are important. I think that's
bad for the world because if the United States, as the leader
it has always been, has its authority and standing diminished,
that can't be good for the Swiss or the Italians or the Germans.
But I don't know how you deal with that problem ..."
Perle and Wolfowitz may shape policy,
but that would not enhance their mundane status among the political
chattering classes if they didn't have a bulldog to disseminate
their clout in the media. That's where William Kristol, the chairman
of the Project for a New American Century and the director of
the magazine Weekly Standard comes in. Kristol's co-chairman
at the PNAC is Robert Kagan, former deputy for policy in the
State Department in the bureau for Inter-American affairs. Kagan
is the author of Of Paradise and Power: America vs Europe in
the New World Order--where, according to a fallacious formula,
Europeans living in a kind of peaceful, Utopian paradise will
be forced to stomach unbridled American power. Robert is the
son of Donald Kagan, ultra-conservative Yale professor and eminent
historian. Kagan junior is a major apostle of nation building,
as in "the reconstruction of the Japanese politics and society
to America's image". He cheerleads the fact that 60 years
later there are still American troops in Japan. The same, according
to him, should happen in Iraq. Any strategist would remind Kagan
that in Japan in 1945 the emperor himself ordered the population
to obey the Americans and in Germany the war devastation was
so complete that the Germans had no other alternative.
William is the son of Irving Kristol
and Gertrud Himmelfarb, classic New York Jewish intellectuals
and ironically former Trotskyite who then made a sharp turn to
the extreme right. Former Trotskyites have a tendency to believe
that history will vindicate them in the end. Irving, at 82 a
former neo-Marxist, neo-Trotskyite, neo-socialist and neo-liberal,
today is officially a neoconservative and one of the AEI's stalwarts.
Kristol junior reportedly likes philosophy,
opera, thrillers and is fond of--who else--Aristotle and Machiavelli,
who not by accident were eminences behind the prince. Instead
of rebelling against his parents, he sulked in his bedroom rebelling
against his own generation--the anti-war, peace-and-love, Bob
Dylan-addicted 1960s baby boomers. Although admitting that Vietnam
was a big mistake, William did not volunteer to go to war, a
fact that qualifies him as the archetypal "chicken hawk"--armchair
warmongers who know nothing about the horrors of war. William
wants to erect conservatism to the level of an ideology of government.
His great heroes include Reagan--for, what else, his "candor"
and "moral clarity". A naked imperialist? No, he's
not as crass as Rumsfeld: he prefers to be characterized as a
partisan of "liberal imperialism".
As media hawk-in-chief, William is just
following up daddy's work: Irving Kristol was the ultimate portable
think tank of Reaganism. Today, Kristol junior is convinced that
the Middle East is an irredeemable source of anti-Americanism,
terrorism, weapons of mass destruction and an assorted basket
of evils. Kristol of course is a very good friend of Wolfowitz,
Kagan and former ex-CIA chief James Woolsey, who not by accident
heaps lavish praise on The War over Iraq: Saddam's tyranny and
America's mission, a book by Lawrence Kaplan and ... William
Kristol. Woolsey loves how the book goes against the "narrow
realists" around Bush senior and the "wishful liberals"
around Bill Clinton.
Under Bush senior, William Kristol was
Dan Quayle's chief of staff. Under Clinton, he was in the wilderness
until he finally managed to launch the Weekly Standard. Who financed
it? None other than Rupert Murdoch, whose tabloidish Fox News
is widely known as Bush TV. The Weekly Standard loses money in
direct proportion to the expansion of its influence. It remains
invaluable as the voice of "Hawk Central".
Hawks, or at least some neoconservatives,
seem to understand the importance of a lighter touch as a key
public relations strategy. That's where David Brooks comes in.
Brooks, former University of Chicago, former Wall Street Journal
and now a big fish at the Weekly Standard, was the one who came
up with the concept of "bobos"--bourgeois bohemians,
or "caviar left" as they are known in Latin countries.
"Bobos", accuse the neocons, do absolutely nothing
to change a social order that they seem to fight but from which
they profit. Bobo-bashing is one of the neocon's ideological
strategies to dismiss their critics out of hand.
In his conference at the World Social
Forum in Porto Alegre, Brazil, in January, Noam Chomsky demistified
the mechanism through which these people, "most of them
recycled from the Reagan administration", are implementing
their agenda: "They are replaying a familiar script: drive
the country into deficit so as to be able to undermine social
programs, declare a 'war on terror' (as they did in 1981) and
conjure up one devil after another to frighten the population
into obedience. In the 1980s it was Libyan hit men prowling the
streets of Washington to assassinate our leader, then the Nicaraguan
army only two days march from Texas, a threat to survival so
severe that Reagan had to declare a national emergency. Or an
airfield in Grenada that the Russians were going to use to bomb
us (if they could find it on a map); Arab terrorists seeking
to kill Americans everywhere while Gaddafi plans to 'expel America
from the world', so Reagan wailed. Or Hispanic narco-traffickers
seeking to destroy our youth; and on, and on."
For both the AEI and the PNAC, the Middle
East is a land without people, and oil without land--and this
is something anyone will confirm in the streets or power corridors
in Cairo, Amman, Beirut, Ramallah, Damascus or Baghdad. The image
fits the AEI and PNAC's acute and indiscriminate loathing and
contempt for Arabs. The implementation of the AEI's and the PNAC's
policies has led to the transformation of Ariel Sharon into a
"man of peace"--Bush's own words at the White House--and
the semi-fascist Likud Party becoming the undisputed number one
ally of American civilization. The occupied Palestinian territories--see
never-complied, forever-spurned UN resolution 242 plus dozens
of others--became "the so-called occupied territories"
(in Rumsfeld's own words). Jewish moderates, inside and outside
Israel, are extremely alarmed.
One of the key excuses for the Iraq war
sold by Washington was the elimination of the roots of terrorism
by striking terrorists and the "axis of evil" that
supports them. This is a total flaw. The excuse is undermined
by the US themselves. Not even Washington believes war is the
way to fight terrorism, otherwise the Bush administration would
not have adopted the AEI and PNAC agenda of promoting "democracy
and liberty" in the Arab world. But neither the Arabs nor
anyone else is convinced that the US is committed to real democracy
or to the "territorial integrity of Iraq" when key
members of the administration, like Perle, signed "Clean
Break" in 1996 advising Benjamin Netanyahu that Iraq and
any other country which tried to defy Israel should be smashed.
The message by the PNAC people to Netanyahu in 1996 and to Bush
since 2001 has been the same: international law is against our
interests; we fix our own objectives; we go for it and the rest
will follow--or not. Even Zbig Brzezinski has recognized the
American corporate press--unlike the European press--has not
uttered a single word about the total similarity of the agendas.
But concerned Americans have already realized the superpower
has no attention span, no patience, no tact--and many would say
no historical credibility--to engage in nation-building in the
Middle East.
There's not much democracy on the cards
either. Iraqis and the whole Arab nation view as an unredeemable
insult and injury the official American plan to enforce a de
facto military occupation. Iraq is already carved up on paper
into three sections (just like the British did in the 1920s).
Two retired generals--including Arabic-speaking, Lebanese-origin
John Abizaid--and a former ambassador to Yemen--will control
the three interim "civil" administrations. Abizaid
studied the history of the Middle East at Harvard--and this is
as far as his democratic credentials go. Everything in Iraq will
be under overseer supremo Jay Garner, a retired general very
close to Ariel Sharon and until a few months ago the CEO of a
weapons firm specialized in missile guidance systems. Iraqis,
Palestinians and Arabs as a whole are stunned: not only has the
US flaunted international legitimacy in its push to war, it will
also install an Israeli proxy as governor of Iraq and will keep
pretending to finally be committed to respect the never-complied
dozens of UN resolutions concerning Palestine.
As much as Israel is widely regarded
by most 1.3 billion Muslims as the de facto 51st American state,
many responsible Americans denounce the Iraq war as Sharon's
war. Washington's Likudniks--the AEI and PNAC people--allied
with evangelical Christians--are running US foreign policy in
the Middle East. Since Autumn 2002, they have managed to convince
Bush to increase the tempo--with no consultation to Congress
or to American public opinion--betting on a point-of-no-return
scenario in Iraq. Meanwhile, Sharon, in a relentless campaign,
managed to convince Bush that war on Palestine was equal to war
against terrorism. But he went one step beyond: he convinced
Bush that the Palestinian Intifada, al-Qaeda and Saddam are all
cats in the same bag, plotting a concerted three-pronged offensive
to destroy Judeo-Christian civilization. Thus the subsequent,
overwhelming Bush administration campaign to try to convince
public opinion that Saddam is an ally of bin Laden. Few fell
into the trap. But European strategists got the drift: they are
already working with the hypothesis that the geopolitical axis
in the Middle East is about to switch from Cairo-Riyadh-Tehran
to Tel Aviv-Ankara-Baghdad (post-Saddam).
In a recent hearing of the Senate Foreign
Relations Committee, undersecretary of state for political affairs
Mark Grossman and undersecretary of defense for policy Douglas
Feith talked for four hours and through 86 pages, apparently
detailing how the US will rebuild Iraq after liberation through
massive bombing. Feith has been on record saying that this war
of course "is not about oil", while stating a few sentences
later that "the US will be the new OPEC". A source
confirms that it was clear at the Senate hearing both Feith and
Grossman had absolutely no idea what the Arab world is all about.
Senators asked how much the war would cost (Yale economist William
Nordhaus said the occupation may cost between $17 billion and
$45 billion a year): nobody had an answer. Feith and Grossman
said it was "unknowable". Rumsfeld is also a major
exponent of the "not knowable" school. The cost of
war for American taxpayers--some estimates go as high as $200
billion--is "not knowable". The size of the occupation
force--some estimates range as high as 400,000 troops--is "not
knowable". The duration of the occupation--former NATO supreme
commander Wesley Clark has mentioned no less than eight years--is
"not knowable".
Arabs, Asians, Europeans--and a few Americans--warn
of blowback: the whole Middle East may explode in a violent,
vicious anti-imperialist struggle. As this correspondent has
been hearing for months from Pakistan to Egypt and from Indonesia
to the Gulf, "dozens of bin Ladens" are bound to emerge.
The strategy advocated by the evangelic apostles of armed democratization--overwhelming
military force, unilateral preemption, overthrow of governments,
seizure of oil fields, recolonization, protectorates--is being
roundly condemned by the same educated Arab elites which would
be the natural leaders of a push for democratization. Many question
not Washington's objective, but the method: they simply cannot
stomach the "imperial liberalism" version marketed
by the hawks. The current absolute mess in Afghanistan is further
demonstration that "democratization" via an American
proconsul is doomed to failure. Moreover, 16 eminent British
academic lawyers have certified the Bush doctrine of preemptive
self-defense is illegal under international law.
Even a tragically surreal, zombie regime
like North Korea's has retained one essential lesson from this
whole crisis : if you don't want regime change, you'd better
maximize your silence, speed and cunning to build your own arsenal
of WMDs. Muslims for their part have understood that the unlikely
Franco-German-Russian axis of peace was and still is trying to
prevent what both al-Qaeda and American fundamentalists want:
a war of civilizations and a war of religion. And the world public
opinion's insight is that Washington may win the war without
the UN--but it will lose peace by shooting the UN down. As a
diplomat in Brussels put it, "The world has voted in unison:
it does not want to be reordered by a posse in Washington."
The men in the AEI and the PNAC galaxy
may be accused of intolerance, arrogance of power, undisguised
fascist tendencies, ignorance of history and cultural parochialism--in
various degrees. This is all open to debate. They may be "chicken
hawks" like Kristol junior or attack dogs like Rumsfeld.
But most of all what baffles educated publics across the world--especially
the overwhelming majority of public opinion in Germany, France,
the UK, Italy and Spain--is the current non-separation of Church
and State in the US.
George W Bush is not ideologically a
neoconservative. But he is certainly a man with a notorious lack
of intellectual curiosity. Backed by his core American constituency
of 60 to 70 million Bible-believing Christians, born-again Bush
is setting out to do God's will on a crusade to Babylon to "fight
evil"--personified by Saddam. Martin Amis, Britain's top
contemporary novelist, argues that Bush, being intellectually
null, had no other option than to adopt God as his foreign policy
mentor. Amis wrote in the Observer that "Bush is more religious
than Saddam: of the two presidents, he is, in this respect, the
more psychologically primitive. We hear about the successful
'Texanization' of the Republican party. And doesn't Texas seem
to resemble a country like Saudi Arabia, with its great heat,
its oil wealth, its brimming houses of worship, and its weekly
executions." For former weapons inspector Scott Ritter,
Bush is "a fundamentalist who does not respect international
law. The United States is becoming a crusader state." For
the absolute majority of 1.3 billion Muslims, a sinister crusader
it is.
The endgame will reveal itself to be
a cheap family farce: the Bush family delivers an ultimatum to
the Hussein family. What Gore Vidal describes as "the Bush-Cheney
junta" has won: Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Perle, the
AEI and PNAC stalwarts. Paul Wolfowitz, above all, has won his
own personal crusade. Colin Powell has lost it all. It does not
matter that the State Department's classified report, "Iraq,
the Middle East and change: no dominoes" was unveiled by
the Los Angeles Times. Wolfowitz and Perle will play with their
dominoes. By predictable mechanisms of power as old as mankind
itself (and incidentally very common in the former USSR) it was
Powell--the adversary of the new doctrine of preemption--who
was charged to defend it in the face of the world. Sources in
New York confirm he was told to get in line: his discourse, his
body language, his whole demeanor changed. Seasoned American
diplomats are appalled by the devastating political and diplomatic
failure of the Bush administration. They know that by deciding
to go to war unilaterally--and leaving the international system
in shambles--the US has squandered its biggest capital: its international
legitimacy. And to make matters worse there was absolutely no
debate--in the Senate, or in the public opinion arena--about
it.
Americans still have to wake up to the
fact of how startlingly isolated they are in the world. The world,
for its part, will keep deploying its weapons of mass democracy.
There can be no "international community" as long as
the popular perception lingers in so many parts of the world
of a clash between the West and Islam. Always ready to recognize
and love the best America has to offer, hundreds of millions
of people would rather try to save it from the fatal unilateralism
distilled by the American fundamentalists of the PNAC and the
AEI. Everyone in Baghdad, the former great capital of Islam at
its apex, is fond of saying how it has survived the Mongols,
the barbarians at the gate. The evangelic apostles of armed democratization
cannot even imagine the fury a new breed of barbarians may unleash
at the gate of the new American century.
Yesterday's
Features
Jo Wilding
From
Waiting to War: a Day and a Night in Baghdad
Stephen Banko
I Was
a Soldier Once
Kevin Alexander Gray
How Did
We Become an Outlaw Nation?
Shane Claiborne
Nomadic
Solidarity: Glimpses of Life in Baghdad on the Eve of War
Kathy Kelly
Waiting on the Baghdad Skies to Crack
Anthony Gancarski
Michelle
Makin's "Liberty Shields"
Rahul Mahajan and Robert
Jensen
Myths
and Facts About the War on Iraq
Jason Leopold
Cheney's
Lies About Halliburton and Iraq
Ron Jacobs
If War is Business as Usual, There Should be No Business as Usual
Chuck O'Connell
Predictions About the Iraq War
Douglas Herman
US Air Force Veteran on the Coming Air Campaign
Ralph Nader
Come
On Democrats, Stand Up for Peace
William Hughes
War is Theft
Sima Saeedi
Dispatch
from Iran
Hammond Guthrie
John Philip Sousa
Website of the Day
Iraq
Body Count
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