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CounterPunch
March 14,
2003
The
Road to Jerusalem Goes Through Baghdad
by FAREED MARJAEE
"Sometime around the late 1950s,
American conservatives picked up a hitch-hiker on the road to
power who wound up hijacking their movement....smear campaigns,
race-baiting, expulsions, and enforced ideological conformity
was imported to the Right via the neo-conservative influx."
Justin Raimondo, Antiwar.com
So who is really behind this unpopular war? Is
the impetus behind the war a politically cohesive force? What
is the true drive behind the war campaign? What are we to make
of the assertions of "bringing democracy to the region?"
In the end, will the White House hawks be checkmated by that
other superpower -- the world public opinion?
As noted in a previous piece (1), in
Jan. 2003, The Carnegie Endowment for International Peace released
a 42-page report titled "Iraq: what is next?" assessing
the weapons inspection regime. On the question of Iraq disarmament,
the paper takes a markedly different position than the Bush Administration.
One of the authors of this report, Joseph
Cirincione, is Senior Associate and Director of the "Non-Proliferation
Project" at the Carnegie Endowment; he worked for 9 years
in the US House of Representatives and served on both the Armed
Services and Government Operations Committees. Mr. Cirincione
is also a member of International Institute for Strategic Studies.
He was interviewed by the National Public Radio on Tuesday, January
28, 2003, hours before the State of the Union address. You
can listen to the interview at here. Here is an excerpt:
"There is a group in the Administration
that has the ear of the President that has apparently won the
debate inside the Administration that wants to go to war. They
see this as being about much more than simply Weapons of Mass
Destruction, and, in fact, much more than just revenge on Saddam
Hussein, or the concern for oil supplies. For some, this is part
of a plan to democratize the Middle East, to shake up the regimes
that were put in place during the Cold War, supported by one
side or the other that are now, what they think of as strangling
the prospects for a Middle East peace solution. They want to
go into Iraq, establish Iraq as a 'democratic beacon!'
"In that process, they will encourage
people in Syria, in Iran and other countries to rise up and overthrow
their regimes; that will in turn help bring about a democratic
Palestinian Liberation Organization that will give Israel a true
reliable partner to negotiate with, and thus, you can bring about
peace in the Middle East. So, in their view, the road to Jerusalem
goes through Baghdad, and we have the ability to do this. It's
almost our duty, our mission to do this. This is part of the
grand view in the eyes of some in the Administration that will
unleash a democratic tsunami, they say in the Middle East, and
bring about a fundamental re-ordering of not just the Middle
East, but the global politics; that is a very seductive view,
a very powerful view of what you think the US can accomplish,
the historic mission, that now you are in a position to fulfill.
That is in great part what's motivating the drive to go into
Iraq....
"There is a group in the Administration
including Deputy Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle, head
of the Defense Policy Board, John Bolton, Douglas Fieth and others
who are really on the extreme edge of foreign policy theory.
And I am not sure the people appreciate just how radical a group
this is; we really haven't ever seen anything like this. And
they have a real messianic vision; they feel that their historic
moment is here. They compare the current situation to 1949, when
a small group of people in the National Security Council around
Harry Truman basically created the world as we know it, created
the institutions of NATO, the UN and the new national security
strategy for the US, "Bretton Woods"(2), and structured
the Cold War world. They think that they are in a position to
do the same for the post-Cold War world, that we have wasted
8 years in the Clinton Administration. They were on the verge
of doing this when they were in the Reagan Administration, they
were rubbed of the opportunity by the loss in 1992, they are
back, they don't want to miss this opportunity; they have a missionary
zeal. The question is whether America is going to be dragged
along with this missionary zeal. I think this vision is extremely
dangerous; that they are seducing America into embarking on a
long-term military occupation of a foreign land. We had never
done anything like this."
Now, with the prospect of an unpopular
war, this agenda-driven group in the leadership is increasingly
receiving more exposure and attention. Beyond the moralist critics
in the media, now, out of frustration and in breach of conventional
protocol, some ex-officials, experts and policy advisors have
seemingly been forced to point out that specific clique constituency
in the administration. David Gergen, who served in the White
House as Reagan's communications director, now in Harvard University,
also referred to this on public television [PBS, Jan 30, 2003].
Pointing to this group, Gergen said this was a group of junior
ministers during the Reagan term who now in Bush's government
have become senior viziers. It is very telling that former Secretary
of State Madeleine Albright, twice in one day [Feb 14, 2003]
in two different interviews on Public Broadcasting Service, said:
"You know, there were people in the Bush administration
this time that wanted to have a war with Iraq in the worst way.
They have managed to do that."
A contributor to the Pacific News Service,
William O. Beeman, Professor of Anthropology at Brown University,
believes that the plan to invade Iraq predates 9/11; the tragedy
of Sept. 11 and the rise to power of pro-war neo-conservatives
gave it life and momentum. In an article for PNS, he writes [Jan.
24, 2003], "The coming U.S. invasion of Iraq was not prompted
by the events of Sept. 11. It is a 5-year-old plan, conceived
by a cabal of officials running defense and security in the White
House today, when they were out of power during the Clinton administration.
The Sept. 11 tragedy, along with the Bush presidency, gave them
the momentum they needed to implement the plan, which lumbers
forward like a drunken elephant threatening to destroy everything
in its path."
Also troubled is Joseph C. Wilson, who
was the senior American diplomat in Baghdad during the Desert
Shield conflict, and is now a Middle East Institute Adjunct Scholar.
He writes in the Nation magazine ["Republic or Empire",
March 3, 2003]: "Then what's the point of this new American
imperialism? The neo-conservatives with a stranglehold on the
foreign policy of the Republican Party, ... want to go beyond
expanding US global influence to force revolutionary change on
the region.... Nothing short of conquest, occupation and imposition
of handpicked leaders on a vanquished population will suffice....
Iraq is the linchpin for this broader assault on the region.
The new imperialists will not rest until governments that ape
our worldview are implanted throughout the region, smacking of
hubris in the extreme."
In a Jan 27, 2003 interview on the News
Hour with Jim Lehrer, Zbigniew Brzezinski remarked, "I suspect
many of them [countries] are convinced that our ultimate objective
is not disarmament. It still is regime change for reasons which
in some cases are openly stated, and for reasons which many around
the world suspect we deliberately refrain from stating."
Joe Klein writing in Time Magazine's
Feb 10 edition is more direct in implicating certain political
forces. He writes, "A stronger Israel is very much embedded
in the rationale for war with Iraq. It is part of the argument
that dare not speak its name, a fantasy quietly cherished by
the neo-conservative faction in the Bush [Administration]...."
Kathleen and Bill Christison are former
CIA political analysts; in an article for [Counterpunch 13, 2002
(Washington Report on Middle East Affairs -March 2003)], they
state that much has been written about the Neo-con circle, but
dual loyalty better describes Bush Administration policy makers.
Under Clinton Administration, the three most senior officials
dealing with the Middle East affairs, had previously either lived
in Israel, or engaged in lobby work for Israel. Speaking of this
double allegiance, Christisons indicate that the link between
promoters of Israel and policy makers gets even much stronger
under the Bush Administration, to the extent that these high
and middle level officials see no difference between US national
security interests and those of Israels'.
A disciple of Neo-conservatism, Max Boot
published an interesting essay on the nature of this political
movement. In his op-ed essay in the Wall Street Journal ["What
the Heck is a 'Neocon'? " December 30, 2002] he deliberates
on the concept of interventionism in foreign policy; he maintains
that President Woodrow Wilson was soft, and that Neo-cons like
Ronald Reagan are "hard Wilsonians." Boot explicitly
states that Neo-cons "want to use American might to promote
American ideals."
In the end, will the White House hawks
be checkmated by that other superpower -- the world public opinion?
<Meezan_2@yahoo.ca>
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