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THE ROVING
EYE
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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
(PNAC), 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.
(©2003 Asia
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