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The Weird Men Behind George W Bush's War
By Michael Lind
04/07/03 "New Statesman (UK)" -- -- America's allies and enemies
alike are baffled. What is going on in the United States? Who is
making foreign policy? And what are they trying to achieve?
Quasi-Marxist explanations involving big oil or American capitalism
are mistaken. Yes, American oil companies and contractors will
accept the spoils of the kill in Iraq. But the oil business, with
its Arabist bias, did not push for this war any more than it
supports the Bush administration's close alliance with Ariel Sharon.
Further, President Bush and Vice-President Cheney are not genuine
'Texas oil men' but career politicians who, in between stints in
public life, would have used their connections to enrich themselves
as figureheads in the wheat business, if they had been residents of
Kansas, or in tech companies, had they been Californians.
Equally wrong is the theory that American and European civilisation
are evolving in opposite directions. The thesis of Robert Kagan, the
neoconservative propagandist, that Americans are martial and
Europeans pacifist, is complete nonsense. A majority of Americans
voted for either Al Gore or Ralph Nader in 2000. Were it not for the
over-representation of sparsely populated, right-wing states in both
the presidential electoral college and the Senate, the White House
and the Senate today would be controlled by Democrats, whose views
and values, on everything from war to the welfare state, are very
close to those of western Europeans. Both the economic-determinist
theory and the clash-of-cultures theory are reassuring: they assume
that the recent revolution in US foreign policy is the result of
obscure but understandable forces in an orderly world. The truth is
more alarming. As a result of several bizarre and unforeseeable
contingencies - such as the selection rather than election of George
W Bush, and 11 September - the foreign policy of the world's only
global power is being made by a small clique that is
unrepresentative of either the US population or the mainstream
foreign policy establishment.
The core group now in charge consists of neoconservative defence
intellectuals (they are called 'neoconservatives' because many of
them started off as anti-Stalinist leftists or liberals before
moving to the far right). Inside the government, the chief defence
intellectuals include Paul Wolfowitz, the deputy secretary of
defence. He is the defence mastermind of the Bush administration;
Donald Rumsfeld is an elderly figurehead who holds the position of
defence secretary only because Wolfowitz himself is too
controversial. Others include Douglas Feith, the number three at the
Pentagon; Lewis 'Scooter' Libby, a Wolfowitz protege who is Cheney's
chief of staff; John R Bolton, a right-winger assigned to the State
Department to keep Colin Powell in check; and Elliott Abrams,
recently appointed to head Middle East policy at the National
Security Council. On the outside are James Woolsey, the former CIA
director, who has tried repeatedly to link both 9/11 and the anthrax
letters in the US to Saddam Hussein, and Richard Perle, who has just
resigned from his unpaid defence department advisory post after a
lobbying scandal. Most of these 'experts' never served in the
military. But their headquarters is now the civilian defence
secretary's office, where these Republican political appointees are
despised and distrusted by the largely Republican career soldiers.
Most neoconservative defence intellectuals have their roots on the
left, not the right. They are products of the largely
Jewish-American Trotskyist movement of the 1930s and 1940s, which
morphed into anti-communist liberalism between the 1950s and 1970s
and finally into a kind of militaristic and imperial right with no
precedents in American culture or political history. Their
admiration for the Israeli Likud party's tactics, including
preventive warfare such as Israel's 1981 raid on Iraq's Osirak
nuclear reactor, is mixed with odd bursts of ideological enthusiasm
for 'democracy'. They call their revolutionary ideology 'Wilsonianism'
(after President Woodrow Wilson), but it is really Trotsky's theory
of the permanent revolution mingled with the far-right Likud strain
of Zionism. Genuine American Wilsonians believe in
self-determination for people such as the Palestinians.
The neo-con defence intellectuals, as well as being in or around the
actual Pentagon, are at the centre of a metaphorical 'pentagon' of
the Israel lobby and the religious right, plus conservative
think-tanks, foundations and media empires. Think-tanks such as the
American Enterprise Institute (AEI) and the Centre for Strategic and
International Studies (CSIS) provide homes for neo-con
'in-and-outers' when they are out of government (Perle is a fellow
at AEI). The money comes not so much from corporations as from
decades-old conservative foundations, such as the Bradley and Olin
foundations, which spend down the estates of long-dead tycoons.
Neoconservative foreign policy does not reflect business interests
in any direct way. The neo-cons are ideologues, not opportunists.
The major link between the conservative think-tanks and the Israel
lobby is the Washington-based and Likud-supporting Jewish Institute
for National Security Affairs (Jinsa), which co-opts many non-Jewish
defence experts by sending them on trips to Israel. It flew out the
retired General Jay Garner, now slated by Bush to be proconsul of
occupied Iraq. In October 2000, he co-signed a Jinsa letter that
began: 'We . . . believe that during the current upheavals in
Israel, the Israel Defence Forces have exercised remarkable
restraint in the face of lethal violence orchestrated by the
leadership of the Palestinian Authority.'
The Israel lobby itself is divided into Jewish and Christian wings.
Wolfowitz and Feith have close ties to the Jewish-American Israel
lobby. Wolfowitz, who has relatives in Israel, has served as the
Bush administration's liaison to the American Israel Public Affairs
Committee. Feith was given an award by the Zionist Organisation of
America, citing him as a 'pro-Israel activist'. While out of power
in the Clinton years, Feith collaborating with Perle, co-authored
for Likud a policy paper that advised the Israeli government to end
the Oslo peace process, reoccupy the territories and crush Yasser
Arafat's government.
Such experts are not typical of Jewish-Americans, who mostly voted
for Gore in 2000. The most fervent supporters of Likud in the
Republican electorate are southern Protestant fundamentalists. The
religious right believes that God gave all of Palestine to the Jews,
and fundamentalist congregations spend millions to subsidise Jewish
settlements in the occupied territories.
The final corner of the neoconservative pentagon is occupied by
several right-wing media empires, with roots - odd as it seems - in
the Commonwealth and South Korea. Rupert Murdoch disseminates
propaganda through his Fox Television network. His magazine the
Weekly Standard, edited by William Kristol, the former chief of
staff of Dan Quayle (vice-president, 1989-93), acts as a mouthpiece
for defence intellectuals such as Perle, Wolfowitz, Feith and
Woolsey as well as for Sharon's government. The National Interest
(of which I was executive editor, 1991-94) is now funded by Conrad
Black, who owns the Jerusalem Post and the Hollinger empire in
Britain and Canada.
Strangest of all is the media network centred on the Washington
Times - owned by the South Korean messiah (and ex-convict) the
Reverend Sun Myung Moon - which owns the newswire UPI. UPI is now
run by John O'Sullivan, the ghost-writer for Margaret Thatcher who
once worked as an editor for Conrad Black in Canada. Through such
channels, the 'Gotcha!' style of right-wing British journalism, as
well as its Europhobic substance, have contaminated the US
conservative movement.
The corners of the neoconservative pentagon were linked together in
the 1990s by the Project for the New American Century (PNAC), run by
Kristol out of the Weekly Standard offices. Using a PR technique
pioneered by their Trotskyist predecessors, the neo-cons published a
series of public letters, whose signatories often included Wolfowitz
and other future members of the Bush foreign policy team. They
called for the US to invade and occupy Iraq and to support Israel's
campaigns against the Palestinians (dire warnings about China were
another favourite). During Clinton's two terms, these fulminations
were ignored by the foreign policy establishment and the mainstream
media. Now they are frantically being studied.
How did the neo-con defence intellectuals - a small group at odds
with most of the US foreign policy elite, Republican as well as
Democratic - manage to capture the Bush administration? Few
supported Bush during the presidential primaries. They feared that
the second Bush would be like the first - a wimp who had failed to
occupy Baghdad in the first Gulf war and who had pressured Israel
into the Oslo peace process - and that his administration, again
like his father's, would be dominated by moderate Republican
realists such as Powell, James Baker and Brent Scowcroft. They
supported the maverick senator John McCain until it became clear
that Bush would get the nomination.
Then they had a stroke of luck - Cheney was put in charge of the
presidential transition (the period between the election in November
and the accession to office in January). Cheney used this
opportunity to stack the administration with his hardline allies.
Instead of becoming the de facto president in foreign policy, as
many had expected, Secretary of State Powell found himself boxed in
by Cheney's right-wing network, including Wolfowitz, Perle, Feith,
Bolton and Libby.
The neo-cons took advantage of Bush's ignorance and inexperience.
Unlike his father, a Second World War veteran who had been
ambassador to China, director of the CIA and vice-president, George
W was a thinly educated playboy who had failed repeatedly in
business before becoming the governor of Texas, a largely ceremonial
position (the state's lieutenant governor has more power). His
father is essentially a north-eastern, moderate Republican; George
W, raised in west Texas, absorbed the Texan cultural combination of
machismo, anti-intellectualism and overt religiosity. The son of
upper-class Episcopalian parents, he converted to southern
fundamentalism in a midlife crisis. Fervent Christian Zionism, along
with an admiration for macho Israeli soldiers that sometimes
coexists with hostility to liberal Jewish-American intellectuals, is
a feature of the southern culture.
The younger Bush was tilting away from Powell and toward Wolfowitz
('Wolfie', as he calls him) even before 9/11 gave him something he
had lacked: a mission in life other than following in his dad's
footsteps. There are signs of estrangement between the cautious
father and the crusading son: last year, veterans of the first Bush
administration, including Baker, Scowcroft and Lawrence Eagleburger,
warned publicly against an invasion of Iraq without authorisation
from Congress and the UN.
It is not clear that George W fully understands the grand strategy
that Wolfowitz and other aides are unfolding. He seems genuinely to
believe that there was an imminent threat to the US from Saddam
Hussein's 'weapons of mass destruction', something the leading
neo-cons say in public but are far too intelligent to believe
themselves. The Project for the New American Century urged an
invasion of Iraq throughout the Clinton years, for reasons that had
nothing to do with possible links between Saddam and Osama Bin
Laden. Public letters signed by Wolfowitz and others called on the
US to invade and occupy Iraq, to bomb Hezbollah bases in Lebanon and
to threaten states such as Syria and Iran with US attacks if they
continued to sponsor terrorism. Claims that the purpose is not to
protect the American people but to make the Middle East safe for
Israel are dismissed by the neo-cons as vicious anti-Semitism. Yet
Syria, Iran and Iraq are bitter enemies, with their weapons pointed
at each other, and the terrorists they sponsor target Israel rather
than the US. The neo-cons urge war with Iran next, though by any
rational measurement North Korea's new nuclear arsenal is, for the
US, a far greater problem.
So that is the bizarre story of how neoconservatives took over
Washington and steered the US into a Middle Eastern war unrelated to
any plausible threat to the US and opposed by the public of every
country in the world except Israel. The frightening thing is the
role of happenstance and personality. After the al-Qaeda attacks,
any US president would likely have gone to war to topple Bin Laden's
Taliban protectors in Afghanistan. But everything that the US has
done since then would have been different had America's 18th-century
electoral rules not given Bush the presidency and had Cheney not
used the transition period to turn the foreign policy executive into
a PNAC reunion.
For a British equivalent, one would have to imagine a Tory
government, with Downing Street and Whitehall controlled by
followers of Reverend Ian Paisley, extreme Eurosceptics, empire
loyalists and Blimpish military types - all determined, for a
variety of strategic or religious reasons, to invade Egypt. Their
aim would be to regain the Suez Canal as the first step in a
campaign to restore the British empire. Yes, it really is that
weird.
Copyright: 2003 New Statesman (UK)
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