|
This perfect storm will
finally destroy the neocon project
Americans are sick of the unrepentant arrogance of this elite.
But the realisation has come at a very heavy cost
By Geoffrey Wheatcroft
05/11/07 "The
Guardian" -- - Now and again people have found
themselves in places where the course of history was
dramatically changed: Paris in 1789, Petrograd in 1917, Berlin
in 1989. Sometimes the feeling of momentous change is illusory.
When Tony Blair won his first election 10 years ago, perfectly
sane people proclaimed that "these are revolutionary times". As
most of us realised long before his ignominious departure, that
was just what they weren't.
And yet to visit the US at present, as I have done, is to
experience an overwhelming sensation of drastic impending
change. It's not merely that President Bush, to whom Blair so
disastrously tethered himself, is "in office but not in power".
Most Americans can't wait for him to go, Congress is beyond his
control, and the Senate majority leader, Senator Harry Reid, has
told him that the war in Iraq is lost - for which statement of
the obvious Reid was accused of "defeatism" by the
vice-president, Dick Cheney.
Besides that the portents range from Paul Wolfowitz's travails
at the World Bank to the Senate interrogation of Alberto
Gonzales, the attorney general, and the trial of Conrad Black.
This might sound like the "succession of small disasters, oh
trifling in themselves", in Alan Bennett's Forty Years On ("a
Foreign Secretary's sudden attack of dysentery at the funeral of
George V, an American ambassador found strangled in his own
gym-slip...") And yet there really is an observable pattern.
Along with the collapse of Bush's authority, all these episodes
are connected to the great disaster in Iraq. And all illustrate
the hubristic, impenitent arrogance of the people who have been
guiding America's destiny - as well as ours, alas - for the past
six years. What one senses so acutely are the conditions
building for a political perfect storm, which will engulf and
destroy the whole neoconservative project.
In Washington I took part in a debate with Christopher Hitchens,
my old sparring partner and drinking companion (mots justes, all
of them), who supports Bush with a defiance worthy of a better
cause. He surpassed himself by insisting that his friend
Wolfowitz is a wronged man. A World Bank committee reportedly
disagrees, and has found that Wolfowitz did violate the bank's
rules in the matter of his lady friend's salary.
But in any case everyone else in Washington says the same thing:
Wolfowitz cannot survive. His appointment was widely resented in
the first place - the German, French, Dutch and Scandinavian
governments have warned that they might withhold funds if he
stays in office; and severe damage is being done to the
organisation he claims to have at heart by his refusal to accept
reality.
Then again, detachment from reality is perhaps to be expected
from one of the architects of the war, a man who thought that
the Iraqis would rise up to greet the American army as
liberators. As the Nobel-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz said,
Wolfowitz and his cabal "do not seem to understand that being
president of the World Bank is a privilege, not an entitlement".
Gonzales was just a Texan hack lawyer who acted as Bush's
consigliere, but he made his contribution to the great
enterprise when he ruled that torture could be justified in the
"war on terror". His Senate hearing provided a little comic
relief, what with his acute amnesia followed by the deathless
admission that "I now understand there was a conversation with
myself and the president". One day Blair may understand that
there was a conversation between himself and the president about
the invasion of Iraq, and that his commitment to the war took
place much earlier than he has ever admitted.
While Lord Black has never worked for the Bush administration,
he was aligned with the neocon elite through the National
Interest, the journal he used to publish, and he brought some of
its members, such as Richard Perle, on to the board of his
companies. Perle seems to have taken his fiduciary duties as
lightly as he and his colleagues took the problems that would
arise in Iraq as a result of the invasion. What has struck me
about Black's trial was that we were hearing another version of
the arrogance and denial we have heard from Wolfowitz and many
others. It will give me no particular pleasure if my former
employer is banged up, but his downfall is another grave blow
for the neocons.
All of which has vital implications for British politics.
Nicolas Sarkozy has been called "an American neoconservative
with a French passport", which he is not. But Blair really is an
American neoconservative with a British passport. He revealingly
and accurately said that "there isn't a world of difference"
between himself and the neocons politically, and his party must
now, as it shakes off the burden of these past years, ask itself
what, in that case, he was doing as Labour leader.
The Tories have questions of their own. Even the stupidest have
grasped that the war and the American alliance are unpopular
with the electorate, but they should now ask if sceptical,
pragmatic Conservatism ever had anything in common with
neoconservatism and its vast revolutionary scheme. One who did
understand is Matthew Parris, the former Tory MP. Before the
2004 presidential election he said he wanted Bush re-elected:
his presidency was halfway through an "experiment whose
importance is almost literally earth-shattering" and should be
played out to its inevitable failure.
But that failure must be demonstrated beyond contradiction. "The
theory that liberal values and a capitalist system can be spread
across the world by force of arms... should be tested to
destruction ... The president and his neoconservative court
should be offered all the rope they need to hang themselves."
His wish has come true; neocons are dangling all around us. In a
flicker of self-knowledge, Wolfowitz told a recent World Bank
meeting: "I understand that I've lost a lot of trust, and I want
to build that trust back up." But it's too late, for him and all
the other courtiers. They never really enjoyed the trust of most
Europeans, let alone Africans and Asians, and they have now lost
the trust of the American people.
All the readings on the barometer and the wind gauge say the
same thing. The perfect storm is gathering. Unfortunately the
collapse of the neocon project comes at a very heavy cost, not
only to the people of Iraq but to all of us.
· Geoffrey Wheatcroft is the author of Yo, Blair! wheaty@compuserve.com
© Guardian News and Media Limited
Click here
to comment on this and other articles
Send Page To a Friend
In accordance
with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material
is distributed without profit to those who have
expressed a prior interest in receiving the
included information for research and educational
purposes. Information Clearing House has no
affiliation whatsoever with the originator of
this article nor is Information ClearingHouse
endorsed or sponsored by the originator.)
|
