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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)
Source:
Information Clearing House
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