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<DIV><FONT size=2>Dear discourse analysts,</FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT size=2></FONT> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT size=2>Hopefully you will not find the following few lines
intrusive.</FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT size=2></FONT> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT size=2>Best refards,</FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT size=2>Mustafa Hussain</FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT size=2>Dept. of Social Sciences, Roskilde University</FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT size=2>Denmark.</FONT></DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<H1>The Weird Men Behind George W. Bush's War</H1>By Michael Lind <BR><BR><I>New
Statesman - London <A
href="http://www.newstatesman.com">www.newstatesman.com</A></I> <BR><BR>April 7,
2003
<P>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. </P>
<P>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. </P>
<P>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. </P>
<P>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. </P>
<P>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 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. </P>
<P>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. </P>
<P>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." </P>
<P>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.
</P>
<P>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. </P>
<P>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. </P>
<P>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. </P>
<P>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. </P>
<P>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. </P>
<P>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. </P>
<P>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. </P>
<P>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. </P>
<P>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. </P>
<P>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. </P>
<P>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. </P>
<P>Michael Lind, the Whitehead Fellow at the New America Foundation in
Washington, DC, is the author of Made in Texas: George W Bush and the Southern
Takeover of American Politics. </P>
<HR>
<I>"The contest for ages has been to rescue liberty from the grasp of executive
power." -- Daniel Webster (1782-1852) <BR><BR>http://www.newstatesman.com
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