- 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 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.
-
- 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.
-
- "The contest for ages has been to rescue liberty
from the grasp of executive power."
- -- Daniel Webster (1782-1852)
-
- http://www.newstatesman.com
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