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How neoconservatives conquered Washington -- and l
amatullah
04/13/03 at 18:39:39
How neoconservatives conquered Washington -- and launched a war

Michael Lind: New Statesman, April 7, 2003


http://www.newstatesman.com/site.php3?newTemplate=NSTemplate_NS&newTop=Section%3A+Front+Page&newDisplayURN=Section%3A+Front+Page

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 the American and European civilizations
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 overrepresentation 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 U.S. 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 Sept.
11 --
the foreign policy of the world's only global power is being made by a
small
clique that is unrepresentative of either the U.S. population or the
mainstream
foreign policy establishment.

The core group now in charge consists of neoconservative defense
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 defense intellectuals include Paul Wolfowitz, the
deputy
secretary of defense. He is the defense mastermind of the Bush
administration;
Donald Rumsfeld is an elderly figurehead who holds the position of
defense
secretary only because Wolfowitz himself is too controversial. Others
include
Douglas Feith, No. 3 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 U.S. to
Saddam
Hussein, and Richard Perle, who has just resigned his unpaid
chairmanship of a
defense department advisory body after a lobbying scandal. Most of these

"experts" never served in the military. But their headquarters is now
the civilian
defense secretary's office, where these Republican political appointees
are
despised and distrusted by the largely Republican career soldiers.

Most neoconservative defense intellectuals have their roots on the left,
not the
right. They are products of the influential Jewish-American sector of
the
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 neocon defense intellectuals, as well as being in or around the
actual
Pentagon, are at the center 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) provide
homes for
neocon "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 neocons 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 defense 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 cosigned a
Jinsa
letter that began: "We ... believe that during the current upheavals in
Israel, the
Israel Defense 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
Organization
of America, citing him as a "pro-Israel activist." While out of power in
the Clinton
years, Feith collaborated with Perle to coauthor a policy paper for
Likud 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
subsidize 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
British
Commonwealth and South Korea. Rupert Murdoch (who may be part Jewish
himself) 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, 1989-1993) -- acts as a mouthpiece
for
defense intellectuals such as Perle, Wolfowitz, Feith and Woolsey as
well as for
Sharon's government. The National Interest (of which I was executive
editor,
1991-1994) 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 centered on the Washington Times
--
owned by the South Korean messiah (and ex-convict) the Rev. Sun Myung
Moon -- which owns the newswire UPI. UPI is now run by John O'Sullivan,
the
ghostwriter 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, and 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 P.R. technique pioneered by their
Trotskyist
predecessors, the neocons 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 U.S. to invade and occupy Iraq and to support
Israel's
campaigns against the Palestinians (dire warnings about China were
another
favorite). 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 neocon defense intellectuals -- a small group at odds with
most of
the U.S. 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 hard-line 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 neocons 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 northeastern 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
authorization from Congress and the U.N.

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 U.S. from Saddam Hussein's "weapons of mass
destruction," something the leading neocons 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 U.S. to invade and
occupy
Iraq, to bomb Hezbollah bases in Lebanon, and to threaten states such as
Syria
and Iran with U.S. 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 neocons 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 U.S. The
neocons urge
war with Iran next, though by any rational measurement North Korea's new

nuclear arsenal is, for the U.S., a far greater problem.

So that is the bizarre story of how neoconservatives took over
Washington and
steered the U.S. into a Middle Eastern war unrelated to any plausible
threat to
the U.S. 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-Qaida attacks, any U.S. president would likely have gone to war to
topple bin
Laden's Taliban protectors in Afghanistan. But everything that the U.S.
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 the Rev. Ian
Paisley,
extreme Euroskeptics, 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, is the author of "Made in Texas: George W. Bush and the
Southern
Takeover of American Politics.


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