The Weird Men Behind
George W. Bush’s War
By Michael Lind
New Statesman - London
www.newstatesman.com
April 7, 2003
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