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THE PROPAGANDA AND LIES OF THE WEEKLY STANDARD
Tue Apr 29 15:54:22 2003
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Breaking Kristol
THE PROPAGANDA AND LIES OF THE WEEKLY STANDARD'S EDITOR WILLIAM
KRISTOL
http://www.prospect.org/webfeatures/2003/04/tomasky-m-04-02.html
--> War Criminal William Kristol Got $100,000 From ENRON
http://www.mediatransparency.org/people/bill_kristol.htm

VOTE TO IMPEACH ALL WAR CRIMINALS
http://www.takebackthemedia.com/index.shtml
http://www.votetoimpeach.org

NEO-CONSERVATIVE CLOUT SEEN IN U.S. IRAQ POLICY
http://www.jsonline.com/news/gen/apr03/131523.asp?format=print
--> WHO FUND$ THE NEOCON$?
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article3143.htm
April 5, 2003

by BRUCE MURPHY

Question: Why are we in Iraq?

Answer: The neo-conservatives made us do it.

The buzz in Washington and beyond has been that President Bush's
attack on Iraq came straight from the playbook of the
neoconservatives, a group of mostly Republican strategists, many of
whom have gotten funding from Milwaukee's Bradley Foundation. The
neoconservatives differ from traditional conservatives in favoring a
more activist role for government and a more aggressive foreign
policy.

Led by Weekly Standard editor William Kristol, the neoconservatives
have offered a sweeping new vision for U.S. foreign policy: to
restructure the Middle East and supplant dictators around the world,
using pre-emptive attacks when necessary against any countries seen
as potential threats. Traditional conservatives, such as Heritage
Foundation fellow John C. Hulsman, suggest that this will lead
to "endless war," while Jessica Mathews of the Carnegie Endowment for
International Peace has charged that "announcing a global crusade on
behalf of democracy is arrogant."

Whether Bush ends up sticking with the neoconservative playbook
remains to be seen, but a wide range of observers suggest it is a key
part of his current game plan.

"I think Bush has drawn upon that thinking," said Michael Joyce, who
led the Bradley Foundation, a leading funder of neoconservative
thinkers, from 1986 to 2001. Joyce added that Bush's "key people,"
including Vice President Dick Cheney, Defense Secretary Donald H.
Rumsfeld and Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, "were clearly
influenced by this thinking."

Under Joyce, the Bradley Foundation made 15 grants totaling nearly
$1.9 million to the New Citizenship Project Inc., a group Kristol led
and which also created the Project for a New American Century, a key
proponent of a more aggressive U.S. foreign policy. The foundation
also is a significant funding source for the American Enterprise
Institute, a Washington, D.C., think tank with many neoconservative
scholars.

Perhaps more important, noted Joyce, the Bradley Foundation was a
longtime funder of Harvard University's John M. Olin Center for
Strategic Studies, which until 2000 was run by Samuel P. Huntington,
who wrote the influential book "The Clash of Civilizations and the
Remaking of World Order" about the conflict between the West and the
Muslim world. Huntington trained "a large number of scholars" who
have helped develop neoconservative theories, Joyce noted.

Read by the Right People

But it is Kristol's Weekly Standard, bankrolled by conservative media
tycoon Rupert Murdoch, that has popularized these viewpoints. The
Standard may have a circulation of just 55,000, but it has aimed
successfully at policy-makers rather than average readers, making
it "one of the most influential publications in Washington," a story
by The New York Times concluded. Hulsman calls the Standard
the "house newspaper" of the Bush administration.

Kristol and Gary Schmidt, executive director of the Project for a New
American Century, have accused the media of exaggerating their impact.

"I think it's ludicrous to see all these articles, in this country
and in Europe, that somehow we are the diabolical cabal behind the
war in Iraq. It wasn't the case that Bill (Kristol) was calling
people in the White House advocating for things," Schmidt told the
Journal Sentinel. Their influence came from "intellectual leverage,
not personal leverage," he added.

In 1997, the Standard's cover story announced that "Saddam Must Go."
In 1998, the Standard published a letter to then-President Clinton,
calling on him to remove Hussein from power. The letter was signed by
18 people, eight of whom would join the Bush administration in senior
positions, including Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz and Richard Perle, who
serves on the influential Defense Policy Board and was until last
month its chairman.

Roman Empire of 21st Century?

The neoconservatives argue that we no longer live in a bipolar world,
as when Russia faced off against the United States. They see a
unipolar world, with America as the Rome of the 21st century, a
colossus that can dictate its will to the world, noting that America
spends as much on defense as the next 15 countries combined and has
troops stationed in 75 countries.

"The fact is," writes Charles Krauthammer, a Washington Post
columnist who espouses neoconservative views, "no country has been as
dominant culturally, economically, technologically and militarily in
the history of the world since the late Roman Empire."

Hulsman summarizes the neoconservative view this way: "We should
acknowledge we have an empire. We have power and we should do good
with it."

In essence, the neoconservatives argue that national sovereignty is
an outdated concept, given the overwhelming power of America, and the
U.S. should do all it can to impose democracy on countries. Some have
called this approach democratic imperialism. It echoes the do-gooder
impulses of Woodrow Wilson, the Democratic president who formulated
the League of Nations as a solution to war, then paradoxically blends
it with American military might. Hulsman dubbed it "Wilsonianism on
steroids."

In a world where nuclear weapons are proliferating, the
neoconservatives argue, you can no longer put the genie back in the
bottle. "The hard truth is that unless you change some of these
regimes, you're going to be hard-pressed to get rid of the threat,"
Schmidt noted. "Liberal democracies don't go to war with each other."

The theory behind this, developed by Michael Doyle, professor of
international affairs at Princeton University, is that democratic
governments are reluctant to go to war because they must answer to
their citizens. And the history of liberal democracies, though
comparatively short in the grand scheme of history, tends to buttress
his point.

But for critics such as Hulsman, democracy arises from the bottom up
and is "intimately connected with local culture and tradition. It can
almost never be successfully imposed from the top down," he contends.

Neoconservatives cite Germany and Japan, but Hulsman noted that Japan
is "98 percent ethnically homogenous," unlike Iraq, which is split
among three major groups. Yet Japan still required five years of
American occupation after World War II before it became an
independent democracy.

The mission of democratizing the world may have no end, Hulsman says,
because "there are always barbarians to convert."

But whatever his disagreement with it, Hulsman called the
neoconservatives' approach "the first new thought in foreign policy
for some time."

These ideas had little impact on presidential candidate George W.
Bush, who espoused a humble foreign policy that emphatically rejected
the kind of nation-building he now envisions for Iraq. In the early
days of Bush's administration, Secretary of State Colin Powell's less
aggressive views on foreign policy prevailed.

But after the attack on the World Trade Center, everything changed.
Wolfowitz was soon declaring that America's intention was not just to
target terrorists connected to Osama bin Laden, but to fight
a "global war" and eliminate any sovereign states "who sponsor
terrorism."

'Critical' Voice in Pentagon

Wolfowitz had long held similar views. While third in command at the
Pentagon (under Cheney) in 1991, Wolfowitz had argued in favor of pre-
emptive action against countries such as Iraq and North Korea. "He
was criticized as unduly hawkish prior to September 11th, but you
don't hear that criticism now," Joyce said.

Wolfowitz was also unique in that he was comfortable in academia and
connected to intellectuals.

"Wolfowitz is critical," Hulsman said. "He's the link between
intellectual neocons like Kristol and the world of decision-makers."

Wolfowitz hammered away at the need to attack Iraq, backed by the
Weekly Standard and the huge American Enterprise Institute. The
institute has supplanted the more traditionally conservative Heritage
Foundation, which was more influential with the senior George Bush as
the key think tank for GOP insiders. Heritage scholars argue in favor
of building alliances, as in the first Gulf War, while the American
Enterprise Institute scholars say America's leadership can be
decisive, with or without allies.

Turning Point of Sept. 11

Joyce said it was inevitable that the younger Bush would embrace the
neoconservative view. "I'm not sure September 11th did more than push
the timetable up," he said. But press accounts suggest that the
events of Sept. 11 were crucial for Bush, and even after this his
thinking changed gradually in response to several things:

--> The anthrax attacks in New York, Washington and Florida in
October 2001 raised fears of Saddam Hussein's involvement.
--> Evidence found in Afghanistan the next month that showed Osama
bin Laden's group had been trying to secure weapons of mass
destruction raised the question again of whether Hussein could be a
possible supplier.
--> And by early 2002, a source told Time magazine, the stories of
Hussein's cruelty to his own people had convinced Bush that the
dictator was "insane" and therefore capable of giving weapons of mass
destruction to al-Qaida terrorists.

By January 2002, Bush signaled his embrace of the neoconservative
vision, declaring Iraq, Iran and North Korea were an "axis of evil"
that must be resisted. By May, Bush announced that the U.S. would
take pre-emptive action against threats from such regimes.

To the neoconservatives, the question of what weapons Hussein might
actually possess was less important than his intention to get
them. "Once the nuclear materials are there, you're screwed," argued
Schmidt of the Project for a New American Century. "When you can
really do pre-emption is when it's early."

'Draining the Swamp'

Overthrowing Hussein could also accomplish broader goals.

Neoconservatives often talk about "draining the swamp" in the Middle
East. Once Hussein is removed, Hudson Institute co-founder Max Singer
has predicted, "there will be an earthquake throughout the region"
that could topple the leadership of Saudi Arabia.

Even more pressing, says Schmidt, is the need to create a more
moderate regime in Iran, which could have a nuclear weapon in 18 to
24 months, he predicted. (By contrast, North Korea, which already has
nuclear weapons, would have to be approached very differently.)

If the goal is to transform the Middle East, the obvious place to
start is with Iraq, which was already in trouble with the United
Nations, had little international standing and was reviled even by
some Arab nations.

A recent story in Time suggests that Cheney became convinced by his
discussions with Fouad Ajami, professor and director of Middle East
studies at Johns Hopkins University, that the people of Iraq
would "erupt in joy" at the arrival of the Americans. Others have
predicted a victory in Iraq could lead to regime changes in Iran,
Syria, the Palestinian Liberation Organization, Yemen and elsewhere.

"To these states," Richard Perle recently suggested, "we could
deliver . . . a two-word message: You're next."

Some Middle Eastern leaders have already gotten this message.

"We are all targeted," Syrian President Bashar Assad told an Arab
summit meeting on March 1.

Quick Action Required

If the war in Iraq lasts months rather than weeks, the theory that
overwhelming American power can simultaneously pursue objectives in
Iraq and beyond will be tested.

"If this is to be done, it has to be done rapidly," Schmidt said of
the Iraq war.

Lawrence F. Kaplan, Kristol's co-author of the influential book "The
War Over Iraq," has put it this way: "The real question is not
whether the American military can topple Hussein's regime, but
whether the American public has the stomach for imperial involvement
of a kind we have not known since the United States occupied Germany
and Japan."

The public's stomach could be affected not just by the war's cost in
lives, but also by its costs in dollars. Beyond the $380 billion
defense budget, the war already is expected to cost an additional $80
billion, with some administration officials estimating it could go as
high as $200 billion.

War's Naysayers

Michael O'Hanlon, a defense policy expert at the Brookings
Institution, a liberal Washington, D.C., think tank, has argued that
most university experts oppose U.S. policy in Iraq.

There are even naysayers within the Bush administration and among
retired military officials.

Hulsman described the neoconservatives as "a very incestuous, self-
referential group of people."

"It's like what we saw with Vietnam. If you surround yourself with
people who agree, you get in trouble."

But Hulsman noted that the secretary of state and his staff have been
less enthusiastic about the neoconservative vision and are probably
more comfortable with the international "realists" at the Heritage
Foundation, such as Hulsman himself. And whatever the seeming unity
in the Bush administration is now, the president could change his
mind again as world events change.

Which is just what Hulsman and other "outs" are waiting for.

"If Iraq goes badly, then I think the realists are ready to take
control," he predicts.

[Last Updated: April 5, 2003. A version of this story appeared in the
Milwaukee Journal Sentinel on April 6, 2003.]

[Copyright © 2003 BRUCE MURPHY - E-Mail: bmurphy@journalsentinel.com  ]

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BRADLEY FOUNDATION FUNDS NEOCON WAR CRIMINALS
http://www.InformationTimes.com

NEO-CONSERVATIVE CLOUT SEEN IN U.S. IRAQ POLICY
http://www.jsonline.com/news/gen/apr03/131523.asp?format=print
--> WHO FUND$ THE NEOCON$?
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article3143.htm

THE LYNDE AND HARRY BRADLEY FOUNDATION EXPOSED
http://www.mediatransparency.org/funders/bradley_foundation.htm
--> Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation Official Website
http://www.bradleyfdn.org
--> Special Investigative Report in Milwaukee Journal Sentinel makes
clear that Bradley Foundation is epicenter of NeoCon warmongering.
http://www.mediatransparency.org

Breaking Kristol
THE PROPAGANDA AND LIES OF THE WEEKLY STANDARD'S EDITOR WILLIAM
KRISTOL
http://www.prospect.org/webfeatures/2003/04/tomasky-m-04-02.html
--> War Criminal William Kristol Got $100,000 From ENRON
http://www.mediatransparency.org/people/bill_kristol.htm

VOTE TO IMPEACH ALL WAR CRIMINALS
http://www.takebackthemedia.com/index.shtml
http://www.votetoimpeach.org

The Return Of War Criminal Elliott Abrams
Israel's Likud Scores Big With White House Appointment
http://www.tompaine.com/feature.cfm/ID/6895

New Arab-American Republican Group Launches Anti-Bush Campaign,
Pledges
Voter Mobilization Drive to Send Bush Packing in 2004
http://www.usnewswire.com/topnews/qtr2_2003/0428-129.html
http://www.aarab.org

Jeff's Anti-Defamation League (ADL) Archive
http://www.jeffsarchive.com/index4.htm

U.S. Armed Forces Murder 15 Demonstrators In Iraq: Al-Jazeera TV
http://islamonline.net/English/News/200