Asia Times Online
Cont'd - no journalist has stood up and ask Rumsfeld
Thu May 8 23:34:23 2003
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Already in 1997, the PNAC wanted to "increase defense spending significantly" to "challenge regimes hostile to our interests and values" and "to accept responsibility for America's unique role in preserving and extending an international order friendly to our security, our prosperity, and our principles". The deceptively bland language admitted "such a Reaganite policy of military strength and moral clarity may not be fashionable today. But it is necessary if the United States is to build on the successes of this past century and to ensure our security and our greatness in the next".

The signatories of this 1997 document read like a who's who of Washington power today: among them, in addition to those mentioned above, Eliot Cohen, Steve Forbes, Francis Fukuyama, Frank Gaffney, William Bennett, Donald Kagan, Zalmay Khalilzad, Lewis Libby, Norman Podhoretz and Dan Quayle.

The PNAC, now actively exercising power, is about to fulfill its dream of invading Iraq. In the PNAC's vision of Iraq, the only vector that matters is US strategic interest. Nobody really cares about Saddam Hussein's "brutal dictatorship", nor his extensive catalogue of human rights violations, nor "the suffering of the Iraqi people", nor his US-supplied weapons of mass destruction, nor his alleged connection to terrorism.

Iraq counts only as the first strike in a high-tech replay of the domino theory: the next dominoes will be Syria, Iran and Saudi Arabia. The idea is to carve up Syria; let Turkey invade northern Iraq; overthrow the Saudi royal family; restore the Hashemites to the Hijaz in Arabia. And dismember Iraq altogether and annex it to Jordan as a vassal kingdom to the US: after all, Jordan's King Abdullah is a cousin of former Iraqi King Faisal, deposed in 1958. This would be one solution for the nagging question of who would have any legitimacy to be in power in Baghdad after Saddam.

Rumsfeld loves NATO, but he abhors the European Union. All PNAC members and most Pentagon civilians - but not the State Department - do: after all, they control NATO, not the EU. These things usually are not admitted in public. But Rumsfeld, the blunt midwesterner, former fighter pilot and former servant of presidents Gerald Ford and Ronald Reagan, prefers John Wayne to Bismarck: even Spanish Prime Minister Jose Maria Aznar, a staunch ally of Bush, complained out loud that diplomacy for Rumsfeld is an alien concept. Rumsfeld even has his own wacky axis of evil: Cuba, Libya and ... Germany. If Rumsfeld barely manages to disguise his aversion for dovish Secretary of State Colin Powell's views, one imagines to what circle of hell he dispatches the pacifist couple of Jacques Chirac and Gerhard Schroeder.

Strange, no journalist has stood up and ask Rumsfeld, in one of those cosy Pentagon spinning sessions, how was his 90-minute session with Saddam in Baghdad in December 20, 1983. The fuzzy photo of Rumsfeld shaking hands with Saddam, observed by Iraqi vice premier Tarik Aziz, is now a collector's item. Rumsfeld was sent by Reagan to mend relations between the US and Iraq only one month after Reagan had adopted a secret directive - still partly classified - to help Saddam fight Iran's Islamic Revolution that had begun in 1979. This close cooperation led to nothing else than Washington selling loads of military equipment and also chemical precursors, insecticides, aluminum tubes, missile components and anthrax to Saddam, who in turn used the lot to gas Iranian soldiers and then civilian Kurds in Halabja, northern Iraq, in 1988. The selling of these chemical weapons was organized by Rumsfeld.

Washington was perfectly aware at the time that Saddam was using chemical weapons. After the Halabja massacre, the Pentagon engaged in a massive disinformation campaign, spinning that the massacre was caused by Iran. Cheney, as Pentagon chief from March 1989 onwards, continued to cooperate very closely with Saddam. The military aid - secretly organized by Rumsfeld - also enabled Saddam to invade Kuwait on August 2, 1990. Between 1991 and 1998, UN weapons inspectors conclusively established that the US - as well as British, German and French firms - had sold missile parts and chemical and bacteriological material to Iraq. So much for the moral high ground defended by America and Britain in the Iraqi weapons of mass destruction controversy.

September 2002's National Security Strategy (NSS) document simply delighted the members of the PNAC. No wonder: it reproduced almost verbatim a September 2000 report by the PNAC, which in turn was based on the now famous 1992 draft Defense Policy Guidance (DPG), written under the supervision of Wolfowitz for then secretary of defense Cheney. Already in 1992, the three key DPG objectives were to prevent any "hostile power' from dominating regions whose resources would allow it to become a great power; to dissuade any industrialized country from any attempt to defy US leadership; and to prevent the future emergence of any global competitor. That's the thrust of the NSS document, which calls for a unipolar world in which Washington's military power is unrivalled.

In this context, the invasion and occupation of Iraq is just the first installment in an extended practical demonstration of what will happen to "rogue" states alleged to have or not have weapons of mass destruction, alleged to have or not have links to terrorism, and alleged connections to anyone or anything that might challenge US supremacy. The European Union, China and Russia beware: the Shock and Awe demonstration that is about to be unleashed on Iraq is pure theatrical militarism, a concept already analyzed by Asia Times Online.

It's no surprise that Bush, on February 26, chose to unveil his vision of a new Middle Eastern order at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), a right-wing Washington think tank. The PNAC's office is nowhere else than on the 5th floor of the AEI building on 17th St, in downtown Washington. The AEI is the key node of a collection of neoconservative foreign policy experts and scholars, the most influential of whom are members of the PNAC.

The AEI is intimately connected to the Likud Party in Israel - which for all practical purposes has a deep impact on American foreign policy in the Middle East, thanks to the AEI's influence. In this mutually-beneficial environment, AEI stalwarts are known as Likudniks. It's no surprise, then, how unparalleled is the AEI's intellectual Islamophobia. Loathing and contempt for Islam as a religion and as a way of life leads to members of the AEI routinely bashing Saudi Arabia and Pakistan. They also oppose any negotiations with North Korea - another policy wholly adopted by the Bush administration. For the AEI, China is the ultimate enemy: not a peer competitor, but a monster strategic threat. The AEI is viscerally anti-State Department (read Colin Powell). Recently, it has also displayed its innate Francophobia. And to try to dispel the idea that it is just another bunch of grumpy dull men, the AEI has been deploying to the BBC and CNN talk shows its own female weapon of mass regurgitation, one Danielle Pletka. Lynn Cheney, vice president Dick's wife, a historian and essayist, is also an AEI senior fellow.

The AEI's former executive vice president is John Bolton, one of the Bush administration's key operatives as undersecretary of state for arms control and international security. Largely thanks to Bolton, the US unilaterally withdrew from the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) treaty. Bolton has also opposed the establishment of the new International Criminal Court (ICC), recently inaugurated in The Hague. The AEI only treasures raw power as established under the terms of neoliberal globalization: the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank and the World Trade Organization. Its nemesis is everything really multilateral: the ABM treaty, the ICC, the Kyoto protocol, the treaty on anti-personal mines, the protocol on biological weapons, the treaty on the total ban of nuclear weapons, and most spectacularly, in these past few days, the UN Security Council.

The AEI's foreign policy agenda is presided over by none other than Richard Perle. As Perle is a longtime friend and advisor to Rumsfeld, he was rewarded with the post of chairman of the Pentagon's Defense Policy Board: its 30-odd very influential members include former national security advisers, secretaries of defense and heads of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). Perle is also a very close friend of Pentagon number two Wolfowitz, since they were students at the University of Chicago in the late 1960s. Perle now reports to Wolfowitz.

On September 20, 2001, Perle went on overdrive, fully mobilizing the Defense Policy Board to forge a link between Saddam and al-Qaeda. The PNAC sent an open letter to Bush detailing how a war on terrorism should be conducted. The letter says that Saddam has to go "even if evidence does not link him to the attack". The letter lists other policies that later were implemented - like the gigantic increase of the defense budget and the total isolation of the Palestinian Authority (PA), as well as others that may soon follow, like striking Hezbollah in Lebanon and yet-to-be-formulated attacks against Iran and especially Syria if they do not stop support for Hezbollah.

The Bush administration strategy in the past few months of totally isolating the PA's Yasser Arafat and allowing Israeli premier Ariel Sharon to refuse as much as a handshake, was formulated by the PNAC. Another PNAC letter states that "Israel's fight is our fight ... for reasons both moral and strategic, we need to stand with Israel in its fight against terrorism". The PNAC detested the Camp David accords between Israel and the Palestinians. For the PNAC, a simmering, undeclared state of war against Palestine, Iraq, Syria, Lebanon and Iran is a matter of policy.

Perle, a former assistant secretary of defense for international security affairs under Reagan, is also a member of the board of the Jerusalem Post. He wrote a chapter - "Iraq: Saddam Unbound" - in Present Dangers, a PNAC book. He is very close to ultra-hawk Douglas Feith, who was his special counsel under Reagan and is now assistant secretary of defense for policy (one of the Pentagon's four most senior posts) and also a partner in a small Washington law firm that represents Israeli suppliers of munitions seeking deals with American weapons manufacturers. It was thanks to Perle - who personally defended his candidate to Rumsfeld - that Feith got his current job. He was one of the key people responsible for strategic planning in the war against the Taliban and is also heavily involved in planning the war against Iraq.

David Wurmser, former head of Middle Eastern projects at the AEI, is now special assistant to PNAC founder John Bolton, the undersecretary of State for arms control and a fierce enemy of multilateralism. Wurmser wrote Tyranny's Ally: America's failure to defeat Saddam Hussein, a book published by the AEI. The foreword is by none other than Perle. Meyrav Wurmser, David's wife, is a co-founder of the Middle East Media Research Institute.

In July 1996, Perle, Feith and the Wurmser couple wrote the notorious paper for an Israeli think tank charting a roadmap for Likud superhawk and then-incoming Israeli prime minister Benjamin "Bibi" Netanyahu. The paper is called "A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm". Perle, Feith and the Wurmsers tell Bibi that Israel must shelve the Oslo Accords, the so-called peace process, the concept of "land for peace", go for it and permanently annex the entire West Bank and the Gaza Strip. The paper also recommends that Israel must insist on the elimination of Saddam, and the restoration of the Hashemite monarchy in Baghdad. This would be the first domino to fall, and then regime change would follow in Syria, Lebanon, Iran and Saudi Arabia. This 1996 blueprint is nothing else than Ariel Sharon's current agenda in action. In November last year, Sharon took the liberty to slightly modify the domino sequence by growling on the record that Iran should be next after Iraq.

Bush's speech on February 26 at the AEI claimed that the real reason for a war against Iraq is "to bring democracy". Cheney has endlessly repeated that Iraqis - like Germany and Japan in 1945 - will welcome American soldiers with wine and roses. For Bush, Iraq is begging to be educated in the principles of democracy: "It's presumptuous and insulting to suggest that a whole region of the world, or the one-fifth of humanity that is Muslim, is somehow untouched by the most basic aspirations of life." But this very presumption is seemingly central to the intellectual Islamophobia of both the AEI and PNAC.

The AEI and the PNAC shaped the now official Bush policy of introducing democracy - by bombing Iraq - and then "successfully transforming the lives of millions of people throughout the Middle East", in the words of AEI scholar Michael Ledeen. At his AEI speech, Bush did nothing else but parrot the idea. Many a voice couldn't resist to point out the splendid American record of encouraging native democracy around the world by supporting great freedom fighters such as the Shah of Iran, Sese Seko Mobutu in the Congo, Augusto Pinochet in Chile, Suharto in Indonesia, the Somozas in Nicaragua, Zia ul-Haq in Pakistan and an array of 1960s and 1970s Latin American dictators. Among newfound American allies, Turkmenistan is nothing less than totalitarian and Uzbekistan is ultra-authoritarian, and among "old" allies, Egypt and Saudi Arabia have absolutely nothing to do with democracy.

Chalmers Johnson is president of the Japan Policy Research Institute, based in California, and author of Blowback: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire. A war veteran turned scholar, he could never be accused of anti-Americanism. His new book about American militarism, The Sorrows of Empire: How the Americans lost their Country, will be published in late 2003. Some of its insights are informative in confirming the role of the PNAC in setting American foreign policy.

Johnson is just one among many who suspect that "after being out of power with Clinton and back to power with Bush ... the neocons were waiting for a 'catastrophic and catalyzing' event - like a new Pearl Harbor" that would mobilize the public and allow them to put their theories and plans into practice. September 11 was, of course, precisely what they needed. National Security Advi Condoleezza Rice called together members of the National Security Council and asked them "to think about how do you capitalize on these opportunities to fundamentally change American doctrine, and the shape of the world, in the wake of September 11th". She said, "I really think this period is analogous to 1945 to 1947 when fear and paranoia led the US into its Cold War with the USSR".

Johnson continues: "The Bush administration could not just go to war with Iraq without tying it in some way to the September 11 attacks. So it first launched an easy war against Afghanistan. There was at least a visible connection between Osama bin Laden and the Taliban regime, even though the United States contributed more to Osama's development as a terrorist than Afghanistan ever did. Meanwhile, the White House launched one of the most extraordinary propaganda campaigns of modern times to convince the American public that an attack on Saddam Hussein should be a part of America's 'war on terrorism'. This attempt to whip up war fever, in turn, elicited an outpouring of speculation around the world on what were the true motives that lay behind President Bush's obsession with Iraq."

The Iraq war is above all Paul Wolfowitz's war. It's his holy mission. His cue was September 11. Slightly after Rumsfeld, on September 15, 2001 at Camp David, Wolfowitz was already advocating an attack on Iraq. There are at least three versions of what happened that day. As a reporter, the Washington Post's Bob Woodward (remember Watergate) used to bring down presidents; now he's a mere presidential public relations officer. In his book Bush at War he writes that Bush told Wolfowitz to shut