When President Bush delivered his fiery speech at the American Enterprise Institute, he restated his vision of a new Middle East. It begins with the changes he will undertake in Iraq. The speech was full of aggressive rhetoric that belongs to fascist rallies. If one had not known better, it would have been possible to confuse it with Bin Laden’s Al-Jazeera messages. The alarming message is horrifyingly ironic; both want to change the world and both will stop at nothing to do so regardless of how bloody the outcome. While Bin Laden has Ayman Alzawahri as his ideological mentor, one wonders who performs the same service for Bush. The answer does not take long to discover. The reins of foreign policy have been seized by a cabal of right wing conservatives who have been lobbying for US for years to play a more aggressive, unilateral role in the world. They are known in political circles as the neo-conservatives — neocons for short.
Most of the first generation of neocons were Jewish; just about all of the later neocons are. Israel looms large for many of them who are closely identified with hard-line policies of the Likud Party. There is Paul Wolfowitz, the deputy secretary of defence and the puppet-master, Richard Perle, who heads the Defense Policy Board, an important Pentagon advisory group. To many, Israel is one of a number of friendly democracies, such as Britain, whose continued well-being is in American interests. The neocons, never numerous, have been shrewd communicators, amplifying their voices through Washington think-tanks sometimes funded by the defence industry. Some of these groups have been formed to tackle narrow issues: One recent example is the Committee for the Liberation of Iraq.
Policies that enhance the US ability to project its power abroad are articles of faith for all neocons. High defense spending is one; missile defense has become another. But these policies are not exclusively associated with the neocons; conservative nationalists favor both because they wish to see an America safe within its borders. In the Bush administration, there has been an alliance of convenience on many issues between these two groups. The neocons are suspicious of multilateralism and international agreements that tie US hands. Hence, they were happy to dump the Kyoto climate-change protocol and to torpedo the talks to add verification procedures to the Biological Weapons Convention. Some neocons are associated with policies for which they have carried a torch for many years. Wolfowitz has been closely linked with US policy in Iraq for almost 25 years, and was the first among senior officials, just five days after Sept. 11, to suggest to Bush that he should deal with the Iraq dictator.
While working in the defense department during the Carter administration, Wolfowitz was the leader of a group that produced a ground-breaking study — still classified — that identified Iraq as a potential threat to US interests. It even warned of an Iraqi attack on Kuwait or Saudi Arabia. “He did some extremely important work. The focus of concern was a Soviet invasion of Iran...He was one of the people who said we needed to look at the bilateral issues, the non-Soviet cases,” a former senior defense official said. “One of the things that came out of this was putting Iraq on the contingency list of things to worry about. That was very important in the Gulf War too.” Based on this, the US military created Central Command, which will run any invasion of Iraq. Wolfowitz was also the principal author of a 1992 Pentagon report that was deemed too controversial for publication; it was later toned down and published. Many of the ideas emerged a decade later in the second Bush administration’s national security strategy document.
For as long as the world is drawn into “us vs. them” ideologies, which separates the world in allies and foes, freedom will be suspended and liberties eroded. Neocons are hijacking America from its friends and allies in the name of a fallacy. As long as Israel and oil are the sole focus of the upcoming war on Iraq and as long as the Sharon-created bloody terror is overlooked, the question will not be if people will follow American policy. But it will be why people no longer “respect” its policy. And that has an obvious answer.
Arab News Features 11 March 2003
