| Date: | Friday June 27, @06:15PM |
|---|---|
| Author: | ewing2001 |
| Topic: | Corporate Crime |
| from the Daralhayat.com dept. | |
I have been monitoring the activities of Israel's partisans in the U.S. administration for 25 years. I saw them take and leave power, and work in research institutes. Nevertheless, I never imagined that a day would come when they would control American policy as they do today with the Bush administration.
I saw them exert their influence, yet, I never expected they would rule, work on undermining the Iraqi and Palestinian causes and manipulate the American policy in a way that targets Arabs and Muslims worldwide.
Today, I am writing an introduction. Several months ago, I used every free hour I had to gather information on Israel's gang in the current administration. I was intending to write a feature on this subject, but what I collected, with the help of researchers, and wrote in English with a specialized colleague, reached 30 pages, half of which was about the "hawks" and the neo-conservatives, or Sharon's Likud, while the other half involved the gangs' key members.
In short, I can say that I think what I wrote is the best-documented study there is on Israel's gangs, thanks to the excellent research sources I had and a well-informed background on the subject.
Therefore, I will publish what I wrote in the form of a series in this column. The reader who collects them will find out in the end that he has a complete file on Israel's gangs, representing therefore a reference when needed. I will go back to March 9, 1978, when my friend Michael Saba, a widely cultivated and powerful American of Arab origin, found out that Steven Brian, then head of the foreign affairs committee in Congress and U.S. Defense Department aid for international security, was showing an Israeli delegation the Pentagon's documents on the Saudi bases and drafting "our policy" (the Israeli policy) toward the American one which he was supposed to represent.
Brian and the Israeli delegation were sitting at a table at the Madison Hotel, while Saba was sitting on a neighboring one. Thus, he was able to register the conversation. At that time, I was at the Madison Hotel, preparing to open an office for Al Sharq Al Awsat, a newly-created Arab newspaper published in London. I heard about Brian, whom Michael made the center of his national activities. From that time, I started following his steps, especially after I opened my private office, after two years, in the Madison building neighboring the hotel.
Steven Brian resigned after Michael Saba revealed his activities. Instead of being sued, Richard Perle, then Under Secretary at the U.S. Defense Department, appointed him as an assistant. Israel's gangs are not only the most ignoble but the most insolent too. Steven Brian, who was accused of handing over the Saudi bases to the Israelis, was employed in the Defense Department, where is kept the confidential defense information related to the Middle East. After 25 years, the neo-conservatives or Israel's gangs were accused of planning to destroy Iraq in favor of Israel, while a retired General Gay Garner, from the Jewish Institute for National Security, was sent to Iraq to rule a 24-million Arab and Muslim country.
The matter is more dangerous than just insolence, for this entire gang is bound by its members' racism and arrogance, and their conviction that they and Israel are the best. It is clear that there is an alliance between Israel's partisans and the born-again Christians in George Bush's constituency in Southern America or what is known as the old testament (Torah) belt, but I feel that they despise the American Christians along with the Arabs and Muslims and take advantage of them keeping always in mind that they are the "best."
I would like to add that the neo-conservatives' influence exceeds their number and their alliance with the born-again Christians represents a good example. They represent 17% of the total of American Christians while the other American churches issued a clear statement against the war on Iraq. Even though, they backed the Bush's southern Baptists wing which means the ruling minority. More than that, they are minorities among American Jews whose crushing majority represents the liberal democrats whose voting for George Bush did not exceed 10% of the total American Jews. This rate will not rise a lot in the coming elections.
I would like the reader, who will follow up these series on Israel's gangs, to remember that those are minorities and the majority of the American Jews support the peace between Palestinians, Arabs and Muslims on one hand and Israelis on the other hand. And if some American Jews are the Palestinian cause (Iraq, Iran, Syria and others) worst enemies, there are also American Jews who represent the best supporters of the Palestinian cause. Racism versus racism makes things worse.
I hope the reader would be interested in this issue and keep this report.
Developments in U.S. foreign policy under the Bush Administration, particularly since the 11 September 2001 terror attacks in New York and Washington, have dramatically demonstrated the unprecedented ascendancy and power of the neo-conservatives in the U.S. administration.
Neo-conservatives have from their early days in the 1970s had a foothold in U.S. administrations, but it is in the George W. Bush administration that they have both their greatest representation numerically and their biggest influence on policy. Some observers claim that the neo-conservatives have 'hijacked' U.S. foreign policy and that through their control of levers of government they are pushing through an agenda they have developed over many years.
Neo-conservative trends have shaped the central elements of post-9/11 policy - the Bush doctrine, the drive to maintain and develop the overwhelming military might of the USA, the designation of an 'axis of evil', the war on terror, the national security doctrine of pre-emption, the ever-stronger support for Israeli policies, pre-emptive attacks, the drive to overthrow Iraqi president Saddam Hussein and the project to reshape the map of the Middle East in the interests of the U.S. and Israel, through regime change where necessary, and a U.S. military presence and the strategic alliance with Israel and the pursuit of unilateralism and weakening of the UN and other multilateral institutions.
The neo-conservative viewpoint is decidedly pro-Israeli and anti-Palestinian. It is anti-Arab and anti-Muslim. Some of the neo-conservatives have been intimately involved in advising Israeli governments, helping them to develop their policies, and promoting their political and economic cause in Washington. The neo-conservatives have subsumed the more than 55-year-old Israel-Palestine conflict into the war on terror. The events of 11 September gave the neo-conservatives the chance to draw parallels between the suicide attacks both the U.S. and Israeli have experienced.
Many neo-conservatives (including former CIA chief James Woolsey) agree with prominent neo-conservative academic Eliot Cohen, Professor of Strategic Studies at John Hopkins School for Advanced International Studies, that we are already in World War IV, the Cold War having been World War III.
The post-11 September climate has accelerated the fusion of the worldviews of the classic neo-conservatives (many of them Jewish), traditional hard-line hawks, the Christian right and key presidential advisers, notably Karl Rove. (Just as not all neo-conservatives are Jewish, so not all Jews in the Administration are neo-conservatives. Richard Haass, the director of the State Department's Policy Planning Staff is an example).
The classic neo-conservatives have worked tirelessly over the years to develop their key set of policies. These policy tenets are illustrated in a series of documents and projects produced over the past decade, which now read like blueprints for the George W. Bush program. They include:
* The Defense Planning Guidance drawn up by Paul Wolfowitz and Libby Lewis for the then Defense Secretary Dick Cheney in 1992. The document, with its emphasis overwhelming U.S. military domination, unilateral U.S. action and the use of pre-emptive force was seen as too extreme at the time.
* The paper A Clean Break drawn up in 1996 for the then new Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu by a team including Richard Perle, Douglas Feith, and the husband and wife team David and Meyrav Wormser. A Clean Break envisages a redrawing of the Middle East political map. It insists that Saddam must be overthrown and advocates a program of neutralizing Syria, and of hot pursuit of the Palestinians. Much of this paper has been translated into official Administration policy.
* The Project for the New American Century (PNAC) founded in 1997 with the support of Paul Wolfowitz, Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney among others has been another vehicle for forceful promulgation of neo-conservative views. Bush's National Security Strategy issued in September 2002 shows the profound influence the opinions of the neo-conservatives have had in moulding the new strategic approach.
A number of well-funded think tanks and foundations provide a focus for the development and dissemination of neo-conservative policies and a platform through which neo-conservatives prepare studies, which have an influence on policy making. They include the Center for Security Policy (CSP), the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs (JINSA), the Middle East Forum (MEF), the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, the Bradley Foundation, the Heritage Foundation and the Hudson Institute.
The Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI) set up by Meyrav Wormser and Colonel Yigal Carmon, a former adviser on terrorism to the Israeli Prime Minister, translates and brings to wide attention articles from the Arabic press that show the Arabs in a particularly bad light.
The neo-conservatives benefit from a highly effective publicity apparatus, one element of which is the public relations company Benador which has neo-conservatives as clients, and guarantees them a high profile in the media and on the lecture circuit. Clients include Richard Perle, Michael Ledeen, Frank Gaffney, Barry Rubin, Martin Kramer, Daniel Pipes, and former CIA director James Woolsey.
The neo-conservatives are regular contributors to the major American newspapers. An important press vehicle for their opinions is the Weekly Standard edited by William Kristol and bankrolled by right-wing publisher Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation.
The war on Afghanistan gave a first taste of the war on terror in practice, but it is the war on Iraq that has been the major neo-conservative experiment, using U.S. hyperpower's overwhelming force to Saddam Hussein as a first step in enforcing widespread change in the Middle East and what the U.S. sees as much-needed reforms. The war on Iraq has been widely seen as a first step in the 'redrawing of the map of the Middle East' and profoundly changing the balance of power, in favor of U.S. and Israeli interests and giving some U.S. control over Iraq's vital oil reserves.
The declared aim is to tackle 'rogue states' that pose a danger to Western interests, curb the presence and development of weapons of mass destruction and spread Western-style democracy in the region thereby make it less of a breeding ground for terrorism. The regime change in Iraq was portrayed as 'liberation'. In practice it is a huge adventure that may turn out to have been very reckless in terms of the chain reaction it has triggered and that will have consequences for the U.S. and the West for many years.
The vision of post-war Iraq that the U.S. and Britain announced on 9 May in the form of a draft resolution to the UN Security Council names them as the occupying powers, referred to in the document as an "authority", gives them control of the country's oil revenues and endorses their "exercise of responsibility" for an initial 12 months. The authority's jurisdiction would continue automatically unless the UN Security Council decided otherwise. The UN is sidelined and has had little role apart from a place on the international advisory board for the proposed Iraqi assistance fund. American companies have been awarded the lucrative reconstruction contracts in Iraq.
The attention that the media has paid the neo-conservatives and the anxieties in some quarters over the direction in which they have taken U.S. policies, with murmurings about dual loyalties, have gained such widespread currency that Secretary of State Colin Powell felt obliged to make a denial in a Congressional hearing in March on foreign aid.
Powell insisted: "The strategy with respect to Iraq has derived from our interest in the region and our support of UN resolutions over time. It is not driven by any small cabal that is buried away somewhere, that is telling President Bush or me or Vice President Cheney or Rice or other members of the administration what our policies should be." The looming conflict in Iraq "is not just the result of a few individuals who are running loose, as some suggest, but it's a comprehensive policy developed over the years with the support of Congress."
Powell has been answering a question from subcommittee chairman Rep Jim Kolbe, Arizona Republican, who said he was hesitant to raise the issue, but invited Powell to "help end speculation that our policy was developed and is being pushed in some kind of conspiratorial manner by supporters of Israel or Saudi Arabia, or any other [ethnic] group or nation."
Powell conceded that the U.S. has been one of Israel's strongest supporters for half a century, but added "We have other friends in the region." He said the U.S. has close alliances with Saudi Arabia and Egypt, and President Bush is committed to the establishment of a Palestinian state.
Some days earlier, Rep James P Moran, Virginia Democrat, had suggested that the influence of American Jews had pushed the U.S. to the brink of war with Iraq. Moran apologized for his remarks, which were condemned by the White House as "shocking" and denounced by Jewish groups.
Pat Buchanan, the far-right two times Republican Presidential candidate and former Presidential speech writer caused a rumpus when he charged in an article in the 24 March issue of The American Conservative, entitled "Whose War?" that U.S. foreign policy has been hijacked by a cabal of neo-conservatives who are "deliberately damaging U.S. relations with every state in the Arab world that defies Israel or supports the Palestinian people's right to a homeland of their own." Buchanan alleged that they "harbor a 'passionate attachment' to a nation not our own that causes them to subordinate the interests of their own country and to act on the assumption that, somehow, what's good for Israel is good for America."
Richard Perle claims it is not surprising that neo-conservatives are Jewish, because "you're going to find a disproportionate number of Jews in any kind of intellectual undertaking... if you balance out the hawkish Jews against the dovish ones, then we are badly outnumbered. But there is clearly an undertone of anti-Semitism about it, there's no doubt." On the question of "Israel first", Perle claims "it's a nasty line of argument to suggest that somehow we're confused about where our loyalties lie."
Neo-conservatives hold some of the most powerful positions in the Bush administration, particularly in the Department of Defense. Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz is widely seen as the architect of the war on Iraq. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld himself has long had a hawkish militaristic outlook that chimes with neo-conservative views, and his friendship with Vice President Dick Cheney dates back to the days when they both served in the Ford Administration.
Wolfowitz's deputy Douglas Feith is a neo-conservative with particularly active ties to Israel. Another neo-conservative Stephen Cambone was on 11 March 2003 sworn in as Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence - a newly-created position. Prior to taking up his new position, Cambone had been Special Assistant to the Secretary and Director for Program Analysis & Evaluation, and before this Principal Deputy Under Secretary of Defense for Policy.
The creation of the post of Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence illustrates the growing power of Defense Secretary Rumsfeld, and it strengthens the hand of the Pentagon versus the CIA in intelligence - whereas others had planned reforms that would have strengthened the CIA's position.
In an article in The New Yorker in May 2003, Seymour Hersh describes how, according to former and present Bush administration officials, the Pentagon's Office of Special Plans has brought about a crucial change of direction in the U.S. intelligence community. The Office of Special Plans was set up in order to find new intelligence evidence to back Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz's belief that Saddam Hussein had close ties to Al Qaeda and that Iraq had an enormous arsenal of weapons of mass destruction that threatened the region and, potentially, the U.S.
The Director of the Office of Special Plans, Abram Shulsky, has worked on intelligence and foreign policy issues for three decades. Under-Secretary of Defense William Liti oversees the Office of Special Plans.
Hersh stresses the fact that Shulsky, like Wolfowitz, was a student of Leo Strauss at the University of Chicago. Strauss, a refugee from Nazi Germany who arrived in the U.S. in 1937, was a political philosopher and a foremost conservative émigré scholar. He was widely know for his argument that the works of ancient philosophers contain deliberately concealed esoteric meanings whose truths can only be comprehended by a very few. Hersh notes that the Straussian movement has many adherents in and around the Bush administration, including, in addition to Wolfowitz, Under-Secretary of Defense for Intelligence Stephen Cambone and editor of The Weekly Standard William Kristol.
Strauss's influence on foreign-policy decision making - although he did not explicitly write about the subject himself - is usually seen in terms of his tendency to see the world as a place where isolated liberal democracies live in constant danger from hostile elements abroad, and face threats that must be confronted vigorously and with strong leadership.
Hersh examines the influence of Strauss also on intelligence gathering. In 1999 Abram Shulsky and Gary Schmitt (executive director of the Project for the New American Century, PNAC) wrote an essay entitled Leo Strauss and the World of Intelligence (By Which We Do Not Mean Nous) criticizing the U.S. intelligence community for its failure to appreciate the duplicitous nature of the regimes it deals with. They accused the CIA of being naive in the Cold War. They argued that political philosophy could be an "antidote" to the failings of the CIA and would help understanding Islamic leaders "whose intellectual world was so different from our own."
According to Hersh, the Office of Special Plans had by last autumn come to rival the CIA and the Pentagon's own Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA). The advisers and analysts in the Office of Special Plans rely on data from other intelligence agencies and also from the Iraq National Congress (INC) headed by Ahmed Chalabi, who provided Special Plans with the testimony of Iraqi defectors. But there are disputes over how reliable the evidence of any defector is, giving that they will have their own axes to grind.
Although some Iraqi defectors gave startling evidence, some of which was revealed in newspapers. Especially over WMD and over alleged Iraqi links to the 11 September attacks, there was skepticism over their reliability. Hersh cites an internal Pentagon memorandum that suggested terrorism experts inside and outside government had deliberately "downplayed or sought to disprove" the link between Al Qaeda and Iraq. The memorandum alleged that there is a bias against defectors.
CIA sources consulted by Hersh counter that many CIA analysts are convinced that the Chalabi group's defectors' reports on WMD and Al Qaeda have produced little of value, and that the DIA agreed with this view.
President Bush has set up a Terrorist Threat Integration Center, which started operations on 1 May and is supposed to enhance the relationship between the Department of Defense intelligence operations and the CIA. The center is composed of elements of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), the new Department of Homeland Security and the Department of Defense. It is headed by John O. Brennan who has worked for the CIA for 23 years, and it is under the ultimate control of the CIA.
Rumsfeld has undertaken a sweeping review of U.S. military strategy and operations and his position was further strengthened when on 7 May 2003 President Bush announced that Air Force Secretary James Roche was being transferred to Army Secretary, and that oil executive Colin McMillan was to be Navy Secretary. Both are firm allies of Rumsfeld.
The 30-member Defense Policy Board, which was set up in 1985 to advise the Pentagon, has assumed its most powerful position ever in relation to policy making under the George W. Bush presidency, which it has used to promote a generally neo-conservative agenda. The members, former high-level government and military officials, are selected by and report to the Under-Secretary for Defense for Policy, Douglas Feith, and all are approved by the Defense Secretary. The members include Rumsfeld's old friend and colleague Ken Adelman.
Richard Perle, who is a member of the Board and chaired it until resigning in March 2003, described it in an interview on PBS with Ben Wattenberg as being "a group of volunteer civilians who advise the Secretary of Defense. It now includes a pretty illustrious group of people, Henry Kissinger, former Defense Secretary James Schlesinger, Harold Brown, Tom Foley and Newt Gingrich, two former speakers. These are wise men with deep experience who come together half a dozen times a year for extensive briefings, discussions, meetings and advice for the Secretary of Defense."
Perle added: "The Board doesn't take corporate views. It's simply a means by which the Secretary of Defense can come together with a group of people who have interesting things to say and they, in turn, can look into what's going on in the Defense Department and give him advice, but there are no votes or anything like that".
The Internet magazine Salon describes the Defense Policy Board in much less flattering terms. Salon said: "formerly an obscure civilian board designed to provide the secretary of Defense with non-binding advice on a whole range of military issues, the Defense Policy Board, now stacked with unabashed Iraq hawks, has become a quasi-lobbying organization whose primary objective appears to be waging war with Iraq."
Richard Perle resigned as chairman of the Defense Policy Board on 27 March after being criticized for being involved in companies that have a significant business involvement with the Department of Defense, meaning there was a possible conflict of interest. Perle retains his place on the Board and has in practice lost little of his influence within it.
The American watchdog the Center for Public Integrity has found that nine of the Board's members have ties to companies that do business with the Department of Defense. The defense contractors concerned won more than $76 billion in contracts in 2001 and 2002.
For example former CIA director James Woolsey, a key member of the board, is a director of Washington-based Paladin Capital set up three months after 11 September as a business opportunity for investment in homeland security. He is also, since July 2002; vice president of consulting firm Booz Allen Hamilton.
Richard Perle tends to attract controversy wherever he goes, and his chairmanship of the Defense Policy Board is no exception. In July 2002 he invited Rand Corp analyst Laurent Murawiec, a former follower of political extremist Lyndon LaRouche to address the Board on Saudi Arabia. In the briefing, which was reported on the front page of the Washington Post, Murawiec claimed that Saudi Arabia was active at every level of the terror chain "from planners to financiers, from cadre to foot-solider, from ideologist to cheerleader."
Murawiec recommended that the U.S. target Saudi Arabia's oil, financial holdings and even its holy places unless it "stamped out anti-U.S. and anti-Israeli writings, stopped funding fundamentalist mosques, and prosecuted or isolated those involved in the terror chain, including in the Saudi intelligence services."
News of the briefing rocked U.S.-Saudi relations and Secretary of State Colin Powell was swift to reassure Saudi Foreign Minister Prince Saud Al-Faisal that the briefing had no bearing on U.S. policy. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld also distanced himself from the presentation. Perle claimed that he had been unaware what Murawiec was going to say in advance.
Outside the Department of Defense also, neo-conservatives have a strong place in the administration. Vice President Dick Cheney is a neo-conservative as is his Chief of Staff the ultra-Zionist Libby 'Scooter' Lewis. It was Lewis who worked with Wolfowitz in 1992 to draw up the Defense Planning Guidance for the then Defense Secretary Cheney.
At the time the document, advocating U.S. action to prevent the rise of hostile powers and calling for pre-emptive strikes against states developing weapons of mass destruction, was seen as too extreme. There was an outcry when excerpts were leaked to the New York Times.
Now, as laid down in the National Security Strategy document presented by George W. Bush in September 2002 there is a fundamental shift of U.S. Defense policy toward pre-emption and U.S. military dominance, and away from deterrence, containment and collective security, showing how neo-conservative thinking has become the official Defense policy of the George W. Bush administration.
The National Security Strategy document of 2002 repeats many of the core elements of the Wolfowitz and Libby paper. Some describe the 1992 document as having been "put on the shelf, and taken down again in 2002." Defense Planning Guidance is only one of several key policy documents drawn up by neo-conservatives that have influenced administration thinking.
Other neo-conservatives in influential positions in the Bush administration include Special Assistant to the President, and Senior Director on the National Security Council for Near East and North African affairs Elliott Abrams; the Under-Secretary of State for Arms Control and International Security John R Bolton and Bolton's Special Assistant David Wormser (whose wife Meyrav is a leading voice among Zionist neo-conservatives).
There are many other neo-conservatives in positions in government. One of the most prominent neo-conservative think tanks, the Center for Security Policy (CSP) lists on its website 21 members of the Center's National Security Advisory Council (NSAC) who are now in government and on leave from the NSAC. They include Elliott Abrams, Richard Perle (who is on the Defense Policy Board), Douglas Feith (former Chairman of the CSP directors) and Air Force Secretary James Roche (now shifted to Army Secretary).
With the neo-conservative vision spreading to embrace formerly disparate groups of policy makers, Bush's enormously powerful aide Karl Rove has been brought under the neo-conservative umbrella. Rove manages the Office of Political Affairs, the Office of Public Liaison and the Office of Strategic initiatives.
Rove was the chief strategist for Bush's presidential campaign and will be using the militaristic image of Bush as a main winning point in the forthcoming re-election campaign.
In the eyes of some, the removal of Saddam Hussein was the first step towards establishing the Pax Americana in the Middle East was and the establishment of an American protectorate in Iraq. This would give control of oilheads, would warn every leader in the Middle East, and would establish in Iraq a military staging area for the eventual invasion and overthrow of several Middle Eastern regimes including some that have been allies of the U.S.
Following the military campaign on Iraq and the overthrow of Saddam Hussein, there is deep concern in the Middle East about who might be in the U.S.'s sights for a further round of regime change. Many neo-conservatives have making noises about Syria, Iran and Saudi Arabia and are strongly pushing the view there must be change, either from inside regimes or through toppling regimes by force.
When Secretary of State Colin Powell - not regarded as a neo-conservative - made his threatening noises about Syria on 30 March, it was noteworthy that this was in a speech to the American Israeli Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC).
Powell said: "My friends, all of us here tonight are brought together by a deep commitment to Israel's security, prosperity, and freedom, and to the strongest possible relationship between Israel and the United States."
Powell said Syria faced a critical choice. "Syria can continue direct support for terrorist groups and the dying regime of Saddam Hussein, or it can embark on a different and more hopeful course. Either way, Syria bears the responsibility for its choices, and for the consequences." But countries in the region do not appreciate being told "change and democratize or else" with a gun held to their heads, literally so in the wake of the Iraq war. Nor do people see the U.S. as such a virtuous repository of values as it claims. They know about the exercise of democracy there - George W. Bush's disputed election victory, the power of the Zionist lobby in the administration and in Congress.
The U.S. presence may make governments clean up their acts. They will realize they cannot go on abusing human rights and oppressing their people and they will recognize that they have to become more accountable to their people. But at the same time through trying to enforce change, the U.S. might actually slow it. No government wants to look as if it is introducing changes dictated from outside.
The diminishing of the UN has been a central plank of the neo-conservative programme. Richard Perle asked: "Is the United Nations better able to confer legitimacy than, say, a coalition of liberal democracies?" wrote an article entitled "Thank God for the death of the UN." There have been efforts to ridicule chief UN weapons inspector Hans Blix and his team, and to keep them out of Iraq while the coalition look for WMD.
The U.S. has come across as selfish - wanting to act in a unilateral way, opposing the International Criminal Court (ICC), weakening the UN, and then when it needs to, using international machinery such as the Geneva Conventions for its own nationals captured by the Iraqis.
It is still far from certain that the translation of the neo-conservative project into action, as shown so dramatically in the war on Iraq, will have the outcome the neo-conservatives dream of. However, some think even if there is chaos this will accord with their scheme of things, enabling yet further intervention or interference. Already the aftermath of the war in Afghanistan had shown the tremendous resources of time and commitment needed if the initial campaign was to have a chance of producing a system in the long-term interest of the U.S.
With Iraq, the experiment of dismantling a state that did not pose an immediate and direct threat and was not engaged in war has not been tried before and has numerous consequences, not all of them foreseeable. Although the regime of Saddam was overthrown, the coalition had by mid-May failed to capture him or his two sons and there was no conclusive evidence that they had been killed.
They faced the prospect of a fugitive leader, issuing videos and audiocassettes from time to time. There had yet to be the conclusive finds of the weapons of mass destruction (WMD), Saddam's possession of which had been the stated casus belli. Luckily for the coalition, Saddam's regime had been so ghastly in its brutality; at least they could claim his overthrow had benefited the Iraqi people.
There was resurgence of Shiite movements and of political parties. It is not at all certain that a free democratic election in Iraq would have a result that is in Western interests. The presence of the U.S. and British was resented, and there have been attacks on them. The Iraqis were already politically sophisticated and well educated, and resented the outside interference and the neo-colonialist era.
Anti-Americanism, already at high levels, intensified further in the Middle East and in many other parts of the world as a result of the war on Iraq. Some Arabs volunteered to fight in Iraq during the war. The perceived U.S. threat to the region, plus the assumption it would control the oil of Iraq and set up bases there, increased resentment. The suicide bomb attacks in Riyadh on 12 March, shortly before Colin Powell arrived there, showed that terrorism in the region had been far from diminished the war on Iraq.
It is far from certain that the coalition action will reduce terrorism in the longer term. It has radicalized further young Arabs and Muslims, including those large populations in the West. The neo-conservative-shaped actions enhanced the chances of a 'Clash of Civilizations'.
Iraqi 'freedom' and 'liberation' have come at a huge price for the Iraqi people, who had already suffered from 12 years of UN sanctions. The Iraqis did not have the freedom to enjoy the most basic things - water, electricity, healthcare, and education. The income of families has been devastated by the cutting off of government salaries and by the loss of jobs and of savings in banks. The coalition forces permitted widespread looting and destruction and Iraq lost much of its cultural heritage. Ministries were burnt. There is a breakdown of security, with armed gangs roaming the streets and many families too scared to leave their houses.
The U.S. effort to reconstruct Iraq was admitted to be in chaos by May and there was a shake-up of the U.S. reconstruction effort. On 6 May 2003 President Bush appointed Lewis Paul "Jerry" Bremer III, 61, as the top civilian administrator in Baghdad, to replace Jay Garner oversee Iraq's transition to democratic rule. Bremer is one of the world's leading authorities on terrorism and has a 23-year career in the U.S. diplomatic service. Bremer's appointment was seen as a victory for the State Department in its long feud with the Defense Department over reconstruction in Iraq.
The appointment of Jay Garner, the former general, had aroused many suspicions in Iraq and the wider Middle East in light of his visit to Israel organized by JINSA in 1998 and had put his name to a JINSA-sponsored statement in October 2000 blaming the Palestinians for the outbreak of violence and praising the "remarkable restraint" of the Israeli Defense Forces.
Confidence in the U.S. programme was shaken when it was announced on 11 May that Barbara Bodine, the U.S. administrator for central Iraq including Baghdad, returned to the U.S. This was an admission that things in Baghdad were not going according to plan.
The war on Iraq has emboldened Israel and its ardent supporters among the neo-conservatives to be even less willing to make any concessions to the Palestinians. Despite the pledge by U.S. President George W. Bush at a press conference with British Prime Minister that he will expend the same amount of effort in the Middle East that Blair has in the Northern Ireland peace process, there was much skepticism that this would translate into real action, especially with the U.S. presidential election campaign grinding into gear.
But without some real movement, things could only get worse for the Palestinians and radicalization and support for Hamas and Islamic Jihad could only grow. During Secretary of State Colin Powell's visit to Israel and separate talks with Sharon and Abu Mazen in the second week of May, little real progress was made on the road map and Israel swiftly reversed its easing on Palestinian movement once Powell had left.
The prevalence of the neo-conservative worldview within the Pentagon has been accompanied by running disagreements between the State Department and Pentagon, and between Donald Rumsfeld and Colin Powell.
The dispute was highlighted in the outburst by former House Speaker Newt Gingrich in a speech to the conservative think tank the American Enterprise Institute on 22 April 2003 in which he attacked the "pathetic" State Department.
Gingrich said that Colin Powell, the U.S. Secretary of State, should not be traveling to Syria while the Syrians "openly host" seven terrorist organizations and when the "U.S. military has created the opportunity to apply genuine economic, diplomatic and political pressure".
It was the State Department, which undermined the U.S. position at the UN by accepting inspections, and agreeing to Hans Blix as chief weapons inspector, Gingrich argued. It was the "ineffective and incoherent" State Department that lost the battle for world public opinion, and despite a "pathetic public campaign of hand wringing and desperation" it failed to gain a majority on the Security Council for a second resolution. "It was a stunning diplomatic defeat of the first order," Gingrich said.
Gingrich attacked the State Department plan for peace in the Middle East, and the so-called "roadmap" that will be put forward by the "quartet". He said that this was "a deliberate and systematic effort to undermine the president's policies" and that it was unimaginable after the bitter lessons of the last five months that the U.S. "would voluntarily accept a system in which the UN, the EU and Russia could routinely outvote President Bush's positions by three to one."
According to Gingrich, the culture of the state department represents "process, politeness, and accommodation" as opposed to the president's approach of "facts, values and outcomes".
Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage retorted: "It's clear Mr. Gingrich is off his meds and out of therapy." And President Bush's press secretary Ari Fleischer defended Powell, saying that he "did a excellent job at ushering through that (diplomatic) process" at the UN and had the president's backing for his trip to Syria.
Some saw Gingrich's remarks as the first round in a neo-conservative campaign to transform the State Department into an equivalent of the Department of under Donald Rumsfeld. The speech was part of a campaign against Powell that was muted during the Iraq invasion but was revived afterwards as some Republicans sought to harden U.S. policy toward other regimes including Syria and Iran.
Some White House officials are reported to have complained that Powell is limiting the influence of hawkish political appointees within the State Department, in the office of Under-Secretary of State for Arms Control and International Security John Bolton. Bolton was previously vice president of AEI.
One prominent Republican businessman, who declined to be identified, even claimed that the anti-Powell campaign had escalated to the point of a petition urging Bush to replace Powell.
The disagreements over strategy within the Bush administration seemed to have intensified with the end of the war, with conflicts over the approach to Syria, Iran, and North Korea as well as in how to rebuild Iraq. And the right, made bold by its victory in Baghdad, seems to be winning more of the arguments.
Administration officials, including Powell, have defended the heated ideological debates within the Cabinet as healthy. But others say they are exhausting for the bureaucracy, confusing to the American public and foreign governments and harmful to administration policies.
Although it is since 11 September that the rise and influence of the neo-conservatives on government policy has become so obvious, the roots of neo-conservative thinking go back to the late 1960s when some of those on the left started to shift from their liberal position over key issues. These included issues relating to Israel. The victory of Israel in the 1967 war encouraged some liberal Jews to become "born again Zionists."
The neo-conservatives had a liberal, even Trotskyite anti-Stalinist, background - hence the prefix "neo". Many of the pioneers of neo-conservative thinking were Jews who had fled persecution and came to the U.S. with idealistic, left wing views. They saw the U.S. as necessarily a force for good and a redemptive country. The political analyst and journalist Jim Lobe recalls hearing Elliott Abrams say: "Well, America may have made mistakes here and there but there's no question that it is the greatest force for good in the world today."
The Holocaust runs deep with many of the neo-conservatives (some of whom including Wolfowitz had family members who perished in it). The Munich agreement of 1938 is abhorred as an example of the type of appeasement with tyranny that should be avoided at all costs. In the run up to the Iraq war, the Munich agreement was often cited by the proponents of war in the U.S. and in Britain. They would ask: "So should we do nothing about the evil of Saddam and the threat he represents? What if we had nothing about Hitler?"
When asked about the neo-conservatives' origins in leftist politics, Richard Perle has said: "I suppose all of us were liberal at one time. I was liberal in high school and a little bit into college. But reality and rigour are important topics and if you got into the world of international affairs and you looked with some rigour at what was going on in the world, it was really hard to be liberal and naïve."
The fathers of the neo-conservative movement include Irving Kristol and Norman Podhoretz. Podhoretz edited the monthly magazine Commentary for many years and his wife Midge Decter was also active in developing the neo-conservative trend.
As has been described earlier, much has been made by The New Yorker journalist Seymour Hersh, by James Atlas of the New York Times and some others of the influence of the Jewish German émigré Chicago University political philosopher Leo Strauss, who died in 1973. Strauss was an influence on Paul Wolfowitz, and Abram Shulsky who heads the Pentagon intelligence outfit, the Office of Special Plans. Irving Kristol and Norman Podhoretz are admirers of Strauss, whose books include 'On Tyranny'.
The vehemently anti-Soviet pro-Israeli Democrat Senator Henry 'Scoop' Jackson is another legendary figure in the history of neo-conservatism. One of Perle's early mentor's, Albert Wohlstetter, suggested that Perle and Paul Wolfowitz, who were at the time graduate students, go to interview Jackson. The outcome was that Perle worked for Jackson for 11 years. Perle often says he is still a Democrat, out of respect for Scoop Jackson.
Some of the other neo-conservatives to have worked with Scoop Jackson are William Kristol (son of Irving Kristol), Elliott Abrams (son-in-law of Norman Podhoretz) and Frank Gaffney. Perle and Abrams, working out of Jackson's office, used the issue of Jewish emigration from the Soviet Union to undermine U.S.-Soviet détente. Jackson sponsored legislation that made the Soviet Union's gaining "most favoured nation status" contingent on an increase in Jewish emigration.
In 1973 Jackson, Daniel Patrick Moynihan and other similarly minded Democrats set up the Coalition for a Democratic Majority, which favoured hawkish policies on Defense and national security. Elliott Abrams was a member, as were Norman Podhoretz, Jeane Kirkpatrick (who would later become Reagan's Ambassador to the UN) and Stephen Bryen. As Nixon's ambassador to the UN in the 1970s, Moynihan he was markedly pro-Israeli.
The policy analyst and journalist Jim Lobe noted in an interview with ABC TV in February 2003 that in the mid-1970s Wolfowitz became a key figure in the development of neo-conservatism when he served on a body called 'Team B' - a group of analysts chosen by hawks in the Ford administration who were already working with people in Senator Jackson's office, particularly Richard Perle.
The hawks took issue with CIA estimates of Soviet strategic abilities and intentions. Wolfowitz wrote a chapter in a study by Team B in which he said the CIA had been much too optimistic in its estimates of U.S. advantage over the Soviet Union. Wolfowitz claimed that the Soviet Union was preparing for a war in which it would prevail in a nuclear exchange.
Jim Lobe described Team B as "hammering some very important nails in the coffin of détente by the mid-70s under the Ford administration and that really was its purpose, that's why it was selected. Wolfowitz is very highly regarded at that time as a strategic analyst and he becomes a key player in this very hardline faction."
At the time Donald Rumsfeld was in his first incarnation as Defense Secretary, and he helped establish Team B. This helped Rumsfeld outmaneuver Henry Kissinger who was trying to work out an arms-control agreement with the Soviet Union.
The creation of Team B and the undermining of the CIA and the U.S. intelligence community forged an alliance between the neo-conservatives from Scoop Jackson's office, who were still Democrats, and Republican right-wingers of the Donald Rumsfeld type.
In 1977, within weeks of Jimmy Carter's election as president, neo-conservatives created the Committee for the Present Danger. They regarded the Carter years as disastrous. This was partly because of developments relating to apparent U.S. weakness in face of the Soviet Union, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and the siege of the U.S. embassy in Tehran. In addition, Carter was seen as less supportive of Israel than previous presidents, and alarm bells rang when he said the Palestinians had the right to a homeland.
The Committee for the Present Danger, which worked towards the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980, is seen as the first alliance between the neo-conservatives and the right wing as represented by Donald Rumsfeld.
When Reagan became president, he brought a number of neo-conservatives into the Administration. Kirkpatrick was appointed as ambassador to the UN, and Richard Perle as Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Policy from 1981 to 1987, and was a stiff opponent of arms-control agreements with the Soviets. Ken Adelman served as Director of the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency in 1983-87 and Elliott Abrams was Reagan's Assistant Secretary of State for Human Rights in the early 1980s, and then became Assistant Secretary for Inter-American Affairs.
Abrams played an active role in the Iran-Contra Affair. He was indicted by the Iran-Contra special prosecutor for giving false testimony He pleaded guilty to two lesser offences of withholding information to Congress, and in this way managed to avoid a trial and possible imprisonment. Abrams and some other Iran-Contra defendants were pardoned by George Bush Sr. in 1992.
A complex network of family, friendships, and working and mentoring-type relationships links the neo-conservatives. Jim Lobe writes in his March 2003 article Neo-conservative Geneology "This list of intricate, overlapping connections is hardly exhaustive or perhaps even surprising. But it helps reveal an important fact. Contrary to appearances, the neo-cons do not constitute a powerful mass political movement. They are instead a small, tightly-knit clan whose incestuous familial and persona connection, both within and outside the Bush administration, have allowed them to grab control of the future of American foreign policy."
Irving Kristol, born in 1920, was one of the founding fathers of neo-conservatism. He was managing editor of Commentary magazine from 1947 to 1950 and was co-founder and editor, with Stephen Spender, of Encounter magazine from 1953 to 1958. Encounter was funded by the CIA. Kristol is married to Gertrude Himmelfarb. Their son William Kristol, editor of the Rupert Murdoch-owned Weekly Standard, is described by Lobe as "Crown Prince of the neo-conservative clique."
In 1999 Irving Kristol, with Arving Kristol, co-authored the book Neo-Conservatism, Autobiography of an Idea. Irving Kristol's disciples included Richard Perle.
Norman Podhoretz, like Irving Kristol, helped invent neo-conservatism in the late 1960s. His wife Midge Decter has been a trustee of the Heritage Foundation since 1981. The couple were leaders of the Committee of the Present Danger in 1980 and worked with Donald Rumsfeld.
The protégés of Norman Podhoretz at Commentary included Jeane Kirkpatrick and Richard Pipes, who was Reagan's top adviser on the Evil Empire. His son Daniel Pipes, director of the Middle East Forum, battles his version of 'evil' - Islam.
Perle was a classmate of Joan Wohlstetter, daughter of the late Alfred Wohlstetter, who introduced him to her father at the family swimming pool. Wohlstetter helped Perle and Paul Wolfowitz get their start in Washington more than 30 years ago. According to Perle, he and Wolfowitz were introduced to each other by Wohlstetter when he thought they could work together in 1969 on the debate taking shape in the Senate over the ballistic missile Defense. Perle and Wolfowitz interviewed Henry 'Scoop' Jackson together and Perle says: "it was love at first sight. I will never forget that first encounter with Scoop. Here we were a couple of graduate students, sitting on the floor of Scoop's office in the Senate reviewing charts and analyses of the ballistic missile Defenses and getting his views on the subject." Perle went to work for Scoop Jackson for 11 years.
Wolfowitz's deputy Douglas Feith is a protégé of Perle. His father Dalck Faith was a follower of the revisionist Zionist leader Vladimir Jabotinsky in his native Poland in the 1930s and was active in Betar, Jabotinsky's youth movement. Dalck and Douglas Feith were honoured at a dinner in November 1997 by the Zionist Organization of American (ZOA), which described them as "the noted Jewish philanthropists and pro-Israel activists."
The right-wing think tank the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) is a focus for some of the relationships. Lynne Cheney, wife of Dick Cheney, is a scholar at AEI. The Cheneys daughter Elizabeth Cheney is deputy assistant Secretary of State for Near East Affairs. In 2002 Norman Podhoretz received the AEI's highest honour - the Francis Boyer award, which in 2003 became the Irving Kristol award.
Michael Ledeen, Resident Scholar in the Freedom Chair at the AEI, is married to Barbara Ledeen, a founder and director of the anti-feminist Independent Women's Forum (WF) who is much criticized by leftists. Barbara Ledeen is regarded as an influential force in Republican Congressional politics.
David Wormser and his wife Meyrav are one of the most high-powered neo-conservative couples. Both were involved with Perle, Feith and others in authoring the 1996 memorandum for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm. Wormser has been director of Middle East studies at AEI. His book Tyranny's Ally: America's Failure to Defeat Saddam Hussein was published by the AEI Press.
Meyrav co-founded with Israeli intelligence operative Yigal Carmon the Middle East Research Institute (MEMRI) and was its executive director for four years. She is currently a Senior Fellow and Director of the Centre for Middle East Studies at the Hudson Institute and is writing a book on the failure of Oslo.
Robert Kagan and his wife Victoria Nuland are another power couple. Robert Kagan is author of the book Of Paradise and Power: America and Europe in the New World Order. He is a neo-conservative foreign policy analyst who started off as a liberal, and is probably still better known in France than in the U.S.
Victoria Nuland was U.S. deputy chief of mission to NATO, and has been appointed as Vice President Dick Cheney's number two foreign policy adviser.
Robert and his brother Frederick are the sons of Donald Kagan. Frederick Kagan is a professor of military history at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point. Together with Donald he wrote the 2000 book While America Sleeps: Self-Delusion, Military Weakness, and the Threat to Peace Today which argues in favour of missile Defense and warns of future threats. Argues in favour of missile Defense and warning of the future threats to the U.S.
Donald Kagan has taught at Yale since 1969 and became Sterling Professor of Classics and History there in 2002. For more than 25 years he taught the popular course The Origins of War. He was a liberal Democrat who became a neo-conservative in the 1970s. Donald Kagan and his two sons often write articles and columns urging ever greater spending on Defense.
Elliott Abrams worked closely with Robert Kagan during the Reagan presidency. Elliott Abrams is son-in-law of Norman Podhoretz.
Norman Podhoretz's son John is a columnist for the New York Post, owned by Rupert Murdoch, and he is often seen on the Murdoch-owned Fox TV Channel. John Podhoretz wrote speeches for Ronald Reagan and then for George Bush Sr. He has written against America putting any pressure on Israel, and claims Israel refuses to defend itself so as to show its "good faith" in seeking peace. The Project for the New American Century
The Project for the New American Century (PNAC) was set up in spring 1997, under the aegis of the New Citizenship Project, which has been generously funded by the Bradley Foundation. PNAC has close links with the American Enterprise Institute (AEI - also funded by Bradley), from which it rents office space.
PNAC is a non-profit educational organization whose goal is to promote American global leadership, and from its inception it has lobbied hard for war on Iraq and for America to play a more permanent role in the Middle East. It believes U.S. foreign policy to be by definition "right".
PNAC's chairman is William Kristol, and the project directors are Robert Kagan, Bruce P Jackson, Lewis E Lehrman and Mark Gerson. The six project staff include executive director Gary Schmitt and Reuel Marc Gerecht, who is Senior Fellow at the AEI and Director of the PNAC's Middle East Initiative.
(Bruce Jackson was for years vice-president of weapons manufacturer Lockheed-Martin and he headed the Republican Party Platform Subcommittee for national Security and Foreign Policy in the 2000 campaign, at which time he called for the removal of Saddam Hussein.)
Jim Lobe describes PNAC as "a front group for the coalition of neo-conservatives, hard-right Republicans and Christian Right activists that is behind what has come to be called Bush's 'neo-imperialist' policies". Many of the neo-conservatives involved in PNAC from its inception are now in positions of power in the Administration, and are able to translate its programmes into action.
A main thrust the setting up of PNAC by Rumsfeld, Cheney et al was to counter what they saw as the drift in President Bill foreign and Defense policy. The establishment of PNAC cemented the powerful alliance between right-wing Republicans like Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld, Christian and Catholic Rightist leaders such as Gary Bauer and William Bennett, and the neo-conservatives, behind a platform of U.S. global military dominance.
Lobe says "PNAC in many ways is the latest incarnations of a series of hawkish groups dominated by Jewish neo-conservatives dating back to the 1970s when they fought the anti-war wing of the Democratic Party and then combined with key Republicans like Rumsfeld to oppose détente with Moscow."
William Pitt has written that PNAC was the driving force behind the drafting and passage of the Iraqi Liberation Act, a bill that painted a veneer of legality over the ultimate designs behind an Iraq war. The names of every prominent PNAC member was on a letter to President Clinton in 1998 castigating him for not implementing the Act by driving troops into Baghdad.
PNAC funneled millions of taxpayer dollars to the Iraqi National Congress. And it created a new group - the Committee for the Liberation of Iraq.
The PNAC's statement of principles, dated 3 June 1997 is signed by 25 people, among them Paul Wolfowitz, Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney, Elliott Abrams, Jeb Bush, Norman Podhoretz and his wife Midge Decter, Zalmay Khalilzad, Frank Gaffney, I Lewis Libby, Dan Quayle, Donald Kagan, William J Bennett, and the right-wing one-time Republican presidential candidate, publisher Steve Forbes.
The statement of principles argues that American foreign and Defense policy is adrift, and that although Conservatives have criticized the incoherent policies of the Clinton administration, they have not confidently advanced a strategic vision of America's role in the world and have not set forth guiding principles for American foreign policy. Nor have they fought for a Defense budget that would maintain American security and advance American interests in the new century. "We aim to change this. We aim to make the case and rally support for American global leadership."
The statement says the history of the 20th century shows that it is important to shape circumstances before crises emerge and to meet threats before they become dire. "The history of this century should have taught us to embrace the cause of American leadership."
* We need to increase Defense spending significantly if we are to carry out our global responsibilities today and modernize our armed forces for the future
* We need to strengthen our ties to democratic allies and to challenge regimes hostile to our interest and values
*We need to promote the cause of political and economic freedom abroad
*We need 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 statement concludes: "Such a Reaganite policy of military strength and moral clarity may not be fashionable today. But it is necessary if the U.S. is to build on the successes of this past century and to ensure our security and our greatness in the next."
PNAC often publishes open letters and memoranda to President George W. Bush and opinion leaders, with numerous signatories including many of the neo-conservatives. The letters and memoranda are posted on the website, as are articles by PNAC members.
On 21 September 2001 PNAC issued an open letter to President Bush, calling on him to take the anti-terror war beyond Afghanistan through removing Saddam Hussein, breaking links with the Palestinian Authority, and preparing for action against Syria, Iran and Hezbollah in Lebanon. The 41 signatories included Richard Perle, Jeane Kirkpatrick, Frank Gaffney, Francis Fukuyama, William Kristol, and Donald and Robert Kagan.
A PNAC letter to Bush on 3 April 2002 commended him for his "strong stance in support of the Israeli government as it engages in the present campaign to fight terrorism...no one should doubt that the U.S. and Israel share a common enemy. We are both targets of what you have correctly called an 'Axis of Evil.' Israel is targeted in part because it is our friend, and in part because it is an island of liberal democratic principles - American principles - in a sea of tyranny, intolerance and hatred. As Secretary of State Donald Rumsfeld has pointed out, Iran, Iraq and Syria are all engaged in 'inspiring and financing a culture of political murder and suicide bombing' against Israel, just as they have aided campaigns of terrorism against the U.S. over the past two decades."
The letter denounced Yasser Arafat and the Palestine Authority leadership. "It can no longer be the policy of the U.S. to urge, much less to pressure, Israel to continue negotiating with Arafat, any more than we would be willing to be pressured to negotiate with Osama Bin Laden or Mullah Omar. Nor should the U.S. provide financial support to a Palestinian Authority that acts as a cog in the machine of Middle East terrorism, any more than we would approve of others providing assistance to Al Qaeda.
"Instead, the U.S. should lend its full support to Israel as it seeks to root out the terrorist network that daily threatens the lives of Israeli citizens."
The letter also urges Bush to accelerate plans for removing Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq.
The letter's 34 signatories include Richard Perle, Norman Podhoretz, Ken Adelman, Robert Kagan, Frank Gaffney, Daniel Pipes, Randy Scheunemann and former CIA director James Woolsey.
The PNAC has attempted to put the best possible gloss on the post-war situation in Iraq. A PNAC memorandum to opinion leaders from Gary Schmitt on post-Saddam Iraq, dated 5 May 2003, criticizes the "doom and gloom" reporting by the media from Baghdad. It attaches an article 'Bad Reporting in Baghdad' by Jonathan Foreman of the New York Post, which was published in The Weekly Standard.
In his report, that contradicts reports by virtually every other journalist from Baghdad, Foreman writes: "The intensity of the population's pro-American enthusiasm is astonishing... and continues unabated despite delays in restoring power and water to the city... It's things like the way the women old and young flirt outrageously with GIs, lifting their veils to smile, waving from high windows, and shyly calling hello form half-opened doors.
"But you wont see much of this on TV or read about it in the papers... to an amazing degree the Baghdad-based press corps avoids writing about or filming the friendly dealings between U.S. forces here and the local population."
In September 2000, PNAC produced a report entitled Rebuilding America's Defenses - Strategy, Forces and Resources for a New Century. There were 27 participants in the project, among them Paul Wolfowitz, William Kristol, Robert Kagan, Gary Schmitt and Lewis Libby. Donald Kagan and Gary Schmitt were the project co-chairmen and Thomas Donnelly the principle author.
The report proceeds from the belief that America should seek to preserve and extend its position of global leadership by maintaining the pre-eminence of U.S. military forces. It calls for a massive increase in Defense spending and the fighting of several major theatre wars to establish U.S. dominance.
The report states: "The United States has for decades sought to play a more permanent role in Gulf regional security. While the unresolved conflict with Iraq provides the immediate justification, the need for a substantial American force presence in the Gulf transcends the issue of the regime of Saddam Hussein." It calls for "global U.S. pre-eminence shaping the international security order in line with American interests" and states that "Even should Saddam pass from the scene" U.S. troops should remain in the Gulf." The report says that peacekeeping missions "demand American political leadership rather than that of the UN." (The 90-page document can be found at www.newamericancentury.org/RebuildingAmericasDefenses.pdf)
For the 2000 presidential campaign PNAC assembled a book, which has been seen as a blueprint for the incoming administration, entitled 'Present Dangers: Crisis and Opportunity in American Foreign and Defense Policy' edited by William Kristol and Robert Kagan (published by Encounter Books). Those contributing chapters include Paul Wolfowitz, Elliott Abrams and Richard Perle.
In his chapter on the Middle East, Elliott Abrams lays out the "peace through strength" concept and argues that U.S. military strength and its willingness to sue it will remain "a key factor in our ability to promote peace." He calls for a pre-emptive toppling of Saddam, as do the other contributors to the bo
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printed from Jihad Al Khazen's PNAC/NeoCon Summary on 2004-06-04 02:42:34