| Author | Message | | Alpha | | Posted: Thu Nov 20, 2003 6:17 pm Post subject: Pentagon Office Home to Neo-Con Network |
| Pentagon Office Home to Neo-Con Network
http://www.antiwar.com/ips/lobe080703.html
An ad hoc office under US Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Douglas Feith appears to have acted as the key base for an informal network of mostly neo-conservative political appointees that circumvented normal interagency channels to lead the push for war against Iraq.
The Office of Special Plans (OSP), which worked alongside the Near East and South Asia (NESA) bureau in Feith's domain, was originally created by Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Deputy Secretary Paul Wolfowitz to review raw information collected by the official US intelligence agencies for connections between Iraqi President Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda.
Retired intelligence officials from the State Department, the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) have long charged that the two offices exaggerated and manipulated intelligence about Iraq before passing it along to the White House.
But key personnel who worked in both NESA and OSP were part of a broader network of neo-conservative ideologues and activists who worked with other Bush political appointees scattered around the national-security bureaucracy to move the country to war, according to retired Lt. Col. Karen Kwiatkowski, who was assigned to NESA from May 2002 through February 2003.
The heads of NESA and OSP were Deputy Undersecretary William Luti and Abram Shulsky, respectively.
Other appointees who worked with them in both offices included Michael Rubin, a Middle East specialist previously with the neo-conservative American Enterprise Institute (AEI); David Schenker, previously with the Washington Institute for Near East Policy (WINEP); and Michael Makovsky; an expert on neo-con icon Winston Churchill and the younger brother of David Makovsky, a senior WINEP fellow and former executive editor of pro-Likud Jerusalem Post.
Along with Feith, all of the political appointees have in common a close identification with the views of the right-wing Likud Party in Israel.
Feith, whose law partner is a spokesman for the settlement movement in Israel, has long been a fierce opponent of the Oslo peace process, while WINEP has acted as the think tank for the most powerful pro-Israel lobby in Washington, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), which generally follows a Likud line.
Also like Feith, several of the appointees were protégés of Richard Perle, an AEI fellow who doubles as chairman until last April of Rumsfeld's unpaid Defense Policy Board (DPB), whose members were appointed by Feith, also had an office in the Pentagon one floor below the NESA offices.
Similarly, Luti, a retired naval officer, was a protégé of another DPB board member also based at AEI, former Republican Speaker of the House of Representatives Newt Gingrich. Luti in turn hired Ret. Col. William Bruner, a former Gingrich staffer, and Chris Straub, a retired lieutenant colonel, anti-abortion activist, and former staffer on the Senate Intelligence Committee.
Also working for Luti was another naval officer, Yousef Aboul-Enein, whose main job was to pore over Arabic-language newspapers and CIA transcripts of radio broadcasts to find evidence of ties between al-Qaeda and Saddam Hussein that may have been overlooked by the intelligence agencies, and a DIA officer named John Trigilio.
Through Feith, both offices worked closely with Perle, Gingrich, and two other DPB members and major war boosters – former CIA director James Woolsey and Kenneth Adelman – in ensuring that the "intelligence" they developed reached a wide public audience outside the bureaucracy.
They also debriefed "defectors" handled by the Iraqi National Congress (INC), an opposition umbrella group headed by Ahmed Chalabi, a longtime friend of Perle, whom the intelligence agencies generally wrote off as an unreliable self-promoter.
"They would draw up 'talking points' they would use and distribute to staff officers for inclusion in any background papers or other documentation provided to their senior officers throughout the Pentagon, and presumably to the office of the Vice President," said Kwiatkowski. "But the talking points would be changed continually, not because of new intel (intelligence), but because the press was poking holes in what was in the memos."
The offices fed information directly and indirectly to sympathetic media outlets, including the Rupert Murdoch-owned Weekly Standard and FoxNews Network, as well as the editorial pages of the Wall Street Journal and syndicated columnists, such as Charles Krauthammer.
In interagency discussions, Feith and the two offices communicated almost exclusively with like-minded allies in other agencies, rather than with their official counterparts, including even the DIA in the Pentagon, according to Kwiatkowski.
Rather than working with the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research, its Near Eastern Affairs bureau, or even its Iraq desk, for example, they preferred to work through Undersecretary of State for Arms Control and International Security (and former AEI executive vice president) John Bolton; Michael Wurmser (another Perle protégé at AEI who staffed the predecessor to OSP); and Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Near East Affairs, Elizabeth Cheney, the daughter of the Vice President Dick Cheney.
At the National Security Council (NSC), they communicated mainly with Stephen Hadley, the deputy national security adviser, until Elliott Abrams, a dyed-in-the-wool neo-con with close ties to Feith and Perle, was appointed last December as the NSC's top Middle East aide.
"They worked really hard for Abrams; he was a necessary link," Kwiatkowski told IPS Wednesday. "The day he got (the appointment), they were whooping and hollering, 'We got him in, we got him in.'"
They rarely communicated directly with the CIA, leaving that to political heavyweights, including Gingrich, who is reported to have made several trips to the CIA headquarters, and, more importantly, I Lewis "Scooter" Libby, Vice President Dick Cheney's chief of staff and national security adviser.
According to recent published reports, CIA analysts felt these visits were designed to put pressure on them to tailor their analyses more to the liking of administration hawks.
In some cases, NESA and OSP even prepared memos specifically for Cheney and Libby, something unheard of in previous administration because the lines of authority in the Vice President's office and the Pentagon are entirely separate. "Luti sometimes would say, 'I've got to do this for Scooter,'" said Kwiatkowski. "It looked like Cheney's office was pulling the strings."
Kwiatkowski said she could not confirm published reports that OSP worked with a similar ad hoc group in Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's office.
But she recounts one incident in which she helped escort a group of half a dozen Israelis, including several generals, from the first floor reception area to Feith's office. "We just followed them, because they knew exactly where they were going and moving fast."
When the group arrived, she noted the book which all visitors are required to sign under special regulations that took effect after the Sep. 11, 2001 attacks. "I asked his secretary, 'Do you want these guys to sign in?' She said, 'No, these guys don't have to sign in.'" It occurred to her, she said, that the office may have deliberately not wanted to maintain a record of the meeting.
She added that OSP and MESA personnel were already discussing the possibility of "going after Iran" after the war in Iraq last January and that articles by Michael Ledeen, another AEI fellow and Perle associate who has been calling for the US to work for "regime change" in Tehran since late 2001, were given much attention in the two offices.
Ledeen and Morris Amitay, a former head of AIPAC, recently created the Coalition for Democracy in Iran (CDI) to lobby for a more aggressive policy there. Their move coincided with suggestions by Sharon that Washington adopt a more confrontational policy vis – vis Teheran.
Iran recently said it was prepared to turn over five senior al-Qaeda figures, including the son of Osama bin Laden, who are currently in its custody if Washington permanently shuts down an Iraqi-based Iranian rebel group that is listed as a terrorist organization by the State Department.
Pentagon officials, particularly Feith's office, have reportedly opposed the deal, which had been favored by the State Department, because of the possibility that the group, the Mujahadeen Khalq, might be useful in putting pressure on Tehran.
(Inter Press Service) | |  | | Alpha | | Posted: Fri Nov 21, 2003 12:20 am Post subject: JINSA Zionist Extremist "Feith is the Answer" |
| See a picture of this (JINSA) Zionist traitor (Douglas Feith) at:
www.nowarforisrael.com
Feith is the Answer
http://www.ipsnews.net/interna.asp?idnews=20952
Analysis - By Jim Lobe
WASHINGTON, Nov 5 (IPS) - ''What's gonna happen with Feith?”
That, in a nutshell, is the question of the month for the Washington cognoscenti trying to figure out whether a major shift in the Bush administration's unilateralist and ultra-hawkish foreign policy is or is not underway.
The reference is to Douglas Feith, the administration's rather obscure but nonetheless strategically placed undersecretary of defence for policy, who reports directly to deputy secretary Paul Wolfowitz and Pentagon chief Donald Rumsfeld.
If the administration is looking for a scapegoat for the situation it faces in Iraq, Feith is the most likely candidate both because of his relative obscurity compared to other administration hawks and the fact that, of virtually all of them, his ideas -- particularly on the Middle East -- might be the most radical.
A protege of Richard Perle, the former chairman of Rumsfeld's Defence Policy Board (DPB) who stands at the centre of the neo-conservative foreign-policy network in Washington, Feith has long opposed territorial compromise by Israel.
He was an outspoken foe of the Oslo process and even the Camp David peace agreement mediated by former President Jimmy Carter between Egypt and Israel. His former law partner, L. Marc Zell, is a spokesman for the Jewish settlers' movement on the occupied West Bank.
But, more to the point, virtually everything that has gone wrong in Iraq -- especially those matters that Congress is either investigating or is poised to probe -- is linked directly to his office. ''All roads lead to Feith,'' noted one knowledgeable administration official this week.
His now-defunct Office of Special Plans (OSP) is alleged to have collected -- often with the help of the neo-conservatives' favourite Iraqi exile, Ahmed Chalabi -- and ''cooked'' the most alarmist pre-war intelligence against Saddam Hussein and then ''stovepiped'' it to the White House via Rumsfeld and Vice President Dick Cheney, unvetted by the intelligence agencies.
It was also his office that was in charge of post-war planning, and rejected the product of months of work by dozens of Iraqi exiles and Mideast experts in the State Department and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) who anticipated many of the problems that have wrong-footed the occupation.
The OSP also excluded many top Mideast experts from the State Department from playing any role in the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) in Iraq.
And it is Feith's office that, with the CPA, recommended companies for huge, and in some cases no-bid, contracts in Iraq that have amounted, in the eyes of some critical lawmakers, to flagrant profiteering.
Among the firms that have profited most are those whose consultants or officers also serve on the Pentagon's DPB, members of which are chosen by Feith.
In a particularly provocative move that raises a host of conflict-of-interest questions, Feith's former partner Zell has set up shop with Chalabi's nephew in Baghdad to help interested companies win contracts for reconstruction projects.
''Until they get rid of Feith, no one is going to believe that the administration is seriously reassessing its policies,'' one congressional aide whose boss has been a strong critic of Bush's policy in Iraq, told IPS.
There are hints that Feith has seen his authority dwindle since the first half of October, when National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice announced that she would head a new interagency Iraq Stabilisation Group (ISG).
The move appeared designed not only to give the appearance that the White House was taking control of a situation that had contributed to a precipitous decline in Bush's approval ratings, but also to ensure that the Pentagon could no longer simply ignore other bureaucracies, Rice included, as it had for much of the past year.
Creation of the ISG followed growing public criticism, even by otherwise loyal Republican lawmakers, of the administration's failure to anticipate post-war problems. It came soon after the appointment of former U.S. ambassador to India, Robert Blackwill -- who was Rice's boss on the National Security Council (NSC) in the first Bush administration -- to a special, high-ranking NSC post.
Other hints that Feith's and other hawks' grip on policy has been loosened came in the form of a distinct softening of the rhetoric against the other two members of the ''axis of evil'' -- Iran and North Korea.
Then, last week a top Feith aide, former assistant defence secretary for international security policy J.D. Crouch II, abruptly resigned his position without explanation.
There have been unconfirmed reports that top White House officials decided two months ago that Feith had to go, but were then dissuaded by Rumsfeld who argued that his departure would be seen as an admission that things had gone seriously wrong in Iraq.
It was in that context, according to these reports, that the administration moved to quietly reduce Feith's authority, in part by creating the ISG.
Like his mentor Perle, Feith has long been a hard-liner on foreign policy and arms control. He was an outspoken opponent of the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty and the Chemical and Biological Weapons conventions, which he criticised as ineffective and dangerous to U.S. interests.
Among other clients, his law firm represented arms giants Lockheed-Martin and Northrop Grunman.
Also like Perle, Feith has long taken a strong interest in Israel and its security. His father, Dalck Feith, a philanthropist and major Republican contributor from Philadelphia, was active in the militantly Zionist youth movement Betar, the predecessor of Israel's Likud Party, in Poland before World War II.
Both father and son have been honoured by the Zionist Organisation of America (ZOA), which, unlike other mainstream Jewish groups in the United States, has consistently supported Likud positions and the settlement movement in the occupied territories and actively courted the Christian Right.
Feith also served with Perle on the board of the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs (JINSA), a think tank that promotes military and strategic ties between the United States and Israel.
Feith first entered government as a Middle East specialist on the National Security Council (NSC) under Ronald Reagan in 1981, but was abruptly fired after only one year. Perle, who was then serving in the Pentagon as assistant secretary of defence for international security, hired him as his deputy, a post he retained until leaving in 1986 to found Feith & Zell.
Three years later, Feith was retained as a lobbyist by the Turkish government and, in that capacity, worked with Perle to build military ties between Turkey and Israel.
In 1996, he participated in a study group chaired by Perle and sponsored by a right-wing Jerusalem-based think tank that produced a report calling for incoming Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu to build a strategic alliance with Turkey, Jordan, and a new government in Iraq that would transform the balance of power in the Middle East in such a way that Israel could decisively resist pressure to trade ''land for peace'' with the Palestinians or Syria.
In 1997, he published a lengthy article, 'A Strategy for Israel', published in 'Commentary' magazine, Feith argued that Israel should repudiate the Oslo accords and move to re-occupy those parts of the West Bank and Gaza that had been transferred to the Palestinian Authority.
Two years later, he and Perle signed an open letter to President Bill Clinton calling for Washington to work with Chalabi's Iraqi National Congress (INC) to oust Saddam Hussein.
In May 2000, they signed a report calling for the United States to be prepared to attack Syria militarily unless Damascus failed to withdraw its troops from Lebanon. (END/2003) | | | | Alpha | | | | Alpha | | | | Alpha | | Posted: Fri Nov 21, 2003 10:16 am Post subject: Ahmed Chalabi: NEOCON PUPPET FOR IRAQ |
| BRITISH AND US SOLDERS ARE DYING IN IRAQ FOR ISRAEL:
http://www.nowarforisrael.com
NO DEMOCRATICALLY ELECTED GOVERNMENT IN IRAQ WILL SELL OIL TO THE LAND STEALING ZIONISTS, BUT A COUNCIL OF IRAQI LACKEYS (LIKE CONVICTED BANK FRAUDSTER CHALABI) MIGHT:
http://www.prospect.org/print/V13/21/dreyfuss-r.html
Tinker, Banker, NeoCon, Spy
Ahmed Chalabi's long and winding road from (and to?) Baghdad
By Robert Dreyfuss
Issue Date: 11.18.02 Print Friendly | Email Article
If T.E. Lawrence ("of Arabia") had been a 21st-century neoconservative operative instead of a British imperial spy, he'd be Ahmed Chalabi's best friend. Chalabi, the London-based leader of the Iraqi National Congress (INC), is front man for the latest incarnation of a long-time neoconservative strategy to redraw the map of the oil-rich Middle East, put American troops -- and American oil companies -- in full control of the Persian Gulf's reserves and use the Gulf as a fulcrum for enhancing America's global strategic hegemony. Just as Lawrence's escapades in World War I-era Arabia helped Britain remake the disintegrating Ottoman Empire, the U.S. sponsors of Chalabi's INC hope to do their own nation building. "The removal of [Saddam Hussein] presents the United States in particular with a historic opportunity that I believe is going to prove to be as large as anything that has happened in the Middle East since the fall of the Ottoman Empire and the entry of British troops into Iraq in 1917," says Kanan Makiya, an INC strategist and author of Republic of Fear. Chalabi would hand over Iraq's oil to U.S. multinationals, and his allies in conservative think tanks are already drawing up the blueprints. "What they have in mind is denationalization, and then parceling Iraqi oil out to American oil companies," says James E. Akins, former U.S. ambassador to Saudi Arabia. Even more broadly, once an occupying U.S. army seizes Baghdad, Chalabi's INC and its American backers are spinning scenarios about dismantling Saudi Arabia, seizing its oil and collapsing the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC). It's a breathtaking agenda, one that goes far beyond "regime change" and on to the start of a New New World Order. What's also startling about these plans is that Chalabi is scorned by most of America's national-security establishment, including much of the Department of State, the CIA and the Joint Chiefs of Staff. He is shunned by all Western powers save the United Kingdom, ostracized in the Arab world and disdained even by many of his erstwhile comrades in the Iraqi opposition. Among his few friends, however, are the men running the Bush administration's willy-nilly war on Iraq. And with their backing, it's not inconceivable that this hapless, exiled Iraqi aristocrat and London-Washington playboy might end up atop the smoking heap of what's left of Iraq next year. The Chalabi Lobby
Almost to a man, Washington's hawks lavishly praise Chalabi. "He's a rare find," says Max Singer, a trustee and co-founder of the Hudson Institute. "He's deep in the Arab world and at the same time he is fundamentally a man of the West." In Washington, Team Chalabi is led by Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz and Richard Perle, the neoconservative strategist who heads the Pentagon's Defense Policy Board. Chalabi's partisans run the gamut from far right to extremely far right, with key supporters in most of the Pentagon's Middle-East policy offices -- such as Peter Rodman, Douglas Feith, David Wurmser and Michael Rubin. Also included are key staffers in Vice President Dick Cheney's office, not to mention Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and former CIA Director Jim Woolsey. The Washington partisans who want to install Chalabi in Arab Iraq are also those associated with the staunchest backers of Israel, particularly those aligned with the hard-right faction of Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and former Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Chalabi's cheerleaders include the Washington Institute for Near East Policy (WINEP) and the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs (JINSA). "Chalabi is the one that we know the best," says Shoshana Bryen, director of special projects for JINSA, where Chalabi has been a frequent guest at board meetings, symposia and other events since 1997. "He could be Iraq's national leader," says Patrick Clawson, deputy director of WINEP, whose board of advisers includes pro-Israeli luminaries such as Perle, Wolfowitz and Martin Peretz of The New Republic. What makes Chalabi so attractive to the Washington war party? Most importantly, he's a co-thinker: a mathematician trained at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the University of Chicago and a banker (who years ago hit it off with Albert Wohlstetter, the theorist who was a godfather of the neoconservative movement), a fellow mathematician and a University of Chicago strategist. In 1985, Wohlstetter (who died in 1997) introduced Chalabi to Perle, then the undersecretary of defense for international-security policy under President Reagan and one of Wohlstetter's leading acolytes. The two have been close ever since. In early October, Perle and Chalabi shared a podium at an American Enterprise Institute conference called "The Day After: Planning for a Post-Saddam Iraq," which was held, appropriately enough, in AEI's 12th-floor Wohlstetter Conference Center. "The Iraqi National Congress has been the philosophical voice of free Iraq for a dozen years," Perle told me. Philosophical or not, since its founding in 1992, Chalabi's INC has been trying to drag the United States into war with Iraq. By its very nature, the INC's strategy -- building a paramilitary presence inside Iraq, creating a provisional government, launching attacks on Iraqi cities -- was intended to create inexorable momentum for a war in which in the United States would be compelled to support the INC. But American policy in the 1990s was focused primarily on containing Saddam Hussein and depriving him of weapons of mass destruction, so the INC's efforts were sidetracked during the Clinton administration. At the time, most of the national-security establishment saw the INC as weak and ineffectual. Retired Marine Gen. Anthony Zinni, former head of Central Command for U.S. forces in the Middle East, famously ridiculed Chalabi and company as "silk-suited, Rolex-wearing guys in London," adding, "I don't see any opposition group that has the viability to overthrow Saddam." Supporting the INC, he warned, meant that "the Bay of Pigs could turn into the Bay of Goats." And a widely cited 1999 Foreign Affairs article titled "The Rollback Fantasy," lambasted the INC's strategy for a gusano-style offensive by a ragtag army operating out of the so-called no-fly zones in northern and southern Iraq, saying it was "militarily ludicrous and would almost certainly end in either direct American intervention or a massive bloodbath." Indeed, in 1996 an ill-organized INC offensive in northern Iraq, where Chalabi had assembled about 1,000 fighters, was half-heartedly backed by the CIA. Not only did Saddam Hussein's troops not defect en masse, as predicted by Chalabi, but one of the INC's key allies, the Kurdistan Democratic Party, chose to ally itself with Baghdad, inviting the Iraqi army back into northern Iraq's Kurdish areas for a mop-up exercise. Another of the INC's allies, the Iraqi National Accord, apparently blew up the INC's main offices in an act of bloody fratricide. These tragic failures only increased the distaste for Chalabi at the CIA and among the U.S. military. Still, Chalabi is a survivor. Since the 1996 fiasco, he's managed a precarious balance atop a fractious and quarrelsome constellation of Iraqi opposition factions, from Kurds and Shi'a tribal leaders to Islamic fundamentalists, monarchists and military officers. Our Man in Baghdad
Born in 1945, Chalabi is the scion of a wealthy, oligarchic Shi'a family with close ties to the Hashemite monarchy that was installed in Iraq after World War I by Lawrence, Gertrude Bell and the British imperial authorities. Chalabi's grandfather served in nine various Iraqi cabinet positions, his father was a cabinet officer and president of the figurehead Iraqi senate, and his mother ran political salons that catered to Iraq's elite. In 1958 that all came to a crashing end when a coalition of army officers and the Iraqi Communist Party led a revolution that toppled King Faisal II. The Chalabis scattered. As a young man Chalabi lived in Jordan, Lebanon, the United Kingdom and the United States, where he attended MIT before earning a doctorate in mathematics at the University of Chicago. He took a position teaching math at the American University of Beirut. In 1977, Crown Prince Hassan of Jordan invited Chalabi to Amman to establish the Petra Bank, a financial institution that would soon become the second-largest commercial bank in Jordan. In an August 1989 episode still surrounded by controversy, however, the government of Jordan seized the Petra Bank under martial law, arresting its chief currency trader and using Jordan's central bank to pump $164 million into the Petra Bank and its allied institutions to keep them liquid. To avoid arrest, Chalabi fled the country "under mysterious circumstances," according to a 1989 article in the Financial Times. The Hudson Institute's Max Singer says that Prince Hassan personally drove Chalabi to the Jordanian border, helping him escape. (According to one account, Chalabi was in the trunk of the car.) Chalabi eventually was tried in absentia by a Jordanian court and sentenced to 22 years of hard labor for embezzlement, fraud and currency-trading irregularities. He reportedly got away with more than $70 million. The INC offers a different version. According to Zaab Sethna, an INC spokesman, King Hussein of Jordan executed a politically motivated coup against Chalabi in coordination with Iraq because Chalabi was "using the bank to fund [Iraqi] opposition groups and learning a lot about illegal arms transfers to Saddam." Because the Petra Bank had inside information about Jordanian-Iraqi trade, Chalabi used his position in a freelance, cloak-and-dagger operation to feed intelligence about Iraq's trade deals to the CIA. Because Chalabi was already active in anti-Iraq opposition groups and had a connection with Perle, it's possible that Chalabi's account is true. Further evidence of political motives behind the seizure of the Petra Bank and Chalabi's intelligence connections: The American lawyer who represented the Petra Bank's Washington, D.C., subsidiary was former Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger. And when Chalabi fled the country, anonymous leaflets reportedly circulated linking Chalabi to an alliance with Iraq's Shi'a and with (mostly Shi'a) Iran, all in a vague conspiracy against Iraq and Jordan. (During the Iran-Iraq war and Iraq's invasion of Kuwait in 1990, Jordan -- always delicately balanced between "Iraq and a hard place," as King Hussein was wont to say -- tilted toward Iraq. Afterward, King Hussein distanced himself from Baghdad and eventually reconciled with Chalabi. The jail sentence for bank fraud stands but reportedly might be lifted soon by Jordan's King Abdullah.) Of course, the fact that Chalabi may have been prosecuted for political reasons does not mean that he is innocent of embezzlement and fraud. In any case, allegations of self-dealing have followed him everywhere since. Puppet Theater
Soon after fleeing Jordan, Chalabi began making the contacts with the CIA that would eventually lead to the INC's founding in 1992. Meeting first in Vienna, Austria, and then in Salahuddin in northern Iraq, the INC emerged as an umbrella group for the many factions of Iraqi opposition in exile. In the early 1990s, the CIA spent about $100 million through the INC and its Kurdish allies in the north -- until the fiasco of 1996. Though the CIA cut off the INC after that, Chalabi was undeterred and went about working with congressional Republicans to pass the Iraq Liberation Act. That law set up a pool of funds and in-kind contributions for the INC and other opposition forces. In its implementation, however, the INC has been embroiled in repeated disputes with the State Department over its accounting for funds received. (In 1999, when asked about secrecy in accounting for certain INC expenditures, Chalabi blurted: "Damn right! It was covert money.") "He's a criminal banker," says Akins, the former ambassador to Saudi Arabia. "He's a swindler. He's interested in getting money, and I suspect it's all gone into his bank accounts and those of his friends." Earlier this year, the State Department and the INC were deadlocked over payments to the INC, and the dispute was resolved only when the Pentagon, with its pro-Chalabi group, agreed to take over payments to the INC for the latter's intelligence-gathering work inside Iraq. Even after 1996, Chalabi continued to insist that Saddam Hussein's government would crumble if the INC, with only limited American backing, were to launch its planned offensive. In June 1997, Chalabi spoke to JINSA's board, which includes, not surprisingly, Perle, Woolsey and key hard-line backers of Israel such as Jeane Kirkpatrick, Max Kampelman, Eugene Rostow and former Rep. Steve Solarz (D-N.Y.). "The INC plan for Saddam's overthrow is simple," Chalabi told JINSA. From its base in northern Iraq, the INC would begin to confront Iraqi forces with only political and logistical support from the United States, including U.S. efforts to "feed, house and otherwise provide for the Iraqi army as it abandons Saddam." Then, Chalabi concluded, "With U.S. political backing and regional support for a process of gradual encirclement, Saddam can be driven into hiding in Takrit and eventually removed." That's it. The idea that ridding Iraq of Saddam Hussein is as easy as that was, of course, ridiculed by virtually all CIA, military and State Department strategists. But without the ability to commit hundreds of thousands of American troops and a relentless wave of bombing sorties, it was all that Chalabi and his allies had -- until September 11. Effectively capitalizing on the impact of 9-11, Perle, Woolsey and company began beating the drums for a full-scale war against Iraq. With President Bush in tow and railing against "the guy who tried to kill my dad," the war party got the upper hand. According to the latest leaks about U.S. strategy, a war against Iraq now could involve up to 250,000 U.S. troops and would result in an open-ended military occupation of Iraq modeled on the post-World War II occupations of Germany and Japan. The INC, meanwhile, hopes to ride into Baghdad on American tanks. Weeks ago the Pentagon began a program to train INC combatants for a coming conflict in Iraq, but its effort fooled no one. Ousting Saddam Hussein, if it happens, will be the work of U.S. troops, not the INC. But a Big Brother-style public-relations offensive is being readied, aimed at creating the myth that Iraq has been liberated by an alliance of the United States and the INC. "I want to create the national story that Iraqis liberated themselves," says WINEP's Clawson. "It may have no more truth than the idea that the French liberated themselves in World War II." But, insists Clawson, it's a fiction that will resonate with Iraqis. Almost no one, not even the INC itself, thinks that Chalabi has any cachet inside Iraq. Entifadh Qanbar, the earnest, young ex-Iraqi officer who heads the INC's office in Washington, says that Chalabi represents Iraq's "silent majority." Asked whether people in Baghdad have even heard of Chalabi, Qanbar says: "They may not know the man. But he represents their views." Others scoff at even that notion. "It's a formula for setting up a puppet regime," says David Mack, vice president of the Middle East Institute, a former U.S. ambassador to the United Arab Emirates and ex-deputy assistant secretary of state for Near Eastern affairs who's dealt extensively with Iraqi opposition politicians and military officers. "And we will have responsibility for propping them up for a long, long time to come, possibly with the blood of American soldiers." But indefinitely propping up an INC-style quisling regime might be exactly what the United States wants, as it would mean that U.S. troops would be occupying Iraq's oil fields for years to come. Striking Oil
It's hard to overstate the importance of Iraqi oil. With proven reserves of 112 billion barrels (and many analysts saying that its true reserves are double that), Iraq sits above the second largest supply of oil in the world. Its crippled industry can produce only 2 million barrels of oil a day at present, but with a modest effort, Iraq's output could soar to as high as 7 million to 8 million barrels per day by decade's end. Controlling that much oil would give the United States enormous leverage over Europe and Japan, which depend heavily on Gulf oil; over Russia, whose economy is hinged to the price of its oil exports, which could be manipulated by an American-run Iraq; and over Saudi Arabia, whose regime's survival is linked to oil. "The American oil companies are going to be the main beneficiaries of this war," says Akins. "We take over Iraq, install our regime, produce oil at the maximum rate and tell Saudi Arabia to go to hell." "It's probably going to spell the end of OPEC," says JINSA's Bryen. The INC is quietly courting the American oil companies. In mid-October, Chalabi had a series of meetings with three major U.S. oil firms in Washington. "The oil people are naturally nervous," says INC spokesman Zaab Sethna, who took part in the meetings between Chalabi and the oil executives. "We've had discussions with them, but they're not in the habit of going around talking about them." That's true. In interviews, oil company officials speak cautiously and only on background about Iraq, laughing nervously at the idea of being quoted. They are extremely wary of associating themselves with the INC or with U.S. war plans for fear of angering Saudi Arabia and other oil-producing countries in the Persian Gulf. Asked about talks with the INC, one U.S. oil executive blanched, saying, "I can't discuss that, even on background." But the untold riches that lie beneath the soil of Iraq are a powerful lure for multinational oil companies. "I would say that especially the U.S. oil companies ... look forward to the idea that Iraq will be open for business," says an executive from one of the world's largest oil companies, adding that the companies are trying hard not to be noticed. "We don't have a stake in Iraq now," says another oil industry executive. "One of the frustrations that U.S. oil companies have is that the Russians, the French and the Chinese already have existing relations with Iraq. And the question is: How much of that will be sanctified by the people who succeed Saddam?" The INC and its backers make no bones about the fact that the American forces gathering to attack Iraq will be liberating Iraq's oil. Unable to restrain himself, Chalabi blurted to The Washington Post that the INC intends to reward its American friends. "American companies will have a big shot at Iraqi oil," he proclaimed. Meanwhile, economists allied with the INC -- including strategists at the Heritage Foundation, the AEI and JINSA -- are abuzz with plans to "denationalize" the Iraqi oil industry and then distribute it to Western, mostly American, companies. In late September, in "The Future of a Post-Saddam Iraq: A Blueprint for American Involvement," the Heritage Foundation's Ariel Cohen put forward a nearly complete scheme for the privatization of Iraq's oil, creating three separate companies for southern Iraq, the region around Baghdad and the Kirkuk fields in northern Iraq, with additional companies to operate pipelines and refineries and to develop Iraq's natural gas. In an interview, Cohen warned that France, Russia and China might find that their existing oil contracts with Iraq won't be honored by the INC. "It will be up to the next government of Iraq to examine the legal validity of the deals signed by the Saddam regime," says Cohen. "From a realpolitik point of view, these governments should try to get in early with the Iraqi National Congress and abandon Saddam. The window of opportunity is closing." It's hard to imagine that a regime that denationalized Iraq's oil would be very popular with Iraqis. The nationalization, which took place between 1972 and 1974, electrified Iraqis and stunned the industry worldwide. It also set dominoes falling throughout the Persian Gulf and the OPEC nations, as other countries ousted the multinationals and created state-owned enterprises. Eventually, even Saudi Arabia seized control of all-powerful Aramco, the consortium of Exxon, Mobil, Texaco and Chevron that had long been the colossus of the Persian Gulf. Now, cautiously, the oil industry sees a war in Iraq as a way to win back what's been lost. "Even in Saudi Arabia, all we can do is buy their oil," says an American oil company official. U.S. companies, this executive confirmed, want to return to greater direct control, perhaps through so-called production-sharing agreements that would give them both a direct stake in the oil fields and a greater share of the profits. It's also clear that the INC, the neoconservatives and oil executives are thinking beyond Iraq to Saudi Arabia. Ever since Robert W. Tucker wrote an article in Commentary in the 1970s proposing a U.S. occupation of Saudi Arabia's oil fields, such a scenario has been a cherished vision for a small but growing circle of strategists. (Last summer Perle invited a RAND Corporation analyst to speak to the Defense Policy Board on exactly that topic.) Earlier this year, in an article titled "Free the Eastern Province of Saudi Arabia," Singer suggested that the United States should help create a Muslim Republic of East Arabia. "I meant it seriously," says Singer. "Saudi Arabia is vulnerable not only to a U.S. seizure of their land but to U.S. unofficial participation in a rebellion by minority Shi'a in the Eastern Province." The Eastern Province, which is largely Shi'a, happens to include the vast bulk of Saudi Arabia's oil fields. One other problem is that the INC does not represent the entire Iraqi opposition movement. The two main Kurdish parties, the Kurdistan Democratic Party and the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, though long-time bloody rivals, have momentarily patched things up. They've allied, in turn, with the Iraqi National Accord, a CIA-backed group of former Iraqi military officers, and with the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq to form the Group of Four, an alternative to the INC that, they hope, will attract further American support. There is even a monarchist group trying to restore T.E. Lawrence's Hashemite kingdom in Baghdad that, some say, could promote a kingship in Iraq for Prince Hassan of Jordan, a Hashemite himself. Do these strategic realities, and the wide ridicule of Chalabi among Middle East experts, matter? "I don't think their point of view is relevant to the debate any longer," says Danielle Pletka, vice president of the American Enterprise Institute. "Sor-ry!" Thanks to the "entire vast army [of neoconservatives]" who've successfully won over Bush and Cheney, she observes, the INC has something that the other groups lack: the support of the president of the United States.
Robert Dreyfuss | | | | Alpha | | Posted: Sun Nov 23, 2003 10:26 am Post subject: U.S. is acting as Israel's proxy by invading Iraq... |
| http://www.nowarforisrael.com
Subj: U.S. is acting as Israel's proxy by invading Iraq...by Ronald Bleier
Date: 11/22/03 11:09:53 PM Pacific Standard Time
From: RePorterNoteBook
April 2003
Invading Iraq: Converging u.s. and Israeli Agendas
by Ronald Bleier
http://desip.igc.org/ConvergingAgendas.html
For a brief moment in early March the media was alive with the question of whether the U.S. is acting as Israel's proxy by invading Iraq. On network TV, Tim Russert asked Richard Perle, a high profile advocate of removing Saddam Hussein, whether the proposed war would be serving U.S. interests, and specifically about the link to Israel. Similar issues were raised in a New York Times Op-ed by Bill Keller ("Is it Good for the Jews," March 8, 2003) and in a Times news article on the subject ("Divide Among Jews Leads to Silence on Iraq War," 3.15.03). Patrick Buchanan in The American Conservative ("Whose War?" March 24, 2003) and Stephen J. Sniegoski in Current Concern ("The War on Iraq: Conceived in Israel," February 2003) published long articles arguing that this is a war on Israel's behalf. Slate's Michael Kinsley wrote a tongue in cheek article on the subject (J'Accuse, Sort Of, 3.12.03).
Activist Ali Abunimah lists three ways in which Israel could hope to gain by the Iraq war. First, it would eliminate Iraq as a potential rival. Second, by increasing "the already deep alienation between Arab and American societies, such a war [would be] good for Israel." Third, the U.S. war against Iraq might give the government of Ariel Sharon cover to crack down even harder on the Palestinians, and perhaps even implement mass expulsions of Palestinians from the Occupied Territories. ("Yearning for World War IV: The Israeli-Iraq connection," October 3, 2000, The Electronic Intifada.)
Key people in Bush administration are on record as strong supporters of Israel and of regime change in Iraq, among them: Vice President Dick Cheney, Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld, Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, Undersecretary of Defense for Policy, Doug Feith, Under Secretary, Arms Control and International Security, John R. Bolton, senior director on Middle Eastern affairs on the National Security Council, Eliot Abrams.
These administration figures and others are promoters of Israel's right wing Likud party in Israel and Israel's superhawkish prime minister, Ariel Sharon. They advocate rolling back the territorial concessions Israel made under the now defunct Oslo accords (1993). Secretary Rumsfeld publicly referred to the "so called occupied territories" in August 2002 and implied that since Israel won them when it urged neighboring countries not to get involved in war, it has no obligation to return those territories.
The events of 9/11 provided administration hawks with the "Pearl Harbor" that allowed them to implement their long standing demand for regime change in Iraq. These plans go back to the neoconservatives who began promoting the removal of Saddam Hussein in the aftermath of the first Gulf War. Many of the neoconservatives were liberals who drifted to the right when the Democratic Party moved to anti-war McGovernite left. And concern for Israel loomed large in their change. As political scientist, Benjamin Ginsberg puts it: 'One major factor that drew them inexorably to the right was their attachment to Israel and their growing frustration during the 1960s with a Democratic party that was becoming increasingly opposed to American military preparedness and increasingly enamored of Third World causes [e.g., Palestinian rights]. In the Reaganite right's hard-line anti-communism, commitment to American military strength, and willingness to intervene politically and militarily in the affairs of other nations ...neocons found a political movement that would guarantee Israel's security. (Stephen J. Sniegoski, op.cit.; For a similar analysis see Buchanan, op.cit.)
Thus support for Israel is at the root of the neoconservative movement which has risen to the top policy making echelon of the U.S. government. As far back as the end of the first Gulf War, Paul Wolfowitz and Dick Cheney urged the adoption of a military plan to invade Iraq but were blocked by Colin Powell (at that time, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff) and General Norman Schwartzkopf. In February 1998 Wolfowitz and a host of neocons signed an open letter to President Clinton which proposed bringing down Saddam Hussein. (Sniegoski, op cit.)
On the one hand it would seem to go against all logic that a tiny country like Israel, albeit with the with the world's 7th, most powerful army and armed with nuclear weapons and delivery systems, could shape U.S. foreign policy. Nevertheless it shouldn't be so surprising that this is the present case. We recall that the tiny Cuban lobby exercises powerful influence over Cuban policy even though they are at odds with the otherwise influential farm lobby. Similarly when it comes to Middle East issues, the extraordinary power of the Zionist lobby has been a fact of life for many years. On the other hand, the U.S. would not venture on such a war if its leadership didn't see clear political and strategic gains for itself.
The Israeli connection to the Iraq war was highlighted by the furor over Virginia Congressman Jim Moran's response in early March to a constituent question during a town hall meeting. He said: that "if it were not for the strong support of the Jewish community for this war with Iraq we would not be doing this. The leaders of the Jewish community are influential enough that they could change the direction of where this is going and I think they should."
He would have been on safer ground had he limited his remarks to the leaders of the Jewish community. Jews, like all other groups, are split on the war. One poll taken shortly before the beginning of the war indicated that 59% of Jews supported the war, matching the rest of the country. But the congressman was correct and extraordinarily courageous in pointing to the leadership of the major Jewish organizations and suggesting that they could have blocked this war. As a 13-year veteran member of the House, Jim Moran has been around long enough to understand how political power on Middle East issues operates in Congress. War against Iraq has so isolated the United States and makes so little sense that were it not perceived as good for Israel it would have had a more difficult time arousing sufficient support. Much of the mainstream media which is also largely controlled by pro-Zionist Jews played an important role in allowing this extremist agenda to go forward without significant question or debate.
(See appendix listing below for Jewish leadership of much of the mainstream media,)
When Congressman Moran says that the leadership of the Jewish community is influential enough to change the direction of where this is going, he is stating a simple truth about the power of the Zionist lobby which helps to explain the silence and timidity of the Democrats. The power of Zionist interests explains in part why many high profile Democrats such as Senators John Kerry, Hillary Rodham Clinton, Charles Schumer, Barbara Boxer and others voted to give President Bush the authority for war in October 2002 despite the manifest recklessness of the venture. They understand that opposition to perceived Israeli interests might well have a dramatic impact on campaign contributions since Jewish sources reportedly donate 50% or more of the total receipts to the Democratic party. (See Mother Jones 400;
http://www.motherjones.com/web_exclusives/special_reports/mojo_400/)
Support by the leadership of the Jewish community for war against Iraq represents a culmination of 50 years of U.S. support for Israel's expansionist and oppressive rule. The passionate attachment to Israel, the dual loyalty felt by many Americans -whereby Israel's interests are put on the same or higher level than U.S. interests -- has come back to haunt the United States through the agency of a President willing to adopt the most extravagant dreams of right wing Israelis and pro-Israeli hawks. The result is that the full might of the world's only super power has been dragged into Israel's service despite the costs, and the dangers and the folly of such a policy. Attachment to Israel has come back to haunt America by enabling a decisive shift in U..S. policy away from helping to preserve the peace and security of the world and turning the U.S. into an aggressor nation, just as Israel has been and continues to be.
A measure of the influence of right-wing pro Israeli hawks in this administration is the way they have allowed Ariel Sharon free reign to apply extraordinary and unending pressure on the Palestinians and to destroy the possibility for Palestinian civil society.
The Bush administration signaled their intention to leave the Palestinians to the tender mercies of the Israeli government as soon as they took office when they announced that they would allow the contending parties to settle their own differences. This ignored the disparity of power between the two sides and predictably the situation has deteriorated to its current awful level, ever spiraling downward with widening ripples into a hopeless future.
In the immediate aftermath of 9/11, it was recognized that the Israeli Palestinian conflict was at the heart of the Al-Qaeda attack and there was a fair amount of attention to the subject even in the United States. However, as time passed, the issue returned to its familiar marginalization, banished from the major media. But it is already clear that the war against Iraq will only exacerbate matters as Sharon continues to put more and more pressure on the Palestinians. As a result, the Muslim and Arab world are likely to be further inflamed, even more now as a longer than expected war is bound to inflict terrible suffering on many Iraqis. All the talk of a road map towards a Palestinian state is widely regarded as mere public relations from a Bush administration dead set against any concessions to the Palestinians.
Permanent War: A Separate U.S. Agenda
In addition to serving Israel, there is a separate and converging U.S. interest in waging war against Iraq: namely the Bush administration's pursuit of an agenda of permanent war. Their policy of pre-emption represents a radical break with the past. The new National Security Strategy issued in September 2002, with its breathtaking justification of pre-emptive military action represents a revolutionary break with fifty years of American policy and raises questions about the government's commitment to U.S. security. It's true that the U.S. has engaged in pre-emptive military action in the past, but pre-emption has never before been invoked as an ongoing policy, nor has it ever been used so audaciously in the face of such widespread opposition. As many have noted, the war against Iraq seems destined to spur rather than deter terrorism and perhaps provoke another 9/11-style attack on the American homeland. For this and other reasons it suggests that the security of the American people is not a priority for this government. Their apparent lack of interest in national security might explain President Bush's veto of $39 million for Port Container Security and cuts of more than $1 billion out of existing grants for local police/fire departments according to Democratic party sources.
See: http://www.house.government.appropriations_democrats/caughtonfilm.htm
How is it possible that the U.S. government could be disinterested, even antagonistic to the security of its people? The answer is that Americans already live in an Orwellian world where the leadership understands that another 9/11-style attack might very well advance their right wing domestic program and their international agenda of permanent war. In the climate of fear and revenge that such another attack would engender, the successor to the Patriot Act, already leaked to the press, would head up a list of Bush administration priorities that would almost certainly face little or no domestic opposition.
As noted above, the core of the neoconservative philosophy is the commitment to American military strength and the desire to use force as the chief option. Under President George W. Bush's leadership the U.S. has worked to free itself from the restraints of multilateralism and seeks war after war. As New York Times columnist Paul Krugman put it, the war against Iraq is merely "a pilot project," ("Things to Come," 3.18.03). If circumstances allow, they will seek to wage war against North Korea and Iran - the other wings of the axis of evil), and afterwards to pursue regime change in some or all of Israel's other enemies, including Syria, Lebanon, and Libya. During the second week of the war, Secretary Rumsfeld complained publicly about Syrian shipments of military equipment including night goggles to Iraq, hinting that an attack on Syria might be a natural outgrowth the Iraq war. The White House did not gainsay his remarks.
In the view of those currently running the U.S. government, the unrivaled military power of the U.S. can operate to best advantage in an atmosphere of anarchy and conflict. U.S. policy in the George W. Bush era, is similar to the unprovoked aggression that the world observed in the days of Hilter, Napoleon, Alexander the Great, and other leaders who stepped onto the world stage with unrivalled military force. Characteristic of the Bush team's brutal cynicism is their comparison of Saddam Hussein to Hitler when they are the ones who most resemble Hitler in their power, their ruthless determination for war at all costs and their threat to world peace and security.
The U.S. government is interested in war in part as a way of testing and employing their high tech military weaponry, including nuclear weapons. Since as far back as the Reagan administration they attempted to move nuclear weapons away from the sphere of deterrence to actual battlefield use. In the current administration, they have already moved to break down the administrative barriers to the use of nuclear weapons and to ease the way for their practical implementation. They have announced that if circumstances warrant they intend to use nuclear weapons even against countries that don't possess them. (See "The Nuclear Option in Iraq: The U.S. has lowered the bar for using the ultimate weapon," William M. Arkin, Los Angeles Times, 1.26.03 http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/wire/la-op-arkin26jan26.story)
The implications of the Bush agenda for permanent war go beyond rearranging the Middle East to Israel's liking. The logical conclusion to their policy is eventually to make war against Russia and China whom they regard as potential rivals. In effect, they want to make war against the whole world. They want to fight World War V after they have won WW3, the war against terrorism, and WW4 the war against militant Islam. It remains to be seen how far the world will allow them to pursue their goals. Noam Chomsky has suggested that their desire to crush any perceived challenges to U.S. power "poses serious dangers" and could even lead to "extinction of the species."
("Deep Concerns, March 20, 2003, distributed over the internet by Znet.) Extinction of the human species may actually be slightly ambitious even for these superhawks, but Chomsky's concern is a serious one. The threats of global warming, resource scarcity and the political tensions they generate are indicators of extraordinary pressures on our modern technological civilization and the Bush regime's prescription for global war can only hasten a day of reckoning.
Clearly the neoconservative war plans are rife with contradictions and ultimately suicidal, not to say reckless and irresponsible. But the important thing to note is that any policy has winners and losers and our task is to look at some of the consequences of a permanent war agenda. First of all, it is a highly promising avenue to re-election and permanent power. Just as the buildup to the Iraq war dominated the 2002 elections, so the Iraq war continues to obscure many other pressing domestic and economic issues that might otherwise be prominent. War divides the opposition and puts it on the defensive. Moreover when the country is at war, it greases the wheels of the right wing domestic agenda. A bloated military budget has already been passed with much more for the military on the way. We have already seen a curtailment of social spending, huge tax cuts for the wealthy, derailment of environmental controls, and an attack on civil liberties. If the war party manages to enact permanent war, it could result in permanent rule, an end to democracy, an end to the republic.
War for oil or war for imperialism? Not really
While Iraq's immense oil reserves are very important and already one of the contracts to rebuild the Iraqi oil infrastructure has gone to a Halliburton subsidiary and undoubtedly more such contracts will flow to American firms, nevertheless it's a misunderstanding to think that this is a "war for oil." The numbers tell a good part of the story. Although its oil reserves are second only to Saudi Arabia's, Iraq represents merely 3% of the world's pumping capacity. It would take ten years and an estimated $40 billion to bring Iraqi output to 6 million barrels a day (double its pre 1991 pumping level). Over the ten year post-war period, total revenue from Iraqi oil exports have been estimated at $300 billion, short of the estimated $350 billion that the war plus five years of peacekeeping is expected to cost the United States. The costs of rebuilding Iraq over the next ten years are estimated at $400 billion. In the current atmosphere it's more than likely that the bulk of Iraq's oil revenue will go towards rebuilding Iraq, rather than reimbursing the U.S. treasury for the costs of the war. (Donald F. Hepburn, "Is It a War for Oil," Middle East Policy, Vol X, No. 1 Spring 2003; see also "Iraq oil, the reality," Dilip Hiro, Middle East International, 10 January 2003)
Similarly the argument that this is a war for oil misses the point that such a war, however immoral would at least have a rational basis in attempting to secure important resources. Yet, before embarking on war, the U.S. was getting all the oil it wanted from Iraq and war has only curtailed these supplies, and could conceivably threaten other oil suppliers. The best way to secure Middle East oil would have been to seriously grapple with the Israeli Palestinian conflict and avoid war with Iraq at all costs. Paul Wolfowitz, chief architect of this war has been quoted as saying: "If we're not true to our principles, we're not serving our national interest." He believes that war on Iraq will engender more democracy in the Middle East and "the tendency toward successful representative self-government works for the benefit of the United States." ("First Stop Iraq," Time Magazine, 3.31.03) It's difficult to see how the reputedly brilliant Wolfowitz can actually believe this rubbish since everybody knows that a democratic Middle East would work against Israel's interests. Perhaps such talk is the way policy makers convince themselves of the justice of their cause. But in any event it should be clear that the Bush war policy is not a rational solution to the problem of scarce and valuable resources and has little to do with real world problem solving. Rather it is an ideological and messianic vision of pursuing a permanent war agenda by way of destroying Israel's enemies.
Similarly, the charge that this is a war to further U.S. imperialist aims misses the point that the U.S. already dominates the world, politically, militarily and economically. It is already a hyper-imperialist power.
The historical record shows that in the real world, hegemony never has been a winning grand strategy. The reason is simple: The primary aim of states in international politics is to survive and maintain their sovereignty. And when one state becomes too powerful - becomes a hegemon - the imbalance of power in its favor is a menace to the security of all other states. So throughout modern international political history, the rise of a would-be hegemon always has triggered the formation of counter-hegemonic alliances by other states. (Sniegoski, op cit.)
As an imperialist power there is little more that the United States could wish for aside from redrawing the Middle East map in order to eliminate Israel's enemies. But Israel has enemies because it dominates and represses Arab peoples in order to consolidate a Jewish state in the former Palestine. It's possible that the enormous military power of U.S. can help to enforce the most grandiose Israeli expansion plans, but this is an uncertain prospect for the long term. By opting for unprovoked aggression against Israel's enemies, the U.S. is embarking on a project beyond imperialism, and moving toward world war and Armageddon.
The End
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Appendix
JEWS IN THE MEDIA 4.3.3
Compiled by Jeffrey Blankfort
MORTIMER ZUCKERMAN, owner of NY Daily News, US News & World Report and chair of the Conference of Presidents of Major Jewish American Organizations, one of the largest pro-Israel lobbying groups.
LESLIE MOONVES, president of CBS television, great-nephew of David Ben-Gurion, and co-chair with Norman Ornstein of the Advisory Committee on Public Interest Obligation of Digital TV Producers, appointed by Clinton.
JONATHAN MILLER, chair and CEO of AOL division of AOL-Time-Warner
NEIL SHAPIRO, president of NBC News
JEFF GASPIN, Executive Vice-President, Programming, NBC
DAVID WESTIN, president of ABC News
SUMNER REDSTONE, CEO of Viacom, "world's biggest media giant" (Economist, 11/23/2) owns Viacom cable, CBS and MTVs all over the world, Blockbuster video rentals and Black Entertainment TV.
MICHAEL EISNER, major owner of Walt Disney, Capitol Cities, ABC.
RUPERT MURDOCH, Owner Fox TV, New York Post, London Times, News of the World (Jewish mother)
MEL KARMAZIN, president of CBS
DON HEWITT, Exec. Director, 60 Minutes, CBS
JEFF FAGER, Exec. Director, 60 Minutes II. CBS
DAVID POLTRACK, Executive Vice-President, Research and Planning, CBS
SANDY KRUSHOW, Chair, Fox Entertainment
LLOYD BRAUN, Chair, ABC Entertainment
BARRY MEYER, chair, Warner Bros.
SHERRY LANSING. President of Paramount Communications and Chairman of Paramount Pictures' Motion Picture Group.
HARVEY WEINSTEIN, CEO. Miramax Films.
BRAD SIEGEL., President, Turner Entertainment.
PETER CHERNIN, second in-command at Rupert Murdoch's News. Corp., owner of Fox TV
MARTY PERETZ, owner and publisher of the New Republic, which openly identifies itself as pro-Israel. Al Gore credits Marty with being his "mentor."
ARTHUR O. SULZBERGER, JR., publisher of the NY Times, the Boston Globe and other publications.
WILLIAM SAFIRE, syndicated columnist for the NYT.
TOM FRIEDMAN, syndicated columnist for the NYT.
CHARLES KRAUTHAMMER, syndicated columnist for the Washington Post. Honored by Honest Reporting.com, website monitoring "anti-Israel media."
RICHARD COHEN, syndicated columnist for the Washington Post
JEFF JACOBY, syndicated columnist for the Boston Globe
NORMAN ORNSTEIN, American Enterprise Inst., regular columnist for USA Today, news analyst for CBS, and co-chair with Leslie Moonves of the Advisory Committee on Public Interest Obligation of Digital TV Producers, appointed by Clinton.
ARIE FLEISCHER, Dubya's press secretary.
STEPHEN EMERSON, every media outlet's first choice as an expert on domestic terrorism.
DAVID SCHNEIDERMAN, owner of the Village Voice and the New Times network of "alternative weeklies."
DENNIS LEIBOWITZ, head of Act II Partners, a media hedge fund
KENNETH POLLACK, for CIA analysts, director of Saban Center for Middle East Policy, writes op-eds in NY Times, New Yorker
BARRY DILLER, chair of USA Interactive, former owner of Universal Entertainment
KENNETH ROTH, Executive Director of Human Rights Watch
RICHARD LEIBNER, runs the N.S. Bienstock talent agency, which represents 600 news personalities such as Dan Rather, Dianne Sawyer and Bill O'Reilly.
TERRY SEMEL, CEO, Yahoo, former chair, Warner Bros.
MARK GOLIN, VP and Creative Director, AOL
WARREN LIEBERFORD, Pres., Warner Bros. Home Video Div. of AOL- TimeWarner
JEFFREY ZUCKER, President of NBC Entertainment
JACK MYERS, NBC, chief….NYT 5.14.2
SANDY GRUSHOW, chair of Fox Entertainment
GAIL BERMAN, president of Fox Entertainment
STEPHEN SPIELBERG, co-owner of Dreamworks
JEFFREY KATZENBERG, co-owner of Dreamworks
DAVID GEFFEN, co-owner of Dreamworks
LLYOD BRAUN, chair of ABC Entertainment
JORDAN LEVIN, president of Warner Bros. Entertainment
MAX MUTCHNICK, co-executive producer of NBC's "Good Morning Miami"
DAVID KOHAN, co-executive producer of NBC's "Good Morning Miami"
HOWARD STRINGER, chief of Sony Corp. of America
AMY PASCAL, chair of Columbia Pictures
JOEL KLEIN, chair and CEO of Bertelsmann's American operations
ROBERT SILLERMAN, founder of Clear Channel Communications
BRIAN GRADEN, president of MTV entertainment
IVAN SEIDENBERG, CEO of Verizon Communications
WOLF BLITZER, host of CNN's Late Edition
LARRY KING, host of Larry King Live
TED KOPPEL, host of ABC's Nightline
ANDREA KOPPEL, CNN Reporter
PAULA ZAHN, CNN Host
MIKE WALLACE, Host of CBS, 60 Minutes
BARBARA WALTERS, Host, ABC's 20-20
.
MICHAEL LEDEEN, editor of National Review
BRUCE NUSSBAUM, editorial page editor, Business Week
DONALD GRAHAM, Chair and CEO of Newsweek and Washington Post, son
of
CATHERINE GRAHAM MEYER, former owner of the Washington Post
HOWARD FINEMAN, Chief Political Columnist, Newsweek
WILLIAM KRISTOL, Editor, Weekly Standard, Exec. Director Project for
a New American Century
RON ROSENTHAL, Managing Editor, San Francisco Chronicle
PHIL BRONSTEIN, Executive Editor, San Francisco Chronicle,
RON OWENS, Talk Show Host, KGO (ABC-Capitol Cities, San Francisco)
JOHN ROTHMAN, Talk Show Host, KGO (ABC-Capitol Cities, San Francisco)
MICHAEL SAVAGE, Talk Show Host, KFSO (ABC-Capitol Cities, San Francisco) Syndicated in 100 markets
MICHAEL MEDVED, Talk Show Host, on 124 AM stations
DENNIS PRAGER, Talk Show Host, nationally syndicated from LA. Has Israeli flag on his home page.
BEN WATTENBERG, Moderator, PBS Think Tank.
ANDREW LACK, president of NBC
DANIEL MENAKER, Executive Director, Harper Collins
DAVID REZNIK, Editor, The New Yorker
NICHOLAS LEHMANN, writer, the New York
HENRICK HERTZBERG, Talk of the Town editor, The New Yorker
SAMUEL NEWHOUSE JR, and DONALD NEWHOUSE own Newhouse Publications, includes 26 newspapers in 22 cities; the Conde Nast magazine group, includes The New Yorker; Parade, the Sunday newspaper supplement; American City Business Journals, business newspapers published in more than 30 major cities in America; and interests in cable television programming and cable systems serving 1 million homes.
DONALD NEWHOUSE, chairman of the board of directors, Associated Press.
PETER R KANN, CEO, Wall Street Journal, Barron's
RALPH J. & BRIAN ROBERTS, Owners, Comcast-ATT Cable TV.
LAWRENCE KIRSHBAUM, CEO, AOL-Time Warner Book Group
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Chinese Axiom:
When things are investigated, knowledge is extended.
When knowledge is extended, the will becomes sincere.
When the will is sincere, the mind is correct.
When the mind is correct, the self is cultivated.
--Confucius
"An anti-Semite condemns people because they are Jews" --ICHEE.org
I am not an anti-Semite
---Michael Santomauro
"An anti-Semite is someone that the Jews hate."
---Joe Sobran
Another way of putting it:
An anti-Semite used to be someone who does not like Jews; now it is
someone who the Jews do not like.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
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RePorterNoteBook@aol.com | | | | Alpha | | | | Alpha | | Posted: Mon Nov 24, 2003 4:21 pm Post subject: Iraq Instability the Intended Result |
| http://www.nowarforisrael.com
Subj: Iraq Instability the Intended Result
Date: 11/24/03 4:28:16 AM Pacific Standard Time
From: hectorpv@comcast.net
To: hectorpv@comcast.net
Sent from the Internet (Details)
Friends,
Iraq Instability the Intended Result
This piece by Michael Doliner provides more reasons as to why the existing chaotic situation in Iraq, with its concomitant huge financial burden for the United States, was the expected outcome in Iraq, as opposed to the neocon optimistic predictions of an easy occupation and a reconstruction of Iraq that could be paid for by Iraq’s oil wealth. As Doliner writes: "The plan, from the start, was unworkable, and one must either assume those in charge are completely incompetent, admittedly a plausible assumption, or that the present outcome is not that far from what they expected. I do not mean that they expected the resistance to be so stiff (though they should have) or that their pretext for the war would be so transparently exposed as lies, but simply that they never intended to restore Iraq to anything like a functioning state."
Doliner focuses on Iraq’s enormous debt—the highest in the world in ratio to national income. Iraq would have to greatly increase its oil production for its national income to even exceed the interest accruing on its debt.. "To increase oil export to the roughly 2.4 million barrels a day prewar figure will require at minimum $10-15 billion investment in infrastructure according to most estimates. No oil company will invest this money in the political morass that is now Iraq. Without this investment Iraq will have a GDP of far less than even the interest accruing on the loan. Right after the war many advocated debt forgiveness for Iraq, but creditors resisted."
The author maintains that the debt cannot simply be written off because it would provide the basis for other debtor nations to demand similar treatment. "Iraq could only emerge from its present catastrophe if it renounced all its former obligations and started afresh. Such a course could never be undertaken while the United States is in control. For the United States to countenance renunciation of Iraqi debt would be to countenance the renunciation of other debt including the debt Russia assumed as a successor state to the Soviet Union and the debt previously incurred by corrupt dictators and now burdening Latin American countries such as Argentina and Chile. Much of this debt is owed to American institutions."
Then the author goes on to imply that the easily foreseen dire conditions now prevailing in Iraq might have been the intended consequence of the war. "So as long as the United States stays in Iraq, it will remain a zone of chaos, a zone that is likely to spread into neighboring states. That this would happen was not hard to predict, but could this result have been the intention of the Bush administration? Again, it was not difficult to determine Iraq’s debt and the probable costs of reconstruction. Nor was it hard to anticipate the political chaos that followed the invasion. Either the Bush Administration had no member capable of adding or thinking politically, or it was aware from the start that reconstruction was not in the cards. Incompetence or calculation?"
Doliner seems to lean to the view that the existing chaos and devastation was the intended result. "Iraq’s wealth, its oil, would be even more valuable without its population. Indeed, without that population oil companies would have a far easier time exploiting it. To extract oil, undermine OPEC, and aid Israel in its battle with the Arab states surrounding her might have been rational motives, but only if the plan were to devastate Iraq so that it could offer no further resistance." The author summarizes: "To destroy the political structure of a country, leaving the population helpless against expropriation is a rational, Machiavellian, if monstrous, political intention."
I think that the author of this article almost has it correct, although the purpose of the unsettled conditions in Iraq would be to benefit Israel, (as the Likudniks envision Israeli security), not to facilitate the acquisition of oil. Oil could be better obtained by stability. And representatives of the oil interests actually opposed the war and had actually sought the lifting of sanctions so as to allow American companies to become involved in Iraqi oil Moreover, there is some evidence that Saddam, through back channels, offered American companies lucrative oil deals in order to state off the US invasion. [David Rennie, "Saddam 'offered Bush a huge oil deal to avert war,'" Telegraph, November 7, 2003, Lebanon Wire, http://www.lebanonwire.com/0311/03110702TGR.asp ; Gary Leupp, "’They Were All Non-Starters’: The Thwarted Iraqi Peace Proposals," CounterPunch, November 10, 2003, http://www.counterpunch.org/leupp11102003.html ]
But certainly, expert opinion predicted dire consequences for an American occupation. For example, a year-long pre-war State Department study foresaw chaotic conditions in Iraq that would exist during the period of US occupation. [Eric Schmitt and Joel Brinkley, "State Dept. Study Foresaw Trouble Now Plaguing Iraq," New York Times, October 19, 2003, http://www.truthout.org/docs_03/102003D.shtml] The CIA also warned the Bush administration of extensive post-war resistance that would make reconstruction extremely difficult. [Bryan Bender, "CIA Warned Bush of Iraq War Guerrilla Peril, Boston Globe, August 9, 2003, http://globalsecurity.com/iraq/cia_warned.htm]
More significantly, and despite administration rhetoric to the contrary, an exhaustive pre-war report conducted in the fall of 2002 by the US Defense Department's Energy Infrastructure Planning Group contended that an oil bonanza should not be expected because of the dilapidated condition of the Iraqi oil infrastructure. It held that Iraq’s oil infrastructure would require years of work and billions of dollars in investment before it would provide plentiful oil. [Rupert Cornwell, "Pentagon officials ignored reports on dire state of Iraq's oil industry," Independent, October 6, 2003, http://www.rense.com/general42/oosl.htm ; Jeff Gerth, "Report Offered Bleak Outlook About Iraq Oil," New York Times, October 5, 2003, http://middleeastinfo.org/article3460.html ]
Furthermore, military experts such as Maj. Gen. Anthony Zinni, who headed the US Central Command from 1997 to 2000 and was later George W. Bush's special envoy to the Israeli/Palestinian negotiations, also predicted difficult conditions for American occupation forces from Iraqi opposition. [Eric Alterman, "Why Chickenhawks Matter," http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20031201&s=alterman ]
The fact of the matter is that outside of the neoconservatives, expert opinion was largely either opposed to or, at best, lukewarm to the invasion of Iraq. Among those foreign policy experts questioning the invasion were Larry Eagleburger, Brent Scowcroft, James Baker, Zbigniew Brzezinski. Now, these individuals had held leading national security positions in previous administrations, including that of George Bush the Elder.
The crux of the matter is that neoconservative rosy views of the occupation completely went against the views of experts and government studies of the subject. The question is why the neocons held such wrongheaded views. Were they simply incompetent, naïve babes in the woods as some critics seem to think?
There are some obvious reasons to reject the "neocons as incompetents" theory beginning with the obvious fact that neocons are intelligent, successful individuals. To say that they were incompetent is to take at face value their pro-war propaganda., which should be looked upon as simply good propaganda to advance their Middle East war agenda. Remember that their mentor Leo Strauss stressed the need to deceive the masses in order to advance a hidden agenda, though I don’t think Strauss’ teaching was necessary to convey this obvious lesson.
More importantly, the destabilization of the Middle East was a long-held Likudnik position, which the neoconservatives openly embraced. I brought this out in my essay "The War on Iraq: Conceived in Israel," [http://www.thornwalker.com:16080/ditch/conc_toc.htm] "War on Iraq: Conceived in Israel," [http://www.currentconcerns.ch/archive/20030102.php]
An increasing number of commentators now identify the neocons as the driving force for the Iraq war, but few have looked into this Israeli Likudnik background. That some American Jews might try to use the US government to advance the interests of Israel is a taboo issue. (Presumably, we are really supposed to believe that AIPAC is working for US interests by its efforts to advance Israel.)
A long-standing Likudnik view has been that a destabilized, fragmented Middle East would enhance Israel security. This destabilization and fragmentation policy was put forth in a 1982 policy paper entitled, "A Strategy for Israel in the 1980s," authored by Oded Yinon. Yinon proposed that Israel would engage in military action to bring about the dissolution of its Middle East enemies. The late critical commentator on Israel affairs Israel Shahak described this proposal in his "The Zionist Plan for the Middle East." . In summarizing this strategy, Shahak observed that Yinon’s essay "represents … the accurate and detailed plan of the present Zionist regime (of Sharon and Eitan) for the Middle East which is based on the division of the whole area into small states, and the dissolution of all the existing Arab states." Shahak continued: "To survive, Israel must 1) become an imperial regional power, and 2) must effect the division of the whole area into small states by the dissolution of all existing Arab states. Small here will depend on the ethnic or sectarian composition of each state. Consequently, the Zionist hope is that sectarian-based states become Israel’s satellites and, ironically, its source of moral legitimation." [http://www.theunjustmedia.com/the%20zionist_plan_for_the_middle_east.htm]
The neoconservatives copied this Likud strategy. Richard Perle, David Wurmser, and Douglas Feith, openly pushed this destabilization strategy in their 1996 study, "A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm," which was originally prepared as a working paper for then-Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel. In this work, the elimination of Saddam's regime would serve as a first step towards eliminating the anti-Israeli governments of Syria, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, and Iran. [The Institute for Advanced Strategic and Political Studies’ "Study Group on a New Israeli Strategy Toward 2000," "A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm," http://www.israeleconomy.org/strat1.htm ]
The report was a framework for a series of follow-up reports on strategy, one of which by David Wurmer, entitled "Coping with Crumbling States:A Western and Israeli Balance of Power Strategy for the Levant," emphasized the fragility of Syria and Iraq, and how Israel should take advantage of that situation. The report read: "Syria’s and Iraq’s regimes are based on Baathism, a variant of Nasser’s brand of secular-Arab nationalism. Baathism has failed. . . . Underneath facades of unity enforced by state repression, their politics are still defined primarily by tribalism, sectarianism, and gang/clan-like competition. It is unlikely that any institutions created by tyrannical secular-Arab nationalist leaders, particularly the army, will escape being torn apart." [http://www.israeleconomy.org/strat2.htm ]
Notably, there was no mention of democracy in these proposals; they were oriented toward strictly Realpolitik. The goal was not to create stable, productive Middle East states, but instead dissolved, fragmented entities that would not be any threat to Israel. It might be added that stable, economically productive, democratic neighbors would be anathema to Likudniks. Democratic states would be almost guaranteed to be anti-Israel, since Arab/Islamic opinion is anti-Zionist. Stable, economically productive Middle Eastern states (controlling a large portion of the world’s oil reserves), who would work together rather than fight each other, would be able to put immense pressure on Israel regarding the Palestinian issue.
It is quite apparent that the war on Iraq has achieved positive results from the neocon/Likudnik perspective--the weakening of Israel's Middle East enemies, the US planted more firmly in the Middle East in opposition to Israel's enemies, the worsening of the Palestinian position, a firmer alliance between Israel and the US, the Middle Eastern states faced with destabilizing terror attacks, and international pressure being placed on Iran to eliminate its nuclear program. Even the fact that the Arabs/Muslims are fighting the US is a positive achievement from the Likudnik position. In short, not only is Israel not alone as an enemy of the Arabs/Muslims, it would actually seem that the US has replaced Israel as the foremost enemy--a very good achievement from the position of Israeli national security. None of this is to deny that the neocons would prefer to have even greater achievements: regime change throughout the entire Middle East with pro-Israel puppet regimes installed by the US. But such a development was unlikely and cannot be attained at this moment because of political realities. But again it should be emphasized that from the neocon/Likudnik perspective the power situation in the Middle East has much improved since 9/11/2001.
Does this mean that the neocons were simply agents of Likudnik Israel, hijacking American foreign policy for the interest of another country? As I have written before, it would simply seem that neoconservatives view American foreign policy through the lens of Israeli interest (as Likudniks perceive Israeli interest). Quite likely they view American and Israeli interests to be identical. The idea that some Americans might be motivated by an attachment to a foreign country and that they could be influential in determining American foreign policy is not such an outlandish, unheard-of idea. Historians and other commentators have frequently stated that German-Americans, Cuban-Americans, Polish-Americans, and other ethnic groups have been influenced in their foreign policy views by their attachment to a foreign country. Historians have stated that Woodrow Wilson’s support for England in World War I was, in part, due to a pro-English bias. If Israel and Jews were not involved, there would be nothing extraordinary about this thesis. .
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http://www.antiwar.com/orig/doliner2.html
The Motive for the Invasion
by Michael Doliner
November 22, 2002
"This follows also on another natural and common necessity, which always causes a new prince to burden those who have submitted to him with his soldiery and with infinite other hardships which he must put upon his new acquisition. In this way you have enemies in all those whom you have injured in seizing that principality, and you are not able to keep those friends who put you there because of your not being able to satisfy them in the way they expected, and you cannot take strong measures against them, feeling bound to them. For, although one may be very strong in armed forces, yet in entering a province one has always need of the goodwill of the natives.
"But in maintaining armed men there in place of colonies one spends much more, having to consume on the garrison all the income from the state, so that the acquisition turns into a loss, and many more are exasperated, because the whole state is injured; through the shifting of the garrison up and down all become acquainted with hardship, and all become hostile, and they are enemies who, whilst beaten on their own ground, are yet able to do hurt. For every reason, therefore, such guards are as useless as a colony is useful."
~Machievelli, The Prince
Those who prosecuted the war against Iraq should have known these passages. After all, The Prince should be on the basic reading list for anyone interested in government. The plan, from the start, was unworkable, and one must either assume those in charge are completely incompetent, admittedly a plausible assumption, or that the present outcome is not that far from what they expected. I do not mean that they expected the resistance to be so stiff (though they should have) or that their pretext for the war would be so transparently exposed as lies, but simply that they never intended to restore Iraq to anything like a functioning state. Hounding the bureaucracy to extinction and dismissing the army are precisely wrong moves for anyone wanting to stabilize the country, but rational for someone who wants to destroy it. They must have known, unless they are completely incompetent, that chaos would follow their actions.
If the hope was to rebuild Iraq it was folly also because of Iraq’s economic situation. Reconstruction in Iraq under American occupation will never happen. Here is an account of Iraqi debt:
"Estimates of Iraq's indebtedness vary greatly, from 60 billion to several hundred billion dollars. The most comprehensive study of Iraqi debts, by the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), calculates Iraq's total debt to be $127 billion, of which $47 billion is accrued interest (based on 2001 World Bank figures). Iraq owes a further $199 billion in Gulf War compensation and $57 billion in pending contracts signed between the Saddam Hussein regime and foreign companies and governments. Iraq's overall financial burden, according to the CSIS figures, is $383 billion.
"Based on these figures, Iraq's financial obligations are 14 times its estimated annual gross domestic product (GDP) of $27 billion – a staggering $16,000 per person. Measured by the debt-to-GDP ratio, Iraq's financial burden is over 25 times greater than Brazil's or Argentina's, making Iraq the developing world's most indebted nation."
The $27 billion GDP mentioned above is Iraq’s income from oil sales before the invasion. Even with the optimistic figures presently given, Iraq now has only a third of that. To increase oil export to the roughly 2.4 million barrels a day prewar figure will require at minimum $10-15 billion investment in infrastructure according to most estimates. No oil company will invest this money in the political morass that is now Iraq. Without this investment Iraq will have a GDP of far less than even the interest accruing on the loan. Right after the war many advocated debt forgiveness for Iraq, but creditors resisted. Here is Bloomberg.com’s take on the situation:
"United Nations, May 8 (Bloomberg) – The Bush administration's plan to rebuild Iraq, including a request that more than a dozen creditor countries forgive $127 billion of Iraqi debt, is getting little support from France, Germany and Russia, who opposed the U.S.-led invasion that toppled Saddam Hussein's regime last month.
"Negotiations – covering sovereign debt owed to such nations as Russia, Poland, Egypt and Germany as well as claims from Iraq's 1990 invasion of Kuwait – may hinder Iraq's reconstruction, according to Robert Hormats, a managing director of Goldman Sachs Group Inc. and a former deputy assistant secretary of state in the Reagan administration.
"'This will be the biggest renegotiation of financial obligations in history and probably the most rancorous,' said Hormats, who also was an economic adviser in the administrations of Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter. 'The countries that are in control have very little of the debt, so they will pressure others to give, and those nations will demand concessions.'
"U.S. Treasury Secretary John Snow asked for debt reduction in meetings of the Group of Seven industrialized nations last month in Washington. While some creditors are willing to discuss debt in global forums such as the Paris Club, they haven't publicly made specific counterproposals.
"Agreement to cut Iraq's debt is critical because a resumption of Iraq's oil sales at prewar levels of 2.4 million barrels a day won't be enough to finance a reconstruction that may cost as much as $100 billion, according to Hormats.
"'Not even close,' Hormats said in an interview."
That was on May 8. Nothing significant has happened since then except for further destruction of Iraq and the further impoverishment of the people so that virtually 100% are now dependent on international food programs for survival, programs that the UN, obviously, can no longer administer. The theoretical costs of reconstruction are rising daily. There is far more that could be said about this, but it is not necessary. Iraq could only emerge from its present catastrophe if it renounced all its former obligations and started afresh. Such a course could never be undertaken while the United States is in control. For the United States to countenance renunciation of Iraqi debt would be to countenance the renunciation of other debt including the debt Russia assumed as a successor state to the Soviet Union and the debt previously incurred by corrupt dictators and now burdening Latin American countries such as Argentina and Chile. Much of this debt is owed to American institutions.
So as long as the United States stays in Iraq, it will remain a zone of chaos, a zone that is likely to spread into neighboring states. That this would happen was not hard to predict, but could this result have been the intention of the Bush administration? Again, it was not difficult to determine Iraq’s debt and the probable costs of reconstruction. Nor was it hard to anticipate the political chaos that followed the invasion. Either the Bush Administration had no member capable of adding or thinking politically, or it was aware from the start that reconstruction was not in the cards. Incompetence or calculation?
In the beginning of the sixteenth century when Machiavelli wrote The Prince, the population of a country was needed to extract the country’s wealth. Iraq’s wealth, its oil, would be even more valuable without its population. Indeed, without that population oil companies would have a far easier time exploiting it. To extract oil, undermine OPEC, and aid Israel in its battle with the Arab states surrounding her might have been rational motives, but only if the plan were to devastate Iraq so that it could offer no further resistance. If so they must be planning for a lot more devastation. After a few more months of resistance the American public might be prepared for such a move.
To destroy the political structure of a country, leaving the population helpless against expropriation is a rational, Machiavellian, if monstrous, political intention. Perhaps the Bush Administration did not expect their pretexts – WMDs, links to al-Qaeda, and whatever – to be so thoroughly exposed as false. No doubt they expected to find some kind of spinnable evidence of these things. But such exposure only influences their ability to gain American public support, and in spite of it, support still remains strong. At worst they might have to wait until after the election to complete the plan. (Battlefield nuclear weapons are now being prepared.) I admit, the idea that devastation was the goal from the start is a horrible one, but the idea that the Bush administration actually believed in Iraqi reconstruction can only be explained by attributing complete incompetence to them. Aside from these two possibilities I see no other.
Continued American presence in Iraq will serve no purpose unless complete devastation is the goal. Iraq cannot recover under American auspices. Machiavelli saw all this clearly. Too much injury has been done to the local population for them ever to accept American, or puppet, rule. Reconstruction requires enormous expense and renunciation of the debt or its forgiveness and hence cannot proceed under American (or puppet) government. There are simply no achievable American goals in Iraq except to turn it into a failed state and extract oil from its corpse. What pursuit of such a policy would mean for American relations with the rest of the world is not hard to imagine. But I do not find it hard to believe that this was the plan all along. Bush administration avowal of imperial ambitions makes it seem plausible.
Michael Doliner studied with Hannah Arendt at the University of Chicago 1964-1970. He has taught at Valparaiso University and Ithaca College, but is now a businessman in Ithaca. | | | | Alpha | | Posted: Tue Nov 25, 2003 10:44 pm Post subject: Iraq: How Did We Get Here? |
| http://www.nowarforisrael.com
http://www.aljazeerah.info/Opinion%20editorials/2003%20Opinion%20Editorials/November/7%20o/Iraq%20How%20did%20we%20get%20here%20John%20Anast.htm
Opinion Editorials, November 2003, www.aljazeerah.info
Iraq: How did we get here?
John Anast
Al-Jazeerah, 11/7/03
As the battle rages in Iraq what do we really know about the reasons for the war? The weapons of mass destruction "WMD" have become harder to identify and as mysterious as UFO sightings. In fact a disturbing aspect of the hunt for WMD was the admission by Mr. Kay, who has no academic background in any scientific discipline, was that no "program" could be found supporting the claim that Iraq had attempted to reconstitute a nuclear capability. As investigations continue within the US Congress as to the nature and quality of intelligence provided to decision makers within the Bush Administration, a few well placed leaks and a few scant news articles are beginning to identify what actually happened. It seems that a small group of Zionists created and operated their own intelligence service within the Pentagon which came to be known as the Office of Special Plans "OSP" run by Douglas Feith, Mr. Shulski and Mr. Luti, under the supervision of Mr. Wolfowitz. According to a July 17, 2003 story in the Guardian by Julian Borge which is an expose on OSP, Israelis were admitted to the Pentagon on occasion without having to show identification or sign-in, allegedly as directly authorized by Mr. Feith. The now defunct OSP is at the center of the storm. It is suspected of rewriting Intelligence as well as providing information known to be false directly to decision makers in the Bush Administration without being vetted or reviewed by seasoned intelligence analysts at CIA.
The Guardian in the same article also reported that OSP had a "parallel ad hoc" sister organization within Sharon's office in Israel -- a separate function from " Mossad " . It was later learned from sources in the UK that a similar office was operating out of 10 Downing Street. The speculation is that Zionist agents in the US, Israel and the United Kingdom under the direction of Israel, directly and through surrogates, planted false intelligence in official Pentagon channels for use by the Bush Administration as a means to deceive the US Congress and the American people. There is further speculation that the Zionist agents were all too eager to circumvent US law and had no hesitation to provide false information to the US Congress. One may note that last statement is not surprising given some of these very same Zionist agents were convicted in the United States of that very offense in the past. It does not take much to assert that they placed the interests of Israel well above the interests of America. CIA reports resolving that Iraq would become a quagmire fuelled by Iraqi resistance to occupation were promptly discarded by the Bush Administration in favor of the ridiculous notion that the US Army would be welcomed as liberators. There is currently an effort emanating from the Vice President's office and from within the Pentagon to wholly blame CIA for faulty intelligence, as the "perpetrators" are attempting to find solace in another lie for the ghastly loss of American lives in Iraq and the economic toll yet to be felt in America. Sources mentioned that the task of rationalizing the intelligence product was well beyond the capability of Dr. Rice at the National Security Council "NSC" who could not handle the task. It may well be that Rice, et al seem more interested in covering-up their errors than in setting forth exactly how their Zionist mentors subverted and co-opted their work.
Some were surprised that these same Zionist fanatics went as far as to out a CIA operative in the press as an alleged slap against her husband Ambassador Wilson. More likely it was a salvo meant to stop similar leaks in an effort to cover-up the connections between prominent members of the Bush Administration, NSC staff and the Israeli operation to deceive the President of the United States, the Congress and the American people, which was apparently not that difficult. It should be no surprise to anyone that Israeli agents in America would disclose information harmful to American interests when their actions are directly responsible for the deaths of over 350 (and rising) US military personnel in Iraq (as well as 1,000 wounded) and have thus far cost the US over $150 Billion (and counting). I have heard it said that within the Administration there is a strategy to wait until after the 2004 presidential election to take action quietly against some people at Pentagon and within the White House itself. It seems that they do not wish to appear "stupid" before the American people.
As to the real reason for the war in Iraq, well that is all too easy to answer. The Iraq war which is spiraling out of control was actually about oil, but not oil destined for the United States. Israel, through deception, instigated the conflict in an attempt to gain access to Iraqi oil. I am sure that many are familiar with the pipeline which runs from Iraq into Jordan and at one time continued on to Haifa. While the pipeline was used to ship oil to Jordan the flow to Palestine was cutoff in 1948. Israel actually had military plans to attack Iraq on its own and steal the oil as outlined in an extensive 17 April article, updated 06 May 2003, by Joe Vialls entitled "Israel's Blitzkrieg on Middle East Oil" That said, Israel lacks the military resources for an extended campaign and direct ground access as well as the manpower to be able to hold a position in Southern Iraq, especially with the continued intafada and the likelihood that Syria and Iran would oppose such a move and attack Israeli positions in Iraq and Israel as well. So with few operational options to implement Israel did the next best thing it instigated a proxy war to be fought by the United States.
The ultimate goal of the Israeli failed plan was to create a "Rotterdam" type export operation at Haifa -- as brilliantly reported by Joe Vialls . A very strange idea considering that the pipeline traverses several Arab countries and is opposed by Iran. But the Israeli's figured that the cost benefit was well worth the effort and cost to America. According to Mr. Vialls' article the Israeli's estimated that the port of Haifa as an oil export terminal would generate $45 billion in annual fees. So Israel used its Zionist agents in America to dupe the Bush Administration (obviously not too hard) into attacking Iraq. While Americans are being killed in Iraq by the dozens, a faint echo of laughter may be heard in Tel Aviv. The Israeli plan also called for the US to attack Syria and Iran (and Saudi Arabia if necessary) as a means of quashing any meaningful opposition to reopening the pipeline.
It took surprisingly little additional effort for the Zionist agents of Israel in the United States to mirror the Israeli plan into official US plans, without attribution, so that they seemed complimentary and in strategic harmony. As if to suggest that their war was our war and that their strategic interests were the same as those of the United States, when nothing could be farther from the truth. The mere fact that Israel sought to implement its plan for oil conquest highlights the fact its strategic objectives are in direct conflict with the strategic regional objectives of America. In addition Israel's acquisition of a sub launched nuclear capability also underscores its desire to move away from dependence upon the US for deterrence. Unfortunately for Israel it is a blight upon the American taxpayer and cannot survive without the constant flow of monetary gifts from the very people it despises and has learned to ignore. The Israel experiment is a complete failure, its economy is in serious trouble and its reliance upon the United States has become problematic and an anathema to them. So if Israel were to become self-sufficient and in fact survive it would need a source of revenue -- oil, which is the premise of Mr. Vialls' article. While their plan failed and lacked the foresight and contingencies expected as opposition to the occupation of Iraq by average Iraqi's became a reality, what did they lose? They gained additional access to US technology, more military aid as well as additional economic aid. While they did not gain Iraqi oil, the US is paying the price in terms of both money and lives.
Turkey which recently refused a state visit by Sharon on his way back to Israel from Moscow would have been the big loser as the Zionist dream (really more of a nightmare) would have replaced Ceyhan as the principle export point in the Med. What every country in the Middle East region must remember is that the goal of Israel in not by any means peace in any sense of the word. Its goal is dominance of the entire region and complete annexation of territory well beyond Palestine. It should be clear by now that agreements with countries like Turkey are a rouse and should be recognized as such. With oil traders in Israel squawking about a "new Rotterdam", I am sure Turkey understands full well they were used as a pawn in a larger Israeli strategy which includes the domination and subjugation of Turkey as well. Palestine is the front line in a struggle against the state sponsored terrorism of Israel. The daily sacrifices made by the Palestinians against ethnic cleansing is a fight for their homeland to be sure, but it is also the finger in the dyke against the expansionist maniacal desires of Israel which threaten the entire Middle East.
The price to be paid by the United States for the sins of Israel are beyond calculation at this point. The Bush Administration's Iraq policy seems to be to prevent any free expression of democratic principles from forming a democratic Islamic government until after the 2004 elections. It seems clear to people on the ground, with exception to the Zionist propagandists who dominate the talk show circuit in the US, that an Islamic government in Iraq is inevitable. The mistakes made in both planning and implementation have been so gross and consistent that one must wonder if the goal of some at the Pentagon was in fact to prevent the quick reconstitution of Iraq? Iraqi owned businesses are being sold off to foreign interests, Israeli military intelligence bases are being constructed near the Iranian border and services have yet to be fully restored. Contracts for needed services have been reverted to sales of new equipment from US suppliers that in many instances the Iraqi people do not need or cannot use, but the sales go on. Some months ago the Pentagon and its civilian counterparts in Iraq decided that medical facilities would be restored and restricted to the hospitals exclusively so that new equipment could be provided as a boon to US suppliers, instead of providing needed medical services free to the average Iraqi in a secure location where they could feel safe. Very few if any American Iraqi doctors were contracted for their obviously needed contribution. In fact many American Iraqi doctors were rebuffed and had to make humanitarian efforts on their own. There were also plans to implement the re-training of the Iraqi military into regional units, and into police agencies to assure order in Iraq. But those plans were rejected at first, and are now only being reviewed for implementation. The human toll and costs of the sins of Israel in Palestine and now Iraq are beyond measure.
The entire world must join together to force peace on Israel -- which is what it fears most. After a Palestinian State (with full statehood) of contiguous territory is recognized, then countries may engage a disarmed Israel in treaties and trade. It is foolish for any country in the region to engage in discussions with Israel regarding any matter except for Palestine. Unless that is accomplished Israel will continue its push into Arab territory without much of a whimper from the Bush Administration here in occupied America. Since the war is being fought on behalf of Israeli interests think we should deduct the costs of the war from the annual military and financial aid to Israel.
* The Guardian article "The Spies who pushed for war" was written by Julian Borge and published July 17, 2003 (Below). The Joe Vialls article was published 17 April 2003 and updated 06 May 2003.
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The spies who pushed for war
Julian Borger reports on the shadow rightwing intelligence network set up in Washington to second-guess the CIA and deliver a justification for toppling Saddam Hussein by force
Thursday July 17, 2003 The Guardian
As the CIA director, George Tenet, arrived at the Senate yesterday to give secret testimony on the Niger uranium affair, it was becoming increasingly clear in Washington that the scandal was only a small, well-documented symptom of a complete breakdown in US intelligence that helped steer America into war.
It represents the Bush administration's second catastrophic intelligence failure. But the CIA and FBI's inability to prevent the September 11 attacks was largely due to internal institutional weaknesses.
This time the implications are far more damaging for the White House, which stands accused of politicising and contaminating its own source of intelligence.
According to former Bush officials, all defence and intelligence sources, senior administration figures created a shadow agency of Pentagon analysts staffed mainly by ideological amateurs to compete with the CIA and its military counterpart, the Defence Intelligence Agency.
The agency, called the Office of Special Plans (OSP), was set up by the defence secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, to second-guess CIA information and operated under the patronage of hardline conservatives in the top rungs of the administration, the Pentagon and at the White House, including Vice-President Dick Cheney.
The ideologically driven network functioned like a shadow government, much of it off the official payroll and beyond congressional oversight. But it proved powerful enough to prevail in a struggle with the State Department and the CIA by establishing a justification for war.
Mr Tenet has officially taken responsibility for the president's unsubstantiated claim in January that Saddam Hussein's regime had been trying to buy uranium in Africa, but he also said his agency was under pressure to justify a war that the administration had already decided on.
How much Mr Tenet reveals of where that pressure was coming from could have lasting political fallout for Mr Bush and his re-election prospects, which only a few weeks ago seemed impregnable. As more Americans die in Iraq and the reasons for the war are revealed, his victory in 2004 no longer looks like a foregone conclusion.
The White House counter-attacked yesterday when new chief spokesman, Scott McClellan, accused critics of "politicising the war" and trying to "rewrite history". But the Democratic leadership kept up its questions over the White House role.
The president's most trusted adviser, Mr Cheney, was at the shadow network's sharp end. He made several trips to the CIA in Langley, Virginia, to demand a more "forward-leaning" interpretation of the threat posed by Saddam. When he was not there to make his influence felt, his chief of staff, Lewis "Scooter" Libby, was. Such hands-on involvement in the processing of intelligence data was unprecedented for a vice-president in recent times, and it put pressure on CIA officials to come up with the appropriate results.
Another frequent visitor was Newt Gingrich, the former Republican party leader who resurfaced after September 11 as a Pentagon "consultant" and a member of its unpaid defence advisory board, with influence far beyond his official title.
An intelligence official confirmed Mr Gingrich made "a couple of visits" but said there was nothing unusual about that.
Rick Tyler, Mr Gingrich's spokesman, said: "If he was at the CIA he was there to listen and learn, not to persuade or influence."
Mr Gingrich visited Langley three times before the war, and according to accounts, the political veteran sought to browbeat analysts into toughening up their assessments of Saddam's menace.
Mr Gingrich gained access to the CIA headquarters and was listened to because he was seen as a personal emissary of the Pentagon and, in particular, of the OSP.
In the days after September 11, Mr Rumsfeld and his deputy, Paul Wolfowitz, mounted an attempt to include Iraq in the war against terror. When the established agencies came up with nothing concrete to link Iraq and al-Qaida, the OSP was given the task of looking more carefully.
William Luti, a former navy officer and ex-aide to Mr Cheney, runs the day-to-day operations, answering to Douglas Feith, a defence undersecretary and a former Reagan official.
The OSP had access to a huge amount of raw intelligence. It came in part from "report officers" in the CIA's directorate of operations whose job is to sift through reports from agents around the world, filtering out the unsubstantiated and the incredible. Under pressure from the hawks such as Mr Cheney and Mr Gingrich, those officers became reluctant to discard anything, no matter how far-fetched. The OSP also sucked in countless tips from the Iraqi National Congress and other opposition groups, which were viewed with far more scepticism by the CIA and the state department.
There was a mountain of documentation to look through and not much time. The administration wanted to use the momentum gained in Afghanistan to deal with Iraq once and for all. The OSP itself had less than 10 full-time staff, so to help deal with the load, the office hired scores of temporary "consultants". They included lawyers, congressional staffers, and policy wonks from the numerous rightwing thinktanks in Washington. Few had experience in intelligence.
"Most of the people they had in that office were off the books, on personal services contracts. At one time, there were over 100 of them," said an intelligence source. The contracts allow a department to hire individuals, without specifying a job description.
As John Pike, a defence analyst at the thinktank GlobalSecurity.org, put it, the contracts "are basically a way they could pack the room with their little friends".
"They surveyed data and picked out what they liked," said Gregory Thielmann, a senior official in the state department's intelligence bureau until his retirement in September. "The whole thing was bizarre. The secretary of defence had this huge defence intelligence agency, and he went around it."
In fact, the OSP's activities were a com plete mystery to the DIA and the Pentagon.
"The iceberg analogy is a good one," said a senior officer who left the Pentagon during the planning of the Iraq war. "No one from the military staff heard, saw or discussed anything with them."
The civilian agencies had the same impression of the OSP sleuths. "They were a pretty shadowy presence," Mr Thielmann said. "Normally when you compile an intelligence document, all the agencies get together to discuss it. The OSP was never present at any of the meetings I attended."
Democratic congressman David Obey, who is investigating the OSP, said: "That office was charged with collecting, vetting and disseminating intelligence completely outside of the normal intelligence apparatus. In fact, it appears that information collected by this office was in some instances not even shared with established intelligence agencies and in numerous instances was passed on to the national security council and the president without having been vetted with anyone other than political appointees."
The OSP was an open and largely unfiltered conduit to the White House not only for the Iraqi opposition. It also forged close ties to a parallel, ad hoc intelligence operation inside Ariel Sharon's office in Israel specifically to bypass Mossad and provide the Bush administration with more alarmist reports on Saddam's Iraq than Mossad was prepared to authorise.
"None of the Israelis who came were cleared into the Pentagon through normal channels," said one source familiar with the visits. Instead, they were waved in on Mr Feith's authority without having to fill in the usual forms.
The exchange of information continued a long-standing relationship Mr Feith and other Washington neo-conservatives had with Israel's Likud party.
In 1996, he and Richard Perle - now an influential Pentagon figure - served as advisers to the then Likud leader, Binyamin Netanyahu. In a policy paper they wrote, entitled A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm, the two advisers said that Saddam would have to be destroyed, and Syria, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, and Iran would have to be overthrown or destabilised, for Israel to be truly safe.
The Israeli influence was revealed most clearly by a story floated by unnamed senior US officials in the American press, suggesting the reason that no banned weapons had been found in Iraq was that they had been smuggled into Syria. Intelligence sources say that the story came from the office of the Israeli prime minister.
The OSP absorbed this heady brew of raw intelligence, rumour and plain disinformation and made it a "product", a prodigious stream of reports with a guaranteed readership in the White House. The primary customers were Mr Cheney, Mr Libby and their closest ideological ally on the national security council, Stephen Hadley, Condoleezza Rice's deputy.
In turn, they leaked some of the claims to the press, and used others as a stick with which to beat the CIA and the state department analysts, demanding they investigate the OSP leads.
The big question looming over Congress as Mr Tenet walked into his closed-door session yesterday was whether this shadow intelligence operation would survive national scrutiny and who would pay the price for allowing it to help steer the country into war.
A former senior CIA official insisted yesterday that Mr Feith, at least, was "finished" - but that may be wishful thinking by a rival organisation.
As he prepares for re-election, Mr Bush may opt to tough it out, rather than acknowledge the severity of the problem by firing loyalists. But in that case, it will inevitably be harder to re-establish confidence in the intelligence on which the White House is basing its decisions, and the world's sole superpower risks stumbling onwards half-blind, unable to distinguish real threats from phantoms. "
Earth, a planet hungry for peace
The Israeli apartheid (security) wall around Palestinian population centers (Ran Cohen, pmc, 5/24/03).
The Israeli apartheid (security) wall around Palestinian population centers in the West Bank, like a Python. (Alquds,10/25/03). | | | | Alpha | | Posted: Thu Dec 04, 2003 7:59 am Post subject: Insider info on the JINSA/PNAC Neo-Cons |
| Insider info on the JINSA/PNAC Neo-Cons
http://www.amconmag.com/12_1_03/feature.html
December 1, 2003 issue
In Rumsfeld’s Shop
A senior Air Force officer watches as the neocons consolidate their Pentagon coup.
By Karen Kwiatkowski
Lt. Col. Karen Kwiatkowski recently retired from the U.S. Air Force. Her final posting was as an analyst at the Pentagon. Below is the first of three installments describing her experience there. They provide a unique view of the Department of Defense during a period of intense ideological upheaval, as the United States prepared to launch—for the first time in its history—a “preventive” war. In early May 2002, I was looking forward to retirement from the United States Air Force in about a year. I had a cushy job in the Pentagon’s Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Policy, International Security Affairs, Sub-Saharan Africa.
In the previous two years, I had published two books on African security issues and had passed my comprehensive doctoral exams at Catholic University. I was very pleased with the administration’s Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Sub-Saharan Africa, former Marine and Senator Helms staffer Michael Westphal, and was ready to start thinking about my dissertation and my life after the military. When Mike called me in to his office, I thought I was getting a new project or perhaps that one of my many suggestions of fun things to do with Africa policy had been accepted. But the look on his face clued me in that this was going to be one of those meetings where somebody wasn’t leaving happy. After a quick rank check, I had a good idea which one it would be.There was a position in Near East South Asia (NESA) that they needed to fill right away. I wasn’t interested. They phrased the question another way: “We have been tasked to send a body over to Bill Luti. Can we send you?” I resisted—until I slowly guessed that in true bureaucratic fashion and can-do military tradition my name had already been sent over. This little soirée in Mike’s office was my farewell.I went back to my office and e-mailed a buddy in the Joint Staff. Bob wrote back, “Write down everything you see.” I didn’t do it, but these most wise words from a trusted friend proved the first of three omens I would soon receive.I showed up down the hall a few days later. It looked just like the office from which I came, newer blue cubicles, narrow hallways piled high with copy paper, newspapers, unused equipment, and precariously leaning map rolls. The same old concrete-building smell pervaded, maybe a little mustier. I was taking over the desk of a CIA loaner officer. Joe had been called back early to the agency and was hoping to go to Yemen. Before he left, he briefed me on his biggest project: ongoing negotiations with the Qatari sheiks over who was paying for improvements to Al Udeid Air Base. I was familiar with Al Udeid from my time on the Air Staff a few years before. Back then we seemed to like the Saudis, and our Saudi bases were a few hours closer to the action than Al Udeid, so the U.S. played a woo-me game. Now that we needed and wanted Al Udeid to be finished quickly and done up right, it was time for the emirs to play hard to get. Joe gave me the rundown on counterterrorism ops in Yemen and an upcoming agreement with the Bahraini monarch to extend our military-security agreement, locking in a relationship just in case those Bahraini experiments with democracy actually took off.I had an obligatory meeting with the deputy director, Paul Hulley, Navy Captain. This meeting followed a phone call in which I hadn’t been as compliant as I should have been with a Navy Captain, and since Paul had handled my bad attitude with candor and grace, I was determined to like him—and I did. I gave him my story: I was a year from retirement and, more importantly, I was in a car pool. I’d be working a 7:15 to 17:30 schedule. He was neither charmed nor impressed. He advised that I’d need to be working a lot longer than that. Then we stepped in to meet Deputy Undersecretary of Defense Bill Luti. I knew Luti had a Ph.D. in international relations from the Fletcher School at Tufts and was a recently retired Navy Captain himself. At this point, I didn’t know what a neocon was or that they had already swarmed over the Pentagon, populating various hives of policy and planning like African hybrids, with the same kind of sting reflex. Luti just seemed happy to have me there as a warm body.My second omen was the super-size bottles of Tums and Tylenol Joe left in his desk. The third occurred as I was chatting with my new office mate, a career civil servant working the Egypt desk. As the conversation moved into Middle East news and politics, she mentioned that if I wanted to be successful here, I shouldn’t say anything positive about the Palestinians. In 19 years of military service, I had never heard such a politically laden warning on such an obscure topic to such an inconsequential player. I had the sense of a single click, the sound tectonic plates might make as they shift deep under the earth and lock into a new resting position—or when the trigger is pulled in a game of Russian roulette.I had never worked for neocons before, and the philosophical journey to understand what they stood for was not a trip I wanted to take. But my conversations with coworkers and some of the people I was meeting in the office opened my eyes to something strange and fascinating. Those who had watched the transition from Clintonista to Bushite knew that something calculated had happened to NESA. Key personnel, long-time civilian professionals holding the important billets, had been replaced early in the transition. The Office Director, second in command and normally a professional civilian regional expert, was vacant. Joe McMillan had been moved to the NESA Center over at National Defense University. This was strange because in a transition the whole reason for the Office Director being a permanent civilian (occasionally military) professional is to help bring the new appointee up to speed, ensure office continuity, and act as a resource relating to regional histories and policies. To remove that continuity factor seemed contraindicated, but at the time, I didn’t realize that the expertise on Middle East policy was being brought in from a variety of outside think tanks.Another civilian replacement about which I was told was that of the long-time Israel/Syria/Lebanon desk, Larry Hanauer. Word was that he was even-handed with Israel, there had been complaints from one of his countries, and as a gesture of good will, David Schenker, fresh from the Washington Institute, was serving as the new Israel/Syria/Lebanon desk.I came to share with many NESA colleagues a kind of unease, a sense that something was awry. What seemed out of place was the strong and open pro-Israel and anti-Arab orientation in an ostensibly apolitical policy-generation staff within the Pentagon. There was a sense that politics like these might play better at the State Department or the National Security Council, not the Pentagon, where we considered ourselves objective and hard boiled.The anti-Arab orientation I perceived was only partially confirmed by things I saw. Towards the end of the summer, we welcomed to the office as a temporary special assistant to Bill Luti an Egyptian-American naval officer, Lt. (later Lt. Cmdr.) Youssef Aboul-Enein. His job wasn’t entirely clear to me, but he would research bits of data in which Bill Luti was interested and peruse Arabic-language media for quotations or events that could be used to demonize Saddam Hussein or link him to nastiness beyond his own borders and with unsavory characters.While I was still hoping to be sent back to the Africa desk, I was also angling to take the NESA North Africa desk that would be vacated in July. During this time, May through mid-July, the news in the daily briefing was focused on war planning for the Iraq invasion. Slides from a CENTCOM brief appeared on the front page of the New York Times on July 5. A few weeks later, Secretary Donald Rumsfeld ordered an investigation into who leaked this information. The Air Force Office of Special Investigation was tasked to work with the FBI, and everyone in NESA was supposed to be interviewed.My interview, by two fresh-faced OSI investigators, occurred sometime in July. One handed me a copy of an article by William Arkin discussing Iraq-war planning published in May 2002 in the Los Angeles Times and asked if I knew Arkin. I didn’t recall the name, but when I checked I learned that he had spent time at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS). Apparently, Arkin had facilitated a leak six weeks before, but it hadn’t caused a fuss. I pointed out that I did know a person with major SAIS links who probably knew Arkin. They leaned forward eagerly. “Have you ever heard of Paul Wolfowitz?” They looked puzzled, so I called up the bio of the deputy secretary and showed them how he ran SAIS during most of the Clinton years. I suggested the investigation look at the answers to the cui bono question. I also told them no one in the military or at CENTCOM would leak war plans because as Rumsfeld accurately said, it gets people killed. But the politicos who were anxious to get the American people over the mental hump that the Bush administration was going to send troops to Iraq were not military and had both motive and opportunity to leak.During the summer, I assumed the duties of the North Africa desk. Part of my job was to schedule and complete two overdue bilateral meetings with longtime U.S. security partners Morocco and Tunisia. Bilateral meetings historically included a tailored regional-security briefing addressing Weapons of Mass Destruction threats and status. In planning my upcoming bilateral agendas and attendee lists, I discovered that Bill Luti had certain issues regarding the regional-security briefing, in particular with the aspects relating to WMD and terrorism.There had been an incident shortly before I arrived in which the Defense Intelligence Officer had been prohibited from giving his briefing to a particular country only hours before he was scheduled. During the summer, the brief was simply not scheduled for another important bilateral meeting. Instead, a briefing was prepared by another policy office that worked on non-proliferation issues. This briefing was not a product of the Defense Intelligence Agency or CIA but instead came from the Office of the Secretary of Defense.At the end of the summer of 2002, new space had been found upstairs on the fifth floor for an “expanded Iraq desk.” It would be called the Office of Special Plans. We were instructed at a staff meeting that this office was not to be discussed or explained, and if people in the Joint Staff, among others, asked, we were to offer no comment. We were also told that one of the products of this office would be talking points that all desk officers would use verbatim in the preparation of their background documents.About that same time, my education on the history and generation of the neoconservative movement had completed its first stage. I now understood that neoconservatism was both unhistorical and based on the organizing construct of “permanent revolution.” I had studied the role played by hawkish former Sen. Scoop Jackson (D-Wash.) and the neoconservative drift of formerly traditional magazines like National Review and think tanks like the Heritage Foundation. I had observed that many of the neoconservatives in the Pentagon not only had limited military experience, if any at all, but they also advocated theories of war that struck me as rejections of classical liberalism, natural law, and constitutional strictures. More than that, the pressure of the intelligence community to conform, the rejection of it when it failed to produce intelligence suitable for supporting the “Iraq is an imminent threat to the United States” agenda, and the amazing things I was hearing in both Bush and Cheney speeches told me that not only do neoconservatives hold a theory based on ideas not embraced by the American mainstream, but they also have a collective contempt for fact. By August, I was morally and intellectually frustrated by my powerlessness against what increasingly appeared to be a philosophical hijacking of the Pentagon. Indeed, I had sworn an oath to uphold and defend the Constitution against all enemies, foreign and domestic, but perhaps we were never really expected to take it all that seriously …
To be continued
______________________________________________
In a coming installment, Lieutenant Colonel Kwiatkowsi relates what happens when a group of Israeli generals treads the well-worn (for them) path to Douglas Feith’s office.
Additional material on Lieutenant Colonel Karen Kwiatkowsi:
http://www.warwithoutend.co.uk/articles/2003/11/18/us-air-force-lt-colonel-speaks-out-against-bush-neocons.php
Pat Buchanan's 'Whose War?' article (also from the American Conservative magazine) is a MUST READ as well (if you would like to know more about the JINSA/PNAC Neocons who have hijacked the Bush regime's Middle East policy for their Israel firster agenda):
http://www.amconmag.com/03_24_03/cover.html | | | | | ©2002-2009 WarWithoutEnd.co.uk |
