| Author | Message | | Alpha | | Posted: Sat Mar 01, 2003 11:03 pm Post subject: Pat Buchanan: Wages of Empire |
| Wages of Empire
By Patrick J. Buchanan, Patrick J. Buchanan is the author of "A Republic,
Not an Empire" and editor of the American Conservative.
http://www.latimes.com/la-op-buchanan23feb23,0,4668780.story
WASHINGTON -- To the acolytes of American empire, the invasion of Iraq is
but Act I in the exhilarating unfolding drama of the 21st century. All the
"Islamo-fascist" regimes of the Middle East and northern Africa -- Iran,
Syria, Sudan, Saudi Arabia, Libya -- are to follow Saddam Hussein's onto the
landfill of history. As democracy was imposed on Japan by Gen. Douglas
MacArthur, so shall it be imposed upon them all.
That is the vision of the neoconservatives to whom George W. Bush incarnates
their Woodrow Wilson, FDR and Winston Churchill. Yet, their disillusionment
is certain, for they misread the man and the times.
True, the relative power of the United States exceeds Britain's at the
height of its empire. But this war to "liberate" Iraq and reshape it in our
own image has already called into existence countervailing forces that stand
athwart our path to empire.
The first is the force of world opinion. To protest a U.S. war on Iraq
without U.N. Security Council sanction, there were million-person marches
last week in the streets of the capitals of our staunchest allies, Spain,
Italy, Britain. Polls show that huge majorities of Europeans oppose a U.S.
war without U.N. sanction. Among Arabs and Turks, the opposition is visceral
and well-nigh universal. We are as isolated as the Brits at the time of the
Boer War. It is the height of hubris to believe America can indefinitely
defy the whole world.
Even if Iraqis initially welcome U.S. soldiers as liberators, within months
there will be Islamic bombers willing to die to drive us out, as they drove
the French out of Algeria, the Israelis out of Lebanon, the Marines out of
Beirut. While the Arab and Islamic worlds did not succeed in many endeavors
in the 20th century, they did excel in terrorizing and expelling all the old
imperial powers. Our turn is next.
Neoconservatives came to their editors' cubicles a century too late. Peoples
everywhere have internalized Thomas Jefferson's dictum that all governments
derive their just powers from the consent of the governed, and Wilson's
gospel about all peoples being entitled to self-determination. This idea has
taken root in the hearts of men: better to fight than be ruled by
foreigners.
We may see American hegemony as benevolent. Is it not clear the world does
not?
Already, Cold War friends and allies are revisiting the issue of whether the
protection afforded by the presence of U.S. troops on their national soil is
worth the price paid in alienation from their own peoples.
According to the New York Times, Crown Prince Abdullah will ask for
withdrawal of all U.S. troops from Saudi Arabia at the end of the Iraq war.
The new president of South Korea was elected on a pledge to review the U.S.
troop presence there. The Pakistanis want us out, and, after 60 years of
occupation, even the Okinawans wish to be rid of us.
Nor should we resist the eviction orders, for the terrorists are only over
here because we are over there.
Worldwide, the anti-American card has become a trump. Herr Gerhard Schroeder
played it deftly to rescue himself from certain defeat in the German
elections. And while Americans may be boycotting French wines, French
Foreign Minister Dominique de Villepin is a more celebrated figure in Old
Europe than Colin L. Powell, let alone Bush.
And the staggering bill for empire has just begun to come in. Not only are
Japan, Germany and Saudi Arabia unwilling to pay the cost of this war, as
they did for Desert Storm, they are not in any condition to do so. Nor does
the United States, staring at deficits of $300 billion to $400 billion, have
the means to subsidize an empire.
The cost of invading and rebuilding Iraq has been put at $100 billion to
$200 billion by Bush's former economic advisor. That was last year.
More recent estimates have soared. Will Americans pay this immense sum to
reconstruct and "democratize" Iraq?
With California mulling higher taxes and firing workers to cover a
$35-billion deficit, how long will taxpayers tolerate shakedowns like
Ankara's demand for as much as $30 billion for U.S. troops to transit Turkey
and Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's demand for $15 billion in foreign
aid and loan guarantees to hold our coat?
Neoconservatives assure us that once Arab peoples see our destructive power
rain down on Iraq, they will line up with the winner and accept our
hegemony. But if such power has not brought respect for Israel in Lebanon or
on the West Bank, what guarantee is there it will make American occupiers
revered or loved?
History teaches otherwise. Five years after the United States had reduced to
smoldering ashes the greatest empire Asia had seen in centuries, little
North Korea, which did not even exist in 1945, launched an invasion to throw
the Americans off the peninsula and out of Asia. World champions never lack
for challengers.
Our own history teaches us this. A dozen years after the British army had
defeated our enemies in the French and Indian War, American patriots were
shooting British soldiers on the Concord Road.
George Washington wept with joy at America's alliance with France in 1777,
but a year after Yorktown, American agents were back-channeling Brits in
Paris to conclude a separate peace.
As for the Bush Doctrine -- "We will not allow the world's worst dictators
to get the world's worst weapons" -- it is already going the way of William
McKinley's "open door." With Russian assistance, Iran is building nuclear
plants it does not need and mining uranium. North Korea, with a secret
uranium- enrichment program running and a plutonium reactor being refired,
is openly taunting and defying the president. The American response to date:
repeated assurances that neither sanctions nor military strikes are being
considered.
Given the immense time, energy, resources and costs -- financial and
political -- of Bush's drive to disarm a weak, isolated Iraq, will the
president, when Baghdad is occupied, press on against other regimes, which
are not under U.N. sanction?
Where will he get his authority to go after Iran, Syria or Libya, as Sharon
and his Amen Corner demand? In Iraq, the president has the cover of U.N.
resolutions. Will the Brits be with us when we go after Iran?
Will British Prime Minister Tony Blair be up for a second adventure? Who
will be with us if we attack North Korea to disarm it? Can the United States
tread alone the path to empire in a world where the United States is
believed by much of mankind to be itself the great threat to world peace?
Imperialism is an idea whose time has come and gone, and, in any event, we
Americans were lousy imperialists. We lacked the tradition, the will to rule
other peoples, the perseverance required. We had not occupied the
Philippines a few years before Theodore Roosevelt, champion of annexation,
wished to be rid of it.
No, empire is not our future, or our fate. The braying Beltway
interventionists are only advancing the day when this generation too will
rid itself of empire and America returns to the foreign policy written in
its history and heart: the friend to freedom everywhere but the vindicator
only of our own.
That way lies long life for the republic. To hell with empire. | |  | | Alpha | | Posted: Sat Mar 01, 2003 11:11 pm Post subject: JINSA/PNAC to Establish Zionist (US) Empire in MidEast |
| JINSA/PNAC Trying to Establish Zionist (US) Empire in Middle East and Beyond in Association with Likud cronies (Sharon and Netanyahu in Israel) as following article conveys that Sharon wants US to go after Iran and Syria when Iraq has been invaded and occupied by US:
http://www.rense.com/general34/nesxt.htm
The following conveys the Dick Cheney connection between the radical JINSA/PNAC agenda and Halliburton (Cheney was the CEO of Halliburton and was on the board of advisors for JINSA before becoming Vice President and helped put fellow JINSA/PNAC Zionist extremists Paul Wolfowitz and Richard Perle into power in the current Bush regime):
War on Iraq: Conceived in Israel:
http://www.warwithoutend.co.uk/middle-east-and-asia/2003/02/10/the-war-on-iraq-conceived-in-israel.php
http://www.truthout.org/docs_03/printer_022803A.shtml
Blood Money
By William Rivers Pitt
t r u t h o u t | Perspective Thursday 27 February 2003
"In the counsels of Government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the Military Industrial Complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists, and will persist. We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes."
- President Dwight Eisenhower, January 1961.
George W. Bush gave a speech Wednesday night before the Godfather of conservative Washington think tanks, the American Enterprise Institute. In his speech, Bush quantified his coming war with Iraq as part of a larger struggle to bring pro-western governments into power in the Middle East. Couched in hopeful language describing peace and freedom for all, the speech was in fact the closest articulation of the actual plan for Iraq that has yet been heard from the administration.
In a previous truthout article from February 21, the ideological connections between an extremist right-wing Washington think tank and the foreign policy aspirations of the Bush administration were detailed.
The Project for a New American Century, or PNAC, is a group founded in 1997 that has been agitating since its inception for a war with Iraq. PNAC was the driving force behind the drafting and passage of the Iraqi Liberation Act, a bill that painted a veneer of legality over the ultimate designs behind such a conflict. The names of every prominent PNAC member were on a letter delivered to President Clinton in 1998 which castigated him for not implementing the Act by driving troops into Baghdad.
PNAC has funneled millions of taxpayer dollars to a Hussein opposition group called the Iraqi National Congress, and to Iraq's heir-apparent, Ahmed Chalabi, despite the fact that Chalabi was sentenced in absentia by a Jordanian court to 22 years in prison on 31 counts of bank fraud. Chalabi and the INC have, over the years, gathered support for their cause by promising oil contracts to anyone that would help to put them in power in Iraq.
Most recently, PNAC created a new group called The Committee for the Liberation of Iraq. Staffed entirely by PNAC members, The Committee has set out to "educate" Americans via cable news connections about the need for war in Iraq. This group met recently with National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice regarding the ways and means of this education.
Who is PNAC? Its members include:
* Vice President Dick Cheney, one of the PNAC founders, who served as Secretary of Defense for Bush Sr.;
* I. Lewis Libby, Cheney's top national security assistant;
* Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, also a founding member, along with four of his chief aides including;
* Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, arguably the ideological father of the group;
* Eliot Abrams, prominent member of Bush's National Security Council, who was pardoned by Bush Sr. in the Iran/Contra scandal;
* John Bolton, who serves as Undersecretary for Arms Control and International Security in the Bush administration;
* Richard Perle, former Reagan administration official and present chairman of the powerful Defense Policy Board;
* Randy Scheunemann, President of the Committee for the Liberation of Iraq, who was Trent Lott's national security aide and who served as an advisor to Rumsfeld on Iraq in 2001;
* Bruce Jackson, Chairman of PNAC, a position he took after serving for years as vice president of weapons manufacturer Lockheed-Martin, and who also headed the Republican Party Platform subcommittee for National Security and Foreign Policy during the 2000 campaign. His section of the 2000 GOP Platform explicitly called for the removal of Saddam Hussein;
* William Kristol, noted conservative writer for the Weekly Standard, a magazine owned along with the Fox News Network by conservative media mogul Ruppert Murdoch.
The Project for the New American Century seeks to establish what they call 'Pax Americana' across the globe. Essentially, their goal is to transform America, the sole remaining superpower, into a planetary empire by force of arms. A report released by PNAC in September of 2000 entitled 'Rebuilding America's Defenses' codifies this plan, which requires a massive increase in defense spending and the fighting of several major theater wars in order to establish American dominance. The first has been achieved in Bush's new budget plan, which calls for the exact dollar amount to be spent on defense that was requested by PNAC in 2000. Arrangements are underway for the fighting of the wars.
The men from PNAC are in a perfect position to see their foreign policy schemes, hatched in 1997, brought into reality. They control the White House, the Pentagon and Defense Department, by way of this the armed forces and intelligence communities, and have at their feet a Republican-dominated Congress that will rubber-stamp virtually everything on their wish list.
The first step towards the establishment of this Pax Americana is, and has always been, the removal of Saddam Hussein and the establishment of an American protectorate in Iraq. The purpose of this is threefold: 1) To acquire control of the oilheads so as to fund the entire enterprise; 2) To fire a warning shot across the bows of every leader in the Middle East; 3) To establish in Iraq a military staging area for the eventual invasion and overthrow of several Middle Eastern regimes, including some that are allies of the United States.
Another PNAC signatory, author Norman Podhoretz, quantified this aspect of the grand plan in the September 2002 issue of his journal, 'Commentary'. In it, Podhoretz notes that the regimes, "that richly deserve to be overthrown and replaced, are not confined to the three singled-out members of the axis of evil. At a minimum, the axis should extend to Syria and Lebanon and Libya, as well as 'friends' of America like the Saudi royal family and Egypt's Hosni Mubarak, along with the Palestinian Authority, whether headed by Arafat or one of his henchmen." At bottom, for Podhoretz, this action is about "the long-overdue internal reform and modernization of Islam."
This casts Bush's speech to AEI on Wednesday in a completely different light.
Weapons of mass destruction are a smokescreen. Paeans to the idea of Iraqi liberation and democratization are cynical in their inception. At the end of the day, this is not even about oil. The drive behind this war is ideological in nature, a crusade to 'reform' the religion of Islam as it exists in both government and society within the Middle East. Once this is accomplished, the road to empire will be open, ten lanes wide and steppin' out over the line.
At the end of the day, however, ideology is only good for bull sessions in the board room and the bar. Something has to grease the skids, to make the whole thing worthwhile to those involved, and entice those outside the loop to get into the game.
Thus, the payout.
It is well known by now that Dick Cheney, before becoming Vice President, served as chairman and chief executive of the Dallas-based petroleum corporation Halliburton. During his tenure, according to oil industry executives and United Nations records, Halliburton did a brisk $73 million in business with Saddam Hussein's Iraq. While working face-to-face with Hussein, Cheney and Halliburton were also moving into position to capitalize upon Hussein's removal from power. In October of 1995, the same month Cheney was made CEO of Halliburton, that company announced a deal that would put it first in line should war break out in Iraq. Their job: To take control of burning oil wells, put out the fires, and prepare them for service.
Another corporation that stands to do well by a war in Iraq is Brown & Root, a subsidiary of Halliburton. Ostensibly, Brown & Root is in the construction business, and thus has won a share of the $900 million government contract for the rebuilding of post-war Iraqi bridges, roads and other basic infrastructure. This is but the tip of the financial iceberg, as the oil wells will also have to be repaired after parent-company Halliburton puts out the fires.
More ominously is Brown & Root's stock in trade: the building of permanent American military bases. There are twelve permanent U.S. bases in Kosovo today, all built and maintained by Brown & Root for a multi-billion dollar profit. If anyone should wonder why the administration has not offered an exit strategy to the Iraq war plans, the presence of Brown & Root should answer them succinctly. We do not plan on exiting. In all likelihood, Brown & Root is in Iraq to build permanent bases there, from which attacks upon other Middle Eastern nations can be staged and managed.
Again, this casts Bush's speech on Wednesday in a new light.
Being at the center of the action is nothing new for Halliburton and Brown & Root. The two companies have worked closely with governments in Algeria, Angola, Bosnia, Burma, Croatia, Haiti, Nigeria, Rwanda, and Somalia during the worst chapters in those nation's histories. Many environmental and human rights groups claim that Cheney, Halliburton and Brown & Root were, in fact, centrally involved in these fiascos. More recently, Brown & Root was contracted by the Defense Department to build cells for detainees in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. The bill for that one project came to $300 million.
Cheney became involved with PNAC officially in 1997, while still profiting from deals between Halliburton and Hussein. One year later, Cheney and PNAC began actively and publicly agitating for war on Iraq. They have not stopped to this very day.
Another company with a vested interest in both war on Iraq and massively increased defense spending is the Carlyle Group. Carlyle, a private global investment firm with more than $12.5 billion in capital under management, was formed in 1987. Its interests are spread across 164 companies, including telecommunications firms and defense contractors. It is staffed at the highest levels by former members of the Reagan and Bush Sr. administrations. Former President George H. W. Bush is himself employed by Carlyle as a senior advisor, as is long-time Bush family advisor and former Secretary of State James Baker III.
One company acquired by Carlyle is United Defense, a weapons manufacturer based in Arlington, VA. United Defense provides the Defense Department with combat vehicle systems, fire support, combat support vehicle systems, weapons delivery systems, amphibious assault vehicles, combat support services and naval armaments. Specifically, United Defense manufactures the Bradley Fighting Vehicle, the M113 armored personnel carrier, the M88A2 Recovery Vehicle, the Grizzly, the M9 ACE, the Composite Armored Vehicle, the M6 Linebacker, the M7 BFIST, the Armored Gun System, the M4 Command and Control Vehicle, the Battle Command Vehicle, the Paladin, the Crusader, and Electric Gun/Pulse Power weapons technology.
In other words, everything a growing Defense Department, a war in Iraq, and a burgeoning American military empire needs.
Ironically, one group that won't profit from Carlyle's involvement in American military buildup is the family of Osama bin Laden. The bin Laden family fortune was amassed by Mohammed bin Laden, father of Osama, who built a multi-billion dollar construction empire through contracts with the Saudi government. The Saudi BinLaden Group, as this company is called, was heavily invested in Carlyle for years. Specifically, they were invested in Carlyle's Partners II Fund, which includes in that portfolio United Defense and other weapons manufacturers.
This relationship was described in a September 27, 2001 article in the Wall Street Journal entitled 'Bin Laden Family Could Profit From Jump in Defense Spending Due to Ties to US Bank.' The 'bank' in question was the Carlyle Group. A follow-up article published by the Journal on September 28 entitled ' Bin Laden Family Has Intricate Ties With Washington - Saudi Clan Has Had Access To Influential Republicans ' further describes the relationship. In October of 2001, Saudi BinLaden and Carlyle severed their relationship by mutual agreement. The timing is auspicious.
There are a number of depths to be plumbed in all of this. The Bush administration has claimed all along that this war with Iraq is about Saddam Hussein's connections to terrorism and weapons of mass destruction, though through it all they have roundly failed to establish any basis for either accusation. On Wednesday, Bush went further to claim that the war is about liberating the Iraqi people and bringing democracy to the Middle East. This ignores cultural realities on the ground in Iraq and throughout the region that, salted with decades of deep mistrust for American motives, make such a democracy movement brought at the point of the sword utterly impossible to achieve.
This movement, cloaked in democracy, is in fact a PNAC-inspired push for an American global empire. It behooves Americans to understand that there is a great difference between being the citizen of a constitutional democracy and being a citizen of an empire. The establishment of an empire requires some significant sacrifices.
Essential social, medical, educational and retirement services will have to be gutted so that those funds can be directed towards a necessary military buildup. Actions taken abroad to establish the preeminence of American power, most specifically in the Middle East, will bring a torrent of terrorist attacks to the home front. Such attacks will bring about the final suspension of constitutional rights and the rule of habeas corpus, as we will find ourselves under martial law. In the end, however, this may be inevitable. An empire cannot function with the slow, cumbersome machine of a constitutional democracy on its back. Empires must be ruled with speed and ruthlessness, in a manner utterly antithetical to the way in which America has been governed for 227 years.
And yes, of course, a great many people will die.
It would be one thing if all of this was based purely on the ideology of our leaders. It is another thing altogether to consider the incredible profit motive behind it all. The President, his father, the Vice President, a whole host of powerful government officials, along with stockholders and executives from Halliburton and Carlyle, stand to make a mint off this war. Long-time corporate sponsors from the defense, construction and petroleum industries will likewise profit enormously.
Critics of the Bush administration like to bandy about the word "fascist" when speaking of George. The image that word conjures is of Nazi stormtroopers marching in unison towards Hitler's Final Solution. This does not at all fit. It is better, in this matter, to view the Bush administration through the eyes of Benito Mussolini. Mussolini, dubbed 'the father of Fascism,' defined the word in a far more pertinent fashion. "Fascism," said Mussolini, "should more properly be called corporatism, since it is the merger of state and corporate power."
Boycott the French, the Germans, and the other 114 nations who stand against this Iraq war all you wish. France and Germany do not oppose Bush because they are cowards, or because they enjoy the existence of Saddam Hussein. France and Germany stand against the Bush administration because they intend to stop this Pax Americana in its tracks if they can. They have seen militant fascism up close and personal before, and wish never to see it again.
Would that we Americans could be so wise.
-------
William Rivers Pitt is a New York Times bestselling author of two books - "War On Iraq" (with Scott Ritter) available now from Context Books, and "The Greatest Sedition is Silence," available in May 2003 from Pluto Press. He teaches high school in Boston, MA.
Scott Lowery contributed research to this report.
JINSA Zionist Extremists (associated with PNAC) have Basically Hijacked the Bush Regime and are PUSHING US to its Long Desired War on Islam (to Begin with the Invasion of Iraq):
http://www.warwithoutend.co.uk/articles/2003/03/01/jinsa-zionist-extremists-push-us-to-perpetual-war.php
JINSA (Jewish Institute of National Security Affairs) Zionist Extremists (have hijacked the current Bush regime and are PUSHING US TO PERPETUAL WAR) are associated with the PNAC (Project for a New American Century) which is mentioned in the Guardian newspaper article below:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/Columnists/Column/0,5673,903073,00.html
Americans are from Mars, Europeans are from Venus. So says the latest hot polemic exciting transatlantic policy types: Robert Kagan's Paradise and Power, a meditation on how Europeans have grown soft and idealistic (and feminine) while the Yanks remain tough, booted and aware (like real men) of how brutal a place the world can be. According to Kagan, our outlooks have grown so far apart that it's time we stopped pretending we even "occupy the same world". We are from different planets. Maybe that explains why so many Europeans are not just on the opposite side from the US in the debate over the coming war on Iraq, but why we are not even having the same conversation. While we still agonise over whether or not to go to war - forcing our prime minister to make and remake his case, even if that means taking an hour of questions on MTV, as he will next Friday - the American conversation moved on long ago. With barely a peep of congressional opposition to a military attack against Saddam, and most Democrats reduced to silent compliance, the Washington village has taken it as read, both that war will happen, and that it is justified. Their debate is focusing instead on a different question: what next? It might be a simple function of power. We sit back making abstract, moral judgments while they, as the nation poised to do the business, concern themselves with practicalities. We are not quite spectators - 40,000 Brits will be involved, after all - but nor do we have the prime spot in the dugout, making the key decisions. Those will be made in Washington. Whatever the explanation, the gulf between us is real. The op-ed pages of the American papers have the odd thumb-suck on the rights and wrongs of prising Saddam out by force, but their more pressing interest (besides pouring bile on the surrender monkeys of France and Germany) is in the task that will face the great US Army of Liberation once its initial work is done. There is, for example, an argument about personnel. Should the American governor-general ruling newly free Iraq be a civilian - perhaps the former nuclear weapons inspector, David Kay, or Bush-friendly lawyer Michael Mobbs - or a soldier? Surely a man in a suit would smack less of military occupation, and therefore be the more tactful choice? On the other hand, a uniformed viceroy might repeat the magic worked when Douglas MacArthur oversaw Japan. If that's the precedent, then retired lieutenant general and veteran of the first Gulf war, Jay Garner, would be a frontrunner. Or would it be smarter-to- name, Arabic-speaking Lebanese-American General John Abizaid, amusingly known as "Mad Arab" to his colleagues? Such are the dilemmas preoccupying pre-occupier America. There are mechanical questions to ponder, too. Which system would work best? If not a formal military occupation, perhaps a Kosovo-style civilian administration? Or an interim government made up, à la Afghanistan, of multiple opposition groups, returned to Iraq after decades of exile? Or would it be more convenient simply to replace Saddam with a new strongman: whether a former Ba'athist suitably made over and rebranded as "pro-western" or an outsider, like Jordan's Prince Hassan, a cousin of Iraq's last king who was assassinated in 1958? Decisions, decisions. And the US will, barring the most dramatic change of heart by either Saddam Hussein or George Bush, be making them soon. What they will turn on will be more than operational matters of efficiency. They will go instead to the heart of why America is fighting this war. For if this conflict's chief aim is what the new, second UN resolution claims it to be - the simple disarmament of Iraq - then any postwar settlement would be devised around that objective: perhaps a new, compliant dictator would do that job best. If the goal is the one touted by Tony Blair in recent days as the moral case - namely, liberation from tyranny - then only a fresh, democratic start will do. If, however, the American victors insist on a much more robust level of US control - restructuring Iraq entirely, studding it with countless military bases - then we could start drawing rather different conclusions as to the true motive of this campaign. We might agree with those who detect in the Iraq adventure the opening move of a much grander American design: the establishing of US hegemony for the next 100 years. This is not just twitchy, anti-war conspiracy talk. An outfit exists on 17th Street in Washington, DC, called the Project for the New American Century, explicitly committed to US mastery of the globe for the coming age. Its acolytes speak of "full spectrum dominance", meaning American invincibility in every field of warfare - land, sea, air and space - and a world in which no two nations' relationship with each other will be more important than their relationship with the US. There will be no place on earth, or the heavens for that matter, where Washington's writ does not run supreme. To that end, a ring of US military bases should surround China, with liberation of the People's Republic considered the ultimate prize. As one enthusiast puts it concisely: "After Baghdad, Beijing." If this sounds like the harmless delusions of an eccentric fringe, think again. The founder members of the project, launched in 1997 as a Republican assault on the Clinton presidency, form a rollcall of today's Bush inner circle. Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, Jeb Bush, Richard Perle - they're all there. So too is Zalmay Khalilzad, now the White House's "special envoy and ambassador-at-large for free Iraqis". It will not be the war itself which will reveal these ultras' true intent. That would be fought the same way whatever the underlying motive: overwhelming force aimed at a swift decapitation of the Iraqi regime. But the postwar occupation will reveal plenty. Then we will know if the hawkish dreamers of the project have indeed taken over US foreign policy. How they remake free Iraq will tell us whether they plan to remake the world. In other words, this is one debate we cannot afford to sit out. As US commentator Sandra Mackay wrote this month: "Washington's hawks understand that the real risks ... are not in war, but in the peace that follows." It's after victory that the most enduring impact will be felt, whether it be a hated US-led occupation, sparking a fresh round of global terrorism, or the sudden release of Iraq's lethal, internal tensions which Saddam has kept pent-up for 35 years. Kurds could fight Turks for their own state in the north; Shias might team up with Iran for control of the south; everyone may turn on the hated Saddamite Ba'athists in a frenzy of revenge. Iraq will not be like 1940s Japan or Germany, the occupations fondly remembered by the US commentariat. Those were coherent nations; Iraq is an artificial fusion of antagonistic tribes. Victory may be rapid and easy - but that's when the real trouble could start. j.freedland@guardian.co.uk
PNAC Group....The List of Players:
http://www.warwithoutend.co.uk/middle-east-and-asia/2003/01/31/pnac-group-the-list-of-players.php
JINSA (Jewish Institute of National Security Affairs) Zionist Extremist Planned Iraq 'Regime Change' before Bush Presidency:
http://www.warwithoutend.co.uk/middle-east-and-asia/2002/12/31/bush-planned-iraq-regime-change-before-becoming-president.php
JINSA Zionist Extremist (who is Associated with PNAC as Well) Richard Perle: 'Inspections Or Not, We'll Attack Iraq':
http://www.warwithoutend.co.uk/middle-east-and-asia/2002/11/24/zionist-richard-perle-inspections-or-not-we-ll-attack-iraq.php
Wake Up America: YOUR GOVERNMENT IS HIJACKED BY ZIONISM:
http://www.warwithoutend.co.uk/middle-east-and-asia/2002/09/29/wake-up-america-your-government-is-hijacked-by-zionism.php
Iraq Invasion: British MP Asks "Why Now"?:
http://www.warwithoutend.co.uk/middle-east-and-asia/2003/02/25/iraq-invasion-british-mp-asks-why-now.php
Zionist Think Tanks Pushing for US Invasion of Iraq:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/elsewhere/journalist/story/0,7792,777100,00.html
Washington's Zionist hawks to reshape Mid-East for Israel:
http://www.warwithoutend.co.uk/middle-east-and-asia/2002/10/25/washington-s-zionist-hawks-to-reshape-mid-east-for-israel.php
Return of Zionist Extremist Elliott Abrams (there is also an article about "transfer/ethnic cleansing the Palestinians off their ancestral homeland and into neighboring Jordan):
http://www.warwithoutend.co.uk/middle-east-and-asia/2003/01/04/return-of-zionist-extremist-elliott-abrams.php
'Life of an American Jew in Racist/Marxist Israel':
http://www.warwithoutend.co.uk/middle-east-and-asia/2002/11/19/life-of-an-american-jew-in-racist-marxist-israel.php
Why Terrorist Attacks are Not Inevitable:
http://www.warwithoutend.co.uk/middle-east-and-asia/2002/11/26/why-terrorist-attacks-are-not-inevitable.php
Congressman Tom Lantos who is a Zionist Jew on the House of Representatives' International Affairs Committee:
We'll be Rid of the Bastard Soon Enough:
http://www.warwithoutend.co.uk/middle-east-and-asia/2003/02/22/lantos-we-ll-be-rid-of-the-bastard-soon-enough-and.php
JINSA/PNAC Zionists have Contributed to N. Korea Crisis Also:
http://www.warwithoutend.co.uk/middle-east-and-asia/2003/02/23/jinsa-zionists-contributed-to-n-korea-crisis-also.php
JINSA/PNAC Zionist Jews Arranging New Regime of US Occupied Iraq:
http://www.warwithoutend.co.uk/middle-east-and-asia/2003/02/22/jinsa-zionist-jews-arranging-new-regime-of-us-occupied-iraq.php
Radical JINSA Zionists at Pentagon to Control Iraq:
http://www.warwithoutend.co.uk/middle-east-and-asia/2003/02/04/radical-jinsa-zionists-at-pentagon-to-control-iraq.php
Israel's Proxy War:
http://www.warwithoutend.co.uk/middle-east-and-asia/2003/02/21/israel-s-proxy-war.php
What does the Bush Imperial Maffia Really Want?:
http://www.warwithoutend.co.uk/middle-east-and-asia/2003/02/18/what-does-the-bush-imperial-maffia-really-want.php | | | | Alpha | | Posted: Sun Mar 02, 2003 9:04 am Post subject: Bush shares JINSA/PNAC dream of Middle East "democracy& |
| http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/EB28Ak02.html
http://www.atimes.com
Middle East
Bush shares dream of Middle East democracy
By Jim Lobe
WASHINGTON - In a major policy address to the neo-conservative think-tank American Enterprise Institute (AEI), US President George W Bush on Wednesday pledged to "ensure that one brutal dictator is not replaced by another" in post-invasion Iraq and argued that a US victory there "could also begin a new stage for Middle Eastern peace".
"The passing of Saddam Hussein's regime will deprive terrorist networks of a wealthy patron that pays for terrorist training, and offers rewards to families of suicide bombers," he said. "And other regimes will be given a clear warning that support for terror will not be tolerated."
The speech, the latest in an accelerating series of appearances by Bush and other senior members of his administration to drum up public support for war in Iraq with or without the United Nations Security Council's authorization, was notable as much for its venue as its content.
AEI, whose foreign policy "scholars" are closely identified with the most unilateralist and pro-Likud elements in the Bush administration, has acted as the hub of a network of neo-conservative activists and groups, including the Project for the New American Century (PNAC), the Center for Security Policy (CSP), the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs (JINSA), and several others that have agitated for war against Iraq and other Arab states that are believed to threaten Israel since the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center in Manhattan and the Pentagon near Washington, DC.
More than any other think-tank in Washington, AEI and its associates have consistently formulated and favored the most radical and hardline proposals for US policy, including aligning US policy in the Middle East with Israel's right-wing Likud party; cutting ties with traditional US allies such as Saudi Arabia and Pakistan; opposing negotiations with North Korea; providing direct security guarantees to Taiwan; and treating China as a strategic threat with which an eventual confrontation should be considered inevitable.
In sympathetic publications - including the Weekly Standard, the National Review, the Washington Times, the New Republic, the editorial pages of the Wall Street Journal - as well as on talk shows on Fox News and CNN, they have aggressively pressed those positions, and launched attacks against their perceived enemies, particularly Secretary of State Colin Powell and former national security advisor Brent Scowcroft, both of whom are seen as dangerous realists, and, more recently, the governments of France and Germany.
AEI has also served as a major recruiting ground for foreign-policy positions in the administration.
Indeed, its former executive vice president, John Bolton, has become one of the Bush administration's most powerful - despite journalistically undercovered - figures as undersecretary of state for arms control and international security, a key post that he has used not only to ensure Washington's withdrawal from the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile treaty, but also the undermining of other elements of the international arms-control regime. He has also spearheaded US efforts to attack the Rome Protocol to set up the new International Criminal Court. He told the Wall Street Journal last year that signing the letter informing the UN of Washington's renunciation of adherence to the Rome Protocol was "the happiest moment of my government service".
Presiding over much of AEI's foreign-policy program has been Richard Perle, a close advisor and longtime friend of Pentagon chief Donald Rumsfeld, who named him as chairman of the Defense Policy Board (DPB). Lynne Cheney, Vice President Dick Cheney's spouse, also works at AEI, albeit not in a foreign-policy position, as does former UN ambassador Jeane Kirkpatrick.
Perle, who has also worked closely with Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz since they were students at the University of Chicago in the late 1960s, convened the DPB within a few days of the attacks to discuss possible links between Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden's al-Qaeda and put Baghdad squarely in Washington's crosshairs in the impending anti-terrorist campaign.
Indeed, within just nine days of September 11, 2001, Perle helped mobilize support for an open letter to Bush by PNAC, whose offices are on the fifth floor of the AEI building in downtown Washington, that laid out a program for conducting a war on terrorism that anticipated much of what the administration has subsequently followed.
Signed by 40 prominent right-wingers and neo-conservatives, of whom at least a dozen were directly associated with AEI, the letter argued that the war on terror must not stop with bin Laden, but must also include ousting Saddam Hussein, "even if evidence does not link him to the [September 11] attack", cutting off aid to the Palestinian Authority (PA), striking Hezbollah in Lebanon, retaliating against Iran and Syria if they do not stop supplying Hezbollah, and sharply increasing the defense budget.
In another letter six months later, the same group called for the US to cut all ties with Palestinian President Yasser Arafat and cease pressure on Israel to negotiate with him pending the emergence of a new Palestinian leadership. "Israel's fight against terrorism is our fight," the letter said. "Israel's victory is an important part of our victory. For reasons both moral and strategic, we need to stand with Israel in its fight against terrorism." After a major struggle between the hawks clustered around Rumsfeld and Cheney and more realist forces led by Powell, Bush adopted PNAC's recommendations.
Having won that battle, its AEI associates led by Perle transformed themselves into neo-Wilsonians by leading the charge for a regional policy of "reshaping", "transforming" and "democratizing" the entire Middle East, the main subject of Bush's address on Wednesday.
"This war cannot be limited to national theaters," Michael Ledeen, another AEI "scholar" and JINSA co-founder along with Perle, argued last September. "We face a regional challenge and must respond accordingly. We are the one truly revolutionary country on Earth, which is both the reason for which we were attacked in the first place and the reason we will successfully transform the lives of millions of people throughout the Middle East."
Similarly, another AEI associate, Joshua Muravchik called as early as a year ago for an aggressive pro-democracy policy in the region. Citing a recent survey by Freedom House, a New York-based neo-conservative think-tank, that found Arab states to be the least "free" of any other region, he argued that "far from pointing toward a relaxation of military efforts [in the war against terror, the survey] suggests that the more terror-loving tyrannies the United States can topple the better".
Yet another AEI scholar and former Central Intelligence Agency officer, Marc Reuel Gerecht, has also called for sweeping changes in US policy toward authoritarian Arab regimes, such as Saudi Arabia, although his views about the compatibility of democratic institutions with Arab temperaments have tended to be far more equivocal, if also revealing. "Arabs only respect strength," he wrote last year in an appeal for Washington to back Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's efforts to crush Palestinian resistance in the occupied territories. "Though the Near East Bureau at State hates the notion, the tougher Sharon becomes, the stronger our image will be in the Middle East."
Gerecht has also been a major proponent of severing ties with Saudi Arabia, as has Perle himself, who last summer got in trouble with the White House for inviting a vehemently anti-Saudi French scholar to address the DPB about the necessity of ousting the royal family from power.
Bush's appearance at AEI on Wednesday, however, made it clear that all had been forgiven. And his embrace of virtually all of the think-tank's theories about democratizing the region made clear the extent to which the most radical hawks in the administration have prevailed in the internal policy debate.
"There was a time when many said that the cultures of Japan and Germany were incapable of sustaining democratic values," said Bush. "Well, they were wrong. Some say the same of Iraq today. They are mistaken. "The nation of Iraq ... is fully capable of moving toward democracy and living in freedom.
"A new regime in Iraq would serve as a dramatic and inspiring example of freedom for other nations in the region," he declared, adding that "it is presumptuous and insulting to suggest that a whole region of the world - or the one-fifth of humanity that is Muslim - is somehow untouched by the most basic aspirations of life".
Moreover, "success in Iraq could also begin a new stage for Middle Eastern peace, and set in motion progress towards a truly democratic Palestinian state ... Without this outside support for terrorism, Palestinians who are working for reform and long for democracy will be in a better position to choose new leaders: true leaders who strive for peace; true leaders who faithfully serve the people.
"For its part, the new government of Israel - as the terror threat is removed and security improves - will be expected to support the creation of a viable Palestinian state and to work as quickly as possible toward a final status agreement," Bush said in his one concession to Arab opinion that must have disappointed his hosts. "As progress is made toward peace, settlement activity in the occupied territories must end."
(©2003 Asia Times Online Co, Ltd. Please contact content@atimes.com for information on our sales and syndication policies.) | | | | Alpha | | Posted: Mon Mar 03, 2003 3:15 am Post subject: Shock and Awe: Pro-War Propaganda |
| http://www.laweekly.com/ink/03/15/on-powers.php
Shock and Awe: Pro-war Propaganda
Pro-war propaganda
by John Powers
(Illustration by Peter Bennett)
MODERN WARFARE ISN'T ONLY ABOUT KILLING ? it's about inspiring mass terror. That's why on the first day of Gulf War II: Die Harder, the Pentagon reportedly intends to launch 300 to 400 cruise missiles at targets in Iraq ? more than during the entire 40 days of the first Gulf War. "[Y]ou have this simultaneous effect, rather like the nuclear weapons at Hiroshima, not taking days or weeks but in minutes," says Harlan K. Ullman, who sounds far too comfortable with the historical analogy. Of course, the guy did co-author the 1996 book that defined the strategy that the U.S. military will be following. Euphemistically known as "Shock and Awe," the plan is designed to cow those Iraqis it doesn't blow up into immediate submission. A similar strategy has been employed here at home. Even as government officials claim that war isn't inevitable, the Bush administration is busy flying 200,000 troops to the Middle East and slipping Turkey $15 billion in baksheesh for its help (now, don't slaughter the Kurds!). Seeking to unite the republic with fear, the government has cranked up the scare tactics ? orange alerts, anti-aircraft missiles on the Mall, talk of Iraqi drone planes dropping biochemical weapons on American cities. Meanwhile, in an infuriatingly circular bit of reasoning, Vice President Dick Cheney has argued (and war criminal Kissinger concurred) that we must use our troops precisely because we've committed them ? if not, we'll seem weak. It's no surprise that our quasi-elected leaders should be working us over in this way. During World War I, the great radical Randolph Bourne famously wrote that "war is the health of the state." He was right: Just look at how the War on Terror has become an excuse for the state to shrink our individual liberties. But war is also the health of the fourth estate, which helps explain why our media have bowed down before Bush's Iraq war juggernaut. After all, war sells papers, boosts ratings, builds reputations (Murrow, Amanpour) and helps networks to establish their brand: CNN was made on the rooftops of Baghdad. Now, there are good reasons for eventually toppling Saddam, and I roll my eyes when I see placards comparing Bush to Hitler: Carry a poster like that in a real fascist state and you're dead, man. But posters are supposed to be simplistic. Magazines and news shows are not. This is why it's so unsettling when, faced with a policy that carries so many huge risks (mass casualties being just one), the media bombard us with pro-war propaganda. Naturally, the vast, wired American landscape does boast some prominent dissenting voices, including Harper's, Salon, The American Conservative and the eloquent Grammy-night philosopher Fred Durst. But given that the vast majority of the world's people oppose the war, it's startling how few of their voices have a regular platform in major outlets, especially television, where Hardball's suddenly watchable Chris Matthews is the only talk-show host who consistently asks aggressive questions about invading Iraq. Traditional liberal redoubts such as the Washington Post and The New Republic have been riding gleeful shotgun for the joy ride to Baghdad ? though TNR's editor is now getting cold feet. And even the supposedly leftish New York Times ran George Packer's seminal article on "liberal hawks," which began by scoffing at peace marchers for being dopes and ended with an Iraqi ?gr?ilencing a peacenik with pleas for his country's liberation. The other night, CNN's agonized liberal Aaron Brown grew defensive over claims that the network had been ignoring the peace movement. "For a variety of reasons, it seems to us, the anti-war movement has been slow to organize and slow to build. It hardly existed in the U.S. Congress." While this is certainly true of our spineless Democrats (Robert Byrd's jeremiads notwithstanding), it's flat-out wrong about popular resistance to the war, which is years ahead of the Vietnam timetable. Despite September 11, millions of ordinary Americans are shocked and awed by the president's brazenness in passing Saddam off as worthy of a war. While Brown means well (his epitaph, I'm afraid), not everyone else does. Last Sunday on Meet the Press, in a battle of ghastly hair, Tim Russert hosted the anti-war Ohio congressman Dennis Kucinich and the defense establishment's ?nence grise, Richard Perle. Russert is the bullying embodiment of the East Coast consensus, and while he gave the saturnine Perle an easy ride, he positively grilled Kucinich. There was no mistaking his edge when he asked, "Do you believe the president of the United States would risk the lives of American men and women for oil?" ? as if no decent person could believe such a thing. Kucinich, alas, lacked the mother wit to remind Russert that, before the last Gulf War, that quintessential Republican Bob Dole told the Senate, "We are in the Mideast for three letters, oil, O-I-L." IN A FINE NEW ARTICLE IN THAT SUBVERSIVE RAG Vanity Fair, James Wolcott argues that the pro-war movement has sought to crush its opponents by turning them into caricatures. It targets anti-war celebs like Sean Penn ("slimed" as "Baghdad Sean"), smears anti-war academics for being "Profs Who Hate America" (as the egregious Daniel Pipes calls them), and vilifies skeptical non-Americans, especially surrender-monkey Europeans and uppity South Koreans who aren't grateful enough for all we've done for them. "As befits a pre-emptive war," Wolcott observes, "the hawks and their media pigeons launched a pre-emptive strike on the anti-war camp . . . Opposition has been discounted in advance with a knowing sneer." And sometimes worse. An editorial in the right-wing New York Sun recently suggested that peace marchers could be considered guilty of treason. When some readers quite reasonably termed such a statement un-American, frothing James Taranto of The Wall Street Journal's online "OpinionJournal" ? who spends his life calling people "appeasers" and "pro-Saddam" ? suggested that the editorial's critics didn't grasp that its talk of "traitors" was a joke. Not as sidesplitting, perhaps, as Uday Hussein chopping his family's enemies to pieces, but uproarious nonetheless. While the anti-war forces are derided, the media have turned pro-war intellectuals into stars. Each time you look up, you find another interview with Kenneth Pollack, the exCIA analyst whose book The Threatening Storm: The Case for Invading Iraq is the bible of war supporters. And there's no escaping the praise for Robert ("Americans are from Mars, and Europeans are from Venus") Kagan, whose new book, Of Paradise and Power: America and Europe in the New World Order, is a 21st-century imperial manifesto. He insists that it's in the whole world's interest that America live by a double standard: "It must refuse to abide by certain international conventions that may constrain its ability to fight effectively . . . It must support arms control, but not always for itself." Talk about your Martians. Kagan seems not to care that imperialists always think they're the good guys. Of course, there are profound moral questions that good guys should ask ? for instance, how many foreign civilians are we willing to kill in order to feel safe from potential danger? But Americans traditionally care more about technique than philosophy, and as war approaches, coverage has grown increasingly obsessed with how we'll fight it ? the spiffy tanks and brainy missiles, the proposed electronic attacks on power grids and anti-Saddam pamphlets being dropped from the sky. The other day on NPR, I heard a report about the army's use of "ruggedized" Phrasalators, talking hand-held devices that U.S. soldiers can use to give commands in Arabic ? "Get down on the ground." Evidently someone has already used them on our reporters, for judging from their willingness to be "embedded" with soldiers by the Pentagon rather than acting as free agents, they are primed for a replay of Desert Storm, when, as war correspondent Chris Hedges says in his compelling new book War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning, "The press was as eager to be of service to the state during the war as most everyone else. Such docility on the part of the press made it easier to do what governments do during wartime, indeed what governments do much of the time, and that is lie." The Bush White House is a Wal-Mart of secrets and lies. It suppresses information (reported in the current Newsweek) that Iraq may have already destroyed its WMDs, fobs off plagiarized student essays as top-secret info on Iraq, talks of giving hard evidence of Iraqi weapons to U.N. inspectors (who call the info "garbage after garbage after garbage"), and insists the war has the support of "new" Europe when it only has the support of its governments (the vast majority of Eastern Europeans oppose it). This last fact should remind us that, even in countries that think themselves democracies, leaders seldom care what their citizens have to say. What makes Bush special is that he doesn't give a damn if we know it. No one was surprised that he didn't care what millions of peace marchers thought. As he told Bob Woodward, "I do not need to explain why I say things. That's the interesting thing about being the president. Maybe somebody needs to explain to me why they say something, but I don't feel like I owe anybody an explanation." That debate with Saddam could be a real humdinger. | | | | Alpha | | | | Alpha | | Posted: Mon Mar 03, 2003 11:18 am Post subject: NEED TO GET JINSA/PNAC OUT OF US GOVERNMENT |
| We Need to Get these Treasonous Israel Firsters Like Richard Perle out of the US government as soon as possible before they PUSH US into a World War for their nefarious JINSA/PNAC agenda (I have heard that Richard Perle was found guilty of a misdemeanor crime for the following or similar to it):
RICHARD PERLE IN 1970
"In mid-October 1970, Kissinger testified, when a second wiretap was
authorized for Helmut Sonnenfeldt, who was then Kissinger’s closest
friend on the NSC staff, his role was even more tangential… was a
summary of a wiretap on the Israeli embassy in which Richard Perle, a
foreign policy aide to Senator Jackson, was overheard discussing
classified information that had been supplied to him by someone on the
National Security Council staff… Kissinger, perhaps seeking to ward off
a Nixon explosion – had handed him (Haldeman) the FBI
wiretap on the Israeli Embassy and requested that the FBI be assigned to
determine which NSC staff member was in contact with Richard Perle.
Kissinger had to realize that Haldeman and Hoover would suspect
Sonenfeldt, who was known from previous wiretaps to have close ties to
the Israelis and Perle."
Source: Seymour M. Hersh, The Price of Power (New York: Summit Books,
1983), pages 321-322. | | | | | ©2002-2009 WarWithoutEnd.co.uk |
