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THE ROVING EYE
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By Pepe Escobar

ALEXANDRIA, Egypt - They've won. They got their war against
Afghanistan (planned before September 11). They're getting their war
against Iraq (planned slightly after September 11). After Iraq, they
plan to get their wars against Syria, Lebanon, Iran and Saudi Arabia.
Last Sunday, one of them, Vice President *** Cheney, said that
President George W Bush would have to make "a very difficult decision"
on Iraq. Not really. The decision had already been taken for him in
the autumn of 2001.

As far as their "showdown Iraq" is concerned, it's not about weapons
of mass destruction, nor United Nations inspections, nor
non-compliance, nor a virtual connection between Saddam Hussein and
al-Qaeda, nor the liberation of the Iraqi people, nor a Middle East
living in "democracy and liberty".

The American corporate media are not inclined to spell it out, and the
absolute majority of American public opinion is anesthetized non-stop
by a barrage of technical, bureaucratic and totally peripheral aspects
of the war against Iraq. For all the president's (sales)men, the whole
game is about global preeminence, if not unilateral world domination -
military, economic, political and cultural. This may be an early 21st
century replay of the "white man's burden". Or this may be just
megalomania. Either way, enshrined in a goal of the Bush
administration, it cannot but frighten practically the whole world,
from Asia to Africa, from "old Europe" to the conservative
establishment within the US itself.

During the Clinton years, they were an obscure bunch - almost a sect.
Then they were all elevated to power - again: most had worked for
Ronald Reagan and Bush senior. Now they have pushed America - and the
world - to war because they want it. Period. An Asia Times Online
investigation reveals this is no conspiracy theory: it's all about the
implementation of a project.

The lexicon of the Bush doctrine of unilateral world domination is
laid out in detail by the Project for a New American Century (PNAC),
founded in Washington in 1997. The ideological, political, economic
and military fundamentals of American foreign policy - and uncontested
world hegemony - for the 21st century are there for all to see.

PNAC's credo is officially to muster "the resolve to shape a new
century favorable to American principles and interests". PNAC states
that the US must be sure of "deterring any potential competitors from
even aspiring to a larger regional or global role" - without ever
mentioning these competitors, the European Union, Russia or China, by
name. The UN is predictably dismissed as "a forum for leftists,
anti-Zionists and anti-imperialists". The UN is only as good as it
supports American policy.

The PNAC mixes a peculiar brand of messianic internationalism with
realpolitik founded over a stark analysis of American oil interests.
Its key document, dated June 1997, reads like a manifesto. Horrified
by the "debased" Bill Clinton, PNAC exponents lavishly praise "the
essential elements of the Reagan administration's success: a military
that is strong and ready to meet both present and future challenges; a
foreign policy that boldly and purposefully promotes American
principles abroad; and national leadership that accepts the United
States' global responsibilities". These exponents include *** Cheney,
Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul
Wolfowitz, Richard Perle, chairman of the Defense Policy Board, an
advisory panel to the Pentagon made up of leading figures in national
security and defense, Florida Governor Jeb Bush and Reagan-era White
House adviser Elliott Abrahms.

Already in 1997, the PNAC wanted to "increase defense spending
significantly" to "challenge regimes hostile to our interests and
values" and "to accept responsibility for America's unique role in
preserving and extending an international order friendly to our
security, our prosperity, and our principles". The deceptively bland
language admitted "such a Reaganite policy of military strength and
moral clarity may not be fashionable today. But it is necessary if the
United States is to build on the successes of this past century and to
ensure our security and our greatness in the next".

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Iraq war is above all Paul Wolfowitz's war. It's his holy mission.
His cue was September 11. Slightly after Rumsfeld, on September 15,
2001 at Camp David, Wolfowitz was already advocating an attack on
Iraq. There are at least three versions of what happened that day. As
a reporter, the Washington Post's Bob Woodward (remember Watergate)
used to bring down presidents; now he's a mere presidential public
relations officer. In his book Bush at War he writes that Bush told
Wolfowitz to shut up and let the number 1 (Rumsfeld) talk. The second
version, defended by the New York Times, says that Bush listened
attentively to Wolfowitz. But a third version relayed by diplomats
holds that in Bush's executive order on September 17 authorizing war
on Afghanistan, there's already a paragraph giving free reign to the
Pentagon to draw plans for a war against Iraq.

Former CIA director James Woolsey, a certified five-star hawk, is a
great friend of Wolfowitz. Woolsey is also the author of what could be
dubbed "the high noon" theory that defines nothing less than Bush's
vision of the world. According to the theory, Bush is not a
six-shooter: he is the leader of a posse.

That's how Bush described himself in a conversation last year with
then Czech president Vaclav Havel. As film fans well remember, Gary
Cooper in High Noon plays a village marshal who tries by all means to
convince his friends to assemble a posse to face the Saddam of the
times (a lean and mean Lee Marvin) who is supposed to arrive in the
noon train. In the end, Cooper has to face "Saddam" Marvin all by
himself.

It's fair to argue that the Bush administration today is enacting a
larger-than-life replay of a high noon. The posse is the "coalition of
the willing". The logic of the posse is crystal clear. The US first
defines a strategic objective (for example, regime change in Iraq).
They propagate their steely determination to achieve this objective
(an awesome worldwide propaganda and disinformation campaign combined
with a major military deployment). And finally they assemble a posse
to help them: the coalition of the willing, or "coalition of the
bribed and bludgeoned", as it was dubbed by democrats in Europe and
the US itself. A devastating report by the Institute for Policy
Studies in Washington has detailed a "coalition of the coerced".
Whatever its name, those who do not join the coalition (the absolute
majority of UN member-states, as well as world public opinion) remain,
as Bush says, "irrelevant".

With missionary fervor, Wolfowitz has been pursuing his Iraqi dream
step by step. In late 2001, James Woolsey roamed all over Europe
trying to find a connection between Saddam and al-Qaeda. He couldn't
find anything. But then in January 2002, Iraq was formally inducted in
the "axis of evil along with Iran and North Korea. Rumsfeld went on
overdrive: he said that Saddam supported "terrorists" (in fact suicide
martyrs in Palestine, who have nothing to do with al-Qaeda). He said
that Saddam promised US$25,000 to each of their families. The neocons
embarked on a media blitzkrieg, and Wolfowitz's mission finally hit
center stage.

During the Cold War in the 1970s, Wolfowitz learned the ropes laboring
on nuclear treaties, the endless talks with the Soviets on nuclear
armament limitations. At the time he also started a career for one of
his better students, Lewis Libby - who today is Cheney's chief of
staff. For three decades Wolfowitz has been involved in strategic
thinking, military organization and political and diplomatic moves.
Even former Jimmy Carter national security adviser Zbigniew
Brzezinski, the author of The Grand Chessboard - or the roadmap for US
domination over Eurasia - allegedly allows Wolfowitz to figure
alongside Henry Kissinger, McGeorge Bundy or Zbig himself: that select
elite of academics who managed to cross over to high office and
radiate intellectual authority and almost unlimited power by osmosis
because of close contact with an American president.

Wolfowitz routinely talks about "freedom and democracy" - with no
contextualization. His renditions always sound like a romantic ideal.
But there's nothing romantic about him. During the First Gulf War,
Wolfowitz was an undersecretary at the Pentagon formulating policy.
Cheney was the Pentagon chief. It was Wolfowitz who prepared Desert
Storm - and also got the money. The bill was roughly $90 billion, 80
percent of it paid by the allies: a cool deal. It was Wolfowitz who
convinced Israel not to enter the war even after the country was hit
by Iraqi Scuds, so the key Arab partners of the 33-nation coalition
would not run away.

But Saddam always remained his nemesis. When Bush senior lost his
re-election, Wolfowitz became dean of the School of Advanced
International Studies at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. Later,
he was fully convinced that Iraq was behind the first attack against
the World Trade Center, in 1993.

Wolfowitz and Perle, though close, are not the same thing. Perle is
virtually indistinguishable from the hardcore policies of the Likud in
Israel. Perle thinks that the only possible way out for the US - not
the West, because he despises Europe as a political player - is a
multi-faceted, long-term, vicious confrontation against the Arab and
Muslim world. Wolfowitz is more sophisticated: he has already served
as American ambassador to Indonesia. He definitely does not subscribe
to the fallacious Samuel Huntington theory of a clash of
civilizations. Wolfowitz even believes in an independent Palestine -
something that for Perle is beyond anathema.

Wolfowitz, born in 1943 in New York, is the son of a Polish
mathematician whose whole family died in Nazi concentration camps. It
was Allan Bloom, the brilliant author of The Closing of the American
Mind and professor at the University of Chicago, deceased in 1992, who
steered Wolfowitz towards political science. Wolfowitz had the honor
of being cloned by Saul Bellow in the novel Ravelstein: the Wolfowitz
character shows up under a fictional name in the same role he occupied
in 1991 at the Pentagon. Messianic, and a big fan of Abraham Lincoln,
Wolfowitz is a walking contradiction: his fierce unilateralism is
based on his faith in the universality of American values.

Wolfowitz and his proteges's are hardcore "Straussians" - after Leo
Strauss, a Jewish intellectual who managed to escape the Nazis, died
in 1999 as a 100-year-old and was totally anti-modern: for him,
modernity was responsible for Nazism and Stalinism. Strauss was a
lover of the classics - most of all Plato and Aristotle. His most
notorious disciples were Chicago's Allan Bloom and also Harvey
Mansfield - who translated both Machiavelli and Tocqueville and was
the father of all things politically correct in Harvard.

Strauss believed in natural right and in an immutable measure of what
is just and what is unjust. Thus the Wolfowitz credo that a vague
"democracy and freedom" is a one-size-fits-all panacea to be served
everywhere, even by force. Plenty of neo-hawks followed Bloom's
courses at the University of Chicago: Wolfowitz of course, but also
Francis Fukuyama of "end of history" fame, and John Podhoretz, who
reigns over the editorial pages of the ultra-reactionary Rupert
Murdoch-owned tabloid the New York Post. As to Mansfield, his most
notorious student was probably William Kristol, the editor of the also
Rupert Murdoch-financed magazine Weekly Standard. In Kristol's own
formulation, all these Straussians are morally conservative,
religiously inclined, anti-Utopian, anti-modern and skeptical towards
the left but also towards the reactionary right.

Ronald Reagan, because of his "moral clarity" and his "virtue", is
their supreme icon - not the devious realpolitik couple of Richard
Nixon and Kissinger. This conceptual choice is absolutely essential to
understand where the neocons are coming from. Take the crucial
expression "regime change": there's nothing casual about it. Strauss
used to say that "classic political philosophy was guided by the
question of the best regime". Here Strauss was talking specifically
about Aristotle and his notion of politeia. The "regime" - or politeia
- designates not only government, but also institutions, education,
morals, and "the spirit of law". In the mind of these Straussians, to
topple Saddam is a mere footnote. "Regime change" in Iraq means to
implant a Western Utopia in the heart of the Middle East: a
Western-built politeia. Many would argue this is no more than a replay
of Rudyard Kipling's "white man's burden".

Perle, also a New Yorker, is much, much rougher than Wolfowitz. No
Aristotle for him. A dull man with a psychopath gaze, he recently
accused New Yorker reporter Seymour Hersh of being "a terrorist" -
because Hersh, in a splendid piece, unveiled how Perle set up a
company that will profit immensely from war in the Middle East. Perle
has repeatedly declared on the record that the US is prepared to
attack Syria, Lebanon and Iran - all "enemies of Israel". One of his
most notorious recent stunts was when he invited an obscure French
scholar to the Defense Policy Board to bash the Saudi royal family. He
casually noted that if the invasion of Iraq brings down another couple
of "friendly" Arab regimes, it's no big deal. At a recent seminar
organized by a New York-based public relations firm and attended by
Iraqi exiles and American Middle East and security officials, Perle
proclaimed that France was no longer an ally of the US; and that NATO
"must develop a strategy to contain our erstwhile ally or we will not
be talking about a NATO alliance". This hawk, though, is no fool, and
loves la vie en rose: Richard Perle spends his holidays in his own
house in the south of France.

If you are a Pentagon senior civilian adviser, saying all those things
out loud, they pack a tremendous punch in Washington: it's practically
official. As official as Perle musing out loud whether the US should
"subordinate vital national interests to a show of hands by nations
who do not share our interests" by seeking the endorsement of the UN
Security Council on a major issue of policy (that's exactly what
happened on Monday). Perle has been saying all along that "Iraq is
going to be liberated, by the United States and whoever wants to join
us, whether we get the approbation of the UN or any other
institution". And Bush repeated these words almost verbatim. As for
the tremendous unpopularity of the US, "it's a real problem and it
undoubtedly diminishes our ability to do the things that we think are
important. I think that's bad for the world because if the United
States, as the leader it has always been, has its authority and
standing diminished, that can't be good for the Swiss or the Italians
or the Germans. But I don't know how you deal with that problem ..."

Perle and Wolfowitz may shape policy, but that would not enhance their
mundane status among the political chattering classes if they didn't
have a bulldog to disseminate their clout in the media. That's where
William Kristol, the chairman of the Project for a New American
Century and the director of the magazine Weekly Standard comes in.
Kristol's co-chairman at the PNAC is Robert Kagan, former deputy for
policy in the State Department in the bureau for Inter-American
affairs. Kagan is the author of Of Paradise and Power: America vs
Europe in the New World Order - where, according to a fallacious
formula, Europeans living in a kind of peaceful, Utopian paradise will
be forced to stomach unbridled American power. Robert is the son of
Donald Kagan, ultra-conservative Yale professor and eminent historian.
Kagan junior is a major apostle of nation building, as in "the
reconstruction of the Japanese politics and society to America's
image". He cheerleads the fact that 60 years later there are still
American troops in Japan. The same, according to him, should happen in
Iraq. Any strategist would remind Kagan that in Japan in 1945 the
emperor himself ordered the population to obey the Americans and in
Germany the war devastation was so complete that the Germans had no
other alternative.

William is the son of Irving Kristol and Gertrud Himmelfarb, classic
New York Jewish intellectuals and ironically former Trotskyite who
then made a sharp turn to the extreme right. Former Trotskyites have a
tendency to believe that history will vindicate them in the end.
Irving, at 82 a former neo-Marxist, neo-Trotskyite, neo-socialist and
neo-liberal, today is officially a neoconservative and one of the
AEI's stalwarts.

Kristol junior reportedly likes philosophy, opera, thrillers and is
fond of - who else - Aristotle and Machiavelli, who not by accident
were eminences behind the prince. Instead of rebelling against his
parents, he sulked in his bedroom rebelling against his own generation
- the anti-war, peace-and-love, Bob Dylan-addicted 1960s baby boomers.
Although admitting that Vietnam was a big mistake, William did not
volunteer to go to war, a fact that qualifies him as the archetypal
"chicken hawk" - armchair warmongers who know nothing about the
horrors of war. William wants to erect conservatism to the level of an
ideology of government. His great heroes include Reagan - for, what
else, his "candor" and "moral clarity". A naked imperialist? No, he's
not as crass as Rumsfeld: he prefers to be characterized as a partisan
of "liberal imperialism".

As media hawk-in-chief, William is just following up daddy's work:
Irving Kristol was the ultimate portable think tank of Reaganism.
Today, Kristol junior is convinced that the Middle East is an
irredeemable source of anti-Americanism, terrorism, weapons of mass
destruction and an assorted basket of evils. Kristol of course is a
very good friend of Wolfowitz, Kagan and former ex-CIA chief James
Woolsey, who not by accident heaps lavish praise on The War over Iraq:
Saddam's tyranny and America's mission, a book by Lawrence Kaplan and
.... William Kristol. Woolsey loves how the book goes against the
"narrow realists" around Bush senior and the "wishful liberals" around
Bill Clinton.

Under Bush senior, William Kristol was Dan Quayle's chief of staff.
Under Clinton, he was in the wilderness until he finally managed to
launch the Weekly Standard. Who financed it? None other than Rupert
Murdoch, whose tabloidish Fox News is widely known as Bush TV. The
Weekly Standard loses money in direct proportion to the expansion of
its influence. It remains invaluable as the voice of "Hawk Central".

Hawks, or at least some neoconservatives, seem to understand the
importance of a lighter touch as a key public relations strategy.
That's where David Brooks comes in. Brooks, former University of
Chicago, former Wall Street Journal and now a big fish at the Weekly
Standard, was the one who came up with the concept of "bobos" -
bourgeois bohemians, or "caviar left" as they are known in Latin
countries. "Bobos", accuse the neocons, do absolutely nothing to
change a social order that they seem to fight but from which they
profit. Bobo-bashing is one of the neocon's ideological strategies to
dismiss their critics out of hand.

In his conference at the World Social Forum in Porto Alegre, Brazil,
in January, Noam Chomsky demistified the mechanism through which these
people, "most of them recycled from the Reagan administration", are
implementing their agenda: "They are replaying a familiar script:
drive the country into deficit so as to be able to undermine social
programs, declare a 'war on terror' (as they did in 1981) and conjure
up one devil after another to frighten the population into obedience.
In the 1980s it was Libyan hit men prowling the streets of Washington
to assassinate our leader, then the Nicaraguan army only two days
march from Texas, a threat to survival so severe that Reagan had to
declare a national emergency. Or an airfield in Grenada that the
Russians were going to use to bomb us (if they could find it on a
map); Arab terrorists seeking to kill Americans everywhere while
Gaddafi plans to 'expel America from the world', so Reagan wailed. Or
Hispanic narco-traffickers seeking to destroy our youth; and on, and
on."

For both the AEI and the PNAC, the Middle East is a land without
people, and oil without land - and this is something anyone will
confirm in the streets or power corridors in Cairo, Amman, Beirut,
Ramallah, Damascus or Baghdad. The image fits the AEI and PNAC's acute
and indiscriminate loathing and contempt for Arabs. The implementation
of the AEI's and the PNAC's policies has led to the transformation of
Ariel Sharon into a "man of peace" - Bush's own words at the White
House - and the semi-fascist Likud Party becoming the undisputed
number one ally of American civilization. The occupied Palestinian
territories - see never-complied, forever-spurned UN resolution 242
plus dozens of others - became "the so-called occupied territories"
(in Rumsfeld's own words). Jewish moderates, inside and outside
Israel, are extremely alarmed.

One of the key excuses for the Iraq war sold by Washington was the
elimination of the roots of terrorism by striking terrorists and the
"axis of evil" that supports them. This is a total flaw. The excuse is
undermined by the US themselves. Not even Washington believes war is
the way to fight terrorism, otherwise the Bush administration would
not have adopted the AEI and PNAC agenda of promoting "democracy and
liberty" in the Arab world. But neither the Arabs nor anyone else is
convinced that the US is committed to real democracy or to the
"territorial integrity of Iraq" when key members of the
administration, like Perle, signed "Clean Break" in 1996 advising
Benjamin Netanyahu that Iraq and any other country which tried to defy
Israel should be smashed. The message by the PNAC people to Netanyahu
in 1996 and to Bush since 2001 has been the same: international law is
against our interests; we fix our own objectives; we go for it and the
rest will follow - or not. Even Zbig Brzezinski has recognized the
American corporate press - unlike the European press - has not uttered
a single word about the total similarity of the agendas. But concerned
Americans have already realized the superpower has no attention span,
no patience, no tact - and many would say no historical credibility -
to engage in nation-building in the Middle East.

There's not much democracy on the cards either. Iraqis and the whole
Arab nation view as an unredeemable insult and injury the official
American plan to enforce a de facto military occupation. Iraq is
already carved up on paper into three sections (just like the British
did in the 1920s). Two retired generals - including Arabic-speaking,
Lebanese-origin John Abizaid - and a former ambassador to Yemen - will
control the three interim "civil" administrations. Abizaid studied the
history of the Middle East at Harvard - and this is as far as his
democratic credentials go. Everything in Iraq will be under overseer
supremo Jay Garner, a retired general very close to Ariel Sharon and
until a few months ago the CEO of a weapons firm specialized in
missile guidance systems. Iraqis, Palestinians and Arabs as a whole
are stunned: not only has the US flaunted international legitimacy in
its push to war, it will also install an Israeli proxy as governor of
Iraq and will keep pretending to finally be committed to respect the
never-complied dozens of UN resolutions concerning Palestine.

As much as Israel is widely regarded by most 1.3 billion Muslims as
the de facto 51st American state, many responsible Americans denounce
the Iraq war as Sharon's war. Washington's Likudniks - the AEI and
PNAC people - allied with evangelical Christians - are running US
foreign policy in the Middle East. Since Autumn 2002, they have
managed to convince Bush to increase the tempo - with no consultation
to Congress or to American public opinion - betting on a
point-of-no-return scenario in Iraq. Meanwhile, Sharon, in a
relentless campaign, managed to convince Bush that war on Palestine
was equal to war against terrorism. But he went one step beyond: he
convinced Bush that the Palestinian Intifada, al-Qaeda and Saddam are
all cats in the same bag, plotting a concerted three-pronged offensive
to destroy Judeo-Christian civilization. Thus the subsequent,
overwhelming Bush administration campaign to try to convince public
opinion that Saddam is an ally of bin Laden. Few fell into the trap.
But European strategists got the drift: they are already working with
the hypothesis that the geopolitical axis in the Middle East is about
to switch from Cairo-Riyadh-Tehran to Tel Aviv-Ankara-Baghdad
(post-Saddam).

In a recent hearing of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee,
undersecretary of state for political affairs Mark Grossman and
undersecretary of defense for policy Douglas Feith talked for four
hours and through 86 pages, apparently detailing how the US will
rebuild Iraq after liberation through massive bombing. Feith has been
on record saying that this war of course "is not about oil", while
stating a few sentences later that "the US will be the new OPEC". A
source confirms that it was clear at the Senate hearing both Feith and
Grossman had absolutely no idea what the Arab world is all about.
Senators asked how much the war would cost (Yale economist William
Nordhaus said the occupation may cost between $17 billion and $45
billion a year): nobody had an answer. Feith and Grossman said it was
"unknowable". Rumsfeld is also a major exponent of the "not knowable"
school. The cost of war for American taxpayers - some estimates go as
high as $200 billion - is "not knowable". The size of the occupation
force - some estimates range as high as 400,000 troops - is "not
knowable". The duration of the occupation - former NATO supreme
commander Wesley Clark has mentioned no less than eight years - is
"not knowable".

Arabs, Asians, Europeans - and a few Americans - warn of blowback: the
whole Middle East may explode in a violent, vicious anti-imperialist
struggle. As this correspondent has been hearing for months from
Pakistan to Egypt and from Indonesia to the Gulf, "dozens of bin
Ladens" are bound to emerge. The strategy advocated by the evangelic
apostles of armed democratization - overwhelming military force,
unilateral preemption, overthrow of governments, seizure of oil
fields, recolonization, protectorates - is being roundly condemned by
the same educated Arab elites which would be the natural leaders of a
push for democratization. Many question not Washington's objective,
but the method: they simply cannot stomach the "imperial liberalism"
version marketed by the hawks. The current absolute mess in
Afghanistan is further demonstration that "democratization" via an
American proconsul is doomed to failure. Moreover, 16 eminent British
academic lawyers have certified the Bush doctrine of preemptive
self-defense is illegal under international law.

Even a tragically surreal, zombie regime like North Korea's has
retained one essential lesson from this whole crisis : if you don't
want regime change, you'd better maximize your silence, speed and
cunning to build your own arsenal of WMDs. Muslims for their part have
understood that the unlikely Franco-German-Russian axis of peace was
and still is trying to prevent what both al-Qaeda and American
fundamentalists want: a war of civilizations and a war of religion.
And the world public opinion's insight is that Washington may win the
war without the UN - but it will lose peace by shooting the UN down.
As a diplomat in Brussels put it, "The world has voted in unison: it
does not want to be reordered by a posse in Washington."

The men in the AEI and the PNAC galaxy may be accused of intolerance,
arrogance of power, undisguised fascist tendencies, ignorance of
history and cultural parochialism - in various degrees. This is all
open to debate. They may be "chicken hawks" like Kristol junior or
attack dogs like Rumsfeld. But most of all what baffles educated
publics across the world - especially the overwhelming majority of
public opinion in Germany, France, the UK, Italy and Spain - is the
current non-separation of Church and State in the US.

George W Bush is not ideologically a neoconservative. But he is
certainly a man with a notorious lack of intellectual curiosity.
Backed by his core American constituency of 60 to 70 million
Bible-believing Christians, born-again Bush is setting out to do God's
will on a crusade to Babylon to "fight evil" - personified by Saddam.
Martin Amis, Britain's top contemporary novelist, argues that Bush,
being intellectually null, had no other option than to adopt God as
his foreign policy mentor. Amis wrote in the Observer that "Bush is
more religious than Saddam: of the two presidents, he is, in this
respect, the more psychologically primitive. We hear about the
successful 'Texanization' of the Republican party. And doesn't Texas
seem to resemble a country like Saudi Arabia, with its great heat, its
oil wealth, its brimming houses of worship, and its weekly
executions." For former weapons inspector Scott Ritter, Bush is "a
fundamentalist who does not respect international law. The United
States is becoming a crusader state." For the absolute majority of 1.3
billion Muslims, a sinister crusader it is.

The endgame will reveal itself to be a cheap family farce: the Bush
family delivers an ultimatum to the Hussein family. What Gore Vidal
describes as "the Bush-Cheney junta" has won: Cheney, Rumsfeld,
Wolfowitz, Perle, the AEI and PNAC stalwarts. Paul Wolfowitz, above
all, has won his own personal crusade. Colin Powell has lost it all.
It does not matter that the State Department's classified report,
"Iraq, the Middle East and change: no dominoes" was unveiled by the
Los Angeles Times. Wolfowitz and Perle will play with their dominoes.
By predictable mechanisms of power as old as mankind itself (and
incidentally very common in the former USSR) it was Powell - the
adversary of the new doctrine of preemption - who was charged to
defend it in the face of the world. Sources in New York confirm he was
told to get in line: his discourse, his body language, his whole
demeanor changed. Seasoned American diplomats are appalled by the
devastating political and diplomatic failure of the Bush
administration. They know that by deciding to go to war unilaterally -
and leaving the international system in shambles - the US has
squandered its biggest capital: its international legitimacy. And to
make matters worse there was absolutely no debate - in the Senate, or
in the public opinion arena - about it.

Americans still have to wake up to the fact of how startlingly
isolated they are in the world. The world, for its part, will keep
deploying its weapons of mass democracy. There can be no
"international community" as long as the popular perception lingers in
so many parts of the world of a clash between the West and Islam.
Always ready to recognize and love the best America has to offer,
hundreds of millions of people would rather try to save it from the
fatal unilateralism distilled by the American fundamentalists of the
PNAC and the AEI. Everyone in Baghdad, the former great capital of
Islam at its apex, is fond of saying how it has survived the Mongols,
the barbarians at the gate. The evangelic apostles of armed
democratization cannot even imagine the fury a new breed of barbarians
may unleash at the gate of the new American century.

From: http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/EC20Ak07.html

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