Coming
Soon!
From Common Courage Press
Recent
Stories
May
27, 2003
Kurt
Nimmo
Condoleezza Rice: Huckstress for Israeli
Myths
Anthony
Gancarski
Hillary: a Dem the NeoCons Could Love?
Patrick
Cockburn
Terror, Bush and Joseph Conrad
John Chuckman
an Interpretation of Bush's Character
Kathleen
Christison
What Sharon Wants, Sharon Gets
Jeffrey
Blankfort
AIPAC Hijacks the Roadmap
Steve
Perry
Trouble in the Hinterlands
May
26, 2003
Franklin
C. Spinney
Test Anxiety: Star Wars, Punctuated
Epistimology and the Triumph of Medievalism
Elaine
Cassel
Supreme Sacrifice
Sam
Hamod
When Trained Killers Return Home
Stew Albert
The Final Conflict
May
24 / 25, 2003
Gary
Leupp
The Philosopher Kings: Leo Strauss
and the Neo-Cons
Uri Avnery
The Hannibal Procedure
Diane
Christian
Who's the Real Enemy?
"Just Cause" or "Kill the Bastards"
Alexander
Cockburn
Derrida's Double Life
William
S. Lind
Is Saddam Really Out of the Game?
William
Cook
Road to Nowhere
David Krieger
Bush's War on the Poor: Economic Justice
Ilan
Pappe
Academic Freedom Under Assault in Israel
Wayne Madsen
American Idle
Noah
Leavitt
Slowing Sowing Justice in the Killing Fields
Walt Brasch
Americans are Liars
Lenni
Brenner
John Brown and Dutch Bill
Mickey
Z.
Hope, Crosby & Al Qaeda
Michael
Ortiz Hill
Grievous Harm Here and Abroad
Adam Engel
Towers of Babel
Poets'
Basement
Albert, Guthrie, Alam, Orloski
May
23, 2003
Standard
Schaefer
Lifting the Sanctions: Who Benefits?
Ron
Jacobs
Long Live People's Park!
Michael
Greger, MD
Return of Mad Cow: US Beef Supply
at Risk
Elaine
Cassel
Tigar to Ashcroft: "Secrecy is the Enemy of Democratic Govt."
Sam
Hamod
The Shi'a of Iraq
Christopher
Greeder
After the Layoffs (poem)
Steve
Perry
Bush's Wars Weblog 5/23
May
22, 2003
Mark
Gaffney
Christian in Name Only
Carl
Estabrook
Republic of Fear
Carl
Camacho, Jr.
Reason for Hope
Ben
Granby
What Rates a Headline from the Middle
East?
Vanessa
Jones
Terror Alerts in Australia
Mickey
Z.
Instant Understanding
Don
Monkerud
Snowballs in a Soggy Economy
Barry Lando
The Nether-Nether World of G.W. Bush
Steve
Perry
Total Information
Awareness: Secret Shadow Program?
May
21, 2003
Dave
Lindorff
Ari Fleischer Quits the Scene: The
Liar's Gone, the Enablers Remain
Chris
Floyd
How Blood Money Becomes Business Opportunity
Dr. Gerry
Lower
Graham's God and Bush's Pathology
Patrick
Cockburn
In Post War Iraq, the Signs of Breakdown
are Everywhere
Brian Cloughley
The Fatuous Braintrust: Newt, Rummy and Wolfowitz
Saul
Landau
Shopping, the End of the World and the Politics of Bush
Larry Kearney
Two Morning Poems, May 2003
Steve
Perry
Chaos in Iraq: Just What the US Wanted?
Elaine
Cassel
Ashcroft Justice Comes to Iraq
May
20, 2003
Tariq
Ali
The Empire Advances
Ahmad
Faruqui
Whither American Nationalism?
Ben Tripp
Dialysis with Osama
Linda
Heard
The Cage of Occupation
Cynthia
McKinney
Toward a Just and Peaceful World
Edward
Said
The Arab Condition
Mokhiber
and Weissman
Why Ari Should Have Resigned in Protest Long Ago
Stew
Albert
Yale Men
Steve Perry
The New Face of Al-Qaeda
May
19, 2003
Veteran
Intelligence Professionals for Sanity
A Letter to Kofi Annan on Powell's Missing
Evidence
CounterPunch
Wire
"Terror" Slut Steve Emerson
Eats Crow
John
Chuckman
Blair's Awkward Lies
Matt
Vidal
Corporate Media and the Myth of the Free Market
Michael
S. Ladah
The Fine Print to Bush's Road Map
Robert
Fisk
Bush's Eternal War Backfires
Elaine
Cassel
Clarence Thomas, Still Whining After All These Years
Jonathan
Freedland
Ann Coulter's Appalling Magic
Steve Perry
Play It Again, O-Sam-a
May
17 / 18, 2003
Uri
Avnery
The Children's Teeth
Peter
Linebaugh
An American Tribute to Christopher
Hill
Gary
Leupp
Nepal Today
Rock and
Rap Confidential
The Republican Plot Against the Dixie Chicks
Walter
Sommerfeld
Plundering Baghdad's Museums
Ron Jacobs
Condy Rice's Yipping Tirades
Thomas
P. Healy
Dubya Does Indy
Tarif Abboushi
Bush, Sharon and the Roadmap
Francis
Boyle
Debating US War Crimes in Iraq
Mark Davis
An Interview with Richard Butler
Richard
Lichtman
American Mourning
Michael
Ortiz Hill
Overcoming Terrorism
Adam
Engel
Uncle Sam is YOU!
Alan Maas
The Best News Show on TV
Poets'
Basement
Reiss, Guthrie, Albert
Elaine
Cassel
Good Enough for an Alien
Website
of the Weekend
The 37 Americans Who Run Iraq
Song of
the Weekend
Talkin' Sounds Just Like Joe McCarthy Blues
May
16, 2003
Leah
Wells
In Iraq Water and Oil Do Mix
Ben Tripp
Fear Itself
Sharon
Smith
The Resegregation of US Schools
Ramzy Baroud
Does Defeat Have to be So Humiliating?
Sam
Hamod
A Nation of Fear
Phil Reeves
Baghdad Pays the Price
Robert
McChesney
The FCC's Big Grab
Mark Engler
Those Who Don't Count
Steve
Perry
We're All
Extras in Bush's Movie
Website
of the Day
Iraq and Our
Energy Future
May
15, 2003
Ayesha
Iman and Sindi Medar-Gould
How
Not to Help Amina Lawal: The Hidden Dangers of Letter
Writing Campaigns
Julie
Hilden
Moussaoui and the Camp X-Ray Detainees:
Can He Get a Fair Trial?
Tanya
Reinhart
Bush's Roadmap: a Ticket to Failure
Laura Carlsen
Here We Go Again: NAFTA Plus or Minus?
Kenneth
Rapoza
The New Fakers: State Dept. Undercuts
New Yorker's Goldberg
Stew Albert
A Story I Will Tell
Steve
Perry
Bush's Little
Nukes
Website
of the Day
Strip-o-Rama
May
14, 2003
Cindy
Corrie
A Mother's Day Talk: the Daughter
I Can't Hear From
Jason
Leopold
The Pentagon and Hallburton: a Secret
November Deal for Iraq's Oil
David
Lindorff
Fighting the Patriot Act: Now It's
Alaska
John
Chuckman
Giggling into Chaos
Jack
McCarthy
Twin Towers of Journalism: Racism
and Double Standards
Wayne
Madsen
Assassinating JFK Again
M.
Junaid Alam
The Longer View
Paul
de Rooij
The New Hydra's Head:
Propagandists and the Selling of the US/Iraq War
James
Reiss
What? Me Worry?
Steve Perry
More on Saudi Arabia Bombings
Website
of the Day
A Tribute to Ted Joans
May
13, 2003
Saul
Landau
Clear Channel Fogs the Airwaves
Michael
Neumann
Has Islam Failed? Not by Western
Standards
Uri
Avnery
My Meeting with Arafat
Steve Perry
The Saudi Arabia Bombing
Jacob
Levich
Democracy Comes to Iraq: Kick Their Ass and Grab Their Gas
William
Lind
The Hippo and the Mongoose: a Question of Military Theory
The
Black Commentator
Fraud at the Times: Blaming Blacks for White Folks' Mistakes
Stew Albert
Asylum
Hammond
Guthrie
An Illogical Reign
Website
of the Day
Sy Hersh: War and Intelligence
May
12, 2003
Chris
Floyd
Bush, Bin Laden, Bechtel, and Baghdad
Dave
Lindorff
America's Dirty Bombs
Sam
Hamod and Elaine Cassel
Resisting the Bush Administration's War on Liberty
Uzi
Benziman
Sharon and Sons, Inc.
Jason
Leopold
The Decline and Fall of Thomas White
Rich Procter
George Jumps the Shark
Federico
Moscogiuri
Going to Israel? Sign or Else
Steve
Perry
Bush's War Web Log 5/12
Book
of the Day
Fooling
Marty Peretz
Website
of the Day
T-Shirts to Protest In
Hot Stories
Cindy
Corrie
A Mother's Day Talk: the Daughter
I Can't Hear From
Elaine
Cassel
Civil Liberties
Watch
Michel
Guerrin
Embedded Photographer Says: "I
Saw Marines Kill Civilians"
Uzma
Aslam Khan
The Unbearably Grim Aftermath of War:
What America Says Does Not Go
Paul de Rooij
Arrogant
Propaganda
Gore Vidal
The
Erosion of the American Dream
Francis Boyle
Impeach
Bush: A Draft Resolution
Click Here
for More Stories.
|
May
28, 2003
A PNAC Primer
How We Got Into
This Mess
By BERNARD WEINER
Recently, I was the guest on a radio talk-show
hosted by a thoroughly decent far-right Republician. I got verbally
battered, but returned fire and, I think, held my own. Toward
the end of the hour, I mentioned that the National Security Strategy
-- promulgated by the Bush Administration in September 2002 --
now included attacking possible future competitors first, assuming
regional hegemony by force of arms, controlling energy resources
around the globe, maintaining a permanent-war strategy, etc.
"I'm not making up this stuff,"
I said. "It's all talked about openly by the neoconservatives
of the Project for the New American Century -- who now are in
charge of America's military and foreign policy -- and published
as official U.S. doctrine in the National Security Strategy of
the United States of America."
The talk-show host seemed to gulp, and
then replied: "If you really can demonstrate all that, you
probably can deny George Bush a second term in 2004."
Two things became apparent in that exchange:
1) Even a well-educated, intelligent radio commentator was unaware
of some of this information; and, 2) Once presented with it,
this conservative icon understood immediately the implications
of what would happen if the American voting public found out
about these policies.
So, a large part of our job in the run-up
to 2004 is to get this information out to those able to hear
it and understand the implications of an imperial foreign/military
policy on our economy, on our young people in uniform, on our
moral sense of ourselves as a nation, on our constitutional freedoms,
on our constitutional freedoms, and on our treaty obligations
-- which is to say, our respect for the rule of law. Nearly
40% of Bush's support is fairly solid, but there is a block of
about 20% inbetween that 40% and the 40% who can be counted upon
to vote for a reasonable Democratic candidate -- and that 20%
is where the election will be decided. We need to reach a goodly
number of those moderate (and even some traditionally conservative)
Republicans and independents with the facts inherent in the dangerous,
reckless, and expensive policies carried out by the Bush Administration.
When these voters become aware of how
various, decades-old, popular programs are being rolled back
or eliminated (because there's no money available for them, because
that money is being used to fight more and more wars, and because
income to the federal coffers is being siphoned-off in costly
tax-cuts to the wealthiest sectors of society), that 20% may
be a bit more open to hearing what we have to say.
When it's your kids' schools being short-changed,
and your state's and city's services to citizens being chopped,
your bridges and parks and roadways and libraries and public
hospitals being neglected, your IRAs and pensions losing their
value, and your job not being as secure as in years past -- in
short, when you can see the connection between Bush&Co.'s
expensive military policies and your thinner wallet and reduced
social amenities, true voter-education becomes possible. It's
still the economy, stupid.
ORIGINS OF THE CRISIS
Most of us Americans saw the end of the
Cold War as a harbinger of a more peaceful globe, and we relaxed
knowing that the communist world was no longer a threat to the
U.S. The Soviet Union, our partner in MAD (Mutually Assured Destruction)
and Cold War rivalry around the globe, was no more. This meant
a partial vacuum in international affairs. Nature abhors a vacuum.
The only major vacuum-filler still standing
after the Cold War was the United States. One could continue
traditional diplomacy on behalf of American ends -- the kind
of polite, well-disguised defense of U.S. interests (largely
corporate) and imperial ambition carried out under Bush#1, Reagan,
Clinton, et al. -- knowing that we'd mostly get our way eventually
given our status as the globe's only Superpower. Or one could
try to speed up the process and accomplish those same ends overtly
-- with an attitude of arrogance and in-your-face bullying --
within maybe one or two Republican administrations.
Some of the ideological roots of today's
Bush Administration power-wielders could be traced back to political
philosophers Leo Strauss and Albert Wohlstetter or to GOP rightist
Barry Goldwater and his rabid anti-communist followers in the
early-1960s. But, for simplicity's sake let's stick closer to
our own time.
In the early-1990s, there was a group
of ideologues and power-politicians on the fringe of the Republican
Party's far-right. The members of this group in 1997 would found
The Project for the
New American Century (PNAC); their aim was to prepare for
the day when the Republicans regained control of the White House
-- and, it was hoped, the other two branches of government as
well -- so that their vision of how the U.S. should move in the
world would be in place and ready to go, straight off-the-shelf
into official policy.
This PNAC group was led by such heavy
hitters as Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney, James Woolsey, Paul
Wolfowitz, Richard Perle, Bill Kristol, James Bolton, Zalmay
M. Khalilzad, William Bennett, Dan Quayle, Jeb Bush, most of
whom were movers-and-shakers in previous Administrations, then
in power-exile, as it were, while Clinton was in the White House.
But even given their reputations and clout, the views of this
group were regarded as too extreme to be taken seriously by the
mainstream conservatives that controlled the Republican Party.
SETTING UP PNAC
To prepare the ground for the PNAC-like
ideas that were circulating in the HardRight, various wealthy
individuals and corporations helped set up far-right think-tanks,
and bought up various media outlets -- newspapers, magazines,
TV networks, radio talk shows, cable channels, etc. -- in support
of that day when all the political tumblers would click into
place and the PNAC cabal and their supporters could assume control.
This happened with the Supreme Court's
selection of George W. Bush in 2000. The "outsiders"
from PNAC were now powerful "insiders," placed in important
positions from which they could exert maximum pressure on U.S.
policy: Cheney is Vice President, Rumsfeld is Defense Secretary,
Wolfowitz is Deputy Defense Secretary, I. Lewis Libby is Cheney's
Chief of Staff, Elliot Abrams is in charge of Middle East policy
at the National Security Council, Dov Zakheim is comptroller
for the Defense Department, John Bolton is Undersecretary of
State, Richard Perle is chair of the Defense Policy advisory
board at the Pentagon, former CIA director James Woolsey is on
that panel as well, etc. etc. (PNAC's chairman, Bill Kristol,
is the editor of Rupert Murdoch's The Weekly Standard.) In short,
PNAC had a lock on military policy-creation in the Bush Administration.
But, in order to unleash their foreign/military
campaigns without taking all sorts of flak from the traditional
wing of the conservative GOP -- which was more isolationist,
more opposed to expanding the role of the federal government,
more opposed to military adventurism abroad -- they needed a
context that would permit them free rein. The events of 9/11
rode to their rescue. (In one of their major reports, written
in 2000, they noted that "the process of transformation,
even if it brings revolutionary change, is likely to be a long
one, absent some catastrophic and catalyzing even--like a new
Pearl Harbor.")
After those terrorist attacks, the Bush
Administration used the fear generated in the general populace
as their cover for enacting all sorts of draconian measures domestically
(the Patriot Act, drafted earlier, was rushed through Congress
in the days following 9/11; few members even read it), and as
their rationalization for launching military campaigns abroad.
(Don't get me wrong. The Islamic fanatics that use terror as
their political weapon are real and deadly and need to be stopped.
The question is: How to do that in ways that enhance rather than
detract from America's long-term national interests?)
THE DOMESTIC RAMIFICATIONS
Even today, the Bush manipulators, led
by Karl Rove, continue to utilize fear and hyped-up patriotism
and a permanent war on terrorism as the basis for their policy
agenda, the top item of which, at this juncture, consists of
getting Bush elected in 2004. This, in order to continue to fulfill
their primary objectives, not the least of which domestically
is to roll back and, where possible, decimate and eliminate social
programs that the far-right has hated since the New Deal/Great
Society days.
By and large, these programs are popular
with Americans, so Bush&Co. can't attack them frontally --
but if all the monies are tied up in wars, defense, tax cuts,
etc., they can go to the American public and, in effect, say:
"We'd love to continue to fund Head Start and education
and environmental protection and drugs for the elderly through
Medicare, but you see there's simply no extra money left over
after we go after the bad guys. It's not our fault."
So far, that stealth strategy has worked.
The Bush&Co. hope is that the public won't catch on to their
real agenda -- to seek wealth and power at the expense of average
citizens -- until after a 2004 victory, and maybe not even then.
Just keep blaming the terrorists, the French, the Dixie Chicks,
peaceniks, fried potatoes, whatever.
One doesn't have to speculate what the
PNAC guys might think, since they're quite open and proud of
their theories and strategies. Indeed, they've left a long, public
record that lays out quite openly what they're up to. As I say,
it was all laid out years ago, but nobody took such extreme talk
seriously; now that they're in power, actually making the policy
they only dreamed about a decade or so ago -- with all sorts
of scarifying consequences for America and the rest of the world
-- we need to educate ourselves quickly as to how the PNACers
work and what their future plans might be.
THE PNAC PAPER TRAIL
Here is a shorthand summary of PNAC strategies
that have become U.S. policy. Some of these you may have heard
about before, but I've expanded and updated as much as possible.
1. In 1992, then-Secretary of Defense
Dick Cheney had a strategy report drafted for the Department
of Defense, written by Paul Wolfowitz, then Under-Secretary of
Defense for Policy. In it, the U.S. government was urged, as
the world's sole remaining Superpower, to move aggressively and
militarily around the globe. The report called for pre-emptive
attacks and ad hoc coalitions, but said that the U.S. should
be ready to act alone when "collective action cannot be
orchestrated." The central strategy was to "establish
and protect a new order" that accounts "sufficiently
for the interests of the advanced industrial nations to discourage
them from challenging our leadership," while at the same
time maintaining a military dominance capable of "deterring
potential competitors from even aspiring to a larger regional
or global role." Wolfowitz outlined plans for military intervention
in Iraq as an action necessary to assure "access to vital
raw material, primarily Persian Gulf oil" and to prevent
the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction and threats
from terrorism.
Somehow, this report leaked to the press;
the negative response was immediate. Senator Robert Byrd led
the Democratic charge, calling the recommended Pentagon strategy
"myopic, shallow and disappointing....The basic thrust of
the document seems to be this: We love being the sole remaining
superpower in the world and we want so much to remain that way
that we are willing to put at risk the basic health of our economy
and well-being of our people to do so." Clearly, the objective
political forces hadn't yet coalesced in the U.S. that could
support this policy free of major resistance, and so President
Bush the Elder publicly repudiated the paper and sent it back
to the drawing boards. (For the essence of the draft text, see
Barton Gellman's "Keeping
the U.S. First; Pentagon Would Preclude a Rival Superpower"
in the Washington Post.)
2. Various HardRight intellectuals outside
the government were spelling out the new PNAC policy in books
and influential journals. Zalmay M. Khalilzad (formerly associated
with big oil companies, currently U.S. Special Envoy to Afghanistan
& Iraq ) wrote an important volume in 1995, "From Containment
to Global Leadership: America & the World After the Cold
War," the import of which was identifying a way for the
U.S. to move aggressively in the world and thus to exercise effective
control over the planet's natural resources. A year later, in
1996, neo-conservative leaders Bill Kristol and Robert Kagan,
in their Foreign Affairs article "Towards a Neo-Reaganite
Foreign Policy," came right out and said the goal for the
U.S. had to be nothing less than "benevolent global hegemony,"
a euphemism for total U.S. domination, but "benevolently"
exercised, of course.
3. In 1998, PNAC unsuccessfully lobbied
President Clinton to attack Iraq and remove Saddam Hussein from
power. The January
letter from PNAC urged America to initiate that war even
if the U.S. could not muster full support from the Security Council
at the United Nations. Sound familiar? (President Clinton replied
that he was focusing on dealing with al-Qaida terrorist cells.)
4. In September of 2000, PNAC, sensing
a GOP victory in the upcoming presidential election, issued its
white paper on "Rebuilding America's Defenses: Strategy,
Forces and Resources for the New Century." The PNAC report
was quite frank about why the U.S. would want to move toward
imperialist militarism, a Pax Americana, because with the Soviet
Union out of the picture, now is the time most "conducive
to American interests and ideals...The challenge of this coming
century is to preserve and enhance this 'American peace'."
And how to preserve and enhance the Pax Americana? The answer
is to "fight and decisively win multiple, simultaneous major-theater
wars."
In serving as world "constable,"
the PNAC report went on, no other countervailing forces will
be permitted to get in the way. Such actions "demand American
political leadership rather than that of the United Nations,"
for example. No country will be permitted to get close to parity
with the U.S. when it comes to weaponry or influence; therefore,
more U.S. military bases will be established in the various regions
of the globe. (A post-Saddam Iraq may well serve as one of those
advance military bases.) Currently, it is estimated that the
U.S. now has nearly 150 military bases and deployments in different
countries around the world, with the most recent major increase
being in the Caspian Sea/Afghanistan/Middle East areas.
5. George W. Bush moved into the White
House in January of 2001. Shortly thereafter, a report by the
Administration-friendly Council on Foreign Relations was prepared,
"Strategic
Energy Policy Challenges for the 21st Century,"that
advocated a more aggressive U.S. posture in the world and called
for a "reassessment of the role of energy in American foreign
policy," with access to oil repeatedly cited as a "security
imperative." (It's possible that inside Cheney's energy-policy
papers -- which he refuses to release to Congress or the American
people -- are references to foreign-policy plans for how to gain
military control of oilfields abroad.)
6. Mere hours after the 9/11 terrorist
mass-murders, PNACer Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld ordered his
aides to begin planning for an attack on Iraq, even though his
intelligence officials told him it was an al-Qaida operation
and there was no connection between Iraq and the attacks. "Go
massive,"
the aides' notes quote him as saying. ( "Sweep it all
up. Things related and not." Rumsfeld leaned heavily on
the FBI and CIA to find any shred of evidence linking the Iraq
government to 9/11, but they weren't able to. So he set up his
own fact-finding group in the Pentagon that would provide him
with whatever shaky connections it could find or surmise.
7. Feeling confident that all plans were
on track for moving aggressively in the world, the Bush Administration
in September of 2002 published its "National
Security Strategy of the United States of America."
The official policy of the U.S. government, as proudly proclaimed
in this major document, is virtually identical to the policy
proposals in the various white papers of the Project for the
New American Century and others like it over the past decade.
Chief among them are: 1) the policy of
"pre-emptive" war -- i.e., whenever the U.S. thinks
a country may be amassing too much power and/or could provide
some sort of competition in the "benevolent hegemony"
region, it can be attacked, without provocation. (A later corollary
would rethink the country's atomic policy: nuclear weapons would
no longer be considered defensive, but could be used offensively
in support of political/economic ends; so-called "mini-nukes"
could be employed in these regional wars.) 2) international treaties
and opinion will be ignored whenever they are not seen to serve
U.S. imperial goals. 3) The new policies "will require bases
and stations within and beyond Western Europe and Northeast Asia."
In short, the Bush Administration seems
to see the U.S., admiringly, as a New Rome, an empire with its
foreign legions (and threat of "shock&awe" attacks,
including with nuclear weapons) keeping the outlying colonies,
and potential competitors, in line. Those who aren't fully in
accord with these goals better get out of the way; "you're
either with us or against us."
SUMMARY & THE
PNAC FUTURE
Everyone loves a winner, and American
citizens are no different. It makes a lot of people feel good
that we "won" the battle for Iraq, but in doing so
we paid too high a price at that, and may well have risked losing
the larger war in the Arab/Muslim region: the U.S. now lacks
moral stature and standing in much of the world, it is revealed
as a liar for all to see (no WMDs in Iraq, no connection to 9/11,
no quick handing-over the interim reins of government to the
Iraqis as initially promised), it destroyed a good share of the
United Nation's effectiveness and prestige that may come in handy
later, it needlessly alienated our traditional allies, it infuriated
key elements of the Muslim world, it provided political and emotional
ammunition for anti-U.S. terrorists, etc.
Already, we're talking about $80 to $100
billion from the U.S. treasury for post-war reconstruction in
Iraq. And the PNACers are gearing up for their next war: let's
see, should we move first on Iran or on Syria, or maybe do Syria-lite
first in Lebanon?
One can believe that maybe PNAC sincerely
believes its rhetoric -- that instituting U.S.-style free-markets
and democratically-elected governments in Iraq and the other
authoritarian-run countries of the Islamic Middle East will be
good both for the citizens of that region and for American interests
as well -- but even if that is true, it's clear that these incompetents
are not operating in the world of Middle Eastern realities.
These are armchair theorheticians --
most of whom made sure not to serve in the military in Vietnam
-- who truly believed, for example, that the Iraqis would welcome
the invading U.S. forces with bouquets of flowers and kisses
when they "liberated" their country from the horribleness
of Saddam Hussein's reign. The Iraqis, by and large, were happy
to be freed of Saddam's terror, but, as it stands now, the U.S.
military forces are more likely to be engulfed in a political/religious
quagmire for years there, as so many of the majority Shia population
just want the occupying soldiers to leave.
And yet PNAC theorists continue to believe
that remaking the political structure of the Middle East -- by
force if necessary, although they hope the example of what the
U.S. did to Iraq will make war unnecessary -- will be fairly
easy.
These are men of big ideas, but who don't
really think. They certainly don't think through what takes place
in the real world, when the genies of war and religious righteousness
are let out of the bottle. For example, as New York Times columnist
Tom Friedman recently put it, the U.S. had no Plan B for Iraq.
They did great with Plan A, the war, but when the Saddam government
collapsed, and with it law and order, and much of the population
remained sullen and resentful towards the U.S., they had no prepared
way of dealing with it. An embarrassing three weeks went by,
with no progress, finally leading the Bush Administration to
force out its initial administrators and to put in another team
to have a go at it.
No, friends, the PNAC boys are dangerous
ideologues playing with matches, and the U.S. is going to get
burned even more in years to come, unless their hold on power
is broken. The only way to accomplish this, given the present
circumstances, is to defeat their boss at the polls in 2004,
thus breaking the HardRight momentum that has done, and is doing,
such great damage to our reputation abroad and to our country
internally, especially to our Constitution and economy.
We don't need an emperor, we don't need
huge tax cuts for the wealthy when the economy is tanking, we
don't need more "pre-emptive" wars, we don't need more
shredding of constitutional due process. Instead, we need leaders
with big ideas who are capable of creative thinking. We need
peace and justice in the Middle East (to help alter the chemistry
of the soil in which terrorism grows), we need jobs and economic
growth at home, and we need authentic and effective "homeland
security" consistent with our civil liberties.
In short, we need a new Administration,
which means that we need to get to serious work to make all this
change happen. Organize!, organize!, organize!#
Bernard Weiner,
Ph.D., has taught government & international relations at
various universities, and was a writer/editor with the San Francisco
Chronicle for nearly 20 years. He now co-edits the progressive
website The Crisis Papers.
Today's
Features
Kurt
Nimmo
Condoleezza Rice: Huckstress for Israeli
Myths
Anthony
Gancarski
Hillary: a Dem the NeoCons Could Love?
Patrick
Cockburn
Terror, Bush and Joseph Conrad
John Chuckman
an Interpretation of Bush's Character
Kathleen
Christison
What Sharon Wants, Sharon Gets
Jeffrey
Blankfort
AIPAC Hijacks the Roadmap
Steve
Perry
Trouble in the Hinterlands
Keep CounterPunch
Alive:
Make
a Tax-Deductible Donation Today Online!
home / subscribe
/ about us / books
/ archives / search
/ links /
|