William O. Beeman, Commentary, Pacific News Service, Jan 30, 2003
Though the plan to invade Iraq predates 9/11, the tragedy of Sept. 11 and the rise to power of a cabal of pro-war neoconservatives gave it life and momentum. Now, writes PNS contributor William O. Beeman, only public opinion -- carefully monitored by White House strategist Karl Rove -- can stop the march toward war.
The coming U.S. invasion of Iraq was not prompted by the events of Sept. 11. It is a 5-year-old plan, conceived by a cabal of officials running defense and security in the White House today, when they were out of power during the Clinton administration. The Sept. 11 tragedy, along with the Bush presidency, gave them the momentum they needed to implement the plan, which lumbers forward like a drunken elephant threatening to destroy everything in its path.
It appears that the only force that can derail the war machine at this point is American public opinion. The administration will back down only if it fears that by pursuing this conflict it will lose the White House in 2004.
In 1997, during the Clinton administration, a number of refugees from the administration of President George Bush Sr., including Dick Cheney and his chief of staff, I. Lewis Libby, got together to lobby then-Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich to invade Iraq. This group was still smarting from the "unfinished" first Gulf conflict. Calling themselves the "Project for the New American Century" (PNAC), the group drew up the plans for a second Iraq war.
In a letter to President Clinton dated Jan. 26, 1998, the PNAC called for "the removal of Saddam Hussein's regime from power." In a letter dated May 29, 1998, to Gingrich and Sen. Trent Lott, they stated that Clinton had not listened to them and asserted: "We should establish and maintain a strong U.S. military presence in the region, and be prepared to use that force to protect our vital interests in the Gulf -- and, if necessary, to help remove Saddam from power." Chair of the PNAC was William Kristol, editor of the conservative Weekly Standard magazine.
Signatories to the plan constitute a neoconservative Who's Who. Aside from Kristol, they include Elliott Abrams, the convicted Iran-Contra conspirator whom Bush recently appointed director of Middle Eastern policy on the National Security Council; Paul Wolfowitz, deputy to Secretary Rumsfeld at the Pentagon; John Bolton, now undersecretary of state for arms control and international security; Richard Perle, chairman of the Defense Science Board; William J. Bennett, secretary of education under President Reagan; Richard Armitage, deputy to Colin Powell at the State Department; Zalmay Khalilzad, President Bush's ambassador to Afghanistan; and other members of the current administration.
Their ideas are no secret. They were printed in a September 2000 PNAC report entitled "Rebuilding America's Defenses: Strategy, Forces, and Resources for a New Century," and in the book "Present Dangers: Crisis and Opportunity in American Foreign and Defense Policy," edited by Robert Kagan and William Kristol.
These publications make it clear that the ultimate aim of the PNAC is permanent colonial occupation of Iraq and American domination of the region and its oil from that base of power.
Now all of these men are at the center of power in Washington. With so many chiefs beating the drums of war, it is not surprising that the White House slaps aside virtually every element that would modify or curtail the conflict --even facts. The lack of any proof of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, the absence of any connection between Iraq and the al Qaeda militants, the opposition of virtually every other nation on Earth to a war in Iraq, the reluctance of the United Nations to support U.S. militancy, the astonishing decline in favorable world public opinion toward the United States and the poorly reported successful boycott of American goods by the 1 billion consumers in the Islamic world all seem to make no difference.
American public opinion seems to be the only force strong enough to stop the war machine, and the only person listening in the Bush administration appears to be White House political strategist Karl Rove. In engineering the political moves of this administration, Rove has been right most of the time, so the president pays attention to him. Rove's strategy of advocating the war to American voters won the mid-term congressional elections for the president. Now the winds have changed and Americans are no longer sure that invading Iraq with scant international support is a good idea. Given this lack of a public mandate for a unilateral war, Rove reportedly convinced the president to seek the approval of the United Nations and other Arab states in the region. However, it was clear that the war strategists went along expecting to garner quick nominal approval and then to proceed with the original invasion plan.
This did not happen. The invasion bogged down in debate and consultations. The delays created by U.N. deliberations and inspections brought out the petulance in President Bush and Secretary Rumsfeld. The president these days is sounding like a 5-year-old having a tantrum, as he complains of the lack of progress in the inspections and berates Saddam. For his part, having called publicly for the Iraqi president's ouster, Secretary Rumsfeld told reporters on Jan. 16 that even if Saddam Hussein left Iraq, the United States might still invade. Apparently no one is going to deny these White House warriors their long-planned invasion.
This state of affairs is a stiff test for American democracy. With public opinion so crucial in shaping the actions of this administration, it is certain that Americans will get this war -- unless they say emphatically that they don't want it. The militants in the White House are champing at the bit. Only their fear of the voters holds them in check.
Iraqi President Saddam Hussein greets Donald Rumsfeld, then special envoy of President Ronald Reagan, in Baghdad on December 20, 1983
NEOCON and BIG OIL SUPER CONSPIRACY
The 'New World Order' Plot To Control Oil, Money, and Power http://groups.yahoo.com/group/neoconsout-dc/message/89
Insiders told BBC Newsnight that planning began "within weeks" of Bush's first taking office in 2001, long before the September 11th attack on the US.
MIDDLEEAST.ORG - MER - Washington - 17 March: With a barrel of oil now selling for more than ever before in history the refusal in practice (rather than word) of the OPEC cartel, itself largely made up of regimes the Americans have nurtured and worked with for decades, to take big steps to lower the price has surprised many. But the reasons for this are probably at least two-fold. First there are many associated with the Bush/Cheney regime, the big oil giants, and the U.S. supported 'client regimes', who are all swallowing and hoarding the billions of petrodollars as never before. At the same time the OPEC cartel has become aware of the ongoing Neocon plan -- and as with all Neocon plans the Israelis are involved -- to create a 'New World Order' which could in time bust up the OPEC cartel and pump up Western economies on a sea of energy resources more under American domination than ever.
It's been one big lie and one major disaster after another from the strange Jewish/Zionist Neocon and Christian Fundamentalist coalition that took power in the United States as a result of the Supreme Court's 5 to 4 decision that put George Bush and Dick Cheney in power in January 2001. But the true consequences of what they have done are only now seeping out from secret meetings; and the huge price to be paid in blood and treasure will continue on for years and decades to come.
Ironically most Americans -- even the small percentage among them who try to be informed and aware -- remain oblivious to what has been done, by who, and for whom, as nearly all the major exposees during the election campaign and since have been broadcast abroad in the U.K., Canada, and Europe, but not in the United States.
Secret US plans for Iraq's oil
By Greg Palast Reporting for Newsnight on BBC on 17 March
The Bush administration made plans for war and for Iraq's oil before the 9/11 attacks, sparking a policy battle between neo-cons and Big Oil, BBC's Newsnight has revealed.
Iraqi-born Falah Aljibury says US Neo-Conservatives planned to force a coup d'etat in Iraq
Two years ago today - when President George Bush announced US, British and Allied forces would begin to bomb Baghdad - protesters claimed the US had a secret plan for Iraq's oil once Saddam had been conquered.
In fact there were two conflicting plans, setting off a hidden policy war between neo-conservatives at the Pentagon, on one side, versus a combination of "Big Oil" executives and US State Department "pragmatists".
"Big Oil" appears to have won. The latest plan, obtained by Newsnight from the US State Department was, we learned, drafted with the help of American oil industry consultants.
Insiders told Newsnight that planning began "within weeks" of Bush's first taking office in 2001, long before the September 11th attack on the US.
We saw an increase in the bombing of oil facilities and pipelines [in Iraq] built on the premise that privatisation is coming Mr Falah Aljibury An Iraqi-born oil industry consultant, Falah Aljibury, says he took part in the secret meetings in California, Washington and the Middle East. He described a State Department plan for a forced coup d'etat.
Mr Aljibury himself told Newsnight that he interviewed potential successors to Saddam Hussein on behalf of the Bush administration.
Secret sell-off plan
The industry-favoured plan was pushed aside by a secret plan, drafted just before the invasion in 2003, which called for the sell-off of all of Iraq's oil fields. The new plan was crafted by neo-conservatives intent on using Iraq's oil to destroy the Opec cartel through massive increases in production above Opec quotas.
Former Shell Oil USA chief stalled plans to privatise Iraq's oil industry The sell-off was given the green light in a secret meeting in London headed by Ahmed Chalabi shortly after the US entered Baghdad, according to Robert Ebel.
Mr Ebel, a former Energy and CIA oil analyst, now a fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, told Newsnight he flew to the London meeting at the request of the State Department.
Mr Aljibury, once Ronald Reagan's "back-channel" to Saddam, claims that plans to sell off Iraq's oil, pushed by the US-installed Governing Council in 2003, helped instigate the insurgency and attacks on US and British occupying forces.
"Insurgents used this, saying, 'Look, you're losing your country, you're losing your resources to a bunch of wealthy billionaires who want to take you over and make your life miserable,'" said Mr Aljibury from his home near San Francisco.
"We saw an increase in the bombing of oil facilities, pipelines, built on the premise that privatisation is coming." Privatisation blocked by industry
Philip Carroll, the former CEO of Shell Oil USA who took control of Iraq's oil production for the US Government a month after the invasion, stalled the sell-off scheme.
Mr Carroll told us he made it clear to Paul Bremer, the US occupation chief who arrived in Iraq in May 2003, that: "There was to be no privatisation of Iraqi oil resources or facilities while I was involved."
Amy Jaffee says oil companies fear a privatisation would exclude foreign firms Ariel Cohen, of the neo-conservative Heritage Foundation, told Newsnight that an opportunity had been missed to privatise Iraq's oil fields.
He advocated the plan as a means to help the US defeat Opec, and said America should have gone ahead with what he called a "no-brainer" decision.
Mr Carroll hit back, telling Newsnight, "I would agree with that statement. To privatize would be a no-brainer. It would only be thought about by someone with no brain."
New plans, obtained from the State Department by Newsnight and Harper's Magazine under the US Freedom of Information Act, called for creation of a state-owned oil company favoured by the US oil industry. It was completed in January 2004 under the guidance of Amy Jaffe of the James Baker Institute in Texas.
Formerly US Secretary of State, Baker is now an attorney representing Exxon-Mobil and the Saudi Arabian government.
Questioned by Newsnight, Ms Jaffe said the oil industry prefers state control of Iraq's oil over a sell-off because it fears a repeat of Russia's energy privatisation. In the wake of the collapse of the Soviet Union, US oil companies were barred from bidding for the reserves.
Ms Jaffe says US oil companies are not warm to any plan that would undermine Opec and the current high oil price: "I'm not sure that if I'm the chair of an American company, and you put me on a lie detector test, I would say high oil prices are bad for me or my company."
The former Shell oil boss agrees. In Houston, he told Newsnight: "Many neo conservatives are people who have certain ideological beliefs about markets, about democracy, about this, that and the other. International oil companies, without exception, are very pragmatic commercial organizations. They don't have a theology." <> A State Department spokesman told Newsnight they intended "to provide all possibilities to the Oil Ministry of Iraq and advocate none".
Greg Palast's film - the result of a joint investigation by BBC Newsnight and Harper's Magazine - will broadcast on Thursday, 17 March, 2005. Plans are to make the program available online for 24 hours after 7pm London time --
P.N.A.C.
The neoconservative Project for the New American Century (P.N.A.C.)
has signaled its intention to continue shaping the government’s national security strategy with a new public letter stating that the “U.S. military is too small for the responsibilities we are asking it to assume.” Rather than reining in the imperial scope of United States national security strategy as set forth by the first Bush administration, PNAC and the letter’s signatories call for increasing the size of America’s global fighting machine. The Jan. 28 P.N.A.C. letter advocates that House and Senate leaders take the necessary steps “to increase substantially the size of the active duty Army and Marine Corps.” Joining the neocons in the letter to congressional leaders were a group of prominent liberals — giving some credence to P.N.A.C.’s claim that the “call to act” to increase the total number of United States ground forces counts on bipartisan support. After an initial spate of public pronouncements after Sept. 11 and during the onset of the Iraq occupation, the Project for the New American Century is again positioning itself as the policy institute that will set the second Bush administration’s security agenda. Although P.N.A.C.’s 1997 statement of principles included only prominent right-wing figures — many of whom later joined the first Bush administration — the neocon policy institute has repeatedly reached out to liberals to give its public letters to the Congress and the president the gloss of bipartisanship. Its new call for congressional leaders to increase overall United States troop levels includes endorsement of key liberal analysts. Among the signatories are the leading foreign policy analysts at the Brookings Institution and the Progressive Policy Institute (P.P.I.), which are closely associated with the Democratic Party. The endorsees of the letter are largely neoconservatives who are principals in such neocon-led institutes as P.N.A.C., American Enterprise Institute (A.E.I.), Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, and the Center for Security Policy. However, this call for a larger expeditionary force was also signed by prominent liberal hawks, including Michael O’Hanlon, Ivo Daalder, James Steinberg, and Will Marshall — all of whom have signed previous P.N.A.C. letters and policy statements. Support for a ‘Generational Commitment’ in the Middle East P.N.A.C.’s “Letter to Congress on Increasing U.S. Ground Forces” endorses Secretary of State Rice’s assessment that United States military engagement in the Middle East is a “generational commitment.” To meet that commitment, the P.N.A.C. signatories call on Congress to fulfill its constitutional obligation to raise and support military forces — which they say means increasing the number of ground forces by at least 25,000 troops annually over the next several years. P.N.A.C., which has repeatedly called for increases in the military budget and for military-backed “regime change” around the world, is concerned that the “United States military is too small for the responsibilities we are asking it to assume.” The neoconservative policy institute, which produced the blueprint for the national security strategy of the first Bush administration, echoes the recent assertion by the chief of the Army Reserve that the “overuse” of United States ground forces in Iraq and Afghanistan could result in a “broken force.” Given that the military’s reenlistment rates are declining and recruitment goals are not being met, P.N.A.C.’s call for Congress to increase troop levels implies either reintroducing the draft or dramatically increasing the pay for volunteer enlistees. The latter option would in effect create a global mercenary force deployed to meet the new responsibilities of preventive war, regime change, and political restructuring of the Middle East. Liberal Hawks Fly With the Neocons The recent P.N.A.C. letter to Congress was not the first time that P.N.A.C. or its associated front groups, such as the Coalition for the Liberation of Iraq, have included hawkish Democrats. Two P.N.A.C. letters in March 2003 played to those Democrats who believed that the invasion was justified at least as much by humanitarian concerns as it was by the purported presence of weapons of mass destruction. P.N.A.C. and the neocon camp had managed to translate their military agenda of preemptive and preventive strikes into national security policy. With the invasion underway, they sought to preempt those hardliners and military officials who opted for a quick exit strategy in Iraq. In their March 19 letter, P.N.A.C. stated that Washington should plan to stay in Iraq for the long haul: “Everyone — those who have joined the coalition, those who have stood aside, those who opposed military action, and, most of all, the Iraqi people and their neighbors — must understand that we are committed to the rebuilding of Iraq and will provide the necessary resources and will remain for as long as it takes.” Along with such neocon stalwarts as Robert Kagan, Bruce Jackson, Joshua Muravchik, James Woolsey, and Eliot Cohen, a half-dozen Democrats were among the 23 individuals who signed P.N.A.C.’s first letter on post-war Iraq. Among the Democrats were Ivo Daalder of the Brookings Institution and a member of former President Bill Clinton’s National Security Council staff; Martin Indyk, Clinton’s ambassador to Israel; Will Marshall of the Progressive Policy Institute and Democratic Leadership Council; Dennis Ross, Clinton’s top adviser on the Israel-Palestinian negotiations; and James Steinberg, Clinton’s deputy national security adviser and head of foreign policy studies at Brookings. A second post-Iraq war letter by P.N.A.C. on March 28 called for broader international support for reconstruction, including the involvement of NATO, and brought together the same Democrats with the prominent addition of another Brookings’ foreign policy scholar, Michael O’Hanlon.
In late 2002 P.N.A.C.’s Bruce Jackson formed the Committee for the Liberation of Iraq that brought together such Democrats as Senator Joseph Lieberman; former Senator Robert Kerrey, the president of the New School University who now serves on the 9/11 Commission; P.P.I.’s Will Marshall; and former Representative Steve Solarz. The neocons also reached out to Democrats through a sign-on letter to the president organized by the Social Democrats/USA, a neocon institute that has played a critical role in shaping the National Endowment for Democracy in the early 1980’s and in mobilizing labor support for an interventionist foreign policy. The liberal hawks not only joined with the neocons to support the war and the post-war restructuring but have published their own statements in favor of what is now widely regarded as a morally bankrupt policy agenda. Perhaps the clearest articulation of the liberal hawk position on foreign and military policy is found in an October 2003 report by the Progressive Policy Institute, which is a think tank closely associated with the Democratic Leadership Council. The report, titled “Progressive Internationalism: A Democratic National Security Strategy,” endorsed the invasion of Iraq, “because the previous policy of containment was failing,” and Saddam Hussein’s government was “undermining both collective security and international law.” P.P.I. President Will Marshall said that the progressive internationalism strategy draws “a sharp distinction between this mainstream Democratic strategy for national security and the far left’s vision of America’s role in the world. In this document we take issue with those who begrudge the kind of defense spending that we think is necessary to meet our needs, both at home and abroad; with folks who seem to reflexively oppose the use of force; and who seem incapable of taking America’s side in international disputes.” Among the other liberal hawks who contributed to the “Progressive Internationalism” report were Bob Kerrey; Larry Diamond of the Hoover Institution and the National Endowment for Democracy; and Michael McFaul of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. The repeated willingness of influential liberal leaders and foreign policy analysts, such as Marshall, O’Hanlon, and Daalder, to join forces with the neoconservative camp has bolstered P.N.A.C.’s claim that its foreign policy agenda is neither militarist nor imperialist but one that is based on a deep respect for human rights, democracy, and universal moral values. Other liberal hawks signing the recent P.N.A.C. letter include New Republic editor Peter Beinart; Steven Nider, director of security studies at the Progressive Policy Institute; James Steinberg, director of Brooking’s foreign policy studies program and former director of the State Department’s Policy Planning office during the Clinton administration; Craig Kennedy, president of the German Marshall Fund and former program officer at the Joyce Foundation; and Michelle Flournoy, a self-described “pro-defense Democrat” who is a member of the Aspen Strategy Group and served in the Clinton administration in the Department of Defense’s strategy secretariat. Having Yale historian Paul Kennedy, the author of The Rise and Fall of Great Powers, sign the new letter was a major coup for P.N.A.C. Not surprising is the list of neocons signing P.N.A.C.’s new letter. In addition to P.N.A.C.’s founders William Kristol and Robert Kagan, other P.N.A.C. principals included as signatories were its deputy director Daniel McKivergan, executive director Gary Schmitt, military strategist Thomas Donnelly, Middle East associate Reuel Marc Gerecht; and board members Bruce Jackson and Randy Scheunemann. Signatories from the closely associated American Enterprise Institute include Daniel Blumenthal, Joshua Muravchik, Danielle Pletka, and Elliot Cohen. Other neocon luminaries among the 34 signatories include pundit Max Boot; Clifford May, executive director of the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies; and Frank Gaffney, founder of the Center for Security Policy. One striking difference marking the new P.N.A.C. letter was its inclusion of several high-ranking retired military officers, including Gen. Barry McCaffrey, former SouthCom commander and Drug Czar, and Lt. Gen. Buster Glosson, who directed air strategy during the Gulf War. Mugging and Hugging Irving Kristol, known as the “godfather of neoconservatism,” famously defined neoconservatives as “liberals who have been mugged by reality.” That political mugging occurred in the late 1960’s and early 1970’s with the rise of the counterculture, the anti-war movement, and progressive New Politics of the Democratic Party. Former Trotskyite militants and Cold War liberals like Kristol, Norman Podhoretz, and Midge Decter switched their loyalties to the Republican Party. The “reality” that mugged the neocons was the progressive turn in the Democratic Party led by such figures as Jesse Jackson, Bella Abzug, George McGovern, and Jimmy Carter. In contrast, the neoconservatives found the militant anticommunism and social conservatism of the Ronald Reagan faction in the Republican Party invigorating. In the neocon lexicon, liberalism became synonymous with secularism, women’s liberation, anti-Americanism, and appeasement. Over the past quarter century, the neocons have sought, with increasing success, to rid the Republican Party of its isolationists, its anti-imperialists, and its realists. The younger neocons, such as William Kristol (son of Irving) and Elliott Abrams (son-in-law of Norman Podhoretz and Midge Decter), have promoted a new right-wing internationalism that holds that America should be both a global cop and a global missionary for freedom. Traditional conservatives and Republican Party realists say that the neocons’ foreign policy agenda is, respectively, neo-imperialist and unrealistic about the capacity of United States military power to remake the world. Apart from their militarist friends in the Pentagon and defense industries, the neocons are finding that their closest ideological allies are the internationalists in the liberal camp. Having recuperated from their mugging, the neocons are now reaching out to liberals who share their idealism about America’s global mission. To the delight of the neocons at P.N.A.C. and A.E.I., an influential group of liberal hawks share their vision of a United States grand strategy that will create a world order based on United States military supremacy and America’s presumed moral superiority.
Tom Barry is policy director of the International Relations Center, online at www.irc-online.org, and director of the I.R.C.’s Right Web program.
THE NEOCON 'WOLFOWITZ'
TO RULE THE WORLD {BANK}
http://www.alternet.org/story/21518/ By David Corn, The Nation. Posted March 16, 2005.
Wolfowitz's record on Iraq is one of miscalculation and exaggeration. And the poor of the world deserve a World Bank president with better judgment. First George W. Bush picks U.N.-basher John Bolton to be ambassador to the United Nations. Then he nominates Karen Hughes, a champion spinner who has little foreign policy experience, to be under secretary of state in charge of enhancing the United States' image abroad. Next, Bush taps Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz to run the World Bank. The Wolfowitz nomination is a win for the Pentagon but a loss for the world. Wolfowitz's achievements as a warmonger may say little about his views on international development, but his record on Iraq is one of miscalculation and exaggeration. And the poor of the world deserve a World Bank president with better judgment. A leading neocon, Wolfowitz was a chief cheerleader for the war in Iraq – even before 9/11. In the first months of the Bush administration, Wolfowitz advocated toppling Saddam Hussein by sending in U.S. troops to seize Iraq's oil fields and establish a foothold. Then, according to Wolfowitz, the rest of the country would rise up against Hussein. As Bob Woodward reported, then-Secreatry of State Colin Powell called this idea "lunacy." Right after the horrific attacks of Sept. 11, Wolfowitz again called for attacking Iraq. He argued that Iraq would be a much easier target than Afghanistan. So much for his strategic sense. And before the invasion of Iraq he was a key pitchman for the phony case that Saddam Hussein presented a direct WMD threat to the United States. For example, on Dec. 2, 2002, he said, "[Bush's] determination to use force if necessary is because of the threat posed by Iraq's weapons of mass destruction." At a subsequent speech at the Council on Foreign Relations, Wolfowitz claimed the WMD case for war was "very convincing." (After the invasion, WMD hunters David Kay and Charles Duelfer concluded there had been no WMDs. And a Senate intelligence committee report noted that the pre-war intelligence had been flawed – that is, not all that convincing.) Shortly after the start of the war, Wolfowitz declared there had been "no oversell" of the WMD threat. No "oversell"? He said there were WMDs; there were no WMDs. Isn't that, by definition, overselling? Wolfowitz did tell Vanity Fair that the WMD argument had been quite convenient: "For bureaucratic reasons. we settled on one issue, weapons of mass destruction, because it was the one reason everyone could agree on." It just happened to be the only reason deployed by Bush and Wolfowitz that made the immediate safety of the country the paramount issue. But with the WMDs clearly missing in action, Wolfowitz tried to pivot. Appearing before Congress, he explained that intelligence is "an art not a science" and that the absence of WMDs did not mean "that anybody misled anybody." Yet before the war he had depicted the intelligence not as art" but as hard-and-fast and "very convincing" material. When the Bush White House was pushing – or manipulating – the case for war, Wolfowitz sided with the administration hawks who believed Hussein's regime had a significant connection to al Qaeda, despite the absence of credible evidence. He pressed the CIA and FBI to find proof of the unconfirmed report that 9/11 ringleader Mohamad Atta had met with an Iraqi intelligence agent in Prague – even after the two intelligence agencies had already investigated the matter and had found nothing to corroborate the allegation. While selling the war to come, Wolfowitz told Congress the conflict in Iraq and the subsequent reconstruction would be financed by oil sales. That, too, was wrong. And Wolfowitz shares responsibility for the administration's inadequate planning for the post-invasion challenges in Iraq. Gen. Tommy Franks, who commanded the Iraq invasion, told Woodward that he had urged Wolfowitz and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld to prepare for the aftermath, but the pair did not do so. When Army chief of staff Gen. Eric Shinseki suggested that hundreds of thousands of troops would be needed to get the job done in Iraq, Wolfowitz scoffed at him and said Shinseki was "wildly off the mark." Misreading the task ahead, he also naively remarked, "Like the people of France in the 1940s, [the Iraqis] view us as their hoped-for liberators." Was that not another "oversell"? Perhaps developments in Iraq and the Middle East will move toward Wolfowitz's grand neocon vision. The elections in Iraq were a positive and encouraging event. But the war is not over, and all the consequences of the war are not yet realized or recognized – even though some direct (and still-mounting) costs are clear: 1,500 dead Americans, tens of thousands of dead Iraqi civilians (perhaps over 100,000), $200 billion in taxpayer funds, a dramatic drop in the United States' standing abroad, the creation (according to the National Intelligence Council) of a new breeding ground for anti-American terrorists), and the uncontrolled dispersal of equipment that could be used to produce unconventional weapons. This war, as of yet, is no slam-dunk. So what's Wolfowitz's reward for his various misjudgments and exaggerations? The fellow who is co-culpable for diminishing U.S. credibility overseas and who symbolizes arrogance and hubris in policymaking is handed a plum position. (Outgoing World Bank president James Wolfensohn got to play cello with Yo-Yo Ma.) What signal does it send to the rest of the world, particularly those troubled nations that need effective assistance from the World Bank? It seems the White House doesn't care. After the Bolton appointment, why worry about this one? The G8 nations, the Europeans will roll over. It's good to be king in a unipolar world In 1967, Robert McNamara, the captain of the Vietnam tragedy, left his post as secretary of defense to become president of the World Bank. So Bush is establishing a bipartisan tradition: you screw up a war, you get to run the World Bank. With this announcement, the impoverished of the world have less reason for hope. For other takes on Wolfowitz, see the comments of fellow bloggers and Wolfowitz-watchers Tim Shorrock and Steve Clemmons. David Corn is the Washington editor of The Nation and author of "The Lies of George W. Bush: Mastering the Politics of Deception." He writes a blog at davidcorn.com.
SNEAKY fucking NEOCONS
Explosive BBC Doc Exposes Decades-Old Neocon Deceits
By cybe Created 28/12/2004 - 11:54
Explosive BBC Doc Exposes Decades-Old Neocon Deceits Hyping Terror For Fun, Profit - And Power http://100777.com/node/1119
By Thom Hartmann 12-28-4 http://rense.com/general61/ddoc.htm [1] For those who prefer to read things online, an unofficial but complete transcript is here: http://www.silt3.com/index.php?id=573 [2]
What if there really was no need for much - or even most - of the Cold War?
What if, in fact, the Cold War had been kept alive for two decades based on phony WMD threats?
What if, similarly, the War On Terror was largely a scam [3], and the administration was hyping it to seem larger-than-life?
What if our "enemy" represented a real but relatively small threat posed by rogue and criminal groups well outside the mainstream of Islam?
What if that hype was done largely to enhance the power, electability, and stature of George W. Bush and Tony Blair?
And what if the world was to discover the most shocking dimensions of these twin deceits - that the same men promulgated them in the 1970s and today?
It happened.
The myth-shattering event took place in England the first three weeks of October, when the BBC aired a three-hour documentary written and produced by Adam Curtis, titled "The Power of Nightmares http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/3755686.stm [4]
If the emails and phone calls many of us in the US received from friends in the UK - and debate in the pages of publications like The Guardian http://www.guardian.co.uk/terrorism/story/0,12780,1327904,00.html [5]are any indicator, this was a seismic event, one that may have even provoked a hasty meeting between Blair and Bush a few weeks later. According to this carefully researched and well-vetted BBC documentary, Richard Nixon, following in the steps of his mentor and former boss Dwight D. Eisenhower, believed it was possible to end the Cold War and eliminate fear from the national psyche. The nation need no longer be afraid of communism [6] or the Soviet Union.
Nixon worked out a truce with the Soviets, meeting their demands for safety as well as the US needs for security, and then announced to Americans that they need no longer be afraid. In 1972, President Richard Nixon returned from the Soviet Union with a treaty worked out by Secretary of State Henry Kissinger [7], the beginning of a process Kissinger called "détente."
On June 1, 1972, Nixon gave a speech in which he said, "Last Friday, in Moscow, we witnessed the beginning of the end of that era which began in 1945. With this step, we have enhanced the security of both nations. We have begun to reduce the level of fear, by reducing the causes of fear-for our two peoples, and for all peoples in the world." But Nixon left amid scandal and Ford came in, and Ford's Secretary of Defense (Donald Rumsfeld) and Chief of Staff (Dick Cheney) believed it was intolerable that Americans might no longer be bound by fear.
Without fear, how could Americans [8] be manipulated [9]? Rumsfeld and Cheney began a concerted effort - first secretly and then openly - to undermine Nixon's treaty for peace and to rebuild the state of fear and, thus, reinstate the Cold War. And these two men - 1974 Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Ford Chief of Staff Dick Cheney - did this by claiming that the Soviets had secret weapons of mass destruction that the president didn't know about, that the CIA [10] didn't know about, that nobody but them knew about. And, they said, because of those weapons, the US must redirect billions of dollars away from domestic programs and instead give the money to defense contractors for whom these two men would one day work.
"The Soviet Union has been busy," Defense Secretary Rumsfeld explained to America in 1976. "They've been busy in terms of their level of effort; they've been busy in terms of the actual weapons they 've been producing; they've been busy in terms of expanding production rates; they've been busy in terms of expanding their institutional capability to produce additional weapons at additional rates; they've been busy in terms of expanding their capability to increasingly improve the sophistication of those weapons. Year after year after year, they've been demonstrating that they have steadiness of purpose. They're purposeful about what they're doing."
The CIA [11]strongly disagreed, calling Rumsfeld's position a "complete fiction" and pointing out that the Soviet Union was disintegrating from within, could barely afford to feed their own people, and would collapse within a decade or two if simply left alone. But Rumsfeld and Cheney wanted Americans [12] to believe there was something nefarious going on, something we should be very afraid of. To this end, they convinced President Ford to appoint a commission including their old friend Paul Wolfowitz to prove that the Soviets were up to no good.
According to Curtis' BBC documentary, Wolfowitz's group, known as "Team B," came to the conclusion that the Soviets had developed several terrifying new weapons of mass destruction, featuring a nuclear-armed submarine fleet that used a sonar system that didn't depend on sound and was, thus, undetectable with our current technology. The BBC's documentarians asked Dr. Anne Cahn of the U.S. Arms Control and Disarmament Agency during that time, her thoughts on Rumsfeld's, Cheney's, and Wolfowitz's 1976 story of the secret Soviet WMDs. Here's a clip from a transcript of that BBC documentary:
"Dr ANNE CAHN, Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, 1977-80: They couldn't say that the Soviets had acoustic means of picking up American submarines, because they couldn't find it. So they said, well maybe they have a non-acoustic means of making our submarine fleet vulnerable. But there was no evidence that they had a non-acoustic system. They're saying, 'we can't find evidence that they're doing it the way that everyone thinks they're doing it, so they must be doing it a different way. We don't know what that different way is, but they must be doing it.'
"INTERVIEWER (off-camera): Even though there was no evidence.
"CAHN: Even though there was no evidence.
"INTERVIEWER: So they're saying there, that the fact that the weapon doesn't exist.
"CAHN: Doesn't mean that it doesn't exist. It just means that we haven't found it."
The moderator of the BBC documentary then notes:
"What Team B accused the CIA [13] of missing was a hidden and sinister reality in the Soviet Union. Not only were there many secret weapons the CIA hadn't found, but they were wrong about many of those they could observe, such as the Soviet air defenses. The CIA were convinced that these were in a state of collapse, reflecting the growing economic chaos in the Soviet Union. Team B said that this was actually a cunning deception by the Soviet régime. The air-defense system worked perfectly. But the only evidence they produced to prove this was the official Soviet training manual, which proudly asserted that their air-defense system was fully integrated and functioned flawlessly. The CIA accused Team B of moving into a fantasy world."
Nonetheless, as Melvin Goodman, head of the CIA's Office of Soviet Affairs, 1976-87, noted in the BBC documentary,
"Rumsfeld won that very intense, intense political battle that was waged in Washington in 1975 and 1976. Now, as part of that battle, Rumsfeld and others, people such as Paul Wolfowitz, wanted to get into the CIA. And their mission was to create a much more severe view of the Soviet Union, Soviet intentions, Soviet views about fighting and winning a nuclear war."
Although Wolfowitz and Rumsfeld's assertions of powerful new Soviet WMDs were unproven - they said the lack of proof proved that undetectable weapons existed - they nonetheless used their charges to push for dramatic escalations in military spending to selected defense contractors, a process that continued through the Reagan administration.
But, trillions of dollars and years later, it was proven that they had been wrong all along, and the CIA had been right. Rumsfeld, Cheney, and Wolfowitz lied to America in the 1970s about Soviet WMDs.
Not only do we now know that the Soviets didn't have any new and impressive WMDs, but we also now know that they were, in fact, decaying from within, ripe for collapse any time, regardless of what the US did - just as the CIA (and anybody who visited Soviet states - as I had - during that time could easily predict). The Soviet economic and political system wasn't working, and their military was disintegrating. As arms-control expert Cahn noted in the documentary of those 1970s claims by Wolfowitz, Cheney, and Rumsfeld:
"I would say that all of it was fantasy. I mean, they looked at radars out in Krasnoyarsk and said, 'This is a laser beam weapon,' when in fact it was nothing of the sort. ... And if you go through most of Team B's specific allegations about weapons systems, and you just examine them one by one, they were all wrong."
"INTERVIEWER: All of them?
"CAHN: All of them.
"INTERVIEWER: Nothing true?
"CAHN: I don't believe anything in [Wolfowitz's 1977] Team B was really true."
But the neocons said it was true, and organized a group - The Committee on the Present Danger http://www.fightingterror.org [14] - to promote their worldview. The Committee produced documentaries, publications, and provided guests for national talk shows and news reports. They worked hard to whip up fear and encourage increases in defense spending, particularly for sophisticated weapons systems offered by the defense contractors for whom neocons would later become lobbyists.
And they succeeded in recreating an atmosphere of fear in the United States, and making themselves and their defense contractor friends richer than most of the kingdoms of the world.
The Cold War was good for business, and good for the political power of its advocates, from Rumsfeld to Reagan.
Similarly, according to this documentary, the War On Terror is the same sort of scam, run for many of the same reasons, by the same people. And by hyping it - and then invading Iraq - we may well be bringing into reality terrors and forces that previously existed only on the margins and with very little power to harm us.
Curtis' documentary suggests that the War On Terror is just as much a fiction as were the super-WMDs this same group of neocons said the Soviets had in the 70s. He suggests we've done more to create terror than to fight it. That the risk was really quite minimal (at least until we invaded Iraq), and the terrorists are - like most terrorist groups - simply people on the fringes, rather easily dispatched by their own people. He even points out that Al Qaeda itself was a brand we invented, later adopted by bin Laden because we'd put so many millions into creating worldwide name recognition for it.
Watching "The Terror of Nightmares" is like taking the Red Pill in the movie The Matrix. [15]
It's the story of idealism gone wrong, of ideologies promoted in the US by Leo Strauss and his followers (principally Wolfowitz, Feith, and Pearle), and in the Muslim world by bin Laden's mentor, Ayman Zawahiri. Both sought to create a utopian world through world domination; both believe that the ends justify the means; both are convinced that "the people" must be frightened into embracing religion and nationalism for the greater good of morality and a stable state. Each needs the other in order to hold power.
Whatever your plans are for tonight or tomorrow, clip three hours out of them and take the Red Pill. [16]Get a pair of headphones (the audio is faint), plug them into your computer, and visit an unofficial archive of the Curtis' BBC documentary at the Information Clearing House website http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/video1037.htm [17]
The first hour of the program, in a more viewable format, is also available here. http://www.prisonplanet.com/articles/november2004/121104powerofnightmares.htm [18]
For those who prefer to read things online, an unofficial but complete transcript is on this Belgian site http://www.acutor.be/silt/index.php?id=573 [19]
More links:
disinfopedia [20]
kuro5shin [21] Google Search [22] Google Search for .avi downloads [23]
But be forewarned: You'll never see political reality - and certainly never hear the words of the Bush or Blair administrations - the same again.
Thom Hartmann (thom at thomhartmann.com) is a Project Censored Award-winning best-selling author and host of a nationally syndicated daily progressive talk show. http://www.thomhartmann.com [24]
Leo Strauss was born in 1899 and died in 1973. He was a Jewish scholar who fled Germany when Hitler gained power. He eventually found refuge in the United States where he taught political science at the University of Chicago. He is most famous for resuscitating Machiavelli and introducing his principles as the guiding philosophy of the neo-conservative movement. Strauss has been called the godfather of Newt Gingrich’s “Contract with America.” More than any other man, Strauss breathed upon conservatism, inspiring it to rise from its atrophied condition and its natural dislike of change and to embrace an unbounded new political ideology that rides on the back of a revolutionary steed, hailing even radical change; hence the name Neo-Conservatives. The father of neo-conservatism had many “spiritual” children at the University of Chicago, among them: Paul Wolfowitz and Abram Shulsky, who received their doctorates under Strauss in 1972. Harry V. Jaffa was a student of Strauss and has an important connection to Dominionists like Pat Robertson as we shall see below. However, Strauss’s family of influence extended beyond his students to include faculty members in universities, and the people his students taught. Those prominent neo-conservatives who are most notable are: Justice Clarence Thomas, Robert Bork, Irving Kristol and his son William Kristol, Alan Keyes, William J. Bennett, J. Danforth Quayle, Allan Bloom, John Podhoertz, John T. Agresto, John Ashcroft, Newt Gingrich, Gary Bauer, Michael Ledeen and scores of others, many of whom hold important positions in George W. Bush’s White House and Defense Department. To understand the Straussian infusion of power that transformed an all but dead conservative realm, think of Nietzsche’s Overman come to life. Or better yet, think of the philosophy most unlike Christianity: Think of pure unmitigated evil. Strauss admits that Machiavelli is an evil man. But according to Strauss, his admission is a prerequisite to studying and reading Machiavelli: the acknowledgement is the safety net that keeps the reader from being corrupted. One is tempted to talk back to Strauss and point out an alternative: the admission could be the subterfuge that keeps a man from being ridiculed and rejected for espousing Machiavellian methods. In one of the most important books for our times, Shadia Drury’s Leo Strauss and the American Right, undertakes to explain the ideas behind Strauss’s huge influence and following. Strauss’s reputation, according to Drury, rests in large part on his view that “a real philosopher must communicate quietly, subtly, and secretly to the few who are fit to receive his message.” Strauss claims secrecy is necessary to avoid “persecution.”[36] In reading Strauss, one sometimes encounters coded contradictory ideas. For example, Strauss appears to respect Machiavelli because—as he points out—in contrast to other evil men, Machiavelli openly proclaimed opinions that others only secretly expressed behind closed doors. But we have just noted that Strauss teaches that secrecy is essential to the real philosopher. Strauss concluded, some would say that Machiavelli was after all, a patriot of sorts for he loved Italy more than he loved his own soul. Then Strauss warns, but if you call him a patriot, you “merely obscure something truly evil.”[37] So Strauss dances his way through the Machiavellian field of evil, his steps choreographed with duplicity and it’s opposite. The reader cannot let go. In Strauss’s view, Machiavelli sees that Christianity “has led the world into weakness,” which can only be offset by returning the world to the ancient practices of the past. (Implied is not a return to the pagan past, but rather a return to the more virulent world of the Old Testament). Strauss laments, “Machiavelli needed …a detailed discussion revealing the harmony between his political teaching and the teaching of the Bible.” [38]These statements of Strauss, by themselves, were sufficient to send neo-conservative Christians to search for correlations between Machiavellianism, radical conservatism and the scriptures.[39] Strauss’s teaching incorporated much of Machiavelli’s. Significantly, his philosophy is unfriendly to democracy—even antagonistic. At the same time Strauss upheld the necessity for a national religion not because he favored religious practices, but because religion in his view is necessary in order to control the population. Since neo-conservatives influenced by Strauss are in control of the Bush administration, I have prepared a brief list that shows the radical unchristian basis of neo-conservatism. I am indebted to Shadia Drury’s book (Leo Strauss and the American Right) and published interviews for the following: First: Strauss believed that a leader had to perpetually deceive the citizens he ruled. Secondly: Those who lead must understand there is no morality, there is only the right of the superior to rule the inferior. Thirdly: According to Drury, Religion “is the glue that holds society together.”[40] It is a handle by which the ruler can manipulate the masses. Any religion will do. Strauss is indifferent to them all. Fourthly: “Secular society…is the worst possible thing,” because it leads to individualism, liberalism, and relativism, all of which encourage dissent and rebellion. As Drury sums it up: “You want a crowd that you can manipulate like putty.”[41] Fifthly: “Strauss thinks that a political order can be stable only if it is united by an external threat; and following Machiavelli, he maintains that if no external threat exists, then one has to be manufactured.”[42] Sixthly: “In Strauss’s view, the trouble with liberal society is that it dispenses with noble lies and pious frauds. It tries to found society on secular rational foundations.” Strauss’s Student, Harry Jaffa on the 700 Club with Pat Robertson For four days in 1986, from July first through the fourth of July, Pat Robertson interviewed neo-conservative Dr. Harry Jaffa, a former student of Leo Strauss, on the 700 Club show. The topic was the importance of the Declaration of Independence. Joining with Jaffa was Robertson’s own man, Herb Titus, the Dean of CBN’s School of Public Policy. This series of interviews was one of the most important philosophical moments in the development of the political agenda and political philosophy of the Dominionists. Robertson found in Harry Jaffa, the champion he needed, whose reasoning would influence how the Constitution should be interpreted by conservatives and would provide a “Christian” view of the establishment of the United States that excluded the secular social contract view. Harry Jaffa would influence both Clarence Thomas (who would be appointed to the Supreme Court by President George Bush senior in 1991) and Antonin Scalia (who would be appointed to the Supreme Court by President Ronald Reagan on September 26, 1986). During the four days of interviews Jaffa and Titus agreed that the Declaration of Independence was the premier document and it superceded the Constitution. Titus said, “The Declaration…is the charter of the nation. It is what you might call the articles of incorporation, whereas the Constitution is the bylaws. The Constitution is the means by which to carry out the great purposes that are articulated in the Declaration.” Robertson asked: “Let’s assume that eighty percent of the people are just totally immoral, they want to live lives of gross licentiousness and they want to prey on one another, that’s what they want and they want a government to let them do it. How does that square with the Declaration of Independence and its consent of the governed?” Titus said, “Even the people can’t consent to give away that which God says is unalienable.” Robertson then asked, “The principles enunciated in the Declaration of Independence, how far have we gone from it and what can we do to redress some of these problems?” Jaffa responded cryptically: “I’d say that today, for example in the Attorney General’s [Edwin Meese’s] warfare with the liberals on the Supreme Court, in his appeal to original intent, he appeals to the text of the Constitution. Jefferson and Madison said together in 1825, ‘If you want to find the principles of the Constitution of the United States, you go first to the Declaration of Independence.’” First, Jaffa means by the term “original intent” that the Constitution must be interpreted according to what it meant when it was originally adopted. It is a revolutionary and brilliant idea that will allow the Dominionists to effectively repeal most of the judicial decisions made in the last century. [43] econdly, if we take Jaffa and the Dominionists at their word and go to the Declaration of Independence, we can see just how radical the conservative revolution and Dominionism are. The only portion that is ever quoted publicly are these words: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness. That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed,” The quote stops in the middle of the sentence—the part that is never quoted is this: That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.” Dominionism then, takes its authority to overthrow the government of the United States from our own Declaration of Independence. By the time all Americans wake up to the Dominionist’s intent, it may be too late. Though Harry Jaffa speaks with a high minded sense of political righteousness, Shadia Drury exposes his Machiavellian side. Like Strauss, he “clearly believes that devious and illegal methods are justified when those in power are convinced of the rightness of their ends.”[44] Jaffa and Robertson saw eye to eye on more than one topic: for instance, Jaffa like his host Pat Robertson, found Oliver North to be a hero (and by extension Michael Ledeen) when both North and Ledeen went around the law to provide military aid to the contras.[45]
