Deep roots of Bush's hatred for

[Gość: Tomasz]

http://www.observer.co.uk/iraq/story/0,12239,914925,00.html

Próba wytłumaczenia obecnej amerykańskiej polityki i przyczyn dla
których jest odrzucana przez wiekszosć krajów Zachodu.

Deep roots of Bush's hatred for
Saddam

The determination in Washington to confront Saddam
goes back more than a decade. The men who are
now President Bush's key advisers have long
advocated regime change in Iraq. This is how their
beliefs became the driving force behind the
administration

Sunday March 16, 2003
The Observer

Twelve years ago, in the aftermath of the first Gulf war, the two
men who would become the key players in driving the US
towards a second war against Iraq sat down to collect their
thoughts. They were Dick Cheney, now Vice-President of the
United States, and Paul Wolfowitz, presently Deputy Secretary
for Defence.

What they wrote would form the basis of US policy today.
Serving as Secretary of Defence, Cheney was even then a
political veteran. He had been chief of staff to President Gerald
Ford, and a friend of George Bush Snr for 20 years, a quiet
mover in the shadows who knew the mechanics of Washington
and almost everyone in the capital as well as anyone. Wolfowitz
was a more mercurial, less conventional figure.

Born to an immigrant Jewish family and son of a mathematician,
Wolfowitz had abandoned an academic career to move to
Washington and pursue a career in politics, taking a job with the
Arms Control and Disarmament Agency during the waning days
of Ronald Reagan.

In Cheney the young Wolfowitz found his mentor. Both greed
that in the aftermath of the Cold War, a new vision was required
for the US. What they argued in that memo was that America
should have no rival on the planet - neither among friends nor
enemies - and should use military might to enforce such a new
order.

The paper's initial concern was raw power. Formally a draft for
the Pentagon's 'Defence Planning Guidance' for the years
1994-1999, the document's first stated objective was to
'establish and protect a new order' and 'to prevent the
re-emergence of a new rival' to the US.

Crucially, it would include a second innovation: a doctrine of the
use of pre-emptive military force that should include the right and
ability to strike first against any threat from chemical or
biological weapons, and 'punishment' of any such threat 'through
a variety of means', including attacks on military bases or
missile silos.

The two men had not finished there. In a rebuff to the
multilateralism of the UN, they argued that the US should
expect future alliances to be 'ad-hoc assemblies, often not
lasting beyond the crisis being confronted'. In Europe, Germany
was singled out as a possible rival to US power, on the Pacific
Rim Japan. 'We must seek to prevent the emergence of
European-only security arrangements,' said the document.

They were deeply controversial ideas and when the document
was leaked it was dismissed at once as the work of an idealistic
staffer. Red-faced, the Pentagon put up a spokesman to say it
had been no more than a 'low-level' document, and that
Secretary Cheney had not even seen it. But with Bill Clinton's
election, Cheney finally came clean, as he and Wolfowitz
defiantly released their own final version of the blueprint of their
ideas in the last hours of the Bush administration arguing that
the US must 'act independently, if necessary'.

The Clinton years would be hard for ideologues such as Cheney
and Wolfowitz, but the ideas they developed in the
administration of Bush Snr were never far away. For while
Cheney accrued a fortune working with Halliburton, the oil and
defence company, and Wolfowitz returned to Chicago university,
they joined a class of Republicans who felt the White House to
be occupied illegitimately by Clinton, no more so than in military
foreign policy, which had shifted from global dominance to
globalism. Where Clinton wanted in, Wolfowitz wanted out and
vice-versa.

Wolfowitz assailed the sending of troops into the Somalian
debacle, 'where there is no significant US interest', and derided
the restoration of Bertrand Aristide to Haiti as 'engaging
American military prestige' in a place 'of little or no importance'.

Over Bosnia, Wolfowitz attacked the Clinton administration for
its failure to 'develop an effective course of action'. It was during
these years that the neo-conservative Right formed under
Reagan and the elder Bush converged around the issue of the
Middle East as the crucible of the new doctrine - with Israel the
key to the region where the exercise of US power was most
urgent. Others gravitated to their view, most prominently Richard
Perle, Reagan's Assistant Secretary of State for Defence.

In the mid-Nineties they began to share a vision for where foreign
policy should be going - a hawkish support for Israel that
incre