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10.04.03, 22:07
MYSLE, ZE OBYWATELE USA POWINNI SIE OBUDZIC I PRZYJRZEC SIE CZOLOWYM
POSTACIOM W RZADIE.
WSZYSCY, KTORZY POPIERAJA ANTYIRACKA POLITYKE USA TEZ MUSZA ZROZUMIEC, ZE
TO TYLKO OBRONA IZRAELA ORGANIZOWANA NIESTETY BARDZO SKUTECZNIE PRZEZ JEGO
AGENTOW W RZADZIE AMERYKANSKIM.
ZACHECAM DO LEKTURY, BO CORAZ WIECEJ OSOB PISZE NA TEN TEMAT I BYC MOZE W
KONCU PRZELAMANA ZOSTANIE ZMOWA MILCZENIA NA TEMAT PODWOJNEJ LOJALNOSCI
WPLYWOWYCH POLITYKOW.
How Neoconservatives Conquered Washington – and Launched a War
by Michael Lind
April 10, 2003
America's allies and enemies alike are baffled. What is going on in the
United States? Who is making foreign policy? And what are they trying to
achieve? Quasi-Marxist explanations involving big oil or American capitalism
are mistaken. Yes, American oil companies and contractors will accept the
spoils of the kill in Iraq. But the oil business, with its Arabist bias, did
not push for this war any more than it supports the Bush administration's
close alliance with Ariel Sharon. Further, President Bush and Vice President
Cheney are not genuine "Texas oil men" but career politicians who, in
between stints in public life, would have used their connections to enrich
themselves as figureheads in the wheat business, if they had been residents
of Kansas, or in tech companies, had they been Californians.
Equally wrong is the theory that the American and European civilizations are
evolving in opposite directions. The thesis of Robert Kagan, the
neoconservative propagandist, that Americans are martial and Europeans
pacifist, is complete nonsense. A majority of Americans voted for either Al
Gore or Ralph Nader in 2000. Were it not for the overrepresentation of
sparsely populated, right-wing states in both the presidential electoral
college and the Senate, the White House and the Senate today would be
controlled by Democrats, whose views and values, on everything from war to
the welfare state, are very close to those of western Europeans.
Both the economic-determinist theory and the clash-of-cultures theory are
reassuring: They assume that the recent revolution in U.S. foreign policy is
the result of obscure but understandable forces in an orderly world. The
truth is more alarming. As a result of several bizarre and unforeseeable
contingencies – such as the selection rather than election of George W.
Bush, and Sept. 11 – the foreign policy of the world's only global power is
being made by a small clique that is unrepresentative of either the U.S.
population or the mainstream foreign policy establishment.
The core group now in charge consists of neoconservative defense
intellectuals. (They are called "neoconservatives" because many of them
started off as anti-Stalinist leftists or liberals before moving to the far
right.) Inside the government, the chief defense intellectuals include Paul
Wolfowitz, the deputy secretary of defense. He is the defense mastermind of
the Bush administration; Donald Rumsfeld is an elderly figurehead who holds
the position of defense secretary only because Wolfowitz himself is too
controversial. Others include Douglas Feith, No. 3 at the Pentagon;
Lewis "Scooter" Libby, a Wolfowitz protégé who is Cheney's chief of staff;
John R. Bolton, a right-winger assigned to the State Department to keep
Colin Powell in check; and Elliott Abrams, recently appointed to head Middle
East policy at the National Security Council. On the outside are James
Woolsey, the former CIA director, who has tried repeatedly to link both 9/11
and the anthrax letters in the U.S. to Saddam Hussein, and Richard Perle,
who has just resigned his unpaid chairmanship of a defense department
advisory body after a lobbying scandal. Most of these "experts" never served
in the military. But their headquarters is now the civilian defense
secretary's office, where these Republican political appointees are despised
and distrusted by the largely Republican career soldiers.
Most neoconservative defense intellectuals have their roots on the left, not
the right. They are products of the influential Jewish-American sector of
the Trotskyist movement of the 1930s and 1940s, which morphed into anti-
communist liberalism between the 1950s and 1970s and finally into a kind of
militaristic and imperial right with no precedents in American culture or
political history. Their admiration for the Israeli Likud party's tactics,
including preventive warfare such as Israel's 1981 raid on Iraq's Osirak
nuclear reactor, is mixed with odd bursts of ideological enthusiasm
for "democracy." They call their revolutionary ideology "Wilsonianism"
(after President Woodrow Wilson), but it is really Trotsky's theory of the
permanent revolution mingled with the far-right Likud strain of Zionism.
Genuine American Wilsonians believe in self-determination for people such as
the Palestinians.
The neocon defense intellectuals, as well as being in or around the actual
Pentagon, are at the center of a metaphorical "pentagon" of the Israel lobby
and the religious right, plus conservative think tanks, foundations and
media empires. Think tanks such as the American Enterprise Institute (AEI)
provide homes for neocon "in-and-outers" when they are out of government
(Perle is a fellow at AEI). The money comes not so much from corporations as
from decades-old conservative foundations, such as the Bradley and Olin
foundations, which spend down the estates of long-dead tycoons.
Neoconservative foreign policy does not reflect business interests in any
direct way. The neocons are ideologues, not opportunists.
The major link between the conservative think tanks and the Israel lobby is
the Washington-based and Likud-supporting Jewish Institute for National
Security Affairs (Jinsa), which co-opts many non-Jewish defense experts by
sending them on trips to Israel. It flew out the retired general Jay Garner,
now slated by Bush to be proconsul of occupied Iraq. In October 2000, he
cosigned a Jinsa letter that began: "We ... believe that during the current
upheavals in Israel, the Israel Defense Forces have exercised remarkable
restraint in the face of lethal violence orchestrated by the leadership of
[the] Palestinian Authority."
The Israel lobby itself is divided into Jewish and Christian wings.
Wolfowitz and Feith have close ties to the Jewish-American Israel lobby.
Wolfowitz, who has relatives in Israel, has served as the Bush
administration's liaison to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee.
Feith was given an award by the Zionist Organization of America, citing him
as a "pro-Israel activist." While out of power in the Clinton years, Feith
collaborated with Perle to coauthor a policy paper for Likud that advised
the Israeli government to end the Oslo peace process, reoccupy the
territories, and crush Yasser Arafat's government.
Such experts are not typical of Jewish-Americans, who mostly voted for Gore
in 2000. The most fervent supporters of Likud in the Republican electorate
are Southern Protestant fundamentalists. The religious right believes that
God gave all of Palestine to the Jews, and fundamentalist congregations
spend millions to subsidize Jewish settlements in the occupied territories.
The final corner of the neoconservative pentagon is occupied by several
right-wing media empires, with roots – odd as it seems – in the British
Commonwealth and South Korea. Rupert Murdoch disseminates propaganda through
his Fox television network. His magazine, the Weekly Standard – edited by
William Kristol, the former chief of staff of Dan Quayle (vice president,
1989-1993) – acts as a mouthpiece for defense intellectuals such as Perle,
Wolfowitz, Feith and Woolsey as well as for Sharon's government. The
National
