The road to Baghdad
Chris Matthews Sunday, March 24, 2002
WASHINGTON -- Like Bob Hope and Bing Crosby, a pair of rightist factions in the Bush administration are hoping to take the United States on the road to Baghdad. Unlike the beloved Hope-Crosby "road" pictures, however, the adventure in Iraq is not going to be funny.
It will take 200,000 U.S. troops to invade Saddam Hussein's capital and effect the "regime change" demanded by neo-conservative policy wonks and backed by oil-patchers George W. Bush and Dick Cheney. The question America needs to answer now, while there's still time to stop this road trip, is whether a war justified by ideology and energy economics is truly in this country's interests.
A U.S.-Iraqi war has advanced well beyond the "contingency" phase. The last barrier of restraint, Secretary of State Colin Powell, has been broken by the will of a Bush administration partnership of ideology and oil that is now set on war. I wonder if anything can prevent this military move against Baghdad on which so many who hold power have set their hearts.
Start with the neo-conservative faction. Op-ed pages are full of anti- Hussein war drums. Weekly Standard editor Bill Kristol has made a crusade of getting U.S. troops onto the streets of Baghdad.
He and fellow Iraq hawk Robert Kagan write a regular column in the Washington Post pushing war, as does fellow neo-conservative Frank Gaffney Jr. for the Washington Times. Also on an Iraq jag is William Safire of the New York Times.
When the neo-conservatives cannot blame Hussein for Sept. 11, they try tagging him with the anthrax letters. When that doesn't work, they again try to connect him to the World Trade Center and Pentagon horrors.
Meanwhile, back at the White House, fellow neo-conservatives keep up the cadence. David Frum, a neo-conservative Canadian, crafted President Bush's "axis of evil" locution targeting Iraq, Iran and North Korea. Joseph Shattan, a like-minded ideologue, fills the vacuum left by Frum's recent departure.
Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz leads the neo-conservative forces at the Pentagon. Undersecretary Doug Feith recently OK'd a new U.S. "posture" that threatens to nuke Iraq if it moves against Israel. I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, chief of staff to Vice President Cheney, is another well- placed hawk, as is neo-conservative high priest and Pentagon adviser Richard Perle.
The neo-cons casually compare Iraq to the Third Reich, Israel to forsaken Czechoslovakia and skeptics to Neville Chamberlain, but their evidence for attacking Iraq doesn't hold up. The anthrax letters came from a source far nearer to our shores than Baghdad. And CIA chief George Tenet testified before the Senate Armed Services Committee last week that the "jury's still out" on whether Hussein had anything to do with Sept. 11.
Oil is a much more powerful motive for an Iraq attack.
Iraq is the Mideast's No. 2 supplier of oil, behind Saudi Arabia. The United States, swallowing a quarter of the world's production, is the world's No. 1 consumer. This country is led by a pair of oil-patch veterans who share a sense of entitlement about the world's oil reserves regardless of what flag flies above them. Bush and Cheney see Hussein's chief weapon of mass destruction as his threatened grip on the Persian Gulf oil tap.
This confluence of interest between ideology and oil has put us on the road to Baghdad. It's time for us to realize that American principles have precious little to do with this costly prospective military campaign.
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