Two men driving Bush into war
Ed Vulliamy in New York profiles the religious figures
behind a 'Texanised presidency' who believe war will
mean America is respected in the Islamic world
Sunday February 23, 2003
The Observer
Behind President George W. Bush's charge to war against Iraq,
there is a carefully devised mission, drawn up by people who
work over the shoulders of those whom America calls 'The
Principals'.
Lurking in the background behind Bush, his Vice-President,
Dick Cheney, and Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld are the
people propelling US policy. And behind them, the masterminds
of the Bush presidency as it arrived at the White House from
Texas, are Karl Rove and Paul Wolfowitz.
It is too simple to explain the upcoming war as 'blood for oil', as
did millions of placards last weekend, for Rove and Wolfowitz
are ideologists beyond the imperatives of profit. They represent
an unlikely and formidable alliance forged between the gritty
Texan Republicans who took over America, fuelled by fierce
conservative Christianity, and a faction of the East Coast
intelligentsia with roots in Ronald Reagan's time, devoted to
achieving raw, unilateral power.
Rove and Wolfowitzhave worked for decades to reach their
moment, and that moment has come as war draws near. Bush
calls Rove, depending on his mood, 'Boy Genius' or 'Turd
Blossom'. Rove is one of a new political breed - the master
craftsmen - nurturing a 24-year political campaign of his own
design, but careful not to expose who he really is.
His Christian faith is a weapon of devastating cogency, but he
never discusses it; no one knows if his politics are religious or
politics are his religion. A Christmas Day child born in Denver,
as a boy he had a poster above his bed reading 'Wake Up,
America!' As a student, he was a fervent young Republican who
pitched himself against the peace movement.
His first bonding with Bush was not over politics, but the two
men's ideological and moral distaste for the Sixties - after
Bush's born-again conversion from alcoholism to Christianity.
Rove was courted by George Bush Snr during his unsuccessful
bid to be the Republican presidential candidate for 1980.
But Rove's genius would show later, on Bush senior's election to
the White House in 1988, when he co-opted the right-wing
Christian Coalition - wary of Bush's lack of theocratic stridency -
into the family camp.
Conservative Southern Protestantism was a constituency Bush
Jr befriended and kept all the way to Washington, defining both
his own political personality and the new-look Republican Party.
When Rove answered the call to come to Texas in 1978, every
state office was held by a Democrat. Now, almost all of them
are Republican. Every Republican campaign was run by Rove
and in 1994 his client - challenging for the state governorship -
was a man he knew well: George W. Bush.
'Rove and Bush came to an important strategic conclusion,'
writes Lou Dubose, Rove's biographer. 'To govern on behalf of
the corporate Right, they would have to appease the Christian
Right.'
Bush's six years as Texas governor were a dry run for national
domestic policy - steered by Rove - as President: lavish favours
to the energy industry, tax breaks for the upper income brackets
and social policy driven by evangelical zeal.
Bush had been governor for only a year when, as Rove says, it
'dawned on me' he should run for President; two years later, in
1997, he began secretly planning the campaign. In March 1999,
Bush ordered Rove to sell his consulting firm - 'he wanted 120
per cent of his attention,' says a former employee, 'full-time, day
and night'.
Rove hatched and ran the presidential campaign, deploying the
Bush family Rolodex and the might of the oil industry and
unleashing the most vigorous direct-mailing blizzard of all time.
'If the devil is in the details,' writes Dubose, 'he had found Rove
waiting to greet him when he got there.'
By the time George W. became President, Rove was the hub of
a Texan wheel connecting the family, the party, the Christian
Right and the energy industry. A single episode serves as
metaphor: during the Enron scandal last year, a shadow was
cast over Rove when it was revealed that he had sold $100,000
of Enron stock just before the firm went bankrupt.
More intriguing, however, was the fact that Rove had personally
arranged for the former leader of the Christian Coalition, Ralph
Reed, to take up a consultancy at Enron - Bush's biggest single
financial backer - worth between $10,000 and $20,000 a month.
This was the machine of perpetual motion that Rove built. His
accomplishment was the 'Texanisation' of the national
Republican Party under the leadership of the Bush family and to
take that party back to presidential office after eight years. Rove
is unquestionably the most powerful policy adviser in the White
House.
Militant Islam was another world from Rove's. However, on 11
September, 2001, it became a new piece of political raw
material needing urgent attention. Rove and Bush had been
isolationists, wanting as little to do with the Middle East - or any
other corner of the planet - as possible. But suddenly there was
a new arena in which to work for political results: and, as Rove
entered it, he met and was greeted by a group of people who
had for years been as busy as he in crafting their political
model; this time, the export of unchallenged American power
across the world.
Rove in theory has no role in foreign policy, but Washington
insiders agree he is now as preoccupied with global affairs as he
is with those at home. In a recent book, conservative staff
speech writer David Frum recalls the approach of the presidency
towards Islam after the attacks and criticises Bush as being
'soft on Islam' for his emphasis on a 'religion of peace'.
Rove, writes Frum, was 'drawn to a very different answer'. Islam,
Rove argued, 'was one of the world's great empires' which had
'never reconciled... to the loss of power and dominion'. In
response, he said, 'the United States should recognise that,
although it cannot expect to be loved, it can enforce respect'.
Rove's position dovetailed with the beliefs of Paul Wolfowitz, and
the axis between conservative Southern Protestantism and
fervent, highly intellectual, East Coast Zionism was forged -
each as zealous about their religion as the other.
There is a shorthand view of Wolfowitz as a firebrand hawk, but
he is more like Rove than that - patient, calculating, logical,
soft-spoken and deliberate. Wolfowitz was a Jewish son of
academe, a brilliant scholar of mathematics and a diplomat.
When he joined the Pentagon after the Yom Kippur war, he set
about laying out what is now US policy in the Middle East.
In 1992, just before Bush's father was defeated by Bill Clinton,
Wolfowitz wrote a blueprint to 'set the nation's direction for the
next century', which is now the foreign policy of George W.
Bush. Entitled 'Defence Planning Guidance', it put an onus on
the Pentagon to 'establish and protect a new order' under
unchallenged American authority.
The US, it said, must be sure of 'deterring potential competitors
from even aspiring to a larger regional or global role' - including
Germany and Japan. It contemplated the use of nuclear,
biological and chemical weaponry pre-emptively, 'even in
conflicts that do not directly engage US interests'.
Wolfowitz's group formalised itself into a group called Project for
the New American Century, which included Cheney and another
old friend, former Pentagon Under-Secretary for Policy under
Reagan, Richard Perle.
In a document two years ago, the Project pondered that what
was needed to assure US global power was 'some catastrophic
and catalysing event, like a new Pearl Harbor'. The document
had noted that 'while the unresolved conflict with Iraq provides
immediate justification' for intervention, 'the need for a
substantial American force presence in the Gulf transcends the
issue of the regime of Saddam Hussein'.
At a graduation speech to the Military Academy at West Point,
Bush last June affirmed the Wolfowitz doctrine as official policy.
'America has, and intends to keep,' he said, 'military strengths
beyond challenge.'
At the Pentagon, Wolfowitz and his boss Rumsfeld set up an
intelligence group under Abram Schulsky and the
Under-Secretary for Defence, Douglas Feith, both old friends of
Wolfowitz. The group's public face is the semi-official Defence
Policy Board, headed by Perle. Perle and Feith wrote a paper in
1996 called 'A Clean Break' for the then leader of Israel's Likud
bloc, Binyamin Netanyahu; the clean break was from the Oslo
peace process. Israel's 'claim to the land (including the West
Bank) is legitimate and noble,' said the paper. 'Only the
unconditional acceptance by Arabs of our rights is a solid basis
for the future.' At the State Department, the 'Arabist' faction of
regional experts favouring the diplomacy of alliances in the area
was drowned out by the hawks, markedly by another new unit
with favoured access to the White House.
And in Rove's White House, with his backing, the circle was
closed and the last piece of the jigsaw was put in place, with the
appointment of Elliot Abrams to handle policy for the Middle
East, for the National Security Council.
Abrams is another veteran of Reagan days and the 'dirty wars' in
Central America, convicted by Congress for lying alongside
Colonel Oliver North over the Iran-Contra scandal, but pardoned
by President Bush's father.
He has since written a book warning that American Jewry faces
extinction through intermarriage and has counselled against the
peace process and for the righteousness of Ariel Sharon's Israel.
He is Wolfowitz's man, talking every day to his office neighbour,
Rove.
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