Off the rails to make a killing
By Mike Carlton
March 15 2003
In 1914, for all the frantic diplomacy in the chanceries of Europe, the march to war became unstoppable when the German army mobilised by rail. It was impossible to turn back the Kaiser's troop trains. There is a similar, ominous inevitability about the coming war to remake Iraq in the image of Crawford, Texas. The United States has dispatched such colossal military force to the Middle East - with such deliberately noisy public spectacles as the detonation of the mother of all bombs the other day - that George Bush now has just two choices. He either pulls the trigger or he makes a humiliating backdown that would wreck his presidency. Guess which one he's gunna do. And John Howard will have us right in there with him.
So war rushes in to fill the vacuum left by the catastrophic implosion of American diplomacy. This is a towering achievement for the Bush neo-conservatives who captured Washington, DC, with those few hanging chads in Florida. In the 18 months since September 11, their dazzling synthesis of arrogance and purblind stupidity has turned the civilised world's sympathy for America into fear of its power and distrust of its motives.
Along the way, the Bush chickenhawks have managed to split Europe, to antagonise America's oldest ally, France, to wreck NATO, and to whip the British Labour Party into open revolt against the once-omnipotent Tony Blair. They are barely speaking to the Canadians; they are bullying the Mexicans; they are condescending to the Russians and ignoring the Chinese, and last but by no means least, they have aroused the infinitely dangerous lunatics of North Korea.
And, most remarkable, it has been deliberate. The blueprint is laid out in what's known inside the Washington beltway as the Project for the New American Century (at www.newamericancentury.org). There you will find a "statement of principles" signed by a cabal of hard-right hustlers who are now some of the leading Bushies, including Dick Cheney, brother Jeb Bush, Donald Rumsfeld and his sinister, scheming deputy, Paul Wolfowitz. These people despise the United Nations and all its works. They state the "fundamental proposition ... that American leadership is good both for America and for the world".
Whether the world likes it or not.
CERTAINLY, though, American leadership is good for business. I wrote here a few weeks ago how Dick Cheney had made many, many millions repairing oilfields destroyed in the first Gulf War. This coming conflict should be still more rewarding.
Take one Richard Perle, for instance. Barely known in this country, hardly any better known in his own, he is, nonetheless, a great figure in Washington. ABC viewers might have seen him interviewed on Four Corners last Monday. A former deputy defence secretary in the Reagan administration and a foreign policy guru on Bush's election campaign team, the plump, saturnine and inordinately self-satisfied Perle now advises his old buddies Rummy and Wolfie at the Pentagon as chairman of the influential Defence Policy Board. Friend and foe alike call him the Prince of Darkness.
His position on that board makes him privy to America's most profound defence secrets. But Perle's nice little earner is a private venture capital company called Trireme Partners, which invests in defence and security technology and services around the world - not least in the Middle East. (You will not be surprised to hear that another of the Trireme punters is the inevitable Dr Henry Kissinger.)
In the latest edition of The New Yorker magazine, the great investigative reporter Seymour Hersh writes of an interesting business lunch that Perle had recently with the legendary Saudi arms dealer Adnan Khashoggi in Marseilles. Adnan has been a bit quiet since he got his chubby, beringed fingers so badly burnt in Ollie North's illegal arms-for-Iran scandal back in the Reagan years, but no doubt he and the Prince of Darkness see exciting new opportunities in the war to come.
Australian business must stand ready as well. We could rebuild bomb-shattered Baghdad with gleaming new Meriton apartment blocks.
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