THE ROVING EYE
This war is brought to you by ...
By Pepe Escobar
Asia Times Online
March 20, 2003
[this is a long article BUT it has some good background info. on 'the agenda' of those who may really be making our foreign policy decisions.]
atimes.com
<<...The lexicon of the Bush doctrine of unilateral world domination is laid out in detail by the Project for a New American Century (PNAC), founded in Washington in 1997. The ideological, political, economic and military fundamentals of American foreign policy - and uncontested world hegemony - for the 21st century are there for all to see.
PNAC's credo is officially to muster "the resolve to shape a new century favorable to American principles and interests". PNAC states that the US must be sure of "deterring any potential competitors from even aspiring to a larger regional or global role" - without ever mentioning these competitors, the European Union, Russia or China, by name. The UN is predictably dismissed as "a forum for leftists, anti-Zionists and anti-imperialists". The UN is only as good as it supports American policy.
The PNAC mixes a peculiar brand of messianic internationalism with realpolitik founded over a stark analysis of American oil interests. Its key document, dated June 1997, reads like a manifesto. Horrified by the "debased" Bill Clinton, PNAC exponents lavishly praise "the essential elements of the Reagan administration's success: a military that is strong and ready to meet both present and future challenges; a foreign policy that boldly and purposefully promotes American principles abroad; and national leadership that accepts the United States' global responsibilities". These exponents include Dick Cheney, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle, chairman of the Defense Policy Board, an advisory panel to the Pentagon made up of leading figures in national security and defense, Florida Governor Jeb Bush and Reagan-era White House adviser Elliott Abrahms.
Already in 1997, the PNAC wanted to "increase defense spending significantly" to "challenge regimes hostile to our interests and values" and "to accept responsibility for America's unique role in preserving and extending an international order friendly to our security, our prosperity, and our principles". The deceptively bland language admitted "such a Reaganite policy of military strength and moral clarity may not be fashionable today. But it is necessary if the United States is to build on the successes of this past century and to ensure our security and our greatness in the next".
The signatories of this 1997 document read like a who's who of Washington power today: among them, in addition to those mentioned above, Eliot Cohen, Steve Forbes, Francis Fukuyama, Frank Gaffney, William Bennett, Donald Kagan, Zalmay Khalilzad, Lewis Libby, Norman Podhoretz and Dan Quayle.
The PNAC, now actively exercising power, is about to fulfill its dream of invading Iraq. In the PNAC's vision of Iraq, the only vector that matters is US strategic interest. Nobody really cares about Saddam Hussein's "brutal dictatorship", nor his extensive catalogue of human rights violations, nor "the suffering of the Iraqi people", nor his US-supplied weapons of mass destruction, nor his alleged connection to terrorism.
Iraq counts only as the first strike in a high-tech replay of the domino theory: the next dominoes will be Syria, Iran and Saudi Arabia. The idea is to carve up Syria; let Turkey invade northern Iraq; overthrow the Saudi royal family; restore the Hashemites to the Hijaz in Arabia. And dismember Iraq altogether and annex it to Jordan as a vassal kingdom to the US: after all, Jordan's King Abdullah is a cousin of former Iraqi King Faisal, deposed in 1958. This would be one solution for the nagging question of who would have any legitimacy to be in power in Baghdad after Saddam...>>
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this conclusion is worth paying attention to...
<<...The endgame will reveal itself to be a cheap family farce: the Bush family delivers an ultimatum to the Hussein family. What Gore Vidal describes as "the Bush-Cheney junta" has won: Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Perle, the AEI and PNAC stalwarts. Paul Wolfowitz, above all, has won his own personal crusade. Colin Powell has lost it all. It does not matter that the State Department's classified report, "Iraq, the Middle East and change: no dominoes" was unveiled by the Los Angeles Times. Wolfowitz and Perle will play with their dominoes. By predictable mechanisms of power as old as mankind itself (and incidentally very common in the former USSR) it was Powell - the adversary of the new doctrine of preemption - who was charged to defend it in the face of the world. Sources in New York confirm he was told to get in line: his discourse, his body language, his whole demeanor changed. Seasoned American diplomats are appalled by the devastating political and diplomatic failure of the Bush administration. They know that by deciding to go to war unilaterally - and leaving the international system in shambles - the US has squandered its biggest capital: its international legitimacy. And to make matters worse there was absolutely no debate - in the Senate, or in the public opinion arena - about it.
Americans still have to wake up to the fact of how startlingly isolated they are in the world. The world, for its part, will keep deploying its weapons of mass democracy. There can be no "international community" as long as the popular perception lingers in so many parts of the world of a clash between the West and Islam. Always ready to recognize and love the best America has to offer, hundreds of millions of people would rather try to save it from the fatal unilateralism distilled by the American fundamentalists of the PNAC and the AEI. Everyone in Baghdad, the former great capital of Islam at its apex, is fond of saying how it has survived the Mongols, the barbarians at the gate. The evangelic apostles of armed democratization cannot even imagine the fury a new breed of barbarians may unleash at the gate of the new American century....>> |
