>>But will their legacy?
Let's hope so. Read the following excerpt, and beware their think tank fantasies.
washingtonmonthly.com
Practice to Deceive
Chaos in the Middle East is not the Bush hawks'
nightmare scenario--it's their plan.
By Joshua Micah Marshall
Imagine it's six months from
now. The Iraq war is over.
After an initial burst of joy
and gratitude at being
liberated from Saddam's rule,
the people of Iraq are
watching, and waiting, and
beginning to chafe under
American occupation. Across
the border, in Syria, Saudi
Arabia, and Iran, our
conquering presence has
brought street protests and
escalating violence. The
United Nations and NATO are in disarray, so America is pretty much on its own.
Hemmed in by budget deficits at home and limited financial assistance from allies, the
Bush administration is talking again about tapping Iraq's oil reserves to offset some of the
costs of the American presence--talk that is further inflaming the region. Meanwhile, U.S.
intelligence has discovered fresh evidence that, prior to the war, Saddam moved
quantities of biological and chemical weapons to Syria. When Syria denies having such
weapons, the administration starts massing troops on the Syrian border. But as they
begin to move, there is an explosion: Hezbollah terrorists from southern Lebanon blow
themselves up in a Baghdad restaurant, killing dozens of Western aid workers and
journalists. Knowing that Hezbollah has cells in America, Homeland Security Secretary
Tom Ridge puts the nation back on Orange Alert. FBI agents start sweeping through
mosques, with a new round of arrests of Saudis, Pakistanis, Palestinians, and Yemenis.
To most Americans, this would sound like a frightening state of affairs, the kind that
would lead them to wonder how and why we had got ourselves into this mess in the first
place. But to the Bush administration hawks who are guiding American foreign policy,
this isn't the nightmare scenario. It's everything going as anticipated.
In their view, invasion of Iraq was not merely, or even primarily, about getting rid of
Saddam Hussein. Nor was it really about weapons of mass destruction, though their
elimination was an important benefit. Rather, the administration sees the invasion as only
the first move in a wider effort to reorder the power structure of the entire Middle East.
Prior to the war, the president himself never quite said this openly. But hawkish
neoconservatives within his administration gave strong hints. In February, Undersecretary
of State John Bolton told Israeli officials that after defeating Iraq, the United States
would "deal with" Iran, Syria, and North Korea. Meanwhile, neoconservative journalists
have been channeling the administration's thinking. Late last month, The Weekly
Standard's Jeffrey Bell reported that the administration has in mind a "world war between
the United States and a political wing of Islamic fundamentalism ... a war of such reach
and magnitude [that] the invasion of Iraq, or the capture of top al Qaeda commanders,
should be seen as tactical events in a series of moves and countermoves stretching well
into the future."
In short, the administration is trying to roll the table--to use U.S. military force, or the
threat of it, to reform or topple virtually every regime in the region, from foes like Syria to
friends like Egypt, on the theory that it is the undemocratic nature of these regimes that
ultimately breeds terrorism. So events that may seem negative--Hezbollah for the first
time targeting American civilians; U.S. soldiers preparing for war with Syria--while
unfortunate in themselves, are actually part of the hawks' broader agenda. Each crisis will
draw U.S. forces further into the region and each countermove in turn will create
problems that can only be fixed by still further American involvement, until democratic
governments--or, failing that, U.S. troops--rule the entire Middle East.
There is a startling amount of deception in all this--of hawks deceiving the American
people, and perhaps in some cases even themselves. While it's conceivable that bold
American action could democratize the Middle East, so broad and radical an initiative
could also bring chaos and bloodshed on a massive scale. That all too real possibility
leads most establishment foreign policy hands, including many in the State Department, to
view the Bush plan with alarm. Indeed, the hawks' record so far does not inspire
confidence. Prior to the invasion, for instance, they predicted that if the United States
simply announced its intention to act against Saddam regardless of how the United
Nations voted, most of our allies, eager to be on our good side, would support us.
Almost none did. Yet despite such grave miscalculations, the hawks push on with their
sweeping new agenda.
Like any group of permanent Washington revolutionaries fueled by visions of a righteous
cause, the neocons long ago decided that criticism from the establishment isn't a reason
for self-doubt but the surest sign that they're on the right track. But their confidence also
comes from the curious fact that much of what could go awry with their plan will also
serve to advance it. A full-scale confrontation between the United States and political
Islam, they believe, is inevitable, so why not have it now, on our terms, rather than later,
on theirs? Actually, there are plenty of good reasons not to purposely provoke a series
of crises in the Middle East. But that's what the hawks are setting in motion, partly on the
theory that the worse things get, the more their approach becomes the only plausible
solution.
Moral Cloudiness
Ever since the neocons burst upon the public policy scene 30 years ago, their movement
has been a marriage of moral idealism, military assertiveness, and deception. Back in the
early 1970s, this group of then-young and still mostly Democratic political intellectuals
grew alarmed by the post-Vietnam Democrats' seeming indifference to the Soviet threat.
They were equally appalled, however, by the amoral worldview espoused by
establishment Republicans like Henry Kissinger, who sought co-existence with the Soviet
Union. As is often the case with ex-socialists, the neocons were too familiar with
communist tactics to ignore or romanticize communism's evils. The fact that many
neocons were Jewish, and outraged by Moscow's increasingly visible persecution of
Jews, also caused them to reject both the McGovernite and Kissingerian tendencies to
ignore such abuses.
In Ronald Reagan, the neocons
found a politician they could
embrace. Like them, Reagan
spoke openly about the evils of
communism and, at least on the
peripheries of the Cold War,
preferred rollback to coexistence.
Neocons filled the Reagan
administration, and men like Paul
Wolfowitz, Richard Perle, Frank
Gaffney, and others provided the
intellectual ballast and moral
fervor for the sharp turn toward
confrontation that the United
States adopted in 1981.
But achieving moral clarity often requires hiding certain realities. From the beginning, the
neocons took a much more alarmist view of Soviet capacities and intentions than most
experts. As late as 1980, the ur-neocon Norman Podhoretz warned of the imminent
"Finlandization of America, the political and economic subordination of the United States
to superior Soviet power," even raising the possibility that America's only options might
be "surrender or war." We now know, of course, that U.S. intelligence estimates, which
many neocons thought underestimated the magnitude and durability of Soviet power, in
fact wildly overestimated them.
This willingness to deceive--both themselves and others--expanded as neocons grew
more comfortable with power. Many spent the Reagan years orchestrating bloody wars
against Soviet proxies in the Third World, portraying thugs like the Nicaraguan Contras
and plain murderers like Jonas Savimbi of Angola as "freedom fighters." The nadir of this
deceit was the Iran-Contra scandal, for which Podhoretz's son-in-law, Elliot Abrams,
pled guilty to perjury. Abrams was later pardoned by Bush's father, and today, he runs
Middle East policy in the Bush White House.
But in the end, the Soviet Union did fall. And the hawks' policy of confrontation did
contribute to its collapse. So too, of course, did the economic and military rot most of
the hawks didn't believe in, and the reforms of Mikhail Gorbachev, whom neocons such
as Richard Perle counseled Reagan not to trust. But the neocons did not dwell on what
they got wrong. Rather, the experience of having played a hand in the downfall of so
great an evil led them to the opposite belief: that it's okay to be spectacularly wrong,
even brazenly deceptive about the details, so long as you have moral vision and a
willingness to use force.
What happened in the 1990s further reinforced that mindset. Hawks like Perle and
William Kristol pulled their hair out when Kissingerians like Brent Scowcroft and Colin
Powell left Saddam's regime in place after the first Gulf War. They watched with
mounting fury as terrorist attacks by Muslim fundamentalists claimed more and more
American and Israeli lives. They considered the Oslo accords an obvious mistake (how
can you negotiate with a man like Yasir Arafat?), and as the decade progressed they
became increasingly convinced that there was a nexus linking burgeoning terrorism and
mounting anti-Semitism with repressive but nominally "pro-American" regimes like Saudi
Arabia and Egypt. In 1996, several of the hawks--including Perle--even tried to sell
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on the idea that Israel should attack Saddam
on its own--advice Netanyahu wisely declined. When the Oslo process crumbled and
Saudi Arabian terrorists killed 3,000 Americans on 9/11, the hawks felt, not without
some justification, that they had seen this danger coming all along, while others had
ignored it. The timing was propitious, because in September 2001 many already held
jobs with a new conservative president willing to hear their pitch.
Prime Minister bin Laden
The pitch was this: The Middle East today is like the Soviet Union 30 years ago.
Politically warped fundamentalism is the contemporary equivalent of communism or
fascism. Terrorists with potential access to weapons of mass destruction are like an
arsenal pointed at the United States. The primary cause of all this danger is the Arab
world's endemic despotism, corruption, poverty, and economic stagnation. Repressive
regimes channel dissent into the mosques, where the hopeless and disenfranchised are
taught a brand of Islam that combines anti-modernism, anti-Americanism, and a worship
of violence that borders on nihilism. Unable to overthrow their own authoritarian rulers,
the citizenry turns its fury against the foreign power that funds and supports these corrupt
regimes to maintain stability and access to oil: the United States. As Johns Hopkins
University professor Fouad Ajami recently wrote in Foreign Affairs, "The great
indulgence granted to the ways and phobias of Arabs has reaped a terrible
harvest"--terrorism. Trying to "manage" this dysfunctional Islamic world, as Clinton
attempted and Colin Powell counsels us to do, is as foolish, unproductive, and dangerous
as détente was with the Soviets, the hawks believe. Nor is it necessary, given the
unparalleled power of the American military. Using that power to confront Soviet
communism led to the demise of that totalitarianism and the establishment of democratic
(or at least non-threatening) regimes from the Black Sea to the Baltic Sea to the Bering
Strait. Why not use that same power to upend the entire corrupt Middle East edifice and
bring liberty, democracy, and the rule of law to the Arab world?
The hawks' grand plan differs depending on whom you speak to, but the basic outline
runs like this: The United States establishes a reasonably democratic, pro-Western
government in Iraq--assume it falls somewhere between Turkey and Jordan on the
spectrum of democracy and the rule of law. Not perfect, representative democracy,
certainly, but a system infinitely preferable to Saddam's. The example of a democratic
Iraq will radically change the political dynamics of the Middle East. When Palestinians
see average Iraqis beginning to enjoy real freedom and economic opportunity, they'll
want the same themselves. With that happy prospect on one hand and implacable United
States will on the other, they'll demand that the Palestinian Authority reform politically
and negotiate with Israel. That in turn will lead to a real peace deal between the Israelis
and Palestinians. A democratic Iraq will also hasten the fall of the fundamentalist Shi'a
mullahs in Iran, whose citizens are gradually adopting anti-fanatic, pro-Western
sympathies. A democratized Iran would create a string of democratic, pro-Western
governments (Turkey, Iraq, and Iran) stretching across the historical heartland of Islam.
Without a hostile Iraq towering over it, Jordan's pro-Western Hashemite monarchy
would likely come into full bloom. Syria would be no more than a pale reminder of the
bad old days. (If they made trouble, a U.S. invasion would take care of them, too.) And
to the tiny Gulf emirates making hesitant steps toward democratization, the corrupt
regimes of Saudi Arabia and Egypt would no longer look like examples of stability and
strength in a benighted region, but holdouts against the democratic tide. Once the dust
settles, we could decide whether to ignore them as harmless throwbacks to the bad old
days or deal with them, too. We'd be in a much stronger position to do so since we'd no
longer require their friendship to help us manage ugly regimes in Iraq, Iran, and Syria.
The audacious nature of the neocons' plan makes it easy to criticize but strangely difficult
to dismiss outright. Like a character in a bad made-for-TV thriller from the 1970s, you
can hear yourself saying, "That plan's just crazy enough to work."
But like a TV plot, the hawks' vision rests on a willing suspension of disbelief, in
particular, on the premise that every close call will break in our favor: The guard will fall
asleep next to the cell so our heroes can pluck the keys from his belt. The hail of enemy
bullets will plink-plink-plink over our heroes' heads. And the getaway car in the driveway
will have the keys waiting in the ignition. Sure, the hawks' vision could come to pass. But
there are at least half a dozen equally plausible alternative scenarios that would be
disastrous for us.
To begin with, this whole endeavor is supposed to be about reducing the long-term
threat of terrorism, particularly terrorism that employs weapons of mass destruction. But,
to date, every time a Western or non-Muslim country has put troops into Arab lands to
stamp out violence and terror, it has awakened entire new terrorist organizations and a
generation of recruits. Placing U.S. troops in Riyadh after the Gulf War (to protect Saudi
Arabia and its oilfields from Saddam) gave Osama bin Laden a cause around which he
built al Qaeda. Israel took the West Bank in a war of self-defense, but once there its
occupation helped give rise to Hamas. Israel's incursion into southern Lebanon (justified
at the time, but transformed into a permanent occupation) led to the rise of Hezbollah.
Why do we imagine that our invasion and occupation of Iraq, or whatever countries
come next, will turn out any differently?
The Bush administration also insists that our right to act preemptively and unilaterally,
with or without the international community's formal approval, rests on the need to
protect American lives. But with the exception of al Qaeda, most terrorist organizations
in the world, and certainly in the Middle East, do not target Americans. Hamas certainly
doesn't. Hezbollah, the most fearsome of terrorist organizations beside al Qaeda, has
killed American troops in the Middle East, but not for some years, and it has never
targeted American civilians on American soil. Yet like Hamas, Hezbollah has an
extensive fundraising cell operation in the States (as do many terrorist organizations,
including the Irish Republican Army). If we target them in the Middle East, can't we
reasonably assume they will respond by activating these cells and taking the war
worldwide?
Next, consider the hawks' plans for those Middle East states that are authoritarian yet
"friendly" to the United States--specifically Egypt and Saudi Arabia. No question these
are problem countries. Their governments buy our weapons and accept our foreign aid
yet allow vicious anti-Semitism to spew from the state run airwaves and tolerate clerics
who preach jihad against the West. But is it really in our interests to work for their
overthrow? Many hawks clearly think so. I asked Richard Perle last year about the
dangers that might flow from the fall of Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak. "Mubarak is
no great shakes," he quipped. "Surely we can do better than Mubarak." When I asked
Perle's friend and fellow Reagan-era neocon Ken Adelman to calculate the costs of
having the toppling of Saddam lead to the overthrow of the House of Saud, he shot
back: "All the better if you ask me."
This cavalier call for regime change, however, runs into a rather obvious problem. When
the communist regimes of Eastern and Central Europe fell after 1989, the people of those
nations felt grateful to the United States because we helped liberate them from their
Russian colonial masters. They went on to create pro-Western democracies. The same is
unlikely to happen, however, if we help "liberate" Saudi Arabia and Egypt. The tyrannies
in these countries are home grown, and the U.S. government has supported them, rightly
or wrongly, for decades, even as we've ignored (in the eyes of Arabs) the plight of the
Palestinians. Consequently, the citizens of these countries generally hate the United
States, and show strong sympathy for Islamic radicals. If free elections were held in
Saudi Arabia today, Osama bin Laden would probably win more votes than Crown
Prince Abdullah. Topple the pro-Western autocracies in these countries, in other words,
and you won't get pro-Western democracies but anti-Western tyrannies.
To this dilemma, the hawks offer two responses. One is that eventually the citizens of
Egypt and Saudi Arabia will grow disenchanted with their anti-Western Islamic
governments, just as the people of Iran have, and become our friends. To which the
correct response is, well, sure, that's a nice theory, but do we really want to make the
situation for ourselves hugely worse now on the strength of a theoretical future benefit?
The hawks' other response is that if the effort to push these countries toward democracy
goes south, we can always use our military might to secure our interests. "We need to be
more assertive," argues Max Boot, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations,
"and stop letting all these two-bit dictators and rogue regimes push us around and stop
being a patsy for our so-called allies, especially in Saudi Arabia." Hopefully, in Boot's
view, laying down the law will be enough. But he envisions a worst-case scenario that
would involve the United States "occupying the Saudi's oil fields and administering them
as a trust for the people of the region."
What Boot is calling for, in other words, is the creation of a de facto American empire in
the Middle East. In fact, there's a subset of neocons who believe that given our
unparalleled power, empire is our destiny and we might as well embrace it. The problem
with this line of thinking is, of course, that it ignores the lengthy and troubling history of
imperial ambitions, particularly in the Middle East. The French and the English didn't
leave voluntarily; they were driven out. And they left behind a legacy of ignorance,
exploitation, and corruption that's largely responsible for the region's current
dysfunctional politics.
Another potential snafu for the hawks is Iran, arguably the most dangerous state in the
Middle East. The good news is that the fundamentalist Shi'a mullahs who have been
running the government, exporting terrorism, and trying to enrich their uranium, are
increasingly unpopular. Most experts believe that the mullahs' days are numbered, and
that true democracy will come to Iran. That day will arrive sooner, the hawks argue, with
a democratic Iraq on Iran's border. But the opposite could happen. If the mullahs are
smart, they'll cooperate just enough with the Americans not to provoke an attack, but put
themselves forth to their own people as defenders of Iranian independence and Iran's
brother Shi'a in southern Iraq who are living under the American jackboot. Such a
strategy might keep the fundamentalists in power for years longer than they otherwise
might have been.
Then there is the mother of all problems, Iraq. The hawks' whole plan rests on the
assumption that we can turn it into a self-governing democracy--that the very presence of
that example will transform politics in the Middle East. But what if we can't really create
a democratic, self-governing Iraq, at least not very quickly? What if the experience we
had after World War II in Germany and Japan, two ethnically homogeneous nations,
doesn't quite work in an ethnically divided Iraq where one group, the Sunni Arabs, has
spent decades repressing and slaughtering the others? As one former Army officer with
long experience with the Iraq file explains it, the "physical analogy to Saddam Hussein's
regime is a steel beam in compression." Give it one good hit, and you'll get a violent
explosion. One hundred thousand U.S. troops may be able to keep a lid on all the
pent-up hatred. But we may soon find that it's unwise to hand off power to the fractious
Iraqis. To invoke the ugly but apt metaphor which Jefferson used to describe the
American dilemma of slavery, we will have the wolf by the ears. You want to let go. But
you dare not.
And what if we do muster the courage to allow elections, but the Iraqis choose a
government we can't live with--as the Japanese did in their first post-war election, when
the United States purged the man slated to become prime minister? But if we do that in
Iraq, how will it look on Al Jazeera? Ultimately, the longer we stay as occupiers, the
more Iraq becomes not an example for other Arabs to emulate, but one that helps
Islamic fundamentalists make their case that America is just an old-fashioned imperium
bent on conquering Arab lands. |
