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Hawks hit by a rhetorical
ricochet
By Jim Lobe
WASHINGTON - By launching a major campaign over
the past two months to extend the war on terrorism as
far as the Saudi royal family, neo-conservative
ideologues who have emerged as the predominant force
around President George W Bush appear now to have
overplayed their hand.
The result, according to
some observers, is that the administration's most ardent
hawks, those who consider an invasion of Iraq only the
prelude to a radical US-led transformation of the entire
Arab world, appear to have lost influence in Bush's
inner councils. That, in turn, has offered Secretary of
State Colin Powell, who favors a more moderate and far
less ambitious approach to both the Mideast and the war
on terrorism, some running room.
The most
visible sign that the hawks have lost momentum came last
week when the White House announced that Bush would seek
formal Congressional authorization for an invasion of
Iraq. The announcement effectively pulled the rug out
from under Vice President Dick Cheney, who only a few
days before said that Bush saw no need for Congressional
action before a military attack.
Even more
stunning was word out of the White House that Bush was
now inclined to ask the United Nations Security Council,
before taking military action, to demand that Baghdad
accept and cooperate with a tough new inspection regime
to ensure it was not developing weapons of mass
destruction (WMD).
That not only deeply
embarrassed Cheney, who had spent much of a major policy
address delivered the previous week arguing that new UN
inspections were a waste of valuable time. It also
marked a rare victory for Powell, who since September 11
had lost virtually every major internal policy debate to
Cheney and the equally hawkish Secretary of Defense,
Donald Rumsfeld.
While Powell's victory may have
been only a temporary detour in Bush's march towards
war, or an attempt at "smile diplomacy" designed to
reassure worried European and Arab allies that
Washington is not as unilateralist or aggressive as they
may have believed, some analysts believe the hawks have
suffered a major setback. "I think the tide has turned,"
one foreign-policy veteran of the administration of
George Bush Sr, told Inter Press Service on Wednesday.
"I think some sanity has been restored to the sandbox."
If so, the credit or blame may go to the
neo-conservative forces in and outside the
administration that have called for a policy of "regime
change" not only in Iraq, but toward all Arab
governments considered hostile to Israel, including
Saudi Arabia.
In the policy debates over the war
on terrorism, both Cheney and Rumsfeld have relied
heavily on the arguments of a group of neo-conservative
staff and advisers with close ties to the right-wing
Likud party in Israel.
They include, among
others, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz,
Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Douglas Feith,
Cheney's chief of staff I Lewis Libby and a number of
policy mavens, especially the chairman of Rumsfeld's
Defense Policy Board (DPB), Richard Perle, based at the
American Enterprise Institute (AEI), a neo-conservative
think tank that also includes Cheney's spouse, Lynne.
Perle and AEI's top Mideast-policy "scholars",
former Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) officer Reuel
Marc Gerecht, Michael Ledeen and Michael Rubin (just
hired by the Pentagon to plan for a post-Saddam Hussein
government in Baghdad), along with former CIA director
James Woolsey, have been at the heart of a
well-orchestrated campaign.
Visible mainly on
the editorial and op-ed pages of the right-wing Wall
Street Journal and The Weekly Standard, it lobbied to
extend the war on al-Qaeda and the Taliban to virtually
the entire Arab Middle East, first through a US invasion
of Iraq (which the same group has insisted has ties to
al-Qaeda and may have been behind last year's September
11 attacks on New York and Washington), and then through
US-backed popular insurrections in Iran and Syria.
"The War on Terror Won't End in Baghdad" was the
title of a typical piece by Ledeen that appeared in the
Journal last week. "This war cannot be limited to
national theaters," he wrote; "we face a regional
challenge and must respond accordingly."
The
same group - along with like-minded associates in the
administration and other think tanks - has depicted
Saudi Arabia, and especially its Wahhabi clergy, as the
fount of global Islamist extremism and terror. They have
repeated endlessly that, of the 19 skyjackers who
slammed airliners into the World Trade Center towers and
the Pentagon one year ago, 15 were from Saudi Arabia.
While these forces have been pressing that
argument since late last year, it made headlines in
August after a DPB member leaked details of a secret
briefing arranged by Perle to the board, given July 10
by Laurent Murawiec, a French academic on temporary
assignment at the Rand Corporation in Washington.
Murawiec described Saudi Arabia as "the kernel
of evil, the prime mover, the most dangerous opponent"
in the Middle East and called for "taking the Saudi out
of Arabia". The leak created a sensation, not only
infuriating the Saudis who had already been complaining
bitterly about the media campaign against them; it also
appears to have mobilized much of the foreign policy
establishment, particularly those sectors linked to
major US oil corporations with huge interests in Saudi
Arabia.
The administration immediately disavowed
Murawiec's views, and Bush, then on vacation at his
Texas ranch, invited Saudi Ambassador Prince Bandar for
a high-profile visit. Rand effectively fired Murawiec,
while Perle insisted that he had no idea what Murawiec
would say in advance, an assertion met with general
disbelief.
It was shortly afterwards that Bush
Sr's national security adviser Brent Scowcroft, as well
as his secretary of state James Baker, a long-time
protector of Big Oil, published columns gravely warning
against the administration's unilateralist course on
Iraq.
In an even more pointed Washington Post
op-ed, former president Jimmy Carter's national security
adviser, Zbigniew Brzezinski, argued that "public
support should not be generated by fear-mongering or
demagogy, with some of it encouraged by parties with a
strategic interest in fostering American-Arab
hostility".
"Particularly disturbing in that
regard," he went on, "has been the news report that some
members of the Pentagon's Defense Policy Board have been
pushing, in addition to war with Iraq, a confrontation
in US-Saudi Arabian relations."
Henry Kissinger,
who had been present at the Rand presentation,
reportedly was the only person in the room to speak in
defense of the Saudi regime, pointing out the practical
problems with making Saudi Arabia an enemy and also
suggesting that perhaps Saudi motivations were less
black and white than Murawiec might believe.
But
it was none other than the president's father who made
it clear early this week that the neo-conservative
campaign against the Arab world in general and Saudi
Arabia in particular had gone much too far.
In
an interview with NBC-TV Monday that studiously avoided
policy issues, the former president predicted that
anti-American sentiment in the Arab world will pass but
then went on to say - in an apparent reference to the
Wall Street Journal, which has acted as the main
mouthpiece for the public neo-conservative campaign over
the past six months, "What I don't like is demonizing
Saudi Arabia, for example, as we see some of the great
national newspapers doing. I don't like that. It's not
true. They're not enemies of ours. And for them to come
under that kind of criticism, I think it's ridiculous."
(Inter Press Service)
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