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COMMENTARY
Of intimidation and
Israel
By Jim Lobe
WASHINGTON
- Why is the administration of US President George W
Bush preparing to go to war against Iraq?
It has
put forward three reasons, none of which is taken
particularly seriously by policy veterans. They include
eliminating Hussein's presumed arsenal of weapons of
mass destruction (WMD), reducing the threat of
international terrorism and promoting democracy and
human rights in Iraq and throughout the Middle East.
As Michael Klare of Hampshire College argued
recently in a paper, none of these rings very true. Yes,
Iraq undoubtedly has WMD - although not nuclear - but so
do many countries in the wider region, including Israel,
Pakistan and Iran (not to mention North Korea, whose
destructive capabilities not only are far greater than
Iraq's, but also can be delivered at much longer range
with much greater accuracy).
As for
international terrorism, Washington has been insisting
for years that Iran is far more active than Iraq, and,
despite extraordinary efforts, administration hawks have
yet to come up with any persuasive evidence that Saddam
has any ties at all to al-Qaeda or other active
terrorist groups.
Indeed, according to the CIA,
Saddam is considered most unlikely to use WMD against
the United States, let alone hand them over to
terrorists for their use, unless he were face-to-face
with his own elimination - precisely what the
administration is now planning.
As for promoting
democracy, critics note that this theme has been pushed
by neo-conservatives who rose to power in the Reagan
administration by attacking Jimmy Carter's human rights
policies, which they claimed unfairly undermined
friendly "authoritarian" regimes like the Shah of Iran
and Somoza's Nicaragua, and have since argued that Arabs
and Muslims respect only power and force.
"There
is ... something hypocritical about the belief in
democratization when it is propounded by people who also
hold the belief in the 'clash of civilizations', [and]
who were insisting a few months ago that there are
regions of the world, particularly the Islamic regions,
in which culture makes freedom impossible," noted The
New Republic magazine last fall.
That hypocrisy
is compounded by the fact that the administration has
shown no reservation about aligning itself since the
September 11, 2001 attacks on the US with some of the
broader area's worst dictatorships, including Uzbekistan
and Turkmenistan and Saudi Arabia, among others.
"Already, this has looked too much like a war in
search of a justification," Washington Post columnist E
J Dionne, wrote last August when the democracy-promotion
argument first became prominent.
So, if the
administration's public justifications are unpersuasive,
what lies behind the drive to war? On this question, the
experts are divided. But most believe there are three
possible major explanations: oil, intimidation and
Israel.
To most on the left, oil seems entirely
persuasive, particularly when, as British writer Robert
Fisk recently noted, you assert the fact that the US is
quickly running out of oil and that Iraq sits on the
world's second largest oil reserves. Combine that with
the well-established connections of Bush, Bush's father
and Vice President Dick Cheney, and you have a very
strong case.
As Klare, who also favors this
thesis, points out, the US since World War II has always
considered the Gulf a "vital interest", precisely
because of its status as the world's greatest
underground sea of petroleum.
But this thesis
suffers some weaknesses. First, there is no evidence
that US oil companies favor an Iraqi adventure; indeed,
some top oil executives have expressed alarm that an
invasion may destabilize other key oil-producers,
notably Saudi Arabia, which may greatly compromise their
access in both the short and long runs.
And if
the theory is correct, one would expect Bush's father
and his former top advisers, who are also major figures
in the oil industry, to back military action,
unilaterally if necessary. Yet, not only has Bush senior
been unenthusiastic about the mission, but his former
secretary of state, James Baker, whose oil connections
are legion, has gone to the trouble of publishing a
report that warned explicitly against any action that
would lend credence to the idea that "imperalist
reasons" were behind an invasion, least of all in the
oil sector.
Finally, some have argued that
Hussein represents no obstacle to US access to Iraqi
oil; indeed, US oil companies have been buying Iraqi
oil, like everyone else, under the United Nations
oil-for-food program. And, while Saddam's removal could
bring badly needed new investment in Iraq's oil sector
that could then increase the global oil supply, an
invasion also risks disrupting those new supplies,
either through sabotage or destabilization of other
nearby sources. "If oil is the question, Iraq is not the
answer," noted oil historian Daniel Yergin recently.
That leaves intimidation and Israel, which, to
some analysts, are closely linked. Intimidation
underlies much of the hawks' rhetoric and comes across
very strongly in the administration's National Security
Strategy document published in September, which makes
clear that the United States favors a uni-polar world in
which its military power is unrivalled. In that respect,
invading Iraq is meant above all as a "demonstration" of
what will happen to "rogue states" with WMD, links to
terrorism or anyone else, for that matter, who
challenges US supremacy.
"The fastest way to
impress one charter member of the axis of evil," argued
the Wall Street Journal, a major cheerleader for the
hawks, earlier this month, "is to depose another, and
sooner rather than later."
Klare offers an
interesting, oil-related variant of this view by citing
1990 remarks by Cheney to the effect that whoever
controls Gulf oil enjoys a "stranglehold" not only on
our economy, but also "on that of most of the other
nations of the world as well". By overwhelming Iraq, he
argues, Washington will be sending an unmistakable
message to potential future rivals, namely China, whose
economy will depend increasingly on Gulf oil.
Significantly, the imperial worldview that
underpins the intimidation rationale was first
articulated by neo-conservative policy analysts and
writers who have long championed the positions of the
right-wing Likud Party in Israel and now occupy key
positions in the Bush administration, particularly in
the offices of Cheney and Pentagon chief Donald
Rumsfeld, and the latter's defense policy board, chaired
by Richard Perle.
Some critics argue that Iraq
policy is driven primarily by these individuals, who,
like Likud, believe that Saddam's obsession with
obtaining WMD marks the greatest threat to Israel's
regional military dominance and security.
Indeed, the strongest advocates for attacking
Iraq both inside and outside the administration - Deputy
Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, Perle and other
defense policy board members, respectively - have been
the neo-conservatives.
"Absent their activities,
the United States would be focusing on containing Iraq,
which we have done successfully since the Gulf War, but
we would not be trying to overthrow Saddam Hussein,"
says Stephen Walt, a dean of the Kennedy School of
Government at Harvard University, who also points to
Washington's unexpectedly sharp tilt toward Likudist
positions on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as
evidence of the neo-conservatives' influence.
In
their view, the interests of Israel and the United
States are virtually identical, or, as one of them,
former Education Secretary William Bennett, noted last
year, "America's fate and Israel's fate are one and the
same."
(Inter Press Service)
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