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Paul Wolfowitz: Neocon media darling |
Prior to the attempt made on Paul Wolfowitz’s life in Baghdad on October 26, 2003, the deputy secretary of defense had already been in the limelight more than any of his predecessors. From Vanity Fair to PBS’s Charlie Rose, including a passing reference in Nobel Prize novelist Saul Bellow’s Ravelstein, Wolfowitz has proved his media savvies. Yet caught up in Bush’s refrains of how the “world is becoming a safer place,” contemptuously repeated by America’s corporate press elite, few English-speaking readers will have noticed that Paul Wolfowitz was chosen on Rosh Hashanah (October 1) by the Jerusalem Post as “Man of the [Jewish] Year.”
Along with his associates in the Bush administration and media circle, Paul Wolfowitz belongs to the “neoconservative” camp. On the field, he is one of a group of policy hawks who have undermined internationalist diplomacy to serve the unilateral ends of the United States through war, covert action and nationalist/militarist propaganda. The neocons hold key power positions in the Bush administration. Where they don’t, as at the State department, they call the shots of what goes on from within the operational offices. Few if any of them have on-the-field military experience. As Gone with the Wind’s Rhett Butler would have said, they are the “stay-at-home speakers filling the ears too full of fine words of those who have to fight.”
The occupation of Iraq is providing some of them with their basic military training. The Iraq’s administrator Paul Bremer may have emerged from Kissinger’s civilian foreign analyst camp; he remains a neoconservative by proxy. As also does, notwithstanding political appearances, the candidate for the Democratic Party retired General Wesley Clark. In its array of public figures, the neoconservative pedigree proudly represents America’s white male elite. Yet their devotion to belligerence has garnered them the appellation of “the War Party.” As Bret Stephens from the Jerusalem Post wrote in celebration of their man of the year: “On September 15, 2001, at a meeting in Camp David, [it was Wolfowitz who] advised President George W. Bush to skip Kabul and train American guns on Baghdad.”
Through a Looking Glass
The neoconservative foreign policy agenda has by now been reported on enough for most world citizens to understand its major aims and alliances. In the neoconservative press, it is especially easy to testify to the group’s frank commitment to Israel’s most rightwing expansionist vision. Long before 9/11, magazines such as the National Review, the Weekly Standard, or newspapers like The Wall Street Journal and the Canadian dailies of the Asper chain were all marching in step to stir up misrepresentation of Arabs. Typically, the information manufacturers seek to demean the nature of a people by roughshod identification with their governments’ agendas.
Through a forced equation linking democracy with human goodness, the only worthy country in the Middle East would be Israel. For those who still remain incredulous about an infiltration of the American government by Israel’s Likud party, it is easy to lock on to how Richard Perle, the Pentagon strongman and former head of the commercial propaganda war machine known as the Defense Advisory Board, worked on policy analysis for Benjamin Netanyahu’s campaign for Prime Minister. It is even easier to thumb through the pages of Daniel Pipes’ book on “Islamism.” Then, turn to the pages of the Jerusalem Post, and notice how both Pipes and Perle are among its closest associates.
| They have undermined internationalist diplomacy to serve the ends of the United States through war, covert action and nationalist/militarist propaganda. |
Brett Stephen’s article is instructive as well for celebrating the “transformative” nature of the foreign policy planning of the current American government. Transformative, that is, of the broader Middle East. As the reader scrolls, it grows very clear how the present concern of the Sharon cabinet is not so much the border and state conflict within the occupied territories it deems its own — to the condemnation of the international community and international law. “Israel has long waited for an administration that understands that the principal problem in the Middle East is not the unsettled status of our borders,” Stephens writes Instead, the Israeli government is focusing on “the unsettling nature of Arab regimes - and of the bellicosity, fanaticism, and resentments to which they give rise.” Getting the US administration to act on that concern has been one of the leading policy tasks of the neoconservative camp.
Nothing in American law prevents close media and political ties with another State, provided it not be communist. But nor is there anything in American political science banning inference based on observation regarding the geopolitical stakes that may lie neatly tucked away behind international connections. The ties that bind the US and Israel are obviously not recent ones. Moreover, neocons, such as Dick Cheney, his chief of staff “Scooter” Libby and Donald Rumsfeld all embraced Arab tyrants in older days when the enemy was communism. Although those winds may have changed, bureaucratic commitment to Israel ’s most fanatical leaders has gone unchanged.
Never has the American government’s willingness to play out Israel ’s game been as striking as it has now become — at least on the lands of the Middle East and the battleground of North American media. Once again: no problems to point out in principle. Just that this alliance is being maintained largely at the expense of world peace and the dignity and patience of the Arab people, to say nothing of the Palestinians, who live in a daily horror few of us can fathom.
Some of the milestones of the US/Israeli alliance are replete with nostalgia. Others, such as the bombing of the USS Liberty in 1967, fester under cover-ups. Many of the neocons have sung the ditching of the Oslo peace accords in a waltz led by Sharon. In the backrooms, Cheney and his clan have reportedly felt the need to block any attempt by Bush to meet with Chairman Arafat, as if Bush’s Christian fundamentalist credentials were too fragile, more on the “Venus” side of the neo-cons’ “Mars” rational cynicism.
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| Richard Perle: “The Prince of Darkness” |
In Bush’s eyes, the world may well appear to be a less dangerous place, but only when contrasted with the law of the jungle dictating the inner operations of the neocons’ world. One might like to question CIA head George Tenet, (hardly the dove he is portrayed to be by his neocon foes in this doublespeak world), after the public castration he was made to bear for his failure to provide credible information proving Iraq ’s threat. Recall the irony: behind all the “son trying to correct harm done to the father” stories, here son stealthily slides a knife into the back of the agency his father once ran.
One of the jobs the neocons set out to execute, documented in a New Yorker report by Seymour Hersch on May 5, 2003, was to establish a more powerful intelligence agency from within the Pentagon itself. The task of setting up the Office of Special Plans, a parallel and counter CIA, was overseen by Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz. Their job: to build the tale of Weapons of Mass Destruction, and propel their “man,” Ahmed Chalabi of the Iraqi National Congress, into power in Iraq .
On a broader level, the neoconservative contribution can be succinctly put in the following terms: Maintain the power of the American economy by securing the future of the oil and arms industries, its wealthiest components. Do this by drawing up a new enemy. Attack any form of resistance by branding it as terrorist.
Step by step, the neocons have taken apart the modern democratic world from within the US structure itself. To the public at home, they present foreign dictatorships as corrupt and evil, but only after using them to bend the Middle East to their advantage. Now they have sent in American troops to clean up the mess made by their mentors. It often seems that the democratic world has been twisted back into clan or even family warfare, with University of Chicago PhDs providing the mental fodder.
| The neoconservatives' devotion to belligerence has garnered them the appellation of the "War Party.” |
The explicit ties between American foreign policy and Israel/Likud interests will surely not dissuade the salivating gung-ho posse from framing any criticism of Israel into latent or tacit anti-Semitism. “In this year when anti-Semitism is once again a fact of life, the name ‘Wolfowitz’ has become its lightning rod,” is the most convincing line Brett Stephens could muster in an attempt to fend off criticism. The terms of the Jerusalem Post award and what it confirms about neocon/Likud machinations must be subjected to the minutest scrutiny. For as Ran Hacohen recently wrote, “People abusing the taboo [of anti-Semitism] in order to support Israel's racist and genocidal policy towards the Palestinians do nothing less than desecrate the memory of those Jewish victims, whose death, from a humanistic perspective, is meaningful only inasmuch as it serves as an eternal warning to the human kind against all kinds of discrimination, racism, and genocide.”
Rationalizing the Real
Ultimately, the Post article does nothing less than place the policy doctrines of the American Enterprise Institute, the neoconservatives’ think tank, into layman’s words. The AEI has been providing the clearest policy initiatives for the Bush administration, and were doing so well before the Clinton years. Some of their stripes are familiar: a capacity to fight on two different fronts; lowering the threshold for the use of nuclear weapons to conventional war; brandishing rogue states as a new united enemy; protecting “free” markets, etc. On the domestic front, one stumbles against the clear advantage given to the country’s military industrial and oil elite, from Columbine to the Alaskan tar sands.
What the Jerusalem Post homage adds is Israel ’s specific take on the issue – that is, the Likud’s take — a perspective most often downplayed back home in the US , and veiled under spurious accusations of anti-Semitism. Stephens’ elegy confirms all suspicions that Israel , far from being the US ’s main ally, is the main player in and through which American foreign policy has been crafted. It is dubious whether the term “alliance” is appropriate to describe this tandem, the vector of which leads from Tel Aviv to Washington, and returning in computerized metal explosive form to Baghdad, Damascus , and who knows, Riyadh.
It is no longer a rhetorical question to ask what other response to Sharon’s state-sponsored terror strikes Israelis could have imagined but the fiercest wave of equally terrorist suicide bombings in the conflict’s history? The grave of Yitzhak Rabin has been desecrated over and over since his assassination by the Israeli far-right eight years ago.
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| Dick Cheney: Puppet-master? |
For many outside the US, refutations of the neoconservative conception of democracy are building momentum. Yet no one should be overly optimistic. Given that the neocons assumed power through a long thought-out process of filling the Supreme Court with rightwing conservative fanatics – the very same court that overruled the Florida vote recount and, de facto, named Bush president – the 2004 elections remain highly preoccupying.
In the next step of a plan that seems to have no end, another neoconservative bureaucrat was named as Middle East advisor to Vice President Dick Cheney on October 21. Said to be a long-time protégé of Richard Perle and a signatory of the various American Enterprise Institute/Project for a New American Century policy drafts, David Wurmser is also known to have called for a joint US-Israeli attack on Damascus. Perle, who has called Syria “a terroristic [sic] organization,” was himself reported to have been in Jerusalem recently to receive an award from the "Jerusalem Summit," an international group of rightwing Jews and Christian Zionists who describe themselves as defenders of "civilization" against "Islamic fundamentalism." Wurmser’s appointment bears all the hallmarks of increased planning toward implementing the next step in Bush’s wars, especially now that his administration will have no choice but to declare extraordinary circumstances in order for him to be re-elected in 2004.
To be sure, no one should consider that Wurmser’s marriage to an Israeli policy analyst at the rightwing Hudson Foundation should stir up concerns. After all, it was no less credible agencies than the US Department of Defense and the General Accounting Office that had, in April 1996, uncovered cases of Israeli espionage within the US, as well as illegal technology retransfers. This was at a time when the neocons were not in the executive.
| To the public at home, they present foreign dictatorships as corrupt and evil, but only after using them to bend the Middle East to their advantage. |
Focusing on the man himself should be enough, for Wurmser is reported to have argued against the US ’s policy of forming alliances with secular-nationalist Arab republics in a bid to fight terrorism. Just as with the American Enterprise Institute documents, there is little, if anything, in the papers he has co-signed that indicate vision and constructive partnerships with the diverse players in the region.
What stands out in his position is how powerful a tool policy rationalism is in diluting extremist hatred of all things Muslim. The exception is where the latter is the religion of non-Arabs and non-Persians, like Turkey and Pakistan , two notably “democratic” American allies. While the media back home has blamed resistance to Turkish “assistance” in Iraq as coming from the Kurds, not one outlet considered it useful to mention that few Iraqi wants to see the return of the Turkish army that dominated their lands for centuries.
With mounting criticism of the hyper-bellicose actions of two otherwise respected world democracies, the neocons are playing the anti-Semitism card with scant remorse. It can be felt as far as Brazil , in which there is little if any religious or ethnic tension to speak of. In a special report written for the October 26 Folha de Sao Paulo, Nelson Ascher insisted that European condemnation of Sharon’s far-right Zionism is nothing but old-school anti-Semitism in metrosexual new dress. Ascher’s job was to stifle any reference to European anger toward Israel as possibly resulting from the demolition of the Palestinian Authority infrastructure. After all, it had largely been funded with European taxpayers’ money. Nor did Ascher find it useful to refer to the Arab-phobia spreading throughout Europe . The latter is far greater than any anti-Semitism, “courageously denounced” in his words, by new breed State-strong conservative liberal intellectuals, like Bernard Henry Levy and Alan Finkielkraut. They, among others, have never hidden their contempt for all “extremism,” save for Israel and America ’s – both a priori cleansed of such human, all too human folly.
As we discuss in the next segment on the American rightwing, searching out the artists is no easy task when religion holds center stage. American Christian fundamentalism has primed a nation already convinced of its right to fight, to use its might to the fullest. In the meantime, the legacy of the neoconservative taste for war and oil will be how American citizens have remained in denial in the information age, when free press and thought lay more than ever at their disposal, behind the peer-pressure marketing of corporate media. Bush faced unprecedented public opposition to the invasion of Iraq . Yet much of it came from abroad. Many Americans fully support the neocons’ vision — and for that they deserve to be angrily criticized.
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