SECTION TWO
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COLUMN
EIGHTY-EIGHT, APRIL
1, 2003
(Copyright © 2003 The Blacklisted Journalist)
DUMB DUMBYA'S WAR TO REMAKE THE WORLD
Subject: The War to Remake the World
Date: Sun, 16 Mar 2003 21:00:05 -0500
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The War to Remake the World
Just the Beginning
Is Iraq the opening salvo in a war to remake the world?
By Robert Dreyfuss
The American Prospect,Issue Date:4.1.03
http://www.prospect.org/print/V14/4/dreyfuss-r.html
For months Americans have been told that the United States is going to war against Iraq in order to disarm Saddam
Hussein, remove him from power, eliminate Iraq's alleged stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction, and prevent
Baghdad from blackmailing its neighbors or aiding terrorist groups. But the Bush administration's hawks, especially
the neoconservatives who provide the driving force for war, see the conflict with Iraq as much more than that. It is a
signal event, designed to create cataclysmic shock waves throughout the region and around the world, ushering in a
new era of American imperial power. It is also likely to bring the United States into conflict with several states
in the Middle East. Those who think that U.S. armed forces can complete a tidy war in Iraq, without the battle spreading
beyond Iraq's borders, are likely to be mistaken.
"I think we're going to be obliged to fight a regional war, whether we want to or not," says Michael Ledeen, a former
U.S. national-security official and a key strategist among the ascendant flock of neoconservative hawks, many of whom
have taken up perches inside the U.S. government. Asserting that the war against Iraq can't be contained, Ledeen says
that the very logic of the global war on terrorism will drive the United States to
confront an expanding network of enemies in the region. "As soon as we land in Iraq, we're
going to face the whole terrorist network," he says, including the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO),
Hezbollah, Hamas, Islamic Jihad and a collection of militant splinter groups backed by nations---Iran, Syria and Saudi
Arabia---that he calls "the terror masters."
"It may turn out to be a war to remake the world," says Ledeen.
In the Middle East, impending "regime change" in Iraq is just the first step in a wholesale reordering of the
entire region, according to neoconservatives---who've begun almost gleefully referring to themselves as a "cabal." Like
dominoes, the regimes in the region---first Iran, Syria and Saudi Arabia, then Lebanon and the PLO, and finally Sudan,
Libya, Yemen and Somalia---are slated to capitulate, collapse or face U.S. military action. To those states,
says
Is Bush's War
'just' or is it
just hegemony?
cabal ringleader Richard Perle, a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) and chairman of the
Defense Policy Board, an influential Pentagon advisory committee, "We could deliver a short message, a two-word
message: 'You're next.'" In the aftermath, several of those states, including Iraq, Syria and Saudi Arabia, may end up
as dismantled, unstable shards in the form of mini- states
that resemble Yugoslavia's piecemeal wreckage. And despite the Wilsonian rhetoric from the president and his advisers
about bringing democracy to the Middle East, at bottom it's clear that their version of democracy might have to be
imposed by force of arms.
And not just in the Middle East. Three-thousand U.S. soldiers are slated to arrive in the Philippines, opening
yet another new front in the war on terrorism, and North Korea is finally in the administration's sights. On the
horizon could be Latin America, where the Bush administration endorsed a failed regime change in
Venezuela
last year, and where new left-leaning challenges are emerging in Brazil, Ecuador and elsewhere. Like the
bombing of Hiroshima, which stunned the Japanese into surrender in 1945 and served notice to the rest of the world that the
United States possessed unparalleled power it would not hesitate to use, the war against Iraq has a similar
purpose.
"It's like the bully in a playground," says Ian Lustick, a University of Pennsylvania professor of political science
and author of Unsettled States, Disputed Lands. "You beat up somebody, and everybody else behaves."
Over and over again, in speeches, articles and white papers, the neoconservatives have made it plain that the
war against Iraq is intended to demonstrate Washington's resolve to implement President Bush's new
national security
strategy, announced last fall---even if doing so means overthrowing the entire post-World War II structure of treaties and
alliances, including NATO and the United Nations. In their book, The War Over Iraq, William Kristol of
The Weekly
Standard and Lawrence F. Kaplan of The New Republic write, "The mission begins in Baghdad, but it does not end there.
We stand at the cusp of a new historical era. This is a decisive moment. It is so clearly about more than Iraq.
It is about more even than the future of the Middle East and
the war on terror. It is about what sort of role the United States intends to play in the twenty-first century."
Invading Iraq, occupying its capital and its oil fields, and seizing control of its Shia Islamic holy places can only
have a devastating and highly destabilizing impact on the entire region, from Egypt to central Asia and Pakistan.
"We are all targeted," Syrian President Bashar Assad told an Arab summit meeting, called to discuss Iraq, on March 1.
"We are all in danger."
"They want to foment revolution in Iran and use that to isolate and possibly attack Syria in [Lebanon's] Bekaa
Valley, and force Syria out," says former Assistant Secretary of State for Near East Affairs Edward S.Walker,
now president of the Middle East Institute. "They want to pressure [Muammar] Quaddafi in Libya and they want to
destabilize Saudi Arabia, because they believe instability there is better than continuing with the current
situation. And out of this, they think, comes Pax Americana."
The more immediate impact of war against Iraq will occur in Iran, say many analysts, including both
neoconservative and more impartial experts on the Middle East. As the next station along the "axis of evil," Iran holds power that's
felt far and wide in the region. Oil- rich and occupying a large tract of geopolitical real estate, Iran is arguably
the most strategically important country in its neighborhood. With its large Kurdish population, Iran has
a stake in the future of Iraqi Kurdistan. As a Shia power, Iran has vast influence among the Shia majority in Iraq,
Lebanon and Bahrain, with the large Shia population in Saudi Arabia's oil-rich eastern province and among the warlords
of western Afghanistan. And Iran's ties to the violent Hezbollah guerrillas, whose anti-American zeal can only be
inflamed by the occupation of Iraq, will give the Bush administration all the reason it needs to expand the war
on terrorism to Tehran.
The first step, neoconservatives say, will be for the United States to lend its support to opposition groups of Iranian
exiles willing to enlist in the war on terrorism, much as the Iraqi National Congress served as the spearhead for
American intervention in Iraq. And, just as the doddering ex-king of Afghanistan served as a rallying point for
America's conquest of that landlocked, central Asian nation, the remnants of the late former shah of Iran's royal
family could be rallied to the cause. "Nostalgia for the last shah's son, Reza Pahlavi has again risen," says Reuel
Marc Gerecht, a former CIA officer who, like Ledeen and Perle, is ensconced at the AEI. "We must be prepared, however, to
take the battle more directly to the mullahs," says Gerecht, adding that the United States must consider strikes at
both Iran's Revolutionary Guard Corps and allies in Lebanon.
"In fact, we have only two meaningful options: Confront clerical Iran and its proxies militarily or ring it with an oil
embargo."
Iran is not the only country where restoration of monarchy is being considered. Neoconservative strategists have also
supported returning to power the Iraqi monarchy, which was toppled in 1958 by a combination of military officers and
Iraqi communists. When the Ottoman Empire crumbled after World War I, British intelligence sponsored the rise of a
little-known family called the Hashemites, whose origins lay in the Saudi region around Mecca and Medina. Two
Hashemite brothers were installed on the thrones of Jordan and Iraq.
For nearly a year, the neocons have suggested that Jordan's Prince Hassan, the brother of the late King Hussein of
Jordan and a blood relative of the Iraqi Hashemite family, might re-establish the Hashemites in Baghdad were Saddam
Hussein to be removed. Among the neocons are Michael Rubin, a former AEI fellow, and David Wurmser, a Perle acolyte.
Rubin in 2002 wrote an article for London's Daily Telegraph headlined, If Iraqis want a king, Hassan of Jordan could
be their man. Wurmser in 1999 wrote Tyranny's Ally, an AEI-published book devoted largely to the idea of restoring the Hashemite dynasty in Iraq. Today Rubin is a key Department
of Defense official overseeing U.S. policy toward Iraq, and Wurmser is a high-ranking official working for
Undersecretary of State for Arms Control and International Security John Bolton, himself a leading neoconservative
ideologue.
But if the neocons are toying with the idea of restoring monarchies in Iraq and Iran, they are also eyeing the
destruction of the region's wealthiest and most important royal family of all: the Saudis. Since September 11, the
hawks have launched an all-out verbal assault on the Saudi monarchy,
Who's next?
Saudi Arabia?
Or Iran?
accusing Riyadh of supporting Osama bin Laden's
al-Qaeda organization and charging that the Saudis are masterminding a worldwide network of mosques, schools and
charity organizations that promote terrorism. It's a charge so breathtaking that those most familiar with Saudi Arabia
are at a loss for words when asked about it. "The idea that the House of Saud is cooperating with al-Qaeda is absurd,"
says James Akins, who served as U.S. ambassador to Saudi Arabia in the mid-1970s and frequently travels to the
Saudi capital as a consultant. "It's too dumb to be talked about."
That doesn't stop the neoconservatives from doing so, however. In The War Against the Terror
Masters,
Ledeen cites Wurmser in charging that, just before 9-11, "Saudi intelligence had become difficult to distinguish from Al
Qaeda." Countless other, similar accusations have been flung at the Saudis by neocons. Max Singer, co-founder of the
Hudson Institute, has repeatedly suggested that the United States seek to dismantle the Saudi kingdom by encouraging
breakaway republics in the oil-rich eastern province (which is heavily Shia) and in the western Hijaz. "After
[Hussein] is removed, there will be an earthquake throughout the region," says Singer. "If this means the fall of the
[Saudi] regime, so be it." And when Hussein goes, Ledeen says, it could lead to the collapse of the Saudi regime, perhaps to
pro-al-Qaeda radicals. "In that event, we would have to
extend the war to the Arabian peninsula, at the very least to the oil-producing regions."
"I've stopped saying that Saudi Arabia will be taken over by Osama bin Laden or by a bin Laden clone if we go into
Iraq," says Akins. "I'm now convinced that's exactly what [the neoconservatives] want. And then we take it over."
Iraq, too, could shatter into at least three pieces, which would be based on the three erstwhile Ottoman Empire
provinces of Mosul, Baghdad and Basra that were cobbled together to compose the state eight decades ago. That
could conceivably leave a Hashemite kingdom in control of largely Sunni central Iraq, a Shia state in the south (possibly
linked to Iran, informally) and some sort of Kurdish entity in the north---either independent or, as is more likely,
under the control of the Turkish army. Turkey, a reluctant player in George W. Bush's
crusade, fears an independent Kurdistan and would love to get its hands on Iraq's
northern oil fields around the city of Kirkuk.
The final key component for these map-redrawing, would-be Lawrences of Arabia is the toppling of Assad's regime and
the breakup of Syria. Perle himself proposed exactly that in a 1996 document prepared for the Institute for Advanced
Strategic and Political Studies (IASPS), an Israeli think tank. The plan, titled,
A Clean Break: A New Strategy for
Securing the Realm, was originally prepared as a working paper to advise then-Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of
Israel. It called on Israel to work with Turkey and Jordan to "contain, destabilize and roll-back" various states in
the region, overthrow Saddam Hussein in Iraq, press Jordan to restore a scion of its Hashemite dynasty to the Iraqi
throne and, above all, launch military assaults against Lebanon and Syria as a "prelude to a redrawing of the map
of the Middle East [to] threaten Syria's territorial integrity." Joining Perle in writing the IASPS paper were
Douglas Feith and Wurmser, now senior officials in Bush's national-security apparatus.
Gary Schmitt, executive director of the Project for a New American Century (PNAC), worries only that the Bush
administration, including Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and Vice President Dick Cheney, might not have
the guts to see its plan all the way through once Hussein is toppled. "It's going to be no small thing for the United
States to follow through on its stated strategic policy in the region," he says. But Schmitt believes that President
Bush is fully committed, having been deeply affected by the events of September 11. Schmitt roundly endorses the
vision put forward by Kaplan and Kristol in The War Over Iraq, which was sponsored by the PNAC. "It's really our book,"
says Schmitt.
Six years ago, in its founding statement of principles, PNAC called for a radical change in U.S. foreign and defense
policy, with a beefed-up military budget and a more muscular stance abroad, challenging hostile regimes and assuming
"American global leadership." Signers of that statement included Cheney; Rumsfeld; Deputy Secretary of Defense
Paul Wolfowitz; Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Affairs Peter W. Rodman; Elliott Abrams, the Near
East and North African affairs director at the National Security Council; Zalmay Khalilzad, the White House
liaison to the Iraqi opposition; I. Lewis Libby, Cheney's chief of
staff; and Gov. Jeb Bush (R-Fla.), the president's brother. The PNAC statement foreshadowed the outline of the
president's 2002 national-security strategy.
Scenarios for sweeping changes in the Middle East, imposed by U.S armed forces, were once thought fanciful---even
ridiculous---but they are now taken seriously given the incalculable impact of an invasion of Iraq.
Charles Freeman,
who served as U.S. ambassador to Saudi Arabia during the Gulf War, worries about everything that could go wrong.
"It's a war to turn the kaleidoscope, by people who know nothing about the Middle East," he says. "And there's no
way to know how the pieces will fall." Perle and Co., says Freeman, are seeking a Middle East dominated by an
alliance between the United States and Israel, backed by overwhelming military force. "It's machtpolitik, might makes right," he
says. Asked about the comparison between Iraq and Hiroshima, Freeman adds, "There is no question that the Richard
Perles of the world see shock and awe as a means to establish a position of supremacy that others fear to challenge."
But Freeman, who is now president of the Middle East Policy Council, thinks it will be a disaster. "This
outdoes anything in the march of folly catalog," he says. "It's the lemmings going over the cliff."
Copyright (c) 2003 by The American Prospect, Inc. Preferred Citation: Robert Dreyfuss, "Just the Beginning," The American Prospect vol. 14 no. 4, April 1, 2003 . This article may not be resold, reprinted, or redistributed for compensation of any kind without prior written permission from the author. Direct questions about permissions to permissions@p... ##
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