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Flight of hawk stirs Pentagon nest
By Jim Lobe
WASHINGTON - A
major Pentagon hawk has abruptly resigned his post in a
move that, in the context of other recent developments,
is likely to fuel speculation that the White House might
be trying to soften the harder edges of its
controversial policies.
The Pentagon announced
on Wednesday evening that Assistant Secretary of Defense
for International Security Policy, J D Crouch II, was
resigning effective Friday in order to return to
"academia" at Southwest Missouri State University
(SMSU).
Significantly, the announcement did not
give a reason for his departure, nor for the suddenness
with which it is taking place. And no one was named to
replace him.
While officials stressed that
Crouch, who has a long association with many of the key
figures who have promoted military pre-eminence as the
United States's post-Cold War strategy, was leaving
voluntarily, some sources said that his resignation
reflected a loss of influence on the part of right-wing
and neo-conservative hawks centered in the Pentagon and
Vice President Dick Cheney's office.
"He's not
being fired, but they're starting to move people
around," said one knowledgeable source. "It's all about
[Bush's] re-election and how to get rid of the loonies
without looking like they screwed up."
As
assistant secretary, Crouch reported to Undersecretary
of Defense for Policy Douglas Feith, whose office has
been responsible for post-war strategy in Iraq. Feith
also oversaw the work of the now-disbanded Office of
Special Plans, which has been charged by retired
intelligence and State Department officials with
"cherry-picking" intelligence that bolstered the case
for going to war and sending it directly to Pentagon
chief Donald Rumsfeld and Cheney's office without having
it vetted by professional analysts for credibility.
As a result, Feith's office has become a major
target of critics of both the war and the post-war
situation, which, given its rising cost in money and the
lives of US soldiers, is being blamed for Bush's
plummeting poll numbers.
Crouch, an arms-control
specialist, had very little to do with the preparation
for war against Iraq. But he has long taken what have
been regarded as extreme and extremely unilateralist
positions on a number of key issues.
A champion
of US withdrawal from the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile
treaty, Crouch has supported military action against
Cuba; defended the development of offensive chemical
weapons; opposed the Chemical Weapons Convention and the
Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty; and advocated the
development of new nuclear weapons for such purposes as
destroying underground facilities (bunker-busters).
Before his appointment in 2001, he also strongly
criticized the previous Bush administration's decision
to withdraw nuclear weapons from South Korea, and called
for Washington to unilaterally destroy suspected nuclear
and missile installations in North Korea unless
Pyongyang complied with an ultimatum to dismantle them.
Crouch's departure is the latest of a series of
developments that suggest to some analysts that a
significant foreign policy shift is under way.
Those hints began with the announcement by
National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice earlier this
month of a new inter-agency committee to coordinate Iraq
policy in the National Security Council. Rumsfeld's
unusually testy reaction to the announcement suggested
that the move was more than cosmetic.
The next
shoe dropped during Bush's recent trip to Asia, where he
repeatedly stressed his willingness to sign a
five-nation security guarantee if North Korea agreed to
fully and verifiably dismantle its nuclear program.
While this did not go as far as Pyongyang's
demand for a bilateral non-aggression pact, it was a
more flexible offer than Bush had previously put on the
table, prompting Donald Gregg, the chairman of the Korea
Society and a former top aide to George H W Bush, to
assert that "a corner has been turned and the
administration's pragmatists are in charge".
In
just the past week, a number of other developments
suggested that the White House was tacking to the
middle, away from right-wingers and neo-conservatives
like Crouch and Feith.
Testifying before
Congress on Tuesday, Deputy Secretary of State Richard
Armitage affirmed that Washington was not seeking
"regime change" in Iran and, indeed, expected to engage
Tehran in a dialogue over its nuclear program and other
issues shortly.
His remarks, which appeared to
align the administration behind a recent European
initiative on Iraq's nuclear program, also included an
unusually strong denunciation of the Pentagon's decision
to negotiate a ceasefire with an Iraq-based Iranian
rebel group during the Iraq war.
Finally, Bush's
decision on Wednesday to "drop by" a meeting between
visiting Chinese Defense Minister Gen Cao Gangchuan and
Rice was considered particularly disappointing to hawks,
who had lobbied hard against such an encounter.
While none of these developments by themselves
would warrant the conclusion that the hawks are in
decline, the totality suggests that they might be more
than mere straws in the wind. "This could be the
beginning of a change," says Charles Kupchan, a foreign
policy analyst at the Council on Foreign Relations.
"What's new is that Bush's poll numbers are nose-diving,
and he's scared."
Some sources say that Robert
Blackwill, the administration's former ambassador to
India who was taken on as a senior aide by Rice last
month, could be most responsible for the shifts.
Blackwill, who was Rice's boss in the National Security
Council during the first Bush administration, is a savvy
Republican operator with friends and proteges in key
posts in the national security bureaucracy and on
Capitol Hill. While considered on the right, he
reportedly shares the first Bush's distrust of
neo-conservatives in particular.
While Crouch is
not considered a neo-conservative, he has long been
closely associated with them. A former member of the
board of advisers of the Center for Security Policy
(CSP), he worked for former Republican Senator Malcolm
Wallop, a far-right Republican from Cheney's home state
of Wyoming, before joining the Pentagon as the principal
deputy assistant secretary of defense for international
security in the first Bush administration.
In
that capacity, he worked under then-undersecretary for
policy Paul Wolfowitz, for whom he reportedly helped
prepare the controversial 1992 Defense Planning Guidance
(DPG) draft. That document called for, among other
things, Washington to pursue military dominance in and
around Eurasia, carry out preemptive attacks against
potential threats, and to rely more on ad-hoc alliances
than multilateral mechanisms like the United Nations or
the North Atlantic Treaty Organization to promote US
interests.
When the paper was leaked to the New
York Times that spring, it was repudiated by the
administration, and Wolfowitz - the current deputy
defense secretary and Feith's superior - and a close
aide, I Lewis Libby (currently Cheney's chief of staff
and national security adviser) were reportedly almost
fired. Crouch himself left the Pentagon in July 1992,
just three months after the draft DPG was exposed.
The current administration's September 2002
National Security Strategy was based largely on the DPG
developed under Wolfowitz, Libby and Crouch 10 years
before.
Crouch is a long-time protege of William
van Cleave, a nuclear arms specialist who played a key
role in the mid-1970s in derailing detente with the
Soviet Union, in part by working with Rumsfeld and
neo-conservative hawks in thwarting then secretary of
state Henry Kissinger's efforts to reach a major
strategic arms agreement with the Soviet Union.
Van Cleave, who heads the SMSU department of
defense and strategic studies to which Crouch will be
returning, has been a major, if low-key, champion of US
military dominance and of developing new nuclear weapons
that can be used in conventional warfare.
Van
Cleave also serves on the boards of advisers of the CSP
and two Israel-based institutions closely tied to the
right-wing Likud Party - the Ariel Center for Policy
Research and the Institute for Advanced Strategic and
Political Studies.
(Inter Press Service)
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