WASHINGTON - Fourteen months after reaching the
zenith of their influence on US foreign policy with the
invasion of Iraq, neo-conservatives appear to have
fallen entirely out of favor, both within the
administration of President George W Bush and in Baghdad
itself.
The signs of their defeat at the hands
of both reality and the so-called "realists", who are
headed within the administration by Secretary of State
Colin Powell, are virtually everywhere, but were
probably best marked by the cover of Newsweek magazine
last week, which depicted the framed photograph of the
neo-cons' favorite Iraqi, Ahmad Chalabi, which had been
shattered during a joint police-US military raid on his
headquarters in Baghdad. "Bush's Mr Wrong" was the title
of the feature article.
The victory of the
realists, who also include the uniformed military and
the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), appeared complete
Monday with the unveiling of the interim Iraqi
government to which an as-yet undefined sovereignty is
to be transferred from the US-led occupation authorities
June 30.
Not only was Chalabi's
arch-rival-in-exile, Iyad Allawi, approved by the Iraqi
Governing Council (IGC) as prime minister, but neither
Chalabi nor any of his closest IGC associates,
especially finance minister Kamel al-Gailani - who is
accused of handing over much of Iraq's banking system to
Chalabi during his tenure - made it into the final
lineup.
"It looks like Chalabi is the big
loser," said one congressional aide who follows Iraq
closely. "And neo-con has become a dirty word up here,"
he added, referring to the Congress, where Republicans
have become increasingly restive as a result of recent
debacles in Iraq, including the scandal over the abuse
by US soldiers of Iraqi detainees and leaks that Chalabi
had been passing sensitive intelligence to Iran, and may
have done so for years.
"We need to restrain
what are growing US messianic instincts - a sort of
global social engineering where the United States feels
it is both entitled and obligated to promote democracy -
by force if necessary," said Senator Pat Roberts, a
conservative Kansas member of Bush's Republican Party
and chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, in a
speech last week that was understood here as a direct
shot at the neo-cons.
The neo-conservatives, a
key part of the coalition of hawks that dominated Bush's
post-September 11 foreign policy, were the first to
publicly call for Saddam Hussein's ouster, which they
saw as a way to transform the Arab world to make it more
hospitable to Western values, US interests and Israel's
territorial ambitions.
Since the latter part of
the 1990s, when they led the charge in Congress for the
1998 Iraq Liberation Act, Chalabi and his Iraqi National
Congress (INC) was their chosen instrument to achieve
that transformation.
While no neo-cons were
appointed to cabinet-level positions under Bush, they
obtained top posts in the offices of Defense Secretary
Donald Rumsfeld - where Paul Wolfowitz was named deputy
defense secretary and Douglas Feith under secretary for
policy - and Vice President Dick Cheney, whose chief of
staff and national security adviser was I Lewis
"Scooter" Libby.
On the White House National
Security Council staff, they were able to place former
Iran-Contra figure Elliott Abrams and Robert Joseph in
key positions dealing with the Middle East and arms
proliferation, respectively.
Rumsfeld's Defense
Policy Board (DPB) was dominated by neo-cons, notably
its former chairman, Richard Perle, former CIA chief
James Woolsey, former arms-control negotiator Kenneth
Adelman and military historian Eliot Cohen.
Neo-cons, more than any other group, pushed
hardest for war in Iraq after September 11 and
predicted, backed up by Chalabi's assurances, that the
conflict would be, among other things, a "cakewalk" and
that US troops would be greeted with "flowers and
sweets".
Within the administration, the
neo-cons, again relying heavily on Chalabi's INC,
developed their own intelligence analyses to bolster the
notion of a link between former Iraqi president Saddam
Hussein and the al-Qaeda terrorist group, and
exaggerated Saddam's alleged weapons of mass destruction
to provide a more credible pretext for war.
Their friends on the DPB and in the media then
stoked the public's fears about these threats through
frequent appearances on television and a barrage of
newspaper columns and magazine articles.
While
analysts and regional experts at the CIA and the State
Department, which had dropped Chalabi as a fraud and a
con-man in the mid-1990s, tried to resist the
juggernaut, they were consistently outflanked by the
neo-cons, whose influence and ability to circumvent the
professionals was greatly enhanced by their access to
Rumsfeld and Cheney, who served as their champions in
the White House and with Bush personally.
Their
influence reached its zenith in early April when Chalabi
and 700 of his paid INC troops were airlifted by the
Pentagon to the southern city of Nassariya on Cheney's
authority against Bush's stated policy that Washington
would not favor one Iraqi faction over another. Bush's
own national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice,
professed surprise when informed of the move by
reporters.
While they were still riding high as
US troops consolidated their control of Iraq, the
neo-cons' star began to wane already last August when it
became clear that their and Chalabi's predictions about
a grateful Iraqi populace were about as well-founded as
their certainties about Saddam's ties to al-Qaeda and
his weapons stockpiles.
Sensing trouble ahead,
Rice asked former ambassador to India, Robert Blackwill,
to return to the White House, where he had been her boss
during the presidency of George H W Bush, the current
leader's father (1989-93). By October, she and he had
formed an inter-agency Iraq Stabilization Group that
gradually wrested control of Iraq policy from the
Pentagon.
It was a process in which Coalition
Provisional Authority chief L Paul Bremer, who had come
to detest Chalabi and his neo-con backers in Baghdad and
Washington, was an enthusiastic participant and which
was effectively completed with the announcement late
last month that the State Department was taking over the
US$14 billion in reconstruction money for Iraq that the
Pentagon had not yet spent.
In the past month,
the neo-con retreat has turned into a rout, particularly
as reports of Chalabi's coziness with Iran gained
currency and, just as important, senior military
officers indicated that a military victory over the
Iraqi insurgency was not possible.
The public
attention given to a blistering attack on the neo-cons
by the former chief of the US Central Command, General
Anthony Zinni, on the popular television program 60
Minutes, also demonstrated that the media, ever
cautious about taking on powerful figures, now saw them
as fair game.
When Perle, Woolsey and several
other neo-cons visited Rice at the White House on May 1
to protest the shoddy treatment Chalabi was receiving at
the hands of the CIA, Bremer and the State Department,
participants said she thanked them for their views and
offered nothing more. Neither Rumsfeld nor Cheney nor
any of their neo-con aides attended.
