Neo-cons: Around the world in seven
steps By Jim Lobe
WASHINGTON
- An influential foreign-policy neo-conservative with
long-standing ties to top hawks in the administration of
US President George W Bush has laid out what he calls "a
checklist of the work the world will demand of this
president and his subordinates in a second term".
The list, which begins with the destruction of
Fallujah in Iraq and ends with the development of
"appropriate strategies" for dealing with threats posed
by China, Russia and "the emergence of a number of
aggressively anti-American regimes in Latin America",
also calls for "regime change" in Iran and North Korea.
The list's author, Frank Gaffney, the founder
and president of the Center for Security Policy (CSP),
also warns that Bush should resist any pressure arising
from the (then) anticipated demise of Palestinian leader
Yasser Arafat to resume peace talks that could result in
Israel giving up "defensible boundaries".
While
all seven steps listed by Gaffney in an article
published late last week in the National Review Online
have long been favored by prominent neo-cons, the
article itself, Worldwide Value, is the first
comprehensive compilation to emerge since Bush's
re-election on November 2.
It is also sure to be
contested, not just by Democrats who, with the election
behind them, are poised to take a more anti-war position
on Iraq, but by many conservative Republicans in
Congress. They blame the neo-cons for failing to
anticipate the quagmire in Iraq and worry that their
grander ambitions, such as those expounded by Gaffney,
will bankrupt the Treasury and break an already
overextended military.
Yet its importance as a
roadmap of where neo-conservatives - who, with the
critical help of Vice President Dick Cheney and Defense
Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, dominated Bush's foreign
policy after the September 11, 2001, attacks on New York
and the Pentagon - want US policy to go was underlined
by Gaffney's listing of the names of his friends in the
administration who he said "helped the president imprint
moral values on American security policy in a way and to
an extent not seen since Ronald Reagan's first term".
In addition to Cheney and Rumsfeld, he cited the
most clearly identified - and controversial -
neo-conservatives serving in the administration:
Cheney's chief of staff, I Lewis "Scooter" Libby; his
top Middle East advisers, John Hannah and David Wurmser;
weapons-proliferation specialist Robert Joseph; and top
Mideast aide Elliott Abrams, on the National Security
Council.
Also on the roster are: Deputy Defense
Secretary Paul Wolfowitz; Under Secretary for Policy
Douglas Feith; Feith's top Mideast aide William Luti, in
the Pentagon; Under Secretary for Arms Control and
International Security John Bolton; and for global
issues, Paula Dobriansky at the State Department.
Virtually all of the same individuals have been
cited by critics of the Iraq war, including Democratic
lawmakers and retired senior foreign-service and
military officials, as responsible for hijacking the
policy and intelligence process that led to the US
invasion of Iraq in March 2003.
Indeed, in a
lengthy interview about the war on the most-watched US
public-affairs TV program, 60 Minutes, last May,
the former head of the US Central Command and Secretary
of State Colin Powell's chief Middle East envoy until
2003, retired General Anthony Zinni, called for the
resignation of Libby, Abrams, Wolfowitz and Feith, as
well as Rumsfeld, for their roles in the attack.
Zinni also cited former Defense Policy Board
chairman Richard Perle, who has been close to Gaffney
since both of them served, along with Abrams, in the
office of Washington state senator Henry M Jackson in
the early 1970s.
When Perle became an assistant
secretary of defense under Reagan he brought Gaffney
along as his deputy. When Perle left in 1987, Gaffney
succeeded him before setting up CSP in 1989.
As
Perle's longtime protege and associate, Gaffney sits at
the center of a network of interlocking think-tanks,
foundations, lobby groups, arms manufacturers and
individuals that constitute the coalition of
neo-conservatives, aggressive nationalists such as
Cheney and Rumsfeld and Christian Right activists
responsible for the unilateralist trajectory of US
foreign policy since September 11.
Included
among CSP's board of advisers over the years have been
Rumsfeld, Perle, Feith, Christian moralist William
Bennett, Abrams, Feith, Joseph, former United Nations
ambassador Jeane Kirkpatrick, former navy under
secretary John Lehman and former Central Intelligence
Agency director James Woolsey.
Woolsey also
co-chairs the new Committee on the Present Danger (CPD),
another prominent neo-con-led lobby group that argues
Washington is now engaged in "World War IV" against
"Islamo-fascism".
Also serving on its advisory
council are executives from some of the country's
largest military contractors, which - along with wealthy
individuals sympathetic to Israel's governing Likud
Party, such as prominent New York investor Lawrence
Kadish and California casino king Irving Moskowitz, and
right-wing bodies, such as the Bradley, Sarah Scaife and
Olin Foundations - finance CSP's work.
Gaffney,
a ubiquitous "talking head" on TV in the run-up to the
war in Iraq, sits on the boards of CPD's parent
organizations, the Foundation for the Defense of
Democracies and Americans for Victory Over Terrorism. He
was a charter associate, with Cheney, Rumsfeld, Perle,
Wolfowitz and Abrams, of the Project for the New
American Century, another prominent neo-conservative-led
group that offered up a similar checklist of what Bush
should do in the "war on terrorism" just nine days after
the September 11 attacks.
His article opens by
trying to preempt an argument that is already being
heard on the right against expanding Bush's "war on
terrorism": that since a plurality of Bush voters
identified "moral values" as their chief concern, the
president should stick to his social conservative agenda
rather than expand the war.
"The reality is that
the same moral principles that underpinned the Bush
appeal on 'values' issues like gay marriage, stem-cell
research and the right to life were central to his
vision of US war aims and foreign policy," according to
Gaffney. "Indeed, the president laid claim squarely to
the ultimate moral value - freedom - as the cornerstone
of his strategy for defeating our Islamofascist enemies
and their state sponsors, for whom that concept is
utterly [sic] anathema."
To be true to that
commitment, policy in the second administration must be
directed toward seven priorities, according to Gaffney,
beginning with the "reduction in detail of Fallujah and
other safe havens utilized by freedom's enemies in
Iraq"; followed by "regime change - one way or another -
in Iran and North Korea, the only hope for preventing
these remaining 'axis of evil' states from fully
realizing their terrorist and nuclear ambitions".
Third, the administration must provide "the
substantially increased resources needed to re-equip a
transforming military and rebuild human-intelligence
capabilities (minus, if at all possible, the sorts of
intelligence 'reforms' contemplated pre-election that
would make matters worse on this and other scores) while
we fight World War IV, followed by enhancing protection
of our homeland, including deploying effective missile
defenses at sea and in space, as well as ashore".
Fifth, Washington must keep "faith with Israel,
whose destruction remains a priority for the same people
who want to destroy us (and ... for our shared 'moral
values') especially in the face of Yasser Arafat's
demise and the inevitable, post-election pressure to
'solve' the Middle East problem by forcing the Israelis
to abandon defensible boundaries".
Sixth, the
administration must deal with France and Germany and the
dynamic that made them "so problematic in the first
term: namely, their willingness to make common cause
with our enemies for profit and their desire to employ a
united Europe and its new constitution - as well as
other international institutions and mechanisms - to
thwart the expansion and application of American power
where deemed necessary by Washington".
Finally,
writes Gaffney, Bush must adapt "appropriate strategies
for contending with China's increasingly fascistic trade
and military policies, [Russian President] Vladimir
Putin's accelerating authoritarianism at home and
aggressiveness toward the former Soviet republics, the
worldwide spread of Islamofascism, and the emergence of
a number of aggressively anti-American regimes in Latin
America", which he does not identify.
"These
items do not represent some sort of neo-con
'imperialist' game plan," Gaffney stressed. "Rather,
they constitute a checklist of the work the world will
demand of this president and his subordinates in a
second term."
