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Attack! Attack!
Attack!
By Jim Lobe
WASHINGTON - It's always difficult to play
defense and offense at the same time, but when the
geopolitical ground is shifting beneath one's feet
and damaging leaks are spurting out of the White
House and Downing Street plumbing like July 4
fireworks, it's more difficult than usual.
At least, that's the sense one gets after
watching the frantic maneuverings last week of
far-right and neo-conservative personalities who
found themselves trying, on the one hand, to
persuade their compatriots to prepare to take on
new enemies in what they call "World War IV",
while, on the other, mounting rear-guard actions
against faint-hearted allies who want out of Iraq
and Democrats who are calling for the head of
President George W Bush's "brain", political
advisor Karl Rove.
While, by week's end,
most of them, at least judging by their
editorials, columns and Fox News television
appearances, were focused on defending Rove from
charges that he may have compromised national
security by "outing" a Central Intelligence Agency
(CIA) officer as the immediate priority, they were
all over the map - almost literally - for most of
the past week or so, dispensing a never-ending
stream of geostrategic advice for all and sundry.
Some of it was entirely familiar,
especially with respect to Iran and Syria, favored
neo-conservative targets, for the next phase of
the "global war on terror".
Indeed, since
last month's surprise victory late last month of
hardliner Mahmud Ahmadinejad in Iran's
presidential elections, neo-conservatives have
launched a new campaign for "regime change",
urging the Bush administration to take more urgent
action to achieve that goal.
"The country
is ripe for revolution," enthused Jeffrey Gedmin,
the neo-conservative director of the Aspen
Institute in Berlin, in the Weekly Standard. "This
regime has to go," he went on, arguing that, what
with the European Union constitutional process
stalemated and the "impending political demise of
[French President] Jacques Chirac and [German
Chancellor] Gerhard Schroeder," Bush should be
able to line up the European Union behind support
for the "democracy movement in Iran".
And
if that strategy should fail, noted Michael Rubin
of the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), "Bush
may decide that pinpoint military strikes are the
only mechanism by which to undercut the Islamic
Republic's [nuclear] ambitions."
AEI's
Michael Ledeen, just back from safari in Botswana
("The best hope for Africa is tough love. Cut off
the aid."), took much the same line in several
articles in National Review Online, arguing that
new and "abundant evidence" has surfaced over
Iranian ties to al-Qaeda and to the insurgency in
Iraq.
"I do not know if ... the Iranians
were involved in the London bombings, but it
really does not matter, for Iran is the most
potent force in the terror network, from which the
killers in London undoubtedly drew succor ... We
cannot possibly have decent security in Iraq
unless we end the murderous tyrannies in Tehran
and Damascus," wrote Ledeen, who, in another
piece, argued, as did several other
neo-conservatives, that the British "elites" had
brought on the attacks on London by their "special
relationship with the Arab world" and
"anti-Semitism".
While this was all quite
familiar, the war hawks also tried to take
advantage of Congressional concern over an
attempted Chinese takeover of US oil giant Unocal
and this week's state visit of Indian Prime
Minister Manmohan Singh to mount a broader
strategic vision of allies and enemies.
This was encapsulated in a brief talk by
the neo-conservative Foundation for the Defense of
Democracies director Clifford May to the US-India
League, in which he called on the US to "forge new
alliances appropriate to a new era" that would
include Eastern Europe, Australia, Israel, Japan
and, "most emphatically, India the world's largest
democracy".
May, who would later in the
week devote his considerable polemical talents to
defending Rove, was joined by Kenneth Timmerman,
author of Countdown to Crisis: The Coming
Nuclear Showdown with Iran, far-right activist
Paul Weyrich, and AEI's Thomas Donnelly, all of
whom argued that Delhi should play a key role in
countering China's strategic ambitions.
So
should Japan, Washington Times and National Review
editor Rich Lowry was quick to add in a Washington
Times column in which he made an increasingly
common argument that Tokyo should tear up its
post-war constitution and become "as reliable a
partner of the US in Asia as Britain is in Europe"
in checking Beijing.
The column, entitled
"Unleash Japan", noted that other Asian countries
have "nightmarish memories of the Japanese
military", but that they should understand that
there's a "new Japanese government ... on the side
of decency and civilization".
As for
China, several prominent neo-conservatives
appeared before a key Congressional committee
arguing that Washington should prevent the sale of
Unocal, most of whose assets are found on China's
doorstep in Asia, to the China National Offshore
Oil Company, because oil is a "national security"
issue rather than a simple commodity that should
be subject to the free market.
"China is
pursuing a national strategy of domination of the
energy markets and strategic dominance of the
western Pacific," argued James Woolsey, a former
CIA director and prominent neo-conservative who
popularized the "World War IV" slogan but who,
until now, had confined its use to the war on
"Islamofascism" in which Beijing is supposedly
allied with Washington.
Appearing on the
same panel as Woolsey was Center for Security
Policy president Frank Gaffney, another
neo-conservative, who warned in the late 1990s
that a Hong Kong-based company's lease of two port
facilities at either end of the Panama Canal was
part of a secret plan to deny the waterway to the
US Navy in the event of war.
"China is
positioning itself to supplant the United States
economically and strategically and, if necessary,
to defeat us militarily in the decades to come,"
said Gaffney who, in a Washington Times article
last week, argued that the London bombings should
prompt the Bush administration to prevent Israeli
Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's disengagement from
Gaza ("Friends don't let friends commit suicide
...").
But while propagating their latest
geostrategic worldview, these same activists and
their comrades also were forced to play defense,
and not just about the damage inflicted on the
White House by the growing scandal over Rove.
The leak of a classified memo from the
British defense minister to Prime Minister Tony
Blair detailing "emerging US plans" to reduce by
half the number of soldiers in Iraq - as well as
reports that the Pentagon intended to
substantially withdraw its forces from Afghanistan
within two years - drew very worried responses
from Weekly Standard editor William Kristol, who
has long assailed Defense Secretary Donald
Rumsfeld for refusing to deploy enough troops to
the two countries.
The British memo "shows
real efforts within the administration to
extricate us from this, and I think ... that's a
much greater threat than anything that happens
directly in London", he told an AEI audience. In a
written memo co-authored by Project for the New
American Century director Gary Schmitt, Kristol
warned that Rumsfeld "is putting the president's
strategic vision at risk".
Worried as well
about a steady stream of public opinion polls
showing US citizens who believe that Bush and his
backers lied about the reasons for going to war in
Iraq, Kristol also gave over half of last week's
Weekly Standard to an article titled "The Mother
of All Connections", in which the author, Stephen
Hayes, presents what he calls "new evidence" of an
operational tie between al-Qaeda and Saddam
Hussein.
(Inter Press Service) |
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