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Washington goes to war over
war
By Jim Lobe
WASHINGTON -
War has been declared in Washington, but not against any
foreign country, at least for the moment.
Rather, the war, which should switch into high
gear when Congress returns from its August recess early
next month, is for the heart and mind of President
George W Bush, who will come under excruciating pressure
by November to decide whether or not the United States
will formally go to war against Iraq some time during
the first half of next year.
For now, the war is
strictly among Republicans - between the conservative
realists who dominated the administration of former
president George H W Bush and the predominantly
neo-conservative coalition of hawks clustered in the
civilian leadership of the Pentagon and in Vice
President Dick Cheney's office.
A series of
leaks this month from senior military brass, who have
grown increasingly distrustful of the adventurism of
their civilian bosses, marked the preliminary skirmishes
in the conflict.
The war burst into the open
last week when the elder Bush's national security
adviser, retired General Brent Scowcroft, lambasted the
idea of war with Iraq in the editorial pages of the
staunchly hawkish Wall Street Journal. Arguing that war
against Baghdad would likely destroy international
cooperation for the war against terrorism, Scowcroft
also warned that it "could well destabilize Arab regimes
in the region, ironically facilitating one of Saddam's
strategic objectives".
Scowcroft, who doubles as
the chairman of the current Presidential Foreign
Intelligence Advisory Board (PFIAB) and hence has access
to top-secret intelligence, also cast doubt on rumors of
any link between Iraqi President Saddam Hussein and
al-Qaeda, let alone Iraqi involvement in the September
11 terrorist attacks on New York and the Pentagon.
Left alone, the Scowcroft op-ed would have
created a stir. But it became a sensation when the New
York Times the next day cited Scowcroft's dissent in its
lead article headlined, "Top Republicans Break with Bush
on Iraq Strategy".
Citing Scowcroft's article
and a column by former secretary of state Henry
Kissinger - who argued that war against Iraq could be
justified but that Washington had to do much more to
cultivate public support at home and abroad - the Times
also quoted unnamed senior State Department officials
who said that they were trying desperately to halt the
course toward war in intra-administration debates. The
Times also quoted another former Republican secretary of
state, Lawrence Eagleburger, as sharing Scowcroft's
views, and cited a Republican on the Senate foreign
relations committee as leading the forces opposed to the
war.
The response was not long in coming. On
Monday, readers got a double blast, aimed at both the
Times and Scowcroft, by two leading neo-conservative
organs, the Wall Street Journal and the Rupert
Murdoch-owned Weekly Standard, which often speak for the
Pentagon and Cheney hawks in the administration.
In its lead editorial titled "This is
Opposition?", the Journal ridiculed the notion of a
split in Republican ranks and went after Scowcroft and
Secretary of State Colin Powell as practitioners of
"realpolitik". That notion, it said, "striv[es] for
balance of power in the old European sense, [and]
resists a foreign policy with a strong moral component
or one designed to expand US principles and democracy".
"So it typically favors 'stability', even when
it's imposed by dictators, over democratic aspiration,"
according to the Journal, which went on to catalogue a
series of "mistaken judgments" allegedly made by
Scowcroft, Eagleburger and Powell during the first Bush
administration.
On the list were: the failure to
intervene against Yugoslav president Slobodan Milosevic;
favoring the maintenance of the Soviet Union under
Mikhail Gorbachev; and, worst, urging Bush senior to
"stop the Gulf War early, based in part on a CIA
[Central Intelligence Agency] fear that a divided Iraq
without a dictator was worse than a 'stable' Iraq ruled
by Saddam or his Baath Party successor".
In a
second article, the Standard weighed in with its own
attack on Scowcroft and the Times. The article, "The
Axis of Appeasement", was penned by the publication's
chief editor, William Kristol, who doubles as co-founder
of the Project for a New American Century (PNAC), a
five-year-old front group that consists of close
associates of the Pentagon-Cheney forces. (Both Defense
Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Cheney signed PNAC's first
declarations.)
It accused the Times of
"shamelessly" mischaracterizing Kissinger's position,
noting that "the establishment fights most bitterly and
honestly when it feels cornered and thinks it's about to
lose".
"Reading the Scowcoft/New York Times
'arguments' against the war, one is struck by how
laughably weak they are," wrote Kristol. "European
international-law wishfulness and full-blown Pat
Buchanan isolationism are the two intellectually honest
alternatives to the Bush Doctrine," he added. "Scowcroft
and the Times wish to embrace neither, so they pretend
instead to be terribly 'concerned' with the
administration's alleged failure to 'make the case' [for
going to war]."
But the central target of
Kristol's attack was Powell, who served as chairman of
the Joint Chiefs of Staff under Bush senior and has long
been a target of neo-conservative wrath. After citing
defenses of Bush policy by Rumsfeld, Cheney and National
Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice (a Scowcroft
protegee), Kristol asked, "Where is Colin Powell?"
"This secretary of state, because of his
popularity at home and his stature abroad, could be
particularly helpful if he were to join the president,
the vice president, the national security adviser, and
the defense secretary in making the case for the Bush
Doctrine with respect to Iraq. Instead, he allows his
top aides to tell the New York Times on background that
he disagrees with the president and is desperately
trying to restrain him."
"Colin Powell," the
piece went on, "is an impressive man. He is loyally
assisted by the able [Deputy Secretary of State] Richard
Armitage. They are entitled to their foreign policy
views. But they will soon have to decide whom they wish
to serve - the president, or his opponents."
This first exchange of cannon-fire took place in
the sweltering mid-August heat, when most Washingtonians
have fled for cooler climes in the mountains, the
seashore, or Europe. So a lull in the rhetorical
fireworks can be expected over the next two weeks. But
battle lines have for the first time been clearly drawn,
and an intensification of the war can be expected.
On one side, the ranks will be led by Rumsfeld
and Cheney and their cheerleaders at the Journal, the
Standard, and a handful of other publications; on the
other will stand the Bush I veterans, led by Scowcroft
outside the administration and Powell, with the not
inconsiderable help of the military brass within.
How the Democrats weigh in - and they, too, face
strong divisions on the issue of war with Iraq - remains
to be seen.
(Inter Press Service)
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