| |
New champions of the war
cause
By Jim Lobe
WASHINGTON
- A small group of influential right-wingers with close
ties to the offices of Pentagon chief Donald Rumsfeld
and Vice President Dick Cheney will this week launch a
new political campaign to rally public support for the
invasion of Iraq.
The task may not be easy:
according to a recent survey, public support for
invading Iraq has fallen from highs of close to 80
percent earlier this year to between 52 percent and 60
percent, and less than one half of the respondents
opposed taking unilateral action if US allies were not
on board.
The Committee for the Liberation of
Iraq, which is setting up its office on Capitol Hill
this week, plans to announce its formal launch next
week, according to its president, Randy Scheunemann, a
veteran Republican Senate foreign policy staffer who
until recently worked as a consultant to Rumsfeld on
Iraq policy.
The committee appears to be a
spin-off of the Project for a New American Century
(PNAC), a front group consisting mainly of
neo-conservative Jews and heavy-hitters from the
Christian right, whose public recommendations on
fighting the war against terrorism and US backing for
Israel in the conflict in the occupied territories have
anticipated to a remarkable degree the administration's
own policy course.
Scheunemann, who is best
known for drafting the 1998 Iraq Liberation Act that
authorized US$98 million for the Iraqi National Congress
(INC), a loose coalition of Iraqi dissidents that is
widely distrusted by the State Department and the
Central Intelligence Agency, said that he was still
putting together the group's board of advisers.
So far, Bruce P Jackson, a vice president at
arms maker Lockheed Martin, who chaired the Republican
Party's subcommittee for national security and foreign
policy when George W Bush ran for president in 2000, has
signed on as chairman.
Other officers include
Gary Schmitt, PNAC's executive director, and Julie
Finley, a prominent Republican fundraiser who worked
with Jackson when he served as president of the US
Committee to Expand NATO, as well as former secretary of
state George Shultz, who strongly supports ousting Iraqi
President Saddam Hussein through US unilateral action,
if necessary.
Former Democratic Senator Bob
Kerrey and retired General Wayne Downing, a former INC
lobbyist who worked on Bush's National Security Council
as its top counter-terrorism official until abruptly
resigning last summer, have also agreed to serve as
advisers.
Aside from its close association with
PNAC (whose website is one of only two links featured on
its website - www.liberationiraq.org), the new committee
appears to be based on a model that came to prominence
before the previous Gulf War in 1991.
The
Committee for Peace and Security in the Gulf (CPSG),
whose membership was drawn from a similar mix of
prominent neo-conservatives and other right-wing hawks,
worked closely with both Bush Senior's administration
and a second group financed by the Kuwaiti monarchy,
called Citizens for a Free Kuwait.
CPSG received
a large grant from the Wisconsin-based Lynde and Harry
Bradley Foundation, a major funder of both the PNAC and
the closely related American Enterprise Institute (AEI).
As recently as 1998, the CPSG called in an open
letter to then president Bill Clinton for Washington to
adopt a "comprehensive political and military strategy
for bringing down Saddam and his regime", centered on
support for the INC and US air power.
That 1998
letter was signed by many of the charter members of the
PNAC, including Rumsfeld, and four of his top deputies
at the Pentagon, Paul Wolfowitz, Douglas Feith, Dov
Zakheim and Peter Rodman. Other signatories included the
current ultra-unilateralist undersecretary of state for
arms control and international strategy, John Bolton,
Schmitt and several AEI "scholars", including the
current chairman of the Defense Policy Board, Richard
Perle.
The PNAC's two co-founders, William
Kristol, editor of Rupert Murdoch's The Weekly Standard,
and neo-conservative commentator Robert Kagan, also
signed the letter.
In 1999, many of the same
figures also created the Balkan Action Committee (BAC)
in support of NATO's Kosovo campaign against Serbia.
Wolfowitz, Rumsfeld and Perle all served on BAC's
executive committee which, like the CPSG, published open
letters to the president and took out ads in major
newspapers, like the New York Times and the Washington
Post.
The new committee, according to its
mission statement, "was formed to promote regional
peace, political freedom and international security by
replacing the Saddam Hussein regime with a democratic
government that respects the rights of the Iraqi people
and ceases to threaten the community of nations". It
"will engage in educational advocacy efforts to mobilize
US and international support for policies aimed at
ending the aggression of Saddam Hussein and freeing the
Iraqi people from tyranny". Scheunemann told Inter Press
Service that the group would concentrate its efforts on
the media "both in the US and in Europe".
Jackson's position as the committee's chairman
is notable because senior executives in the defense
industry have generally shunned the limelight,
particularly in citizens' or lobby groups that promote
wars, lest they be painted by the media as "merchants of
death". A former military intelligence officer in the US
Army, Jackson worked in the office of both Frank
Carlucci and Dick Cheney when they served as defense
secretaries under former presidents Ronald Reagan and
George Bush Sr. After a brief stint as an investment
banker for Lehman Brothers in New York, he joined the
defense industry, rising to his current post as vice
president for strategy and planning at Lockheed Martin.
An outspoken champion of Taiwan, Jackson came to
public prominence as head of the US Committee to Expand
NATO, which lobbied Congress in favor of the greatest
possible eastward expansion of new NATO members, a
lucrative new market for major arms sales for Lockheed
Martin, as well as five other big US military
contractors.
Working with him was Steve Hadley,
an assistant secretary of defense under Bush Sr and
currently George W Bush's deputy national security
adviser. At the time, Hadley worked for Shea and
Gardner, a law firm that represents Lockheed Martin.
More recently, the PNAC's deputy director, Tom Donnelly,
joined Lockheed Martin, but was then assigned to the
AEI, where he reportedly works with Perle.
(Inter Press Service)
|
| |
|
|
 |
|
