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COMMENTARY
Upheaval, any upheaval, will do
By Jim Lobe
WASHINGTON -
"Whenever I hear policymakers talk about the wonders of
'stability', I get the heebie-jeebies," wrote Michael
Ledeen, a scholar at the neoconservative American
Enterprise Institute (AEI) in early 2000. "That is for
tired old Europeans and nervous Asians, not for us."
"In just about everything we do, from business
and technology to cinema and waging war, we are the most
revolutionary force on earth. We are not going to fight
foreign wars or send our money overseas merely to defend
the status quo; we must have a suitably glorious
objective," said the former anti-terrorism consultant
for Italian military intelligence and the Reagan
administration, who is now counted among the very few
foreign policy analysts regularly consulted by Karl
Rove, President George W Bush's political eyes and ears
at the White House.
Ledeen, a long-time
associate of office mate and Defense Policy Board
chairman Richard Perle, with whom he founded the
right-wing Jewish Institute of National Security
Affairs, is so excited about the impending invasion of
Iraq and its regional implications that he can scarcely
contain himself.
"As soon as we land in Iraq,
we're going to face the whole terrorist network," he
told the latest edition of The American Prospect
magazine, meaning not only al-Qaeda, Lebanon's
Hezbollah, the Palestinian Hamas and Islamic Jihad, but
also Iran, Syria and Saudi Arabia - what he calls "the
terror masters". "I think we're going to be obliged to
fight a regional war, whether we want to or not," Ledeen
added. "It may turn out to be a war to remake the
world," he told the Prospect's Robert Dreyfuss.
Ledeen, like his fellow neoconservatives in and
out of the Bush administration, such as Perle and deputy
Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, insists that Iraq will
be the first "domino" to fall in what will become a
democratic revolution that will spread the blessings of
liberty and representative government across the Arab
Middle East.
Indeed, Bush himself adopted that
as the official position of the US government three
weeks ago in a major policy address at, not
insignificantly, the AEI itself. "A new regime in Iraq
would serve as a dramatic and inspiring example of
freedom for other nations in the region," he told
Ledeen, Perle and their fellow neoconservatives.
But the overwhelming consensus among Middle East
experts both inside and outside the government is that
such hopes bear no relation whatsoever to an achievable
reality. According to one intelligence official,
restoring a strong central government in Baghdad would
be the best that could realistically be hoped for.
Indeed, the State Department's bureau of
intelligence and research circulated a classified report
to top policymakers entitled "Iraq, the Middle East and
Change: No Dominoes", which, according to one unnamed
official quoted in the Los Angeles Times, concludes that
the notion of a regional democratic transformation is
"not credible".
The bureau's conclusion, which
is said to reflect the views of most Central
Intelligence Agency analysts as well, also echoes the
views of independent analysts and retired diplomats who
have spoken out against the current policy and its
optimistic assumptions.
"It may be excusable as
a fantasy of some Israelis reacting to the trauma of the
second Intifada," said Anthony Cordesman, the normally
taciturn Mideast specialist at the conservative Center
for Strategic and International Studies last September.
"As American policy, however, it crosses the line
between neoconservative and neo-crazy."
"The
idea of instant democratic transformation in the Middle
East is a mirage," asserted four veteran democracy and
regional specialists at the Carnegie Endowment for
International Peace. Besides, they concluded, "If a
tidal wave of political change actually came to pass,
the United States would not be even remotely prepared to
cope with the resulting instability."
Indeed,
the consensus position among regional specialists is
that, if anything, a US invasion will likely bring
instability throughout the region. "Democratic
imperialism promises not only to liberate the Arabs from
despotic rule but also to unleash the sectarian, ethnic
and ideological animosities that historically have torn
them apart," warned Richard Joseph, a Mideast scholar at
the University of Texas in a recent column.
But
as frightening a prospect as that may be, it may not be
totally unattractive to neoconservatives like Perle,
Ledeen, Wolfowitz and his deputy, Douglas Feith, as one
might imagine.
In fact, some analysts here have
begun to suggest that, in the probable event that
democracy does not sweep the region, the default option
- fragmentation and disintegration of Arab states -
corresponds all too neatly to the long-held dreams of
some on the Israeli right with which the
neoconservatives have long been closely linked.
Such a scenario was spelled out in an article
published on the eve of Israel's invasion of Lebanon in
1982 by Oded Yinon, who at that time was attached to
Israel's foreign ministry. Published by the World
Zionist Organization, the paper, "A Strategy for Israel
in the 1980s", urged policies that promote the
dissolution of Arab states into different ethnic and
sectarian groupings, and expressed the hope that the
then-raging war between Iran and Iraq would result in
the breakup of the latter into at least three states for
the three major groups - Kurds, Sunnis, and Shi'ites.
According to veteran Israeli peace activist and
former Knesset member, Uri Avnery, Israeli Prime
Minister Ariel Sharon, who led Israel's ultimately
disastrous invasion of Lebanon shortly after Yinon
published his piece, entertained some of the same ideas
at the time.
"[Sharon's] head was full of grand
designs for restructuring the Middle East, the creation
of an Israeli 'security zone' from Pakistan to Central
Africa, the overthrow of regimes and installing others
in their stead, moving a whole people [the Palestinians]
and so forth," he wrote last Fall.
"I can't help
it, but the winds blowing now in Washington remind me of
Sharon. I have absolutely no proof that the Bushies got
their ideas from him, even if all of them seem to have
been mesmerized by him."
It may not have been
necessary, because Perle, Feith and David Wurmser, who
now works on post-invasion Iraq in the State Department,
and other neoconservatives were already working on a
related scenario in 1996 when they prepared a memorandum
for Sharon's Likud rival, former prime minister Benjamin
Netanyahu. In addition to the idea of ousting Saddam and
restoring the Hashemite monarchy in Iraq, the paper
touted re-establishing the "principle of preemption"
against Syria and threats in Lebanon in part by securing
alliances with different ethnic and tribal groups there.
In the end, the administration and its
neoconservative members and cheerleaders may prefer a
democratization of the region over destabilization and
possible fragmentation of the Arab world, but the
default option, in their eyes, is not necessarily a bad
one.
"It's a war to turn the kaleidoscope, by
people who know nothing about the Middle East," a former
US ambassador to Saudi Arabia, Chas Freeman, told the
Prospect. "And there's no way to know how the pieces
will fall."
(Inter Press Service)
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