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ANALYSIS
Watch
Woolsey
By Jim Lobe
WASHINGTON - If you want to figure out whether
the administration of President George W Bush intends a
crusade to remake the Middle East in the wake of
Washington's presumed military victory in Iraq, watch
what happens with R James Woolsey. A former director of
the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), Woolsey is being
pushed hard by his fellow neoconservatives in the
Pentagon to play a key role in the post-Saddam Hussein
US occupation.
Less well-known than his
long-time associates and close friends, Deputy Defense
Secretary Paul Wolfowitz and the former head of the
Defense Policy Board (DPB) Richard Perle, Woolsey has
long believed that Washington has a mission to use its
overwhelming military power and its democratic ideals to
transform the Arab world. And he has pushed for war with
Iraq as hard as anyone, even before the terrorist
attacks of September 11, 2001.
If he soon pops
up in Baghdad, you can bet that the "clash of
civilizations" is imminent, if it has not begun already.
To Woolsey's mind, the US is already engaged in what he
and many of his fellow neoconservatives call "World War
IV", a struggle that pits the US and Britain against
Islamist and Wahhabi extremists like al-Qaeda's Osama
bin Laden, Iranian theocrats, and Ba'ath Party
"fascists" in Syria and Iraq. In their view, the Cold
War was World War III.
Their list also includes
other authoritarian rulers in the Arab world, such as
Egypt's President Hosni Mubarak and the ruling Saud
family in Saudi Arabia, whose "Faustian bargain" with
the Muslim Wahhabi sect, in Woolsey's view, is
responsible for al-Qaeda and much of Islamist-related
terrorism throughout the world.
"We want you
nervous," Woolsey told Mubarak and the Saudi monarchy in
a speech to students at the University of California at
Los Angeles last week. "We want you to realize now, for
the fourth time in a hundred years, that this country
and its allies are on the march, and that we are on the
side of those you most fear: we're on the side of your
own people."
"Iraq can be seen as the first
battle of the fourth world war," Woolsey declared in a
NATO conference in Prague last November, in rhetoric
that he has practiced and honed virtually since
September 11. "After two hot world wars and one cold one
that all began and were centered in Europe," he said,
"the fourth world war is going to be for the Middle
East."
A high-flying corporate lawyer, Woolsey,
like other neoconservatives, began as a liberal Democrat
in the 1960s who marched in the civil rights movement
and even campaigned for the anti-Vietnam War candidate,
Senator Eugene McCarthy. Unlike most neoconservatives,
Woolsey served a brief stint in the army - albeit not in
Indochina - before entering government, where he fell in
with the rising stars of the neoconservative movement,
including Perle and Wolfowitz, as an arms-control
negotiator.
He served for two years in the Jimmy
Carter administration as undersecretary of the navy, and
was then recruited by Perle and other hardliners in the
Reagan administration to return to arms control work,
which he also pursued under the administration of George
H W Bush.
Unhappy with the realism of the first
Bush, and outraged by his failure to oust Saddam Hussein
after the first Gulf War, he supported Bill Clinton for
president in 1992. To the enthusiasm of other
neoconservatives, Clinton made him CIA director in 1993,
but he resigned less than two years later, complaining
that he and Clinton never established a close
relationship.
But Woolsey maintained his
obsession with Saddam, and in January 1998 signed a
public letter to Clinton by the newly formed Project for
the New American Century calling for the adoption of a
"regime change" as the main US policy goal towards Iraq.
In that same year, he lobbied hard for passage of the
Iraq Liberation Act, which not only formalized regime
change as a policy but allocated up to US$100 million
for the Iraqi opposition, mainly the Iraq National
Congress, headed by Ahmed Chalabi.
That lobby
went into high gear immediately after September 11.
Within just a few days, Perle convened the DPB to
discuss how Washington could use the incidents as
justification for attacking Iraq, and Woolsey was tasked
to go to Europe to collect evidence that Saddam was
linked to al-Qaeda. He spent many weeks on that mission,
emerging with the story that an unnamed informant had
told Czech intelligence that he had seen the leader of
the September 11 skyjackers meet with an Iraqi agent in
Prague in the April before the attack.
Even
though the report was dismissed as not credible by US,
British, French and Israeli intelligence agencies, it
became the basis - endlessly repeated by Woolsey and
other neoconservatives on television talk shows and in
op-ed pages of major newspapers - of a major propaganda
campaign against Iraq, even as Washington carried out
its military campaign in Afghanistan in late 2001.
Woolsey even suggested that Saddam was behind
the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center towers and
the anthrax-bearing letters sent to various lawmakers
after September 11, and that US intelligence agencies
could not find the connection because they lacked
sufficient imagination. The campaign largely worked: by
late last year, well over one-half of the respondents in
one key poll believed that Saddam was somehow linked to
September 11.
Like other neoconservatives,
Woolsey also appears to have somewhat ambivalent views
about the democratic revolution he seeks to generate
throughout the Arab world. "Only fear will re-establish
respect for the US," he told the Washington Post when
asked why US conquests in the Islamic world would not
incite even more support for Islamist radicals and
al-Qaeda.
When asked whether he would retain his
enthusiasm for democracy in the Arab world if tomorrow
democratic elections were won by Islamist parties
hostile to Washington, he joked, "Well, then perhaps the
election should be the day after tomorrow."
Still, Woolsey insists that he opposes a clash
of civilizations and that he is counting on the
empowerment of silent majorities throughout the Arab
world to see the value of allying themselves with
Washington. "The key alliance here, just as it was in
the Cold War, over and above our military power, is
going to be with the moderate and sensible and
reasonable Muslims who constitute the vast majority of
the world's Muslims and their understanding that we are
on their side, just as we were on the side of the people
of Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union in the Cold War."
(Inter Press Service)
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