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Gloves come off on the US home
front
By Jim Lobe
WASHINGTON
- Only a week after United States military forces
consolidated their control of Baghdad, a new war has
broken out, this time in Washington. The opening
cannonade was delivered on Tuesday by the former
Republican Speaker of the House of Representatives
(1995-98) and member of the Pentagon's Defense Policy
Board, Newt Gingrich, at the neo-conservative American
Enterprise Institute (AEI).
Gingrich, who is
close to Pentagon chief Donald Rumsfeld, aimed the full
fury of his rhetorical fire on a building located about
two kilometers to the southwest, the State Department,
which he accused of actively subverting President George
W Bush's agenda in Iraq and beyond. "The last seven
months have involved six months of diplomatic failure
and one month of military success," Gingrich charged,
adding, "Now the State Department is back at work
pursuing policies that will clearly throw away all the
fruits of hard-won victory."
While he insisted
that he was not faulting Secretary of State Colin
Powell, whom he depicted as a prisoner of the department
and its Near East bureau, he called for a thorough
transformation of the diplomatic service. "Without bold
dramatic change at the State Department," Gingrich
warned, "the United States will soon find itself on the
defensive everywhere except militarily. In the long run
that is a very dangerous position for the world's
leading democracy."
It was a stunning attack from
someone so closely identified with Rumsfeld and the
neo-conservative hawks around him. Charles Kupchan, a
foreign policy expert at Georgetown University, said
that Gingrich, as a member of the Policy Board, probably
even had cleared his remarks with top officials. "I've
never seen a wholesale attack on America's entire
diplomatic establishment like this," Kupchan said. "This
is fundamentally about ideology and the efforts of the
neo-conservatives to institutionalize their victories
over the moderate and liberal internationalists."
It also illustrates the degree to which
relations between the State Department and the Pentagon
hawks has moved to open warfare as both sides jostle for
control of policy in Iraq and the broader Middle East.
"Frankly, my mind goes back to the 1950s and what was
considered a vicious and unjustified and wrong-headed
purge of the China hands in the State Department," said
Richard Murphy, who served as assistant secretary of
state for Near Eastern Affairs under Ronald Reagan and
is currently a Middle East expert with the New
York-based Council on Foreign Relations.
"I
think it is designed to scare people into thinking that
anyone who challenges the right wing is going to suffer
for it. He wants to get these people who in his mind
pervert presidential policy out on the street. Calls for
State Department reform are really a veiled way of
trying to make permanent changes that would leave a
certain ideological strain that could be called
'neo-imperial' in control, not just of the Pentagon but
of other parts of the government as well," Kupchan said.
The fact that Gingrich's remarks, which were
leaked to the Washington Post in advance, were delivered
at the AEI, where he is a senior fellow, is also highly
significant. It was there that Bush almost two months
ago presented his most comprehensive proposal yet for
democratizing Iraq and the Arab world, and negotiating
peace between Israel and the Palestinians.
The
AEI is also home to the former chairman of the Defense
Policy Board, Richard Perle, who was perhaps the most
vocal champion of going to war with Syria, as well as
several other neo-conservative analysts who have been
the most outspoken about using the "war on terror" and
the occupation of Iraq to promote "regime change" in
Iran and Syria and even in US allies Saudi Arabia and
Egypt.
In his remarks, Gingrich charged that the
administration was split between two "worldviews": the
State Department worldview as one of "process,
politeness and accommodation", and the president's
worldview of "facts, values and outcomes". Gingrich said
that the Pentagon appeared far more faithful to the
latter.
Despite the State Department's failure
to persuade key allies, such as Turkey, South Korea,
France and Germany to support Washington, the Pentagon
brought along Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and Jordan, according
to Gingrich, thus making it far easier to go to war.
"The military delivered diplomatically and then the
military delivered militarily in a stunning, four-week
campaign," he declared.
But even now, he warned,
those gains are jeopardized by the State Department in
four critical areas. First, he called Powell's
recently announced visit to Damascus next month to meet
Syrian President Bashir Assad - whom Gingrich called a
"terrorist-supporting, secret police-wielding dictator"
- "ludicrous". "This is a time to demand changes in
Damascus before a visit is even considered," Gingrich
said.
Second, Gingrich attacked the State
Department's "invention" of the so-called "Quartet" for
Palestinian-Israeli peace talks as a "clear disaster for
American diplomacy". "After the bitter lessons of the
last five months," he said, it is unimaginable that the
United States would voluntarily accept a system in which
the UN, the European Union and Russia could routinely
outvote President Bush's positions by three to one - or
four to one if the State Department voted its cultural
belief against the president's policies", a reference to
the allegedly pro-Arab bias of the Near East Bureau.
Third, Gingrich assailed the diplomats
sent to help oversee the occupation in Iraq as
"representing the worst instincts" of the bureau. "They
were promoted in a culture of propping up dictators,
coddling the corrupt and ignoring the secret police.
Their instinct is to create a weak Iraqi government that
will not threaten its Syrian, Iranian, Saudi and other
dictatorial neighbors," he said.
Fourthly, he said involving the US Agency
for International Development (USAID) in the
reconstruction process in Iraq was "a further sign that
nothing has been learned". "As of two weeks ago, not one
mile of road had been paved in Afghanistan ...There is
no reason to believe USAID will be any better in Iraq
than the disaster it has been in Afghanistan," Gingrich
said, adding, "the State Department should be
transformed, but USAID should be abolished."
The
State Department itself issued a low-key response to the
Gingrich attack, insisting that it was loyally and
effectively carrying out Bush's policy, including the
roadmap for Israeli-Palestinian peace. White House
Spokesman Ari Fleischer stood firmly behind Powell. "The
fact of the matter is the State Department and Secretary
Powell did a excellent job at ushering through that
process. There were others who complicated the process
in the Security Council. That in no way is reflective of
the State Department or what the president thinks about
the State Department or Secretary Powell's superb
efforts."
But Murphy remarked that many of the
factual assertions made by Gingrich about diplomacy
leading up to the war were "nonsense". "A cynic would
say that he wants to be secretary of state," he added.
"Gingrich and company should look at themselves in the
mirror," said Kupchan. "If you ask who is it who has set
most of the world against the United States, it's not
the Department; it's the Pentagon and the neo-cons."
(Inter Press Service)
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