WASHINGTON - Despite a tidal wave of bad news
from the Iraq occupation they did so much to promote,
neo-conservatives are calling for US President George W
Bush to pursue a military solution against resistance
fighters there.
"Crush the insurgents in Iraq",
screamed a column in Sunday's Washington Post by
prominent New York politician-banker Lewis Lehrman and
Bill Kristol, the editor of the Weekly Standard, the
magazine that comes closest to defining orthodoxy among
neo-conservatives.
"The immediate task is ...
the destruction of the armies and militias of the
insurgency - not taking and holding territory, not
winning the hearts and minds of Iraqis, not conciliating
opponents and critics, not gaining the approval of other
nations," the two men wrote. "All of these can follow
after victory over the violent insurrection."
The advice clearly goes against the general
drift of US policy since last month's politically
disastrous siege of Fallujah and the outbreak of the
Muqtada al-Sadr rebellion in Baghdad and the
predominantly Shi'ite southern part of the country.
Even the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff,
General Richard Myers, who has been widely criticized by
the other military brass for being too deferential to
Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and his neo-con
aides, insisted last week: "We can't win with the
military alone." Victory will require efforts on "the
political and the economic fronts as well", he added.
What with reports from more than one US
intelligence agency that Ahmed Chalabi, a prominent
Iraqi exile who championed the US-led attack on Iraq
last year and who has been touted by the neo-cons as
Iraq's "George Washington" for much of the past decade,
has been doing the bidding of those the neo-cons call
the "the terror masters" in Tehran, and the fact that
virtually all of their prewar predictions about the
occupation have turned out to have been wishful
thinking, one might think that Kristol and company would
be inclined to reflect, at least a little, before making
such calls.
But one would be wrong.
It
has become an article of faith among neo-conservatives
that, as one of their number - syndicated columnist Mona
Charen - recently put it, "the question of the moment is
not whether we've done enough good, but whether we've
been tough enough".
Neo-cons have been calling
for months for their erstwhile ally, Rumsfeld, to send
in tens of thousands more troops to bolster the
occupation, if only to persuade the "Ba'athist
dead-enders", the "Islamo-fascists", and "foreign
fighters" that resistance is futile against overwhelming
US power.
If all of Iraq - particularly the
infamous Sunni triangle - had been subject to the "shock
and awe" of Washington's military might, in neo-cons'
view, the Fallujah siege, which began on April 2 after
US officials vowed to capture those responsible for the
killing and mutilation of four US civilian guards and
"pacify" the city, would never have happened.
"We expect a strong - even 'overwhelming' -
military response," Kristol wrote at the time. And
indeed, that's what seemed to be under way as tanks and
helicopter gunships blasted away at suspected targets,
killing at least 700 Iraqis, including many women and
children - much of it broadcast live on Arab television,
evoking fury throughout the Arab world and even among
Iraq's majority Muslim Shi'ite population.
Commanders on the ground knew it was a disaster
and, with White House backing, eventually agreed to lift
the siege and permit a former Revolutionary Guard
general, who had been cashiered under Chalabi's
"de-Ba'athization" program, to organize a local security
force that includes other ex-Ba'athists, and which so
far has also kept the peace.
Denounced as
"appeasement" by the neo-cons, that agreement is now
seen by the uniformed military, as well as the realists
in the State Department, the intelligence agencies and
the British Foreign Office - who have always considered
the neo-cons' dreams of "transforming" Iraq into a
democratic, pro-Western, pro-Israel state fanciful - as
the model for dealing with other restive parts of the
country, including the Shi'ite south.
But this
infuriates the neo-cons who, despite their constant
rhetoric about democracy and the importance of the "war
of ideas", have always considered military force to be
the only language their enemies can ever really
understand, be they Iraqis, Arabs, Muslims, Soviets,
communists or even Sandinistas in Nicaragua.
Thus, shortly after the war in Afghanistan,
neo-conservative columnist Charles Krauthammer exulted:
"Power is its own reward. Victory changes everything,
psychology above all. The psychology in the region is
now one of fear and deep respect for American power."
On the eve of the Iraq war, the Wall Street
Journal, whose editorial page is another important
source of neo-conservative thinking, warned: "Before the
US can worry about rebuilding Iraq, it has to win
militarily, and decisively so. As [Princeton University
Orientalist] Bernard Lewis and other scholars have long
noted, Arab cultures despise weakness in an adversary
above all."
Now, more than 15 months later -
with close to 90 percent of Iraqis, according to the
latest survey, saying they consider US troops to be
"occupiers" rather than "liberators", Kristol and
Lehrman have insisted that "decisive military victories
in Iraq would be respected by Sunnis, Shi'ites and Kurds
alike. [Muqtada] Sadr's militia must be rendered
powerless," they wrote, while "Fallujah must be
conquered."
Precisely how Fallujah or other
towns and cities are to be "conquered" without piling up
horrendous civilian casualties that alienate people far
beyond Iraq's borders is unclear. Kristol suggested last
week that "any site where Americans are attacked will be
regarded as a combat zone", a suggestion that curiously
recalled what since 1982 has been cited by
neo-conservatives as "Hama Rules", although to make an
entirely different point.
Much of Hama, a city
in northern Syria, was leveled by Syrian government
forces to put down a radical Islamist uprising in 1982.
From 4,000-20,000 people were believed to have been
killed in the assault. Since then, "Hama Rules", as used
mainly by neo-conservatives, has referred to the
ruthlessness of Arab governments in repressing
challenges to their rule.
As Charen wrote last
month: "Iraq cannot be truly liberated until it has been
transformed. And it cannot be transformed if the bad
elements are not afraid of American soldiers. Those
gleeful faces in Fallujah make the point: they think we
are patsies."
