WASHINGTON - When President George W Bush
unveils his long-awaited new strategy on Iraq on
Wednesday night eastern US time, he will be
relying heavily on the counsel of one J D Crouch
II, perhaps the most hardline - if most obscure -
of his hawkish advisers.
Over the past 15
years, the generally low-profile Crouch has taken
any number of controversial positions, from
advocating military action against Cuba and North
Korea to blaming the 1999 Columbine High School
student massacre in Colorado on "30
years
of liberal social policy".
As deputy
national security adviser, Crouch, who has held
three posts in the Bush administration, chaired
the inter-agency group charged with mapping out
Bush's new Iraq strategy, whose main feature, it
is expected, will be to add some 20,000 new US
troops to the 140,000 already there in hopes of
stabilizing Baghdad and rebellious al-Anbar
province.
Crouch, whose substantive
expertise is in arms control - or, more precisely,
how the US can evade or undermine international
efforts to promote arms control - has long been a
favorite of Vice President Dick Cheney, whose own
national security adviser, neo-conservative John
Hannah, has reportedly played a key role in the
deliberations over Iraq.
Crouch first
worked under Cheney at the Pentagon during the
administration of president George H W Bush when,
as a deputy assistant secretary for international
security, he contributed to the controversial 1992
draft Defense Policy Guidance (DPG) that, among
other things, called on Washington to pursue
unquestioned military dominance in and around
Eurasia.
He returned to the Pentagon as
assistant secretary for international security
after President George W Bush's election in 2001.
In that capacity, he focused mostly on the current
administration's withdrawal from the 1972
Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, its plans to
develop new kinds of nuclear weapons, and the
preparation of the 2002 National Security
Strategy, which codified many of the ideas first
proposed in the 1992 DPG, rather than on
Washington's military campaigns in Afghanistan and
Iraq.
He left the administration in late
2003 to return to Southwest Missouri State
University (SMSU), long a stronghold of
missile-defense, nuclear-arms and space-weapons
advocates, only to be appointed the following year
as ambassador to Romania, a post he held for just
eight months before being recalled to Washington
in early 2005 as deputy national security adviser
under Stephen Hadley.
His return was
described by Washington Post columnist Jim
Hoagland as evidence that Cheney was "charging
ahead with undiminished influence and unshakable
self-confidence".
Now 48, Crouch first
entered government after earning a doctorate in
international relations at the University of
Southern California in the mid-1980s. With the
help of his longtime mentor and one of
then-president Ronald Reagan's most hawkish
advisers, William Van Cleave, Crouch was assigned
to the State Department's Arms Control and
Disarmament Agency before joining the staff of the
far-right senator from Cheney's home state of
Wyoming, Malcolm Wallop, in 1986.
He moved
in 1990 to the Pentagon, where he worked under
then-under secretary of defense for policy Paul
Wolfowitz. After the first Gulf War he was part of
a team that included Wolfowitz; Cheney's future
vice-presidential chief of staff until 2005, I
Lewis Libby; and Washington's current ambassador
to Iraq, Zalmay Khalilzad, and that prepared the
draft DPG. Its leak to the New York Times sparked
a major controversy that eventually prompted the
Bush Sr administration to repudiate its more
unilateralist proposals.
Crouch spent most
of the 1990s teaching at SMSU, whose department of
defense and strategic studies was headed by Van
Cleave, and speaking out against what he and his
associates charged was the "appeasement" policies
of the Bill Clinton administration.
He
strongly denounced US-North Korean negotiations in
1995, for example, calling for Washington to send
more troops and deploy tactical nuclear weapons to
South Korea to carry out air strikes against
nuclear targets in North Korea if Pyongyang
refused to give up its nuclear program at the
time.
The following year, he criticized
Clinton for imposing travel restrictions and
economic sanctions against Cuba after its air
force shot down two civilian planes flown by
anti-Fidel Castro activists from south Florida.
"We ought to have considered military options," he
said at the time. "As long as we allow a
totalitarian communist regime to exist 90 miles
from our borders, we can expect these kinds of
problems to recur."
He also joined the
board of advisers of the ultra-hawkish Center for
Security Policy, a lobby group funded by defense
contractors and far-right Zionists associated with
Israel's Likud Party and headed by hardline
neo-conservative Frank Gaffney.
Other
members of that board have included senior members
of the current US administration, including Elliot
Abrams, the senior Middle East director on the
National Security Council; former Defense Policy
Board chairman Richard Perle; former under
secretary of defense for policy Douglas Feith; and
a number of former and current SMSU faculty
members, including Van Cleave, Charles Kupperman,
Keith Payne, and the former head of Reagan's Star
Wars program, Henry Cooper.
From his perch
at SMSU, meanwhile, Crouch also spoke out and
wrote on domestic issues, taking classically
far-right positions against big government,
progressive taxation and gun control.
In a
letter published in the Washington Times, he
blamed the shooting rampage by two teenage
students of 12 of their classmates and one teacher
on "30 years of liberal social policy that has put
our children in daycare, taken God out of the
schools, taken Mom out of the house and banished
Dad as an authority figure from the family
altogether". He has since insisted that he does
not oppose "women in the workplace".
Although such positions generally do not
reflect neo-conservative views, neo-cons,
including Perle and Gaffney, have, like Cheney,
been among Crouch's most enthusiastic boosters
over the years.
"Knowing him as I do,"
Gaffney, whose list of US adversaries against
which Washington should be much more
confrontational runs from Iran, North Korea, Syria
and Venezuela to China, Russia and France, told
the St Louis Post Dispatch, "I'm almost certain
that he is exercising influence, and influence
that is reinforcing the most robust policies and
positions of this administration."
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