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2 Rice picks neo-con champion on
Iraq By Jim Lobe
WASHINGTON - In a move that has surprised
many foreign-policy analysts, US Secretary of
State Condoleezza Rice has appointed a prominent
neo-conservative hawk and leading champion of the
Iraq war to the post of State Department
counselor.
Eliot A Cohen, who teaches
military history at Johns Hopkins School of
Advanced International Studies in Washington and
has also served on the Pentagon's Defense Policy
Board (DPB) since 2001, will take up the position
next month that was left vacant late
last year by Rice's
longtime confidant, "realist" thinker Philip
Zelikow.
A close friend and protege of
former deputy secretary of defense Paul Wolfowitz
and advisory board member of the American
Enterprise Institute (AEI), Cohen most recently
led the harsh neo-conservative attack on the
bipartisan Iraq Study Group (ISG), co-chaired by
former secretary of state James Baker and former
Democratic congressman Lee Hamilton.
Like
his fellow neo-cons, Cohen was particularly
scathing about the ISG's recommendations for
Washington to engage Syria and Iran directly and
revive the Israeli-Palestinian peace process -
recommendations Rice herself has explicitly
endorsed in the past few weeks.
"This is a
group composed, for the most part, of retired
eminent public officials, most with limited or no
expertise in the waging or study of war," Cohen
wrote in column titled "No way to win a war"
published by the Wall Street Journal the day after
the ISG released its report in early December.
"A fatuous process yields, necessarily,
fatuous results," he went on in a wholesale
dismissal of the relevance of what he called the
"Washington establishment whose wisdom was
exaggerated in its heyday, and which has in any
event succumbed to a kind of
political-intellectual entropy since the 1960s".
Confirming Cohen's appointment on Friday,
State Department spokesman Sean McCormack said,
"Eliot brings a lot to the table in terms of being
a counselor, being somebody who can be an
intellectual sounding board" for Rice.
Some analysts here, however, said they
thought the appointment was designed instead to
reduce or preempt criticism from neo-conservatives
and other hawks in and outside the administration
of US President George W Bush for the direction in
which Rice hopes to take US policy, particularly
in the Middle East. With no operational
responsibilities, the State Department counselor
can be used - or ignored - at the secretary's
discretion.
"Condi may feel she needs to
have a neo-con right next to her to protect her
flanks," said Chris Nelson, editor of the widely
read Washington insider newsletter The Nelson
Report. "And if she's really planning to put her
foot down on the Israelis, which [Washington] will
have to do if it wants to get a real process with
the Palestinians under way as part of a bigger
regional deal with the Saudis and Iranians, then a
guy like Cohen up there on the [State
Department's] seventh floor who is in on it and
can claim influence on the outcome can help."
Steven Clemons, director of the American
Strategy Program at the New America Foundation,
agreed: "Bringing on Cohen could help inoculate
her from criticism by the Cheney camp," Clemons
said in a reference to Vice President Richard
Cheney and the neo-conservatives and other hawks
who surround him. "One of the things that's been
consistent is that Rice never takes Cheney head-on
and is very careful not to take on people who
might antagonize him."
In that respect,
Cohen is a nearly ideal choice. Like Cheney, Cohen
was a founding member in 1997 of the Project for
the New American Century, whose positions on how
to prosecute the "war on terror" - including the
invasion of Iraq and cutting ties to the
Palestinian Authority (PA) under Yasser Arafat -
he has consistently endorsed.
Although
lacking regional expertise or policymaking
experience, Cohen has written prolifically in
recent years on US policy in the Middle East.
Cohen first gained national prominence
shortly after the terrorist attacks of September
11, 2001, when he published a Wall Street Journal
column titled "World War IV" - a moniker quickly
adopted by hardline neo-cons such as former
director of central intelligence and fellow DPB
member James Woolsey, former Commentary editor
Norman Podhoretz, and Center for Security Policy
president Frank Gaffney (on whose board Cohen also
sits) - to put Bush's "war on terror" in what he
considered to be the appropriate historical
context and to define its enemy as "militant
Islam".
After defeating the Taliban, Cohen
argued, Washington should not only "finish off"
Iraqi president Saddam Hussein, whom he
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