Page 2 of 2 Rice picks neo-con champion on
Iraq By Jim Lobe
accused of having "helped al-Qaeda", but
also seek to overthrow "the mullahs" in Iran whose
replacement by a "moderate or secular government
would be no less important a victory in this war
than the annihilation of [Osama] bin Laden".
In another Journal article in April 2002
when the second Palestinian intifada was at its
height, Cohen, who had just signed a PNAC letter
that called for severing ties to the PA and
asserted
that
"Israel's fight against terrorism is our fight",
argued that proposals to send an international
force that would separate Israeli forces from the
Palestinians were "not serious ... there are times
when well-intentioned measures can only make
matters worse", he warned.
Cohen has also
been quick to label critics of Israel and the
so-called "Israel lobby" in the US as
anti-Semites. "Sometimes the word
'neo-conservative' is used when what they really
would like to say is 'Jew'," he told a British
Broadcasting Corp interviewer in 2003 about
critics of neo-cons such as himself.
"Only
a reshuffling of the deck - through the
disappearance of Arafat, or an event, such as the
overthrow of Saddam Hussein, that profoundly
changes the mood in the Arab world - will make
something approaching truce, let alone peace,
possible," he argued in a favorite pre-Iraq-war
neo-conservative theme.
The following
summer, he achieved new fame when Bush was
photographed carrying Cohen's just-published book,
Supreme Command, which argued that the
greatest civilian wartime leaders, such as Abraham
Lincoln and Winston Churchill, had a far better
strategic sense than their generals. It was a
particularly timely message in the months that
preceded the Iraq war when a surprising number of
recently retired military brass here were voicing
strong reservations about the impending invasion.
Cohen also became a charter member of the
Committee for the Liberation of Iraq (CLI), an
administration-supported group that lobbied for
war in Iraq, largely on behalf of Ahmad Chalabi's
Iraqi National Congress (INC). Indeed, Cohen, like
his friend Wolfowitz, was in December 2001 already
arguing publicly for Washington to rely heavily on
the INC in any effort to overthrow Saddam.
After the invasion of Iraq, however, Cohen
became progressively more critical of the way in
which the subsequent occupation and
counterinsurgency were being carried out,
although, after a Pentagon-sponsored tour of Iraq
that featured interviews with top military
commanders there, including General George Casey,
in February 2006, he became briefly more
optimistic.
"After a wretched start, we
have the right people at the top and the right
policies in effect - and even more importantly,
the right philosophy behind it all," he wrote in
yet another Journal article titled "Will we
persevere?"
Just nine months later,
however, he had changed his mind. In the same
article in which he attacked the ISG, he described
US difficulties as stemming "not so much from
failures to find the right strategy as from an
astounding and depressing inability to implement
the strategic and operational choices we have
nominally made", an inability, for example, "as
personal as picking the wrong people for key
positions".
Still, while admitting in a
Vanity Fair interview late last year that US
choices in Iraq range between "bad and awful",
Cohen has called for perseverance and played a key
role in selling to Bush an AEI-hatched plan to add
some 30,000 troops to the 140,000 soldiers in Iraq
when he met with the president as part of a small
group of "surge"-boosters at the White House in
mid-December.
If the surge should fail,
however, Cohen's preferred and "most plausible"
option, which he laid out in an October Journal
column titled "Plan B", would be a coup d'etat
("which we quietly endorse") in Iraq that would
bring to power a "junta of military modernizers",
a development that, as he noted himself, would
call into question the Bush administration's and
Rice's avowed goal of democratization.
In
any event, he argued in the same column, "American
prestige has taken a hard knock [in Iraq]; it will
probably take a harder knock, and in ways that
will not be restored without a considerable and
successful use of American military power down the
road.
"The tides of Sunni Salafism and
Iran's distinct combination of messianism and
power politics have not crested, and will not
crest without much greater violence in which we
too will be engaged," he asserted.
In a
Vanity Fair interview last autumn, Cohen said,
"I'm pretty grim. I think we're heading for a very
dark world, because the long-term consequences of
this are very large, not just for Iraq, not just
for the region, but globally - for our reputation,
for what the Iranians do, all kinds of stuff."
If Rice's intent was to reassure Cheney
and the neo-conservatives that she is not a
captive of the ISG and the "Washington
establishment", that passage alone should do the
trick.
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