WASHINGTON - A newly-formed and still obscure neo-conservative foreign policy
organization is giving some observers flashbacks to the 1990s, when its
predecessor staked out the aggressively unilateralist foreign policy that came
to fruition under the George W Bush administration.
The blandly-named Foreign Policy Initiative (FPI) - the brainchild of Weekly
Standard editor William Kristol, neo-conservative foreign policy guru Robert
Kagan, and former Bush administration official Dan Senor - has thus far kept a
low profile; its only activity to this point has been to sponsor a conference
pushing for a US "surge" in Afghanistan.
But some see FPI as a likely successor to Kristol and Kagan's previous
organization, the now-defunct Project for the New American Century (PNAC),
which they launched in 1997 and
became best known for leading the public campaign to oust former Iraqi
president Saddam Hussein both before and after the September 11, 2001 attacks.
PNAC's charter members included many figures who later held top positions under
Bush, including vice president Dick Cheney, secretary of defense Donald
Rumsfeld and his top deputy Paul Wolfowitz.
FPI was founded earlier this year, but few details are available about the
group, which has so far attracted no media attention. The organization's
website lists Kagan, Kristol and Senor, who came to prominence as a spokesman
for the occupation authorities in Iraq, as the three members of its board of
directors.
Two of FPI's three staffers, policy director Jamie Fly and Christian Whiton,
have come directly from foreign policy posts in the Bush administration, while
the third, Rachel Hoff, last worked for the National Republican Congressional
Committee. Contacted by Inter Press Service at the group's office, Fly referred
all questions to Senor, who did not return the call.
The organization's mission statement argues that the "United States remains the
world's indispensable nation" and warns that "strategic overreach is not the
problem and retrenchment is not the solution" to Washington's current financial
and strategic woes. It calls for "continued engagement - diplomatic, economic
and military - in the world and rejection of policies that would lead us down
the path to isolationism”.
The mission statement opens by listing a familiar litany of threats to the US,
including "rogue states", "failed states", "autocracies" and "terrorism", but
gives pride of place to the "challenges" posed by "rising and resurgent
powers", of which only China and Russia are named.
Their prominence may reflect the influence of Kagan, who has argued in recent
years that the 21st century will be dominated by a struggle between the forces
of democracy (led by the US) and autocracy (led by China and Russia). He has
called for a League of Democracies as a mechanism for combating Chinese and
Russian power, and the FPI statement stresses the need for "robust support for
America's democratic allies".
This emphasis may also indicate that FPI intends to make confrontation with
China and Russia the centerpiece of its foreign policy stance. If this is the
case, it would mark a return to the early days of the Bush administration,
before 9/11, when Kristol's Weekly Standard took the lead in attacking
Washington for its alleged "appeasement" of Beijing.
For its formal coming out, however, FPI has chosen to push for escalating the
US military effort in Afghanistan. The organization's first event, to be held
in Washington on March 31, will be a conference entitled "Afghanistan: Planning
for Success".
The lead speaker will be Senator John McCain, the 2008 Republican presidential
candidate and long a favorite of both Kagan and Kristol. In February, McCain
gave a well-publicized speech at the neo-conservative American Enterprise
Institute (AEI) arguing that the US could not afford to scale back its military
commitment in Afghanistan and calling for a redoubled effort to win the war.
Other speakers will include AEI fellow Frederick Kagan, Robert's brother and
one of the key proponents of the "surge" strategy in Iraq, counterinsurgency
expert Lieutenant Colonel John Nagl, the new director of the Center for a New
American Security, and hawkish Democratic Representative Jane Harman.
FPI has inevitably drawn comparisons to PNAC, a "letterhead organization"
founded by Kristol and Kagan shortly after their publication in Foreign Affairs
of an article entitled "Toward a Neo-Reaganite Foreign Policy" which called for
Washington to exercise "benevolent global hegemony" and warned against what
they saw as the post-Cold War drift of the Republican Party toward
"neo-isolationism" after it lost the White House to Bill Clinton.
"This reminds me of the Project for the New American Century," said Steven
Clemons, director of the American Strategy Program at the New America
Foundation. "Like PNAC, it will become a watering hole for those who want to
see an ever-larger US military machine and who divide the world between those
who side with right and might and those who are evil or who would appease
evil."
PNAC's membership was a veritable who's-who of neo-conservatives and other
future Bush administration hawks. In addition to Cheney, Rumsfeld and
Wolfowitz, charter members included then-Florida governor Jeb Bush, who was at
the time considered a more likely presidential candidate than his elder
brother; Cheney's chief of staff, I Lewis "Scooter" Libby, who left the
administration after being indicted for perjury in October 2005; and Elliott
Abrams, who became Bush's top Middle East aide at the National Security
Council; among several others who later served in senior Bush administration
posts.
The group's June 1997 statement of principles called for "a Reaganite policy of
military strength and moral clarity" that entailed "increas[ing] defense
spending significantly" and "challeng[ing] regimes hostile to our interests and
values".
In January 1998, PNAC published an open letter to president Clinton calling for
"the removal of Saddam Hussein's regime from power", by military force if
necessary. The letter was signed by many who would become architects and
backers of the 2003 invasion of Iraq, including Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Abrams,
future deputy secretary of state Richard Armitage, and future UN ambassador
John Bolton.
In September 2001, only days after the 9/11 attacks, another PNAC letter called
on president Bush to broaden the scope of the "war on terror" beyond those
immediately responsible for the attacks to include Iraq and Lebanon's
Hezbollah.
And in April 2002, the group labeled Yasser Arafat and the Palestinian
Authority (PA) "a cog in the machine of Middle East terrorism", compared Arafat
to al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden and called on the US to end support for both
the PA and the Israeli-Palestinian peace negotiations as a whole.
"Israel's fight against terrorism is our fight," it said, urging Bush to
"accelerate plans for removing Saddam Hussein from power."
That FPI's debut public event should focus on why Washington should escalate
its involvement in Afghanistan is ironic given the role played by PNAC and
other hawks in and outside the administration in pushing for the invasion of
Iraq so soon after the US campaign to oust the Taliban and al-Qaeda in
Afghanistan in late 2001. Many experts believe the diversion of military and
intelligence resources to Iraq made it possible for both the Taliban and
al-Qaeda's leadership to survive and rebuild.
The top priority given by the Bush administration - again, with the strong
encouragement of PNAC and its supporters - to Iraq as the "central front in the
war on terror" also meant that aid needed to bolster the Western-backed
government of President Hamid Karzai was unavailable.
PNAC effectively ceased its activities at the beginning of Bush's second term.
This may partly have been due to the large amount of bad publicity the group
attracted for its seminal role in bringing about the Iraq war.
But the formation of FPI may be a sign that its founders hope once again to
incubate a more aggressive foreign policy during their exile from the White
House, in preparation for the next time they return to political power.
Jim Lobe's blog on US foreign policy can be read at http://www.ips.org/blog/jimlobe/.
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