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Edited on Thu Sep-04-03 03:43 PM by Stephanie
<original link is archived>
http://www.commondreams.org/views03/0325-04.htm
The Wraps Come Off Bush's Colonialist Agenda
by Robert Scheer
excerpt:
The post-Hussein strategy, formed by a neoconservative clique close to the White House, is another indicator that this is in no way a war "to disarm Iraq." If disarmament were the central goal, the U.S.-British alliance would need to control Iraq for only months, not years. That would be enough time for its weapons inspectors to do what it said the United Nations could not accomplish.
Instead, unable to produce any real evidence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq before the invasion or since it began, the administration publicly shifted its rationale from disarmament to the "nation-building" that Bush properly derided during the 2000 election.
However, there is ample evidence that "regime change" and redrawing the map of the Mideast were the goals of the Bush administration's neoconservative core all along.
The Carnegie Endowment (www.ceip.org) last week published "Origins of Regime Change in Iraq," a thorough portrait of this "textbook case of how a small, organized group can determine policy in a large nation, even when the majority of officials and experts originally scorned their views."
Continued...
http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/features/2003/0304.marshall.html
Practice to Deceive
Chaos in the Middle East is not the Bush hawks' nightmare scenario--it's their plan.
April 2003
By Joshua Micah Marshall
<snip>In their view, invasion of Iraq was not merely, or even primarily, about getting rid of Saddam Hussein. Nor was it really about weapons of mass destruction, though their elimination was an important benefit. Rather, the administration sees the invasion as only the first move in a wider effort to reorder the power structure of the entire Middle East. Prior to the war, the president himself never quite said this openly. But hawkish neoconservatives within his administration gave strong hints. In February, Undersecretary of State John Bolton told Israeli officials that after defeating Iraq, the United States would "deal with" Iran, Syria, and North Korea. Meanwhile, neoconservative journalists have been channeling the administration's thinking. Late last month, The Weekly Standard's Jeffrey Bell reported that the administration has in mind a "world war between the United States and a political wing of Islamic fundamentalism ... a war of such reach and magnitude the invasion of Iraq, or the capture of top al Qaeda commanders, should be seen as tactical events in a series of moves and countermoves stretching well into the future."
<snip>
Whacking the Hornet's Nest
If the Bush administration has thought through these various negative scenarios--and we must presume, or at least pray, that it has--it certainly has not shared them with the American people. More to the point, the president has not even leveled with the public that such a clean-sweep approach to the Middle East is, in fact, their plan. This breaks new ground in the history of pre-war presidential deception. Franklin Roosevelt said he was trying to keep the United States out of World War II even as he--in some key ways--courted a confrontation with the Axis powers that he saw as both inevitable and necessary. History has judged him well for this. Far more brazenly, Lyndon Johnson's administration greatly exaggerated the Gulf of Tonkin incident to gin up support for full-throttle engagement in Vietnam. The war proved to be Johnson's undoing. When President Clinton used American troops to quell the fighting in Bosnia he said publicly that our troops would be there no longer than a year, even though it was widely understood that they would be there far longer. But in the case of these deceptions, the public was at least told what the goals of the wars were and whom and where we would be fighting.
Today, however, the great majority of the American people have no concept of what kind of conflict the president is leading them into. The White House has presented this as a war to depose Saddam Hussein in order to keep him from acquiring weapons of mass destruction--a goal that the majority of Americans support. But the White House really has in mind an enterprise of a scale, cost, and scope that would be almost impossible to sell to the American public. The White House knows that. So it hasn't even tried. Instead, it's focused on getting us into Iraq with the hope of setting off a sequence of events that will draw us inexorably towards the agenda they have in mind.
The brazenness of this approach would be hard to believe if it weren't entirely in line with how the administration has pursued so many of its other policy goals. Its preferred method has been to use deceit to create faits accomplis, facts on the ground that then make the administration's broader agenda almost impossible not to pursue. During and after the 2000 campaign, the president called for major education and prescription drug programs plus a huge tax cut, saying America could easily afford them all because of large budget surpluses. Critics said it wasn't true, and the growing budget deficits have proven them right. But the administration now uses the existence of big budget deficits as a way to put the squeeze on social programs--part of its plan all along. Strip away the presidential seal and the fancy titles, and it's just a straight-up con. </snip>
http://www.guardian.co.uk/elsewhere/journalist/story/0,7792,1029595,00.html
Get real
Driven by a neo-conservative dream, the US is loath to relinquish control in Iraq. But the price for Washington's stubbornness may be failure, writes Brian Whitaker
Tuesday August 26, 2003
Talk of impending failure in Iraq may sound like whinging when it comes from those who opposed the war, but last week the unspeakable seven-letter F-word was uttered by one of the bastions of US neo-conservative hawkery.
Under the headline "Do what it takes in Iraq", an editorial in the Weekly Standard called for a huge commitment of more troops, more money and more civilian workers to fend off disaster.
<snip>
The neo-conservative solution is to devote to Iraq whatever it takes and for as long as it takes, for a whole generation if necessary. The Weekly Standard wants an immediate allocation of $60bn (£38.4bn) for reconstruction. If the Bush administration is serious, "then this is the necessary down payment," it said, while the official Washington line has been that reconstruction will be funded by Iraq's (still largely non-existent) oil revenue.
Only total commitment on a scale not seen since the end of the second world war can ensure US success in Iraq, the Weekly Standard insisted, but the problem for George Bush is that he can't give that commitment, at least not if he values his presidency.
Many US voters don't share the neo-conservatives' obsession with redesigning the Middle East with Texas as a model, and they can quite reasonably ask what they are getting for their money. For the $100bn or so spent on the invasion, they have seen the welcome departure of Saddam Hussein, but that was supposed to be the grand finale of the war, not the overture. Instead, they are stuck with an open-ended military occupation costing $4bn a month and which could drag on for years.<more>
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