Truly Heinous Deeds
by Molly Ivins

In our continuing quest to understand how we got where we are, let us turn our attention to Ahmed Chalabi. He's a most plausible con man and comes with excellent credentials. Born to a prominent Iraqi family in 1944, exiled in 1958 with buckets of family money, went to MIT at age 16, got his Ph.D. in math from the University of Chicago, where he first encountered one of the founders of the neo-conservative movement, Albert Wohlstetter. According to a profile in Salon.com, he there met future neo-con leaders Richard Perle and Paul Wolfowitz.

Salon reports, he is "charming, worldly and a skilled networker." (Someone needs to look into whether Chalabi studied with Leo Strauss, the neo-con guru at Chicago who reportedly had profoundly anti-democratic instincts, including the idea that it's fine for governments to lie to their people. That is second-hand information: I have not read Strauss myself.)[It turns out that Chalabi did].

What follows is a complicated business-financial history, leading to the founding of the Petra Bank in Jordan in 1977. Chalabi had ties both to the Shia theocracy in Iran and the Shia Amal militia in Lebanon. He also helped finance Saddam Hussein's trade with Jordan during the 1980s, according to Salon. By 1986, Petra had $1 billion in annual trade with Iraq. The bank collapsed, and Chalabi was convicted of embezzlement and fraud. He fled Jordan for London.

As head of the Iraqi National Congress, funded by the United States, Chalabi continued to push for the overthrow of Saddam. The United States is still paying him and his organization $350,000 a month. His association with neo-con hawks continued, even though both the CIA and the State Department concluded he was untrustworthy. The "intelligence" he provided to the Bush administration before the war consistently proved wrong and fraudulent.

So why did the neo-cons trust him, despite his record? My theory is there is a terrible naivete about neo-cons that often deludes them into believing what they want to be true. Remember the time they convinced themselves Jonas Savimbi of Angola was a great freedom fighter? For anyone who knew Savimbi's record, it was "gag me with a spoon" city, but they kept insisting this disgusting human was a hero.

Other neo-cons so hated the Sandinistas in Nicaragua they backed drug-runners and creeps of all description against them. (Fat lot of good it did the Nicaraguans, who now have the worst health record in the hemisphere -- worse than Haiti.)

The neo-cons fell for Chalabi for one reason: He said he would help Israel. Once Saddam was overthrown, he said he would reinstate the Iraq-Israel pipeline, recognize Israel, trade with Israel.

Chalabi, with our backing, became a member of the current Iraqi Governing Council. He has also made his nephews into power players in postwar Iraq. Gone are the promises about Israel. Whether justified or not, most Iraqis believe Chalabi corrupt beyond counting. Even some of the neo-cons who have so long discounted the CIA and State Department reports about Chalabi's essential dishonesty, are starting to doubt him. Could this entire disaster in Iraq be as simple as, "We wuz conned.Yep.

http://www.funnytimes.com/notfunny/20040506MI.html

The Neocons in Power
By Elizabeth Drew
The Freedom of Information Center
Volume 50, Number 10 , June 12, 2003
http://foi.missouri.edu/evolvingissues/neoconsinpower.html

1. The conflict within the Bush administration in recent months over policy for postwar Iraq has caused much confusion and has already damaged the reconstruction effort. The stakes are enormous not just for the US and for the people of Iraq, but for the entire Middle East, and the rest of the world. Almost from the outset of the Bush administration there have been battles between the State Department and the Defense Department, but the controversy over postwar Iraq has brought out bitterness and knife-wielding of a sort that Washington has seldom seen.

To some extent, the tension between the two departments is inherent because of their different missions. This conflict spills over into the White House and the think tanks and the offices of various consultants around town. It is really a conflict between the neoconservatives, who are largely responsible for getting us into the war against Iraq, and those they disparagingly call the "realists," who tend to be more cautious about the United States' efforts to remake the Middle East into a democratic region.


The word "neoconservative" originally referred to former liberals and leftists who were dismayed by the countercultural movements of the 1960s and the Great Society, and adopted conservative views, for example, against government welfare programs, and in favor of interventionist foreign policies. A group of today's "neocons" now hold key positions in the Pentagon and in the White House and they even have a mole in the State Department.

The most important activists are Richard Perle, who until recently headed the Defense Policy Board (he's still a member), a once-obscure committee, ostensibly just an advisory group but now in fact a powerful instrument for pushing neocon policies; James Woolsey, who has served two Democratic and two Republican administrations, was CIA director during the Clinton administration, and now works for the management consult-ing firm Booz Allen Hamilton; Kenneth Adelman, a former official in the Ford and Reagan administrations who trains executives by using Shakespeare's plays as a guide to the use of power (www.moversandshakespeares .com); Paul Wolfowitz, the deputy secretary of defense and the principal advocate of the Iraq policy followed by the administration; Douglas Feith, the undersecretary of defense for policy, the Pentagon official in charge of the reconstruction of Iraq; and I. Lewis ("Scooter") Libby, Vice President Cheney's chief of staff. Two principal allies of this core group are John Bolton, undersecretary of state for arms control (though he opposes arms control) and international security affairs, and Stephen Hadley, the deputy national security adviser. Cheney himself and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld can be counted as subscribing to the neocons' views about Iraq.

A web of connections binds these people in a formidable alliance. Perle, Wolfowitz, and Woolsey have long been close friends and neighbors in Chevy Chase, Maryland. The three have worked with one another in the Pentagon, served on the same committees and commissions, and participated in the same conferences. Feith is a protege of Perle, and worked under him during the Reagan administration. Adelman, a friend of Perle, Wolfowitz, and Woolsey, is very close to Cheney and Rumsfeld. The Cheneys and the Adelmans share a wedding anniversary and celebrate it together each year; Adelman worked for Rumsfeld in three government positions, and the Adelmans have visited the Rumsfelds at their various homes around the country. Woolsey and Adelman are members of Perle's Pentagon advisory group. At the outset of this administration Perle made sure that it was composed of people who share his hawkish views. (Perle recently resigned the chairmanship over allegations of conflicts of interest with his private consulting business, but he remains a member of the advisory board, and his power isn't diminished.) Bolton, over the objections of Colin Powell, was appointed to the State Department at the urging of his neocon allies. (A State Department official said to me recently, referring to the Pentagon, "Why don't we have a mole over there?")

Perle, Woolsey, and Wolfowitz are all disciples of the late Albert Wohlstetter, a University of Chicago professor who had worked for the RAND corporation and later taught at the University of California. Throughout the cold war he argued that nuclear deterrence wasn't sufficient, that the US had to actually plan to fight a nuclear war in order to deter it. He strongly advocated the view that the military power of the USSR was underrated. Wolfowitz earned his Ph.D. under Wohlstetter; Perle met Wohlstetter when he was a high school student in Los Angeles and was invited by Wohlstetter's daughter to swim in their pool. Later, Wohlstetter invited Perle, then a graduate student at Princeton, to Washington to work with Wolfowitz on a paper about the proposed Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, which Wohlstetter opposed and which has been abandoned by the Bush administration. Wohlstetter introduced Perle to Democratic Senator Henry ("Scoop") Jackson of Washington, an aggressive cold warrior and champion of Israel's interests. Woolsey (who calls himself "a Scoop Jackson Democrat") came to know Wohlstetter in 1980, when they both served on a Pentagon panel. Of Wohlstetter Woolsey said in a conversation we had in mid-April, "A key to understanding how Richard and Paul and I think is Albert. He's had a major impact on us."

And through Wohlstetter, Perle met Ahmed Chalabi, then an Iraqi exile who had founded the Iraqi National Congress, an umbrella organization of Iraqi groups, many of its members in exile.

Perle's career has been an astonishing one. Though he has held only one government position, that of an assistant secretary of defense during the Reagan administration, he has had tremendous influence over the administration's Iraq policy. He openly advocated the overthrow of the Saddam Hussein regime shortly after he left the Pentagon in 1987. In the 1970s, while working on Jackson's Senate staff, he opposed dtente, helped to stop ratification of the SALT II arms control agreement, and aided Jackson in getting through Congress the Jackson-Vanik law, which cut off trade with the Soviet Union if it continued to bar the emigration of Jews.

During the Reagan administration, when he was assistant secretary of defense for policy, Perle became famous for opposing arms control agreements and acquired the nickname "The Prince of Darkness." Working with a small group of journalists who circulate his views, he's been known to savage someone he opposes on a big issue. He makes his influence felt through frequent television appearances, through his network of allies in the bureaucracy, and through his strategy of staking out an extreme posi-tion and trying to make the ground shift in his direction, which it often has. He is a strong advocate of the views of right-wing Israeli leaders, and serves on the board of the company that owns the pro-Likud Jerusalem Post. When he's not working with his clients, who include defense contractors, he is a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank. From this position Perle invites people to an annual conference in Beaver Creek, Colorado, cosponsored by AEI and former president Gerald Ford, and he has several times invited Ahmed Chalabi as his guest there. At the conferences, Chalabi was able to meet Cheney, Rumsfeld, and Wolfowitz.

Chalabi fled Iraq when he was thirteen, along with other members of his wealthy and prominent Shiite family, after the military coup in 1958 that overthrew the British-installed monarchy. He studied in America, earning an undergraduate degree in mathematics at MIT, and then a doctorate, also in mathematics, at the University of Chicago (where he met Wohlstetter) , and then went into banking. He has been tried and convicted, in absentia, in Jordan on charges of fraud and embezzlement over the collapse of the Petra Bank, which he founded and ran. (Chalabi has said that the bank's collapse was the result of a plot by Saddam Hussein's government.[*]) After founding the Iraqi National Congress in 1992, he received CIA funds. In 1995, working from Kurdish territory in northern Iraq, he promoted a coup against Saddam Hussein, but his plan fizzled. Even one of his current allies says he "may have overstated" the degree of support his attempted coup would receive from disaffected members of the Iraqi military.

Chalabi claimed at the time that the CIA supported him, but Anthony Lake, then Clinton's national security adviser, denies this. "Fearing another Bay of Pigs," he told me, "everyone agreed that we needed to be crystal clear with Chalabi. The United States had already betrayed the Kurds twice, and we didn't want to see it happen again by our encouraging such a dubious operation. So I personally sent him a message that we didn't support him." A current senior administration official says that Saddam's government knew in advance about Chalabi's plan, and had penetrated it.

Back in Washington, where he spent a great deal of time, Chalabi impressed various members of Congress, among them John McCain and Joseph Lieberman, and was the moving force behind the passage in 1998 of the Iraq Liberation Act, which called for the overthrow of the Saddam regime and directed that the State Department grant $97 million to the INC. But before long the department, suspicious that the organization had misallocated funds, ordered an audit, announced "accounting irregularities," and held up further contributions�to the everlasting fury of Perle and other neocons. When the Bush administration came in, the Pentagon began funding the INC.

Chalabi's role in postwar Iraq has become one of the most contentious issues within the Bush administration. The State Department considers him "damaged goods," and someone who has been out of touch with Iraq for too long. The neocons admire him as a man of strong intelligence and a courageous fighter for the overthrow of Saddam and for democracy in Iraq; they see him as the perfect person to lead postwar Iraq. After the start of the war, without informing the State Department, the Pentagon flew Chalabi and his paramilitary forces, which the American military had trained in Hungary, back into Iraq. Their intention was to give him a strong head start toward becoming the leader of the new Iraqi government. But the State Department objected to the US installing Iraq's new leader, and Colin Powell argued strenuously in National Security Council meetings that the United States should not impose a new ruler on Iraq, a position that the President adopted during discussions in February with his national security advisers: Cheney, Condoleezza Rice, Rumsfeld, Powell, and George Tenet of the CIA. The official position of the US government became that the Iraqi people should decide the future of Iraq and that the future leaders should be drawn from Iraqis who had been both inside and outside the country during the Saddam regime. But there's a question of how many anti-Baathist leaders could survive in Iraq during Saddam's reign. The neocons argue that no one comparable to Konrad Adenauer or Vclav Havel is likely to be found inside Iraq.

Despite the President's position, Chalabi's friends in Washington continue to back him strongly. A senior member of the administration says, "Their whole approach to life seems to be to get Mr. Chalabi in a position of authority." A well-informed official told me recently that in National Security Council meetings, "Nobody would argue against the point that there had to be insiders and outsiders. Some people in the administration wouldn't argue against that point but wouldn't accept it." This person said that Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz, along with their like-minded outsiders, took the position that "we're going to fight this war and we're going to install Chalabi."

=The British government takes a skeptical view of Chalabi, who spent several of his exile years in London, and has so informed the Bush administration. Even those outside the neocons' circle who think well of Chalabi agree that it's been a major mistake for Chalabi's US supporters to make it so apparent that he's their man in Iraq. US forces are now providing protection for Chalabi in Baghdad.

Perle says of Chalabi, "He's an exceptional person, brilliant, with the disciplined mind of a mathematician. He's someone you want to talk to� deeply knowledgeable of the region, its history and culture." He adds, "One of the sources of opposition to Chalabi is the dictators of the countries around Iraq and the reason is obvious: he's going to fight for democracy and other peoples will want it." Woolsey said, "The State Department bureaucracy tilts pro-Saudi and anti-Chalabi. The key thing about Ahmed is not that he's a banker, not that he wears $2,000 suits, not that he's been in and out of Iraq since he was a teenager. I think that the key problem is that he's Shiite: the State bureaucracy has been used to Sunni powers in Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Iraq, pretty much everywhere in the Middle East." (Sixty percent of the Iraqi people are Shiite but there are as yet no signs that the secular Chalabi has the support of Shiite religious leaders in Iraq.) Woolsey added, "The State Department bureaucracy likes to get along with clients and the CIA likes to control things and Chalabi isn't controllable, he has his own views."

When we talked in April Kenneth Adelman told me, "The starting point is that conservatives now are for radical change and the progressives�the establishment foreign policy makers' are for the status quo." He added, "Conservatives believe that the status quo in the Middle East is pretty bad, and the old conservative belief that stability is good doesn't apply to the Middle East. The status quo in the Middle East has been breeding terrorists."

2. In January, the President signed a secret National Security Policy Directive, giving the Defense Department the authority to manage postwar policy in Iraq, and directing other agencies to coordinate with Defense. But this didn't settle things: conflict between the Defense Department and the State Department continued. The State Department submitted a list of people to serve in the reconstruction and the Defense Department rejected some of them without informing State.

The appointment of retired general James Garner to run the reconstruction effort in Iraq was controversial from the outset. Garner was a friend of Rumsfeld from the days when they served together in 1998 on a commission that strongly advocated missile defense. After the first Gulf War Garner was much praised in northern Iraq for his management of Operation Provide Comfort, a program of aid for Kurdish refugees. The Bush I administration had urged the Kurds in northern Iraq, as well as the Shiites in southern Iraq, to rise against the Saddam regime, but then abandoned them. Garner, the president of a company that supplies missile parts, had advised Israel on the use of the Patriot missile during the Gulf War. More recently he was one of forty-four retired military officers who signed a document praising the "remarkable restraint" of Israel's defense forces "in the face of lethal violence orchestrated by" the PLO. Garner's support of Israel's government has been widely noted in the Arab press; the American conservative Jewish publication Forward in late March proudly published a piece headlined "Pro-Israel General Will Oversee Reconstruction of Postwar Iraq."

Before the war ended, Garner and a staff of a few hundred people installed themselves in a row of beachfront villas in Kuwait, and, in the deepest secrecy, made plans for the postwar period. After they got to Baghdad, they remained largely inaccessible in a grand palace, trapped by the insecure surroundings which they hadn't adequately planned for.

Then, in early May, came word that a civilian, Paul Bremer, a former State Department official in charge of counterterrorism and former manager of Henry Kissinger's consulting firm, would be installed as head of the reconstruction effort over Garner. The administration had become aware, belatedly, that it wasn't brilliant public relations to have a military man in charge of the reconstruction effort and that it was running into serious difficulties. US officials had failed to anticipate the degree of chaos that followed the war: they didn't have an adequate plan, didn't protect hospitals and other public buildings from looters, or citizens from violent crime, and by early May still hadn't restored many basic services. The leaders of long-repressed Shiite Muslims were taking charge of some neighborhoods and calling for a theocratic state. Iraqis were agitating for the US to leave. The State Department had argued from the outset that a civilian should run the reconstruction efforts, and the British government, among others, had complained to the Bush administration about the appointment of a military man.

Rumsfeld, I was told, suggested the appointment of Bremer, who is close to the neocons, and State Department officials were pleased with the idea because they considered Bremer, a former foreign service officer, to be one of them. Thus, Bremer's appointment was a rarity: State and Defense were both enthusiastic, while Garner was highly displeased and is to leave Iraq soon, along with some of the officials who were found lacking in skills needed for the postwar administration. But Robert Oakley, a former ambassador to Pakistan and Zaire, a special envoy to Somalia for two presidents, a former head of the counterterrorism program (he was succeeded by Bremer), and now a visiting fellow at the National Defense University, said to me after the shake-up, "I don't think it matters who's leaving and who's taking their place. It's too late. In large part events are developing out there in ways that may now be beyond our control."

Perle confirmed to me what others had told me, that he has been the leader of the pro-Chalabi group. "It may have been because I knew him longer and introduced him to others," he said. He has known Chalabi for twelve years. It was Chalabi who encouraged the US planners of the war to believe that the Shiites in the south would welcome the US forces as liberators (despite the fact that the US had betrayed them in 1991), that the Iraqi army would lack the will to fight, and that there would be substantial defections by the Republican Guard. This advice led Cheney to say on Meet the Press, "I really do believe that we will be greeted as liberators.... I think the regular army will not [fight, and that] significant elements of the Republican Guard are likely as well to want to avoid conflict"; and it led Kenneth Adelman to predict that defeating Saddam Hussein's regime would be a "cakewalk." The overconfidence of US officials was the result not only of Chalabi's "information" but also of their and Chalabi's eagerness to sell the war. Perle concedes having underestimated the role of the Fedayeen Saddam, a paramilitary force set up by Saddam's son Uday after the Gulf War. "What we didn't expect," Perle said, "was that the Fedayeen Saddam got moved south, by the busload", thus causing the taking of some southern towns to be more difficult than expected. Perle and Chalabi had argued that between 40,000 and 80,000 American soldiers would suffice, that if a small number of troops were sent in they could be augmented by forces recruited by the INC, and that large parts of the Iraqi military would quickly join them. As Rumsfeld began planning for an invasion, he ordered, as one option, a study for a war strategy using 80,000 troops. He was eager to prove his point that the military, in particular the Army, could be slimmed down, that many of its previous roles in combat could be performed by sophisticated new weapons and by Special Operations forces.

In holding down the number of US forces to fight in Iraq to approximately 230,000 to 250,000, roughly half the number of troops that were sent to fight in the Gulf War, and belatedly redirecting the troops that had been supposed to be sent through Turkey (they didn't arrive until after the fighting had ceased), Rumsfeld took some big chances. Among other consequences, there weren't enough troops to deal with the chaos in Baghdad after it fell to the allies. Some military experts also argue that supply lines were unnecessarily endangered, and that lives were unnecessarily lost. Retired General Wesley Clark said on CNN, "We took the risk and it worked out.... But I'm still of the school that would say, don't take risks if you don't have to take the risk." Rumsfeld has tried to have it both ways. In a single press briefing, he insisted both that there were adequate troops and that the Baghdad Museum couldn't be protected (though the Oil Ministry was) because "when some of that looting was going on, people were being killed, people were being wounded."

Rumsfeld's determination to hold down the number of troops in Iraq carried over from the war to the postwar period. Earlier this year, General Eric Shinseki, the Army Chief of Staff, testified to Congress that at least 200,000 troops would be needed after the fighting ended. Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz, loath to have the public think that waging war in Iraq would impose a long-term burden on the US, were angered by Shinseki's testimony, which the next day Wolfowitz called "wildly off the mark." So then they were stuck with staying below 200,000 troops in Iraq. Rumsfeld rejected requests to have a sizable number of military police ready to impose order and protect facilities when the fighting ended. As of May 12, there were roughly 150,000 US troops inside Iraq, with many more in the region. Of late, officials have privately admitted that they underestimated the degree of lawlessness and looting that would follow the fighting , but this kind of activity has had many precedents in postwar situations.

Like Perle, Wolfowitz had favored bringing down the Saddam regime since before the Bush administration took office, and in meetings of the President's national security advisers just after September 11, Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz put forward their view that Saddam's regime should be eliminated. Iraq was a terrorist state, they argued, and should be made a target of the "war on terrorism." Kenneth Adelman says, "At the beginning of the administration people were talking about Iraq but it wasn't doable. There was no heft. That changed with September 11 because then people were willing to confront the reality of an international terrorist network, and terrorist states such as Iraq. The terrorist states are even worse than terrorist networks because they have so many more resources at their disposal,they have money, they have weapons, and they can send contraband material in diplomatic pouches."

Iraq's supposed ties to al-Qaeda have still not been proved; but Bush apparently became convinced that they existed. (Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz, unhappy that the CIA and the Penta-gon's own Defense Intelligence Agency weren't confirming their charges about Iraq's ties to terrorist groups, set up their own intelligence group, one more likely to tell them what they wanted to hear.) By repeating the charge that Iraq was linked with international terrorism, the President and other officials succeeded in convincing nearly half the US public before the war that Iraq was involved in the attack on the World Trade Center. Several sources told me that if Cheney and his neocon allies had had their way, the war with Iraq would have begun in the fall of 2002; they attribute the delay to Powell's success in convincing Bush to take his case to the UN and send weapons inspectors to Iraq.

Not long after September 11, high US military officials were told by members of the Bush administration that the regimes of six other countries besides Iraq would eventually have to be removed because they harbored terrorist groups: Syria, Iran, Lebanon, Somalia, Sudan, and Libya. The administration had declared a "war on terrorism," but, unsure how to fight it, adopted the strategy of "draining the swamps" in which it was said to breed. In announcing on May 1 the end of "major combat" in Iraq, Bush called that war "one victory in a war on terror that began on September 11, 2001, and still goes on."

The neocons' assurance that the United States could not only remove Saddam Hussein but also convert Iraq and the rest of the Middle East into democratic nations relies on several false analogies. Wolfowitz, his neo-con allies, and the journalists who circulate their ideas often cite Germany and Japan after the Second World War as examples of countries that were transformed into democracies. But unlike Iraq, Japan had a largely homogeneous culture and a symbol of national unity, the Emperor, who kept his title if not his power. Japan, in any case, has had essentially one-party rule since the end of the war. And Germany, which also had a cohesive society, had a democratic constitution and parliamentary institutions until Hitler was barely elected chancellor in 1933. Moreover, the US occupied Japan for seven years and Germany for four. Rumsfeld has said that no time limit can be set on the US occupation of Iraq, but US officials are aware that the longer it goes on the greater will be the danger to US troops there,and perhaps domestic pressures to bring them home. (The neocons,as well as officials of previous administrations and some academics , also assert that democracies don't make war on each other, but this is a highly debated proposition.)

<Because some, but certainly not all , of the neoconservatives are Jewish and virtually all are strong supporters of the Likud Party's policies, the accusation has been made that their aim to "democratize" the region is driven by their desire to surround Israel with more sympathetic neighbors. Such a view would explain the otherwise puzzling statements by Wolfowitz and others before the war that "the road to peace in the Middle East goes through Baghdad." But it is also the case that Bush and his chief political adviser Karl Rove are eager both to win more of the Jewish vote in 2004 than Bush did in 2000 and to maintain the support of the Christian right, whose members are also strong supporters of Israel. The neoconservatives are powerful because they are cohesive, determined, ideologically driven, and clever (even if their judgment can be questionable), and some high administration officials, including the vice-president, are sympathetic to them. (Rove is known to have bought the road-through-Baghdad argument, which gave them a powerful boost.)

But the neocons don't win all the time. In the argument over how involved the UN should be in postwar Iraq, the State Department and Tony Blair favored a fairly large role whereas the Defense Department preferred virtually none at all. The President came down somewhere near the middle, saying that the UN should have a "vital" role. On May 9, the US circulated a draft resolution providing for a United Nations "special coordinator" who would work with the US on humanitarian activities and help US administrators in setting up political and civic institutions. Colin Powell is skilled in bureaucratic infighting, yet when the White House makes a decision that favors Powell, the ideologues on the right don't take this as final: they keep pushing. Powell's general inclination, after he has fought for a position, is to support his commander in chief, as he did on going to war in Iraq. A diplomatic source has called Powell "The Unsackable," because of his national popularity rating (higher than Bush's) and his international standing.

Rumsfeld was reported to be in trouble before September 11 for having alienated almost everyone,Congress, the military, defense contractors (who are big campaign contributors to the Republicans), and his ideas for restructuring the military were going nowhere. He has been riding high since the war. On the Sunday after Baghdad fell, The Washington Post and The New York Times ran front-page stories saying that Rumsfeld was now in a commanding position within the government. This was no accident. The stories were apparently encouraged by Rumsfeld's people. Rumsfeld and his associates saw the victory in Iraq as providing leverage for his struggles with other agencies and support for his program to change the military. So now Rumsfeld is "unsackable," too. As a result, as long as Powell and Rumsfeld choose to remain in place, the conflicts between the two departments, unprecedented in their intensity and openness, will go on.

Bush, who can by several accounts be snappish and harsh with his staff, even his highest-placed advisers (and has a fearsome temper), hates leaks and tolerates no open disagreement among advisers in other matters. He has fired some members of his administration for raising questions about his policies, in particular his economic program; yet he tolerates open conflict among his national security team. Some people argue that Condoleezza Rice should foster greater cooperation, but a former high State Department official says, "You can't coordinate people who refuse to be coordi- nated." The President himself seems unable or unwilling to impose order. People familiar with how Rumsfeld operates say that he cows people, makes them ill at ease in his presence; a former Republican official calls him "unsettling." Powell, for his part, raised questions about the planning for the war in meetings of the national security advisers, but said nothing publicly about his doubts. He has told people, "I'm no longer a soldier. I'm not going to manage defense policy." Rumsfeld has no corresponding reluctance about foreign affairs. In his virtually daily televised briefings, unprecedented for a cabinet officer, on which he clearly thrives, he has unhesitatingly insulted other countries, France and Germany among them.

The problems in a postwar Iraq were always going to be difficult, but they have been made worse as a result of several factors: the administration's zeal, particularly on the part of the neocons and their allies, to remove Saddam Hussein from power while failing to plan for the peace; Bush's pretense that he hadn't decided to go to war long after he apparently had in fact decided to; the administration's relative lack of interest in peacekeeping and belief that such efforts are politically unpopular (a carryover from the 2000 campaign that is also proving destructive in Afghanistan); and Rumsfeld's determination to hold down the number of troops in Iraq after the war, at whatever cost.

Senator Richard Lugar, the Republican chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, has publicly complained that the planning for the aftermath of the war "started very late.... A gap has occurred, and that has brought some considerable suffering." Bush, whose presidency has been audacious and even radical, is now embarked on his riskiest gamble so far.

May 14, 2003
Notes[*]According to the London Guardian of April 14, "Reports compiled...by investigators in London and Jordan, including investigations by the accountants Arthur Andersen, describe how millions of dollars of depositors' money [in the Petra Bank] was transferred to other parts of the Chalabi family empire in Switzerland, Lebanon and London, and not repaid."

The Bloody "Realism" of Jeane Kirkpatrick
Mid-Wife of the Neocons
Counterpunch.org
By GREG GRANDIN
December 9 / 10, 2006

Jeane Kirkpatrick, Ronald Reagan's envoy to the UN, died yesterday at 80. She picked a graceful moment to exit, the day after the Iraqi Study Group announced its recommendations, signaling, we are told, the return of realist reason to the Republican Party. In the coming days, expect eulogies that will compare Kirkpatrick's diplomatic philosophy favorably to the neocon delusion that convinced Bush to believe he could lead a global crusade to "rid the world of evil." Kirkpatrick did after all lambaste Democrats in the early 1980s for believing the US could be "world's mid-wife" to democracy. "No idea," she complained, "holds greater sway in the mind of educated Americans than the belief that it is possible to democratize governments, anytime, anywhere, under any circumstances." But don't believe the hype, for the righteousness that underwrote Kirkpatrick-style realism easily bleeds into the kind of blinkered moralism that so excites the neocons.

Bush's ongoing commitment to Woodrow-Wilson style idealism has baffled many observers, seeming to stand at odds to the Republican tradition of diplomatic realpolitik, particularly to the kind of realism advanced by Kirkpatrick and other top officials in Ronald Reagan's White House as late as the 1980s. But the realism that powered the rise of the New Right, which brought Reagan to power, was of a particular variety, deeply ideological and committed to a fulfillment of American purpose in the world. With the Cold War raging however there were few places in the world where such a robust view of American military and moral power could be applied. But there was Central America, where US-funded and trained anti-communist mercenaries in Nicaraguan and death-squad states in El Salvador and Guatemala slaughtered 300,000 civilians and tortured of hundreds of thousands more. Kirkpatrick has quite a bit of blood on her hands (as do a lesser group of civilian militarists, many of them Kirkpatrick acolytes like John Bolton, Otto Reich, and Robert Kagan who we will undoubtedly hear testifying over the next couple of weeks about her wisdom and foresight), having justified this carnage in the name of national security.

Yet more than just helping to turn Central America into a graveyard, Kirkpatrick used the region's conflicts as a form of collective therapy to work through the crisis of self-confidence provoked by Vietnam and Watergate. It was Kirkpatrick who provided the moral and intellectual framework to rationalize Reagan's Central American policy. In so doing, she began the synthesis of the realist and idealist traditions of American diplomacy into a new, and highly volatile diplomatic philosophy.

Kirkpatrick considered herself a realist when it came to foreign policy, in the tradition of Hans Morgenthau, Dean Acheson, and George Kennan. Though a lifelong Democrat, she found herself repulsed by the self-flagellation that she believed had overcome her party in the wake of Vietnam. Attracted as a result to Reagan's bid for the White House, Kirkpatrick met with the candidate early in 1980 and pronounced his "intuitive grasp" of foreign affairs "generally correct and very realistic" and soon accepted his invitation to join his campaign.

Kirkpatrick was a consummate "action intellectual," combining practice and theory to rebut the philosophical premises that underwrote post-Vietnam anti-militarism. Appointed by Reagan to the position of ambassador to the UN, she served notice that condemnation of Washington, which had come too easy in the past, would now have a cost. Her office compiled and distributed the voting records of each member nation, and, when one or another country maligned this or that US policy, she called its envoy into her office and demanded an explanation. In her speeches and writings, she repeatedly pointed out the hypocrisy of condemning Israel while praising Libya, say, or censuring Apartheid in South Africa while ignoring human rights violations in Cuba.

But Kirkpatrick did more than just point out double standards. Prior to serving as Ambassador to the UN, which under her tenure was raised to a cabinet-level position with direct access to the president, she worked as a Georgetown political scientist who mostly researched the minutia of the presidential nominating process. She had a broad engagement with intellectual history, however, and where other New Right groups offered visceral but not very effective reactions to the Vietnam Syndrome, Kirkpatrick wrote terse, accessible essays that updated the conservative tradition to the current moment. Drawing on Thomas Hobbes' respect for the centrality of power in human affairs and Edmund Burke's respect for the intractability of tradition to understand the limits of that power, Kirkpatrick not only pointed out what she described as the hypocrisy behind criticisms of countries such as El Salvador and South Africa but actively defended the institutions of those countries as important bulwarks of order and stability.

It was in Latin America where Kirkpatrick's ideas were most fully elaborated and applied. In a series of articles, she used the region to refute what at the time seemed like an emerging dominant consensus regarding what should be the role of America in the world. The US military's defeat by a poorly armed peasant insurgency in Vietnam led many in the Democratic foreign policy establishment to rethink the wisdom of seeing all global conflict through the bifocal lens of superpower conflict. They began to recommend an acceptance of "ideological pluralism," that is, the belief that not all societies will follow the same road to development. According to this new perspective, third-world nationalism, of the kind that drove the US out of Southeast Asia, should be dealt with on its own terms and not as a cat's paw for Soviet Communism. Proponents of this new forbearance believed that the US should work with Moscow to limit the proliferation of nuclear weapons, divert money from military to human development (since it was argued that poverty, not ideology, fed insurgencies), normalize relations with Cuba, forsake paternalism and intervention, encourage allies to democratize, and promote trade and development policies that furthered global equity even to the detriment of US economic interests. Even Carter's hawkish National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski argued that increased technological and commercial interdependence had made the world less ideological (foreshadowing much of the techno-optimistic writing on globalization during the Clinton years). Old dogmas, Brzezinski suggested, concerning the relationship of territory to national interests no longer held, which meant that the US could adopt a "more detached attitude toward revolutionary processes."

Kirkpatrick responded point by point to this sanguine philosophy of international relations, while broadly countering it with an old-fashioned conservative insistence on the dark-side of human nature. Carter of course either ignored or opposed much of the new liberal internationalism, yet Kirkpartrick successfully linked it to his administration to account for the fall of Nicaragua and Iran, the spread of insurgencies in El Salvador and Guatemala, the ongoing influence of Castro, and the emergence of revolutionary nationalism throughout the Middle East and the Caribbean.

Kirkpatrick provided the Republican administration with the argument it needed to justify ongoing support for brutal dictatorships. Autocrats, no matter how premodern their hierarchies and antimodern their values, allowed, she said, for a degree of autonomous civil society. By contrast, Marxist Leninist totalitarians such as the Sandinistas mobilized all aspects of society, which made war, as a means to maintain such mobilization, inevitable. Since political liberalization was more likely to occur under a Somoza than a Marxist regime like that of the Sandinistas, Kirkpatrick insisted that a foreign policy that forced allies to democratize was not only bad for US security but detrimental for the concerned countries as well: it led in Nicaragua and Iran not to reform but to radical regimes and was threatening to do the same in Bolivia, El Salvador, Guatemala, Brazil, Argentina, Chile, Uruguay, and South Africa. Kirkpatrick's analysis was not original. It recycled not just dubious distinctions between "authoritarian" and "totalitarian" regimes but also well-rehearsed justifications for supporting Latin American dictators dating back to the beginning of the Cold War. Yet it did provide the Reagan administration with a rationale for undoing many of Carter's human rights initiatives.

Kirkpatrick went beyond merely justifying alliances with unseemly allies. In repudiating the "rational humanism" of the liberal internationalists she gave voice to what may be called the Hobbesian impulse in US foreign policy ­ an insistence that brute power and not human reason establishes political legitimacy. In a 1980 essay titled "The Hobbes Problem: Order, Authority and Legitimacy in Central America," she invoked the seventeenth-century philosopher to attack Carter's conditioning of military aid to El Salvador on the implementation of social reforms, including a land reform, and on the reduction of human rights violations. Such requirements, she wrote, were wrong-headed because they ignore the fact that "competition for power" rooted "in the nature of man" is the foundation of all politics. Kirkpatrick advised the incoming Republican administration to abandon Carter's reform program and sanction the Salvadoran military's effort to impose order through repression, even if it meant the use of death squads. Such a course of action was justified, she contended, because Salvador's political culture respects a sovereign who is willing to wield violence. Proof of this was that one of the death squads took the name Maximiliano Hernández Martínez, a dictator who in 1932 slaughtered as many as 30,000 indigenous peasants in the course of a week. Kirkpatrick described Hernández Martínez as a "hero" to Salvadorans and argued that by taking his name the assassins sought to "place themselves in El Salvador's political tradition and communicate their purpose." (Perhaps a similar logic explains why a notoriously corrupt and brutal Contra unit in Nicaragua took the name the "Jeane Kirkpatrick Task Force"). Washington needed to think "more realistically" about the course of action it pursued in Latin America, Kirkpatrick argued elsewhere: "The choices are frequently unattractive."

Kirkpatrick also repeatedly attacked what might be called the Kantian impulse in US foreign policy, after Immanuel Kant, the eighteenth-century Enlightenment philosopher who believed that human progress would result in a peacefully ordered world government. Again and again she hammered against the conceit that US power should and could be used to promote universal, internationalist abstract goals, such as "human rights," "development" and "fairness." She warned against trying to be the "world's mid-wife" to democracy. "No idea," she complained, "holds greater sway in the mind of educated Americans than the belief that it is possible to democratize governments, anytime, anywhere, under any circumstances." In classic conservative terms, she cautioned that "thought set free from experience is unlimited by the constraints of experience or of probability. If history is not relevant then the future is free from the past. Theories cut loose from experience are usually blinding optimistic. They begin not from how things are but how they ought to be, and regularly underestimate the complexities and difficulties concerning how you get there from here."

But it is important to emphasize that Kirkpatrick was not arguing against morality in foreign policy. Far from it, for she believed that a conviction in the righteousness of US purpose and power was indispensable in the execution of effective diplomacy. But for America's foreign policy establishment, Vietnam shook that conviction. The optimism in which liberal internationalists approached the world, she charged, was but a thin mask to hide the shame they felt over American power. The problem, according to Kirkpatrick, was not idealism as such but Carter's misplaced application of it, which not only led him and his advisors to doubt American motives but to abandon the responsibility of power for the abstractions of history. Carter's White House, Kirkpatrick pointed out, repeatedly explained foreign policy setbacks in terms of impersonal terms, as "forces" or "processes." "What can a US president faced with such complicated, inexorable, impersonal processes do?" Kirkpatrick asked: "The answer, offered again and again by the president and his top officials, was, Not Much."

Setting the stage for today's neocons, she called for a diplomacy that once again valued human action, resolve, and will. If America acted with moral certainty to defend its national interests, the consequence would, by extension, be beneficial for the rest of the world. "Once the intellectual debris has been cleared away," she believed, "it should become possible to construct a Latin American policy that will protect U.S. security interest and make the actual lives of actual people in Latin America somewhat better and somewhat freer."

American diplomacy here, even in the hands of a committed realist such as Kirkpatrick, is an article of faith, expressed in the self-confident writ of policy makers that when America acts in the world, even when it is doing so expressly to defend its own interests, the consequences of its actions (hundreds of thousands dead and tortured, millions exiled) will be in the general interest. It is in such assuredness that the roots of the punitive idealism that drives the new imperialism can be found, roots which first began to sprout in Reagan's Central American policy and now are fully bloomed in the desert sands of Iraq.

Greg Grandin teaches Latin American history at NYU and is the author of the Empire's Workshop: Latin America, The United States, and The Rise of the New Imperialism, from which this essay has been excerpted. He can be reached at: gjg4@nyu.edu

Neocon architect says: 'Pull it down'
By Alex Massie
informationclearinghouse

02/21/06 "The Scotsman" -- -- NEOCONSERVATISM has failed the United States and needs to be replaced by a more realistic foreign policy agenda, according to one of its prime architects.

Francis Fukuyama, who wrote the best-selling book The End of History and was a member of the neoconservative project, now says that, both as a political symbol and a body of thought, it has "evolved into something I can no longer support". He says it should be discarded on to history's pile of discredited ideologies.

In an extract from his forthcoming book, America at the Crossroads, Mr Fukuyama declares that the doctrine "is now in shambles" and that its failure has demonstrated "the danger of good intentions carried to extremes".

In its narrowest form, neoconservatism advocates the use of military force, unilaterally if necessary, to replace autocratic regimes with democratic ones.

Mr Fukuyama once supported regime change in Iraq and was a signatory to a 1998 letter sent by the Project for a New American Century to the then president, Bill Clinton, urging the US to step up its efforts to remove Saddam Hussein from power. It was also signed by neoconservative intellectuals, such as Bill Kristol and Robert Kagan, and political figures Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle and the current defence secretary, Donald Rumsfeld.

However, Mr Fukuyama now thinks the war in Iraq is the wrong sort of war, in the wrong place, at the wrong time.

"The most basic misjudgment was an overestimation of the threat facing the United States from radical Islamism," he argues.

"Although the new and ominous possibility of undeterrable terrorists armed with weapons of mass destruction did indeed present itself, advocates of the war wrongly conflated this with the threat presented by Iraq and with the rogue state/proliferation problem more generally."

Mr Fukuyama, one of the US's most influential public intellectuals, concludes that "it seems very unlikely that history will judge either the intervention [in Iraq] itself or the ideas animating it kindly".

Going further, he says the movements' advocates are Leninists who "believed that history can be pushed along with the right application of power and will. Leninism was a tragedy in its Bolshevik version, and it has returned as farce when practised by the United States".

Although Mr Fukuyama still supports the idea of democratic reform - complete with establishing the institutions of liberal modernity - in the Middle East, he warns that this process alone will not immediately reduce the threats and dangers the US faces. "Radical Islamism is a by-product of modernisation itself, arising from the loss of identity that accompanies the transition to a modern, pluralist society. More democracy will mean more alienation, radicalisation and - yes, unfortunately - terrorism," he says.

"By definition, outsiders can't 'impose' democracy on a country that doesn't want it; demand for democracy and reform must be domestic. Democracy promotion is therefore a long-term and opportunistic process that has to await the gradual ripening of political and economic conditions to be effective."

Are the Neocons Losing It?
By Patrick Buchanan
www.realclearpolitics.com
March 25, 2006

While President Bush appears serenely confident about Iraq, the same cannot be said of the War Party propagandists who were plotting this conflict when Dubya was still a rookie governor of Texas.

William Kristol of The Weekly Standard now demands the firing of Donald Rumsfeld. William F. Buckley, whose National Review branded the antiwar Right "unpatriotic conservatives" who "hate" America, now calls upon Bush for an "acknowledgement of defeat."

Richard Perle says the administration "got the war right and the aftermath wrong." Self-described "humiliated pundit" Andrew Sullivan confesses to "a sense of shame and sorrow." Michael Ledeen says of Bush's war, "Wrong war, wrong time, wrong way, wrong place."

Frank ("The End of History") Fukuyama concedes that "Iraq has now replaced Afghanistan as a magnet, a training ground and an operational base for jihadists, with plenty of American targets to shoot at."
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Neocon Implosion: Frank Fukuyama and Charles Krauthammer Rip Each Other Apart

...Charles Krauthammer Goes Ballistic On Frank Fukuyama

Meanwhile in GOP Circus Tent Number 2, Charles Krauthammer today became indignant on Frank Fukuyama's description of the moment of truth that caused him to realize the error of his ways and renounce the Neocon theory he helped co-found. He said he sat in disbelief some years back as Charles Krauthammer described the his delusional fantasy of a wonderful success going on Iraq while any realist could see the Iraq War was a foolish tragedy getting steadily worse. This has Krauthammer spitting mad and attacking Fukuyama's credibility and book. Fukuyama's Fantasy

WASHINGTON -- It was, as the hero tells it, his Road to Damascus moment. There he is, in a hall of 1,500 people he has long considered to be his allies, hearing the speaker treat the Iraq War, nearing the end of its first year, as ``a virtually unqualified success.'' He gasps as the audience enthusiastically applauds. Aghast to discover himself in a sea of comrades so deluded by ideology as to have lost touch with reality, he decides he can no longer be one of them.

And thus did Francis Fukuyama become the world's most celebrated ex-neoconservative, a well-timed metamorphosis that has brought him a piece of the fame that he once enjoyed 15 years ago as the man who declared, a mite prematurely, that history had ended.
...

[but] I happen to know something about this story, as I was the speaker whose 2004 Irving Kristol lecture to the American Enterprise Institute Fukuyama has now brought to prominence. I can therefore testify that Fukuyama's claim that I attributed ``virtually unqualified success'' to the war is a fabrication.

Krauthammer goes on to encourage folks to check out a transcript of his speech at " the American Enterprise Institute under its title ``Democratic Realism: An American Foreign Policy for a Unipolar World.'' (It can be read at http://www.aei.org/...)"

But Krauthammer says the jury is still out on success in Iraq.

We do not yet know. History will judge whether we can succeed in ``establishing civilized, decent, nonbelligerent, pro-Western polities in Afghanistan and Iraq.'' My point then, as now, has never been that success was either inevitable or at hand, only that success was critically important to ``change the strategic balance in the fight against Arab-Islamic radicalism.''

I made the point of repeating the problematic nature of the enterprise: ``the undertaking is enormous, ambitious and arrogant. It may yet fail.''

You see folks, even Krauthammer already noted then how "arrogant" the effort was. Giving him later distance. But his most scathing criticism is reserved for Fukuyama.

For Fukuyama to assert that I characterized it as ``a virtually unqualified success'' is simply breathtaking. My argument then, as now, was the necessity of this undertaking, never its assured success. And it was necessary because, as I said, there is not a single, remotely plausible, alternative strategy for attacking the root causes of 9/11: ``the cauldron of political oppression, religious intolerance, and social ruin in the Arab-Islamic world -- oppression transmuted and deflected by regimes with no legitimacy into virulent, murderous anti-Americanism.''

Fukuyama's book is proof of this proposition about the lack of the plausible alternative. The alternative he proposes for the challenges of 9/11 -- new international institutions, new forms of foreign aid and sundry other forms of ``soft power'' -- is a mush of bureaucratic make-work in the face of a raging fire. Even Berman, his sympathetic reviewer, concludes that ``neither his old arguments nor his new ones offer much insight into this, the most important problem of all -- the problem of murderous ideologies and how to combat them.''

Fukuyama now says that he had secretly opposed the Iraq War before it was launched. An unusual and convenient reticence, notes Irwin Stelzer, editor of ``The Neocon Reader,'' for such an inveterate pamphleteer, letter writer and essayist. After public opinion had turned against the war, Fukuyama then courageously came out against it. He has every right to change his mind at his convenience. He has no right to change what I said.

Well folks, what else can aspiring progressive pundints say to discredit these folks? When they do such an excellent job ripping themselves about, it sort of takes the challenge and fun out of it for folks like me.

Oh well, whatever...
As long as the job gets done.

The Real Obituary of Jeane Kirckpatrick
Dec 10, 2006
By Nicolaus Copernicus
CRIMES AND CORRUPTION OF THE NEW WORLD ORDER NEWS

One of the more difficult tasks is to write an obituary of a politician that even attemnpts to criticize the deceased. Death is supposed to be such a solemn occasion that only good deeds are recited and bad deeds are deftly passed, even if these misdeeds were the result of a pattern that led to death and destruction.

And of course there are exceptions. No one would have an issue with the death of a tyyrant apart from the beneficiaries of his or her tynrany. The border line seems to be the number murdered, and the notoriety of the person who caused or was active in committing the dastardly act.

So, Jeane Kirkpatrick died. And obituaries seem to fly into the ethereal air of gentle reminiscences and the neutral, almost cozy, recital of abominable acts and a treacherous political life, which started by swinging across the aisle at the behest of the Gipper, a dithering old character who peddled folksy extremism and dangerous delusions, sleeping through momentous decisions taken by a bunch of quarrelsome adventurers - on behalf the American people, waking up infrequently to the deafening sound of the accolades engineered by the stenographic media, much as a Floor Manager standing in the shadows of the TV studio, inciting the submissive audience breathlessly pointing to the flashing yellow 'Applause' signs – all sounding discordant as the world outside looked in wonder at the 'legal' murders committed in the name of high flaunting ideals: 'democracy' and 'freedom,' tales, the peoples of Granada, Nicaragua and the Lebanon remember only too well as they visit the cemeteries and tend the graves of the victims.

So, let Ms. Kirkpatrick's other obituary commence:

Born to a failed oil-prospector father, she finished her studies in smaller colleges with an MS from Columbia University. Ms. Jordan, as her name was, belonged to the Democratic Party. She discovered the Republican Party when Ronald Reagan "won her over" she said, in a party setup by George Wil, a syndicated columnist of the extreme right, according to the San Francisco Chronicle. Reagan, she claimed, fancied an article she wrote professing that "Traditional authoritarian governments are less repressive than revolutionary autocracies."

Ignoring the pretence to academic fluency or credentials, the article effectively concluded that supporting a bloody dictator like Samoza, of Nicaragua, is preferable to supporting his enemies. The criterion is the degree of friendship they have with the US – and we know what US she is referring to and certainly not the US of the people of the US.

Generally speaking, the article is a mediocre essay in international affairs. The evidence she brings forward can easily be used against her argument, and issues of humanity and principle fall victims to furthering, at any cost, the interests of the corporations who were and are sucking with their US-armor clad straws the life out of many Latin American countries.

But for the Republican Party leadership, the value of having a 'thinker' even possessing of half-baked thoughts, were and are invaluable. History is replete with strenuous attempts to over the millennia to develop a philosophical foundation for the 'rights of wealth' and 'justification for usurpation of the livelihood of others.' No such a theory could ever be elaborated on any basis but contemptible greed and despicable avarice. Still, having even Ms. Kirkpatrick as a theoretician and despite her lack of academic background or qualifications seemed to the ebbing tide of Republican fortunes worth a try.

Soon she joined the Reagan White House. And soon she was in Mr. Regan's National Security Planning Group. There she became notorious for offering the advantages of clandestine activities in the world. The San Francisco Chronicle

"Mrs. Kirkpatrick weighed the risks and rewards of clandestine warfare in Central America, covert operations against Libya, the disastrous deployment of American Marines in Lebanon, the invasion of Grenada and support for rebel forces in Afghanistan."

The obituary does not, unfortunately, note that by perusing the murderous course, she did effectively create Bin Laden, and did foster and nourish with taxpayer's money, the efforts of Al-Qai'da – established, indeed, with money she advocated spending in Afghanistan.

Her outspoken performance included as well a complicity in stealing tens of millions from the taxpayer's treasury to fund cocaine smuggling, murderous Iran Contra. The San Francisco Chronicle by distributing snippets about her advocacy and involvement in the planning and execution of that crime adds:

Mrs. Kirkpatrick was at the June 1984 National Security Planning Group meeting that began the secret initiative called the Iran-Contra affair. Congress had cut off funds for the Contras. At the CIA, Director William Casey wanted to obtain money from foreign countries in defiance of the ban.

Mrs. Kirkpatrick was in favor:

"We should make the maximum effort to find the money," she said. Secretary of State George Shultz was opposed. "It is an impeachable offense," he said. Reagan warned that if the story leaked, "we'll all be hanging by our thumbs in front of the White House."

Over the next two years, millions skimmed from secret arms sales to Iran went to the Contras. The story did leak, as Reagan feared, and his administration was shaken by congressional investigations and criminal charges. Robert McFarlane, one of Reagan's national-security advisers, pleaded guilty to misinforming Congress. By then, Mrs. Kirkpatrick had left the government.

Soon she moved to the UN as the US Permanente Representative. The hapless Quixotic Bolton must have learnt a lesson or two from her languages, throwing about words like "liars" and other 'polite diplomatic' verbiage that can only come from an ill-bred person. The targets adversaries she helped create for the people of the US from nations around the world.

Her record include:

* Support for the bloody dictatorship in El Salvador where tens of thousands were slaughtered with the blessing of the administration of the Gipper. The popular uprising against the US-supported dictatorship led to mass displacement of tens of thousands, including a sizeable number in the US today. A painful essay describing some of what she did to the people of El Salvador appears on the Internet.
* Urging the invasion of the Lebanon by Israel, which resulted in the death of thousands, including the famous massacre of Sabra and Shatila massacre engineered by Israel's Sharon and committed by Lebanese accomplices. Sharon was found responsible for the massacre (indirectly) and lost his job as a Defense Minister after a determination of an official enquiry. But like other criminals in Israel past, such as Begin who butchered overnight 135 women and children in Dier Yasin , Sharon became later a Prime Minister, so did Begin!
* Playing a significant role in the Reagan administration (illicit) support of the Nicaraguan Contras and in misappropriating funds to the tunes of $20 million diverted to foment the civil war in Nicaragua. Congress passed a special law to prevent further illegal acts.

Ms. Kirkpatrick was in the forefront of the embezzlement effort. The San Francisco Chronicle obiturates:

We should make the maximum effort to find the money," she said. Secretary of State George Shultz was opposed. "It is an impeachable offense," he said. Reagan warned that if the story leaked, "we'll all be hanging by our thumbs in front of the White House."

And so he did, and the Democrats in Congress felt like turning the usual blind eye! The transaction was meant to by-pass the law passed by congress banning support to the Contras. Later, the obituary reads:

In private, Mrs. Kirkpatrick supported American efforts to sustain the Contras, the rebel group that tried to overthrow the Sandinistas with help from the CIA. She was a key participant in a March 1981 National Security Planning Group meeting that produced a $19 million covert action plan to make the Contras a fighting force.

Israel was instrumental in the transaction as it was trying to buy the favor of the Iran Mullahs by resolving their spare parts crisis denied them by the US. The Don Quixotic anti-Sandinistas hawks in the White House were keen to continue their illicit and illegal operations against the Sandinistas. And so, Israel provided the spares parts to Iran, the Pentagon replaced Israel's stores from US army ordnance, the proceeds of the sale for the sale minus an Israeli cut was spent sending arms to the Contras.


The San Francisco Chronicle continues:

Over the next two years [after 1983 – NC.], millions skimmed from secret arms sales to Iran went to the Contras. The story did leak, as Reagan feared, and his administration was shaken by congressional investigations and criminal charges. Robert McFarlane, one of Reagan's national-security advisers, pleaded guilty to misinforming Congress. By then, Mrs. Kirkpatrick had left the government.

An aspect of the legacy of Ms. Kirkpatrick is the flourishing cocaine trade that erupted in Southern California and

* Membership of the Committee for the Present Danger, a group setup by Israel's friends to further Israel's interests under the guise of defending those of the people of America. It supplements today the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) of the same orientation by incorporating senior politicians such as Senator Lieberman, who is the current co-Chairman of the front organization. The Committee played the same role during the Reagan era which the AEI played in the presidency of George W. Bush. Up to fifty members of the Committee occupied senior White House and government positions and in as much as they drove the administration to invade and occupy Iraq, the Committee turned Lebanon into a battle zone for Israeli expansion to reach the Litani River... And of course, they failed, just as they did again in July, 2006.

So what would one remember Ms. Kirkpatrick for? The slaughter of the El Salvadorans, the embezzlements and theft of US taxpayers, the felony in breaking laws enacted by Congress, the cocaine addicts in Southern California introduced by the Contra with the connivance of the CIA, the dead women and children in Sabra and Shatila, or her guiding light as a member of a suspect 'Committee' (which still exists) putting the interests of the ruling circles of Israel above those of her homeland?

I am sorry she died just I would be about any human being. But I find it hard to remember her in the clinical way the media wants everybody to. The cries of the bereaved, the addicts, and the victims of the mayhem she helped spread still reverberate - but more to the point, the lesson we have not learned about our system of government which justifies lending itself to buyers, foreign and local, with barrages of sham cries about democracy and freedom is alive and continues the legacy of Ms. Kirkpatrick - a legacy of bloodshed, death and destruction.

Posted by CRIMES AND CORRUPTION OF THE NEW WORLD ORDER NEWS mparent7777 Marc Parent at 9:46 AM

Angry Wolfowitz in four-letter tirade
Richard Adams in Washington
Tuesday May 15, 2007
Guardian Unlimited

Paul Wolfowitz
Paul Wolfowitz. Photograph: AP

An angry and bitter Paul Wolfowitz poured abuse and threatened retaliations on senior World Bank staff if his orders for pay rises and promotions for his partner were revealed, according to new details published last night.

Under fire for the lavish package given to Shaha Riza, a World Bank employee and Mr Wolfowitz's girlfriend when he became president, an official investigation into the controversy has found that Mr Wolfowitz broke bank rules and violated his own contract – setting off a struggle between US and European governments over Mr Wolfowitz's future.

Sounding more like a cast member of the Sopranos than an international leader, in testimony by one key witness Mr Wolfowitz declares: "If they **** with me or Shaha, I have enough on them to **** them too."

The remarks were published in a report detailing the controversy that erupted last month after the size of Ms Riza's pay rises was revealed. The report slates Mr Wolfowitz for his "questionable judgment and a preoccupation with self-interest", saying: "Mr Wolfowitz saw himself as the outsider to whom the established rules and standards did not apply."

The report brushed off Mr Wolfowitz's defence that he thought he had been asked to arrange Ms Riza's pay package, observing that "the interpretation given by Mr Wolfowitz ... simply turns logic on its head".

The investigators have sent their completed report to the bank's governing board, containing a string of withering criticisms of Mr Wolfowitz's behaviour and casting doubt on his ability to continue running the bank, a multibillion-pound international agency with 12,000 staff based in Washington.

According to the report, Mr Wolfowitz's actions "had a dramatic negative effect on the reputation and credibility" of the bank.

It concluded that "the damage done to the reputation of the World Bank group" should lead the bank's board to "consider whether Mr Wolfowitz will be able to provide the leadership needed to ensure that the bank continues to operate to the fullest extent possible".

It also said: "Mr Wolfowitz's contract requiring that he adhere to the code of conduct for board officials and that he avoid any conflict of interest, real or apparent, [was] violated."

Despite the weeks of turmoil within the bank, Mr Wolfowitz may still keep his job if the US government is prepared to stick by him.

Mr Wolfowitz still enjoys support from the Bush administration, where he served as deputy defence secretary at the Pentagon during the invasion of Iraq.

Yesterday vice president Dick Cheney defended Mr Wolfowitz, saying: "Paul is one of the most able public servants I've ever known .... I think he's a very good president of the World Bank, and I hope he will be able to continue."

The US treasury secretary, Hank Paulson, was yesterday said to also be drumming up support for Mr Wolfowitz, while European governments increasingly despair of US intransigence in allowing Mr Wolfowitz to hang on.

The angry comments attributed to Mr Wolfowitz came from damning testimony by Xavier Coll, head of human resources at the bank, who provided investigators with his notes of a meeting with Mr Wolfowitz last year. The notes directly contradict Mr Wolfowitz's assertions that the details of Ms Riza's treatment were properly shared with senior bank officials.

In March last year, when a mention of Ms Riza's secondment outside the bank to avoid rules about partners was first published in the magazine US News & World Report, an angry Mr Wolfowitz accused Mr Coll of leaking the information.

According to Mr Coll's notes: "At the end of the conversation Mr Wolfowitz became increasingly agitated and said that he was 'tired of people ... attacking him' and 'you should get your friends to stop it'. Mr Wolfowitz said, 'If they **** me or Shaha, I have enough on them to **** them too'," naming several senior bank staff he felt were vulnerable.

Mr Wolfowitz appears before the bank's executive board today to make a final defence of his actions, with the board meeting tomorrow to consider the report and make a statement later in the week.

With Mr Wolfowitz so far refusing to step down, the board may need to take radical action to break the stalemate. Members have discussed a range of options, including sacking Mr Wolfowitz, issuing a vote of no confidence or reprimanding him. Some board members argue that a vote of no confidence would make it impossible for him to stay in the job.

Shock, awe and Hobbes have backfired on America's neocons

Iraq has shown the hubris of a geostrategy that welds the philosophy of the Leviathan to military and technological power

Richard Drayton
Wednesday December 28, 2005
The Guardian

The tragic irony of the 21st century is that just as faith in technology collapsed on the world's stock markets in 2000, it came to power in the White House and Pentagon. For the Project for a New American Century's ambition of "full-spectrum dominance" - in which its country could "fight and win multiple, simultaneous major-theatre wars" - was a monster borne up by the high tide of techno euphoria of the 1990s.

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Ex-hippies talked of a wired age of Aquarius. The fall of the Berlin wall and the rise of the internet, we were told, had ushered in Adam Smith's dream of overflowing abundance, expanding liberty and perpetual peace. Fukuyama speculated that history was over, leaving us just to hoard and spend. Technology meant a new paradigm of constant growth without inflation or recession.

But darker dreams surfaced in America's military universities. The theorists of the "revolution in military affairs" predicted that technology would lead to easy and perpetual US dominance of the world. Lieutenant Colonel Ralph Peters advised on "future warfare" at the Army War College - prophesying in 1997 a coming "age of constant conflict". Thomas Barnett at the Naval War College assisted Vice-Admiral Cebrowski in developing "network-centric warfare". General John Jumper of the air force predicted a planet easily mastered from air and space. American forces would win everywhere because they enjoyed what was unashamedly called the "God's-eye" view of satellites and GPS: the "global information grid". This hegemony would be welcomed as the cutting edge of human progress. Or at worst, the military geeks candidly explained, US power would simply terrify others into submitting to the stars and stripes.

Shock and Awe: Achieving Rapid Dominance - a key strategic document published in 1996 - aimed to understand how to destroy the "will to resist before, during and after battle". For Harlan Ullman of the National Defence University, its main author, the perfect example was the atom bomb at Hiroshima. But with or without such a weapon, one could create an illusion of unending strength and ruthlessness. Or one could deprive an enemy of the ability to communicate, observe and interact - a macro version of the sensory deprivation used on individuals - so as to create a "feeling of impotence". And one must always inflict brutal reprisals against those who resist. An alternative was the "decay and default" model, whereby a nation's will to resist collapsed through the "imposition of social breakdown".

All of this came to be applied in Iraq in 2003, and not merely in the March bombardment called "shock and awe". It has been usual to explain the chaos and looting in Baghdad, the destruction of infrastructure, ministries, museums and the national library and archives, as caused by a failure of Rumsfeld's planning. But the evidence is this was at least in part a mask for the destruction of the collective memory and modern state of a key Arab nation, and the manufacture of disorder to create a hunger for the occupier's supervision. As the Süddeutsche Zeitung reported in May 2003, US troops broke the locks of museums, ministries and universities and told looters: "Go in Ali Baba, it's all yours!"

For the American imperial strategists invested deeply in the belief that through spreading terror they could take power. Neoconservatives such as Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle and the recently indicted Lewis "Scooter" Libby, learned from Leo Strauss that a strong and wise minority of humans had to rule over the weak majority through deception and fear, rather than persuasion or compromise. They read Le Bon and Freud on the relationship of crowds to authority. But most of all they loved Hobbes's Leviathan. While Hobbes saw authority as free men's chosen solution to the imperfections of anarchy, his 21st century heirs seek to create the fear that led to submission. And technology would make it possible and beautiful.

On the logo of the Pentagon's Information Awareness Office, the motto is Scientia est potentia - knowledge is power . The IAO promised "total information awareness", an all-seeing eye spilling out a death-ray gaze over Eurasia. Congressional pressure led the IAO to close, but technospeak, half-digested political theory and megalomania still riddle US thinking. Barnett, in The Pentagon's New Map and Blueprint for Action, calls for a "systems administrator" force to be dispatched with the military, to "process" conquered countries. The G8 and a few others are the "Kantian core", writes Barnett, warming over the former Blair adviser Robert Cooper's poisonous guff from 2002; their job is to export their economy and politics by force to the unlucky "Hobbesian gap". Imperialism is imagined as an industrial technique to remake societies and cultures, with technology giving sanction to those who intervene.

The Afghanistan war of 2001 taught the wrong lessons. The US assumed this was the model of how a small, special forces-dominated campaign, using local proxies and calling in gunships or airstrikes, would sweep away opposition. But all Afghanistan showed was how an outside power could intervene in a finely balanced civil war. The one-eyed Mullah Omar's great escape on his motorbike was a warning that the God's-eye view can miss the human detail.

The problem for the US today is that Leviathan has shot his wad. Iraq revealed the hubris of the imperial geostrategy. One small nation can tie down a superpower. Air and space supremacy do not give command on the ground. People can't be terrorised into identification with America. The US has proved able to destroy massively - but not create, or even control. Afghanistan and Iraq lie in ruins, yet the occupiers cower behind concrete mountains.

The spin machine is on full tilt to represent Iraq as a success. Peters, in New Glory: Expanding America's Supremacy, asserts: "Our country is a force for good without precedent"; and Barnett, in Blueprint, says: "The US military is a force for global good that ... has no equal." Both offer ambitious plans for how the US is going to remake the third world in its image. There is a violent hysteria to the boasts. The narcissism of a decade earlier has given way to an extrovert rage at those who have resisted America's will since 2001. Both urge utter ruthlessness in crushing resistance. In November 2004, Peters told Fox News that in Falluja "the best outcome, frankly, is if they're all killed".

But he directs his real fury at France and Germany: "A haggard Circe, Europe dulled our senses and fooled us into believing in her attractions. But the dugs are dry in Germany and France. They deluded us into prolonging the affair long after our attentions should have turned to ... India, South Africa, Brazil."

While a good Kleinian therapist may be able to help Peters work through his weaning trauma, only America can cure its post 9/11 mixture of paranoia and megalomania. But Britain - and other allied states - can help. The US needs to discover, like a child that does not know its limits, that there is a world outside its body and desires, beyond even the reach of its toys, that suffers too.

· Dr Richard Drayton, a senior lecturer in history at Cambridge University, is the author of Nature's Government, a study of science, technology and imperialism
RHDrayton@yahoo.co.uk

The Straussians: What one dead philosopher has to do with the Iraq War
From Adbusters #71, May-Jun 2007

Leo Strauss
The celebrated philosopher-king of the neoconservatives forging America’s radical new foreign policy was a controversial philosophy professor at the University of Chicago. Leo Strauss, who died in 1973, was little known outside of academic and think-tank circles until this year, but the influence of his ideas has long been felt.

“Why are so many Straussians in the Reagan Administration?” asked Newsweek in a 1987 article entitled “The Cult of Leo Strauss.” “Some of their critics suggest that the brotherhood is committed to no less than halting the drift of modern democracy.” The Straussians, observed historian Gordon S. Wood in the New York Review of Books the following year, are the biggest phenomenon in 20th-century academia.

His ideas emerge from his life experience. Strauss fled Nazi Germany for the safety of America in 1937, and blamed not fascism but the Weimar Republic’s liberal democratic ideals for permitting the rise of Nazism. A classicist, he taught the works of Plato, Machiavelli, Nietzsche and Hobbes, instructing his students to look for secret “codes” in the texts. Truth, he believed, was the preserve of an elite few who might have to tell “noble lies” – an idea he lifted from Plato – to the uncomprehending masses.

Are political entities, asked the charismatic Strauss, “not compelled to use force and fraud . . . if they are to prosper?”

“‘Weapons of mass destruction’ would be a noble lie,” says Shadia Drury, a scholar who has written two books on Strauss, “because you’re convinced this [war on Iraq] is the right thing to do and you are the wise few, the elite, who are leading the stupid masses, and the stupid masses aren’t going to agree to sacrifice their lives for nothing – for the glory of the nation – unless their own survival is at stake.” So you tell them their own survival is at stake.

Strauss believed that democracy, however flawed, was best defended by an ignorant public pumped up on nationalism and religion. Only a militantly nationalist state could deter human aggression, and since most people were naturally self-absorbed and hedonistic, Strauss believed that the only way to transform them was to make them love their nation enough to die for it.

Such nationalism requires an external threat – and if one cannot be found, it must be manufactured.

While not bound by religion himself, Strauss rather cynically promoted religion as a tool to maintain an acquiescent population. Authority and discipline are key values for Straussians, and the masses need religion to keep them in line. “Marx called religion the opium of the people,” says Drury. “Strauss thought the people needed their opium.”

Neoconservatism has more complex roots than just the ideas of Leo Strauss, but it’s hard to ignore the uncanny similarities between Straussian thought and the decisions emanating from the Bush administration, where many of the neoconservatives in charge of foreign policy were taught by Strauss or his students. Many of the major players occupying the White House are descendants of the Jewish-American New York intellectuals who veered from the radical left (anti-Stalinist Trotskyism of the 1920s and ’30s) to the radical right (hence the “neo”). In between, they were allies of McCarthy in the fight against communism, and later joined the Reagan administration. They have nothing but contempt for the free-thinking idealism of the 1960s, with its emphasis on social equality (Strauss argued that the strong are fit to rule; the weak to be ruled), opposition to war (force is important and necessary), and feminism (Plato’s “philosopher-kings” are, by definition, men). But it wasn’t until the presidency of George W. Bush that they ascended to the pinnacle of power, bringing their ideas with them.

“In the course of the past year, a new belief has emerged in the town [of Washington, DC]: the belief in war against Iraq,” wrote Ari Shavit in Ha’aretz, Israel’s leading daily newspaper, in April 2003. “That ardent faith was disseminated by a small group of 25 or 30 neoconservatives, almost all of them Jewish, almost all of them intellectuals . . . people who are mutual friends and cultivate one another and are convinced that political ideas are a major driving force of history.”

New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman to Ari Shavit: “This is a war of an elite.” Laughing: “I could give you the names of 25 people – all of whom are at this moment within a five-block radius of this office – who, if you had exiled them to a desert island a year and a half ago, the Iraq war would not have happened.”