Preacherman
Member
I have seldom read an article that has struck me so forcefully. This British journalist has captured a very important "snapshot" about current relations between the US and Europe. I recommend it highly.
Source text is available at http://www.williamshawcross.com/first_page.html: click on the "After Iraq: America and Europe" link.
AFTER IRAQ: AMERICA AND EUROPE
2003 Harkness Lecture
King¹s College, London
27 March 2003
I AM IMMENSELY GRATEFUL to the Harkness Foundation. They gave me a scholarship to go to America for the first time in September 1972. I had just spent three months in Vietnam reporting on the war for the Sunday Times.
There I had formed one view of the United States. Living in America gave me quite another. With the backing of the Harkness I got a Congressional Fellowship which meant that I worked in both houses of Congress for Teddy Kennedy on the Health Subcommittee which he chaired and then for Congressman Les Aspin, who later became Secretary of Defence. And, because my time there coincided with Watergate, I did a lot of writing – I became the New Statesman¹s Washington correspondent.
I was staggered by the openness of American society and the availability of information and the diversity of views. I made good friends in Virginia, in New York and elsewhere who remain good friends today. From then on I went back and back to America and I have tried since always to write books which have an American content. I have reason for great gratitude to the Harkness foundation.
********
We meet tonight in interesting times. Frightening and challenging times.
I want to look at several questions briefly.
The first is President Bush.
The second is his advisers.
The third is the question of Iraq.
The fourth is the question of Europe.
But I would like to talk about all of these things, all of these people in one simple context – that of September 11. You cannot emphasise too often the importance of the attacks upon America. Everything that is happening today happened as a result of 9/11. For Americans it made a new world, if not a new America. Some say America just became more itself.
PRESIDENT BUSH
It is fashionable not just on the left but generally amongst the European intelligentsia to decry George Bush as an idiot.
This is, if I may say so, not very wise.
Cartoons and articles in papers such as the Guardian or the Daily Mirror constantly try and persuade us that this fool should not be taken seriously. Gerald Kaufman MP announced last year that ³Bush, himself the most intellectually backward American president of my political lifetime, is surrounded by advisers whose bellicosity is exceeded only by their political, military and diplomatic illiteracy.²
George Bush may not be obviously eloquent. He may address his remarks more frequently to Lubbock Texas than to Islington, but that does not make him stupid. What in fact we have here is not a stupid leader but one of the most radical in recent times. Bush leads a team which really wants to change the world. It is perhaps that which makes Europeans uncomfortable. But not wishing to acknowledge this, they take refuge in the stupidity claim.
He did well to become Governor of Texas, beating Anne Richards the well established Democrat. The Republicans have been sweeping through the South for years. Recently, I talked to Karl Rove, his close political adviser, who said that when he arrived in Texas in the late seventies there were a couple of republicans in the state legislature. Now there are a couple of Democrats. The South is being transformed.
Stupid? The British ambassador Christopher Meyer, who visited him in Texas in 1998 found him self-deprecatory, humorous and quick on his feet; he acknowledged he did not know much about the world, apart from Mexico.
After he won the Republican primaries he had planned to come to Europe. He did not, apparently at least in part because of the hostile press his victory generation. Le Monde referred to ³Le cretinisation² of US policy. This was perhaps beginning of the poison in the bloodstream.
Then he won the presidency, in very controversial circumstances, as you know.
Bush has changed since he came into office.
As governor of Texas, he was seen as a centrist, an incrementalist, even a conciliator. He ran in 2000 as a uniter not a divider. Most people expected Bush to govern from the centre, as Clinton had done. After all, he had squeaked in by the tiniest majority – or not, as the case may be. He had no mandate.
There is no centrism about him now. Now he seems to be an increasingly ideological president – his policies seem much more radical, both at home and abroad.
He is moving very boldly in a direction a lot of people will dislike. It involves levelling taxes, exploiting resources, celebrating wealth and markets. Government entitlements will be replaced by private safety nets – and they will be closer to the ground. The government is to become more efficient, more corporate. The courts are there to protect property and enforce individual responsibility.
From his successful $1.35 trillion tax cut, through the second round of huge tax cuts that he has proposed for this year, his conservative judicial nominations, and his proposals to reform Medicare and Medicaid, Bush¹s programme now has a distinctly conservative flavour, with little bipartisan appeal.
Bush does not seek just to cut taxes – he has pushed tax cuts with a supply side bias – in other words to stimulate investment rather consumer demand. He has persisted in this policy long after more cautious republicans started worrying more about the deficit. Instead of pre-empting the Democrats by, for example, cutting the payroll tax, which would benefit low-income tax payers, Bush plans to eliminate taxes on dividends.
He is making a radical shift of responsibilities from the government to the private sector and from the federal government to the states. The aim is to try and privatise retirement, through individual investment accounts, education through vouchers and welfare through faith based charities. This is not an overnight revolution but a gradual change – but there is no doubt about the direction in which it is going. Bush has announced plans to outsource thousands of federal jobs. This will help diminish the power of the public employee labour unions which till now have remained one of the strongest labour sectors in the economy.
There are hiccups or diversions.
Last March he slapped punitive tariffs on steel imports and gave similar favours to the farm and textile industries. This protectionism infuriated Europe and also his conservative admirers. White House officials however claim that it was done for short term tactical reasons – to persuade congressmen from those states that Bush should be given the freedom to negotiate trade deals. He got that authority.
And last November he proposed to the WTO that tariffs on all industrial and consumer goods be phased out, reaching zero by 2015. Textile state lawmakers were alarmed.
Also in November Bush infuriated the Teamsters, one of the few Labour unions, he has courted, by allowing Mexican truckers to transport goods anywhere in the USA. There are 20 million people of Mexican descent in America. Handy.
His policies are focussed on next year¹s elections. He did very well in the midterm elections last year. Jonathan Freedland covered him and wrote very revealingly about what a successful campaigner Bush was. He is determined to energise the Republican base. And it seems to be working.
Many of my friends in America detest a lot of what he is doing. They think he is destroying the domestic social welfare system and the notion of equity. But his approval ratings are higher even than Reagan¹s among Republicans. The plan is to reinforce his image as a strong decisive leader. Polarisation seems to be an acceptable price to pay for demonstration of resolve and vision. Bush¹s advisers see his strength as his ability to change the parameters of debate with bold initiatives.
This is what we should realise – Bush constantly defies the predictions of those who think they are smarter than he is.
He is not a dazzling speaker like Bill Clinton who could free associate for an hour on end and convince you that you have just heard the most important thing since Moses handed down the Ten Commandments. But his aides say that he is very good at focussing on an issue and carrying it out clearly and easily.
He likes to be seen as more Reagan Jr than Bush 2. Mike Deaver, the former senior Reagan aide, says ³He¹s the most Reagan-like politician we have seen, certainly in the White House. His father was supposed to be the third term of the Reagan Presidency but then he wasn¹t – this guy is.² Bush, like Reagan, believes that Presidents make their own mandates.
The symbol of Reaganism was his famous phrase ³It¹s morning in America.² Bush has as yet coined no such slogan. He lacks Reagan¹s facility, his eloquence.
Many people would say he also lacks Reagan¹s extraordinary public appeal.
Bush does not reach out to people. He does not seek to persuade. Instead he delivers ukases.
But he is a better manager than Reagan, who delegated every decision he could.
He could not bear to sack people. Bush maintains discipline himself. He sets an example for the White House which is rigorously followed.
The Clinton White House was characterised by endless discussion over endless pizzas, and the postponement of decisions. Pizzas are not called into the Bush White House. Discussion is limited. Decisions are made. People may not like them, but they are made.
********
There is another very important aspect to Bush.
A few weeks ago Jeremy Paxman interrogated Tony Blair on the war. He asked him ³Do you and President Bush pray together². Blair looked shocked, as if he regarded this as a pretty offensive question – which it certainly was.
However there is an underlying truth in that Blair and Bush do share their Christianity. They come from very different forms of church. But one senior member of the White House to whom I talked recently said that one of the reasons for the close relationship between Bush and Blair is indeed their shared faith.
In September 2002 Bush invited religious leaders – three Christian, one Jewish, one Muslim, to meet with him in the Oval Office. He talked about the war on terror and he asked them to pray with him. ³You know,² he said, ³I had a drinking problem. Right now I should be in a bar in Texas, not the Oval Office. There is only one reason I am in the Oval Office and not a bar. I found faith. I found God. I am here because of the power of prayer.²
Bishops in this country and in the United States may denounce the war as morally wrong, but Bush has no doubts about the rightness of his cause. After September 11 he reminded us that ³Freedom and fear, justice and cruelty have always been at war, and we know that God is not neutral between them.²
In his state of the union speech this year, he spoke of the ³power, wonderworking power² of ³the goodness and idealism and faith of the American people². The words ³wonderworking power² come from a hymn in which they refer to ³the precious blood of the lamb, Jesus Christ².
After 9/11 people came to churches in droves and many of them then left, having failed to find a larger meaning for what had happened. Bush in some ways has succeeded in framing that meaning. He asserts a world view which is usually dismissed as a heresy – the myth of redemptive violence, which posits a war between good and evil, between God and Satan. For God to win, evil needs to be destroyed by God¹s faithful followers.
This is alarming to the increasingly secular Europeans. Javier Solana, the EU¹s foreign policy chief recently said that the role of religion in US policy was becoming a difficulty for Europe. ³It is a kind of binary model. It is all or nothing. For us Europeans, it is difficult to deal with because we are secular. We do not see the world in such black and white terms.²
BUSH¹S ADVISERS
It is commonly said that US foreign policy is now dominated by a small group of neo-conservatives, neo-cons for short. They are called that because their intellectual origins were in the Democratic party, on the left.
One of their fundamental ideas is that the post Cold War world gives the US not just the opportunity but it some cases also the duty to extend liberal democracy around the world through the use of American power. They draw heavily on Wilsonian traditions, except that they distrust international frameworks and collective security. They differ also from conservative realists like Henry Kissinger who espouse balance of power politics and managed international relations. Unlike the Kissingerians, they demand moral clarity in foreign policy.
In the Clinton era – a period which is anathema to the neo-cons – they were centred on several publications like the Weekly Standard edited by William Kristol and owned by Rupert Murdoch, Commentary and the Wall Street Journal. The conservative think tank, the American Enterprise Institute, was the spiritual backer and home for many of them.
One of their most important groupings (in retrospect at least) was the Project for a New American Century founded in 1997 by William Kristol and Robert Kagan. Kagan is the author of the book Paradise and Power which has made a huge stir over recent months. He proposes the thesis that in terms of making foreign policy and war Americans are from Mars and Europeans are from Venus.
Its original members included Richard Perle, Paul Wolfowitz, Lewis Libby, Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney, Elliot Abrams and Zalmay Khalilzad.
Back then in the late 90s, they had a specific goal. Saddam. The group wrote to President Clinton that ³the only acceptable strategy is one that eliminates the possibility that Iraq will be able to use or threaten to use weapons of mass destruction. In the near term this means a willingness to undertake military actionŠIn the long term it means removing Saddam Hussein and his regime from power.² Almost all of these men are now senior members of the Bush administration – some of them, as you know, very senior. They are now implementing the policy towards Iraq which they have advocated for at least five years.
I don¹t want to say that they all believe the same things. They don¹t, but there are some common threads in their views.
They tend to believe that we live in a special moment of history, one which is characterised above all by America¹s unparalleled military power and the opportunity to expand the boundaries of democracy around the world. This is the time for a grand strategy to assert Pax Americana. This is the decisive decade in human liberty.
They value strategic thinking and the setting of priorities. They are wary of permanent alliances and are attracted to bold geopolitical moves for the expansion of American values. They are not wedded to stability. Conversely, they are not afraid of challenging the status quo. As we are seeing in Iraq.
They see American values as universal values and believe passionately in the special mission of the United States to bring American style democracy to the rest of the world. That is particularly true since 9/11. They, like President Bush, tend to see the world in very straightforward terms – even in terms of good and evil. They do not believe that evil governments can be reformed. Sovereignty is relative – the more evil the state the less sovereignty to which it is entitled.
They are particularly close to the state of Israel, in some cases to the Likud party, and they see the defence of Israel as a test of America¹s willingness to defend American values. They believe that Israel will achieve peace not through compromising with her enemies, but through a grand re-ordering of her environment, through overwhelming force, and through daring strategic moves.
Even before the agonising rows over Resolution 1441 and Iraq¹s lack of disarmament, they had no great regard for the United Nations. They see it as filled with undemocratic or anti American nations which seek to use it to constrain the United States.
They believe that the US:
ß must maintain its military pre-eminence through increased defence spending and the removal of any constraints on its ability to project its military power around the world.
ß must act alone if necessary to defend its interest, whether those be access to oil, preventing the proliferation of WMD or ending global terrorism.
Until September 11, some of them tended to see the emergence of China as a global power as the greatest threat to US goals. Since September 11 of course it is the Muslim world which they see as the most important with which they have to deal. They argue that only the removal of illegitimate regimes in the Middle East and the creation of democratic states in Islamic societies can deal with the threat of Islamic terrorism.
********
George Bush was not a neo-conservative when he came to office. He appointed Colin Powell as Secretary of State, which was seen as an embrace of realism, but many of his other appointments, from Donald Rumsfeld down, gave great power to the neo-cons within the administration, even before September 11.
As soon as he came into office he infuriated many of his allies by refusing to enforce the Kyoto Treaty on climate change and by withdrawing from the fledgling International Criminal Court.
On the matter of Kyoto, it is worth pointing out that Bill Clinton never fought for it either. He sat on it for three years and never presented it to the Senate, which he knew would never ratify it. The Bush administration¹s mistake was perhaps to be casually frank about it.
But September 11 is the watershed. The lessons of Vietnam, which had replaced the lessons of Munich and held American policymakers and soldiers in thrall since the mid 1970s, vanished on 12 September. Now the only lessons that mattered were those of 9/11 itself and they were not instantly easy to read.
Three days later in his speech at the National Cathedral in Washington, President Bush stated that the US would not hesitate to act alone and would act pre-emptively to prevent future terrorist threats. Paul Wolfowitz, one of the most subtle of the neo-cons and now Deputy Secretary of Defence, stated that the US would ³end² states which supported terrorism. Wolfowitz had been urging the end of Saddam Hussein for a decade.
The Taliban were given time to hand over Bin Laden; when they refused, they were attacked and driven from power. Western commitment to Afghanistan since has faltered, but the country is nonetheless much better off than it was under the tyranny of the Taliban.
(Continued in next post)
Source text is available at http://www.williamshawcross.com/first_page.html: click on the "After Iraq: America and Europe" link.
AFTER IRAQ: AMERICA AND EUROPE
2003 Harkness Lecture
King¹s College, London
27 March 2003
I AM IMMENSELY GRATEFUL to the Harkness Foundation. They gave me a scholarship to go to America for the first time in September 1972. I had just spent three months in Vietnam reporting on the war for the Sunday Times.
There I had formed one view of the United States. Living in America gave me quite another. With the backing of the Harkness I got a Congressional Fellowship which meant that I worked in both houses of Congress for Teddy Kennedy on the Health Subcommittee which he chaired and then for Congressman Les Aspin, who later became Secretary of Defence. And, because my time there coincided with Watergate, I did a lot of writing – I became the New Statesman¹s Washington correspondent.
I was staggered by the openness of American society and the availability of information and the diversity of views. I made good friends in Virginia, in New York and elsewhere who remain good friends today. From then on I went back and back to America and I have tried since always to write books which have an American content. I have reason for great gratitude to the Harkness foundation.
********
We meet tonight in interesting times. Frightening and challenging times.
I want to look at several questions briefly.
The first is President Bush.
The second is his advisers.
The third is the question of Iraq.
The fourth is the question of Europe.
But I would like to talk about all of these things, all of these people in one simple context – that of September 11. You cannot emphasise too often the importance of the attacks upon America. Everything that is happening today happened as a result of 9/11. For Americans it made a new world, if not a new America. Some say America just became more itself.
PRESIDENT BUSH
It is fashionable not just on the left but generally amongst the European intelligentsia to decry George Bush as an idiot.
This is, if I may say so, not very wise.
Cartoons and articles in papers such as the Guardian or the Daily Mirror constantly try and persuade us that this fool should not be taken seriously. Gerald Kaufman MP announced last year that ³Bush, himself the most intellectually backward American president of my political lifetime, is surrounded by advisers whose bellicosity is exceeded only by their political, military and diplomatic illiteracy.²
George Bush may not be obviously eloquent. He may address his remarks more frequently to Lubbock Texas than to Islington, but that does not make him stupid. What in fact we have here is not a stupid leader but one of the most radical in recent times. Bush leads a team which really wants to change the world. It is perhaps that which makes Europeans uncomfortable. But not wishing to acknowledge this, they take refuge in the stupidity claim.
He did well to become Governor of Texas, beating Anne Richards the well established Democrat. The Republicans have been sweeping through the South for years. Recently, I talked to Karl Rove, his close political adviser, who said that when he arrived in Texas in the late seventies there were a couple of republicans in the state legislature. Now there are a couple of Democrats. The South is being transformed.
Stupid? The British ambassador Christopher Meyer, who visited him in Texas in 1998 found him self-deprecatory, humorous and quick on his feet; he acknowledged he did not know much about the world, apart from Mexico.
After he won the Republican primaries he had planned to come to Europe. He did not, apparently at least in part because of the hostile press his victory generation. Le Monde referred to ³Le cretinisation² of US policy. This was perhaps beginning of the poison in the bloodstream.
Then he won the presidency, in very controversial circumstances, as you know.
Bush has changed since he came into office.
As governor of Texas, he was seen as a centrist, an incrementalist, even a conciliator. He ran in 2000 as a uniter not a divider. Most people expected Bush to govern from the centre, as Clinton had done. After all, he had squeaked in by the tiniest majority – or not, as the case may be. He had no mandate.
There is no centrism about him now. Now he seems to be an increasingly ideological president – his policies seem much more radical, both at home and abroad.
He is moving very boldly in a direction a lot of people will dislike. It involves levelling taxes, exploiting resources, celebrating wealth and markets. Government entitlements will be replaced by private safety nets – and they will be closer to the ground. The government is to become more efficient, more corporate. The courts are there to protect property and enforce individual responsibility.
From his successful $1.35 trillion tax cut, through the second round of huge tax cuts that he has proposed for this year, his conservative judicial nominations, and his proposals to reform Medicare and Medicaid, Bush¹s programme now has a distinctly conservative flavour, with little bipartisan appeal.
Bush does not seek just to cut taxes – he has pushed tax cuts with a supply side bias – in other words to stimulate investment rather consumer demand. He has persisted in this policy long after more cautious republicans started worrying more about the deficit. Instead of pre-empting the Democrats by, for example, cutting the payroll tax, which would benefit low-income tax payers, Bush plans to eliminate taxes on dividends.
He is making a radical shift of responsibilities from the government to the private sector and from the federal government to the states. The aim is to try and privatise retirement, through individual investment accounts, education through vouchers and welfare through faith based charities. This is not an overnight revolution but a gradual change – but there is no doubt about the direction in which it is going. Bush has announced plans to outsource thousands of federal jobs. This will help diminish the power of the public employee labour unions which till now have remained one of the strongest labour sectors in the economy.
There are hiccups or diversions.
Last March he slapped punitive tariffs on steel imports and gave similar favours to the farm and textile industries. This protectionism infuriated Europe and also his conservative admirers. White House officials however claim that it was done for short term tactical reasons – to persuade congressmen from those states that Bush should be given the freedom to negotiate trade deals. He got that authority.
And last November he proposed to the WTO that tariffs on all industrial and consumer goods be phased out, reaching zero by 2015. Textile state lawmakers were alarmed.
Also in November Bush infuriated the Teamsters, one of the few Labour unions, he has courted, by allowing Mexican truckers to transport goods anywhere in the USA. There are 20 million people of Mexican descent in America. Handy.
His policies are focussed on next year¹s elections. He did very well in the midterm elections last year. Jonathan Freedland covered him and wrote very revealingly about what a successful campaigner Bush was. He is determined to energise the Republican base. And it seems to be working.
Many of my friends in America detest a lot of what he is doing. They think he is destroying the domestic social welfare system and the notion of equity. But his approval ratings are higher even than Reagan¹s among Republicans. The plan is to reinforce his image as a strong decisive leader. Polarisation seems to be an acceptable price to pay for demonstration of resolve and vision. Bush¹s advisers see his strength as his ability to change the parameters of debate with bold initiatives.
This is what we should realise – Bush constantly defies the predictions of those who think they are smarter than he is.
He is not a dazzling speaker like Bill Clinton who could free associate for an hour on end and convince you that you have just heard the most important thing since Moses handed down the Ten Commandments. But his aides say that he is very good at focussing on an issue and carrying it out clearly and easily.
He likes to be seen as more Reagan Jr than Bush 2. Mike Deaver, the former senior Reagan aide, says ³He¹s the most Reagan-like politician we have seen, certainly in the White House. His father was supposed to be the third term of the Reagan Presidency but then he wasn¹t – this guy is.² Bush, like Reagan, believes that Presidents make their own mandates.
The symbol of Reaganism was his famous phrase ³It¹s morning in America.² Bush has as yet coined no such slogan. He lacks Reagan¹s facility, his eloquence.
Many people would say he also lacks Reagan¹s extraordinary public appeal.
Bush does not reach out to people. He does not seek to persuade. Instead he delivers ukases.
But he is a better manager than Reagan, who delegated every decision he could.
He could not bear to sack people. Bush maintains discipline himself. He sets an example for the White House which is rigorously followed.
The Clinton White House was characterised by endless discussion over endless pizzas, and the postponement of decisions. Pizzas are not called into the Bush White House. Discussion is limited. Decisions are made. People may not like them, but they are made.
********
There is another very important aspect to Bush.
A few weeks ago Jeremy Paxman interrogated Tony Blair on the war. He asked him ³Do you and President Bush pray together². Blair looked shocked, as if he regarded this as a pretty offensive question – which it certainly was.
However there is an underlying truth in that Blair and Bush do share their Christianity. They come from very different forms of church. But one senior member of the White House to whom I talked recently said that one of the reasons for the close relationship between Bush and Blair is indeed their shared faith.
In September 2002 Bush invited religious leaders – three Christian, one Jewish, one Muslim, to meet with him in the Oval Office. He talked about the war on terror and he asked them to pray with him. ³You know,² he said, ³I had a drinking problem. Right now I should be in a bar in Texas, not the Oval Office. There is only one reason I am in the Oval Office and not a bar. I found faith. I found God. I am here because of the power of prayer.²
Bishops in this country and in the United States may denounce the war as morally wrong, but Bush has no doubts about the rightness of his cause. After September 11 he reminded us that ³Freedom and fear, justice and cruelty have always been at war, and we know that God is not neutral between them.²
In his state of the union speech this year, he spoke of the ³power, wonderworking power² of ³the goodness and idealism and faith of the American people². The words ³wonderworking power² come from a hymn in which they refer to ³the precious blood of the lamb, Jesus Christ².
After 9/11 people came to churches in droves and many of them then left, having failed to find a larger meaning for what had happened. Bush in some ways has succeeded in framing that meaning. He asserts a world view which is usually dismissed as a heresy – the myth of redemptive violence, which posits a war between good and evil, between God and Satan. For God to win, evil needs to be destroyed by God¹s faithful followers.
This is alarming to the increasingly secular Europeans. Javier Solana, the EU¹s foreign policy chief recently said that the role of religion in US policy was becoming a difficulty for Europe. ³It is a kind of binary model. It is all or nothing. For us Europeans, it is difficult to deal with because we are secular. We do not see the world in such black and white terms.²
BUSH¹S ADVISERS
It is commonly said that US foreign policy is now dominated by a small group of neo-conservatives, neo-cons for short. They are called that because their intellectual origins were in the Democratic party, on the left.
One of their fundamental ideas is that the post Cold War world gives the US not just the opportunity but it some cases also the duty to extend liberal democracy around the world through the use of American power. They draw heavily on Wilsonian traditions, except that they distrust international frameworks and collective security. They differ also from conservative realists like Henry Kissinger who espouse balance of power politics and managed international relations. Unlike the Kissingerians, they demand moral clarity in foreign policy.
In the Clinton era – a period which is anathema to the neo-cons – they were centred on several publications like the Weekly Standard edited by William Kristol and owned by Rupert Murdoch, Commentary and the Wall Street Journal. The conservative think tank, the American Enterprise Institute, was the spiritual backer and home for many of them.
One of their most important groupings (in retrospect at least) was the Project for a New American Century founded in 1997 by William Kristol and Robert Kagan. Kagan is the author of the book Paradise and Power which has made a huge stir over recent months. He proposes the thesis that in terms of making foreign policy and war Americans are from Mars and Europeans are from Venus.
Its original members included Richard Perle, Paul Wolfowitz, Lewis Libby, Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney, Elliot Abrams and Zalmay Khalilzad.
Back then in the late 90s, they had a specific goal. Saddam. The group wrote to President Clinton that ³the only acceptable strategy is one that eliminates the possibility that Iraq will be able to use or threaten to use weapons of mass destruction. In the near term this means a willingness to undertake military actionŠIn the long term it means removing Saddam Hussein and his regime from power.² Almost all of these men are now senior members of the Bush administration – some of them, as you know, very senior. They are now implementing the policy towards Iraq which they have advocated for at least five years.
I don¹t want to say that they all believe the same things. They don¹t, but there are some common threads in their views.
They tend to believe that we live in a special moment of history, one which is characterised above all by America¹s unparalleled military power and the opportunity to expand the boundaries of democracy around the world. This is the time for a grand strategy to assert Pax Americana. This is the decisive decade in human liberty.
They value strategic thinking and the setting of priorities. They are wary of permanent alliances and are attracted to bold geopolitical moves for the expansion of American values. They are not wedded to stability. Conversely, they are not afraid of challenging the status quo. As we are seeing in Iraq.
They see American values as universal values and believe passionately in the special mission of the United States to bring American style democracy to the rest of the world. That is particularly true since 9/11. They, like President Bush, tend to see the world in very straightforward terms – even in terms of good and evil. They do not believe that evil governments can be reformed. Sovereignty is relative – the more evil the state the less sovereignty to which it is entitled.
They are particularly close to the state of Israel, in some cases to the Likud party, and they see the defence of Israel as a test of America¹s willingness to defend American values. They believe that Israel will achieve peace not through compromising with her enemies, but through a grand re-ordering of her environment, through overwhelming force, and through daring strategic moves.
Even before the agonising rows over Resolution 1441 and Iraq¹s lack of disarmament, they had no great regard for the United Nations. They see it as filled with undemocratic or anti American nations which seek to use it to constrain the United States.
They believe that the US:
ß must maintain its military pre-eminence through increased defence spending and the removal of any constraints on its ability to project its military power around the world.
ß must act alone if necessary to defend its interest, whether those be access to oil, preventing the proliferation of WMD or ending global terrorism.
Until September 11, some of them tended to see the emergence of China as a global power as the greatest threat to US goals. Since September 11 of course it is the Muslim world which they see as the most important with which they have to deal. They argue that only the removal of illegitimate regimes in the Middle East and the creation of democratic states in Islamic societies can deal with the threat of Islamic terrorism.
********
George Bush was not a neo-conservative when he came to office. He appointed Colin Powell as Secretary of State, which was seen as an embrace of realism, but many of his other appointments, from Donald Rumsfeld down, gave great power to the neo-cons within the administration, even before September 11.
As soon as he came into office he infuriated many of his allies by refusing to enforce the Kyoto Treaty on climate change and by withdrawing from the fledgling International Criminal Court.
On the matter of Kyoto, it is worth pointing out that Bill Clinton never fought for it either. He sat on it for three years and never presented it to the Senate, which he knew would never ratify it. The Bush administration¹s mistake was perhaps to be casually frank about it.
But September 11 is the watershed. The lessons of Vietnam, which had replaced the lessons of Munich and held American policymakers and soldiers in thrall since the mid 1970s, vanished on 12 September. Now the only lessons that mattered were those of 9/11 itself and they were not instantly easy to read.
Three days later in his speech at the National Cathedral in Washington, President Bush stated that the US would not hesitate to act alone and would act pre-emptively to prevent future terrorist threats. Paul Wolfowitz, one of the most subtle of the neo-cons and now Deputy Secretary of Defence, stated that the US would ³end² states which supported terrorism. Wolfowitz had been urging the end of Saddam Hussein for a decade.
The Taliban were given time to hand over Bin Laden; when they refused, they were attacked and driven from power. Western commitment to Afghanistan since has faltered, but the country is nonetheless much better off than it was under the tyranny of the Taliban.
(Continued in next post)
, Art