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Excerpts from "America Alone" |
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America Alone: The Neoconservatives and the Global Order
By Stefan Halper and Jonathan Clarke
Two Conservatives Answer: Why Iraq?
About the authors: Reagan is their favorite. One worked for Nixon, Ford and Reagan. Careful scholars, conservative in their judgement, they have studied the neoconservatives in depth. Here, in their own words, is what they found:
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Cheney & Neocons Hijacked Bush's Foreign Policy
"[The neoconservatives'] focus is narrow, in fact distilled: the Middle East and military power, most of all the use of military power in the Middle East." (p.19)
"throughout the campaign, Bush repeatedly came out against nation-building." (p.134)
"Bush said 'I don't think our troops should be used for what's called nation-building. I think our troops should be used to fight and win war.' (p.135)
"Cheney is unique in American history .... He is the vortex in the White House on foreign policymaking. Everything comes through him." (p. 120)
"Hijack may be a harsh word, but there is no better description of what occured. America and the world will have to live with the consequences long after the neoconservatives themselves are but a distant memory.
What did the hijack consist of? The vital components were early moves to capture the language of the debate to choke off options they did not like. This was followed by advancing the long-cherished objective of an almost exclusive focus on the Middle East and the use of military force not simply for defensive purposes but for preemptive reasons." (p.139)
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New Policy: Preemptive War
"The administration's emerging policy of preemptions achieved formal status when it was included in the National Security Strategy published on September 17, 2002. ... One neo-conservative has described the NSS as a 'quintessentially neo-conservative document." ... [Halper & Clarke then describe occasional use of preemption by past presidents.] ... All of this begs the question of why, if the arrow was in the quiver, the administration chose to take this highly public and provocative step. Among the immediate results was alarm among allied governments who had to defend their common cause with America before skeptical parliaments and hostile publics.
In sum, the doctrine laid out by the NSS was exactly what Bush had warned against in his campaign speeches and debates—but it was entirely consistent with the approach advocated by the neo-conservatives for over a decade." (p.141-143)
[This not only laid the groundwork for the Iraq war but for the nuclear preemption policy about to be adopted.]
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Iraq War Was Planned Before 9/11
"At his confirmation hearing [well before 9/11] Wolfowitz underscored his Iraq views, saying that sanctions were only part of the solution and that should there be a "real option" to overthrow Hussein, "I would certainly think it was worthwhile." (p. 148)
"The precise sequence of events showing how the neo-conservatives secured the adoption of their agenda is set out below in our case study of Iraq. In summary, the crucial meeting took place on September 15 in the Laurel Lodge at Camp David, at which Wolfowitz made the case for action against Iraq." (p.149)
"With Cheney signed up in the hawks' camp, however, Bush received advice throughout the summer of 2002 to forget the U.N., forget inspections, and focus instead on taking aggressive action against Iraq." (p.154)
"The reasons for the war—weapons of mass destruction, links with al-Qaeda, human rights abuses—covered a wide and ever-changing kaleidoscope. With the war's conclusion, the 'WMD' argument has been largely discredited and it is retrospectively seen as a politically conveniently pretext.
What, then, was the unstated reason for going to Iraq? According to Wolfowitz, another "almost unnoticed but huge" reason for war was to promote Middle East peace by allowing the United States to take its troops out of Saudi Arabia—ironically, this was precisely Osama bin Laden's agenda." (p. 155)
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Neo-cons are not Neo-Reaganites
"As he [Podhoretz, the #2 neocon] argued: 'What President Reagan's response to the Polish crisis reveals is that he has in practice been following a strategy of helping the Soviet Union stabilize its empire, rather than a strategy aimed at encouraging the breakdown of that empire from within.' ... This typical neo-con desire for public pyrotechnics led them to miss the more subtle side of Reagan's response: financial assistance delivered to the Solidarity movement via the AFL/CIO and moral suasion through Pope John Paul II." (p.166)
"When the [Reagan] administration announced plans to sell five early warning radar aircraft to Riyadh [Saudi Arabia] ... Irving Kristol [#1 neocon] described it as 'an action for which not even a foolish reason can be given.'" (p.167)
"As Podhoretz argued, 'the President's [Reagan's] friends and enemies imagined him a champion of the liberation of the Soviet empire. The truth, however, is that Mr. Reagan as Prsident has never shown the slightest inclination to pursue such an ambitious strategy.'" (p.171)
"Reagan was optimistic; he appealed to people's best hopes, not their fears. His was a confidence that America itself was attractive. ... By contrast, the neo-conservative vision is one of fear. ... their philosophy is a philosophy centered around Hobbes's doomsday vision."
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Murdoch, Fox—Why Americans Think Iraq Planned 9/11
"The paths of Murdoch and the neo-conservatives converged in the 1990s. Murdoch asserted his strong personal and business attachments to Israel, and like many neoconservatives, he received recognition in the United States for his support of Israel. His position on Israel has been enough to force correspondents to resign when their stories did not conform to the approved line. A former correspondent for the London Times, Sam Kiley, provides a case in point. He resigned after a disagreement over a story involving an incident on the West Bank. Kiley said, 'No for-Israel lobbyist ever dreamed of having such power over a great national newspaper.'" (p.186)
Murdoch owns the Weekly Standard, the "flagship publication of the neo-conservatives," which "has operated at a financial loss ever since it was founded." This is unheard of for a Murdoch publication and demonstrates Murdoch's political commitment. "The Murdoch empire grew over the 1990s to include Fox Broadcasting Network." (p.187)
"... in the lead-up to the war and during the postwar period, a large section of the American public held a number of mis-perceptions ...
believed Iraq to have been directly involved in the attacks of 9/11;
that Iraq and al-Qaeda were linked;
that weapons of mass destruction were found in Iraq after the war;
that Iraq actually used weapons of mass destruction during the war; and
that world opinion generally approved of America's going to war.
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But in the case of Fox News, the polling data demonstrated clearly that the more attention viewers paid to the network, the greater the likelihood that they would hold serious mis-perceptions."
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Neocon Mistakes or Deceptions? You decide.
"according to Kaplan and Kristol ... only 75,000 troops would be required to police the war's aftermath, at only $16 billion a year. ... drawn down to several thousand soldiers after a year or two." (p.119-120)
"As Wolfowitz told Congress ... 'we are dealing with a country that can really finance its own reconstruction' ... 'There's a lot of money to pay for this. It doesn't have to be U.S. taxpayer money." (p.222-3)
"The State Department and seventeen other federal agencies had embarked on an enormous effort called the Future of Iraq Project, which involved hundreds of Iraqis from the country's many ethnic and religious factions ... eventually a 13 volume report emerged anticipating many of the problems that eventually beset post-conflict Iraq. The project devised strategies for winning hearts and minds of the average Iraqis by improving and securing living conditions ... the working group contended that not all Baathists were war criminals and that these people were a necessary part of the nation-building process."
"While the detailed work of the Future of Iraq project was brushed aside, Chalabi's [a neocon ally since 1982] people assured the Administration that they controlled a vast underground network that would rise up in support of coalition forces and support the enforcement of security. They were adamant that the whole of the Iraqi army must be immediately disbanded." (p.224-5) [This is what was done and it has been considered one of the top three mistakes of the war ever since.]
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http://zfacts.com/p/130.html | 01/18/12 07:17 GMT
Modified: Tue, 10 Oct 2006 04:25:26 GMT
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America Alone:
By mainstream Republicans with long experience in government. Fair-minded and fascinating. The book is a damning indictment of neocons and the Iraq War -- because it is incredibly well researched and cautious. Read the authors' key points in their own words.
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