With the Bush administration opting to target Afghanistan first, neoconservatives presented it as simply a first step in a broader Middle Eastern war. In the October 29, 2001, issue of The Weekly Standard, Robert Kagan and William Kristol predicted a much wider war on terrorism.
When all is said and done, the conflict in Afghanistan will be to the war on terrorism what the North Africa campaign was to World War II: an essential beginning on the path to victory. But compared with what looms over the horizon – a wide-ranging war in locales from Central Asia to the Middle East and, unfortunately, back again to the United States – Afghanistan will prove but an opening battle …. But this war will not end in Afghanistan. It is going to spread and engulf a number of countries in conflicts of varying intensity. It could well require the use of American military power in multiple places simultaneously. It is going to resemble the clash of civilizations that everyone has hoped to avoid.2
Despite their reference to the desire to avoid such a civilizational clash, it seems that Kagan and Kristol looked forward to that gigantic conflagration.
In a November 20, 2001, article in The Wall Street Journal, Eliot A. Cohen would dub the conflict “World War IV,” a term picked up by other neoconservatives and their critics. (“World War III” had been applied to the cold war.) Cohen proclaimed that “The enemy in this war is not 'terrorism' … but militant Islam …. Afghanistan constitutes just one front in World War IV, and the battles there just one campaign.”1
Critics of a wider war in the Middle East were quick to notice the neo-conservative war propaganda effort. In analyzing the situation in late September 2001, Scott McConnell wrote:
For the neoconservatives, however, bin Laden is but a sideshow …. They hope to use September 11 as pretext for opening a wider war in the Middle East. Their prime, but not only, target is Saddam Hussein's Iraq, even if Iraq [had] nothing to do with the World Trade Center assault.2
However, McConnell mistakenly considered the neocon position to be a minority one within the Bush administration.
The neocon wish list is a recipe for igniting a huge conflagration between the United States and countries throughout the Arab world, with consequences no one could reasonably pretend to calculate. Support for such a war – which could turn quite easily into a global war – is a minority position within the Bush administration (Assistant Secretary of State [sic] Paul Wolfowitz is its main advocate) and the country. But it presently dominates the main organs of conservative journalistic opinion, the Wall Street Journal, National Review, the Weekly Standard, and the Washington Times, as well as Marty Peretz's neoliberal New Republic. In a volatile situation, such organs of opinion could matter.3
Expressing a similar view, veteran columnist Georgie Anne Geyer observed:
The “Get Iraq” campaign … started within days of the September bombings …. It emerged first and particularly from pro-Israeli hard-liners in the Pentagon such as Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz and adviser Richard Perle, but also from hard-line neoconservatives, and some journalists and congressmen.
Soon it became clear that many, although not all, were in the group that is commonly called in diplomatic and political circles the “Israel-firsters,” meaning that they would always put Israeli policy, or even their perception of it, above anything else.
Within the Bush administration, Geyer believed that this line of thinking was “being contained by cool heads in the administration, but that could change at any time.”1
Although the neoconservatives could not completely get their entire war against the Middle East enemies of Israel begun right away, the events of 9/11 were critical in leading the United States to adopt significant portions of their already-existing Middle East war program. This entailed a melding of American and Israeli policy.
And it was not just that the United States would be moving to combat Israel's enemies but that it would adopt the same militant, absolutist approach of the Israeli right. Naomi Klein, writing in The Guardian, aptly refers to it as “Likudisation of the world.” She writes:
What I mean is that on September 11, George W. Bush went looking for a political philosophy to guide him in his new role as “War President,” a job for which he was uniquely unqualified. He found that philosophy in the Likud Doctrine, conveniently handed to him ready-made by the ardent Likudniks already ensconced in the White House. No thinking required …. It's not simply that Bush sees America's role as protecting Israel from a hostile Arab world. It's that he has cast the United States in the very same role in which Israel casts itself, facing the very same threat. In this narrative, the U.S. is fighting a never ending battle for its very survival against utterly irrational forces that seek nothing less than its total extermination.2
The events of 9/11 had a profound impact on President Bush's psyche, causing him to adopt the neocons pre-packaged simple solution of a war of good versus evil. The idea of a war of good versus evil was undoubtedly in line with Bush's Christian evangelical beliefs. Bush's adoption of the neocon war agenda provided him with a purpose in life, which he identified as the will of God. As Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank writes:
Bush has come to view his leadership of post 9/11 America as a matter of fate, or of God's will …. With that assumption, it is almost impossible to imagine Bush confining the war on terrorism to al-Qaeda. Instead, he quickly embraced the most sweeping foreign policy proposal his most hawkish advisers had developed – a vision of American supremacy and preemption of emerging threats – and that policy leads inexorably to Iraq, and beyond.3
This neocons' war agenda fitted in not only with Bush's born-again Evangelical Christianity, with its millenarian aspects, but it also meshed with the vaunted American frontier values of toughness and simplicity, which Bush consciously tries to emulate. Historian Douglas Brinkley, director of the Eisenhower Center at the University of New Orleans, calls Bush a “rough and ready” President in the mold of Jackson, Polk and Truman.
“He's absorbed those traditions, this very tough-line attitude,” Brinkley said. “It's a way for him to get intellectual certainty without getting involved in deeper questions. He can cling tenaciously to a belief. When there's a crisis, he resorts to a tough rhetorical line or threat.”1
Neoconservatives presented the September 11 atrocities as a lightning bolt to make President Bush aware of his destiny to destroy the evil of world terrorism. In the religious (ironically Christian) terminology of Norman Podhoretz,
[A] transformed – or, more precisely, a transfigured – George W. Bush appeared before us. In an earlier article in these pages, I suggested, perhaps presumptuously, that out of the blackness of smoke and fiery death let loose by September 11, a kind of revelation, blazing with a very different fire of its own, lit up the recesses of Bush's mind and heart and soul. Which is to say that, having previously been unsure as to why he should have been chosen to become President of the United States, George W. Bush now knew that the God to whom, as a born-again Christian, he had earlier committed himself had put him in the Oval Office for a purpose. He had put him there to lead a war against the evil of terrorism.2
In essence, the events of September 11 had transformed George Bush in the way he would look at the world. Stefan Halper and Jonathan Clarke write in America Alone:
The duty-bound, born-again, can-do Texan morphed into a man who drew on those qualities and intensity of those early days to focus a searing rage. He was determined to rally the nation and the civilized world to crush al-Qaeda and the diabolical future it represented. The dynamic forged by the moment distilled the many shades of gray reflecting relations among nations into a black and white Manichean “either you are with us or against us” position. To say that American national security priorities were transformed is an understatement. His declaration of the “war on terror” redefined the strategic landscape. Most significant in terms of the shift was the transition from a “humble” candidate Bush to a President whose administration policy was based on unilatera
l preemption and millenarian nation building.3
Moreover, the neocons in the post 9/11 period were feeding Bush with bogus intelligence. In short, the weight of information provided to Bush naturally moved him in the pro-war direction. It was understandable that a man who knew nothing else would adopt the neocon line that was being handed him, although a curious individual might grasp the neocons' biases. Added to this was the fact that the pro-war policy seemed to have political support and Bush could bask in the praise of his supporters for his firm “leadership.” Such positive feedback naturally would tend to convince Bush of the rightness of his pro-war viewpoint.
The Bush administration's post-911 militant, unilateralist position is quite different from what had been the American foreign policy position of the United States in the past. It differs from liberal internationalism in its rejection of international cooperation and international law. A few days after the United States attack on Iraq in March 2003, Richard Perle gleefully celebrated the destruction of internationalism wrought by the American preemptive attack.
Saddam Hussein's reign of terror is about to end. He will go quickly, but not alone: in a parting irony, he will take the UN down with him. Well, not the whole UN. The “good work” part will survive, the low-risk peacekeeping bureaucracies will remain, the chatterbox on the Hudson will continue to bleat. What will die is the fantasy of the UN as the foundation of a new world order. As we sift the debris, it will be important to preserve, the better to understand, the intellectual wreckage of the liberal conceit of safety through international law administered by international institutions.1
The neocon agenda adopted by the Bush administration differs dramatically from the traditional conservative foreign policy position stance in its rejection of maintaining global stability. Stefan Halper and Jonathan Clarke maintain that
the neoconservatives have taken American international relations on an unfortunate detour, veering away from the balanced, consensus-building, and resource-husbanding approach that has characterized traditional Republican internationalism – exemplified today by Secretary of State Colin Powell – and acted more as a special interest focused on its particular agenda.2
By adopting the neocon position of dramatically altering the Middle East status quo, the Bush administration stood in stark contrast to the traditional American position of promoting stability in the area in order to facilitate the flow of oil to the West – though forceful change, of course, meshed perfectly with the long-established Israeli goal of destabilizing its enemies. According to Kenneth Adelman, “The starting point is that conservatives now are for radical change and the progressives – the establishment foreign policy makers – are for the status quo.” Adelman emphasized that “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.”1 In the words of Michael Ledeen: “Creative destruction is our middle name. We do it automatically …. It is time once again to export the democratic revolution.”2
The foreign policy shift by the neocons was not supported by members of the foreign policy elite. Significantly, those cool to the preemptive strike on Iraq included luminaries of the Republican foreign policy establishment such as Brent Scowcroft, who served as national security advisor under Presidents Ford and George H. W. Bush; Lawrence Eagleburger, who served as deputy secretary of state and secretary of state under the first Bush; and James Baker, who served as secretary of state in that administration.3
In an op-ed piece in the August 15, 2002, issue of Wall Street Journal, entitled, “Don't Attack Iraq,” Scowcroft contended that Saddam was not connected with terrorists and that his weapons posed no threat to the United States. Scowcroft acknowledged that “Given Saddam's aggressive regional ambitions, as well as his ruthlessness and unpredictability, it may at some point be wise to remove him from power.” However: “An attack on Iraq at this time would seriously jeopardize, if not destroy, the global counterterrorist campaign we have undertaken.”4
Also expressing strong opposition to the war on Iraq was Zbigniew Brzezinski, the national security advisor in the Carter administration, who is often wrongly identified by hardline war critics as the central figure in the war cabal.5 To be sure, Brzezinski explicitly advocated American global dominance in his 1997 work, The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy and its Geostrategic Imperatives.6 However, during the build up for war, he expressed the concern that a unilateral attack on Iraq would serve to undermine America's global interests. What especially troubled him was the havoc America's unilateral march to war was wreaking on America's alliance with Western Europe, which he considered the central element of American global policy, terming it the “anchor point of America's engagement in the world.” Brzezinski feared that the “cross-Atlantic vitriol” over America's plan to attack Iraq despite European opposition had left “NATO's unity in real jeopardy.” Moreover, the Bush administration's fixation on Iraq interfered with America's ability to engage in other global hotspots, with Brzezinski observing that “there is justifiable concern that the preoccupation with Iraq – which does not pose an imminent threat to global security – obscures the need to deal with the more serious and genuinely imminent threat posed by North Korea.” Brzezinski granted that “force may have to be used to enforce the goal of disarmament. But how and when that force is applied should be part of a larger strategy, sensitive to the risk that the termination of Saddam Hussein's regime may be purchased at too high a cost to America's global leadership.”1
In fact, the entire foreign policy establishment tended to be cool to the war policy, as shown by opposition from within the elite Council on Foreign Relations. As columnist Robert Kuttner wrote in September 2003, “… it's still a well-kept secret that the vast foreign policy mainstream –Republican and Democratic ex-public officials, former ambassadors, military and intelligence people, academic experts – consider Bush's whole approach a disaster.”2
While the neoconservatives never succeeded in winning over the foreign policy elite to their Middle East war agenda, the September 11, 2001, terror events, however, enabled the neoconservatives to gain support from a majority of the American people for their Middle East war agenda. Most importantly, neoconservative policies have received particular support from Americans of a more conservative, patriotic bent.
The 9/11 attacks made the American people angry and fearful. Ordinary Americans wanted to strike back at the terrorist enemy, even though they weren't exactly sure who that enemy was. Many could not distinguish between Saddam and Osama bin Laden. Moreover, they were fearful of more attacks and were susceptible to the administration's propaganda that the United States had to strike Iraq before Iraq somehow struck the United States. In other words, the neocons' propaganda found fertile soil in America, though it got virtually nowhere in the rest of the world.
It wasn't that difficult to channel American fear and anger into war against Iraq. Polls and much anecdotal evidence showed a majority of the American people in favor of the war. The support was strongest among the white American working and lower middle class. Blacks opposed the war but not by a substantial margin. Since the September 11 terrorism the popular heroes have been average Americans – policemen, firemen, soldiers. Their perceived heroism had the effect of boosting the self-esteem of average, ordinary white people.1 The least educated tended to be the most angry and fearful and gave the greatest support to the war.2
To conclude, the American war on Iraq and the overall effort calling for regime change in the Middle East reflects a partial adoption of the neoconservative agenda for the area. The war did not reflect any existing agenda of the oil lobby, American militarists, or the Bush family. Although the neoconservatives were influential in political circles, it was only the environment created by the September 11, 2001, terrorist events that enabled the neoconservatives to have the American government adopt, though not yet totally adopt, the
ir Middle East war agenda – a war agenda that advances the interests of Israel and has been sought by the Israeli government. The neocons achieved their goal not by winning the support of the American foreign policy elite by virtue of their reasoned arguments, but by providing an agenda that fitted in with the psychological trauma caused by the 9/11 terrorism, and thus captivating President Bush and a significant percentage of the American people.
1. Joseph Wilson, The Politics of Truth: Inside the Lies that Led to War and Betrayed My Wife's CIA Identity (New York: Carroll & Graf Publishers, 2004), p. 425; Craig R. Eisendrath and Melvin A. Goodman, Bush League Diplomacy: How the Neoconservatives Are Putting the World at Risk (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2004); Stefan Halper and Jonathan Clarke, America Alone: The Neoconservatives and the Global Order (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 2004); Joshua Micah Marshall, “Bomb Saddam?: How the Obsession of a Few Neocon Hawks Became the Central Goal of U.S. Foreign Policy,” Washington Monthly, June, 2002, online; Michael Lind, “How Neoconservatives Conquered Washington – and Launched a War,” Antiwar.com, April 10, 2003; Elizabeth Drew, “The Neoocons in Power,” New York Review of Books, Vol. 50, No. 10, June 12, 2003, online; Michael Hirsh, “The Mideast: Neocons on the Line,” Newsweek, June 23, 2003, online; Robert Kuttner, “Neocons Have Hijacked U.S. Foreign Policy,” Boston Globe, September 10, 2003, online; Patrick J. Buchanan, “Whose War?” The American Conservative, March 24, 2003, online [see pp. 135–147 of the companion to the present volume, Neo-CONNED!—Ed.]; Justin Raimondo, “The Neocons' War,” Antiwar.com, June 2, 2004; Sam Francis, “An Anti-War Column: Bush Likudniks Seek to Start 'World War IV,'” Vdare.com, March 20, 2003; Paul Craig Roberts, “Neo-Jacobins Push for World War IV,” LewRockwell.com, September 20, 2003; Scott McConnell, “The Struggle Over War Aims: Bush Versus the Neo-Cons,” Antiwar.com, September 25, 2002.
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