Bush Ultra-Hawks May Have Overplayed Iraq Bluster

by Jim Lobe

The result, according to some observers, is that the administration's most ardent hawks, those who consider an invasion of Iraq only the prelude to a radical U.S.-led transformation of the entire Middle East, may be losing influence in Bush's inner councils.

That, in turn, has offered Secretary of State Colin Powell, who seems to favor a more moderate and far less ambitious approach to both the Mideast and the war on terrorism, some running room.

The most visible sign that the hawks may have lost momentum came last week when the White House announced that Bush will seek formal Congressional authorization for an invasion of Iraq. The announcement seemed to pull the rug out from under Vice President Dick Cheney, who only a few days before, said Bush saw no need for Congressional action before a military attack.

Even more sobering was word out of the White House that Bush was now inclined to ask the United Nations Security Council, before taking military action, to demand that Baghdad accept and cooperate with a tough new inspection regime to ensure it was not developing weapons of mass destruction (WMD).

That may have embarrassed Cheney, who had spent much of a major policy address delivered the previous week arguing that new UN inspections were a waste of valuable time. It could also have marked a rare victory for Powell, who since last Sept. 11 had lost virtually every major internal policy debate to Cheney and the equally hawkish Secretary of Defence, Donald Rumsfeld.

However, other observers believe that this is all window-dressing and that Bush might very well get everything he wants from both the AIPAC-scared Congress and Security Council.

While Powell's victory could only be an attempt at "smile diplomacy" designed to reassure worried European and Arab allies that Washington is not as unilateralist or aggressive as they may have believed, some analysts believe the hawks have really suffered a major setback.

"I think the tide has turned," one foreign-policy veteran of the administration of George Bush Sr., told IPS Sept.11. "I think some sanity has been restored to the sandbox."

If so, the blame may go to the neo-conservatives themselves in and outside the administration that have called for a policy of "regime change" not only in Iraq, but in all Arab countries hostile to Israel, including longtime ally Saudi Arabia.

In the policy debates over the war on terrorism, both Cheney and Rumsfeld have relied heavily on the arguments of a group of extreme conservative staff and advisers with close ties to the right-wing Likud party in Israel.

They include, among others, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Douglas Feith, Cheney's chief of staff I. Lewis Libby, and a number of policy mavens, especially the chairman of Rumsfeld's Defence Policy Board (DPB), Richard Perle, based at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), a rightist think-tank that also includes Cheney's spouse, Lynne.

Perle and AEI's top Mideast-policy "scholars", former Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) officer Reuel Marc Gerecht, Michael Ledeen, and Michael Rubin (just hired by the Pentagon to plan for a post-Saddam Hussein government in Baghdad), along with former CIA director James Woolsey, have been at the heart of a well-orchestrated war campaign.

Visible mainly on the editorial and op-ed pages of the rightist Wall Street Journal and The Weekly Standard, the group has lobbied to extend the war on al Qaeda and the Taliban to virtually the entire Arab Middle East, first through a U.S. invasion of Iraq (which the same group, without any evidence, has insisted has ties to al Qaeda and may have been behind last year's Sept. 11 attacks in New York and Washington), and then through U.S.-payrolled insurrections in Iran and Syria.

'The War on Terror Won't End in Baghdad"' was the title of a typical piece by Ledeen that appeared in the Journal last week. "This war cannot be limited to national theatres," he wrote; "We face a regional challenge and must respond accordingly".

The same group -- along with like-minded associates in the administration and other think tanks -- has depicted Saudi Arabia, and especially its Wahhabi clergy, as the fount of global Islamist extremism and terror. They have repeated endlessly that, of the 19 skyjackers who slammed airliners into the World Trade Center towers and the Pentagon one year ago, 15 were from Saudi Arabia.

While these forces have been pressing that argument since late last year, it made headlines in August after a DPB member leaked details of a secret briefing arranged by Perle to the board, given July 10 by Laurent Murawiec, a French academic on temporary assignment at the Rand Corporation here.

Murawiec described Saudi Arabia as "the kernel of evil, the prime mover, the most dangerous opponent" in the Middle East and called for "taking the Saudi out of Arabia."

The leak created a sensation, not only infuriating the Saudis who had already been complaining bitterly about the media campaign against them; it also appears to have mobilized much of the foreign-policy establishment, particularly those actors linked to major U.S. oil corporations with huge interests in the region, like Bush Sr. aides Brent Scowcroft and James Baker..

The administration immediately disavowed Murawiec's views, and Bush, then on vacation at his Texas ranch, invited Saudi Ambassador Prince Bandar for a high-profile visit. Rand effectively fired Murawiec, while Perle insisted that he had no idea what Murawiec would say in advance, an assertion met with general disbelief.

It was shortly afterwards that Bush Sr.'s national security adviser Scowcroft, as well as his secretary of state Baker, a long-time protector of Big Oil, published columns gravely warning against the administration's unilateralist course on Iraq.

In an even more pointed Washington Post op-ed, former President Jimmy Carter's national security adviser, Zbigniew Brzezinski, argued that "public support should not be generated by fear-mongering or demagogy, with some of it encouraged by parties with a strategic interest in fostering American-Arab hostility," a veiled reference to the pro-Likud group.

"Particularly disturbing in that regard," he went on, "has been the news report that some members of the Pentagon's Defense Policy Board have been pushing, in addition to war with Iraq, a confrontation in U.S.-Saudi Arabian relations."

But it was none other than the president's father, a longtime Òoiligarch,Ó who made it clear early this week that the neo-conservative campaign against the Arab world in general and Saudi Arabia in particular had gone much too far.

In an interview with NBC-TV Monday that studiously avoided policy issues, the former president predicted that anti-American sentiment in the Arab world will pass but then went on to say -- in an apparent reference to the Wall Street Journal, which has acted as the main mouthpiece for the public neo-conservative campaign over the last six months:

"What I don't like is demonising Saudi Arabia, for example, as we see some of the great national newspapers doing. I don't like that. It's not true. They're not enemies of ours. And for them to come under that kind of criticism, I think it's ridiculous."