NEOCON HAWKS SELF DESTRUCT?

Evidence is emerging that the neo-conservative hawks who shaped the Bush administration’s Middle East Policy, and in particular the war in Iraq, are in a self destruct mode.
For some time, journalists have been unable to determine if the once powerful neocon institution PNAC –Project for the New American Century- is still functioning or has closed its doors. More puzzling is that no one answers phones at its base in Washington DC. and its last public statement was in January 2005. All of this should come as no surprise to political commentators who have watched a growing “political cannibalism” within the group. That has been characterized by some of its founders and most prominent speakers attacking each other over the direction of the war in Iraq.
The attacks began with leading neocons like Weekly Standard editor and Fox News contributor, Bill Kristol, zeroing in on Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld, for his failure to anticipate the Iraq insurgency and to deploy sufficient troops to pacify the country. Further disagreements between PNAC ideologues centered on the Bush administration’s continued belief that it could still democratize the Middle East. Some PNAC officials complained that a persistent commitment to a disastrous Iraq war had contributed to a failure to anticipate the growing threat from China and to plan for the day the US might have to defend the island of Taiwan against Chinese aggression.
PNAC leaders have always lambasted their critics for attributing to them too much influence in the shaping US foreign policy and promoting America as a glob superpower, but there now is sufficient evidence to show that PNAC did indeed mould Bush White House foreign policy agendas.
PNAC began life in 1997 as a Washington DC non-profit think tank with the aim of establishing American as the world biggest economy and military superpower. The organization had powerful allies in the background, providing money and influence. Among their backers were three wealthy foundations – The Sarah Scaife, the Bradley Foundation and the John Mc Oil Foundation. One only has to look at some of the founders to see how influential it was likely to become. Apart from its chairman, Bill Kristol, the following were in its ranks: Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney, Richard Perle, Paul Wolfowitz, Elliott Abrams, Richard Armitage, William Bennett, Lewis Libby, Francis Fukuyama, Zalmay Khalilzad and John Bolton. All those men, and more, especially Cheney and Rumsfeld who were PNAC founders, featured prominently in office after George Bush became president in 2000. Today, for example, John Bolton is ambassador to the UN and Zalmay Khalilzad is ambassador in Iraq.
From its inception PNAC made no secret of its conviction that Taiwan and Israel were America’s most important allies and required its unwavering support. Close ties were established to Israel’s Likud Party and PNAC founders began formulating strategies about how the Middle East could be shaped to further US power in the Gulf and beyond, and how the outcome had to blend with Israel’s vision of a New Middle East. An insight into how PNAC viewed the world can be found in a letter in which John Bolton and four other PNAC leaders sent to President Clinton in January 1998. The letter began with the thesis that Iraq presented the biggest threat to US interests in the Middle East and, therefore, Saddam Hussein should be removed from power as quickly as possible. There was no way, the letter’s authors argued, that UN inspections could stop Iraq’s chemical and biological weapons production - weapons Saddam would undoubtedly use against American troops in a region that produced a third of the world’s oil. The letter added that the US had full UN authority to use military means to take down the Iraqi regime and it concluded with the following plea to President Clinton:
“If you act now to end the threat of weapons of mass destruction against the U.S. or its allies, you will be acting in the most fundamental national security interests of this country.”

A close reading of that letter is sufficient to convince any skeptic of PNAC’s influence on American policy that the same agenda was pitched successfully to President Bush months after he moved into the White House. By then, PNAC had enough of its founders in place – even in the White House itself - to convince the president that the overthrow of Saddam Hussein should top his agenda. As we know now, the overthrow of Saddam became the president’s agenda even before the events of 9/11 and PNAC’s leaders were in place to see it through - men like Cheney, Rumsfeld, Perle, Wolfowitz, Armitage, Bolton, Peter Rodman, Lewis Libby and Elliott Abrams.
When things started to go badly wrong in Iraq by the end of 2004, unity within PNAC on the Iraq policy began to unravel with some members reaching out to other groupings who felt Iraq was steadily becoming a quagmire and was obscuring other vital issues such as Russia’s drift back to a hard-line communist ideology and China’s increasing desire for economic global domination. Bill Kristol, and some of his fellow PNAC members, argued that the US was much too soft on Russia and China, countries that posed greater threats to US global interests in the long term.
PNAC’s last public statement in January 2005 called for a large increase in the US troop presence in Iraq. It was a desperate final effort by some leading figures in the organization to shore up a failed Iraq. By committing more troops those PNAC members hoped to stem the descent into chaos in the country. The plea did not find favor in the White House or with Dick Cheney who had no desire to make such a politically unpopular move and further bind the US to a long term Iraq strategy.
The PNAC move highlighted the origins of a serious and seemingly implacable gulf in thinking between members of an organization that had done so much to ensure we invaded Iraq and subsequently wondered if it had been a wise move. Recent comments from some neocons indicate they know the Iraq war gamble was a disaster that shifted focus from vital areas of US foreign policy. That is a far cry from the heady days of 1997/1998 and later 2002 when PNAC founders saw the overthrow of Saddam as a first step in reshaping the Middle East with subsequent steps being regime change in Syria and Iran. In the final analysis, all PNAC has achieved has been a loss of lives – American and Iraqi – and a failed Middle East policy that has hurt the US internationally and left us blind to major issues elsewhere across the globe. Some prominent PNAC members, and their friends in the Likud Party, may still hope the US follows the organization’s founding agenda to help Israel take down the present leaders in Syria and Iran but that could ultimately prove more costly than the Iraq gamble.