Category: Hawkwatch

THE ‘CON’ IN ‘NEO-CON’: I was just re-reading (and correcting a typo or two in) yesterday’s post about Chalabi. And it came to me with the proverbial blinding flash! Now we know what the ‘con’ in ‘neo-con’ really stands for!
And we thought it was “conservative.” No, friends, these guys (Perle, Wolfie, BAD, and friends) are anything but conservative. They are rabid, wild-eyed radicals.
And “con” just stands for itself.

EARTH TO ARI FLEISCHER: Fleischer, I just saw, was warning everyone that

RICHARD PERLE, VIEWED FROM AFRICA: Sitting around waiting in the the ICTR press office earlier this week, I pisked up a copy of The East African. UN Public Affairs Officer Straton Musonera, who hails from Rwanda, saw what I was looking at. “Did you see that?” he asked, outraged. It was a syndicated article by Richard Perle titled something like, “The UN has no place in the New World Order.”
Well yes, I had scanned through the piece, and had been disgusted by some of the Prince of Darkness’s more aggressive arguments against the UN.
“Richard Perle!” I said. “What can you expect?”
“You know him?” Straton asked. “So who is he?”
I pointed to the tagline at the bottom of the piece. “Look, it says here: ‘a member of the Pentagon’s defense Policy Board.’ Well, of course till a couple of weeks ago he was the Chairman of the DPB. But he’s still very influential.”
“You mean, he’s actually an official? I thought he was just some journalist. My God!”
Oh yes, Straton. And he’s not just some low-ranking paper-pusher, either. He is part of the small group of policy advisors who are driving the administration’s present policies….
Honestly, how can we, as Americans, defend having such a malevolent figure as Perle enjoy such influence over our government’s policy? Okay, okay, I know I should probably describe him as “misguided” rather than “malevolent”… But still, my general point stands.
Note in this regard, too, that if any group of people should feel abandoned or betrayed by the UN, it should be survivors of the Rwandan genocide, like Straton and his friends. Their “case” against the UN has even in recent weeks been vociferously articulated by several high-ranking members of the US administration.
But even though the Rwandan genocide survivors have a huge and quite understandable criticism to make regarding the UN’s failure to stop the genocide in 1994, still, most of them are quite realistic enough to see that the UN plays a vital role in the world today: one that their nation, like all other small nations, relies on.
So Richard Perle’s arguments against the UN may play well to that part of the US electorate that has long distrusted the organization, and that feels that the US can get along quite well without it. But I think it would very hard to sell his arguments in most other parts of the world. And that even includes, as far as I can see, in Rwanda.

BILL SAFIRE GOES BESERK: I think that at heart of the present (and impending) imbroglio in Iraq lies not only a profound moral/ethical miscalculation– to the effect that problems can be solved through violence— but also a very profound political miscalculation: the one that predicted with seeming confidence that the Iraqi populace would certainly greet the arriving US troops as “liberators”.
It is true, and most certainly significant, that there are already signs of deep disquiet, back-biting, finger-pointing, and just general CYA from inside the Pentagon regarding many operational aspects of this war. See, for example, the quotes in Thomas Ricks’ really interesting article in today’s Washington Post. The piece is titled, simply and ominously enough, “War could last months, officers say.” Its lead reads:
“Despite the rapid advance of Army and Marine forces across Iraq over the past week, some senior U.S. military officers are now convinced that the war is likely to last months and will require considerably more combat power than is now on hand there and in Kuwait, senior defense officials said yesterday.”
In the body of the piece, there are numerous quotes, on background, from an un-named U.S. Army general and other un-named administration officials. Ricks also uses on-the-record quotes from retired Army General Barry McCaffrey, and retired war-planning specialist Maj. Robert Killebrew. (Interestingly, much of what Ricks writes about seems to track positively with the excerpts I cited in my post Tuesday, about the Russians’ apparently impressive ability to listen in on high-level Pentagon communications… Worth watching this more, I think.)
But possibly the funniest (saddest?) part of Ricks’ article came near the end when, in an attempt I suppose to beef up the required “balance”, he notes that, “Some Pentagon insiders and defense experts vigorously contested these pessimistic assessments.” And then, the first of these folks whom he quotes is– ta-da!!– Newt Gingrich, the infamously ignorant and mean-spirited former Republican Speaker of the US House of Representatives who is now on Richard Perle’s just-plain-infamous “Defense Planning Board”. (Before Gingrich two-timed his wife Marianne, she was on the payroll of an Israeli settlers’ organization, as I recall.)
At the heart of the present and set-to-continue strategic/operational imbroglio are issues like how fast the US ground forces should be moving forward, and how hard the US military in general should be bombarding the Iraqi cities. These are tough issues indeed for military planners to make a judgment call on. (And they also have truly heart-wrenching consequences, either way, regarding the life-chances of the combatants and civilians on the battlefield.)
But we have to recognize that antecedent to the design of the present US forces’ present operational plan was the essential political judgment, as articulated most clearly last week by Vice-President Cheney, to the effect that once they entered Iraq the US forces would be greeted by the vast majority of the Iraqi people “as liberators”.
That has not happened, and as of now it is highly unlikely that it will happen on any significant scale anywhere in the country (except, of course, in the already long-“liberated” north of the country. But that would be nothing new.)
Where did that very grave political miscalculation come from? Cheney and Richard Perle are among the administration (or, administration-linked) officials who have articulated it most clearly. But behind them stands a phalanx of well-connected, extremely rightwing commentators and intellectuals who try to pass themselves off as “Middle East specialists” when the need requires. The very same people who have sponsored Iraqi opposition “leader” Ahmed Chalabi all along — even though there has been plenty of evidence in the past that Chalabi’s claims to be able to speak for and about “all Iraqis” have been grossly exaggerated. Right now, those claims have been ground firmly into the mud that is engulfing many US encampments in the lower Tigris valley. (Sorry about the metaphor confusion there.)
So how are these radical rightwing ideologues dealing with the fact that the promised pro-US uprisings have nowhere taken place?
First of all, apoplectically. Second of all, by engaging in wild finger-pointing and saying something to the effect that that, “Well, that just proves how repressive Saddam Hussein is, because his people are out there, right now, stomping on all the free souls who would otherwise be doing the uprising… ”
Actually, since I grew up in England, I have a simpler explanation. I was born in 1952, but my family and community’s folk-culture was full of stories of the London Blitz. And the main story-line there was the way that, under intense bombardment from an outside power, Londoners came together despite their many class and political differences and rallied round their national leadership and their national symbols.
There are many other examples of that phenomenon in the history of the 20th century. (Stalingrad has already been mentioned in connection w/ Baghdad.) It actually takes an extremely brutal and sustained bombardment of a city to cause its leaders and people to cave…
Which brings me to Bill Safire, uber-cheerleader for Ahmed Chalabi (as for Ariel ‘Bulldozers-Away’ Sharon); and to Safire’s truly remarkable and disturbing column in today’s New York Times. This column is, disingenuously enough, titled “Help Iraqis Arise”. In most of it, Safire puts forth his own feisty version of the argument that “the fact that Iraqis haven’t risen against Saddam yet is just further proof of how repressive and heinous he is”.
But at the end, Safire becomes downright terrifying. He writes,
“President Bush and Prime Minister Blair, meeting today, should emulate their World War II predecessors. They should pre-empt proposals for bombing halts and armistices with a ringing statement about the only way to end the war: by unconditional surrender.
Change the leaflets and broadcasts. No talks about terms; no amnesties for paramilitary killers; no deals on exile for torturers. Surrender, plain and simple.”
Excuse me? How would we get such a surrender?
Is he honestly proposing the use of the same means that forced the German and Japanese surrenders in 1945? Lest we forget, those means included the fire-bombings of Dresden, Tokyo, and numerous other cities in the two countries — not to mention the use of the atomic bombs in Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
I am appalled. Saddened. Horrified. If somebody has such a sick mind that he would recommend following this path today, he needs to be hauled off to DC’s fine psychiatric hospital, St. Elizabeth’s.
Please, someone do this. For all of our sakes.
[And next up on JWN: News of my column in today’s CSM; and an assessment of how the Iranians are sitting by and enjoying seeing their two sworn enemies slug it out in the mud of Mesopotamia.]

BUSH CONVERTS TO KEYNESIANISM– JUST NOT FOR DOMESTIC CONSUMPTION? Among the many unseemly and downright scandalous aspects of this war (which I need not list here), one of the most distasteful has been the spate of reports that the administration is already preparing to hand out large contracts to large U.S. firms, to engage in the “post-war reconstruction” of Iraq.
In a good piece in today’s NYT, Elizabeth Becker quotes unnamed administration officials as saying the administration is already offering $1.5 billion-worth of contracts to private US companies– and just $50 million to not-for-profit US groups like Save the Children– while bypassing the many highly experienced multilateral relief and development organizations almost completely.
“Administration officials,” she writes, “said it was important to give contracts to American corporations… as a way to demonstrate to the Iraqi people that the United States is a ‘liberator’ bringing economic prosperity and democratic institutions to their nation.”
How’s that again? Oh, now it’s clear. The Iraqis, being “simple, ignorant souls”, will presumably have forgotten at that point which foreign power it was that just weeks or days previously had bombed their infrasructure to smithereens. “Relief work,” Becker quotes her sources as telling her, “will begin almost as soon as the first bombs are dropped and the military is confronted with Iraqi civilians in need of food, water, medicine and shelter.”
Alert readers can probably guess the kinds of companies that have been invited to submit bids. Yes, there’s Halliburton subsidiary Kellogg Brown Root on the list, along with Bechtel and many others of the “usual suspects.”
To add perspective to her story, Becker uses some quotes from Frances Cook, a woman who was previously US Ambassador to Oman and is now a consultant to several Middle Eastern companies. Cook’s been lobbying (why am I not surprised) for Middle Eastern companies to get some of the contracting action.
But actually, the points she makes are fair enough. “They are already screaming in the Middle East– you call us corrupt, look at you giving contracts to American companies and no one else,” she is quoted as saying.
Yes, it does all leave a very nasty taste in the mouth, doesn’t it? First the Bushies get to gratuitously bomb the country to bits. And then, almost immediately, they sweep in as “liberators”, asking for laurel wreaths and a welcome mat because they’re handing out contracts to Halliburton to come and fix the plumbing.
Elision alert! Elision alert! Did anyone hear a swish as one of the Horseman of the Apocalypse rode through there? He was in there somewhere, I swear.
So yes, distasteful. But maybe there’s another way to look at it? Couldn’t this be the ultimate Keynesian scheme? After all, the British economic guru had famously recommended someplace that, given that government spending is such an effective stimulant for the general economy, it might well make sense for the government to hire one set of workers to dig holes in the streets, and another set to come by the next day and fill them in…
Of course, the Bushies would probably rather die than admitting to being Keynesians. John Maynard Keynes– whose theories helped inspire the New Deal and who networked personally to help bring about the creation of the World Bank– advocated economic policies directly contrary to the Bushies’ favored cure-all of tax cuts for the rich…
And the administration is notably not proposing any plans to have these same companies come into US cities and regions and undertake the kinds of large-scale infrastructure-development projects that so much of the country needs…
So could we see this entire war-in-Iraq thing as a big Keynesian dig-and-fill-up-the-holes project?
Nah. On a horrible day like today, even cute humor doesn’t work. War still stinks. It has no redeeming value whatsoever and will only cause further waves of violence to ricochet down through history. Unless, G-d help us all, we can all get a grip and step out of this paradigm of violence and counter-violence.