Anatol Lieven, The London Review of Books (literary biweekly), London, England, Oct. 3, 2002
The most surprising thing about the Bush administration's plan to invade Iraq is not that it is destructive of international order; or wicked, when we consider the role the United States (and Britain) have played, and continue to play, in the Middle East; or opposed by the great majority of the international community; or seemingly contrary to some of the basic needs of the war against terrorism. It is all of these things, but they are of no great concern to the hard-line nationalists in the administration. This group has suffered at least a temporary check as a result of the British insistence on U.N. involvement, and Saddam Hussein's agreement to weapons inspections. They are, however, still determined on war—and their power within the administration and in the U.S. security policy world means that they are very likely to get their way. Even the Washington Post has joined the radical rightist media in supporting war.
The most surprising thing about the push for war is that it is so profoundly reckless. If I had to put money on it, I'd say that the odds on quick success in destroying the Iraqi regime may be as high as 5/1 or more, given U.S. military superiority, the vile nature of Saddam Hussein's rule, the unreliability of Baghdad's missiles, and the deep divisions in the Arab world. But at first sight, the longer- term gains for the United States look pretty limited, whereas the consequences of failure would be catastrophic. A general Middle Eastern conflagration and the collapse of more pro-Western Arab states would lose us the war against terrorism, doom untold thousands of Western civilians to death in coming decades, and plunge the world economy into depression.
These risks are not only to American (and British) lives and interests, but to the political future of the administration. If the war goes badly wrong, it will be more generally excoriated than any within living memory, and its members will be finished politically— finished for good. If no other fear moved these people, you'd have thought this one would.
This war plan is not like the intervention in Vietnam, which at the start was supported by a consensus of both political parties, the Pentagon, the security establishment, and the media. It is true that today—for reasons to which I shall return—the Democrats are mostly sitting on the fence; but a large part of the old Republican security establishment has denounced the idea and the Pentagon has made its deep unhappiness very clear.
The administration has therefore been warned of the dangers. And while a new attack by Al-Qaeda during the war would help consolidate anti-Muslim American nationalism, the administration would also be widely accused of having neglected the hunt for the perpetrators of Sept. 11 in order to pursue an irrelevant vendetta. As far as the Israeli lobby is concerned, a disaster in the Middle East might be the one thing that would at last bring a discussion of its calamitous role into the open in the United States.
With the exception of Donald Rumsfeld, who conveniently did his military service in the gap between the Korean and Vietnam Wars, neither Bush nor any of the other prime movers of this war served in the military. Of course, Gen. Colin Powell served in Vietnam, but he is well known to be extremely dubious about attacking Iraq. All the others did everything possible to avoid service. If the war goes wrong, the “chicken hawk” charge will be used against them with devastating political effect.
Vietnam veterans, both Democrat and Republican, have already started to raise this issue, stirred up in part by the insulting language used by Richard Perle and his school about the caution of the professional military. As a recent letter to the Washington Post put it, “The men described as chicken hawks avoided military service during the Vietnam War while supporting that war politically. They are not accused of lacking experience and judgment compared to military men. They are accused of hypocrisy and cowardice.” Given the political risks of failure—to themselves, above all—why are they doing this? And, more broadly, what has bred this reckless spirit?
To understand the administration's motivation, it is necessary to appreciate the breathtaking scope of the domestic and global ambitions which the dominant neo- conservative nationalists hope to further by means of war, and which go way beyond their publicly stated goals. There are of course different groups within this camp: some are more favorable to Israel, others less hostile to China; not all would support the most radical aspects of the program. However, the basic and generally agreed plan is unilateral world domination through absolute military superiority, and this has been consistently advocated and worked on by the group of intellectuals close to Dick Cheney and Richard Perle since the collapse of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s.
This basic goal is shared by Colin Powell and the rest of the security establishment. It was, after all, Powell who, as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, declared in 1992 that the United States requires sufficient power “to deter any challenger from ever dreaming of challenging us on the world stage.” However, the idea of preemptive defense, now official doctrine, takes this a leap further, much further than Powell would wish to go. In principle, it can be used to justify the destruction of any other state if it even seems that that state might in future be able to challenge the United States. When these ideas were first aired by Paul Wolfowitz and others after the end of the Cold War, they met with general criticism, even from conservatives. Today, thanks to the ascendancy of the radical nationalists in the administration and the effect of the Sept. 11 attacks on the American psyche, they have a major influence on U.S. policy.
To understand the genesis of this extraordinary ambition, it is also necessary to grasp the moral, cultural and intellectual world of American nationalism in which it has taken shape. This nationalism existed long before last September, but it has been inflamed by those attacks and, equally dangerously, it has become even more entwined with the nationalism of the Israeli right.
To take the geopolitical goals first. As with National Missile Defense, the publicly expressed motive for war with Iraq functions mainly as a tool to gain the necessary public support for an operation the real goals of which are far wider. The indifference of the U.S. public to serious discussion of foreign or security affairs, and the negligence and ideological rigidity of the U.S. media and policy community make searching debate on such issues extremely difficult, and allow such manipulation to succeed.
The immediate goal is indeed to eliminate Iraq's weapons of mass destruction. There is little real fear, however, that Saddam Hussein will give those weapons to terrorists to use against the United States—though a more genuine fear that he might conceivably do so in the case of Israel. Nor is there any serious prospect that he would use them himself in an unprovoked attack on the United States or Israel, because immediate annihilation would follow. The banal propaganda portrayal of Saddam as a crazed and suicidal dictator plays well on the American street, but I don't believe that it is a view shared by the administration. Rather, their intention is partly to retain an absolute certainty of being able to defend the Gulf against an Iraqi attack, but, more important, to retain for the United States and Israel a free hand for intervention in the Middle East as a whole.
>From the point of view of Israel, the Israeli lobby and their representatives in the administration, the
apparent benefits of such a free hand are clear enough. For the group around Cheney, the single most important
consideration is guaranteed and unrestricted access to cheap oil, controlled as far as possible at its source.
To destroy and occupy the existing Iraqi state and dominate the region militarily would remove even the present
limited threat from OPEC, greatly reduce the chance of a new oil shock, and eliminate the need to woo and
invest in Russia as an alternative source of energy.
It would also critically undermine the steps already taken towards the development of alternative sources of energy. So far, these have been pitifully few. All the same, Sept. 11 brought new strength to the security arguments for reducing dependence on imported oil, and as alternative technologies develop, they could become a real threat to the oil lobby—which, like the Israeli lobby, is deeply intertwined with the Bush administration. War with Iraq can therefore be seen as a satisfactory outcome for both lobbies. Much more important for the future of mankind, it is also part of what is in essence a strategy to use American military force to permit the continued offloading onto the rest of the world of the ecological costs of the existing U.S. economy—without the need for any short-term sacrifices on the part of U.S. capitalism, the U.S. political elite, or U.S. voters. <SNIP> http://www.worldpress.org/Europe/774.cfm