http://www.antiwar.com/orig/leopold13.html
On several fronts, this is neither revelatory nor a big deal politically.
For at least 10 days now, Wolfowitz has been making the rounds on the pundit shows. He has consistently argued that the primary rationale for invading and occupying Iraq was/is to install a "free market democracy that respects the will of the Iraqi people" (i.e. a friendly client regime) that will lessen U.S. dependence on Saudi Arabia as the primary U.S. protectorate in the Middle East. Establishing a pliable vassal in Iraq and reducing U.S. dependence on Saudi Arabia opens up room for the U.S. to prosecute the war against Wahhabism without fear of losing its beachhead in the Middle East.
While Wolfowitz's claims are draped in heavily ideological language ("free market democracy" etc.), when one unpacks and reinterprets his terminology, his argument is at least logically consistent, and I for one think that it truly reflects his own perspective on the necessity of the war. Whether it actually informs U.S. policy in any serious or direct way is another issue entirely, since Wolfowitz is an ideologue as much as he is a policymaker. I don't discount the notion, however, that there is a faction of highly ideological "intellectuals" (sic) in the national security state, who genuinely believe that some kind of Washington Consensus model can be imposed on Arab/Muslim states that have strayed from the righteous path of neo-liberal parliamentary democracy, and that such a scheme is key to entrenching U.S. hegemony in the Middle East. The neo-cons are not just shills for the petroleum and defense oligarchy, even though the latter can pursue their sectoral and class objectives under the guise of the neo-cons program. Note also that the neo-con ideology, stripped of its messianic zeal and its emphasis on U.S. unilateralism, does not differ significantly from Clinton/Albright justifications for bombing Serbia.
Of course this all begs the question of why it is crucial to take on Wahhabism, which the neo-cons will not divulge -- not because "fundamentalist Muslims" pose a severe and ongoing threat to the security of U.S. citizens, but because they do represent a popular (however "unsavory") challenge to U.S. hegemonic pretensions in a region of utmost geostrategic significance.
John Gulick
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