[And we are there.]
The American Prospect
Volume 14, Issue 3.
March 1, 2003.
Just the Beginning
Is Iraq the opening salvo in a war to remake the world?
by Robert Dreyfuss
For months Americans have been told that the United States is going to
war against Iraq in order to disarm Saddam Hussein, remove him from
power, eliminate Iraq's alleged stockpiles of weapons of mass
destruction, and prevent Baghdad from blackmailing its neighbors or
aiding terrorist groups. But the Bush administration's hawks,
especially the neoconservatives who provide the driving force for war,
see the conflict with Iraq as much more than that. It is a signal
event, designed to create cataclysmic shock waves throughout the
region and around the world, ushering in a new era of American
imperial power. It is also likely to bring the United States into
conflict with several states in the Middle East. Those who think that
U.S. armed forces can complete a tidy war in Iraq, without the battle
spreading beyond Iraq's borders, are likely to be mistaken.
"I think we're going to be obliged to fight a regional war, whether we
want to or not," says Michael Ledeen, a former U.S. national-security
official and a key strategist among the ascendant flock of
neoconservative hawks, many of whom have taken up perches inside the
U.S. government. Asserting that the war against Iraq can't be
contained, Ledeen says that the very logic of the global war on
terrorism will drive the United States to confront an expanding
network of enemies in the region. "As soon as we land in Iraq, we're
going to face the whole terrorist network," he says, including the
Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), Hezbollah, Hamas, Islamic
Jihad and a collection of militant splinter groups backed by nations
-- Iran, Syria and Saudi Arabia -- that he calls "the terror masters."
"It may turn out to be a war to remake the world," says Ledeen.
In the Middle East, impending "regime change" in Iraq is just the
first step in a wholesale reordering of the entire region, according
to neoconservatives -- who've begun almost gleefully referring to
themselves as a "cabal." Like dominoes, the regimes in the region --
first Iran, Syria and Saudi Arabia, then Lebanon and the PLO, and
finally Sudan, Libya, Yemen and Somalia -- are slated to capitulate,
collapse or face U.S. military action. To those states, says cabal
ringleader Richard Perle, a resident fellow at the American Enterprise
Institute (AEI) and chairman of the Defense Policy Board, an
influential Pentagon advisory committee, "We could deliver a short
message, a two-word message: 'You're next.'" In the aftermath, several
of those states, including Iraq, Syria and Saudi Arabia, may end up as
dismantled, unstable shards in the form of mini-states that resemble
Yugoslavia's piecemeal wreckage. And despite the Wilsonian rhetoric
from the president and his advisers about bringing democracy to the
Middle East, at bottom it's clear that their version of democracy
might have to be imposed by force of arms.
And not just in the Middle East. Three-thousand U.S. soldiers are
slated to arrive in the Philippines, opening yet another new front in
the war on terrorism, and North Korea is finally in the
administration's sights. On the horizon could be Latin America, where
the Bush administration endorsed a failed regime change in Venezuela
last year, and where new left-leaning challenges are emerging in
Brazil, Ecuador and elsewhere. Like the bombing of Hiroshima, which
stunned the Japanese into surrender in 1945 and served notice to the
rest of the world that the United States possessed unparalleled power
it would not hesitate to use, the war against Iraq has a similar
purpose. "It's like the bully in a playground," says Ian Lustick, a
University of Pennsylvania professor of political science and author
of Unsettled States, Disputed Lands. "You beat up somebody, and
everybody else behaves."
Over and over again, in speeches, articles and white papers, the
neoconservatives have made it plain that the war against Iraq is
intended to demonstrate Washington's resolve to implement President
Bush's new national-security strategy, announced last fall -- even if
doing so means overthrowing the entire post-World War II structure of
treaties and alliances, including NATO and the United Nations. In
their book, The War Over Iraq, William Kristol of The Weekly Standard
and Lawrence F. Kaplan of The New Republic write, "The mission begins
in Baghdad, but it does not end there. ... We stand at the cusp of a
new historical era. ... This is a decisive moment. ... It is so
clearly about more than Iraq. It is about more even than the future of
the Middle East and the war on terror. It is about what sort of role
the United States intends to play in the twenty-first century."
Invading Iraq, occupying its capital and its oil fields, and seizing
control of its Shia Islamic holy places can only have a devastating
and highly destabilizing impact on the entire region, from Egypt to
central Asia and Pakistan. "We are all targeted," Syrian President
Bashar Assad told an Arab summit meeting, called to discuss Iraq, on
March 1. "We are all in danger."
"They want to foment revolution in Iran and use that to isolate and
possibly attack Syria in [Lebanon's] Bekaa Valley, and force Syria
out," says former Assistant Secretary of State for Near East Affairs
Edward S. Walker, now president of the Middle East Institute. "They
want to pressure [Muammar] Quaddafi in Libya and they want to
destabilize Saudi Arabia, because they believe instability there is
better than continuing with the current situation. And out of this,
they think, comes Pax Americana."
The more immediate impact of war against Iraq will occur in Iran, say
many analysts, including both neoconservative and more impartial
experts on the Middle East. As the next station along the "axis of
evil," Iran holds power that's felt far and wide in the region.
Oil-rich and occupying a large tract of geopolitical real estate, Iran
is arguably the most strategically important country in its
neighborhood. With its large Kurdish population, Iran has a stake in
the future of Iraqi Kurdistan. As a Shia power, Iran has vast
influence among the Shia majority in Iraq, Lebanon and Bahrain, with
the large Shia population in Saudi Arabia's oil-rich eastern province
and among the warlords of western Afghanistan. And Iran's ties to the
violent Hezbollah guerrillas, whose anti-American zeal can only be
inflamed by the occupation of Iraq, will give the Bush administration
all the reason it needs to expand the war on terrorism to Tehran.
The first step, neoconservatives say, will be for the United States to
lend its support to opposition groups of Iranian exiles willing to
enlist in the war on terrorism, much as the Iraqi National Congress
served as the spearhead for American intervention in Iraq. And, just
as the doddering ex-king of Afghanistan served as a rallying point for
America's conquest of that landlocked, central Asian nation, the
remnants of the late former shah of Iran's royal family could be
rallied to the cause. "Nostalgia for the last shah's son, Reza Pahlavi
... has again risen," says Reuel Marc Gerecht, a former CIA officer
who, like Ledeen and Perle, is ensconced at the AEI. "We must be
prepared, however, to take the battle more directly to the mullahs,"
says Gerecht, adding that the United States must consider strikes at
both Iran's Revolutionary Guard Corps and allies in Lebanon. "In fact,
we have only two meaningful options: Confront clerical Iran and its
proxies militarily or ring it with an oil embargo."
Iran is not the only country where restoration of monarchy is being
considered. Neoconservative strategists have also supported returning
to power the Iraqi monarchy, which was toppled in 1958 by a
combination of military officers and Iraqi communists. When the
Ottoman Empire crumbled after World War I, British intelligence
sponsored the rise of a little-known family called the Hashemites,
whose origins lay in the Saudi region around Mecca and Medina. Two
Hashemite brothers were installed on the thrones of Jordan and Iraq.
For nearly a year, the neocons have suggested that Jordan's Prince
Hassan, the brother of the late King Hussein of Jordan and a blood
relative of the Iraqi Hashemite family, might re-establish the
Hashemites in Baghdad were Saddam Hussein to be removed. Among the
neocons are Michael Rubin, a former AEI fellow, and David Wurmser, a
Perle acolyte. Rubin in 2002 wrote an article for London's Daily
Telegraph headlined, "If Iraqis want a king, Hassan of Jordan could be
their man." Wurmser in 1999 wrote Tyranny's Ally, an AEI-published
book devoted largely to the idea of restoring the Hashemite dynasty in
Iraq. Today Rubin is a key Department of Defense official overseeing
U.S. policy toward Iraq, and Wurmser is a high-ranking official
working for Undersecretary of State for Arms Control and International
Security John Bolton, himself a leading neoconservative ideologue.
But if the neocons are toying with the idea of restoring monarchies in
Iraq and Iran, they are also eyeing the destruction of the region's
wealthiest and most important royal family of all: the Saudis. Since
September 11, the hawks have launched an all-out verbal assault on the
Saudi monarchy, accusing Riyadh of supporting Osama bin Laden's
al-Qaeda organization and charging that the Saudis are masterminding a
worldwide network of mosques, schools and charity organizations that
promote terrorism. It's a charge so breathtaking that those most
familiar with Saudi Arabia are at a loss for words when asked about
it. "The idea that the House of Saud is cooperating with al-Qaeda is
absurd," says James Akins, who served as U.S. ambassador to Saudi
Arabia in the mid-1970s and frequently travels to the Saudi capital as
a consultant. "It's too dumb to be talked about."
That doesn't stop the neoconservatives from doing so, however. In The
War Against the Terror Masters, Ledeen cites Wurmser in charging that,
just before 9-11, "Saudi intelligence had become difficult to
distinguish from Al Qaeda." Countless other, similar accusations have
been flung at the Saudis by neocons. Max Singer, co-founder of the
Hudson Institute, has repeatedly suggested that the United States seek
to dismantle the Saudi kingdom by encouraging breakaway republics in
the oil-rich eastern province (which is heavily Shia) and in the
western Hijaz. "After [Hussein] is removed, there will be an
earthquake throughout the region," says Singer. "If this means the
fall of the [Saudi] regime, so be it." And when Hussein goes, Ledeen
says, it could lead to the collapse of the Saudi regime, perhaps to
pro-al-Qaeda radicals. "In that event, we would have to extend the war
to the Arabian peninsula, at the very least to the oil-producing
regions."
"I've stopped saying that Saudi Arabia will be taken over by Osama bin
Laden or by a bin Laden clone if we go into Iraq," says Akins. "I'm
now convinced that's exactly what [the neoconservatives] want. And
then we take it over."
Iraq, too, could shatter into at least three pieces, which would be
based on the three erstwhile Ottoman Empire provinces of Mosul,
Baghdad and Basra that were cobbled together to compose the state
eight decades ago. That could conceivably leave a Hashemite kingdom in
control of largely Sunni central Iraq, a Shia state in the south
(possibly linked to Iran, informally) and some sort of Kurdish entity
in the north -- either independent or, as is more likely, under the
control of the Turkish army. Turkey, a reluctant player in George W.
Bush's crusade, fears an independent Kurdistan and would love to get
its hands on Iraq's northern oil fields around the city of Kirkuk.
The final key component for these map-redrawing, would-be Lawrences of
Arabia is the toppling of Assad's regime and the breakup of Syria.
Perle himself proposed exactly that in a 1996 document prepared for
the Institute for Advanced Strategic and Political Studies (IASPS), an
Israeli think tank. The plan, titled, "A Clean Break: A New Strategy
for Securing the Realm," was originally prepared as a working paper to
advise then-Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel. It called on
Israel to work with Turkey and Jordan to "contain, destabilize and
roll-back" various states in the region, overthrow Saddam Hussein in
Iraq, press Jordan to restore a scion of its Hashemite dynasty to the
Iraqi throne and, above all, launch military assaults against Lebanon
and Syria as a "prelude to a redrawing of the map of the Middle East
[to] threaten Syria's territorial integrity." Joining Perle in writing
the IASPS paper were Douglas Feith and Wurmser, now senior officials
in Bush's national-security apparatus.
Gary Schmitt, executive director of the Project for a New American
Century (PNAC), worries only that the Bush administration, including
Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and Vice President Dick Cheney,
might not have the guts to see its plan all the way through once
Hussein is toppled. "It's going to be no small thing for the United
States to follow through on its stated strategic policy in the
region," he says. But Schmitt believes that President Bush is fully
committed, having been deeply affected by the events of September 11.
Schmitt roundly endorses the vision put forward by Kaplan and Kristol
in The War Over Iraq, which was sponsored by the PNAC. "It's really
our book," says Schmitt.
Six years ago, in its founding statement of principles, PNAC called
for a radical change in U.S. foreign and defense policy, with a
beefed-up military budget and a more muscular stance abroad,
challenging hostile regimes and assuming "American global leadership."
Signers of that statement included Cheney; Rumsfeld; Deputy Secretary
of Defense Paul Wolfowitz; Assistant Secretary of Defense for
International Security Affairs Peter W. Rodman; Elliott Abrams, the
Near East and North African affairs director at the National Security
Council; Zalmay Khalilzad, the White House liaison to the Iraqi
opposition; I. Lewis Libby, Cheney's chief of staff; and Gov. Jeb Bush
(R-Fla.), the president's brother. The PNAC statement foreshadowed the
outline of the president's 2002 national-security strategy.
Scenarios for sweeping changes in the Middle East, imposed by U.S
armed forces, were once thought fanciful -- even ridiculous -- but
they are now taken seriously given the incalculable impact of an
invasion of Iraq. Chas Freeman, who served as U.S. ambassador to Saudi
Arabia during the Gulf War, worries about everything that could go
wrong. "It's a war to turn the kaleidoscope, by people who know
nothing about the Middle East," he says. "And there's no way to know
how the pieces will fall." Perle and Co., says Freeman, are seeking a
Middle East dominated by an alliance between the United States and
Israel, backed by overwhelming military force. "It's machtpolitik,
might makes right," he says. Asked about the comparison between Iraq
and Hiroshima, Freeman adds, "There is no question that the Richard
Perles of the world see shock and awe as a means to establish a
position of supremacy that others fear to challenge."
But Freeman, who is now president of the Middle East Policy Council,
thinks it will be a disaster. "This outdoes anything in the march of
folly catalog," he says. "It's the lemmings going over the cliff."
Robert Dreyfuss
Copyright © 2003 by The American Prospect, Inc. Preferred Citation:
Robert Dreyfuss, "Just the Beginning," The American Prospect vol. 14
no. 3, March 1, 2003. This article may not be resold, reprinted, or
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