Why we must break with the American crazies
From today's Times newspaper:
Once again we see the neo-cons - who, in reality, are simply the American wing of the Likud Party - once again championing the interests of Israel and the US as if they are interchangeable. If something threatens Israel then the logic appears to be that America must intervene.When Gordon Brown returned from his fact-finding tour of Iraq on Monday, he proclaimed the importance of learning from our mistakes but also of looking forward instead of backward. Did this admission hint at a shift in Britain’s foreign policy when Mr Brown takes over in ten days’ time? To judge by the announcement he made in the next sentence – a restructuring of the British security apparatus to guard against future intelligence failures such as the nonexistent weapons of mass destruction – the answer is “no”. Mr Brown’s foreign policy will remain as backward-looking and self-deluding as Tony Blair’s.
I say this with growing despair, because I too have returned from a fact-finding tour, to America. Viewed from across the Atlantic it is clear that the parochial British obsession with WMD and “sexed-up dossiers” bears no relationship to the catastrophes now unfolding in the Middle East and beyond – not only in Iraq, but also in Gaza, Lebanon and Afghanistan, and soon maybe Syria, Iran and Pakistan. What people are talking about in America is not whether the invasion of Iraq was legally or morally justified but why it went so disastrously wrong and whether the same blundering fanatics will launch another catastrophic military adventure, most likely a bombing campaign against Iran, to distract attention from failure in Iraq. After all, the neoconservative ideologues who still run the Bush Administration have nothing left to lose politically – and in their fevered imaginations they still think they could inflict military defeat on the “Islamofascists” in what they now see as an even greater historical confrontation than the Cold War.
While Mr Brown and the British media are still fretting about who said what to whom about WMD intelligence, the talk in American policy circles is about an article, The Case for Bombing Iran, published two weeks ago in Commentary and The Wall Street Journal and cited approvingly to anyone who cares to listen by officials close to Dick Cheney. Its author, Norman Podhoretz, is an intellectual mentor to the people who took America into Iraq. His self-explanatory message is that Iran today is more dangerous than Hitler’s Germany, since it could soon have nuclear weapons – and that Israel’s very existence is menaced now as never before.
If they had argued honestly before the Iraq war that they were sending young Americans to die in a conflict through which they sought to obtain Israel's regional dominance in the Middle East, I think many American parents might have asked why Israel, who the US have armed to the teeth, can't fight her own wars.
However, since the war in Iraq was proven not to be about WMD at all, with Wolfowitz admitting that WMD were chosen as the reason to invade for "bureaucratic reasons", the neo-cons have become much more vocal about the US fighting for Israel with William Kristol going as far as proclaiming Israel's wars are America's wars the moment it became clear that Israel was losing her war in Lebanon last summer.
Indeed, long before 9-11 there were some in the Bush administration who wanted Saddam removed and the reason they gave was not American security, it was the security of Israel:
When elected, Bush was opposed to "nation building," but Dick Cheney brought in eight fellow neocons who advocated "regime change" and re-building Iraq. This was before 9/11 and had nothing to do with Bush's war on terrorism.These same nutters are still in the White House and know that time is running out for this administration and many of them are itching to attack Iran. And the Israelis are also piling pressure on the White House with ever more lurid claims of when Tehran might find itself with a nuclear weapon.
Cheney's group all belonged to PNAC or IASPS. IASPS advocated regime change to increase Israeli security, while PNAC focused on our Middle East allies but named only Israel. Using 9/11, Cheney and the neocons convinced Bush to go against the long-standing conservative principles he proclaimed during his election campaign.
It is significant that Ehud Olmert, the Israeli Prime Minister, travelled to Washington at about the same time as the article was published to plead with congressmen “not to tie President Bush’s hands over Iran”. Also that John McCain, the only unequivocally pro-war presidential candidate, endorsed Podhoretz’s argument, stating that “the only thing more dangerous than attacking Iran is allowing Iran to get nuclear weapons” – and that Mohamed ElBaradei, the head of the UN nuclear inspectorate, came out with a strikingly undiplomatic public statement, giving warning that “crazies in Washington” now seemed to be planning to repeat the Iraq disaster by attacking Iran.These buggers are serious about this, no matter how insane the plan sounds or what catastrophic consequences an attack would unleash. Bush has convinced himself that Ahmadinejad is the new Hitler, and is determined to strike, and from the recent debate with Republican candidates, it seems all but Ron Paul would endorse this madness.
General Anthony Zinni, the chief of US central command, war-gamed Iraq for more than a year before the invasion and every scenario he devised ended in a disaster, requiring many hundreds of thousands of US troops to bring it under control and remain in occupation for many years. Yet none of these scenarios was even considered by President Bush when he made the decision to invade.Brown has only three options:
Vice-President Cheney viewed the Iraq as a perfect opportunity to prove the “Rumsfeld doctrine” of low-manpower, shock-and-awe aerial warfare, without any need for the US to win allies or for the military to engage in “state-building” tasks.There is now strong evidence that President Bush didn’t even know the difference between Shia and Sunni Muslims when he decided to attack Iraq – and that dissenting opinions were simply blocked by Mr Cheney before they could reach the President’s desk.
As the anarchy in Iraq goes from bad to worse and Washington’s only answer is to expand the circle of its aggression, clichés about the special relationship are no longer sufficient. Mr Brown must decide whether to remain a silent but active partner in this madness, whether to retreat quietly like the Italians, Poles and Spaniards or to develop a third and genuinely courageous option. This is to positively forestall further disasters by breaking publicly with the Bush Administration and trying to develop a genuine European alternative to the suicidal American-led policies, not only in Iraq, but also in Israel, Palestine and Iran.The Bush administration will be remembered as the most disastrous in America's history, and the neo-con movement as a bunch of crazies who somehow - in a moment of collective madness - were allowed the keys to the engine room.
As their time in office draws to a close and the likelihood of a Democrat winning the next Presidency increases, the likelihood of these nutcases taking a last throw of the dice increases. Brown wants to keep well away from these lunatics. Fuck the special relationship, that isn't with the Bush administration, that is with the American people, and the American people do not support this President anymore.
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