[Mb-civic] (no subject)

[Hawaiipolo at cs.com]

Pretty interesting..ties together a detailed cast of characters making up the 
Cheney/Rumsfield Foreign Policy cabal...MD> 
> All the Vice President's Men 
> By Juan Cole 
> Salon.com 
> 
> Friday 28 October 2005 
> 
> 
> >> The ideologues in Cheney's inner circle drummed up a war. Now their 
>> zealotry is blowing up in their faces.
>  
> As Washington waits on pins and needles to see if special counsel Patrick 
> Fitzgerald hands down indictments, the focus falls on Dick Cheney's inner 
> circle. This group, along with that surrounding Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, 
> made up what Colin Powell's top aide, Lawrence Wilkerson, called "a cabal" 
> that "on critical issues ... made decisions that the bureaucracy did not know 
> were being made." Cheney is the first vice president to have had, in effect, 
> his own personal National Security Council. This formidable and unprecedented 
> rump foreign policy team, composed of radical hawks, played a key role in 
> every aspect of the war on Iraq: planning for it, gathering "evidence" to 
> justify it and punishing those who spoke out against it. It is not surprising that 
> members of that team, and Cheney himself, have now also emerged as targets 
> in Fitzgerald's investigation of the outing of Valerie Plame Wilson to the 
> press, along with Bush advisor Karl Rove. 
> Although the investigation has focused on Cheney's chief of staff, I. Lewis 
> "Scooter" Libby, a number of other Cheney staffers have been interviewed. Who 
> are these shadowy policymakers who played such a major role in shaping the 
> Bush administration's foreign policy? 
> Most of the members of Cheney's inner circle were neoconservative 
> ideologues, who combined hawkish American triumphalism with an obsession with Israel. 
> This does not mean that the war was fought for Israel, although it is 
> undeniable that Israeli concerns played an important role. The actual motivation 
> behind the war was complex, and Cheney's team was not the only one in the game. 
> The Bush administration is a coalition of disparate forces - country club 
> Republicans, realists, representatives of oil and other corporate interests, 
> evangelicals, hardball political strategists, right-wing Catholics, and 
> neoconservative Jews allied with Israel's right-wing Likud party. Each group had its 
> own rationale for going to war with Iraq. 
> Bush himself appears to have had an obsession with restoring family honor by 
> avenging the slight to his father produced by Saddam's remaining in office 
> after the Gulf War. Cheney was interested in the benefits of a war to the oil 
> industry, and to the military-industrial complex in general. It seems likely 
> that the Iraq war, which produced billions in no-bid contracts for the 
> company he headed in the late 1990s, saved Halliburton from bankruptcy. The 
> evangelicals wanted to missionize Iraqis. Karl Rove wanted to turn Bush into a war 
> president to ensure his reelection. The neoconservatives viewed Saddam's Iraq 
> as a short-term danger to Israel, and in the long term, they hoped that 
> overthrowing the Iraqi Baath would transform the entire Middle East, rather as 
> Kamal Ataturk, who abolished the offices of Ottoman emperor and Sunni caliph in 
> the 1920s, had brought into being a relatively democratic Turkey that was 
> allied with Israel. (This fantastic analogy was suggested by Princeton emeritus 
> professor and leading neoconservative ideologue Bernard Lewis.) This 
> transformation would be beneficial to the long-term security of both the United 
> States and Israel. 
> None of these rationales would have been acceptable across the board, or 
> persuasive with Congress or the American public, so the various factions focused 
> on the threat of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction. Unfortunately for them, 
> this rationale was discovered to be a mirage. And in the course of trying to 
> punish those who were pointing out that the emperor had no clothes - or, in 
> this case, that the dictator had no weapons of mass destruction - Cheney and 
> Bush's underlings went too far. Ironically, their attempt to silence critics 
> succeeded only in turning a harsh light on their own actions and motivations. 
> "Cheney Assembles Formidable Team," marveled a Page One article in the Feb. 
> 3, 2001, edition of the New York Times. It turns out that Cheney had 15 
> military and political advisors on foreign affairs, at a time when the president's 
> own National Security Council was being downsized. The number of aides who 
> counseled Cheney on domestic issues was much smaller. In contrast, Al Gore had 
> been advised by a single staffer on security affairs. 
> The leader of the team was Libby, Cheney's chief of staff. Libby had studied 
> at Yale with Paul Wolfowitz, who brought him to Washington. He co-authored a 
> hawkish policy document with Wolfowitz in the Department of Defense for its 
> head, Dick Cheney, after the Gulf War in 1992. When it was leaked, it 
> embarrassed the first President Bush. Libby was a founding member of the Project for 
> a New American Century in 1997 during the Clinton years, when many 
> neoconservatives were out of office. The PNAC attempted to use the 
> Republican-dominated Congress to pressure Clinton to take a more belligerent stance toward Iraq, 
> and it advocated significantly expanding military spending and using US 
> troops as "gendarmes" in the aftermath of wars to "shape" the international 
> security environment. 
> Cheney was also a PNAC member, and his association with this group from 1997 
> signaled a shift from his earlier hard-nosed realism, as he allied himself 
> with the neoconservatives, who dreamed of transforming other societies. The 
> James Baker branch of the Republican Party had long been critical of Israel for 
> causing trouble for the United States in the Middle East with its 
> expansionist policies and unwillingness to stop the settlement of the West Bank, and 
> Baker was well aware that the vast majority of American Jews do not vote 
> Republican. 
> Although a staunch defender of Israel, Cheney at one time was at least on 
> speaking terms with this wing of the Republican Party. (The sense of betrayal 
> felt by his old colleagues was summed up by Bush I's national security advisor 
> Brent Scowcroft, who told the New Yorker he considered Cheney a friend, "But 
> Dick Cheney I don't know anymore." As time went on, however, he increasingly 
> chose to ally with neoconservatives and the Jewish right in the US and 
> Israel, accepting them as powerful allies and constituents for his vision of a 
> post-Cold War world dominated by an unchallenged American hegemony that would be 
> backed by a vast military-industrial establishment fed by US tax dollars. He 
> continually promised skeptical Jewish audiences that a democratic Iraq would 
> benefit Israel. His choice of advisors when he became vice president 
> demonstrated a pronounced preference for the neoconservatives. 
> But Cheney's alliance with the neocons was probably driven more by his 
> Manichaean, Cold War-inspired worldview - in which the US battled an evil enemy - 
> and his corporate ties, than by an obsession with Israel or remaking the 
> Middle East. Islamist terror provided a new version of the Soviet "evil empire." 
> And the neocons' dynamic foreign policy vision, their "liberalism with guns," 
> offered more opportunities for the military-industrial complex than did 
> traditional Republican realism in a post-Soviet world, where peer states did not 
> exist and no credible military threat menaced the US Only a series of wars of 
> conquest in the Middle East, dressed up as a "defense" against the 
> proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, could hope to keep the Pentagon and the 
> companies to which it outsourced in the gravy. 
> Such wars could no longer be fought in East Asia, given Chinese and North 
> Korean nuclear capabilities, and there were no US constituencies for such wars 
> in most other parts of the world. The Middle East was the perfect arena for a 
> renewed American militarism, given that the US public held deep prejudices 
> against the Arab-Muslim world, and, after Sept. 11, deeply feared it. 
> A key, but less well-known, Cheney advisor on the Middle East is John 
> Hannah, a former Soviet expert. He had been part of a policy group assembled by 
> Cheney when he was secretary of defense, in 1989, under the direction of Paul 
> Wolfowitz. Hannah was distinguished for his distrust of Soviet reformist Prime 
> Minister Mikhail Gorbachev, according to the New Republic. 
> Hannah then came to head the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, a 
> stridently pro-Israel think tank that has gained enormous influence in 
> Washington. WINEP had been founded in the 1980s with the backing of the American 
> Israel Public Affairs Committee, the legendarily powerful pro-Israel lobbying 
> group. The initial impetus for it was that think tanks like the Brookings 
> Institution were felt to be insufficiently pro-Israel. Initially WINEP tended to 
> support the government in power in Israel, but in the past 15 years it has 
> increasingly been drawn into the orbit of the right-wing, expansionist Likud 
> Party. 
> WINEP wields enormous influence, to the point where it almost functions as a 
> governmental entity. The director of a private consulting firm with a 
> contract from the Department of Defense that involved trying to think about the 
> future of the main political parties in Iraq told me in 2004 that he was 
> specifically instructed, as part of his contract, to depend on the material at the 
> WINEP Web site. State Department officials and US military officers are 
> detailed to WINEP to learn about the Middle East and are indoctrinated into a 
> pro-Likud point of view at taxpayers' expense. Despite its highly political 
> activities, WINEP has the status for tax purposes of a nonprofit charitable 
> foundation. 
> When Hannah was at WINEP, he was still deeply concerned with post-Soviet 
> Russian foreign policy toward the Middle East. The Soviets had been major 
> patrons of the Palestine Liberation Organization, Syria and Iraq, all of whom 
> Hannah viewed as enemies. In a 1993 interview with the Jewish Institute for 
> National Security Affairs, another pro-Israel, right-wing organization, Hannah 
> expressed anxiety about the rise of Russian nationalists who, he claimed, sought 
> to undermine United Nations sanctions against Libya and to position Russian 
> companies to invest in Iraq should the sanctions on that country begin to 
> slip. For figures such as Hannah, Russian nationalism and Middle Eastern rogue 
> states like Libya and Iraq represented unfinished business left over from the 
> Cold War. For the Israeli hawks and their American supporters, the Cold War 
> was not really over as long as the former Soviet allies in the Middle East 
> continued to express enmity to Israel. 
> As former Secretary of State Warren Christopher once remarked, the US State 
> Department probably owes WINEP a finder's fee for providing it with key 
> personnel. From the institute, Hannah came to work for Christopher (who served 
> from 1993 to 1997). During this period, Hannah cultivated ties with Ahmad 
> Chalabi and his Iraqi National Congress, an expatriate group funded by the CIA and 
> the State Department to overthrow Saddam. One of the things that made Chalabi 
> attractive to Hannah and other neocons was that he promised them that if he 
> came to power he would recognize Israel and take Iraq in the same direction 
> as Turkey, a Muslim country allied with the Zionist state. 
> We next meet Hannah as an aide to John Bolton. Bolton, a curmudgeonly lawyer 
> who helped stop the Florida recount in 2000, was rewarded by Bush by being 
> made undersecretary of state for arms control and international proliferation. 
> Bolton detailed Hannah to Cheney's office as chief adviser on the Middle 
> East. (Hannah actually knew little about the Middle East and knows no Arabic, 
> being primarily an old Russia hand.) 
> Cheney's other major advisor besides Libby on Middle East affairs is David 
> Wurmser, a Johns Hopkins Ph.D. in international relations. He served as 
> project officer at the congressionally funded US Institute of Peace, from 1988 to 
> 1994. He then moved for two years to the Washington Institute for Near East 
> Policy, where he was director of institutional grants until 1996. In the latter 
> year he co-authored, with Richard Perle, Douglas Feith and others, a 
> now-famous policy paper for incoming Likud leader Binyamin Netanyahu, "A Clean 
> Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm," that advocated a war to overthrow 
> Saddam Hussein and install a Hashemite monarchy in Iraq as a way of moderating 
> the Shiites of the region and securing "the realm" of Israel. Since 
> post-Khomeini Shiites despise monarchy as un-Islamic, and since the Hashemites, who 
> used to rule Iraq before 1958 and still rule Jordan, are Sunni Muslims, this 
> plan was worse than science fiction. Science fiction is coherent and often 
> involves some actual knowledge. 
> The neoconservatives were actually more concerned with Syria initially than 
> Iraq, since it more directly threatened Israeli security. Indeed, "A Clean 
> Break" advocated the removal of Saddam Hussein mainly as a way of pressuring 
> Damascus. The policy paper said, with astonishing ignorance, "Israel can shape 
> its strategic environment, in cooperation with Turkey and Jordan, by 
> weakening, containing, and even rolling back Syria. This effort can focus on removing 
> Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq - an important Israeli strategic objective 
> in its own right - as a means of foiling Syria's regional ambitions. King 
> Hussein may have ideas for Israel in bringing its Lebanon problem under 
> control. The predominantly Shia population of southern Lebanon has been tied for 
> centuries to the Shia leadership in Najf [sic] Iraq rather than Iran. Were the 
> Hashemites to control Iraq, they could use their influence over Najf to help 
> Israel wean the south Lebanese Shia away from Hizballah, Iran, and Syria. Shia 
> retain strong ties to the Hashemites: the Shia venerate foremost the 
> Prophet's family, the direct descendants of which - and in whose veins the blood of 
> the Prophet flows - is King Hussein." 
> This paragraph must be the most absurd, ill-informed and frankly lunatic 
> pieces of prose ever produced by any policy advisor anywhere. It is full of 
> false premises and ignorant assumptions. Saddam Hussein's branch of the Baath 
> Party was a rival of the Syrian Baath Party, not a supporter. Syria had joined 
> Bush I's coalition against Iraq, allying with the Americans in 1990-91. 
> Removing the Iraqi Baath would more likely strengthen Syria than weaken it. As for 
> the Shiites in Iraq and southern Lebanon, they had been deeply influenced by 
> the ideology of Ayatollah Khomeini, who preached that monarchy is 
> incompatible with Islam. The idea that the old Hashemite monarchy could be revived and 
> reinstalled in revolutionary Iraq was itself absurd. That a Sunni king in 
> Baghdad might have any appeal to the Shiites of southern Lebanon, who favored 
> Hezbollah and Khomeinism, would only occur to someone completely ignorant of the 
> actual politics of Tyre and Nabatiya. The tragedy is that this sort of 
> hallucination appears actually to have underpinned real policy moves by the 
> neoconservatives as they became powerful in Washington under George W. Bush and 
> Dick Cheney. 
> Wurmser is married to Meyrav Wurmser, director of Middle East programs at 
> the right-wing Hudson Institute. She was listed as a co-author of "A Clean 
> Break." She had also co-founded, with a former colonel in Israeli military 
> intelligence, the MEMRI translation service, which cherry-picks Arabic newspapers 
> for the more outrageous articles and political cartoons, and translates them 
> into English for the purpose of creating a negative view of the Arab world. 
> In 1999 David Wurmser published "Tyranny's Ally: America's Failure to Defeat 
> Saddam Hussein." In 2000, Wurmser authored a paper urging the US government 
> to push Syria out of Lebanon and to refuse to engage with Damascus that was 
> published by the Middle East Forum of Daniel Pipes. The Middle East Forum 
> advisory board is primarily composed of leaders of right-wing organizations such 
> as the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs and the Zionist 
> Organization of America. 
> Wurmser was picked by fellow neoconservative and Undersecretary of Defense 
> for Planning Douglas Feith (whom the departing Colin Powell denounced to 
> George W. Bush as a "card-carrying member of the Likud") after Sept. 11 to form 
> part of the notorious Office of Special Plans in the Near East and South Asia 
> division of the Department of Defense. That unit cherry-picked intelligence on 
> Iraqi weapons of mass destruction and Saddam's alleged links to al-Qaida, 
> singling out unreliable, single-sourced accounts and stripping them of any 
> context that would show where they came from. These were then stove piped to 
> Libby and Hannah in Cheney's office, so as to go directly to Bush and make an end 
> run around the professional intelligence agencies. When allegations emerged 
> that corrupt Iraqi businessman and longtime expatriate politician Ahmad 
> Chalabi had been given classified information about US intelligence efforts 
> against Iran, and had promptly passed it on to Tehran, Wurmser was among the 
> officials the FBI interviewed searching for the leak. 
> When the OSP was dissolved after the Iraq war, Wurmser went back to work for 
> Bolton. Although Wurmser only came to Cheney's shadow national security 
> council in September 2003, after the Plame leak, he had been in close contact 
> with Libby and Hannah all along. Close observers noted a distinct turn toward 
> belligerency against Syria in White House pronouncements soon after Wurmser's 
> advent. (He replaced old Soviet hand Eric Edelman, who was sent as ambassador 
> to Turkey.) 
> On Sept. 10, 2002, the Boston Globe had reported that ascendant hawks in the 
> Bush administration saw the overthrow of Saddam as a first step toward 
> democratizing and transforming the Middle East. John Donnelly and Anthony Shadid 
> wrote, "The argument for reshaping the political landscape in the Mideast has 
> been pushed for years by some Washington think tanks and in hawkish circles. 
> It is now being considered as a possible US policy with the ascent of key 
> hard-liners in the administration - from Paul Wolfowitz and Douglas Feith in the 
> Pentagon to John Hannah and Lewis Libby on the vice president's staff and 
> John Bolton in the State Department, analysts and officials say." 
> Cheney and other advocates of this policy promised that an Iraq war would 
> break the deadlock between the Israelis and the Palestinians. Donnelly and 
> Shadid quote Meyrav Wurmser, "Everyone will flip out, starting with the Saudis 
> ... It will send shock waves throughout the Arab world ... But if we can get a 
> democracy in the Palestinian Authority, democracy in Iraq, get the Egyptians 
> to improve their human rights and open up their system, it will be a 
> spectacular change. After a war with Iraq, then you really shape the region." Since 
> both Wurmsers and their circle had argued forcefully for the destruction of 
> the Oslo peace process and against the surrender by Israel of any of the 
> Palestinian territories captured in 1967, it seems most likely that they hoped that 
> getting the US to produce chaos in the Middle East by undermining its allies 
> would give hawkish Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon a free hand to annex 
> most of the West Bank, and perhaps other Arab lands, rather than that it 
> would lead to a just peace. Weakened by the loss of their backers in Baghdad and 
> Damascus, the Palestinians would be forced to make peace on Sharon's terms. 
> Libby, Hannah and Wurmser were at the center of the production and purveying 
> of bad intelligence on alleged Iraqi weapons of mass destruction. Hannah 
> received intelligence directly from the Iraqi National Congress, according to a 
> leaked memo from that organization. He was also a liaison with Wurmser when 
> the latter was in the Office of Special Plans. 
> According to a Newsweek article of Dec. 15, 2004, "a June 2002 memo written 
> by INC lobbyist Entifadh Qunbar to a US Senate committee lists John Hannah, a 
> senior national-security aide on Cheney's staff, as one of two 'US 
> governmental recipients' for reports generated by an intelligence program being run by 
> the INC and which was then being funded by the State Department." The 
> article explains that the program arranged for the raw information coming from 
> defectors and other sources to be "reported to, among others, 'appropriate 
> governmental, non-governmental and international agencies.'" The memo explicitly 
> mentioned Hannah as "a principal point of contact" for the program. The other 
> point of contact, according to Newsweek, was William Luti, who headed the 
> Office of Special Plans in the Pentagon under Feith. (Luti, also known as 
> "uber-Luti," was such a zealot that he denounced retired Gen. Anthony Zinni as a 
> "traitor" for expressing reservations about the impending Iraq war.) Chalabi's 
> lie factory thus had two main customers, both of them wholesalers to Cheney. 
> (These alleged contacts are an apparent violation of the National Security 
> Act, which prohibits federal officials from engaging in unauthorized 
> intelligence gathering.) 
> These, then, were the key neocon players gathered around Cheney. Cheney's 
> office was key to the manufacturing of the bogus case for Iraq being close to 
> having a nuclear bomb (it had no nuclear weapons program at all after the 
> mid-1990s) and for it having a biological weapons program on wheels (biological 
> weapons labs require clean rooms and cannot be mounted in Winnebagos). 
> Cheney's office was among the originators of the smears against critics of such 
> allegations, such as Joseph Wilson. Wilson's attack on the integrity of their 
> intelligence gathering deeply threatened them. At the time he began speaking 
> out, no high US government official had dared name their fantasy for what it was 
> - a tissue of innuendo and falsehoods fed to them by the ambitious and 
> swallowed by the greedy and the gullible. That he was connected to the CIA's own 
> unit on weapons proliferation through his wife, Valerie, made him all the more 
> dangerous in their eyes, once Cheney had ferreted out that link. 
> The New York Times reported on Oct. 24, 2005, that it was Cheney who told 
> Libby that Wilson's wife worked at the CIA. White House chief of staff Karl 
> Rove also learned of Plame's identity, although it is not known how. Both of 
> them shared the information with the press, including Matt Cooper of Time 
> magazine, Robert Novak of CNN and Judith Miller of the New York Times. Their aim 
> was to discredit Wilson in official Washington as a tool of CIA disinformation, 
> someone determined to make the White House the fall guys in the intelligence 
> scandal, so as to spare the Company criticism. Some have a dark suspicion 
> that they may also have wished to disrupt the CIA unit on anti-proliferation, 
> which continued to doubt the case they were making about the rogue Middle East 
> states. When confronted by special counsel Patrick Fitzgerald, Libby and 
> Rove seem to have claimed that they did not reveal the name of Valerie Plame 
> Wilson. In fact, they had called her "Joe Wilson's wife." This denial, however, 
> is strikingly disingenuous and unconvincing. 
> Clearly Cheney's men had powerful domestic political reasons to try to 
> destroy Wilson. But considering the larger geopolitical ambitions of the neocons 
> in Cheney's inner circle, and their combination of ignorance and arrogance, it 
> could be argued that Iraq and Iraqi weapons were all along a mere 
> pied-à-terre. Syria, Iran and the rest of the Middle East were in the cross hairs, and 
> Wilson and Plame were getting in the way of the next projects. 
> With the war in Iraq a disaster, possible indictments looming and polls 
> showing that 80 percent of Americans believe that revealing Plame's identity was 
> either illegal or unethical, those dreams of world domination have crumbled 
> to dust. 
> ------- 
> Jump to today's TO Features:                                                 
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