This piece from the New Yorker is about a year old, and in that respect it offers some usefulness as a way to gauge Paul wolfowitz’s claims and expectations against the reality a year later. (The very last line of the article being the most poignant of those.) But less so than one might think, for an article subtitled “Paul Wolfowitz defends his war”. This article is more of a look into the man himself– how he came to where he is in his views, and how he operates “in the field” in present day. (Well, present day a year ago.) In this case, the reporter accompanied Wolfowitz on a multi-stop tour in Europe.

It’s long, and informative, and not hostile or incendiary– though it doesn’t give Wolfowitz a free pass, either. Just an in-depth look at neocon Paul Wolfowitz, in development, and in action.

THE BELIEVER

Paul Wolfowitz defends his war.

by PETER J. BOYER
Issue of 2004-11-01
Posted 2004-10-25

On the night of October 5th, a group of Polish students, professors, military officers, and state officials crowded into a small auditorium at Warsaw University to hear Paul Wolfowitz, the Deputy Secretary of Defense, give a talk on the subject of the war in Iraq. It was an unusually warm evening for October, and every seat was filled; the room seemed nearly airless. Wolfowitz began by joking that his father, a noted mathematician, would have been proud to see him in this academic setting, even as he was saddened that the younger Wolfowitz had pursued the political, rather than the “real,�? sciences. After a few minutes, Wolfowitz’s voice, which normally has a soft tremble, grew even more faint, and his aspect became wan. For an instant, he seemed actually to wobble.

It had been a tiring day, preceded by an overnight flight from Washington. This was to have been a routine official trip for Wolfowitz—a visit with soldiers in Germany and some bucking up of Iraq-war allies in Warsaw and London. The bucking up, however, was made a bit more complicated by developments within the Administration. The previous afternoon, as Wolfowitz was preparing to board his plane at Andrews Air Force Base, an aide had handed him a report containing some vexing news. Wolfowitz’s boss, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, had just delivered a speech in New York and, in a question-and-answer exchange afterward, had declared that he had not seen any “strong, hard evidence�? linking Al Qaeda with Saddam Hussein’s regime. Rumsfeld’s unexpected remark—undercutting one of the Administration’s principal arguments for going to war—had already prompted press inquiries at the Pentagon, suggesting a bad news cycle ahead. Meanwhile, the Washington Post was preparing to report that L. Paul Bremer, the former administrator of the American-led occupation of Iraq, had faulted the U.S. postwar plan for lacking sufficient troops to provide security—affirming a principal contention of the Administration’s critics. In addition, the government’s Iraq Survey Group, headed by Charles Duelfer, was about to release a final report on the search for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq; already the report’s substance was being summed up in headlines as “report discounts iraqi arms threat.�? And the Times had learned of a new C.I.A. assessment casting doubt on links between the Jordanian terrorist Abu Musab al-Zarqawi and Saddam’s regime—undermining yet another of the Administration’s rationales for the war.

Wolfowitz has been a major architect of President Bush’s Iraq policy and, within the Administration, its most passionate and compelling advocate. His long career as a diplomat, strategist, and policymaker will be measured by this policy, and, more immediately, the President he serves may not be returned to office because of it. The Administration had been divided over Iraq from the start, and new fissures seemed to be appearing. The Poles sitting in the Warsaw audience, “new�? Europeans who had cast their lot with America, might understandably have been concerned. The government in Poland, where public opinion has shifted against the war, faces elections next year, and will probably reduce its forces in Iraq in the coming months.

After his faltering start, Wolfowitz, nearing the midpoint of his speech, began to find his voice. He recounted the events of Poland’s darkest days, and the civilized world’s acquiescence to Hitler’s ambitions which preceded them. When Hitler began to rearm Germany, Wolfowitz said, “the world’s hollow warnings formed weak defenses.�? When Hitler annexed Austria, “the world sat by.�? When German troops marched into Czechoslovakia before the war, “the world sat still once again.�? When Britain and France warned Hitler to stay out of Poland, the Führer had little reason to pay heed.

“Poles understand perhaps better than anyone the consequences of making toothless warnings to brutal tyrants and terrorist regimes,�? Wolfowitz said. “And, yes, I do include Saddam Hussein.�? He then laid out the case against Saddam, reciting once again the dictator’s numberless crimes against his own people. He spoke of severed hands and videotaped torture sessions. He told of the time, on a trip to Iraq, he’d been shown a “torture tree,�? the bark of which had been worn away by ropes used to bind Saddam’s victims, both men and women. He said that field commanders recently told him that workers had come across a new mass grave, and had stopped excavation when they encountered the remains of several dozen women and children, “some still with little dresses and toys.�?

Wolfowitz observed that some people—meaning the “realists�? in the foreignpolicy community, including Secretary of State Colin Powell—believed that the Cold War balance of power had brought a measure of stability to the Persian Gulf. But, Wolfowitz continued, “Poland had a phrase that correctly characterized that as ‘the stability of the graveyard.’ The so-called stability that Saddam Hussein provided was something even worse.�?

Finally, Wolfowitz thanked the Poles for joining in a war that much of Europe had repudiated, and continues to oppose. His message was clear: history, especially Europe’s in the last century, has proved that it is smarter to side with the U.S. than against it. “We will not forget Poland’s commitment,�? he promised. “Just as you have stood with us, we will stand with you.�?

Wolfowitz, who is sixty, has served in the Administrations of six Presidents, yet he is still regarded by many in Washington with a considerable measure of puzzlement. Read the rest of this entry »

This article on why it’s in the U.S.’s best interest to leave Iraq speaks for itself, so I have little to add as an intro. I’ll simply precede it with some biographical information about the article’s author, Charles V. Peña– and I’ll note that while the article is published at TomPaine.com (”The best progressive insight and action. All day.”), Mr. Peña’s insight’s are “progressive” (as in liberal) only by coincidence. He himself is a libertarian– director of defense policies at the Cato Institute.

And he doesn’t come without qualifications, to put it lightly:

From Cato:

Cato’s director of defense policy studies Charles V. Peña is the author of studies on the war on terrorism, the Iraq war, homeland security, bioterrorism, missile defense, and national security. He is an analyst for MSNBC, and has worked for several defense contractors with a variety of government clients, including the Office of the Secretary of Defense, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the Federal Emergency Management Agency. Peña has analyzed and managed programs and studies on missile defense, strategic nuclear weapons, targeting policy and strategy, arms control, precision guided munitions, the future of air power, long-range military planning, Navy force structure and costing, joint military exercises, and emergency preparedness and response. He has been cited in the New York Times, the Washington Post, USA Today, the Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times, and the Chicago Tribune. He has appeared on The McLaughlin Group, The O’Reilly Factor, Hardball, Lester Holt Live, Market Watch, and the NBC Nightly News. Peña holds an M.A. in security policy studies from the George Washington University.

From TomPaine.com:

Charles V. Peña is an adviser to the Straus Military Reform Project, senior fellow with the Coalition for a Realistic Foreign Policy, and analyst for MSNBC. He is a co-author of Exiting Iraq: Why the United States Must End the Military Occupation and Renew the War against Al Qaeda (Cato Institute, 2004) and author of the forthcoming Winning the Un-War: A New Strategy for the War on Terrorism (Potomac Books, Inc.).

Getting Out: Our Strategic Interest
November 22, 2005

by Charles V. Peña

Rep. John Murtha is right when he says, “The U.S. cannot accomplish anything further in Iraq militarily. It is time to bring them home.�? Yet the administration persists. At the American Enterprise Institute, Vice President Dick Cheney responded to Murtha, saying, “A precipitous withdrawal from Iraq would be a victory for the terrorists, an invitation to further violence against free nations, and a terrible blow to the future security of the United States of America.�?

And so the official White House policy remains what it was on Veterans Day when President Bush did his best to evoke Winston Churchill: “We will never back down, we will never give in, we will never accept anything less than complete victory.�?

Even if victory could somehow be achieved, it would be Pyrrhic given the costs and consequences. Moreover, it would only be a tactical victory at the expense of losing strategic position in the war on terrorism. What the Bush administration refuses to understand is that the U.S. military occupation in Iraq is part of the problem, not part of the solution. Therefore, the strategic imperative is to exit Iraq rather than stay. And although it is counterintuitive, exiting Iraq may be a prerequisite for victory.
Read the rest of this entry »

Pat Buchanan strikes an interesting tone in this article about the recurrence of “Vietnam Syndrome” in America. He’s been firmly against the war in Iraq from the start, but Buchanan is also a patriot and a nationalist, so he is hard-pressed to revel in the rise in anti-war sentiment, since it means the near-certain undoing of what, for better or worse, was a big project and goal of the U.S.: successful regime change in Iraq.

Part of what puts Buchanan in a strange position is the fact that he was a part of the Nixon administration during America’s last giant quagmire, and by necessity, he became invested in the idea of putting a positive spin on that war, and hoping for its success. When I have heard him speak on TV about Vietnam, he has conveyed the idea that it was lost due to a failure of will on the part of the American people. Which may in fact be the case, but only when considered in the context of just what it is that the American people were expected to have the will for– i.e., the loss of tens of thousands of American lives in order to change the leadership in a foreign land, with dubious prospects for long-term success.

Buchanan proposes that that “malady” is upon the American populace again, and he suggests that there’s generally only one way to cure it: an unsatisfying and potentially disastrous withdrawal from Iraq before it’s “done”.

He does raise the obvious point that is begged by all this– is it a lack of will from the public or a lack of leadership from the president that is at fault here?– but it comes up briefly and is dismissed as irrelevant in a practical sense. Which, at least as far as Iraq goes, it is. That dynamic is under way, and determining whoever is to “blame” won’t stop it.

However, to the extent that there is a “Vietnam Syndrome”– a distaste and impatience for foreign wars of dubious purpose — future U.S. leaders would do well to factor that into their war planning. I was only alive for about two years of Vietnam, but even I saw this Iraq strain of Vietnam Syndrome coming from a mile away. And if you plan to use U.S. forces and U.S. tax dollars to pursue a given mission, and your mission is going to be long and somewhat murky, the onus is on you, as the leader, to ensure that your citizens are willing to support that full, murky, potentially unsatisfying mission. All other matters aside– if a leader is going to expect support for a war that lasts years, costs thousands of lives and hundreds of billions of dollars, and provides long stretches of uncertainty, that leader must have a cause and a mission that will engender such support. And that’s not a small matter. The success of the mission depends on it.

And if Americans “don’t have the stomach” for all that it would take to remake Iraq (and let’s not forget Afghanistan), then what of a bigger plan to remake the Middle East? What of the neoconservative desire to exert similar control in other parts of the globe?

Buchanan’s prediction, if Iraq fails, is this:

As for Bush, a retreat from Iraq and defeat there would mean a failed presidency. The Bush Doctrine of employing U.S. power to unhorse dictators and impose democracy will be dead.

America will adopt a new non-interventionist foreign policy, except where vital U.S. interests are imperiled. The tragedy is that we did not do, voluntarily, 15 years ago, what a foolish, failing neoconservative foreign policy may now force us to do in the not-too-distant future.

The malady recurs
WorldNetDaily
© 2005 Creators Syndicate Inc.

Posted: November 21, 2005

——————————————————————————–

Despite America’s triumph in Desert Storm and Tommy Frank’s brilliant run up to Baghdad, the Vietnam Syndrome is with us yet.

We never really purged it from our system.

That is the meaning of 40 Senate votes on a resolution demanding that President Bush give quarterly progress reports and a timetable for getting us out of Iraq. While 58 senators voted no on timetables, they bought into the rest of the resolution.

And what is the message? We are not going deeper into Iraq, as McCain urges. We are not going to stay the course, as Bush insists. America is coming home. It is but a matter of time.
Read the rest of this entry »

David Henderson is a research fellow with the Hoover Institution and an associate professor of economics in the Graduate School of Business and Public Policy at the Naval Postgraduate School. Henderson is neither liberal or conservative, though the natural inclination would be to align him more with the conservative camp, if for no other reason than that he is a free market economist who works for the Hoover Institute, a well-known conservative think tank.

I say this, because in reading David’s article below, a skeptic might be inclined to think he’s just another typical “anti-American” liberal (not me, but there are folks who feel that way). I can assure you — and David Henderson’s credentials can back me up — that this is not the case. If his Hoover Institute affiliation isn’t enough to make that point, a look at his book The Joy of Freedom would seal the deal. Here’s a link to reviews of that book — a glowing tribute to the free market and limited government.

Anyway, on to the piece, which highlights a handful of examples of how U.S. intervention in the affairs of other nations has had unfortunate unintended consequences– for the U.S. Meaning that often when we venture abroad to try and solve what appears to be a problem for the U.S., we set in motion an even bigger problem that we will have to deal with at some point.

An Economist’s Case Against an Interventionist Foreign Policy
David R. Henderson

Antiwar.com
November 14, 2005

I’ve been an economist over half my life. The more I’ve learned, the more I’ve seen what a powerful insight economist Ludwig von Mises had over 60 years ago when he pointed out that virtually every government intervention leads to unintended consequences that then lead to further interventions. So, for example, Nixon’s 1973 price controls on gasoline caused us to waste hundreds of millions of dollars in time lining up for gas. That led the U.S. government to dictate the fuel economy of cars. The fuel economy laws caused auto companies to make lighter cars, causing a few extra thousand deaths a year. (For more on this, see Chapter 2 of my book The Joy of Freedom: An Economist’s Odyssey.) The gasoline lines also caused people to be more sympathetic to intervening in the Middle East.

In foreign policy also, when government intervenes, it creates problems that it tries to solve by intervening further. Take Iraq… please, as the late Henny Youngman would have said. How did we get to the point where the Bush government invaded Iraq? Let’s take a trip down memory lane.

In 1963, the CIA helped a young Iraqi ally who, along with other plotters, overthrew General Adbul Qassim. You may have heard of this young Iraqi ally; he’s been in the news lately. His name is Saddam Hussein. Five years later, the CIA backed another coup that made Hussein deputy to the new military ruler. Then, in 1979, Hussein took his turn as dictator.

Hussein proceeded to wage a long and costly war on Iran. Although many people, correctly, point to this war as evidence of Hussein’s evil, they rarely mention one highly relevant fact: the Reagan administration supported this invasion with billions of dollars in export credits and with satellite intelligence. Saddam Hussein was evil for initiating and fighting that war. How, then, should we evaluate the U.S. government officials who actively supported him?

But my main purpose here is not to question the morality of war. Rather, it is to point out how one intervention leads to another. The U.S. government supported a man who eventually took over Iraq’s government and who later became, in the eyes of the U.S. government, the enemy. The U.S. government’s interventions of the 1960s led, indirectly but inexorably, to its current intervention.
Read the rest of this entry »

MSNBC has this story about the results of a major 4-year survey, held by the Pew Research Center for People and the Press. The last time the “America’s Place In the World” survey was held was in the summer before 9-11. The findings should be a relief for those who have been worried that the neoconservative foreign policy approach had been embraced by the people of America. It was said by many during the 2004 election campaign that the election was to represent whether Americans rejected or embraced President Bush’s more aggressive foreign policy, but for a lot of reasons, it was not that straightforward. This survey would seem to be a lot more instructive on that issue, at least as far as opinion polls go.

Two graphs from the Pew report:

Since 1997, when the PNAC was founded, acceptance of their core belief has gone down among “influencers”

Non-interventionist sentiment is up slightly from 10 years ago

We will do a more in-depth look at the full survey results and report soon, but for now, this article is fairly self-explanatory. If the Pew study can be considered to be a report card on how well the neocons have convinced America to accept its doctrine, they seem to have earned about a “D”.

Here’s the opening paragraph from the report itself:

Preoccupied with war abroad and growing problems at home, U.S. opinion leaders and the general public are taking a decidedly cautious view of America’s place in the world. Over the past four years, opinion leaders have become less supportive of the United States playing a “first among equals” role among the world’s leading nations. The goal of promoting democracy in other nations also has lost ground, and while most opinion leaders view President Bush’s calls for expanded democracy in the Middle East as a good idea, far fewer think it will actually succeed.
…

And here’s the MSNBC article:

Americans less enchanted as sole superpower - Politics - MSNBC.com
Major new poll shows sharp rise in belief U.S. should mind its own business

By Alex Johnson
MSNBC
Nov. 17, 2005

Americans’ appetite for world leadership has waned significantly since before the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, with more than two-fifths saying the United States should mind its own business, according to a major new survey released Thursday.

The survey, conducted by the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press and the Council on Foreign Relations, found an isolationist streak that rivals sentiments that emerged in the mid-1970s in the aftermath of the Vietnam War.

Pew and the Council on Foreign Relations conduct the survey, titled “America and Its Place in the World,�? every four years. The last survey was conducted in the summer of 2001, just before the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, providing a useful gauge of changes in Americans’ attitudes after the attacks and the subsequent wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

“September 11 is losing its power to shape views on foreign policy,�? Lee Feinstein, deputy director of studies at the Council on Foreign Relations, said in a briefing for reporters. “Activism looks much less appealing.�?
Read the rest of this entry »

This article from the upcoming issue of The American Conservative is a really good account of the influence the magazine The Weekly Standard, whose editor is PNAC Chairman Bill Kristol, has had on the rise of the neocons, and on the drive for war in Iraq.

As I was reading it, about 7 different spots seemed to deserve excerpting and highlighting, and I was concerned I wouldn’t be able to choose which to use. Then I got near the end, and I found the one:

During the second week of the Iraq invasion, the Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz interviewed several intellectual supporters of the war. The New York Times’ Thomas Friedman (who backed the war despite being haunted by its similarities to Israel’s 1982 invasion of Lebanon, which he saw firsthand) suggested that this was very much an intellectuals’ war. “It’s the war the neoconservatives marketed. Those people had an idea to sell when September 11 came, and they sold it. Oh boy, did they sell it. So this is not a war that the masses demanded. This is a war of an elite. … I could give you the names of 25 people (all of whom are at this moment within a five block radius of this office) who, if you had exiled them to a desert island a year and a half ago, the Iraq war would not have happened.�? Then Friedman paused, clarifying, “It’s not some fantasy the neoconservatives invented. It’s not that 25 people hijacked America. You don’t take such a great nation into such a great adventure with Bill Kristol and the Weekly Standard and another five or six influential columnists. In the final analysis what fomented the war is America’s over-reaction to September 11. … It is not only the neoconservatives that led us to the outskirts of Baghdad. What led us to the outskirts of Baghdad is a very American combination of anxiety and hubris.�?

That kind of ambiguous conclusion about the Standard’s and the neocons’ role in starting the war is what the undisputed and public evidence will sustain. The Standard was important. It amplified the views of “the 25�? the way luncheon seminars at the American Enterprise Institute and other neocon think tanks never could have.
—

But don’t let the excerpt satisfy you. This whole article is a very interesting read, and adds some essential context to our current historical situation.

One other big point the article makes is that the Standard (and neocon intellectuals) are in some part backing off of their support of the current administration, and are now looking more to moderates and Democrats to adopt their ideas. That’s very important to understand — that while the neocons have gained major influence in the current circles of power, they are not wedded to a particular party– or even wedded to conservatives, for that matter.

(A note on bias: For those who are not aware, The American Conservative, a “paleoconservative” (i.e., old or traditional conservative) magazine founded by Pat Buchanan, is a publishing competitor and ideological opponent of The Weekly Standard, founded by neoconservative William Kristol.)

The Weekly Standard’s War

Murdoch’s mag stands athwart history yelling, “Attack!�?

By Scott McConnell
The American Conservative

As the Weekly Standard celebrates its 10th birthday, it may be time to ask whether America has ever seen a more successful political magazine. Many have been more widely read, profitable, amusing, or brilliant. But in terms of actually changing the world and shaping the course of history, what contemporary magazine rivals the Standard? Even if you believe that the change has been much for the worse, the Standard’s record of success in its own terms is formidable.

At the time of the Standard’s founding in 1995, there was considerable speculation among neoconservatives over whether the movement had run its course. In “Neoconservatism: A Eulogy,�? Norman Podhoretz argued that neoconservatism had effectively put itself out of business by winning on its two major battle fronts: over communism and the residue of the 1960s counterculture. In the process, it had injected itself into the main body of American conservatism to such a degree that it was no longer particularly distinct from it. The eulogy was not a lamentation, more an appreciation of a job well done.

But while there was something to the Podhoretz argument, the American Right in 1995 did not have a neoconnish feel. Read the rest of this entry »

The following comes from author Ivan Eland, a Senior Fellow at the libertarian Independent Institute, Director of the Institute’s Center on Peace & Liberty, and author of the books The Empire Has No Clothes: U.S. Foreign Policy Exposed, and Putting “Defense�? Back into U.S. Defense Policy.

It talks about how the war in Iraq seems to have become a birthing ground for a sort of Al Qaeda 2.0, more vicious than the first version, which seems to now be moving beyond the main battleground in Iraq.

It’s certainly worth thinking about this: How powerful would Abu Musab al-Zarqawi be today if the United States had not invaded Iraq?

The New Al Qaeda: More Dangerous than the Old Version

November 14, 2005
Ivan Eland

Say good-bye to the old al Qaeda and hello to a new, more dangerous version created by President George W. Bush. The recent suicide bombings by Iraqis in Amman, Jordan are ominous because they provide hard evidence (confirmed by U.S. intelligence analysis) that the war in Iraq—far from pinning terrorists down within that country’s borders, as the president alleges—is incubating combat-hardened jihadists for export to other countries. As many opponents of the Iraq war predicted beforehand, a non-Islamic nation’s invasion of another Muslim country has spawned the same radical Islamic terrorism that occurred after the Soviets invaded Afghanistan in the 1980s and Russia invaded Chechnya in the 1990s.

The former invasion ultimately led to the rise of Osama bin Laden, al Qaeda’s leader and once dominant force. After 9/11, the United States made considerable progress in eliminating al Qaeda’s safe haven and training infrastructure in Afghanistan and isolating bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri, his deputy, from their forces in the field. Yet the U.S. invasion of Iraq allowed Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, a previously independent actor who didn’t care that much about the United States, to grab the spotlight by joining al Qaeda and becoming the face of the Iraqi insurgency against the U.S. occupation. Zarqawi and his “al Qaeda in Iraq�? organization make the treacherous bin Laden and Zawahiri look like choirboys. Zarqawi’s trademarks are the brutal videotaped beheadings and the wanton slaughter of Muslim innocents, as well as the foreign occupiers and their Iraqi allies.

Zarqawi is so ruthless that Zawahiri sent him a letter asking him nicely to tone it down a bit. We know things are bad when the al Qaeda leadership seems temperate in comparison. Yet, Zarqawi has ignored pleas from al Qaeda’s leadership for moderation, and the bombings by his Iraqi minions in Jordan seem to indicate that he is now expanding his attacks outside Iraq. Read the rest of this entry »

Picking up where we left off, the following is another article about conservatives shedding their confidence in the effort to bring democracy to the Middle East via the war in Iraq. This article serves up more than our last entry on this subject, however, in that it focuses in part on remarks made at a conference hosted by the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), an organization closely associated with the PNAC.

The title of this article is fairly misleading in my opinion–the so-called “conservatives” in this article don’t appear to me to be deserting the war campaign, at least not based on what is reported. There is clearly a lot of disappointment as to how the war has been conducted and doubt about Iraq’s future prospects, but I didn’t read anyone say that they oppose the war or think the U.S. should exit anytime soon.

To their credit, that is in line with the neoconservative angle on the Iraq war. Under the neoconservative framework, Iraq really has to be won by the U.S.– or at least needs to be a demonstrable success of some sort. (If for no other reason than because it was supposed to be a “show of power” that would result in a greater level of respect/fear for the U.S. throughout the Middle East, and in troublesome regimes around the globe.) And despite the oft-repeated contentions by pro-war pundits that “Iraq is better off without Saddam” (”no matter how things turn out” usually being unstated, but implicit), and citations of various indicators of progress in this “developing democracy”, this article makes it clear that many of the war’s most ardent supporters are seriously concerned that the Iraq adventure might turn out to be a near-total failure. Whether it’s concern about fundamental flaws in the structure of the developing Iraqi government, or worry about the effect the 2006 congressional election will have on the political will power of Bush and the Republicans, neoconservatives and conservative war supporters appear to be getting their heads around the idea that the Iraq war may ultimately be a lost cause.

The article was originally published by Financial Times; I’m archiving it in full here for educational and research purposes.

By Guy Dinmore

10/11/05 “Financial Times” — – Even among the strongest advocates in Washington of the war in Iraq there is a sense of alarm these days, with harsh criticism directed particularly at the draft constitution, which they see as a betrayal of principles and a recipe for disintegration of the Iraqi state.

Expressions of concern among conservatives and former Iraqi exiles, seen also in the rising disillusionment of the American public, reflect a widening gap with the Bush administration and its claims of “incredible political progress�? in Iraq.

Over the past week, two of Washington’s most influential conservative think-tanks, the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) and the Heritage Foundation, held conferences on Iraq where the mood among speakers, including Iraqi officials, was decidedly sombre.

Kanan Makiya, an outspoken proponent of the war who is documenting the horrors of the Saddam regime in his Iraq Memory Foundation, opened the AEI meeting by admitting to many “dashed dreams�?.

He said he and other opposition figures had seriously underestimated the powers of ethnic and sectarian self-interest, as well as the survivability of the “constantly morphing and flexible�? Ba’ath party. He also blamed the Bush administration for poor planning and committing too few troops.

The proposed constitution, to be taken to a referendum on Saturday, was a “profoundly destabilising document�? that could “deal a death blow�? to Iraq, he said.

The constitution was a recipe for greater chaos, said Rend Rahim, a former exile who had been designated as Iraq’s first postwar ambassador to the US. Unless revised, it would lead to such a devolution of power that the central government would barely exist, she said.

Qubad Talabani, Washington representative of the Kurdistan regional government, delivered a stinging indictment of the central government that echoed the growing divisions in the ruling alliance of Shia and Kurds.

Danielle Pletka, senior analyst at AEI and conference moderator, called the constitution deeply flawed, describing it as the result of political machinations between Iraqis and Americans. She said the process had been reduced to a benchmark for the exit of US troops.

With growing numbers of Americans wanting an early withdrawal from Iraq, Mrs Pletka’s remarks reflect the concerns of conservative ideologues that the Bush administration will succumb to internal pressures and pull out prematurely.
Read the rest of this entry »

The PNAC’s “Rebuilding America’s Defenses” position paper can be found in PDF form at the PNAC site, or here at our site:

http://pnac.info/RebuildingAmericasDefenses.pdf

This weblog entry/article from The Nation’s Capital Games blog, by David Corn discusses former CIA Director James Woolsey’s rising profile in America’s new military expansion. (Here’s an entry about Woolsey’s “World War IV” theory which was mentioned on CNN).

The Pentagon’s (CIA) Man in Iraq

04/04/2003 @ 2:50pm

Toward the start of the second Persian Gulf War, I found myself in a room with R. James Woolsey, CIA chief during the first two years of the Clinton administration. A television was turned on, and we both watched a news report on the latest development in the North Korea nuclear drama. How much longer, I asked him, could this administration wait before dealing with North Korea and its efforts to develop nuclear-weapons material? A little while, but not too long, he said. Until after the Iraq war? Yes, Woolsey said, we can take care of things then. (That was when the prevailing assumption was the war in Iraq would take about as long as a Donald Rumsfeld press conference.) And, I wondered, is this a challenge that can be taken care of with, say, a well-planned and contained bombing raid, one that strikes the nuclear facilities in question? “Oh, no, ” he said. “This is going to be war.” War, full-out war, with a nation that might already have a few nuclear weapons and that does have 600,000 North Korean soldiers stationed 25 miles from Seoul, with 37,000 US troops in between? “Yes, war.” He didn’t flinch, didn’t bat an eye.

Woolsey is something of a prophet of war. And the Pentagon wants him to be part of its team running postwar Iraq.

Full story…