The Weird Men Behind George W Bush's War

[kalian]

http://www.newamerica.net/index.cfm?pg=article&pubID=1189

America's allies and enemies alike are baffled. What is going on in the United States? Who is making foreign policy? And what are they trying to achieve? Quasi-Marxist explanations involving big oil or American capitalism are mistaken. Yes, American oil companies and contractors will accept the spoils of the kill in Iraq. But the oil business, with its Arabist bias, did not push for this war any more than it supports the Bush administration's close alliance with Ariel Sharon. Further, President Bush and Vice-President Cheney are not genuine 'Texas oil men' but career politicians who, in between stints in public life, would have used their connections to enrich themselves as figureheads in the wheat business, if they had been residents of Kansas, or in tech companies, had they been Californians.

Equally wrong is the theory that American and European civilisation are evolving in opposite directions. The thesis of Robert Kagan, the neoconservative propagandist, that Americans are martial and Europeans pacifist, is complete nonsense. A majority of Americans voted for either Al Gore or Ralph Nader in 2000. Were it not for the over-representation of sparsely populated, right-wing states in both the presidential electoral college and the Senate, the White House and the Senate today would be controlled by Democrats, whose views and values, on everything from war to the welfare state, are very close to those of western Europeans. Both the economic-determinist theory and the clash-of-cultures theory are reassuring: they assume that the recent revolution in US foreign policy is the result of obscure but understandable forces in an orderly world. The truth is more alarming. As a result of several bizarre and unforeseeable contingencies - such as the selection rather than election of George W Bush, and 11 September - the foreign policy of the world's only global power is being made by a small clique that is unrepresentative of either the US population or the mainstream foreign policy establishment.

The core group now in charge consists of neoconservative defence intellectuals (they are called 'neoconservatives' because many of them started off as anti-Stalinist leftists or liberals before moving to the far right). Inside the government, the chief defence intellectuals include Paul Wolfowitz, the deputy secretary of defence. He is the defence mastermind of the Bush administration; Donald Rumsfeld is an elderly figurehead who holds the position of defence secretary only because Wolfowitz himself is too controversial. Others include Douglas Feith, the number three at the Pentagon; Lewis 'Scooter' Libby, a Wolfowitz protege who is Cheney's chief of staff; John R Bolton, a right-winger assigned to the State Department to keep Colin Powell in check; and Elliott Abrams, recently appointed to head Middle East policy at the National Security Council. On the outside are James Woolsey, the former CIA director, who has tried repeatedly to link both 9/11 and the anthrax letters in the US to Saddam Hussein, and Richard Perle, who has just resigned from his unpaid defence department advisory post after a lobbying scandal. Most of these 'experts' never served in the military. But their headquarters is now the civilian defence secretary's office, where these Republican political appointees are despised and distrusted by the largely Republican career soldiers.

Most neoconservative defence intellectuals have their roots on the left, not the right. They are products of the largely Jewish-American Trotskyist movement of the 1930s and 1940s, which morphed into anti-communist liberalism between the 1950s and 1970s and finally into a kind of militaristic and imperial right with no precedents in American culture or political history. Their admiration for the Israeli Likud party's tactics, including preventive warfare such as Israel's 1981 raid on Iraq's Osirak nuclear reactor, is mixed with odd bursts of ideological enthusiasm for 'democracy'. They call their revolutionary ideology 'Wilsonianism' (after President Woodrow Wilson), but it is really Trotsky's theory of the permanent revolution mingled with the far-right Likud strain of Zionism. Genuine American Wilsonians believe in self-determination for people such as the Palestinians.

...more...

Very interesting read about the neoCONs behind shrub and his gang.
Scary to think that these very same neocons were bred within
liberal ranks.... :eyes:

[JohnyCanuck]

1. I thing they are missing the point

Quasi-Marxist explanations involving big oil or American capitalism are mistaken. Yes, American oil companies and contractors will accept the spoils of the kill in Iraq. But the oil business, with its Arabist bias, did not push for this war any more than it supports the Bush administration's close alliance with Ariel Sharon.

If the Bushies believe the Peak Oil theorists are correct in their assesment that world oil production is going to peak in a much shorter time frame (e.g. 15 years or so) than has been officially acknowledged, it could provide a very important motivating factor for the invasion and planting of permanent US military bases in Iraq. The world runs on oil and petrochemicals. When world oil production peaks, those who exercise control over some of the largest remaining reserves of oil (i.e. Middle East) would have enormous strategic and economic advantages over potential rivals.

It could be significant too that one of the members of Cheney's 2001 energy task force, the prominent energy investment banker Matthew Simmons, appears to be a peak oiler and has publicly ruminated on the disasterous consequences of ignoring the consequences of peak oil. If the Bushies thought that the Peak Oil theory was correct and they were also intent on implementing the neo-con/PNAC plan for global US hegemony, (as discussed in this DU thread) it would make sense to try and control the Middle Eastern and Iraqi oil fields.

Statement by Matthew Simmons, energy adviser for President Bush, at the 1:st International Workshop on Oil Depletion, Uppsala, Sweden, May, 23-25, 2002:
“We need a wake up call. We need it desperately. We need basically a new form of energy. I don’t know that there is one.” (TV4, Sweden)
See links at http://www.peakoil.net/MatSim.html

For more on peak oil:

www.peakoil.net
www.hubbertpeak.com
http://globalpublicmedia.com/SECTIONS/ENERGY/oil.depletion.php