Posted on 02/16/2004 12:32:03 AM PST by Destro
Have the neocons killed a presidency?
Posted: February 16, 2004
1:00 a.m. Eastern
© 2004 Creators Syndicate, Inc.
George W. Bush "betrayed us," howled Al Gore.
"He played on our fear. He took America on an ill-conceived foreign adventure, dangerous to our troops, an adventure that was preordained and planned before 9-11 ever happened."
Hearing it, Gore's rant seemed slanderous and demagogic. For though U.S. policy since Clinton had called for regime change in Iraq, there is no evidence, none, that Bush planned to invade prior to 9-11.
Yet, the president has a grave problem, and it is this: Burrowed inside his foreign-policy team are men guilty of exactly what Gore accuses Bush of, men who did exploit our fears to stampede us into a war they had plotted for years. Consider:
* In 1996, in a strategy paper crafted for Israel's Bibi Netanyahu, Richard Perle, Douglas Feith and David Wurmser urged him to "focus on removing Saddam Hussein from power" as an "Israeli strategic objective." Perle, Feith, Wurmser were all on Bush's foreign policy team on 9-11.
* In 1998, eight members of Bush's future team, including Perle, Wolfowitz and Rumsfeld, wrote Clinton urging upon him a strategy that "should aim, above all, at the removal of Saddam Hussein."
* On Jan. 1, 2001, nine months before 9-11, Wurmser called for U.S.-Israeli attacks "to broaden the [Middle East] conflict to strike fatally ... the regimes of Damascus, Baghdad, Tripoli, Teheran and Gaza ... to establish the recognition that fighting with either the United States or Israel is suicidal."
"Crises can be opportunities," added Wurmser.
On Sept. 11, opportunity struck.
On Sept. 15, according to author Bob Woodward, Paul Wolfowitz spoke up in the War Cabinet to urge that Afghanistan be put on a back burner and an attack be mounted at once on Iraq, though Iraq had had nothing to do with 9-11. Why Iraq? Said Wolfowitz, because it is "doable."
On Sept. 20, 40 neoconservatives in an open letter demanded that Bush remove Saddam from power, "even if evidence does not link Iraq directly to the [9-11] attack." Failure to do so, they warned the president, "would constitute an early and perhaps decisive surrender in the war on international terrorism."
While Bush had taken office as a traditional conservative skeptical of "nation-building" and calling for a more "humble" foreign policy, after 9-11, he was captured by the neocons and converted to an agenda they had worked up years before. Suddenly, he sounded just like them, threatening wars on "axis-of-evil" nations that had nothing to do with 9-11.
And here is where Bush's present crisis was created.
Though he had internalized the neoconservative agenda for war, he had no rationale, no justification, no casus belli. Iraq had not threatened or attacked us.
Enter the WMD. Neoconservatives pressed on Bush the idea that Iraq must still have weapons of mass destruction and must be working on nuclear weapons. And as Saddam was a figure of such irrationality – i.e., a madman – he would readily give an atom bomb to al-Qaida. An American city could be incinerated.
Therefore, Saddam had to be destroyed. Bush bought it.
The problem, however, was this: While there is much evidence Saddam is evil, there is no evidence he was insane. He had not used his WMD in 1991, when he had them. For he was not a fool. He knew that would mean his end. Why would he then build a horror weapon now, give it to a terrorist and risk the annihilation of his regime, family, legacy and himself, a fate he had narrowly escaped in 1991?
Made no sense – and there was no hard evidence on the WMD.
Thus, when the CIA was unable to come up with hard evidence that Saddam still had WMD, or was building nuclear weapons, neocon insiders sifted the intelligence, cherry-picked it, presented tidbits to the media as unvarnished truth, and persuaded Powell and the president to rely on it to make the case to Congress, the country and the world. Powell and the president did.
Now the WMD case has fallen apart. Powell has egg on his face. And the president must persuade Tim Russert and the nation that Iraq was a "war of necessity" because we "had no choice when we looked at the intelligence I looked at."
But, sir, the intelligence you "looked at" was flawed. Who gave it to you?
To its neocon architects, Iraq was always about empire, hegemony, Pax Americana, global democracy – about getting hold of America's power to make the Middle East safe for Sharon and themselves glorious and famous.
But now they have led a president who came to office with good intentions and a good heart to the precipice of ruin. One wonders if Bush knows how badly he has been had. And if he does, why he has not summarily dealt with those who misled him?
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Patrick J. Buchanan was twice a candidate for the Republican presidential nomination and the Reform Party’s candidate in 2000. He is also a founder and editor of the new magazine, The American Conservative. Now a political analyst for MSNBC and a syndicated columnist, he served three presidents in the White House, was a founding panelist of three national television shows, and is the author of seven books.
Pat is a loon.This article of his and the use of neocon ( his code for JEWS )as a pejorative, is pathetic, irrelevant, mindless and worthless to all, but his sycophants.
But if Saddam didn't have WMDs, and wouldn't use them even if he had them, then he was no threat to Israel. And if he was no threat to Israel, why would Israel want him removed from power? If the Mossad or the Elders of Zion or the Neoconservative Cabal or whoever were "cherry-picking" intelligence to frame Saddam, surely at least the conspirators knew the truth. Or is Pat saying that Sharon is smarter than Bush but dumber than Saddam?
Conversely, is Pat now saying that WMDs were a legitimate reason to depose Saddam? Back when everybody in the world believed Saddam was sitting on stockpiles of ready-to-use chemical and biological weapons, Pat was saying that wasn't a valid reason for war. If that's still the case—if real WMDs aren't a legitimate casus belli—then discussing how the Jews "cherry-picked" the intelligence they allowed Bush and Powell to see is irrelevant.
A reasonable person could have written a very straightforward editorial saying "see, I told you so"—Pat didn't believe Saddam was a threat and lo, Saddam wasn't a threat, case closed. But no, Pat has to make this about the Jews.
So we should have refused France's help?
"[America] well knows that by once enlisting under other banners than her own, were they even the banners of foreign independence, she would involve herself beyond the power of extrication in all the wars of interest and intrigue, of individual avarice, envy and ambition, which assume the colors and usurp the standards of freedom. The fundamental maxims of her policy would insensibly change from liberty to force." --John Quincy Adams
"Peace, commerce and honest friendship with all nations; entangling alliances with none." --Thomas Jefferson
"Our own share of miseries is sufficient: Why enter then as volunteers into those of another?" --Thomas Jefferson
"Of all the enemies to public liberty, war is, perhaps, the most to be dreaded, because it comprises and develops the germ of every other. War is the parent of armies; from these proceed debts and taxes; and armies, and debts, and taxes are the known instruments for bringing the many under the domination of the few." --James Madison
But then, we all do have to remember that Pat thinks that we should NOT have entered into WW II and that Hitler would have left the USA alone. Poor Pat and his paltry few followers.
Yep, and I think we all know what it's a code word for.
When will the neocons be a problem? Well I think it is when they use Iraq to stage their agenda into Syria and into Iran and beyond. That is why the neocons wanted to go into Iraq-as a staging ground to change the Middle East - by force if need be. But classical conservatives feel the need only to go into Iraq. Fix Iraq and go home. THAT is what neocons do not want and that is where the tug of war is for Bush's attention.
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