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Posted on 10-11-2004 Revolution Will Not Be Televised Neo-Con Agenda: Iran, China, Russia, Latin America ...
By Jim Lobe, Inter-Press Service, 5 November 2004
Washington - An influential foreign-policy neo-conservative with
longstanding ties to top hawks in the administration of President
George W Bush has laid out what he calls "a checklist of the work the
world will demand of this president and his subordinates in a second
term."
The list, which begins with the destruction of Fallujah in Iraq and
ends with the development of "appropriate strategies" for dealing with
threats posed by China, Russia and "the emergence of a number of
aggressively anti-American regimes in Latin America," also calls for
"regime change" in Iran and North Korea.
The list's author, Frank Gaffney, the founder and president of the
Center for Security Policy (CSP), also warns that Bush should resist
any pressure arising from the anticipated demise of Palestinian leader
Yasser Arafat to resume peace talks that could result in Israel's
giving up defensible boundaries."
While all seven steps listed by Gaffney in an article published
Friday morning in the 'National Review Online' have long been favored by
prominent neo-cons, the article itself, 'Worldwide Value', is the first
comprehensive compilation to emerge since Bush's re-election Tuesday.
It is also sure to be contested, not just by Democrats who, with the
election behind them, are poised to take a more anti-war position on
Iraq, but by many conservative Republicans in Congress. They blame the
neo-cons for failing to anticipate the quagmire in Iraq and worry
their grander ambitions, like those expounded by Gaffney, will
bankrupt the Treasury and break an already-overextended military.
Yet its importance as a road map of where neo-conservatives - who,
with the critical help of Vice President Dick Cheney and Defense Secretary
Donald Rumsfeld, dominated Bush's foreign policy after the Sep. 11, 2001
attacks on New York and the Pentagon - want U.S. policy to go, was
underlined by Gaffney's listing of the names of his friends in the
administration who he said, "helped the president imprint moral values on
American security policy in a way and to an extent not seen since Ronald
Reagan's first term."
In addition to Cheney and Rumsfeld, he cited the most clearly identified
- and controversial - neo-conservatives serving in the administration:
Cheney's chief of staff, I Lewis "Scooter" Libby; his top Middle East
advisors, John Hannah and David Wurmser; weapons proliferation specialist
Robert Joseph and top Mideast aide Elliott Abrams, on the National
Security Council (NSC).
Also on the roster are: Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz;
Undersecretary for Policy Douglas Feith; Feith's top Mideast aide
William Luti, in the Pentagon; Undersecretary for Arms Control and
International Security John Bolton, and for global issues, Paula
Dobriansky at the State Department.
Virtually all of the same individuals have been cited by critics of
the Iraq War, including Democratic lawmakers and retired senior foreign
service and military officials, as responsible for hijacking the policy
and intelligence process that led to the U.S. invasion of Iraq in March
2003.
Indeed, in a lengthy interview about the war on the most-watched
public-affairs TV program, '60 Minutes', last May, the former head of
the U S. Central Command and Secretary of State Colin Powell's chief
Middle East envoy until 2003, retired Gen Anthony Zinni, called for
the resignation of Libby, Abrams, Wolfowitz and Feith, as well as
Rumsfeld, for their roles in the attack.
Zinni also cited former Defence Policy Board (DPB) chairman, Richard
Perle, who has been close to Gaffney since both of them served, along
with Abrams, in the office of Washington State Senator Henry M Jackson
in the early 1970s. When Perle became an assistant secretary of
defense under Reagan he brought Gaffney along as his deputy. When
Perle left in 1987, Gaffney succeeded him before setting up CSP in
1989. As Perle's long-time protégé and associate, Gaffney sits at the
center of a network of interlocking think tanks, foundations, lobby
groups, arms manufacturers and individuals that constitute the
coalition of neo-conservatives, aggressive nationalists like Cheney
and Rumsfeld and Christian Right activists responsible for the
unilateralist trajectory of U S. foreign policy since 9/11.
Included among CSP's board of advisers over the years have been
Rumsfeld Perle, Feith, Christian moralist William Bennett, Abrams, Feith,
Joseph, former United Nations Ambassador Jeane Kirkpatrick, former Navy
Undersecretary John Lehman and former Central Intelligence Agency (CIA)
Director James Woolsey. Woolsey also co-chairs the new Committee on the
Present Danger (CPD), another prominent neo-con-led lobby group that
argues Washington is now engaged in "World War IV" against
"Islamo-fascism."
Also serving on its advisory council are executives from some of the
country's largest military contractors, which - along with wealthy
individuals sympathetic to Israel's governing Likud Party, such as
prominent New York investor Lawrence Kadish and California casino king
Irving Moskowitz, and right-wing bodies, such as the Bradley, Sarah
Scaife and Olin Foundations - finance CSP's work. Gaffney, a
ubiquitous "talking head" on TV in the run-up to the war in Iraq, sits
on the boards of CPD's parent organizations, the Foundation for the
Defence of Democracies (FDD) and Americans for Victory Over Terrorism
(AVOT). He was a charter associate, with Cheney, Rumsfeld, Perle,
Wolfowitz and Abrams, of the Project for the New American Century
(PNAC), another prominent neo-conservative-led group that offered up a
similar checklist of what Bush should do in the "war on terrorism"
just nine days after the 9/11 attacks.
His article opens by trying to pre-empt an argument that is already
being heard on the right against expanding Bush's "war on terrorism":
that since a plurality of Bush voters identified "moral values" as
their chief concern, the president should stick to his social
conservative agenda rather than expand the war. "The reality is that
the same moral principles that underpinned the Bush appeal on 'values'
issues like gay marriage, stem-cell research and the right to life
were central to his vision of U.S. war aims and foreign policy "
according to Gaffney. "Indeed, the president laid claim squarely to
the ultimate moral value - freedom - as the cornerstone of his
strategy for defeating our Islamofascist enemies and their state
sponsors, for whom that concept is utterly (sic) anathema."
To be true to that commitment, policy in the second administration
must be directed toward seven priorities, according to Gaffney, beginning
with the "reduction in detail of Fallujah and other safe havens utilized
by freedom's enemies in Iraq"; followed by "regime change - one way or
another - in Iran and North Korea, the only hope for preventing these
remaining Axis of Evil' states from fully realizing their terrorist and
nuclear ambitions."
Third, the administration must provide "the substantially increased
resources needed to re-equip a transforming military and rebuild
human-intelligence capabilities (minus, if at all possible, the sorts
of intelligence 'reforms' contemplated pre-election that would make
matters worse on this and other scores) while we fight World War IV,
followed by enhancing "protection of our homeland, including deploying
effective missile defenses at sea and in space, as well as ashore."
Fifth, Washington must keep "faith with Israel, whose destruction
remains a priority for the same people who want to destroy us (and ...
for our shared 'moral values) especially in the face of Yasser
Arafat's demise and the inevitable, post-election pressure to 'solve'
the Middle East problem by forcing the Israelis to abandon defensible
boundaries."
Sixth, the administration must deal with France and Germany and the
dynamic that made them "so problematic in the first term: namely,
their willingness to make common cause with our enemies for profit and
their desire to employ a united Europe and its new constitution - as
well as other international institutions and mechanisms - to thwart
the expansion and application of American power where deemed necessary
by Washington."
Finally, writes Gaffney, Bush must adapt "appropriate strategies for
contending with China's increasingly fascistic trade and military
policies, (Russian President) Vladimir Putin's accelerating
authoritarianism at home and aggressiveness toward the former Soviet
republics, the worldwide spread of Islamofascism, and the emergence of
a number of aggressively anti-American regimes in Latin America",
which he does not identify. "These items do not represent some sort of
neo-con 'imperialist' game plan", Gaffney stressed. "Rather, they
constitute a checklist of the work the world will demand of this
president and his subordinates in a second term."
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