White man's burden

By Ari Shavit

The war in Iraq was conceived by 25 neoconservative intellectuals, 
most of them Jewish, who are pushing President Bush to change the 
course of history. Two of them, journalists William Kristol and 
Charles Krauthammer, say it's possible. But another journalist, 
Thomas Friedman (not part of the group), is skeptical  

1. The doctrine

WASHINGTON - At the conclusion of its second week, the war to liberate 
Iraq wasn't looking good. Not even in Washington. The assumption of a 
swift collapse of the Saddam Hussein regime had itself collapsed. The 
presupposition that the Iraqi dictatorship would crumble as soon as 
mighty America entered the country proved unfounded. The Shi'ites didn't 
rise up, the Sunnis fought fiercely. Iraqi guerrilla warfare found the 
American generals unprepared and endangered their overextended supply 
lines. Nevertheless, 70 percent of the American people continued to 
support the war; 60 percent thought victory was certain; 74 percent 
expressed confidence in President George W. Bush. 

Washington is a small city. It's a place of human dimensions. A kind of 
small town that happens to run an empire. A small town of government 
officials and members of Congress and personnel of research institutes 
and journalists who pretty well all know one another. Everyone is busy 
intriguing against everyone else; and everyone gossips about everyone 
else.  

In the course of the past year, a new belief has emerged in the town: 
the belief in war against Iraq. That ardent faith was disseminated by 
a small group of 25 or 30 neoconservatives, almost all of them Jewish, 
almost all of them intellectuals (a partial list: Richard Perle, Paul 
Wolfowitz, Douglas Feith, William Kristol, Eliot Abrams, Charles 
Krauthammer), people who are mutual friends and cultivate one another 
and are convinced that political ideas are a major driving force of history. 
They believe that the right political idea entails a fusion of morality and 
force, human rights and grit. The philosophical underpinnings of the 
Washington neoconservatives are the writings of Machiavelli, Hobbes 
and Edmund Burke. They also admire Winston Churchill and the policy 
pursued by Ronald Reagan. They tend to read reality in terms of the 
failure of the 1930s (Munich) versus the success of the 1980s (the 
fall of the Berlin Wall).  

Are they wrong? Have they committed an act of folly in leading Washington 
to Baghdad? They don't think so. They continue to cling to their belief. 
They are still pretending that everything is more or less fine. That 
things will work out. Occasionally, though, they seem to break out in 
a cold sweat. This is no longer an academic exercise, one of them says, 
we are responsible for what is happening. The ideas we put forward are 
now affecting the lives of millions of people. So there are moments when 
you're scared. You say, Hell, we came to help, but maybe we made a mistake.  

2. William Kristol

Has America bitten off more than it can chew? Bill Kristol says no. 
True, the press is very negative, but when you examine the facts in the 
field you see that there is no terrorism, no mass destruction, no attacks 
on Israel. The oil fields in the south have been saved, air control has 
been achieved, American forces are deployed 50 miles from Baghdad. 
So, even if mistakes were made here and there, they are not serious. 
America is big enough to handle that. Kristol hasn't the slightest doubt 
that in the end, General Tommy Franks will achieve his goals. The 4th 
Cavalry Division will soon enter the fray, and another division is on its 
way from Texas. So it's possible that instead of an elegant war with 60 
killed in two weeks it will be a less elegant affair with a thousand killed 
in two months, but nevertheless Bill Kristol has no doubt at all that the 
Iraq Liberation War is a just war, an obligatory war.  

Kristol is pleasant-looking, of average height, in his late forties. 
In the past 18 months he has used his position as editor of the 
right-wing Weekly Standard and his status as one of the leaders of the 
neoconservative circle in Washington to induce the White House to do 
battle against Saddam Hussein. Because Kristol is believed to exercise 
considerable influence on the president, Vice President Richard Cheney 
and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, he is also perceived as having 
been instrumental in getting Washington to launch this all-out campaign 
against Baghdad. Sitting behind the stacks of books that cover his desk 
at the offices of the Weekly Standard in Northwest Washington, he tries 
to convince me that he is not worried. It is simply inconceivable to him 
that America will not win. In that event, the consequences would be 
catastrophic. No one wants to think seriously about that possibility.  

What is the war about? I ask. Kristol replies that at one level it is 
the war that George Bush is talking about: a war against a brutal regime 
that has in its possession weapons of mass destruction. But at a 
deeper level it is a greater war, for the shaping of a new Middle East. 
It is a war that is intended to change the political culture of the entire 
region. Because what happened on September 11, 2001, Kristol says, 
is that the Americans looked around and saw that the world is not what 
they thought it was. The world is a dangerous place. Therefore the 
Americans looked for a doctrine that would enable them to cope with 
this dangerous world. And the only doctrine they found was the 
neoconservative one.  

That doctrine maintains that the problem with the Middle East is the 
absence of democracy and of freedom. It follows that the only way to 
block people like Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden is to 
disseminate democracy and freedom. To change radically the cultural 
and political dynamics that creates such people. And the way to fight 
the chaos is to create a new world order that will be based on freedom 
and human rights - and to be ready to use force in order to consolidate 
this new world. So that, really, is what the war is about. It is being 
fought to consolidate a new world order, to create a new Middle East.  

Does that mean that the war in Iraq is effectively a neoconservative 
war? That's what people are saying, Kristol replies, laughing. But 
the truth is that it's an American war. The neoconservatives succeeded 
because they touched the bedrock of America. The thing is that America 
has a profound sense of mission. America has a need to offer something 
that transcends a life of comfort, that goes beyond material success. 
Therefore, because of their ideals, the Americans accepted what the 
neoconservatives proposed. They didn't want to fight a war over 
interests, but over values. They wanted a war driven by a moral vision. 
They wanted to hitch their wagon to something bigger than themselves.  

Does this moral vision mean that after Iraq will come the turns of 
Saudi Arabia and Egypt?  

Kristol says that he is at odds with the administration on the question 
of Saudi Arabia. But his opinion is that it is impossible to let Saudi 
Arabia just continue what it is doing. It is impossible to accept the 
anti-Americanism it is disseminating. The fanatic Wahhabism that Saudi 
Arabia engenders is undermining the stability of the entire region. 
It's the same with Egypt, he says: we mustn't accept the status quo there. 
For Egypt, too, the horizon has to be liberal democracy.  

It has to be understood that in the final analysis, the stability that 
the corrupt Arab despots are offering is illusory. Just as the stability 
that Yitzhak Rabin received from Yasser Arafat was illusory. In the end, 
none of these decadent dictatorships will endure. The choice is between 
extremist Islam, secular fascism or democracy. And because of 
September 11, American understands that. America is in a position 
where it has no choice. It is obliged to be far more aggressive in 
promoting democracy. Hence this war. It's based on the new American 
understanding that if the United States does not shape the world in 
its image, the world will shape the United States in its own image.  

[snip]

Full article at Ha'aretz ...
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/pages/ShArt.jhtml?itemNo=280279&contrassID=2
&subContrassID=14&sbSubContrassID=0&listSrc=Y


Cheers, Steve...

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