“MAN OF THE YEAR” ON A WAR COURSE AGAIN

The Year 2004 in Retrospect: After the US election, Washington’s Neoconservative Hawks make a second attempt at restructuring the Middle East

By Rainer Rupp

[This article originally published in: junge Welt, 12/28/2004 is translated from the German on the World Wide Web, www.jungewelt.de/2004/12-28/007.php.]


At Christmas, the best-known US newsmagazine Time chose George W. Bush “2004 Man of the Year”. The editor-in-chief explained this with the “uncompromising leadership style” of the president and “because he has his gun firmly under control literally and symbolically”. The choice and reason provoked great outrage among many Americans. Bush’s critics recalled that a certain Hitler was chosen “man of the year” by Time magazine in 1938.

Although president Bush is supposedly politically strengthened by his reelection, his decision are questioned even in his own republican ranks. For his second period in office, he has purged his cabinet and the secret service and filled them with unconditional yes-men. However new resistance is forming on other planes. In nominating the corrupt chief of police of New York, Bernard Kerik, to be director of “Homeland Security”, Bush was shown that his wish is no longer a command. Within a week he had to withdraw Kerik’s nomination because Bush's "most successful and most effective police officer" turned out to be a corrupt man with close contacts to the Mafia.

RUMSFELD UNDER PRESSURE

Not only the Kerik-episode provoked doubts in Bush’s powers of discernment among republicans. The nomination of his legal advisor in the White House, Alberto Gonzales, as the next Attorney General caused a sensation. Gonzales was entangled in the greatest financial fraud of US history, the Enron scandal, and distinguished himself as the author of the notorious legal opinion that justified torture and recommended the president not observe the Geneva Convention. Beyond the person of Gonzales, Bush’s fatherly friend and mentor in matters of international politics, Donald Rumsfeld, is under fire more intensely than ever. According to the most recent polls, 56 percent of US citizens believe the Iraq war was a mistake. A slight majority urge the resignation of Rumsfeld. Unlike the army command, Rumsfeld holds fast to his plans according to which Iraq can be controlled and pacified with a small, mobile high-tech US army.

Rumsfeld also sees himself abandoned by his most determined past supporters, the neoconservative war hawks. Rumsfeld has hoisted their leading representatives Paul Wolfowitz and Douglas Feith to the second and third positions in the Pentagon hierarchy. Other key positions in the machine are filled with neoconservative buddies. In the meantime the neoconservatives have begun distancing themselves from the “failure” Rumsfeld to maintain their power and make him responsible alone for the Iraq disaster. On December 15, the chief ideologue of the neocons, William Kristol, even went so far to urge Rumsfeld’s resignation in the Washington Post. Kristol said literally: “American soldiers deserve a better Secretary of Defense!”

ASTRONOMIC COSTS

However the neoconservatives were the actual planners of the Iraq war. Their goal, the restructuring of the whole Middle East, required “cheap” victories. The neoconservatives only thought they had a chance for gaining the firm uncomplaining support of the American public for their wars if their own casualty numbers were low, the armies not too large and expensive and the adversary would quickly submit and be pacified. The Iraqi resistance thwarted their plans.

Meanwhile US experts assume that Washington must adjust “to a bloody struggle for decades” in Iraq as the International Crisis Group declared shortly before the end of the year. Their experts were not alone in concluding that “Washington’s alleged intention to make out of Iraq a model for the region with a liberal free market economy cannot be realized.” Just before Christmas, Contrack International, leader of a consortium for one of the largest so-called reconstruction projects in Iraq, also announced its withdrawal from the contested country. They could not make money any more given the astronomically high costs for security.

IRAN AND SYRIA AS TARGETS

The knowledge that the Iraq war is already lost seems increasingly accepted even in conservative-republican circles without drawing the only correct conclusion, namely withdrawal from Iraq. Instead, prominent republican Rumsfeld critics like Senator John McCain believe Iraq can still be “pacified” with more US soldiers. While there is increasingly open speculation in Washington about Runsfeld’s resignation, the neoconservative warmongers already hope for a second chance at realizing their Middle East plans by moving Wolfowitz to the post of Secretary of Defense.

A politically influential group of neoconservatives teamed up as the “Committee for the Present Danger” now present a blueprint for regime change in Iran. This should be enforced with “preventive strikes” if necessary. Syria has also fallen under intensified pressure again. The Iraq problem – according to the argument of neoconservatives in Washington – can only be solved by overthrowing the governments in Damascus and Teheran because they massively support the Iraqi resistance. From a military perspective, another war against Syria or Iran would be sheer madness in view of the situation in Iraq. However the campaign against Baghdad showed that this madness has a method with neoconservatives.

A flight of neoconservatives in the next offensive war cannot be excluded since the Iraq problem increasingly paralyzes Washington’s political possibilities and an intensified financial crisis is expected for 2005 through growing deficits in the US federal budget and the balance of payments. Increasing resistance against that offensive is forming even in the US. Al Neuhardth, founder and editor of the largest American daily newspaper, USA Today, wrote two days before Christmas that the best way of “helping our soldiers” is to protect them “from unwise and imprudent presidents” who send them into thoughtless, ill-considered adventures like Vietnam and Iraq.” Instead, these soldiers should be brought home. “The faster the better. That should be our good resolution for the New Y ear”, Al Neuharth writes.