The 'Ignoble Liars' Behind
Bush's Deadly Iraq War
by Jeffrey Steinberg
On Sunday, March 16, 2003, Vice President ***** Cheney emerged from
his cave to appear on the NBC News “Meet the Press” show, for a
one-hour interview with Tim Russert. In the course of the hour, Cheney
all-but-announced that there was nothing that Saddam Hussein could do
to avert an unprovoked and unjustifiable American military invasion of
Iraq. Cheney repeatedly referred to the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, as
the “historic watershed” that, for the first time, justified an
American unilateral preventive war. Yet Cheney himself, a dozen years
earlier, had embraced the idea of preventive war--not against a Saddam
Hussein who had been armed by the Reagan and Bush Administrations with
weapons of mass destruction, but against any nation or combination of
nations that challenged American global military primacy in the
post-Soviet world. On the pivotal issue of preventive war, Cheney was
lying, willfully. But that was just the tip of the iceberg.
Cheney's extraordinary hour-long pronouncement was composed, almost
exclusively, of disinformation, which had either already been publicly
discredited, or would soon be exposed as lies.
Cheney asserted that Saddam Hussein was actively pursuing the
acquisition of nuclear weapons, when, days earlier, International
Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) chief weapons inspector Mohammed
El-Baradei had testified before the UN Security Council that the
allegations were based on documents determined to be forgeries.
Indeed, in the March 31 issue of The New Yorker magazine,
investigative reporter Seymour Hersh detailed how IAEA investigators
had determined, in just several hours of research, that purported
Niger government communiqués confirming the sale of 500 tons of
“yellow cake” uranium precursor to Baghdad, were shoddy forgeries,
drawn up on outdated Niger government letterheads. Hersh wrote that
the forgeries were passed to the Bush Administration, through British
MI6, and had probably originated with the British intelligence
service, with the Mossad, or with Iraqi oppositionists affiliated with
the Iraqi National Congress (INC) of Dr. Ahmed Chalabi.
Cheney also repeated the by-then-thoroughly-discredited charge that
Saddam Hussein had “longstanding” ties to the al-Qaeda terrorist
organization, and that it was “only a matter of time” before Saddam
Hussein provided the bin Laden gang with weapons of mass
destruction--biological, chemical, and, ultimately, nuclear. As Cheney
well knew, an October 2002 assessment from Central Intelligence Agency
(CIA) Director George Tenet, delivered to the Senate Intelligence
Oversight Committee, had pointedly stated that Saddam Hussein would
only resort to WMD, or engage with al-Qaeda, if he felt that he was
backed into a corner and facing imminent American military attack.
Repeated efforts by “war party” operatives, like former Director of
Central Intelligence and Iraqi National Congress lobbyist R. James
Woolsey, had failed to turn up any credible evidence of
Saddam-al-Qaeda links, particularly prior to Sept. 11, 2001.
Perhaps Cheney's biggest lie--which flew in the face of all
assessments from the CIA, the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), the
Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS), and State Department Middle East
experts--was that the military conquest of Iraq would be a “cakewalk.”
Cheney told Russert, “Now, I think things have gotten so bad inside
Iraq, from the standpoint of the Iraqi people, my belief is we will,
in fact, be greeted as liberators.”
Russert challenged Cheney's rosy forecast: “If your analysis is not
correct, and we're not treated as liberators, but conquerors, and the
Iraqis begin to resist, particularly in Baghdad, do you think the
American people are prepared for a long, costly, and bloody battle
with significant American casualties?”
To which Cheney responded: “Well, I don't think it's likely to unfold
that way, Tim, because I really do believe that we will be greeted as
liberators. I've talked with a lot of Iraqis in the last several
months myself, had them to the White House.... The read we get on the
people of Iraq is there is no question but that they want to get rid
of Saddam Hussein and they will welcome as liberators the United
States when we come to do that.” Later in the interview, Cheney added,
“If you look at the opposition, they've come together, I think, very
effectively, with representatives from Shia, Sunni, and Kurdish
elements in the population.”
Towards the end of his performance, the Vice President extended his
“cakewalk liberation” forecast, to further assert that American
preventive military action to overthrow Saddam Hussein would stabilize
the Middle East. He cited Dr. Bernard Lewis, the British Arab Bureau
spook and author of the “Arc of Crisis,” “Islamic card” fiasco, as his
authority: “I firmly believe, along with, you know, men like Bernard
Lewis, who's one of the great, I think, students of that part of the
world, that strong, firm U.S. response to terror and to threats to the
United States would go a long way, frankly, towards calming things in
that part of the world.”
Almost exactly 80 hours after Cheney's appearance on NBC-TV, the
United States launched an unprovoked and unnecessary war on Iraq.
According to Washington-based senior Arab diplomatic sources,
governments of the Middle East were told by top Bush Administration
officials, on the eve of the attack, that the Iraq war would be over
in seven to ten days.
The Straussian Lie
Vice President Cheney's lying performance on “Meet the Press” was no
mere act of personal hubris and folly. His declaration of preventive
war against Iraq--which neo-conservative allies, like self-professed
“universal fascist” Michael Ledeen, more frankly celebrated as the
beginning of a perpetual Clash of Civilizations war, targeting
virtually every Arab nation-state in the Middle East--marked the
culmination of a campaign of more than a dozen years, to permanently
redraw the map of the Near East and Persian Gulf, through unending war
and colonialist raw material seizure.
Even more than that, it signaled a long-in-the-making policy putsch in
Washington by a small group of neo-conservatives--a majority of whom
were followers of the German-born fascist philosopher Leo Strauss
(1899-1973). Their policy is to permanently transform the United
States, from a Constitutional republic, dedicated to the pursuit of
the general welfare and a community of principle among perfectly
sovereign nation-states, into a brutish, post-modern imitation of the
Roman Empire, engaged in murderous imperial adventures abroad, and
brutal police-state repression at home.
Although a Jew, who was active in the Vladimir Jabotinsky-led
Revisionist Zionist circles in Germany in the 1920s, Strauss was also
a protégé and enthusiastic promoter of the ideas of two leading
intellectual figures of the Nazi Party: existentialist philosopher and
Friedrich Nietzsche-revivalist Martin Heidegger; and Nazi jurist Carl
Schmitt, who wrote the legal opinion justifying Adolf Hitler's
February-March 1933 post-Reichstag Fire dictatorial putsch. Schmitt
personally arranged for Strauss to leave Germany on a Rockefeller
Foundation fellowship in 1932, to study in London and Paris, and then
took up teaching posts in the United States, first at the New School
for Social Research in New York, and later at the University of
Chicago.
In Germany of the 1920s and 1930s, there were Jews who were Nazis, but
who, like Strauss and the Frankfurt School gaggle of left-wing
Nietzscheans (Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Leo Lowenthal, Herbert
Marcuse, et al.), had no chance for party advancement because of
Hitler's anti-Semitism; and so they chose to leave Germany, to pursue
more “universal” fascist ideas and policies abroad, particularly in
the United States and Great Britain.
For Leo Strauss and his disciples, the ignoble
lie--disinformation--was the key to achieving and holding political
power. And raw political power was the ultimate goal. For Strauss and
the Straussians, there were no universal principles, no natural law,
no virtue, no agapé, no notion of man in the living image of God.
William Kristol, a leading Washington “Straussian” and the chief
public propagandist for the war party in the George W. Bush
Administration, made the point bluntly in an interview with Nina J.
Easton, who authored a book-length profile of the top leaders of the
right-wing insurgency of the 1990s, Gang of Five (New York: Simon &
Schuster, 2000). Kristol told her, “One of the main teachings [of
Strauss] is that all politics are limited and none of them is really
based on the truth. So there's a certain philosophic disposition where
you have some distance from these political fights.... You don't take
yourself or your causes as seriously as you would if you thought this
was 100% ‘truth.' Political movements are always full of partisans
fighting for their opinion. But that's very different from ‘the
truth.'|”
From his perch as editor-in-chief of the Rupert Murdoch-bankrolled
Weekly Standard magazine, launched in 1995, Kristol has perfected the
art of political deception and the Goebbels “Big Lie.” The son of two
first-generation postwar neo-conservatives, Irving Kristol and
Gertrude Himmelfarb, Kristol was trained at Harvard from the time of
his 18th birthday by one of Leo Strauss' leading disciples, Harvey
Mansfield, Jr.
Kristol's Harvard graduate school roommate and fellow Straussian was
Alan Keyes, later a Reagan State Department official and unsuccessful
candidate for the U.S. Senate in Maryland (Kristol ran Keyes' 1988
campaign against Democrat Paul Sarbanes). His other classmates
included Francis Fukuyama, later promoter of the Nietzschean idea of
“the end of history,” who came to Harvard following undergraduate
studies at Cornell, where he was trained by Allan Bloom, another of
the inner circle University of Chicago students of Strauss. Bloom's
life was recounted by fellow Chicagoan Saul Bellow in the true-to-life
novel Ravelstein.
Neo-Conservative 9/11 Putsch
Bellow's tribute to Bloom also highlighted another Straussian now
playing a larger-than-life role in the Bush Administration inside
putsch: Paul Wolfowitz.
Wolfowitz was one of the first of the Strauss-Bloom disciples to come
to Washington. Through Bloom, while completing his graduate studies at
the University of Chicago, Wolfowitz had been introduced to RAND
Corporation founder Albert Wohlstetter and to Paul Nitze, a leading
arms control expert who had served in most of the post-World War II
governments in senior posts. By the 1970s, Wolfowitz was working his
way through the arms control bureaucracy--and establishing his ties to
other Straussians and Wohlstetter protégés who had been planted on
various Senate committee staffs. Among Wolfowitz's collaborators
during this period were Richard Perle, Steven Bryen, and Elliott
Abrams, who served on the Senate staffs of Henry “Scoop” Jackson
(D-Wash.), Clifford Case (R-NJ), and Daniel Patrick Moynihan (D-NY),
respectively. Perle reports that he first was introduced to Wolfowitz
in 1969, when the two were both sent by Wohlstetter to do a research
project for Senator Jackson.
Among the other Strauss disciples who are currently part of the
ongoing neo-con insurgency are: John Podhoretz, editorial page editor
of Murdoch's yellow tabloid, the New York Post, former editor of The
Weekly Standard, and offspring of first generation neo-cons Norman
Podhoretz and Midge Decter; Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas;
Attorney General John Ashcroft; I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby, chief of
staff and chief national security advisor to Vice President Cheney,
who was introduced to the world of Leo Strauss by his own Yale
University professor and mentor, Paul Wolfowitz; Pentagon
disinformation officer Abram Shulsky; Gary Schmitt, executive director
of the Kristol-led Project for the New American Century (PNAC); David
Brook, another editor of The Weekly Standard; Werner Dannhauser, a
protégé of Strauss, who left academia to assume the editorship of the
flagship neo-con magazine Commentary following the retirement of
Norman Podhoretz; and Robert Kagan, also of The Weekly Standard, and
the son of leading Yale University Straussian Donald Kagan.
As the Wolfowitz case makes clear, this cabal of Strauss disciples,
along with an equally small circle of allied neo-conservative and
Likudnik fellow-travellers, has operated as an underground network, in
and around government, for the past 30 years--awaiting the moment of
opportunity to launch their not-so-silent coup. Sept. 11, 2001
provided them with the once-in-a-lifetime moment of opportunity, a
moment for which they were thoroughly prepared.
As Lyndon LaRouche has written in his LaRouche in 2004 campaign
report, Zbigniew Brzezinski and September 11th, the events of 9/11
could not have occurred without significant inside complicity from
elements of the U.S. national security establishment, given the total
breakdown of rudimentary security procedures and the depth of inside
knowledge about those vulnerabilities. The Sept. 11 attacks could not,
LaRouche assessed, have been carried out by al-Qaeda operatives
without such complicity. Indeed, the attacks constituted a
sophisticated act of military covert irregular warfare, far beyond the
capacities of the bin Laden apparatus. The idea that Osama bin Laden,
operating out of caves in Afghanistan, could have pulled off the most
significant act of irregular warfare against the United States in
memory is, perhaps, the most significant Goebbels “Big Lie” of all.
In his Brzezinski and September 11th report, LaRouche acknowledged
that while the details of precisely how the attack was orchestrated
involve covert military secrets that are often the most difficult to
unravel, the larger question of cui bono--who benefitted--from the
attacks is much more accessible. To deal with this question, however,
requires a review of some critical events, dating back, at minimum, to
the period of the “Bush 41” Presidency.
Imperial Preventive War
On May 21, 1990, at the request of then-Secretary of Defense Cheney, a
team of civilian strategists in the Pentagon policy office delivered
an oral presentation to Cheney on the subject of the post-Soviet
strategic environment and long-range national security implications
for the United States. The bulk of the presentation was delivered by
Assistant Secretary of Defense for Policy Paul Wolfowitz. Other team
members included: Lewis Libby, who was Wolfowitz's deputy; Zalmay
Khalilzad, a RAND Corporation/University of Chicago protégé of Albert
Wohlstetter, who was at that time also in Wolfowitz's Pentagon shop;
and Eric Edelman, a career Foreign Service officer also working under
Wolfowitz. Today, all four men hold top posts in the “Bush 43”
government: Wolfowitz is Deputy Secretary of Defense; Libby is
chief-of-staff and chief national security aide to Vice President
Cheney; Edelman is Libby's deputy there; and Khalilzad is White House
liaison to the Iraqi opposition.
In that 1991 briefing to Cheney, Wolfowitz proposed that the United
States adopt a policy of preventive action to forestall any nation or
combination of nations from challenging American military and economic
“primacy” for the forseeable future, using all means necessary. When
Cheney incorporated the Wolfowitz concept in his 1992 Defense Planning
Guidance (DPG), all Hell broke loose. Senior military officers leaked
portions of the Guidance to the New York Times; President George H.W.
Bush, his National Security Advisor Gen. Brent Scowcroft, and his
Secretary of State James Baker III, all rejected the unilateralism of
the Cheney-Wolfowitz strategy.
Ultimately the DPG was re-written, and featured only a substantially
watered-down version of the scheme. But following President Bush's
re-election defeat, in January 1993, Secretary Cheney and his team
delivered a parting shot, with the publication of Defense Strategy for
the 1990s: The Regional Defense Strategy, which not only revived the
idea of preventive unilateral war, but also promoted the idea that the
United States must develop a new generation of mini-nuclear weapons,
appropriate for use against Third World targets.
It was no secret that both Cheney and Wolfowitz were furious at
President Bush for not allowing the U.S.-led “coalition” forces to
roll into Baghdad and overthrow Saddam Hussein, at the conclusion of
Operation Desert Storm in 1991. Indeed, associates of Wolfowitz report
that he has been obsessed with overthrowing Saddam Hussein and
overturning the entire Middle East chessboard since the late 1970s.
Saul Bellow's Ravelstein reported that Wolfowitz telephoned his
Straussian mentor Allan Bloom, back in Chicago, to rant against
President Bush for his lack of Nietzschean hubris.
The ‘Clean Break'
Largely out of power in Washington during the eight-year Clinton
Presidency, the Straussian cabal did not go dormant. Following the
September 1993 signing of the Oslo Accords at the White House, the
Straussians and neo-cons launched an all-out drive to kill the “land
for peace” deal. Several leading disciples of Strauss and Bloom had
already migrated to Israel, and they would form the core of an
apparatus inside Israel dedicated to sinking the peace process.
In 1994, Hillel Fradkin and Yoram Hazony founded the Shalem Center,
with financing from two American billionaires, both associated with
the little-known but powerful “Mega Group” of right-wing
Zionists--Ronald Lauder and Roger Hertog. Hertog is today part owner,
with Lord Conrad Black and Michael Steinhardt, of the New York Sun;
and is also a one-third owner, with Martin Peretz and Steinhardt, of
The New Republic, long a bastion of Straussian political propaganda.
(New Republic editor Lawrence Kaplan, for example, has recently teamed
with The Weekly Standard's William Kirstol to produce a book-length
promotion of the war on Iraq.)
Fradkin was a student of Allan Bloom, and taught at the University of
Chicago Committee on Social Thought. He later went on to launch the
Shalem Center's Washington office, while also serving as director of
the Ethics and Public Policy Center (he replaced Elliott Abrams in
that post, when Abrams was brought onto the National Security Council
under “Bush 43”), and as a Middle East scholar at the American
Enterprise Institute (AEI). Hazoney got his PhD at Rutgers University
under another Strauss disciple, Wilson Cary McWilliams, then moved to
Israel, where he worked as a speech-writer for Likud leader Benjamin
Netanyahu. Hazoney is an unabashed backer of the racist Rabbi Meir
Kahane, the late founder of the terrorist Jewish Defense League and
Kach Movement.
In addition to the Shalem Center and the Foundation for a
Constitutional Democracy, launched by leading Strauss student Paul
Eidelberg--an advocate of the permanent annexation of all of “Judea,”
“Samaria,” and Gaza by the Israeli state--a third Israeli think-tank
played a pivotal role in advancing the Straussian/neo-con agenda
during the Clinton Presidency. The Institute for Advanced Strategic
and Political Studies (IASPS), with offices in Jerusalem and
Washington, was launched in 1984 as an outpost of the “Chicago School”
of British System free-trade economics, promoting the work of Adam
Smith, Friedrich von Hayek, and Milton Friedman. Twelve years later,
the Institute established a Division for Research in Strategy. By its
own description, IASPS is a center of Straussian influence in Israel.
An advertisement for the Institute's Strategic Fellowship program in
Washington, posted on the IASPS website, warns applicants that if they
are not followers of Leo Strauss, they need not apply.
In 1996, following the assassination of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin,
the newly established IASPS Division of Research in Strategy
commissioned a series of studies on how to undo the Oslo Accords, to
be presented to incoming Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu.
The key study in the series, “A Clean Break: A New Strategy for
Securing the Realm,” was prepared by a team of American neo-cons led
by Richard Perle. Other members of the study group were: James Colbert
of the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs (JINSA); Charles
Fairbanks of the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced
International Studies (SAIS), a Strauss disciple and an intimate of
Paul Wolfowitz since the 1960s; Douglas Feith, now Assistant Secretary
of Defense for Policy; Robert Loewenberg, President of IASPS; Jonathan
Torop of the Washington Institute for Near East Studies (WINEP), the
think-tank spawned by the American Israel Public Affairs Committee
(AIPAC), the official Israeli lobby in America; David Wurmser, then
the director of the Middle East project at AEI, and now the special
assistant to State Department chief arms control negotiator John
Bolton--himself, former Vice Chairman of AEI; and Meyrav Wurmser,
formerly with the Middle East Research and Information Project (MERIP)
of Sharonist Israeli military intelligence officer Col. Yigal Carmon,
and now the director of Middle East programs at the Hudson Institute.
The six-page “Clean Break” document was hand-delivered by Perle to
Netanyahu on July 8, 1996--two days before Netanyahu addressed a joint
session of the U.S. Congress. Most of Netanyahu's speech consisted of
pre-selected excerpts from “Clean Break.” The paper called for a total
rejection of Oslo and “land for peace”; a brutal crackdown and
reoccupation of the Palestinian Authority territories by the Israeli
Defense Forces--to be justified on the basis of the “right to hot
pursuit” of terrorists, leading to Israel's eventual permanent
annexation of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip; and a war against
Iraq, to overthrow not only the Saddam Hussein regime in Baghdad, but
the Ba'ath regime in Damascus.
“Israel can shape its strategic environment,” Perle and company wrote,
“in cooperation with Turkey and Jordan, by weakening, containing, and
even rolling back Syria. This effort can focus on removing Saddam
Hussein from power in Iraq--an important Israeli strategic objective
in its own right--as a means of foiling Syria's regional ambitions.”
Perle and company penned “Clean Break” knowing full well that in
1990-91, the Bush Administration had launched Operation Desert Storm
in response to Israeli threats to launch their own war of
extermination against Saddam Hussein. Israel's move would have
triggered a perpetual Middle East religious war, precisely along the
lines of the Clash of Civilizations first spelled out by Dr. Bernard
Lewis in a 1990 Atlantic Monthly article, three years before the
appearance of Samuel Huntington's more well-known Clash of
Civilizations diatribe in Foreign Affairs. The Bush Administration
caved in to the Israeli threats and pre-empted Israeli strikes on
Iraq, by conducting the “Coalition” war and imposing the post-war
sanctions, no-fly zones, etc. Now, through Perle, Feith, Wurmser, et
al. the Straussians were upping the ante.
‘New American Century'
In early 1997, William Kristol and Robert Kagan, two of the leading
neo-con “Straussian intellectuals” in Washington, joined forces with
collaborators at the AEI to shove the “Clean Break” policy down the
throat of the Clinton Administration. Using office space on the fifth
floor of the AEI headquarters, Kristol and company launched a new
tax-exempt front group, the Project for the New American Century
(PNAC), specifically to promote the buildup of American military force
to unilaterally police the globe--starting with the overthrow of
Saddam Hussein.
On June 3, 1997, PNAC released a Statement of Principle, which was
signed by Elliott Abrams, Gary Bauer, William Bennett, Florida
Governor Jeb Bush, ***** Cheney, Midge Decter, Francis Fukuyama, Lewis
Libby, Norman Podhoretz, Peter Rodman, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul
Wolfowitz, and others.
The Statement of Principle was based on an article co-authored by
William Kristol and Robert Kagan, published in the July/August 1996
issue of Foreign Affairs, the journal of the New York Council on
Foreign Relations--simultaneous with the Perle-Feith-Wurmser release
of “Clean Break.” Kristol and Kagan called for a “Neo-Reaganite
Foreign Policy.” This was a willfully dishonest choice of terms, given
that President Reagan's most noteworthy foreign and national security
policy achievement had been his collaboration with Lyndon LaRouche in
launching the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), which Reagan
envisioned as a joint, cooperative effort with the Soviet Union, to
bring about the end of the era of “mutually assured destruction.” When
Soviet General Secretary Yuri Andropov rejected Reagan's generous
offer of scientific and technological cooperation to build a global
defense against nuclear weapons, the collapse of the Soviet empire was
guaranteed, as LaRouche forecast in 1984, and again in a now-famous
October 1988 speech in West Berlin, in which he anticipated the fall
of the Berlin Wall a year later.
Kristol and Kagan defined their “neo-Reaganite foreign policy” as
“benevolent global hegemony,” based on a massive buildup of American
military might. The authors were reviving the 1991 Wolfowitz doctrine
of unilateral preventive war, explicitly stating, “The appropriate
goal of American foreign policy is to preserve that hegemony as far
into the future as possible.”
Kristol and Kagan specifically called for the overthrow of more than
200 years of American anti-colonialist tradition, singling out John
Quincy Adams as their particular nemesis: “Conservatives these days,”
they wrote, “succumb easily to the charming old metaphor of the United
States as a ‘city on a hill.' They hark back ... to the admonition of
John Quincy Adams that America ought not go ‘abroad in search of
monsters to destroy.' But why not? The alternative is to leave
monsters on the loose, ravaging and pillaging to their hearts'
content, as Americans stand by and watch. What may have been wise
counsel in 1823, when America was a small, isolated power in a world
of European giants, is no longer so, when America is the giant.
Because America has the capacity to contain or destroy many of the
world's monsters, most of which can be found without much searching,
and because the responsibility for the peace and security of the
international order rests so heavily on America's shoulders, a policy
of sitting atop a hill and leading by example becomes in practice a
policy of cowardice and dishonor.”
On Jan. 26, 1998, PNAC issued an Open Letter to President Clinton,
calling for immediate “regime change” in Iraq, based on the bogus
claim that Saddam was about to launch weapons of mass destruction
against the United States and America's allies. Among the signators on
the Open Letter were the following individuals, all of whom are now in
the “Bush 43” Administration: Abrams, Richard Armitage, John Bolton,
Fukuyama, Khalilzad, Perle, Peter Rodman, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, and
Robert Zoellick. Other signators included Kristol, Kagan, and James
Woolsey, who briefly served as President Clinton's Director of Central
Intelligence, and who was, at the time the PNAC letter was issued,
already the attorney representing the Iraqi National Congress.
In September 2000, on the eve of the Presidential elections, pitting
George W. Bush against Al Gore, PNAC issued a lengthy study,
“Rebuilding America's Defenses--Strategy, Force and Resources for a
New Century,” which revived at great length the Cheney-Wolfowitz
1991-93 preventive war strategy. Among the “usual suspects” who
contributed to the “Rebuilding” study was Wolfowitz protégé Lewis
Libby. He had just completed a stint as the general counsel to the Cox
Commission, which was promoting a strategic showdown in North Asia
with China and North Korea; he would soon be Vice President Cheney's
chief of staff. While out of government, Libby had also been the
personal attorney of Marc Rich, the Russian “Mafiya” godfather who had
been convicted in absentia in Federal court for tax evasion and
“trading with the enemy”--Iran's Ayatollah Khomeini--during the
American hostage crisis of 1979-80. Libby was the behind-the-scenes
Svengali responsible for the disastrous Clinton Presidential pardon of
Rich, working directly with “former” Mossad operatives Zvi Rafiah and
Avner Azulay.
Despite the proliferation of Straussians and neo-cons inside the
George W. Bush national security team, the Iraq war lobby made very
little headway until the event that Vice President Cheney termed “the
historic watershed.”
The Sept. 11, 2001 attacks on the Pentagon and the World Trade Center
triggered an instant response from the neo-cons in and around the Bush
Administration. Just four days after the attacks, Paul Wolfowitz
attended a Sept. 15 National Security Council session with President
Bush at Camp David, where he delivered a pitch for an immediate U.S.
invasion of Iraq. For reasons that still remain in dispute, the
President, the Vice President, and even Defense Secretary Rumsfeld
rejected the Wolfowitz proposal as “premature.” However, several days
later, in a Presidential national security order authorizing the
attack on Afghanistan, President Bush did authorize the CIA and the
military to begin developing contingency plans for dealing with
Saddam.
‘Chickenhawk Intelligence Agency' Is Born
A week after Wolfowitz's “premature” war pitch, Richard Perle convened
a session of the Defense Policy Board addressed by British Arab Bureau
veteran spook Dr. Bernard Lewis, and INC founder Dr. Ahmed Chalabi, a
bank swindler and protégé of Albert Wohlstetter at the University of
Chicago, who was the Zionist Lobby and the Israeli right wing's
hand-picked successor to Saddam Hussein. At the CIA and the State
Department, Chalabi was considered virtually persona non grata, and
his INC umbrella was viewed as a collection of martini-slurping
professional exiles, with virtually no assets on the ground inside
Iraq. Perle and Bernard Lewis had been introduced to Chalabi in the
early 1980s, and the former banker, who faces a 20-year prison
sentence in Jordan for bank fraud and currency manipulation, has been
a pet project of JINSA and AEI ever since.
In a candid moment shortly before Sept. 11, 2001, Defense Secretary
Rumsfeld had confided to associates that he was thinking about
resigning his Cabinet post and returning to Chicago. His explanation
was revealing: “The Likud has taken over the building,” he told
friends, referring to the Wolfowitz-Perle cabal that had run circles
around him in the early months of the “Bush 43” Administration.
Sources familiar with Rumsfeld describe the Secretary as a “control
freak” and micro-manager, who had presumed that his participation in a
Clinton-era commission on missile proliferation had sufficiently
offset his quarter-century absence from Washington, and that he would
be able to maintain a tight grip on the vast Pentagon bureaucracy,
including the uniformed military command, centered at the Joint Chiefs
of Staff.
Through the personal efforts of former Secretary of State and “Chicago
School” ideologue George Shultz, Deputy Defense Secretary Wolfowitz
had been inserted in the inner circle of George W. Bush campaign
policy tutors, the so-called “Vulcans,” which enabled him to bring
Perle and the whole neo-con crowd to Austin, Texas for personal
mis-education sessions with the President-to-be. Wolfowitz parlayed
that personal relationship with the new President, and staffed
Rumsfeld's office with a veritable army of like-minded Strauss
disciples and Likudniks.
In June 1988, EIR had revealed that then-Secretary of Defense Caspar
Weinberger's general counsel office had compiled a list of suspected
members of the “X Committee,” the network of Israeli spies and
agents-of-influence who had penetrated the Reagan-Bush
Administration's national security establishment, and were believed to
have directed the espionage efforts of Jonathan Jay Pollard. Among the
dozen leading “X Committee” suspects being probed by the general
counsel team were: Wolfowitz, Perle, Feith, Wohlstetter, Fred Iklé,
Stephen Bryen, Michael Ledeen, Frank Gaffney, John Lehman, and Henry
Rowen.
Under Wolfowitz, the “Bush 43” Pentagon once again became a hub of “X
Committee” influence and penetration.
Nevertheless, the intelligence coming out of the CIA, the DIA, and the
State Department firmly rejected any evidence of linkage between
Saddam Hussein and the attacks of 9/11. The overwhelming evidence also
suggested that Iraq posed no immediate or near-term threat to the
United States or any of its neighbors. Early in the Bush
Administration, Secretary of State Colin Powell had proposed a
revision of sanctions, called “smart sanctions,” recognizing that
international support for the continuing isolation of Iraq was wearing
thin.
To seize upon the dramatic shift that occurred on Sept. 11, 2001,
Wolfowitz and Deputy Secretary of Defense for Policy Doug Feith, one
of the most rabid of the Jabotinskyites in the Pentagon civilian
bureaucracy, launched a secret intelligence unit. Its mission was to
provide Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld--who had abandoned his pre-9/11
plans to retire, and was now fully in synch with the Wolfowitz
cabal--with a constant flow of “intelligence” to counter the CIA/DIA
resistance to the “Get Saddam” agenda of the “Clean Break” crowd. One
of the principal sources of this unvetted “intelligence” was to be
Chalabi's discredited INC.
Wolfowitz and Feith chose Abram Shulsky to head the secret cell, which
was buried in the maze of civilian Pentagon bureaucracy under the
Assistant Secretary for Policy. A Strauss disciple, Shulsky had been a
professional staffer for Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan (D-N.Y.), along
with Elliott Abrams and Gary Schmitt--now the President of Bill
Kristol's and Robert Kagan's tax-front, PNAC. Shulsky had served on
the staff of the Senate Intelligence Oversight Committee. He had been
an underling of neo-con wunderkind and Iran-Contra operative Roy
Godson at the Consortium for the Study of Intelligence, a project of
the New York City-based National Strategy Information Center. And
Shulsky had co-authored, with Zalmay Khalilzad and others, a 1999 RAND
Corporation study, “The United States and a Rising China,” which
promoted the idea that China, more than any other nation, posed a
direct challenge to American global and regional military primacy, and
would have to be directly confronted.
Who Makes This ‘Intelligence'?
Others identified with the Shulsky “chickenhawks intelligence agency”
included:
Harold Rhode, the Middle East specialist in Dr. Andrew Marshall's
Pentagon Office of Net Assessments (ONA). Marshall was a founder, with
Albert Wohlstetter, of the RAND Corporation at the close of World War
II. He was installed at the Pentagon in 1975 by then-Secretary of
Defense James Rodney Schlesinger, who created the ONA specifically to
house Marshall and his team of RAND systems analysis and game theory
utopians. At the very outset of the “Bush 43” Administration, Marshall
had grabbed the ear of Rumsfeld, provoking a near revolt of the Joint
Chiefs of Staff, who considered Marshall to be the driver behind the
dangerously incompetent “revolution in military affairs.”
Michael Ledeen, in his recent book-length rant, The War Against the
Terror Masters (New York: St. Martins Press, 2002), described Rhode as
his “guru on the Middle East for nearly 20 years.” In 1991, Rhode was
in the Pentagon Office of International Security Policy, covering
Turkey, at a time that Perle and Feith were running an international
consulting operation, selling Israeli military hardware to the Turkish
Army. Wolfowitz has described Rhode as his “Islamic affairs advisor”
at ONA; and according to one account, Rhodes, in a meeting during the
early months of the Bush Administration, had staged a noisy
in-your-face confrontation with a top Saudi official, vowing that the
historical U.S.-Saudi partnership was a thing of the past. The
incident reportedly cost Rhode a more senior--and visible--post inside
the Wolfowitz-Feith Pentagon bureaucracy.
Rhode, according to several sources, has travelled, on several
occasions, to London, with Richard Perle, Chairman, until recently, of
the Defense Policy Board, to gather “intelligence” from INC officials,
which has been funneled through Shulsky's shop to Rumsfeld--without
first being evaluated and cross-checked by CIA or Defense Intelligence
Agency professionals.
William Luti, formerly an advisor to Vice President Cheney, more
recently named as the Deputy Under Secretary of Defense for Special
Plans and Near East and South Asian Affairs, has been described by a
recent visitor to his office as a man crazed with the mission to
eliminate Saddam Hussein. “He reminded me of a serial killer, right
out of a Hollywood horror flick,” according to the source, who
described Luti's Pentagon office as covered from floor to ceiling with
desecrated photographs and news clippings of Saddam Hussein and his
inner core. A retired Navy Captain and pilot who served during
Operation Desert Storm, Luti was described, in a March 11, 2002 New
Yorker story by Seymour Hersh, as “so obsessed with an immediate
overthrow of Saddam Hussein that he hasn't thought through the
consequences.” Despite these psychological profiles, Luti has been one
of the Pentagon civilian point-men, working with the Iraqi
“opposition” on both intelligence and operations. According to
accounts in the New York Times, Luti was dispatched to London in
November and December 2002, to meet with Chalabi and other Iraqi
exiles.
On Dec. 17, Luti and Maj. Gen. David Barno met secretely with 11 Iraqi
opposition figures in London, and selected the initial group of Iraqis
to be trained in Hungary to participate in any military operation, as
the indigenist “window dressing” on what would, in reality, be an
all-American or Anglo-American military invasion.
In a Washington speech on Oct. 16, 2002, Luti had promoted,
aggressively, the need for the United States to adopt a new, imperial
interventionist policy, which he dubbed “anticipatory self-defense.”
Reuel Marc Gerecht, a retired CIA officer, has been identified as one
of the secret liaisons between the Shulsky “chickenhawk intelligence
agency” at DOD and the Iraqi oppositionists in London and elsewhere in
Europe. Based most of the time in Brussels, along with Robert Kagan,
Gerecht is a senior fellow at AEI, and is the Director of the Middle
East Initiative at PNAC, working directly under Kristol, Kagan, and
Shulsky's close associate Gary Schmitt.
.
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| User: "Jean Guernon" |
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| Title: Re: The 'Ignoble Liars' Behind Bush's war |
14 Sep 2003 08:52:01 AM |
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a crit :
The 'Ignoble Liars' Behind
Bush's Deadly Iraq War
by Jeffrey Steinberg
Please snip off apn from the headers of your pure lies.
J.
.
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| User: "" |
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| Title: Re: The 'Ignoble Liars' Behind Bush's war |
14 Sep 2003 09:46:46 AM |
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On Sun, 14 Sep 2003 13:52:01 GMT, Jean Guernon
<jguernon@globetrotter.net> wrote:
DaarkSyde@home.com a écrit :
The 'Ignoble Liars' Behind
Bush's Deadly Iraq War
by Jeffrey Steinberg
Please snip off apn from the headers of your pure lies.
J.
Please eat ***** and crawl back to your lillypad FROG.
.
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| User: "Jean Guernon" |
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| Title: Re: The 'Ignoble Liars' Behind Bush's war |
15 Sep 2003 09:08:47 AM |
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On your dreams retard *****.
J.
DaarkSyde@home.com a crit :
On Sun, 14 Sep 2003 13:52:01 GMT, Jean Guernon
<jguernon@globetrotter.net> wrote:
DaarkSyde@home.com a écrit :
The 'Ignoble Liars' Behind
Bush's Deadly Iraq War
by Jeffrey Steinberg
Please snip off apn from the headers of your pure lies.
J.
Please eat ***** and crawl back to your lillypad FROG.
.
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|
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| User: "" |
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| Title: Re: The 'Ignoble Liars' Behind Bush's war |
16 Sep 2003 07:28:26 AM |
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On Mon, 15 Sep 2003 14:08:47 GMT, Jean Guernon
<jguernon@globetrotter.net> wrote:
On your dreams retard *****.
J.
DaarkSyde@home.com a écrit :
On Sun, 14 Sep 2003 13:52:01 GMT, Jean Guernon
<jguernon@globetrotter.net> wrote:
DaarkSyde@home.com a écrit :
The 'Ignoble Liars' Behind
Bush's Deadly Iraq War
by Jeffrey Steinberg
Please snip off apn from the headers of your pure lies.
J.
Please eat ***** and crawl back to your lillypad FROG.
What's the matter FROG. Gettin under your skin again? Hahahahahah
You are so easily baited. Hahahahah
"life is like a mushroom, they feed you ***** and keep you in the dark"
.
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| User: "Jean Guernon" |
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| Title: Re: The 'Ignoble Liars' Behind Bush's war |
26 Sep 2003 07:54:52 AM |
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Bah, you are a wordless ***** eater who only pollutes NGs.
J.
DaarkSyde@home.com a crit :
On Mon, 15 Sep 2003 14:08:47 GMT, Jean Guernon
<jguernon@globetrotter.net> wrote:
On your dreams retard *****.
J.
DaarkSyde@home.com a écrit :
On Sun, 14 Sep 2003 13:52:01 GMT, Jean Guernon
<jguernon@globetrotter.net> wrote:
DaarkSyde@home.com a écrit :
The 'Ignoble Liars' Behind
Bush's Deadly Iraq War
by Jeffrey Steinberg
Please snip off apn from the headers of your pure lies.
J.
Please eat ***** and crawl back to your lillypad FROG.
What's the matter FROG. Gettin under your skin again? Hahahahahah
You are so easily baited. Hahahahah
"life is like a mushroom, they feed you ***** and keep you in the dark"
.
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| User: "" |
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| Title: Re: The 'Ignoble Liars' Behind Bush's war |
28 Sep 2003 10:30:31 AM |
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On Fri, 26 Sep 2003 12:54:52 GMT, Jean Guernon
<jguernon@globetrotter.net> burped:
Nothing of relevance. Guernon you stupid FROG, if brains were dynamite
you wouldn't have enough to blow your nose.Stick to your crack pipe
and Jew buddies and keep your head permanently buried in the sand
where it belongs.
"life is like a mushroom, they feed you ***** and keep you in the dark"
.
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| User: "Jean Guernon" |
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| Title: Re: The 'Ignoble Liars' Behind Bush's war |
28 Sep 2003 01:46:05 PM |
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a crit :
On Fri, 26 Sep 2003 12:54:52 GMT, Jean Guernon
<jguernon@globetrotter.net> burped:
Nothing of relevance.
Bah, you are a wordless ***** eater who only pollutes NGs.
J.
.
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| User: "Pia" |
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| Title: Re: The 'Ignoble Liars' Behind Bush's war |
29 Sep 2003 10:23:39 PM |
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Jean Guernon <jguernon@globetrotter.net> wrote in message news:<3F772D0E.22170675@globetrotter.net>...
DaarkSyde@home.com a crit :
On Fri, 26 Sep 2003 12:54:52 GMT, Jean Guernon
<jguernon@globetrotter.net> burped:
Nothing of relevance.
Bah, you are a wordless ***** eater who only pollutes NGs.
J.
It's funny.....your responses. Pollution? The lack of decent
vocabulary is the smokestack. Have seen this style in many places and
it's very transparent. No depth, just a bunch of babble.....because
no logical human being could ever defend bush without sounding either
biased or illiterate. It's no wonder the man's popularity is slipping
and the media is trying it's damndest to recover it. So silly.
.
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| User: "" |
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| Title: Re: The 'Ignoble Liars' Behind Bush's war |
04 Oct 2003 11:39:34 AM |
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On 29 Sep 2003 20:23:39 -0700, (Pia) wrote:
Jean Guernon <jguernon@globetrotter.net> wrote in message news:<3F772D0E.22170675@globetrotter.net>...
DaarkSyde@home.com a écrit :
On Fri, 26 Sep 2003 12:54:52 GMT, Jean Guernon
<jguernon@globetrotter.net> burped:
Nothing of relevance.
Bah, you are a wordless ***** eater who only pollutes NGs.
J.
It's funny.....your responses. Pollution? The lack of decent
vocabulary is the smokestack. Have seen this style in many places and
it's very transparent. No depth, just a bunch of babble.....because
no logical human being could ever defend bush without sounding either
biased or illiterate. It's no wonder the man's popularity is slipping
and the media is trying it's damndest to recover it. So silly.
On the chain of evolution the FROG Guernon rates about the level of a
slug.
"life is like a mushroom, they feed you ***** and keep you in the dark"
.
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| User: "Jean Guernon" |
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| Title: Re: The 'Ignoble Liars' Behind Bush's war |
30 Sep 2003 11:34:47 AM |
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Pia a crit :
Jean Guernon <jguernon@globetrotter.net> wrote in message news:<3F772D0E.22170675@globetrotter.net>...
DaarkSyde@home.com a crit :
On Fri, 26 Sep 2003 12:54:52 GMT, Jean Guernon
<jguernon@globetrotter.net> burped:
Nothing of relevance.
Bah, you are a wordless ***** eater who only pollutes NGs.
J.
It's funny.....your responses. Pollution? The lack of decent
vocabulary is the smokestack.
It is not when used only with the assholes who ppollute.
You are obviously such garbage not to see that.
J.
.
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| User: "" |
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| Title: Re: The 'Ignoble Liars' Behind Bush's war |
04 Oct 2003 11:41:21 AM |
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On Tue, 30 Sep 2003 16:34:47 GMT, Jean Guernon
<jguernon@globetrotter.net> burped:
..
It's funny.....your responses. Pollution? The lack of decent
vocabulary is the smokestack.
It is not when used only with the assholes who ppollute.
You are obviously such garbage not to see that.
J.
Learn too spel FROG. Youare speling suks jest lik you.
"life is like a mushroom, they feed you ***** and keep you in the dark"
.
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