The Management of Savagery. Max Blumenthal
post–Cold War Middle Eastern geopolitical chessboard. Essentially, the neocons’ paper amounted to a call to violently replace the leadership of any regional state that challenged Israel’s expansionist agenda—a feat that could only be accomplished with direct American military intervention.
The “Clean Break” authors envisioned the first target as Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, which had supported the PLO and fired Scud missiles at Israel during the first Gulf War. As Feith and his co-authors wrote, “removing Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq [was] an important Israeli strategic objective in its own right.” But Iraq would only be a stepping-stone to a greater war that would extend to Syria, a country under the control of Hafez al-Assad that based its strategy of deterrence on close alliances with Iran, Russia and Hezbollah, the Lebanese Shia militia that was well on its way toward dislodging the occupying Israeli military from southern Lebanon.
Through a joint effort by US-allied countries like Jordan, Turkey and a new, US-friendly Iraqi regime, the neoconservatives hoped to “squeeze and detach Syria from the Saudi Peninsula. For Syria … this could be the prelude to a redrawing of the map of the Middle East which would threaten Syria’s territorial integrity.” They proposed weaponizing the heavily religious, rural Sunni population as a proxy force in Syria’s eastern hinterlands: “Israel has an interest supporting diplomatically, militarily and operationally Turkey’s and Jordan’s actions against Syria, such as securing tribal alliances with Arab tribes that cross into Syrian territory and are hostile to the Syrian ruling elite,” the neocons argued, alluding to the Salafi-centric rural population that would later rally behind Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia and the Islamic state.
“A Clean Break” presented a microcosm of the vision outlined on a global scale in an essay published the same year, 1996, by two of the neoconservative movement’s principal ideologues, Robert Kagan and William Kristol. Published in the journal of the Council on Foreign Relations, the essay’s title, “Toward a Neo-Reaganite Foreign Policy,” was clearly intended to soften the nakedly militaristic thrust of its contents. Kagan and Kristol called for exploiting the void left by the Soviet Union’s collapse to intervene wherever and whenever the United States felt it could exert “preponderant influence and authority over all others in its domain.” The goal, they wrote, was “benevolent global hegemony.”
In the post–Cold War status quo, where under Pax Americana the United States had no viable competitors to fear, Kagan and Kristol pointed to a pacific domestic atmosphere and latent antiwar sentiment as the key obstacle to a renewed drive for imperial expansion. “In a world in which peace and American security depend on American power and the will to use it,” they wrote, “the main threat the United States faces now and in the future is its own weakness.”
A year after the publication of “A Clean Break,” Kagan and Kristol organized a virtual who’s who of neoconservatives into an informal working group to push for the “benevolent global hegemony” they sought. Centered in the offices of the American Enterprise Institute, the nest of Washington’s neoconservative second generation, this group called itself the Project for the New American Century, or PNAC.
Signatories of PNAC’s first letter included civilian national security figures like Feith, Perle, Paul Wolfowitz, Donald Rumsfeld and Christian right moralists like Gary Bauer, William Bennett and the blue-blooded Republican political upstart Jeb Bush. The neocons found a few liberal allies as well, like New Republic editor Leon Wieseltier, an ardent Zionist and reflexive military interventionist who tended to favor progressive social policies at home. PNAC was determined to maintain a patina of bipartisanship, but its true base lay in the Republican Party. In the Clinton era, this meant that its membership would be relegated to firing off open letters, delivering congressional testimony and publishing op-eds.
While the neocons cooled their heels in Beltway think tanks, they conjured up dreams of a national emergency that would electrify their imperial agenda. One PNAC manifesto read, “Further, the process of transformation, even if it brings revolutionary change, is likely to be a long one, absent some catastrophic and catalyzing event—like a new Pearl Harbor.”
In Iraq, to the great dismay of the regime change advocates in neoconservative circles, the Clinton administration was then invested in a strategy its foreign policy hands described as “dual containment,” adapting the prevailing American approach to the Soviet Union from the days of the Cold War. The concept was formally introduced in 1993 by Martin Indyk, a former staffer for the pro-Israel lobbying group, American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), who was appointed to Clinton’s National Security Council. Rather than removing Iraq’s government in one fell swoop, dual containment aimed to erode the country’s stability through slowly imposing unilateral “no fly zones” that enabled the United States to bomb Iraq once a week at a cost of over a billion dollars. It was complemented by crushing sanctions that targeted Iraq’s infrastructure and civilian population. While the sanctions’ death toll remains hotly disputed, one 1995 study by the medical journal Lancet and sponsored by the United Nations Food and Agricultural Organization found that 576,000 children under the age of five had died. Grilled by Leslie Stahl of 60 Minutes, then-secretary of state Madeleine Albright infamously declared that the containment policy was “worth it”—even if it triggered half a million infant deaths.
Though Clinton resisted neoconservative calls for a full-scale invasion, he gave PNAC a boost in 1998 when he signed the Iraq Liberation Act, a congressional resolution that budgeted $97 million to assist anti-Saddam proxy groups and that called for complete regime change. The money went straight to Ahmad Chalabi, a shady Iraqi exile who had been sentenced to twenty-two years in jail for a banking scandal in Jordan before resurfacing in London as the leader of the Iraqi National Congress. At the time, the four-star general who oversaw US military operations in the Persian Gulf, Anthony Zinni, privately dismissed the scheme as “harebrained.”
The congressional sponsors of the Iraq Liberation Act drew explicit inspiration from the Reagan-era strategy of undermining sovereign states from within by arming and training opposition groups as proxy militias. “At the height of the Cold War, we supported freedom fighters in Asia, Africa and Latin America willing to fight and die for a democratic future. We can and should do the same now in Iraq,” said Republican senator Trent Lott in his argument for the bill’s passage. Senator Jesse Helms, the old anticommunist stalwart, declared that the Iraq Liberation Act “harkens back to the successes of the Reagan doctrine, enlisting the very people who are suffering most under Saddam’s yoke to fight the battle against him.” Thus, the Cold War’s covert anti-Soviet operations were adapted by the world’s lone superpower to violently destabilize the states that remained opposed to Western influence. In the case of Ba’athist-run Iraq, then-Democratic senator Bob Kerrey insisted America should accept nothing less than the messianic goal of “replacing it with a transition to democracy.”
Though the rising aggression against Iraq was a bipartisan effort in Washington, it met with stiff resistance from a burgeoning grassroots antiwar movement. In February 1998, when Clinton’s secretary of state, Madeleine Albright, National Security’s Sandy Berger and Defense Secretary William Cohen convened a special CNN town hall to defend their plan to launch a punishing military strike on Iraq, they faced withering criticism from among the audience of 6,000.
Challenged by a caller over the hypocrisy of American support for ruthless dictators in allied countries while Washington sanctioned Iraq, Albright responded, “No one has done what Saddam Hussein has done, or is thinking of doing. He is producing weapons of mass destruction, and he is qualitatively and quantitatively different from other dictators.” When an audience member grilled Berger about the casualties US bombing had already exacted on Iraqi civilians, the national security advisor claimed without evidence, “you’re dealing with someone who uses people as human shields.”
The botched attempt at pro-war public relations helped expose the flabby justifications for bombing a country whose danger to the United States was questionable at best. What’s more, it boldly displayed the American public’s healthy skepticism of military interventionism. A caller from Oklahoma wondered if the United States was entering a state of permanent war. He pleaded, “How many times are we going to send our children and our children’s children to fight Saddam Hussein?”
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