The First of Many Wars

By Peter Hartcher, Washington, Australian Financial Review, 22 March 2003

Believe it. Iraq is just the beginning of a revolutionary plan that involves the very face of the Middle East. The neo-conservatives who run the US no longer support the status quo—they want quite literally to change the world as we know it.

As president, George Bush the elder famously disparaged what he called the vision thing. His son takes an entirely different approach to the presidency.

The job is the vision thing matters. That's another thing I learned, George Bush the younger said last year. While there is intense scrutiny of the United States-led invasion of Iraq at the moment, you can be sure that it is only a glimpse of the Bush administration's grand vision.

US Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld put it plainly only a month after the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001. Those attacks, he explained, created the kind of opportunities that World War II offered, to refashion the world.

Bush's America is taking those opportunities. The change in the US approach to power and foreign policy is so profound that the wider world is having a great deal of trouble absorbing its reality and its implications.

Since the end of the Cold War, the US has been largely a status quo power, content with its dominance of world economics, politics and military affairs. Under the latest Bush administration, it has become a revolutionary power, seriously dissatisfied with the state of world affairs and determined to change them.

Transforming the Middle East is its most urgent revolutionary project.

The President and his top officials have told us repeatedly that it is a top priority. And this is not just some political blather to cover a greedy lunge for Iraq's oil. It is a very real, very serious and very determined goal of US policy. The war on Iraq is an essential beginning, but only a beginning.

The revolutionary element is the essential difference between this US-led war on Iraq and the last one. The 1991 Gulf War was fought to restore the status quo ante, to reverse Iraq's invasion of Kuwait and to restore the border. This war is being fought to overturn the status quo altogether.

The dominant officials in the administration, and their allied activists outside it, are already drafting the next phases. They are impatient to overturn regimes in hostile states such as Iran and Syria, but also in allied nations Saudi Arabia is a major target of this angry new American dissatisfaction with the state of the world.

If these revolutions can be achieved peacefully, then that's fine by Washington. If not, then consider the lessons we are being shown in Iraq.

This latest intervention makes one point unmistakably clear, writes Andrew Bacevich, professor of international relations at Boston University and a former colonel in the US Army.

The US no longer views force as something to be used reluctantly or as a last resort.

Force, today, has emerged as the preferred instrument of American statecraft in the eyes of policy makers and taxpayers alike. Military might is no longer a necessary evil entrusted to American hands, it has become invaluable.

It is hard for most countries to imagine why the US would want to refashion a world in which it is already so preponderant.

>From the collapse of the Cold War until now, the US has essentially been a status quo power. And why not? It won the Twentieth Century. It compounded and extended its power in each great struggle, the only country to finish each of the century's major wars World War I, II and the Cold War in a more powerful condition than when it entered them.

Its power was so great that a French minister invented a new term for it not a superpower but a hyperpower. The status quo suited it because it was the status quo.

What changed? There are two crucial factors. First, a cadre of committed neo-conservative ideologues together with some old-fashioned hawks rode to power along with Bush. Their intellectual leader is Defence Deputy Secretary Paul Wolfowitz. John Bolton is one of theirs too. Their political champion is Vice-President Dick Cheney.

These people brought to the White House a pre-existing revolutionary agenda designed to extend US power and check the rise of any competitor state.

Remember, even before he was elected, Bush redefined the American relationship with China Bill Clinton had called it a strategic partner, whereas Bush, seeing Beijing as a potential challenger to US dominance in north-east Asia, described it as a strategic rival.

These officials believe strongly in confronting hostile states and not accommodating them. They are contemptuous of the Clinton administration for negotiating with North Korea and believe that it was nothing but appeasement of a terrorist state.

For the neo-cons, as the neo-conservatives are known, it is always 1939, and the enemy is always Hitler, and it must always be confronted, says Michael Lind, a fellow at the New America Foundation and himself a former neo-con.

Part of the reason for this is that the group has strong Jewish connections, says Lind, who is part Jewish. What makes them different from other conservative American security types is that they have constant close contact with relatives or friends in Israel, and they're always hearing about attacks and deaths of people they know it gives them a much darker and more pessimistic view of threats and dangers.

This group also carried an idealistic belief in the virtue of supporting democracies. So it favoured a tilt in US policy towards Taiwan against China, and towards India over Pakistan. It also put high priority on helping Israel against the hostile dictatorships surrounding it.

This group was in place with its agenda honed even before the second big change in the US September 11, 2001. That event transformed America's perception of itself and the world.

America today embodies a paradox of omnipotence and vulnerability, writes Jack Snyder, a professor of international relations at Columbia University. US omnipotence is evident in its military might. Its vulnerability was awakened on September 11.

This situation has fostered a psychology of vulnerability that makes Americans hyper-alert to foreign dangers and predisposed to use military power in what may be self-defeating attempts to escape their fears.

The terrorist attacks also vindicated the view of the world held by neo-conservatives and hawks. History moved their way, and they had a ready agenda for just such an occasion.

Bacevich poses the question: The long march to Baghdad should give Americans pause: exactly where is this road leading us?

Bush gave us some strong clues in a speech last month to the American Enterprise Institute, an incubator of neo-conservative thinking and the source of no fewer than 20 Bush administration officials.

Bush said: There are hopeful signs of a desire for freedom in the Middle East. Arab intellectuals have called on Arab governments to address the 'freedom gap' so their peoples can fully share in the progress of our times ..

And from Morocco to Bahrain and beyond, nations are taking genuine steps toward politics reform. A new regime in Iraq would serve as a dramatic and inspiring example of freedom for other nations in the region.

On a visit to Israel last month, the US Under-Secretary of State for Arms Control, John Bolton, filled in some of the more specific steps the US is contemplating to achieve this vision of democracy blossoming throughout the Middle East. He told Prime Minister Ariel Sharon he had no doubt America will attack Iraq and that it will be necessary to deal with threats from Syria, Iran and North Korea afterward, according to a report in Ha'aretz, an Israeli newspaper.

We heard last year from the President himself of the axis of evil comprising Iraq, Iran and North Korea. So Bolton was really just freshening it up, adding Syria to the list of evil regimes awaiting US attention.

The administration is much more circumspect in talking about the future of Saudi Arabia, a US ally for 60 years. But September 11 transformed this relationship with the realisation that most of the terrorists were Saudi citizens, that al-Qaeda was partly funded by the Saudi establishment, and that Saudi Arabia tolerated the terrorist group provided it operated outside Saudi territory.

One of the chief cheerleaders and pamphleteers for the neo-conservative movement, William Kristol, editor of The Weekly Standard, has said publicly what many American policy experts say privately: I think a [US] military presence in a free and democratic Iraq ... is very much preferable to the military presence in Saudi Arabia, actually ... Sixty years of accommodation to the Saudi royal family I think we've paid a big price for that. And I think we really need to rethink our Saudi policy.

Bush did not craft this revolutionary policy for the Middle East, but he is embracing it, starting in Iraq.

Where the administration goes next depends a great deal on what happens in Iraq, says Jim Steinberg, deputy national security adviser to Bill Clinton.

If the war in Iraq goes well, that will embolden them and create the political support for them to go further in the Middle East. Bush has the vision and is ready for the chance.

I will seize the opportunity to achieve big goals, he said of his foreign policy.

Don't doubt it.