Contents

This Week on the Right | Tom Barry
What’s New | Profile: John Podhoretz, Final Statement of Brussels Tribunal, Pax Americana: What's the Alternative?

This Week on the Right

War in Iraq is "Regional War"
By Tom Barry

Neoconservatives, much like dogmatic Marxists, are blessed with supreme intellectual and political confidence. While other analysts may pause in an attempt to understand changing circumstances, the neocon polemicists rush to judgment.

It’s not that analysts like Michael Rubin or Michael Ledeen are smarter or better informed than their progressive, liberal, or conservative counterparts. Their ability to respond quickly to rapidly evolving political situations (as in Iraq) with summary judgments is a product of their dogmatism. While Marxist fundamentalists can be counted on to recur to arguments about the “material economic conditions,” the neocons always marshal the same Machiavellian interpretations of reality. Not only does their analysis about the dangers of appeasement/engagement, the urgent need to confront evil with overwhelming power, and the threats to Judeo-Christianity come to bear on most any political crisis. Despite the altered reality­from the “cakewalk” liberation of Iraq to “war of terrorism”­they also offer the same set of solutions.

As the neocons have said from the start, the invasion of Iraq will be the first step of a larger campaign to restructure the Middle East. Recent commentaries by AEI “scholars” Michael Rubin and Michael Ledeen amply illustrate this neocon dogmatism.

As Ledeen explains in a National Review Online commentary titled “The Iranian Hand,” “Americans must understand that the war in Iraq is in reality a regional war.” Ledeen, who founded the Coalition for Democracy in Iran and holds the Freedom Chair at AEI, makes the case that the violence in Iraq is a product of an Iranian plot. “Iraq cannot be peaceful and secure so long as Tehran sends its terrorist cadres across the border,” explains Ledeen, who makes the case that Washington needs to fight the “terrorists” in Iraq by mounting a regional campaign of regime changes. He calls for a “political campaign aimed at toppling the Iranian regime… Security in Iraq will come in large measure from freedom and reform in Iran (as well as in Syria and Saudi Arabia).”

Both Ledeen and Rubin expressed their outrage about reports that the U.S. government reached out diplomatically to the Iranian regime in an appeal for the Iranians to use their influence among Shiite community in Iraq to rein in militant clerics like Muqtada al-Sadr. “How could we allow a charter member of President Bush’s “Axis of Evil” to negotiate a “peace” with the thuggish Sadr and his band of fanatical militants?” The two AEI analysts both advocate that instead of engaging Iran the Bush administration cast aside all diplomatic initiatives attempting to “engage” the Iranianis but instead forthrightly call for regime change in Iran.

When Rubin views the outbreaks of violence against the U.S. occupying army and the forces allied with the U.S.-directed Coalition Provisional Authority, he doesn’t see a national resistance to occupation but a foreign-directed campaign by “Iranian-backed guerrillas, Saudi-financed Whahabis, and Syrian-supported Baathist remnants.” But the “dangerous liaisons” described by Rubin extend beyond the Middle East to the heart of the liberal establishment in Washington. In his April 15 commentary in National Review Online, Rubin says that the fight for freedom must not ignore that the appeasers and engagers in “Foggy Bottom and the National Security Council continue to lend legitimacy to an unrepresentative and dictatorial regime [Iran].”

Michael Rubin is one of the youngest neoconservative figures to gain prominence within the George W. Bush administration. Rubin, an AEI scholar, was involved in several meetings and conferences officiated by Douglas Feith and Harold Rhode at AEI as part of the Bush transition team. One of the objectives of these meetings was to reshape the top leadership at the Pentagon, sidelining or removing those who were regarded as moderates. Out of these discussions came the idea for the creation of the Office of Special Plans (OSP). Between 2002 and 2004, Rubin worked as a staff adviser for Iran and Iraq in the Office of the Secretary of Defense, in which capacity he was seconded to the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq. Rubin was assigned to the Pentagon’s Office of Special Plans, which was fold into the Northern Gulf Affairs Office after the unit was implicated in cooking intelligence information to justify the Iraq war and occupation.

Right Web Profiles: Michael Rubin
                              Michael Ledeen
                              Coalition for Democracy in Iran
                              Committee for a Free Lebanon

(Tom Barry is Policy Director of the Interhemispheric Resource Center (IRC), online at: www.irc-online.org.)

What's New on Right Web

Featured Profiles

Narcissism, Nepotism, and Incestuous Ideology.. In 1994-1995, Podhoretz, “with the backing of telecommunications mogul Rupert Murdoch,” helped launch the Weekly Standard. However, Podhoretz did not take well to being constantly overshadowed at the Standard by Kristol and Fred Barnes, and in 1997 he became an editor and columnist for one of Rupert Murdoch’s many enterprises, the neoconservative New York Post.

Right Web Profile: John Podhoretz

Brussels Tribunal Holds PNAC Accountable. In its concluding statement, an international commission of inquiry declared: “Contrary to claims that this domination would be a “benevolent hegemony”, it is more likely to lead to a state of permanent war. PNAC policies are based on brutal unilateralism and disregard for legality.”

Right Web Profile: Final Statement of Brussels Tribunal

Pax Americana: What’s the Alternative?. By Tom Barry

Defending the Project for the New American Century (PNAC). In the interests of explaining the logic of the foreign policy agenda developed by PNAC and of sparking informed discussion about an alternative agenda, Tom Barry offered to present a defense of the neoconservative policy agenda developed by PNAC. The defense was presented at the Brussels Tribunal, held April 14-17, 2004, in Brussels, Belgium. The following is an excerpt of Pax Americana: What’s the Alternative?, which can be found at: http://rightweb.irc-online.org/analysis/2004/0404paxamericana.php

By way of comparison, it’s worth considering the connections and influence of the liberal Progressive Policy Institute, which recently published its own foreign policy blueprint entitled Progressive Internationalism: A Democratic National Security Strategy. Should the Progressive Policy Institute be disqualified as a nonprofit educational organization if its members and supporters are invited to join a future Democratic Party administration? It’s also relevant to note, with respect to the larger question about PNAC accountability to the current state of world affairs, that the policy framework of this proposed “progressive internationalism” in many respects mirrors the neoconservative posture.

Like PNAC’s founders, the Progressive Policy Institute hails the “tough-minded internationalism” of past Democratic presidents such as Harry Truman. Like PNAC, which warned of the present danger in its documents, the Progressive Policy Institute declares that “America is threatened once again” and needs assertive individuals committed to strong leadership. Its observation that “like the cold war, the struggle we face today is likely to last not years but decades” mirrors neoconservative and administration national security assessments. The Progressive Policy Institute stands behind the invasion of Iraq, “because the previous policy of containment was failing,” and the Saddam Hussein regime was “undermining both collective security and international law.”

Like PNAC and the Bush administration, the Progressive Policy Institute has a vision of national security that extends to fostering democracy and freedom around the world in “the belief that America can best defend itself by building a world safe for individual liberty and democracy.” It’s likely that PNAC itself would heartily agree with the Progressive Policy Institute’s criticism of those who complain that “the Bush administration has been too radical in recasting America’s national security strategy.” Rather, quoting the Progressive Policy Institute’s assessment of the Bush foreign policy agenda, “we believe it has not been ambitious enough or imaginative enough.” Clearly, then any inquiry into the “new imperial world order” or Pax Americana should extend beyond the self-styled “conservative internationalists” of PNAC.

The Progressive Policy Institute is a center-right educational organization that boasts close ties with large numbers of Democratic Party leaders and congressional representatives. The closely associated Democratic Leadership Council includes the presumptive Democratic Party presidential nominee Senator John Kerry. The institute’s president, Will Marshall, is a member of various advocacy groups that have been closely associated with PNAC, such as the U.S. Committee on NATO and the Committee for the Liberation of Iraq.

When one looks to the future, as PNAC has, care should be taken in any attempt to attribute the structure and structure of what the Brussels Tribunal calls the “new imperial order” solely to PNAC neoconservatives. Consider, for example, the following statement: “We aim to rebuild the moral foundation of U.S. global leadership by harnessing America’s awesome power to universal values of liberal democracy.” Is this an expression of what PNAC calls “conservative internationalism,” or is it an articulation of “progressive internationalism”? And if one believes that such statements that link power, leadership, morality, and mission are trappings of a Pax Americana, then the following questions must be discussed: What’s wrong with seeking moral clarity and moral foundations for U.S. leadership? Is it arrogant to assume the responsibility for global leadership, given the many dimensions of U.S. power and given the absence of other sources of global leadership? Do critics of American leadership dispute the existence of universal values, as expressed in the U.S. Declaration of Independence? And aren’t these universal values best promoted by liberal democracy?

Finally, what are the alternatives to the benevolent hegemony of a Pax Americana? If the critique of PNAC is that its principles and policy recommendations haven’t produced the benevolent hegemony its founders intended, what principles and what policies would ensure benevolent U.S. global leadership? And if one disputes the entire notion of a Pax Americana, what are the real alternatives to the exercise of U.S. military power as the guarantor of international security? Would the European Union, Russia, China, Japan­or the General Assembly and Security Council of the United Nations­be willing to assume the burden of the “muscular internationalism” that the leading internationalists of both political parties in the United States say is a fundamental condition of international security and stability? If the history of the 20th century­the “first American century”­is our guide, then it’s unlikely that serious alternatives to Pax Americana will emerge in the near future.

Related Analysis from Right Web : The Right’s Architecture of Power by Tom Barry

Right’s Architecture a Work in Progress. At the center of the architecture of power are two closely associated institutions: American Enterprise Institute and the Project for the New American Century (PNAC).

Related analysis from Foreign Policy in Focus, a joint project between the IRC and IPS:From Iraqi Occupation to Islamic Reformation: Neocons Aim Beyond Baghdad
By Jim Lobe (April 9, 2004) No one ever said that U.S. neoconservatives lack ambition.

Neoconservatives Argue That Sadr Uprising is “Made in Teheran”
By Jim Lobe (April 9, 2004) Neocons aim at Teheran while Baghdad burns.