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Oct 31, 2005, 10:59:04 AM10/31/05

Salon
October 28, 2005

All the vice president's men

The ideologues in Cheney's inner circle drummed up a war. Now their zealotry is
blowing up in their faces.

By Juan Cole

As Washington waits on pins and needles to see if special counsel Patrick Fitzgerald
hands down indictments, the focus falls on Dick Cheney's inner circle. This group,
along with that surrounding Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, made up what Colin
Powell's top aide, Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson, called a "cabal" that "on critical
issues ... made decisions that the bureaucracy did not know were being made".
http://groups.google.ca/group/soc.culture.iranian/msg/dd9285a9efc88835?hl=en

Dick Cheney is the first vice president to have had, in effect, his own personal
National Security Council (NSC). This formidable and unprecedented rump foreign
policy team, composed of radical hawks, played a key role in every aspect of the war
on Iraq: planning for it, gathering "evidence" to justify it and punishing those who
spoke out against it. It is not surprising that members of that team, and Cheney
himself, have now also emerged as targets in Fitzgerald's investigation of the outing
of Valerie Plame Wilson to the press, along with Bush advisor Karl Rove.
Although the investigation has focused on Cheney's chief of staff, Irv Lewis
"Scooter" Libby, a number of other Cheney staffers have been interviewed. Who are
these shadowy policymakers who played such a major role in shaping the Bush
administration's foreign policy?

Most of the members of Cheney's inner circle were neoconservative ideologues, who
combined hawkish American triumphalism with an obsession with Israel. This does not
mean that the war was fought for Israel, although it is undeniable that Israeli
concerns played an important role.

The actual motivation behind the war was complex, and Cheney's team was not the only
one in the game. The Bush administration is a coalition of disparate forces --
country club Republicans, realists, representatives of oil and other corporate
interests, evangelicals, hardball political strategists, right-wing Catholics, and
neoconservative Jews allied with Israel's right-wing Likud party. Each group had its
own rationale for going to war with Iraq.

Bush himself appears to have had an obsession with restoring family honor by avenging
the slight to his father produced by Saddam's remaining in office after the Second
Persian Gulf War (1991). Cheney was interested in the benefits of a war to the oil
industry, and to the military-industrial complex in general. It seems likely that the
Iraq war, which produced billions in no-bid contracts for the company he headed in
the late 1990s, saved Halliburton from bankruptcy.

The evangelicals wanted to missionize Iraqis. Karl Rove wanted to turn Bush into a
war president to ensure his reelection.

The neoconservatives viewed Saddam's Iraq as a short-term danger to Israel, and in
the long term, they hoped that overthrowing the Iraqi Ba'ath would transform the
entire Middle East, rather as Kamal Ataturk, who abolished the offices of Ottoman
emperor and Sunni caliph in the 1920s, had brought into being a relatively democratic
Turkey that was allied with Israel. (This fantastic analogy was suggested by
Princeton emeritus professor and leading JEW neoconservative ideologue Bernard Lewis
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernard_Lewis). This transformation would be beneficial
to the long-term security of both the United States and Israel.

None of these rationales would have been acceptable across the board, or persuasive
with Congress or the American public, so the various factions focused on the threat
of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction. Unfortunately for them, this rationale was
discovered to be a mirage. And in the course of trying to punish those who were
pointing out that the emperor had no clothes -- or, in this case, that the dictator
had no weapons of mass destruction -- Cheney and Bush's underlings went too far.
Ironically, their attempt to silence critics succeeded only in turning a harsh light
on their own actions and motivations.

"Cheney Assembles Formidable Team", marveled a Page One article in the February 3,
2001, edition of the New York Times. It turns out that Cheney had 15 military and
political advisors on foreign affairs, at a time when the president's own National
Security Council was being downsized. The number of aides who counseled Cheney on
domestic issues was much smaller. In contrast, Al Gore had been advised by a single
staffer on security affairs.

The leader of the team was Lewis Libby, Cheney's chief of staff. Libby had studied at
Yale with Paul Wolfowitz, who brought him to Washington. He co-authored a hawkish
policy document with Wolfowitz in the Department of Defense for its head, Dick
Cheney, after the Second Persian Gulf War in 1992. When it was leaked, it embarrassed
the first President Bush. Lewis Libby was a founding member of the Project for a New
American Century, PNAC (http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article1665.htm) in
1997 during the Clinton years, when many neoconservatives were out of office.

The PNAC (http://rightweb.irc-online.org/org/pnac.php) attempted to use the
Republican-dominated Congress to pressure Clinton to take a more belligerent stance
toward Iraq, and it advocated significantly expanding military spending and using
U.S. troops as "gendarmes" in the aftermath of wars to "shape" the international
security environment.

Cheney was also a PNAC member, and his association with this group from 1997 signaled
a shift from his earlier hard-nosed realism, as he allied himself with the
neoconservatives, who dreamed of transforming other societies. The James Baker
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Baker) branch of the Republican Party had long
been critical of Israel for causing trouble for the United States in the Middle East
with its expansionist policies and unwillingness to stop the settlement of the West
Bank, and James Baker was well aware that the vast majority of American Jews do not
vote Republican.

Although a staunch defender of Israel, Cheney at one time was at least on speaking
terms with this wing of the Republican Party. (The sense of betrayal felt by his old
colleagues was summed up by Bush I's national security advisor Brent Scowcroft
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brent_Scowcroft), who told the New Yorker he considered
Cheney a friend, "But Dick Cheney I don't know anymore".

As time went on, however, he increasingly chose to ally with neoconservatives and the
Jewish right in the U.S. and Israel, accepting them as powerful allies and
constituents for his vision of a post-Cold War world dominated by an unchallenged
American hegemony that would be backed by a vast military-industrial establishment
fed by U.S. tax dollars. He continually promised skeptical Jewish audiences that a
democratic Iraq would benefit Israel. His choice of advisors when he became vice
president demonstrated a pronounced preference for the neoconservatives.

But Cheney's alliance with the neocons was probably driven more by his Manichaean,
Cold War-inspired worldview -- in which the U.S. battled an evil enemy -- and his
corporate ties, than by an obsession with Israel or remaking the Middle East.
Islamist terror provided a new version of the Soviet "evil empire". And the neocons'
dynamic foreign policy vision, their "liberalism with guns", offered more
opportunities for the military-industrial complex than did traditional Republican
realism in a post-Soviet world, where peer states did not exist and no credible
military threat menaced the U.S.

Only a series of wars of conquest in the Middle East, dressed up as a "defense"
against the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, could hope to keep the
Pentagon and the companies to which it outsourced in the gravy.

Such wars could no longer be fought in East Asia, given Chinese and North Korean
nuclear capabilities, and there were no U.S. constituencies for such wars in most
other parts of the world. The Middle East was the perfect arena for a renewed
American militarism, given that the U.S. public held deep prejudices against the
Arab-Muslim world, and, after September 11, deeply feared it.

A key, but less well-known, Cheney advisor on the Middle East is John Hannah
(http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=John_Hannah), a former Soviet expert. He
had been part of a policy group assembled by Cheney when he was secretary of defense,
in 1989, under the direction of Paul Wolfowitz. Hannah was distinguished for his
distrust of Soviet reformist Prime Minister Mikhail Gorbachev, according to the New
Republic.

John Hannah then came to head the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, WINEP
(http://rightweb.irc-online.org/org/winep.php), a stridently pro-Israel think tank
that has gained enormous influence in Washington. WINEP had been founded in the 1980s
with the backing of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee AIPAC
(http://rightweb.irc-online.org/org/aipac.php), the legendarily powerful pro-Israel
lobbying group.

The initial impetus for it was that think tanks like the Brookings Institution
(http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Brookings_Institution) were felt to be
insufficiently pro-Israel. Initially WINEP tended to support the government in power
in Israel, but in the past 15 years it has increasingly been drawn into the orbit of
the right-wing, expansionist Likud Party.

WINEP wields enormous influence, to the point where it almost functions as a
governmental entity. The director of a private consulting firm with a contract from
the Department of Defense that involved trying to think about the future of the main
political parties in Iraq told me in 2004 that he was specifically instructed, as
part of his contract, to depend on the material at the WINEP Web site. State
Department officials and U.S. military officers are detailed to WINEP to learn about
the Middle East and are indoctrinated into a pro-Likud point of view at taxpayers'
expense.
http://www.washingtoninstitute.org/templateC11.php?CID=89&newActiveSubNav=Our%20People&activeSubNavLink=templateC11.php%3FCID%3D89&newActiveNav=aboutUs

Despite its highly political activities, WINEP has the status for tax purposes of a
nonprofit charitable foundation.

When John Hannah was at WINEP, he was still deeply concerned with post-Soviet Russian
foreign policy toward the Middle East. The Soviets had been major patrons of the
Palestine Liberation Organization, Syria and Iraq, all of whom John Hannah viewed as
enemies.

In a 1993 interview with the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs, JINSA
(http://rightweb.irc-online.org/org/jinsa.php), another pro-Israel, right-wing
organization, John Hannah expressed anxiety about the rise of Russian nationalists
who, he claimed, sought to undermine United Nations sanctions against Libya and to
position Russian companies to invest in Iraq should the sanctions on that country
begin to slip.
http://www.jinsa.org/articles/articles.html/function/view/categoryid/118/documentid/276/history/3,2359,947,653,118,276

For figures such as John Hannah, Russian nationalism and Middle Eastern rogue states
like Libya and Iraq represented unfinished business left over from the Cold War. For
the Israeli hawks and their American supporters, the Cold War was not really over as
long as the former Soviet allies in the Middle East continued to express enmity to
Israel.

As former Secretary of State Warren Christopher once remarked
(http://www.washingtoninstitute.org/templateC07.php?CID=69), the U.S. State
Department probably owes WINEP a finder's fee for providing it with key personnel.
From the institute, Hannah came to work for Warren Christopher (who served from 1993
to 1997). During this period, John Hannah cultivated ties with Ahmad Chalabi and his
Iraqi National Congress, an expatriate group funded by the CIA and the State
Department to overthrow Saddam. One of the things that made Chalabi attractive to
John Hannah and other neocons was that he promised them that if he came to power he
would recognize Israel and take Iraq in the same direction as Turkey, a Muslim
country allied with the Zionist state.

We next meet John Hannah as an aide to John Bolton
(http://rightweb.irc-online.org/ind/bolton/bolton.php). Bolton, a curmudgeonly lawyer
who helped stop the Florida recount in 2000, was rewarded by Bush by being made
undersecretary of state for arms control and international proliferation. Bolton
detailed Hannah to Cheney's office as chief adviser on the Middle East. (John Hannah
actually knew little about the Middle East and knows no Arabic, being primarily an
old Russia hand.)

Cheney's other major advisor besides Libby on Middle East affairs is David Wurmser
(http://rightweb.irc-online.org/ind/wurmser_d/wurmser-d.php), a Johns Hopkins Ph.D.
in international relations. He served as project officer at the congressionally
funded U.S. Institute of Peace, from 1988 to 1994. He then moved for two years to the
Washington Institute for Near East Policy, where he was director of institutional
grants until 1996. In the latter year he co-authored, with Richard Perle, Douglas
Feith and others, a now-famous policy paper for incoming Likud leader Binyamin
Netanyahu, "A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm"
(http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article1438.htm), that advocated a war to
overthrow Saddam and install a Hashemite monarchy in Iraq as a way of moderating the
Shias of the region and securing "the realm" of Israel.

Since post-Khomeini Shias despise monarchy as un-Islamic, and since the Hashemites,
who used to rule Iraq before 1958 and still rule Jordan, are Sunni Muslims, this plan
was worse than science fiction. Science fiction is coherent and often involves some
actual knowledge.

The neoconservatives were actually more concerned with Syria initially than Iraq,
since it more directly threatened Israeli security. Indeed, "A Clean Break" advocated
the removal of Saddam mainly as a way of pressuring Damascus. The policy paper said,
with astonishing ignorance,

"Israel can shape its strategic environment, in cooperation with Turkey and
Jordan, by weakening, containing, and even rolling back Syria.

This effort can focus on removing Saddam from power in Iraq -- an important
Israeli strategic objective in its own right -- as a means of foiling Syria's
regional ambitions. King Hussein may have ideas for Israel in bringing its Lebanon
problem under control. The predominantly Shia population of southern Lebanon has been
tied for centuries to the Shia leadership in Najaf Iraq rather than Iran.

Were the Hashemites to control Iraq, they could use their influence over Najaf
to help Israel wean the south Lebanese Shia away from Hezbollah, Iran, and Syria.
Shia retain strong ties to the Hashemites: the Shia venerate foremost the Prophet's
family, the direct descendants of which — and in whose veins the blood of the Prophet
flows — is King Hussein".

This paragraph must be the most absurd, ill-informed and frankly lunatic pieces of
prose ever produced by any policy advisor anywhere. It is full of false premises and
ignorant assumptions. Saddam's branch of the Ba'ath Party was a rival of the Syrian
Ba'ath Party, not a supporter. Syria had joined Bush I's coalition against Iraq,
allying with the Americans in 1990-91. Removing the Iraqi Ba'ath would more likely
strengthen Syria than weaken it.

As for the Shias in Iraq and southern Lebanon, they had been deeply influenced by the
ideology of Ayatollah Khomeini, who preached that monarchy is incompatible with
Islam. The idea that the old Hashemite monarchy could be revived and reinstalled in
revolutionary Iraq was itself absurd. That a Sunni king in Baghdad might have any
appeal to the Shias of southern Lebanon, who favored Hezbollah and Khomeinism, would
only occur to someone completely ignorant of the actual politics of Tyre and
Nabatiya. The tragedy is that this sort of hallucination appears actually to have
underpinned real policy moves by the neoconservatives as they became powerful in
Washington under George W. Bush and Dick Cheney.

David Wurmser is married to Meyrav Wurmser
(http://rightweb.irc-online.org/ind/wurmser_m/wurmser-m.php), director of Middle East
programs at the right-wing Hudson Institute
(http://rightweb.irc-online.org/org/hudson.php). She was listed as a co-author of "A
Clean Break". She had also co-founded, with Yigal Carmon, a former colonel in Israeli
military intelligence, the MEMRI (http://rightweb.irc-online.org/org/memri.php)
translation service, which cherry-picks Arabic newspapers for the more outrageous
articles and political cartoons, and translates them into English for the purpose of
creating a negative view of the Arab world.

In 1999 David Wurmser (http://www.sourcewatch.org/wiki.phtml?title=David_Wurmser)
published "Tyranny's Ally: America's Failure to Defeat Saddam Hussein"
(http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0844740748). In 2000, Wurmser authored
a paper urging the U.S. government to push Syria out of Lebanon and to refuse to
engage with Damascus that was published by the Middle East Forum
(http://rightweb.irc-online.org/org/mef.php) of Daniel Pipes
(http://rightweb.irc-online.org/ind/pipes/pipes.php). The Middle East Forum advisory
board is primarily composed of leaders of right-wing organizations such as the Jewish
Institute for National Security Affairs (JINSA) and the Zionist Organization of
America (http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Zionist_Organization_of_America).

David Wurmser was picked by fellow neoconservative and Undersecretary of Defense for
Planning Douglas Feith (http://rightweb.irc-online.org/ind/feith/feith.php), whom the
departing Colin Powell denounced to George W. Bush as a "card-carrying member of the
Likud".

After September 11 to form part of the notorious Office of Special Plans (OSP) in the
Near East and South Asia division of the Department of Defense. That unit
cherry-picked intelligence on Iraqi weapons of mass destruction and Saddam's alleged
links to al-CIA-duh (al-Qaida), singling out unreliable, single-sourced accounts and
stripping them of any context that would show where they came from. These were then
stovepiped to Lewis Libby and John Hannah in Cheney's office, so as to go directly to
Bush and make an end run around the professional intelligence agencies. When
allegations emerged that corrupt Iraqi businessman and longtime expatriate politician
Ahmad Chalabi had been given classified information about U.S. intelligence efforts
against Iran, and had promptly passed it on to Tehran, David Wurmser was among the
officials the FBI interviewed searching for the leak.

When the OSP was dissolved after the Iraq war, Wurmser went back to work for John
Bolton. Although David Wurmser only came to Cheney's shadow national security council
in September 2003, after the Plame leak, he had been in close contact with Lewis
Libby and John Hannah all along. Close observers noted a distinct turn toward
belligerency against Syria in White House pronouncements soon after Wurmser's advent.
(He replaced old Soviet hand Eric Edelman
(http://rightweb.irc-online.org/ind/edelman/edelman.php), who was sent as ambassador
to Turkey.)

On September 10, 2002, the Boston Globe had reported that ascendant hawks in the Bush
administration saw the overthrow of Saddam as a first step toward democratizing and
transforming the Middle East. John Donnelly and Anthony Shadid wrote, "The argument
for reshaping the political landscape in the Mideast has been pushed for years by
some Washington think tanks and in hawkish circles. It is now being considered as a
possible U.S .policy with the ascent of key hard-liners in the administration -- from
Paul Wolfowitz and Douglas Feith in the Pentagon to John Hannah and Lewis Libby on
the vice president's staff and John Bolton in the State Department, analysts and
officials say".

Cheney and other advocates of this policy promised that an Iraq war would break the
deadlock between the Israelis and the Palestinians. Donnelly and Shadid quote Meyrav
Wurmser, "Everyone will flip out, starting with the Saudis ... It will send shock
waves throughout the Arab world ... But if we can get a democracy in the Palestinian
Authority, democracy in Iraq, get the Egyptians to improve their human rights and
open up their system, it will be a spectacular change. After a war with Iraq, then
you really shape the region".

Since both Wurmsers and their circle had argued forcefully for the destruction of the
Oslo peace process and against the surrender by Israel of any of the Palestinian
territories captured in 1967, it seems most likely that they hoped that getting the
U.S. to produce chaos in the Middle East by undermining its allies would give hawkish
Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon a free hand to annex most of the West Bank, and
perhaps other Arab lands, rather than that it would lead to a just peace. Weakened by
the loss of their backers in Baghdad and Damascus, the Palestinians would be forced
to make peace on Sharon's terms.

Lewis Libby, John Hannah and David Wurmser were at the center of the production and
purveying of bad intelligence on alleged Iraqi weapons of mass destruction. John
Hannah received intelligence directly from the Iraqi National Congress, according to
a leaked memo from that organization. He was also a liaison with Wurmser when the
latter was in the Office of Special Plans.

According to a Newsweek article of December 15, 2004, "a June 2002 memo written by
INC lobbyist Entifadh Qunbar to a U.S. Senate committee lists John Hannah, a senior
national-security aide on Cheney's staff, as one of two 'U.S. governmental
recipients' for reports generated by an intelligence program being run by the INC and
which was then being funded by the State Department".

The article explains that the program arranged for the raw information coming from
defectors and other sources to be "reported to, among others, 'appropriate
governmental, non-governmental and international agencies' ". The memo explicitly
mentioned John Hannah as "a principal point of contact" for the program. The other
point of contact, according to Newsweek, was William Luti
(http://rightweb.irc-online.org/ind/luti/luti.php), who headed the Office of Special
Plans in the Pentagon under Feith. (Luti, also known as "uber-Luti", was such a
zealot that he denounced retired General Anthony Zinni as a "traitor" for expressing
reservations about the impending Iraq war).

Chalabi's lie factory thus had two main customers, both of them wholesalers to
Cheney. (These alleged contacts are an apparent violation of the National Security
Act, which prohibits federal officials from engaging in unauthorized intelligence
gathering).

These, then, were the key neocon players gathered around Cheney. Cheney's office was
key to the manufacturing of the bogus case for Iraq being close to having a nuclear
bomb (it had no nuclear weapons program at all after the mid-1990s) and for it having
a biological weapons program on wheels (biological weapons labs require clean rooms
and cannot be mounted in Winnebagos).

Cheney's office was among the originators of the smears against critics of such
allegations, such as ambassador Joseph Wilson
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_C._Wilson). Wilson's attack on the integrity of
their intelligence gathering deeply threatened them. At the time he began speaking
out, no high U.S. government official had dared name their fantasy for what it was --
a tissue of innuendo and falsehoods fed to them by the ambitious and swallowed by the
greedy and the gullible. That he was connected to the CIA's own unit on weapons
proliferation through his wife, Valerie Plame Wilson
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Valerie_Plame), made him all the more dangerous in
their eyes, once Cheney had ferreted out that link.

The New York Times reported on October 24, 2005, that it was Cheney who told Lewis
Libby that Wilson's wife worked at the CIA. White House chief of staff Karl Rove also
learned of Valerie Plame Wilson's identity, although it is not known how. Both of
them shared the information with the press, including Matthew Cooper
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matthew_Cooper) of Time magazine, Robert Novak
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Novak) of CNN and Judith Miller
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judith_Miller_%28journalist%29) of the New York Times.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plame_affair

Their aim was to discredit ambassador Wilson in official Washington as a tool of CIA
disinformation, someone determined to make the White House the fall guys in the
intelligence scandal, so as to spare the Company criticism. Some have a dark
suspicion that they may also have wished to disrupt the CIA unit on
anti-proliferation, which continued to doubt the case they were making about the
rogue Middle East states.

When confronted by special counsel Patrick Fitzgerald, Lewis Libby and Karl Rove seem
to have claimed that they did not reveal the name of Valerie Plame Wilson. In fact,
they had called her "Joe Wilson's wife". This denial, however, is strikingly
disingenuous and unconvincing.

Clearly Cheney's men had powerful domestic political reasons to try to destroy
ambassador Wilson. But considering the larger geopolitical ambitions of the neocons
in Cheney's inner circle, and their combination of ignorance and arrogance, it could
be argued that Iraq and Iraqi weapons were all along a mere pied-à-terre. Syria, Iran
and the rest of the Middle East were in the cross hairs, and ambassador Joseph Wilson
and Valerie Plame Wilson were getting in the way of the next projects.

With the war in Iraq a disaster, possible indictments looming and polls showing that
80% of Americans believe that revealing Valerie Plame Wilson's identity was either
illegal or unethical, those dreams of world domination have crumbled to dust.
http://www.truthout.org/docs_2005/102905X.shtml