Bush Administration's Thoughts Wander Towards Syria
The U.S. occupation and rebuilding of Iraq is just beginning, but the thoughts of the Bush administration are already wandering away from Baghdad. The first hints came when Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld accused Syria of sending supplies, such as night-vision goggles, to the Iraqi military, and sheltering members of Hussein's Baath party. Now, nearly every member of the Bush administration has been clamoring to reprimand and threaten Syria.
Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz: "There's got to be a change in Syria. The Syrians need to know . . . they'll be held accountable." (Meet the Press, April 6)
President Bush: "The Syrian government needs to cooperate with the United States and our coalition partners." (The New York Times, April 14)
White House Press Secretary Ari Fleischer: "Syria is indeed a rogue nation." (Reuters, April 15)
Sound familiar? The Bush administration has, in effect, recycled the soundbites the nation heard nine months ago, simply substituting "Iraq" with "Syria." You've read these statements before, on the pages of another newpaper or magazine, last summer or last fall. The only difference now seems to be the name of the country, and the absence of Saddam Hussein.
In an attempt to allay the concerns raised over Bush's new target, Colin Powell stated that the administration did not have "a war plan right now to go attack someone else, either for the purpose of overthrowing their leadership or for the purpose of imposing democratic values." Yet this is simply not true. Several key members of Bush's administration -- including Vice President Dick Cheney, Rumsfeld, and Wolfowitz -- have a very explicit plan which aims to do exactly those two things: to overthrow governments and to install "democratic," American-friendly leaders as a means of achieving and maintaining an American-controlled world order. What remains to be seen is whether Bush will adhere to this plan. So far, it appears that he is consulting nothing else.
In the mid-1970s, CIA Director George Bush, Sr. (yes, he was the director of the CIA) assembled a group, called "Team B," to explore allegations that the CIA was presenting too soft a picture of the Soviet threat. Its members included Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Lewis Libby (Cheney's current chief of staff), and Richard Perle -- the very same hawks whom Bush exhumed three years ago and who now run his administration. Not surprisingly, they concluded that, yes, the Red Menace was far more horrific than ever imagined, and that the Kremlin was willing to spend every ruble they could get on building nuclear weapons. The solution? Increase defense spending and build more weapons -- a strategy which has remained a constant for the neo-conservatives.
In 1992, Wolfowitz, working for the Pentagon under Cheney (yes, Cheney was the Secretary of Defense), compiled a report called the "Defense Planning Guide," which aimed to serve as a plan for eliminating any sort of threat to American dominance of the world. This concept prompted fellow neo-conservative William Kristol to write a manifesto called "Project for a New American Century" in 1997, which was signed by Cheney, Wolfowitz, Rumsfeld, and Libby. The plan calls for a major increase in defense spending; a confrontation of "regimes hostile to U.S. interests and values" and to "extend an international order friendly to our security, prosperity, and values." This was followed by a letter to President Clinton, expounding their plan and urging him to authorize military action in Iraq, and signed by Cheney and company, plus Richard Armitage, Richard Perle, James Woolsey, Robert Zoellick, and Zalmay Khalilzad -- all now high-ranking officials in the Bush administration.
Notice that there is no mention of regimes hostile to their own people -- Cheney et al. are interested solely in overthrowing governments as a means of aiding U.S. interests. Like Iraq, Syria does have an authoritarian government that has been widely criticized by human rights organizations (although not to the same extent as Hussein). But also like Iraq, the U.S. is not interested in "liberating" the people -- that only became the justification for the war on Iraq when (at the F News went to press) the U.S. failed to both kill Saddam Hussein or locate any weapons of mass destruction. This is why the U.S. is taking on the reconstruction (or, rather, paying billions to U.S. companies) alone, without using the U.N.
This is why an "interim" government of Iraq, mainly retired American generals and diplomats, is composed wholly of yes-men who will kowtow to anything the administration prescribes. (If there were any doubts about that, the leader of the interim team, Lt. Gen. Jay Garner, was quoted in The New York Times saying, "If President Bush had been president, we would have won" the war in Vietnam.) Will the U.S. rebuild a free, democratic Iraq, or will it simply shift the world's attention to its next target? If Bush's neglect of Afghanistan, where the "democratic" government it installed has lost virtually all of its power (and where the administration forgot to include humanitarian aid in next year's budget), and rumblings about Syria are any indication, the U.S. is moving right along according to plan.
Illustration By Padraig Johnston