Is U.S. war machine
on a roll?
Commentary by PAT MURPHY
Even before U.S. troops finish mopping up
Iraq, President Bush is talking tough to Syria, leading some to believe he might
order troops to march on Damascus.
Every day, Bush II distances himself even
farther from the mistakes of Bush I, who pushed Iraqi troops out of Kuwait in
1991, but halted the pursuit to Baghdad, rested on his laurels, and then lost
re-election.
Bush the Junior’s political advisers won’t
tolerate those mistakes.
Bush will keep the threat of more war
alive through Election Day 2004, essentially robbing the already spineless,
voiceless Democratic Party of making headlines on homeland issues of
unemployment, a recession and deficits.
No guessing is required about this
strategy.
Foreign reporters, especially in Britain,
discovered the Bush political blueprint months ago, and have been writing about
it. Only recently have U.S. reporters leaped onto the story.
The U.S. invasion of Iraq was outlined in
papers and books produced by a small group of hard-line, neo-conservative
intellectuals clustered in and around the Project for a New American Century.
This so-called think tank was founded by William Kristol, chief of staff to
then-Vice President Dan Quayle and now editor of The Weekly Standard magazine,
widely read in the Bush White House. Some other PNAC adherents, such as Deputy
Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, are important advisers to Bush.
They outlined what amounts to a new world
order—attacking, if necessary, Iraq, Syria and Iran to change regimes and to
shock nearby Arab governments into changing their ways and creating a safer
neighborhood for Israel. Their intellectual treatises go back as far as 1997
during the Clinton years, when their authors advocated an invasion of Iraq.
The veiled threats delivered to Syria the
past few days are part of the master plan extolled by Wolfowitz and by a long
list of other obscure names whose ideas have transformed President Bush’s
promised "humble" foreign policy and aversion to nation-building into a rumbling
military juggernaut with grand visions of rebuilding the Middle East into an
American incubator of democracies.
Unlike Bush the Elder, who declined to
lead Gulf War forces to Baghdad and overthrow Saddam Hussein because, he said,
he didn’t have a United Nations mandate, Bush the Junior has announced he
doesn’t need a UN mandate to launch wars.
Is it working? You bet.
Iraq’s tyrant dictator is gone,
mischievous North Korea is moderating its menacing talk about stepped up nuclear
programs, and U.S. public opinion for now is heavily supporting the
president—according to a Gallup poll conducted last week 28 percent even favor
waging war against Syria.
All President Bush needs to do is to
smokescreen problems at home with constant threats of taking out dictators that
he says threaten the American homeland with weapons of mass destruction—without
proving they exist—and re-election is a cakewalk like the road to Baghdad.
Those who would criticize or oppose talk
of war run the risk of being denounced as unpatriotic, squishy liberals who
don’t know a good war when they see one.