BOOK REVIEW
Calling it Conspiracy
Stephen
Sniegoski, The
Transparent Cabal: The Neoconservative Agenda, War in the Middle East, and the
National Interest of Israel (Foreword by Congressman Paul Findley,
Introduction by Paul Gottfried) (Enigma Editions, Norfolk Virginia 2008)
$27.95, 480 pp.
Reviewed
by Tim Wilkinson
In this
meticulously researched and cogently argued book, Stephen Sniegoski presents
the thesis that the 2003 Iraq war was, at root, all about Israel.
More precisely,
Sniegoski argues that
the origins of the American war on Iraq revolve around the United States’ adoption of a war agenda whose basic format was conceived in Israel to advance Israeli interests and was ardently pushed by the influential pro-Israeli American neoconservatives, both inside and outside the Bush administration…
Such a thesis
does not mean that the neoconservatives intentionally sought to aid Israel at
the expense of the United States, but rather that they have seen American
foreign policy through the lens of Israeli interest.
Sniegoski
identifies the neocons as a group and establishes that they have, at least
since the late sixties, been strongly motivated by a close identification with
the state of Israel, and specifically with a Likudnik view of that state's
interests. A substantial part of the book (the best part of five chapters) is
dedicated to a detailed history of the neocons, and a huge amount of evidence
is amassed, making this part of the book useful as a general - if not
definitive - reference on the history of the neocons.
Among the events
covered in this section are the neocons’ move from the Democratic to the
Republican party - apparently motivated by the latter's more congenial attitude
to an aggressive foreign-policy - and their wielding of disproportionate
influence by means of a network of interconnected, overlapping and mutually
supportive think tanks, which also extended to explicitly pro-Israel and indeed
Israeli, and Israeli government, institutions.
The evidence
adduced for the neocons' strong attachment to - even preoccupation with - a
certain view of Israeli interests is overwhelming. Besides their
connections with the Israeli foreign policy establishment, Sniegoski adduces in
evidence a number of policy documents, detailed below, which make it quite
clear that the neocons were directly concerned with the interests, as they saw
them, of Israel, unmediated by a conception of US interests.
In the course of
establishing the neocons’ attachment to Israel, Sniegoski goes further and
relates the development of a specific war strategy for the middle east
originating with right-wing Israeli strategists, and carried forward both in
Israel and among American neoconservatives, culminating in the emergence of the
specific neocon plan to bring down Saddam. Sniegoski describes a consistent
strategy which varies in its details but not in its central focus: the
geopolitical ‘reconfiguration’ of the Middle East by a weakening of Israel's
neighbour states, generally by means of destabilisation and fragmentation.
Sniegoski
amasses a significant body of evidence for this approach, starting with a 1982
article by Oded Yinon, an Israeli foreign policy strategist and ex-government
advisor, which recommends just such a fragmentation policy, with specific
emphasis Lebanon as a model and Iraq as a target. It has been suggested that
Sniegoski places too much reliance on this document in support of the
fragmentation thesis as applied to the motives for the Iraq war, but this
is not clearly so. Certainly considerable evidence is presented that the
strategy formed a main current in Likudnik thinking at the time and since. An
article by Yoram Peri, another government advisor specialising in military
matters, argued against the policy - clearly stating that it was at the time
dominant, and its intended outcome desirable - on the grounds that it would
alienate the USA. As it transpired he was proved right when Israel received
heavy criticism for its second invasion of Lebanon shortly after both papers
were published.
That invasion, it must be
admitted, does not quite conform to Sniegoski’s very specific thesis of a fixed
destabilisation and fragmentation policy. Although the 1978 invasion had indeed
achieved just such an outcome in Lebanon, Sniegoski suggests that the aim of
the second invasion was to install a friendly Christian government for the
whole of the country. However, this could easily be seen as a second,
consolidatory, stage of a strategy depending on fragmentation. Furthermore,
Sniegoski adduces evidence that the further aims of the invasion included
striking a blow against Syria, another target for destabilisation identified by
Yinon.
In any case, Sniegoski
can happily grant that installation of a dependably pliant government was
an outcome at least as desirable to belligerent Israeli opinion, without
abandoning the view that the fragmentation policy he establishes was also
central. In fact, ascribing to strategists an utterly inflexible policy of
destabilisation over regime-change would be rather implausible. Perhaps a more
salient objection to Sniegoski’s account would be that it does not establish
that the neocons took on the policy from its Israeli originators.
An argument
taken from the translator of the Yinon article, Israel Shahak - that the
references in that article reveal substantial connections to the neocons - is
maybe somewhat overstated, and would in any case suggest an influence in the
opposite direction. However, while it is not clear that the neocons were
involved in the development of the strategy from its inception, Sniegoski
establishes that the neocons did indeed adopt the strategy not long after, and
continued to work closely with Israelis in propounding it up to the time of the
second Iraq war.
Indeed,
Sniegoski suggests that the emergence of neocon involvement in the strategy
only emerged after – and as a consequence of – its first outing in Lebanon. As
Peri had warned, the intervention in Lebanon drew widespread criticism,
including from Israel’s patron the USA. His recommendation had been to effect a
change in US policy, rather than attempting to go it alone.
Pass over
Sniegoski’s detailed and compelling account of Israeli involvement in the
Iran-Iraq war, we take up the story at the end of the first Gulf war with an
article by A.M. Rosenthal of the New York Times. [Rosenthal may be regarded as
a neo-con fellow traveller in virtue of his hawkish brand of support for Israel
which in 1999 earned him the Guardian of Zion Award, an honour he shares with
Krauthammer, Safire, Podhoretz and the younger Pipes.]
Sniegoski
relates that Rosenthal’s article marked the beginning of the ‘regime change and
democracy’ policy which became the mainstay of neocon rhetoric regarding the
Middle East. Objecting to the failure of the US to press their advantage and
invade Iraq, he wrote:
the “realists” have dominated American foreign policy, particularly on the Middle East. They constantly search for a “balance of power” that is unattainable because it is based on dictatorships, which by their very nature are the cause of instability. They dismiss the concept of morality in international affairs and believe that democracy is impossible in the Middle East.
At the same time
as articulating the position that was to remain a distinctive feature of neocon
discourse, Rosenthal manifested a clear, though indirectly stated,
intention that Iraq should be fragmented in the process of invasion: “were
Americans sent into combat against Saddam Hussein so that Washington should now
help him keep together the jigsaw country sawed out of the Middle East by the
British after World War I?”
Sniegoski
follows the trail through the last days of the Bush I presidency and
the 1992 draft Defense Planning Guidance document produced in by Paul
Wolfowitz, I. Lewis Libby, Richard Perle and Albert Wohlstetter. Calling
attention to the effect the document had in extending a militantly aggressive
strategy into the post-cold war age, he notes that the document established the
neo-con tropes that were to be called on later, referring to WMD as the main
danger to the United States and even, in its draft form recommending
“pre-emptive” strikes as a supposed countermeasure. When a leak of this content
sparked global outrage, Sniegoski reports that “the emphasis on unilateral
action in the draft was altered to mention collective security, but the aim of
US world domination and the emphasis on WMD remained.” Sniegoski might also
have mentioned that the main scenarios considered involved Iraq and North
Korea.
During the
Clinton administration, the neocons were not idle. Lacking direct influence at
home, their military strategising focused more directly and obviously on
Israel. Sniegoski cites the 1996 paper “A Clean Break: A New Strategy for
Securing the Realm,” the realm in question being Israel, the publisher an
Israeli think tank, the Institute for Advanced Strategic and Political Studies,
and the report’s producers including, among other neocons, Richard Perle,
Douglas Feith, and David Wurmser.
The ‘Clean
Break’ document, Sniegoski reports, was intended for the incoming Likudnik
Netanyahu government, and laid out a comprehensive and aggressive new strategy
for dominance over the Palestinians and the region as a whole. The plan started
with a “pre-emptive” strike against Saddam, replacing him with a Hashemite
monarchy. As in the case of the 1982 Lebanon invasion, this iteration of the
policy to neutralise Iraq deviates slightly from the ‘fragmentation’ policy –
though Sniegoski points out that like the rest of the document, it
manifests little concern for the ideal of democracy that was later to be
vaunted in neocon propaganda. The installation of an unthreatening regime in
Iraq, itself regarded as an important objective, was also to be the first step
in a wider onslaught taking in Syria and Iran (both of which the US did indeed
threaten after the invasion of Iraq, but did not in the end attack). Another
notable feature of the ‘Clean Break” recommendations was an emphasis on the
need, purely from a propaganda viewpoint, to appeal to “Western values” and US
interests in, for example, missile defence in gaining US support for Israeli
actions. Sniegoski points out that the document was directed toward the aim of
achieving greater independence for Israel from US influence, while still
receiving US support. As Sniegoski remarks,
…the “Clean Break” study was an astounding document that has been given insufficient attention by the mainstream American media. Though written to advance the interests of a foreign country, it appears to be a rough blueprint for actual Bush administration policy, with which some of the “Clean Break” authors – Perle, Feith, and Wurmser – were intimately involved.
Sniegoski further relates that Wurmser produced an extended follow-up
document for the same think-tank, entitled “Coping with Crumbling States: A Western
and Israeli Balance of Power Strategy for the Levant.” As the “clean Break”
report had, Wurmser’s analysis viewed Iraq entirely from the viewpoint of
Israeli interests, concluding that it was both the strategic key to the region
and a vulnerable and harmless “crumbling” state. This view, it might be argued,
could explain the move away from the fragmentation strategy at this time, since
it would hardly be necessary to break up by force a country which was on the
brink of disintegration in any case. It might be surmised, though Sniegoski
does not do so, that as apparently had been the case in Lebanon in 1982, a
second, post-fragmentation stage was envisaged, under which the area, or parts
of it, were to be stabilised under an unthreatening regime. This might however
be to rely too much on the imposition of a presumed consistency onto matters
which can be assessed in any case only speculatively – something which
Sniegoski to his credit avoids doing throughout his complex and closely-sourced
narrative.
In any case,
only three years later in 1999, Sniegoski reports, Wurmser, in association with
Perle and Ledeen, produced another document, this time for US consumption. In
keeping with the propaganda aims of the Clean Break document and its follow-up
piece, and in stark contrast to the image of a weak and unthreatening Iraq
portrayed therein, “Tyranny’s Ally: America’s Failure to Defeat Saddam Hussein”
offered stark warnings of a (rather nebulous) threat to the US from resurgent
Arab Nationalism (not, as Sniegoski
remarks, the ‘Islamism’ that was later to become the pretext for the war).
TOTALITARIAN TYRANNY
Iraq, Wurmser
claimed, was “a totalitarian tyranny. Such tyranny is, by its very nature,
violent, aggressive, and rabidly anti-Western.” Again, the recommendation
(this time to the US) was for wider operations throughout the area, in the
interests, of course, of its people, though not by way of democracy. Sniegoski
reports that the document advocated “a return to the rule of the Hashemites and
the powerful traditional families. And he presented Ahmed Chalabi as
representing this viable, positive tradition.”
Wurmser added:
“For much of the Arab world, factionalism constitutes the sole barrier against
the absolute power of its tyrants.” which suggests that plans for Hashemite
‘monarchy’ might not have been regarded as so different from fragmentation as
one familiar with monolithic European constitutional monarchies might suppose.
Sniegoski
reports yet a further step along this propaganda route which occurred with the
publication of Study of Revenge: Saddam Hussein’s Unfinished War against
America in 2000 by a Laurie Mylroie. This alleged that major terrorist attacks
from the 1993 WTC bombing onwards had been the work of Saddam. Sniegoski
writes: “Mylroie’s Saddam conspiracy theory was far outside mainstream
thinking, and she would have been considered something of an oddball if it were
not for her connections to people with power.”
He adds that the
book acknowledged Wolfowitz, Libby, Wurmser and John Bolton, and was praised by
Perle and Wolfowitz among others. He relates that after the 2001 WTC attacks,
it was republished by Rupert Murdoch’s HarperCollins, retitled ‘The War Against
America: Saddam Hussein and the World Trade Center Attacks’, while Mylrioe was
employed as an Iraq expert by Fox News.
No account of
the long road to the second Gulf war could fail to mention the neocon Project
for a New American Century. Sniegoski traces the organisation from its
foundation in 1997; through two letters, the second open, to President Clinton
in early 1998 and a third to ex-House Speaker Newt Gringrich and Senate
Republican leader Trent Lott, all calling for military action to overthrow
Saddam; to the publication in 2000 of Rebuilding America’s Defences: Strategy,
Forces and Resources for a New Century. Sniegoski describes the document:
In regard to the
Middle East, the report called for an increased American military presence in
the Gulf, whether Saddam was in power or not, maintaining: “The United States
has for decades sought to play a more permanent role in Gulf regional security.
While the unresolved conflict with Iraq provides the immediate justification,
the need for a substantial American force presence in the Gulf transcends the
issue of the regime of Saddam Hussein.” The report struck a prescient note when
it observed that “the process of transformation, even if it brings
revolutionary change, is likely to be a long one, absent some catastrophic and
catalyzing event – like a new Pearl Harbor.”
There can be
little doubt that Sniegoski establishes the Israeli origins and Likudnik aims
of the neocons’ long-standing plan for an attack on Iraq. The very specific
thesis that the chosen tactic was to fragment Iraq is persuasive but not
entirely compelling. The final, PNAC-era phase of neocon thinking does
not feature the goal explicitly, though it is plainly a strong possibility, and
less likely to be mentioned once the neocons had turned all their effort to
persuading the US to do the neocons’ bidding.
In the end, the
truth of the fragmentation thesis is independent of Sniegoski’s other
arguments. It could be supplemented with the alternative that the neocons might
have hoped to install a US- (and thus Israel-) friendly government – the US has
certainly, predictably, attempted to ensure that should a stable
government emerge it will be pro-US, or to ensure that a permanent US garrison
would remain – which it almost certainly will. All of these would further the
supposed interest of Israel in weakening its perceived enemies, and Sniegoski
amasses strong evidence that at least one of those aims was the intention of
the neocons in pursuing the war.
Finally, it
should be stressed that in tracing the influence of this doctrine, Sniegoski
has also produced a valuable reference on the neocons in its own right, replete
with thoroughly-referenced information, and with particular emphasis on the
departure of neocon thinking on some social and economic areas from that of
traditional conservative Republican thought. This to some extent represents
something of a digression from the main thrust of the book and perhaps reflects
Sniegoski’s own concerns. It forms a relevant part of the story at least
insofar as it tends to show that neocons really did execute something of a coup
in gaining such influence in the Republican party, which adds collateral
support, if any is needed, to the thesis that the neocon strategy was by no
means a programme based on traditional home-grown conservative foreign policy
goals.
And so, with the
neocons’ hopes of a New Pearl Harbour hanging breathlessly in the eery pre-9/11
calm, their members distributed among the second tier of Republican office, the
media and Washington and in command of a highly leveraged echo-chamber of
interlocking think tanks and foundations, we leave Sniegoski’s narrative, and
consider some predictable concerns about the book’s general approach.
Sniegoski is
well aware that his book is likely to attract accusations of anti-semitism.
Proofing his book against such false ad hominem attacks costs him many
extra pages of what ought to be, but are not, unnecessary clarifications. He is
at pains to point out that the bulk of American Jewry were not in favour of the
war and to cite Jewish sources, explicitly flagging their ethnicity, to back
any claim relating to Israel and the neocons' Israeli connections.
The whole of the
second chapter is given over to showing that the war-for-Israel claim is widely
shared by those not plausibly regarded as anti-semites including Jewish journalists
and politicians, and documenting the campaign of anti-semitism accusations made
against those supporting such a claim. Indeed he quotes Jewish sources decrying
this devaluation of antisemitism, ending the chapter with a quotation from
another impeccable Jewish source, Forward magazine:
The line between legitimate debate and scapegoating is a fine one. Friends of Israel will be tempted to guard that line by labeling as antisemites those who threaten to cross it. They already have begun to do so. But it is a mistake. Israel and its allies stand accused of manipulating America’s public debate for their own purposes. If they were to succeed in suppressing debate to protect themselves, it only would prove the point. Better to follow the democratic path: If there is bad speech, the best reply is more speech.
CONSPIRACY THEORIES
The other
accusation that Sniegoski risks is one commonly intertwined with that of
antisemitism - that of propounding a 'conspiracy theory'. This Sneigoski
disavows too, pointing out that - as the title of his work and the foregoing
summary of their paper trail suggests - the neocons were quite overt about
their aims and much of their plotting:
Evidence for the neoconservative and Israeli connection to the United States war in the Middle East is overwhelming and is mostly out in the open. There was no dark, hidden “conspiracy,” a term of derision often used by detractors of the idea of a neocon connection to the war. But in the realm of politics, as George Orwell observed, “To see what is in front of one’s nose needs a constant struggle.”
The topic of
'conspiracy theories', their nature and status, is of great contemporary
importance for the public understanding of history and politics. At present,
dominant mainstream discussion of the topic tends to assume only two possible
approaches: the quietistic, whereby all talk of conspiracy is taboo, and the
quixotic, whereby anything goes except coincidence or cock-up.
Sniegoski errs,
if at all, on the side of the quietists. He draws attention to the (admittedly
ridiculous) conspiracy theories put forward by neocons - notably Mylroie,
mentioned above. Sniegoski notes her description as 'the neocons' favourite
conspiracy theorist', and reports her pre-9/11 stories which accused Saddam of
masterminding a terrorist campaign against the US. Likewise, the neocons' angry
cries of conspiracy in response to the 2007 National Intelligence Assessment,
which adjudged Iran to pose no current military threat to the US, are
understandably rejected.
At one point
Sniegoski makes rather questionable use of the 'conspiracy' label. He rejects
the hypothesis that the US deliberately encouraged Saddam's 1990 invasion of
Kuwait: “though logical, the conspiracy thesis assumes too much planning on the
part of the U.S. government.”
This is perhaps
a little too quick. Deceptive use of diplomacy to trick an adversary does not
amount to a 'conspiracy' in the usual sense, nor, in the absence of further
explanation, is the reason given very convincing. It must be noted however that
Sniegoski does not claim to have disproved the thesis, only to find it
implausible. Further, this is a peripheral issue dealt with only in passing,
which fact in turn suggests that the paucity of argument might reflect space
constraints rather than a cavalier dismissal of the 'conspiracy thesis'.
Sniegoski
entirely avoids the issue of 9-11 covert action scenarios (or 'conspiracy
theories'). This is entirely understandable, especially given that it is not
part of his remit to speculate on such matters. One may note, though, that his
honest and thorough approach means that he does not suppress facts or opinions
which might be thought to support such theories. For example, his book
inevitably highlights how very useful - indeed indispensable - the events of
9-11 were to the neocon cause, adding that
“The report
struck a prescient note when it observed that ‘the process of transformation,
even if it brings revolutionary change, is likely to be a long one, absent some
catastrophic and catalyzing event – like a new Pearl Harbor.’”
Chapter 8
('September 11') reports Netanyahu's contemporary comment that the attacks were
'good' for Israel and Sharon's opportunistic announcement that 'Arafat is Bin Laden'.
Of course these factors are not lost on those who are willing to countenance
9-11 covert action (or inaction) scenarios, and of those willing to speculate
about the sponsorship of such hypothesised covert action, many suggest some
Mossad involvement. Sniegoski, to reiterate, does not address any such matters,
which lie outside the scope of his concerns.
Sniegoski's
claim that there is no conspiratorial element in the events he describes is not
entirely accurate since the key events triggering the war very clearly involved
an organised campaign of deception which can only at the expense of all
plausibility be regarded as innocent.
Sniegoski
maintains the general approach of denying a ‘conspiracy’ despite making valid
observations such as “the deceptive means used by the neoconservatives to
mobilize domestic support for the war especially belied their identification
with the ethos of democracy”. It is possible that this is an expository tactic
designed to head off knee-jerk reactions to the label ‘conspiracy theory’. Or
it may be that Sniegoski himself shares this aversion to such vocabulary.
Nonetheless,
Sniegoski faithfully reports conspiratorial aspects of the neo-con project. For
example, Chapter 12, ironically titled “Democracy for the Middle East”
summarises the tactics used by the neocons and other elements in the Bush
administration. It is hardly necessary to rehearse here the scattergun approach
to advocacy that included duplicitous variations on the themes of Al Qaeda, WMD
and humanitarianism/democracy. But it is clear that a significant degree of
deception was involved, and the standard excuse of mistake rather than
dishonesty cannot really stand in the face of such shifting approaches. The
question of the motive for such deception is to a great extent irrelevant –
after all, almost any set of actions can be described as being done for
subjectively good motives - especially if self-serving rationalisations
are allowed to count.
Another
conspiratorial aspect which Sniegoski somewhat underplays is secrecy – a common
(though not strictly essential) component of conspiracies. Sniegoski points out
that the neocons acted to some extent ‘in the open’ – and it is of course their
non-secret statements that provide most of Sniegoski’s data. But that is only
half the story. Secrecy is not an all-or-nothing business, as Sniegoski notes
in passing: "...though acting largely in the open, they nonetheless have
been shrouded in a certain measure of secrecy, especially regarding their
connection to Israel... ."
This secrecy was
not hermetic. Washington insiders and those who knew where to look could easily
discern the neocons’ excessive sympathy with the Likud line. Likewise, it was
not terribly difficult to discern that the neocons were engaged in a propaganda
campaign in favour of war in Iraq. The image of a conspiracy in public life as
surrounded by an impermeable barrier of secrecy is misconceived. One may draw
an analogy between secrecy and hygiene. Even in surgery, there is no attempt to
eradicate all bacteria from the environment. One merely needs to reduce the
risk of serious infection to a low enough level.
In the same way,
secrets do not need to be absolute – except in cases where the truth is so
virulent that the very idea of its possibility (rather than its establishment
to the satisfaction of those who would rather not hear it) would undermine the
plan, however plausibly denied or dismissed. This was not such a case - so the
odd whistleblower or indiscreet remark could easily be dealt with – and the
conspiracy remain, from the point of view of the general public, just as much a
conspiracy.
COMPETING ACCOUNTS
In chapter 17,
“The Supporting Cast for War” and chapter 18, “Oil and other arguments”, Sniegoski
addresses challenges to his thesis that the neocons were the ‘driving force’
behind the war.
Almost all of
these are concerned with oil or private profit or both, and most are considered
explicitly by Sniegoski. These are: private US oil interests, a general US
interest in gaining access to Iraqi oil and control of the oil-rich region, and
relatedly, the desire to establish more permanent military bases in the Middle
East. There is also the matter of personal enrichment of some of the war planners
via lucrative military and reconstruction contracts, which may seem a
dreadfully venal reason for starting a war, but is not necessarily much more so
than the others under consideration – and more importantly, is not entirely
implausible given the characters involved.
Sniegoski is
persuasive but not conclusively convincing on these matters. He argues that
since the major US oil companies seemed to be opposed to military action and
had been lobbying for sanctions to be lifted, they were not a significant factor
in pushing for war. Certainly this seems plausible – though the significance of
the push for lifting of sanctions is doubtful – after all, lifting sanctions is
one way of getting hold of Iraqi oil, regime change another.
More
importantly, Sniegoski rather neglects a more plausible ‘oil war’ hypothesis:
that a perceived US strategic interest in gaining control of Iraqi oil might
have provided a significant motivating factor. This possibility is briefly
considered, but rejected on the grounds that maintaining such control would in
turn require very tight control over a puppet regime – and that in any case,
there do not appear to have been plans for taking such control.
This is not
entirely convincing. First, poor planning is not necessarily a sign of lack of
intent. More importantly, US strategic interests are advanced by having
guaranteed access to Iraqi oil, without necessarily having total control over
every aspect of the Iraqi oil industry.
But most significantly, the US administration have succeeded in
installing a very friendly government, as well as establishing a permanent
fortified military presence throughout the country – a crude but effective form
of influence.
Furthermore, the
Bush administration drafted an Iraqi Oil Law which the Iraqi government is
pushing and which would put US companies in control of extraction for most of
Iraq’s oilfields. It is worth noting that if US companies have contracts to
extract oil from most of Iraq, then they have a good deal of control over oil
production – and can certainly prevent it from being arbitrarily halted.
Another angle to
which Sniegoski gives perhaps inadequate attention is the question of wider oil
policy in the region, specifically OPEC’s threatened move towards the Euro as the
currency in which oil is bought and sold. This had serious ramifications for
the US economy and its global power – and Saddam had only recently announced
the decision to make the change (one which the other ‘Axis of evil’ countries
and the disproportionately demonised Chavez were also involved in). That move –
as regards Iraq anyway – has now been headed off. This is not the place to
investigate that issue, but it is certainly one which merits consideration.
On the whole,
however, Sniegoski’s thesis is persuasively argued and – even though there may
have been significant role for other motives in explaining the participation of
non-neocons in the war effort, it seems unlikely that these would have been
sufficient to precipitate the war in the absence of the neocons’ efforts. One
cannot hope to establish the complete truth about the Iraq war, however,
without understanding the motivations and actions of one man who above all was
the kingpin and central actor in the process.
Cheney is not
obviously seen as an 'Israel-firster', largely because he lacks the
characteristic most obviously and commonly associated with allegiance to the
Jewish state: Jewish identity. This is manifestly the central factor in the
neocons' attachment to Israel. Indeed, , notoriously secretive and inscrutable,
Cheney is something of an enigma. The closest thing to analysis of his motives
is the description “not neocon but nationalist.” Sneigoski then acknowledges
that Cheney’s appointment as vice-president was the single most important Bush
decision for war, but the neocons' “potential power could be fully actualized
only if it had positive support from the top, otherwise the neocons would
remain on the periphery as they had in the Bush I administration. Cheney would
serve that supportive function by exerting far more power on behalf of the
neocon agenda than James Baker had ever been able to wield...”
The question of
Cheney’s motives, then, is the only gap in Sniegoski’s analysis. To
oversimplify, who was following whom? Was Cheney in some way co-opted, duped,
won over or recruited by the neocons, or did he use them to further his own
ends? More probably, was there an alliance between Cheney with his downstream
oil interests and concern for US access to Middle East oil and the neocons,
with their concern for (a debased idea of) Israeli security? Or was Cheney's
adoption of the Iraq war strategy simply a favor to his helpful neo-con staff?
It is unsurprising that Sniegoski cannot provide a definitive answer to these
questions - for neither can anyone else. Cheney's secrecy was extreme.
According to Sniegoski, he used huge safes for his routine documentation,
refused to supply documents to others, and even talking points for journalists
were often marked ‘secret’.
Some possible
motives were a general US interest in access to Iraqi oil and greater control
of the oil-rich region in general through permanent bases in Iraq and the need
to prevent OPEC abandoning the petrodollar in favour of the Euro,
especially precipitously. These were the kind of motives which could be
seen - at least by the elite - as in the interest of the US as a whole, though
that does not of course provide any defence against the Nuremberg hanging
offence of waging aggressive war. But as Sniegoski points out, the traditional
“realist” foreign policy establishment appeared to oppose the war. It is
possible that Cheney shared these motives and simply disagreed on how best they
were to be achieved, but in such a case, it seems likely that his opinions on
the matter were influenced by his neocon coterie.
Another motive,
for some war or other, might have been Cheney's quasi-fascist mission to
“restore the powers of the presidency” (and we must add, to boost those of the
vice presidency). The events of 9/11 and of the subsequent “War on Terror” were
instrumental in his project of massively increasing executive powers. But there
seems no compelling reason why he need have expended so much effort in
directing the war plans in the direction of Iraq in particular, in which case once
again a neo-con influence may be appealed to.
Finally there is
the standard motive for most premeditated crime: filthy lucre. With his
(temporarily shelved) interests in Halliburton, profits to be made in
downstream oil and reconstruction were of course of significant interest to
Cheney. And it may be that the downstream oil interests who had been lobbying
for the removal of sanctions would accept a war as the means to that end, if
the simple lifting of sanctions was unattainable. But of course a major force
opposing the lifting of sanctions against Saddam's Iraq was the Israel lobby,
particularly the hyper-Likudnik neocons.
In the end,
Sniegoski can admit any or all of these possibilities without endangering his
conclusion. The neocons did, he demonstrates, gain pervasive power in the Bush
administration. They did view the US national interest through the prism of
their own conception of Israel's national interest, and they did provide the
driving force for the Iraq invasion - very probably with the intention of
fragmenting the country into less powerful and possibly warring states.
Further, just
because he is not Jewish or a Christian Zionist we cannot rule out the
possibility that Cheney shared the neocons' Israelocentric view of that most
conveniently nebulous [flexible, pliable, plaint, malleable, adaptable, Portean
subjective, susceptible to self-serving interpretation: each sees what he wants
to see] entity, the national interest. Sniegoski certainly shows that Cheney
has, for whatever reason, been in bed with the neocons for some time. Whatever
Cheney's motives in pushing the Iraq war agenda, he could not have done it
without the neocons. In the absence of a deliberate ploy by Cheney to set up
the neocons as patsies for his own distinct plan - for which we have no
evidence - Sniegoski’s thesis stands. There are always such theoretical
possibilities which could, if true, undermine any historical thesis. But going
on the evidence, Sniegoski has established his claim as well as anyone can
expect and certainly better than any competing claim can be demonstrated.
Tim Wilkinson blogs at surelysomemistake.
This review was
published in the February, 2010 issue of Culture
Wars.
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