Unfortunately, the Military Industrial (and Security) Complex has long
driven much of our foreign policy goals and the recent flap over the Dubai
Ports World deal, with all its Israel-boycotting, US law-skirting, White House
dealing in the middle of the night out of public review, serves to confirm that
nation states are declining, as Keith Hudson says, but that unless checks and
balances are exercised, any war president is going to abuse power claimed under
nationalistic flag waving, as Bush has done enthusiastically with ‘fast track’
trade deals and “signing statements” after laws were passed by Congress.
If the US Congress can work out a compromise with DPW, in which they
renounce the Israel boycott, leave copies of their books on US soil, and provide
similar security assurances such as the deal the US brokered with France when
Renault first bought into US firms in the 70s, then the protectionists and fear
mongering will have less to foam about.
However, one of the premises of this war president’s preemptive
doctrine has been that the US should fight terrorists “over there”, not here. Now many see this international deal,
rightly or wrongly, as inviting The Enemy into The Homeland. This may be a good financial deal in
another political climate, but the Bush administration cannot have it both ways
and blame anyone else but themselves for creating a climate of fear (“Freedom
Fries”, “Old Europe”, “with us or against us”, “Axis of Evil”, “imminent danger”,
“thugs and bad guys”, “crusade”, “extremists” etc. etc. etc.). With talk of a
Border Wall with Mexico to keep out terrorists as well as illegals, wiretapping
citizens, tech scanning and privacy violations in the name of national security,
it is a bit of a different attitude to say “Trust Me”, there’s no security
problem from Mr. Mission Accomplished.
All of a sudden are Americans to believe that Bush is an
internationalist, after years of bait and switch, secrecy and being asleep at
the wheel 9/11 and Katrina? Or are
we to finally realize that permanent bases, access to oil pipelines and MISC
contracts get top billing, damn the rhetoric, full speed ahead? kwc
Talking terror: “It could be any employment contract setting out salary, paid
holidays, home leave and grievance procedures — except the employer is al Qaeda
and the recruit’s job is ‘carrying out jihad,’” The London Telegraph reports on finds from the military’s Harmony collection of al Qaeda docs. “Osama bin Laden’s plan to use terrorism to
trigger an Islamic reawakening that will challenge Western dominance of world
events and assure the ascendancy of Sunni extremists is moving forward — at an
alarming rate,” John Brennan comments in the Post. “To all but
the most militant true believers, it has become increasingly evident that Bush
committed an error of the first order” in abandoning the law-enforcement
approach to terror, Andrew Bacevich broods in The American Conservative. “My prediction: Mr. Bush’s
successors, for all their criticisms, will find it hard to move outside the
framework of the [his] National Security Strategy, as they take on fighting what
we’re starting to call the Long War,” Michael
Barone bruits in The Washington Times. “The radical Islamists are on
the offensive. Will we defeat them?” The Weekly Standard’s William Kristol wonders. (CQ Homeland Security 030106)
In case you missed this from the
prior post, Dubai is one of the West’s biggest military hardware/software
clients.
Why
Bush is Stuck on the Ports Deal http://atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/HB25Ak04.html
Second Dubai firm
faces security appraisal: Israel boycott also under review
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/03/01/AR2006030102192.html
US Free Traders
retreat from UAE port deal http://ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=32217
POLITICS-US:
Neo-Con Superhawk Earns His Wings on Port Flap
Jim
Lobe, Inter Press Service News Agency (IPS),
Feb. 23, 2006
WASHINGTON - The founder and president
of the Washington-based Centre for Security Policy (CSP), a small think tank
funded mainly by U.S. defence contractors, far-right foundations, and
right-wing Zionists, Gaffney was among the first to seize on the government's
approval of a Dubai company to manage terminals at six major U.S. ports and
helped blow it up into a major embarrassment to Pres. George W. Bush.
Indeed, it was Gaffney who wrote the first nationally syndicated column about
the approval, which, if sustained, would turn over the management of terminals
in the ports of New York, New Jersey, Philadelphia, Miami, Baltimore, and New
Orleans to Dubai Ports World (DPW), a government-owned company based in the
United Arab Emirates (UAE).
"How would you feel if, in the aftermath of 9/11, the U.S. government had
decided to contract out airport security to the ...country where most of the
operational planning and financing of the attacks occurred?" he asked in
his weekly column in the right-wing Washington Times Feb. 14.
"It seems a safe bet that you, like most Americans, would think it a
lunatic idea, one that would clear the way for still more terror in this
country," he argued, concluding that, "If the President will not,
Congress must ensure that the United Arab Emirates is not entrusted with the
operation of any American ports."
With the help of other right-wing columnists and broadcast commentators who
quickly rallied to his call, Gaffney's alarum -- much like the famous ride of
Paul Revere, the colonist who warned towns around Boston at the outset of the
war for independence that "the British are coming!" -- helped
transform what had been a relatively routine decision by a high-level
inter-agency committee that reviews major foreign investments in the U.S. into
the biggest story in Washington within just seven days.
Indeed, eight days after publishing what a Nexis data-base search identified as
the first broadside against the deal, and many television (especially Fox News)
and talk-radio appearances later, Gaffney was claiming victory, this time in an
article published by National Review Online where he is a contributing editor. "President Bush has dug in his
heels on a fight he surely cannot win," wrote Gaffney, noting the
president's threat to veto any legislation that would annul the DPW deal.
"The deal will ...be aborted."
It has been a typical performance by the indefatigable Gaffney, who bills his
Centre for Security Policy as "the special forces in the war of
ideas".
Precisely whom the war is being waged against depends on the week. But since
the Centre's founding in 1988, the enemy has included the Soviet Union and its
real or suspected allies; China; the Oslo peace process; Arabs (especially
Palestinians); the United Nations and the Law of the Sea, in particular; anyone
opposed to ever-bigger defence budgets and expensive, if unworkable,
missile-defence programmes; and, most recently, "Islamofascists"
(from al Qaeda to Saudi Arabia and the UAE to Iran).
Other nemeses include professors of Middle East studies; the Middle East
specialists at the State Department and Central Intelligence Agency (CIA); and
even Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon whose withdrawal from Gaza marks a
"threat to the entire Free World, including its leader, the United
States".
Like many neo-conservatives,
Gaffney began his adult political life in the early 1970s as a hawkish but
liberal Democrat.
And, like several heavyweights in the movement -- including former Defence
Policy Board (DPB) chairman and American Enterprise Institute (AEI) honcho Richard Perle and Bush's chief Middle East
advisor, Elliott Abrams -- he
worked on the staff of former Senate Armed Services Committee chairman Henry
"Scoop" Jackson, a
staunch supporter of Israel widely known as well as the "Senator from Boeing".
In the 1980s, Perle, by then a senior Pentagon official under Ronald Reagan,
hired Gaffney, who eventually rose to become assistant secretary of defence for
international security policy. In that role, he became a vociferous advocate of
Reagan's "Star Wars" programmes and a determined foe of
high-technology arms transfers to Washington's European allies, before being
forced out in 1987 by the more moderate national security leadership that took
power in the wake of the Iran-contra scandal.
When he left government,
he founded CSP and, with Perle's help, quickly gained the backing of key
defence contractors, particularly those positioned to benefit from Reagan's
Star Wars programme. He also found favour with U.S. followers of Israel's
right-wing Likud Party, the most notorious being Irving Moskowitz, the California "casino king"
who has sent millions of dollars to the most aggressive elements of the West
Bank settlement movement.
Like Perle, his mentor and a long-time member of CSP's board of advisors, Gaffney
has occupied key nodes in an interlocking network of neo-conservatives, such as
former U.N. Amb. Jeanne Kirkpatrick
and former CIA director James Woolsey,
and aggressive nationalists, such as Vice President Dick Cheney, Pentagon chief Donald
Rumsfeld, and U.N. Amb. John
Bolton that dates back to the mid-1970s.
Most recently, for example, he has served on the boards of the Foundation for
the Defence of Democracies, a pro-Likud group formed two days after 9/11;
Americans for a Victory Over Terrorism; the Committee on the Present Danger;
"Set America Free" a new coalition of neo-conservative, Jewish, and
green groups to reduce U.S. reliance on oil imports; and has been closely
associated with the Project for the New
American Century.
His own board includes individuals like Charles Kupperman, a vice-president for
missile defense systems of the Boeing Company; M.D.B. Carlisle, the Pentagon's former chief lobbyist; and David Steinmann, the long-time chairman of
the pro-Likud Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs.
Like other right-wingers and consistent with his obsession with missile
defence, Gaffney was most preoccupied with threats from states -- particularly
China, North Korea, Iraq, and Syria -- until the Sep. 11 attacks. Indeed, in an
odd echo of the Dubai controversy, he mounted a major campaign against the
leasing by Hutchison-Whampoa of two port facilities at either end of the Panama
Canal in the late 1990s. He argued that the lease was part of a Chinese plot to
close the canal to U.S. warships in a future crisis.
After 9/11, however, he embraced the "global war on terror" as the
new imperative and redefined the chief enemy as "Islamofascism", a
phrase that "makes clear that the war is about much more than Iraq and
Afghanistan" and includes those countries -- namely, Saudi Arabia, Iran,
Syria, Pakistan, North Korea, China, Cuba, Venezuela, and South Africa -- which
provide direct or indirect support for the Islamofascists "in their death
struggle with us".
Indeed, his latest ideas for defeating Washington's enemies are laid out in a
new book in which he acted as the lead author, "War Footing: Ten Steps
America Must Take to Survive and Prevail in the War for the Free World",
with several of his CSP colleagues and Michael
Rubin, another Perle protégé at AEI.
While protection of U.S. ports from Islamofascists is his priority of the
moment, he is particularly concerned about Iran's nuclear ambitions. At a
recent Committee on the Present Danger forum in Congress, he warned that that
Tehran "is working toward a capability that could destroy America as we
know it".
Iran's missile programme, he asserted, appears designed to detonate a nuclear
weapon "in space high above the United States, unleashing an immensely
powerful electro-magnetic pulse (EMP)" that would destroy the U.S.
electrical grid. The result could reduce the United States "to a
pre-industrial society in the blink of an eye". (FIN/2006)
http://www.ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=32275
