The following articles were published in "The Guardian", newspaper
of the Communist Party of Australia in its issue of Wednesday,
October 17th, 2001. Contact address: 65 Campbell Street, Surry Hills.
Sydney. 2010 Australia. Phone: (612) 9212 6855 Fax: (612) 9281 5795
CPA Central Committee: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
"The Guardian": <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Webpage: http://www.cpa.org.au>
Subscription rates on request.
******************************
Inside the Pentagon:
Hawks and doves fight for control of "infinite war"
[The] Pentagon hawks call it "Operation Infinite War". It is a sinister
reworking of the original codename for the mobilisation against the
Taliban -- Operation Infinite Justice. Two detailed proposals for
warfare without limit have been presented to the US President by his
Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. Both have been temporarily put aside
but remain on hold. They were drawn up by Rumsfeld's deputy, Paul
Wolfowitz who rose through State Department and Pentagon ranks under
Ronald Reagan to become one of the chief architects of the 1991 Gulf
War.
By Rick Rozoff
Drafted with a small coterie of loyal aides, mainly civilian political
appointees at the Pentagon, the plans argue for open-ended war without
constraint either of time or geography and potentially engulfing the
entire Middle East and Central Asia.
The proposals have opened up an abyss in the Bush administration, since
they run counter to plans carefully laid by Secretary of State Colin
Powell, who has had the upper hand against the Pentagon for the first
three weeks since the disaster, but is starting to lose his commanding
position within the Oval Office.
The Pentagon notion starts with the basic proposal that the US should
begin its war on terrorism in Afghanistan as it has -- along with
British troops -- using special operations units to scout out targets,
ready to pinpoint them with lasers when the bombers fly over.
Where it differs is that the dominant thinking in the administration
over the past few days is that the plot to attack the World Trade Centre
and Pentagon spread well beyond Afghanistan and Osama bin Laden into
what Attorney-General John Ashcroft called "a series of individuals and
a series of networks around the world".
Senior Pentagon officials believe that such a diagnosis demands a
military response to match. "This is the green light", said one
official, "to do away with fundamentalist terrorism worldwide, for
good."
The plans put before the President involve expanding the war beyond
Afghanistan to include similar incursions by special ops forces --
followed by air strikes by the bombers they would guide -- into Iraq,
Syria and the Bekaa Valley area of Lebanon, where the Syrian-backed
Hizbollah (Party of God) fighters that harass Israel are based.
In Iraq, any site suspected of being a chemical weapons facility or
proliferation plant of any threatening kind would be bombed, in an
escalation of the almost weekly current harassment of Iraqi
installations by British and US fighter jets.
In Syria and Lebanon, as in Afghanistan, special ops would guide air
strikes, and also be called on to mount guerrilla-style raids on
training camps and to carry out assassinations.
While a presidential executive order -- which Bush is under pressure to
revoke -- bans overseas assassinations, the Pentagon points out that the
US can act as it pleases in self-defence.
If action in Lebanon led to an Israeli reinvasion of the southern part
of the country, it would be supported by the US. Asked whether the Hamas
organisation on the West Bank and in Gaza would be too controversial for
inclusion among possible targets, one source said: "never say never".
According to one suggestion, the teams would be added to by Arab and
Arab-American fighters, who would scout terrain, locate camps and
hideouts and scatter sensors disguised as rocks along roads and trails
used by terrorists.
Special US units could be deployed in conjunction with domestic troops
against terrorist cells in allied Western countries, notably Britain,
Germany, France and Spain.
Colin Powell's arguement -- backed by National Security Advisor
Condoleezza Rice -- is that such a campaign would be disastrous,
isolating the United States and breaking up the coalition Bush has
carefully built, making more than 80 calls to heads of foreign
governments since the attacks on September 11.
Officials say that in a war without precedent, the rules have to be made
up as it develops, and that the so-called "Powell Doctrine" arguing that
there should be no military intervention without "clear and achievable"
political goals is "irrelevant".
Ironically, the principal obstacles to the hawks, apart from Powell, is
the military itself, much of which remains loyal to the view of its
erstwhile chief, Powell, that "American GIs are not pawns on some global
game board". Officials speak of bitter arguments between President's
Bush's political appointees and the generals and officer class who hold
a deep distaste for front-line action.
While happy to support operations in Afghanistan, military sources say
that the US risks being dragged into a quagmire of wars far deeper than
Bosnia or Kosovo if it begins to strike in Iraq, Syria or Lebanon.
The driving force behind the influential hard line is an axis of
old-time hawks gathered around an erstwhile colleague of Paul Wolfowitz
at the Pentagon, Richard Perle.=20
(Rick Rozoff lists the warhawks as Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle, Donald
Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney, Jeanne Kirkpatrick [former US ambassador to the
UN] and William Schneider [former adviser to Rumsfeld])
Perle and Rumsfeld head a think-tank called Project for the New American
Century, which sent a letter to President Bush laying out the Pentagon's
position and urging the removal of Iraq's Saddam Hussein as a
precondition to the upcoming war.
"Failure to undertake such an effort", it said, "will constitute an
early and perhaps decisive surrender in the war against terrorism." The
letter goes on: "Coalition building has run amok. The point about a
coalition is 'can it achieve the right purpose?' not 'can you get a lot
of members?'
President Bush said of his foreign policy team: "There's going to be
disagreements, I hope there's disagreement."
The bitter divisions in Washington are long-standing. Wolfowitz and
Powell first disagreed over military intervention in the Gulf War, which
Powell initially opposed.
They also held opposing views on the Shia rebellion against Saddam
Hussein which followed in its wake. Powell refusing to support it while
Wolfowitz saw it as an opportunity.
They next clashed over the Balkans: while Powell used his full influence
to forestall US military intervention in Bosnia, Wolfowitz was one of
the first senior politicians to advocate it.
There is an ironic twist. Brought into the inner circle is Zalmay
Khalizad, an Afghan and Reagan veteran whose speciality was championing
armed insurgencies. Khalizad was one of the early supporters of Bosnia's
Muslims and made his name managing the Reagan administration's backing
for the mujahideen -- and Osama bin Laden -- against the Red Army in his
native Afghanistan.
That was the time that the then Pakistani head of state Benazir Bhutto
warned President Reagan: "You are creating a Frankenstein".
***********************************************
--
Leftlink - Australia's Broad Left Mailing List
mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
Archived at http://www.cat.org.au/lists/leftlink/
Sponsored by Melbourne's New International Bookshop
Subscribe: mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]?Body=subscribe%20leftlink
Unsubscribe: mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]?Body=unsubscribe%20leftlink
