Newsgroup: it.cultura.storia.militare
Titolo: Neocons: golpisti assassini

JOHN NEWHOUSE is one of the foreign policy establishment's more thoughtful
observers. He has passed between the worlds of journalism, think tanks, and
government service to the enlightenment of all three. His new book,
"Imperial America: The Bush Assault on the World Order," is a "cri de coeur"
from that lost Washington world that favors diplomacy over dictate, working
with allies rather than unilaterialism, and "sensible pragmatic policy"
rather than the "ritual truculence" that has become the hallmark of
America's international relations.
His canvas is the second Bush administration's missed opportunities since
Sept. 11, 2001, when most of the world stood horrified at what had happened
and when even countries that might not have traditionally loved us offered
their hand. Newhouse argues that a lasting coalition against terror could
have been built to this country's advantage. Instead, President Bush, in
stark contrast to his father, adopted the attitudes, prejudices, and
strategies of America's far right, which for the first time has gained
ascendancy in foreign policy to the detriment of this country's long-term
security.
Ronald Reagan, Newhouse argues, came to power with ideas and support from
the right, but with the help of "gifted people" such as James Baker and
Michael Deaver, he was able to impose "just enough moderation on his core
political base" to operate within the traditional framework of US foreign
policy. According to Newhouse, the second Bush administration is "the first
to have positioned itself on the far right," a position that Newhouse calls
"radical" rather than conservative.
The missed opportunities run the gamut from North Korea to the
Israeli-Palestinian conflict to Iran, Pakistan, and Russia, to our
traditional European allies, whom we have unnecessarily alienated. Secretary
of State Colin Powell is one of Newhouse's good guys, but he sees Powell and
the State Department as marginalized while the hard right-wingers installed
in the Pentagon and the office of Vice President Cheney have stolen American
foreign policy from its traditional vicars.
The new foreign policy makers have corrupted intelligence to get their way
and told it "like they thought it ought to be," instead of like it is. In
this new world there can be no compromises or different opinions among
nations. By early March 2003, Bush "had described other countries as being
'with us or with the terrorists' 99 times since taking office."
Newhouse traces the right's bid for power to the attempt to take over the
Ford administration in the so-called Halloween Massacre of 1975, when Donald
Rumsfeld was White House chief of staff and Cheney his deputy. Rumsfeld
maneuvered Secretary of State Henry Kissinger out of his dual role as
national security adviser, got Secretary of Defense James Schlesinger fired
to be replaced by Rumsfeld himself, with Cheney promoted to chief of staff.
Vice President Nelson Rockefeller was told he would not be on the ticket
when Ford ran for president the following year. Rumsfeld was not interested
in Kissinger's efforts to limit nuclear weapons-he wanted a harder line-nor
did the right want the moderates associated with Rockefeller's branch of the
party.
Ford lost the election. But the right wing tried again during the first Bush
administration with a proposed doctrine "cobbled together" after the first
Gulf War by Paul Wolfowitz, Rumsfeld's deputy today, and Lewis Libby, now
Cheney's chief of staff. The new doctrine spoke of not just remaining number
one in the world but of destroying any state that might in the future
challenge the United States-i.e., preemptive offense without benefit of
allies, without UN sanction, with a stress on raw military power over
containment, persuasion, and diplomacy. It was not a doctrine that gained
any purchase with Bush senior's administration. But after 9/11 in a new Bush
administration, its day has come. Rumsfeld and others were angling for an
attack on Iraq before Afghanistan, a suggestion which Bush wisely rejected.
But it is now clear that for this administration, regime change always
trumped disarming Iraq-thus the intelligence skewing that has now been
exposed.
One dream of the new right radicals is a wave of democracy sweeping over the
Middle East that would destabilize the old monarchies and regimes. The
influence of Israel's right-wing Likud Party over many in the Bush
administration is a Newhouse theme. He writes that a "cohort in the Pentagon
has operated, in effect, like an extension of the Likud leadership and has
scared other governments with talk of redrawing the political map of the
Middle East and implicitly turning the region into a US-Israeli
co-management sphere."
Many in and out of government have warned that democracy will not come
easily to the Arab regimes of the Middle East, and the administration's
difficulties in Iraq should drive home the point. But the true-right in the
Bush administration wants to believe otherwise. The danger in all this, as
Amos Elon said about Israel and Newhouse says about the United States, is
that as military power grows, overall security may be diminishing, if only
because priorities have become so unrealistic and unbalanced.
H.D.S. Greenway's column appears regularly in the Globe.
(c) Copyright 2003 Globe Newspaper Company.
First appeared in The Boston Globe, Sept. 19, 2003

Ehm scusate ho sbagliato ng... Come se non avessi postato nulla ok?