THE NEW AMERICAN CENTURY

Neoconservatives and their Influence on U.S. Foreign Policy in the Middle East, 2000-2010

Damian Lataan

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INTRODUCTION

The neoconservatives’ loudly-proclaimed belief that American

exceptionalism together with America’s sole ‘super-power’ status and

its military and economic might can and should be used to bring

democracy and human rights to other countries in order to advance the

interests of the United States and Israel is the core belief of

neoconservatives and it is this belief that has been the driving force

behind the tumultuous events that have defined much of the first decade

of the twenty-first century. This work will examine the crucial role that

the predominantly Israeli-centric neoconservatives have played in the

evolution and enactment of American foreign policy during the George

W. Bush and early Obama administrations in relation to events in the

Middle East and elsewhere during the first decade of the twenty-first

century.

This work will show how the controversial election of George

W. Bush to the presidency in 20001 signalled the opening of the door to

the ready and anxiously waiting US neoconservatives and the

implementation of many of their ideological and think-tank driven ideas

for US foreign policy. Many of those who had spent years during the

Clinton era formulating ideas about how US foreign policy should

proceed, particularly in the Middle East, were given senior positions in

the Bush administration. The work will demonstrate how the

neoconservatives’ ideas were then gradually brought into fruition by

taking full advantage of a combination of three essential factors: the

election of a right-wing conservative Republican President who was

entirely receptive to their ideas; America’s position as the world’s only

1 Several works have provided explanations covering the controversy. For a

comprehensive narrative see: Leonard Downie, Steve Coll and Bill Hamilton, (eds.)

Deadlock: The Inside Story of America’s Closest Election, (New York: Public Affairs,

2001). See also: Howard Gillman, The Votes That Counted: How the Court Decided the

2000 Presidential Election, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001). For an

alternative perspective of the election, see: Garvin Karunaratne, The Administrative

Bungling That Hijacked the 2000 US Presidential Election, (Lanham, MD: University

Press of America, 2004).

active super-power; and, most importantly, the attacks of 11 September

2001 that served as the catalyst that activated many of the

neoconservatives’ well prepared foreign policy ideas. The work will

also show how Israel, more than any other nation, benefited from the

actions of the neoconservatives during this period and will show how

Israel would have benefited further had the neoconservative plans for

the restructuring of the Middle East materialised after the invasion of

Afghanistan and Iraq.

1. ON DEFINING THE NEOCONSERVATIVE CHARACTER

What should be made clear from the outset is that there is no fully

comprehensible definition for neoconservatism.2 However, the

narrative that follows will highlight many of the characteristics that

identify neoconservatives.

The neoconservatives that dominated the George W. Bush

administration and, indeed, neoconservatives generally can be

described as individuals that, above all, have a profound belief in

Western exceptionalism, particularly American exceptionalism,

together with a boundless belief in the righteousness of the Zionist

cause in Israel and its inseparability from American exceptionalism.

While there are no set parameters to accurately define exactly what

neoconservatism is, there are a number of starting points which can be

used to begin building a definition of the term ‘neoconservativism’.

One useful starting point is to examine typical well-known

neoconservative organisations that have well-known and established

neoconservative intellectuals and political figures within their ranks.

One example of such an organisation is the now defunct ‘The Project

for the New American Century’ (PNAC), or its successor organisation,

‘The Foreign Policy Initiative’ (FPI). An examination of the myriad of

other think-tank style organisations who, as shall be shown, share some

of the same boards of directors, academics, scholars and staffers as each

other, also serves to describe the neoconservative character.

2 Seymour Martin Lipset, “Neoconservatism: Myth and Reality”, Society, Vol. 25, No.

5, July/August 1988, p. 29.

Initially, neoconservatives were, as shall be discussed in

Chapter One, those who found themselves to the right of politics after

having been on the left – hence neo (new) conservative – new to the

conservative body of politics, usually after having been liberal or even

socialist or Marxist; something other than conservative. In today’s

modern parlance, however, the term neoconservative has taken on a

new meaning which the term itself no longer describes. Instead, it refers

to those who are not just ‘new’ conservatives per se, but those who are

far more to the right of political conservatism, particularly with regards

to foreign policy, and in many cases to the extreme right, but who have

also worked with and supported the neoconservative cause which all

but dominated the Bush administration. Because intellectual

neoconservatives – those brought up on the writings of the likes of

Norman Podhoretz, William Kristol, et al – had taken a leading role in

the Bush administration, other right wing more traditional conservatives

who have played a major role in the Bush administration have now also

been labelled neoconservatives, and this has led to another more

portentous interpretation of the neoconservative label. Paul Gottfried,

Professor of Humanities at Elizabethtown College, Pasadena, observes,

“the term ‘neoconservative’ is now too closely identified with the

personal and ethnic concerns of its Jewish celebrities.”3 In saying ‘is

now too closely identified’ Gottfried implies that this is a recent

phenomenon. In reality this is not the case, though it would be true to

say that such identification has recently become a far more widespread

view. Weighing in to this argument, Kenneth R. Weinstein of the

Hudson Institute has been quoted as saying that the view that the

modern US neoconservative movement is part of some Jewish

conspiracy or Zionist cabal is ‘Hogwash’ and that “There are four

major players now running American policy – President Bush, number

one; number two, Dick Cheney, number three is Don Rumsfeld and

3 Paul Gottfried, “What’s in a Name? The Curious Case of the ‘Neoconservative’”,

VDARE.COM, April 2003. http://www.vdare.com/gottfried/neoconservative.htm

Accessed 2 November 2003.

number four is Colin Powell. The whole notion that there is some cabal

of people pulling the strings is ludicrous.”4

Kevin McDonald, Professor of Psychology at California State

University, Long Beach, disputes this and argues,

A common argument is that neoconservatism is not Jewish

because of the presence of various non-Jews amongst their

ranks. But in fact, the ability to recruit prominent non-Jews,

while nevertheless maintaining a Jewish core and a

commitment to Jewish interests, has been a hallmark —

perhaps the key hallmark — of influential Jewish intellectual

and political movements throughout the 20th century.

5

Where Weinstein’s argument fails – apart from the fact that Colin

Powell could never really be counted among the administrations list of

senior neoconservatives – is in the inference that as Bush, Cheney and

Rumsfeld are not Jewish they cannot be part of an exclusively Jewish

neoconservative conspiratorial cabal if, indeed, there is one, which

Weinstein denies. All three of these leaders have always been

conventional conservatives, but now find that many of their views

converge or run parallel with neoconservatism. It is this that makes

McDonald’s argument compelling. The fact is, George W. Bush, Dick

Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld are all strong supporters of the Zionist

cause and, at least to some extent, possess neoconservative values.

By mid 2003, the discussion over the extent of Israeli and

Jewish politics being enmeshed in the politics of US neoconservatism

had taken on renewed enthusiasm for debate among the wider

community. Prior to this, most debate in this regard had been confined

4 Amy Keller, “Who’s really steering US foreign policy?” Detroit Jewish News.

http://www.detroitjewishnews.com/modules.php?name=News&file=print&sid=721

Accessed 4 November 2003. 5 Kevin McDonald, “Thinking About Neoconservatism”, VDARE.COM, 18 September

2003.

http://www.vdare.com/misc/mcdonald_neoconservatism.htm Accessed 4 November

2003.

to intellectuals and commentators. The reason for the renewed

enthusiasm is the increasingly noticeable alignment of Western

governments, not just the US, with the policies of Israel in their fight

with the Palestinians. Since it was the neoconservatives who, in the

propaganda lead-up to the invasion of Iraq, had campaigned the hardest

to effect ‘regime change’ in Iraq using Iraq’s alleged association with

‘terrorists’ generally, and the ‘terrorists’ of 11 September particularly,

and, in turn, Saddam Hussein’s known support for the Palestinian

cause, the connection between the right wing of Israel’s government

and the US neoconservatives became plainly visible. By March 2006,

the influence of Israeli politics via neoconservatism had come to a head

with the publication of the controversial Mearsheimer and Walt paper

on the Israeli lobby.6

The argument over the extent of Zionist interests in modern US

neoconservatism is ongoing. Undoubtedly, many, but by no means all,

of the established US neoconservatives are, indeed, Jewish Americans.

The question is, have they become neoconservatives because they are

Jewish American intellectuals or is the fact that they are mostly Jewish

incidental? Certainly the established history of modern

neoconservatism would suggest that their evolution towards the right

was influenced to a large extent by the anti-Semitism of the

communism of the Eastern European Bloc nations and the Soviet Union

which led to the emerging neoconservatives’ fervent anti-communism

during the Reagan era.7 Their connections to Israel have grown and

evolved ever since and because of this, the non-Jewish who have joined

the neoconservatives’ ranks now give their wholehearted support to

Israeli interests.

As has been pointed out, Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld and Powell

are not Jewish. However, their journey to neoconservatism has allowed

them to become aligned with those other neoconservatives who

6 John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt, “The Israel Lobby”, London Review of Books,

Vol. 28, No. 6, 23 March 2006, pp. 3-12. 7 Peter Steinfels, Neoconservatives: The Men Who Are Changing America’s Politics,

(New York: Simon & Schuster, 1979), pp. 277-279.

represent Israeli interests and who do so with as much, if not greater,

fervour as they support US interests. The result has been a synergy that

has evolved out of their relationship with each other; for Bush, Cheney,

Rumsfeld and Powell, the key to US hegemony in the Middle East is

support of Israeli interests. For the neoconservatives, the key to Israeli

interests is support for US hegemony. It would, therefore, not be

incorrect to say that Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld and Powell did all

become neoconservatives at some stage during this period.

Many neoconservatives view themselves as neoconservatives,

an observation that requires some qualification. Some neoconservatives

are at ease with this self-description. For example, Irving Kristol,

regarded as one of the founding fathers of neoconservatism, has said,

“Is neoconservatism the right label? I don’t mind it – but then, if the

political spectrum moved rightward, and we should become ‘neo-

liberal’ tomorrow, I would accept that too.”8 Eight months later, Kristol

wrote, “The more I think about the term, the more I like it.”9 That was

in 1976. Other neoconservatives do not accept the title at all. Seymour

Martin Lipset, for example, a twentieth-century social critic and one of

the original modern neoconservatives, famously wrote that the term

“was invented as an invidious label to undermine political opponents,

most of whom have been unhappy with being so described.”10

That was

in 1988.

By late 2002, as the war against Iraq loomed, the term ‘neocon’

or ‘neocons’, was increasingly being used not just simply as an

abbreviation of the word ‘neoconservative’ but in a derogatory sense,

made so by its use predominantly in left-wing commentary. Renowned

neoconservative writer, Max Boot, wrote that the term ‘neocon’ had

“become an all-purpose term of abuse for anyone deemed to be

hawkish”.11

At around the same time, the right-wing and mainstream

8 Irving Kristol, “What Is a Neo-conservative?” Newsweek, 19 January 1976, p. 87. 9 Irving Kristol, “What Is a Liberal – Who Is a Conservative? A Symposium”,

Commentary, September 1976, p. 74. 10 Lipset, “Neoconservatism: Myth and Reality”, pp. 29-37. 11 Max Boot, “Myths About Neoconservatism”, in Irwin Stelzer, (ed.), The Neocon

Reader, (New York: Grove Press, 2004), p. 47.

media press began to drop the use of the word ‘neoconservative’ in

their commentary, preferring instead to use actual names coupled with

terms like ‘a prominent hawk in the Bush administration’12

or ‘a

leading hawk in the US administration’.13

By the beginning of 2004,

most people familiar with the events that were going on in the world as

a result of US foreign policy were aware of who some of the

neoconservatives were, what they stood for and what their positions

were in the Bush administration. Toward the end of the first decade of

the twenty-first century and as the George W. Bush administration

passed into history, the word ‘neocon’ reverted into non-derogatory

everyday usage, often being used by neocons themselves.

By February 2004, the core argument for the war against Iraq

had collapsed. As shall be shown, the weapons of mass destruction

(WMDs) that were the stated casus belli for the war were revealed to be

a myth. No such weapons were found. While the leaders of the nations

that went to war with Iraq knew that these weapons did not exist at the

time war was being planned, they continued to use highly contentious

circumstantial and historical evidence in an unprecedented effort to

convince both world opinion and the United Nations (UN) that Iraq was

a danger to the world because of its WMDs. This work will point out

how and, perhaps more importantly, why this was achieved and will

also show the extent of the neoconservatives’ influence in all of these

matters. In doing so, it will further demonstrate the neoconservative

character.

It is not the intention of this work to discuss the detailed history

or evolution of neoconservatism, nor to delve into deep philosophical

arguments as to the ethics or morals associated with intellectual

12 Toby Harnden, “Syria now top US target for ‘regime change’”, UK Telegraph, 8

April 2003. This article refers to John Bolton, who is described as “a prominent hawk

in the Bush administration”.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/2003/04/08/wsyria08.xml Accessed

20 January 2004. 13 “US hawk seeks Turkish support”. BBC News, UK, 3 December 2002 This article

refers to Paul Wolfowitz, who is described as “a leading hawk in the US

administration”. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/2537421.stm Accessed 20 January

2004.

neoconservatism. Nor is it the intention of this work to analyse or

examine the economic ideas of neoconservatism.14

There is already

much scholarly literature that deals with all of these aspects of

neoconservatism, many of which shall be referred to throughout this

dissertation and discussed generally in the section below. Therefore, the

purpose of any discussion of some general aspects of neoconservatism

in this dissertation is solely for the purpose of identifying

neoconservatives so that they may be properly placed within the

framework of the dissertation’s argument. Having established who the

neoconservatives are, then the next step will be to analyse their roles

and the extent of their influence on US foreign policy leading up to and

during the George W. Bush era and beyond.

2. RESOURCES AND LITERATURE

Since the neoconservative agenda has relied significantly on the written

word, as has the debate about neoconservatism and its aims, it is

necessary to describe the nature of the resources used in this research.

Material supporting this work originates from a number of

sources. Much of the literature can be grouped into four distinct

categories: academic books and articles; books, commentaries and

opinion pieces by journalists; books and articles by neoconservative

commentators and intellectuals, which can usefully be described as

primary sources, since the work is essentially about neoconservatism;

and finally, books and articles by officials and former officials of the

various administrations, many of which can also be described as

primary sources. However, because of the complex cross-over nature of

the resources, (for example, many neoconservatives are themselves

academics and/or were players within the Bush administration) the

14 Except inasmuch that neoconservatives generally are instinctively conservative in

their economic views, they otherwise are far more interested in foreign policy. For most

neoconservatives, economic policies are a means to an end that might realise their ideas

about foreign policy which takes precedence over economic policy. For a brief

discussion on neoconservative economic ideas see: Irwin Stelzer, “Neoconservative

Economic Policy: Virtues and Vices”, in Stelzer, The Neocon Reader, pp. 195-198.

discussion of resources will not necessarily be in any particular order as

grouped above.

Apart from the literature outlined above, a critically important

resource is government documents, which are generally available via

the Internet. The US archival network maintains a full record of

speeches, interviews, press releases, etc., of all of the senior members

of the administrations hierarchy including those of George W. Bush,

Dick Cheney, Colin Powell, Condoleezza Rice and Donald Rumsfeld.

Similarly, the government archives of the various leaders of the nations

that became part of the ‘Coalition of the Willing’ that supported Bush’s

war on Iraq are also a valuable online resource that will be used

throughout this work.15

While newspaper and other media resources can also be of

significant importance, the credibility of many newspaper articles and,

therefore, their authors, needs to be carefully considered in the light of

the misleading way the mainstream media handled the run up to the

Iraq war.16

While the misleading of the public by the media leads to

questions about their credibility as a reliable resource of factual

evidence to support various statements, the fact that the mainstream

media did seriously mislead during this period further demonstrates the

influence of the neoconservatives during this period, an issue that will

be discussed further in Chapter Three of this work.

Despite a plethora of books, articles and other works, many of

which will be cited and referred to in this work, much of the scholarly

literature on the history of neoconservatism and its influence on US

foreign policy in the Middle East and Central Asia in the twenty-first

century is still yet to come. However, of the works that have been

completed, one of the most outstanding is Stephan Halper and Jonathan

15 Refer to the bibliography of this work for a full list of such resources used and

referred to. 16 While the role of the media will be discussed in Chapter 3, it should be noted that

The New York Times published what amounted to an apology to its readers for having

published stories which had not been thoroughly checked prior to publication during the

lead up to the war against Iraq. See: Editors, “The Times and Iraq”, The New York

Times, 26 May 2004.

Clarke’s America Alone: The Neo-conservatives and the Global Order,

published in 2004.17

Published after the allied invasion of Iraq and the

downfall of the Saddam Hussein regime, the book became a benchmark

work that effectively created a template by which neoconservatives

generally could be identified. The authors’ analyses of neoconservatism

and neoconservatives and their role in the Bush administration remains

as valid now as when it was written as the neoconservatives’ war

against Iraq was underway and as the insurgency against the allied

presence in Iraq was getting started.

America Alone: The Neoconservatives and the Global Order

remains one of the pre-eminent scholarly works on the subject, both for

its prescient analysis of the neoconservative polity and for the scholarly

use of resources. Its bibliography alone is a resource in itself, since it is

clear that the authors exhausted virtually all of the works available at

the time.

While it is not usual for a review of a scholarly work to be

quoted within a work, it is done so here in order to demonstrate the

response of neoconservatives, which, in turn, portrays the

neoconservative character. In a review of America Alone, writer and

editor Stanley I. Kutler adequately describes the thrust of the book.

America Alone levels a broad indictment against the Bush

administration, which in the name of the war on terror has

launched the Iraq war, mounted an assault on personal liberties

at home, engaged in a purposeful deceit of the media and the

public (both of which suspended any critical judgment) and,

above all, has inflicted terrible damage on U.S. moral authority

and international legitimacy. The chief culprits for the authors

are the neocons, who are depicted as conspirators who hijacked

American foreign policy.18

17 Stefan Halper and Jonathan Clarke, America Alone: The Neo-conservatives and the

Global Order, (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2004). 18 Stanley I. Kutler, “The Vision Thing”, Washington Post, 15 August 2004.

Unsurprisingly, neoconservatives were less inclined to agree with

Kutler’s summation. While conceding that both Halper and Clarke were

themselves “fine Reaganites, American loving optimists and tough

Cold Warriors”, Jon Kyl, the neoconservative Republican Senator from

Arizona, wrote in the Wall Street Journal,

Downgrading the neoconservatives, however, isn't supportable

on the basis of their book. It is full of oversimplifications,

convenient shifts in argument and outright inaccuracies…

People of good will can debate which counterterrorism

measures are wisest in a post-9/11 world. But to press their

case, Messrs. Halper and Clarke flail wildly against the

"militarist" neocons, even making the preposterous suggestion

that they would rather see U.S. troops occupy certain countries

than take non-lethal steps to encourage a democratic

evolution.19

In 2007, Halper and Clarke wrote what some critics suggested20

was a

follow-up to America Alone called The Silence of the Rational Center:

Why American Foreign Policy is Failing.21

It was only a ‘follow-up’

inasmuch that it was written after America Alone and deals with the

aftermath of the Bush administration’s and the neoconservatives’

venture into Iraq. However, it has little of the resourcefully presented

character and quality that made America Alone so compelling.

One of the earliest comprehensive studies of the phenomenon

of neoconservatism was Peters Steinfels’ The Neoconservatives: The

Men Who are Changing America’s Politics. Published in 1979, the

book offers the first extended serious analysis, history and critique of

19 Jon Kyl, “As Some States See Red, Others Feel Blue”, Wall Street Journal, 30 June

2004. http://online.wsj.com/article/SB108854395775350735.html Accessed 15 June

2009. 20 Michiko Kakutani, “The Silence of the Rational Center”, The New York Times, 20

February 2007. 21 Stefan Halper and Jonathon Clarke, The Silence of the Rational Center: Why

American Foreign Policy is Failing, (New York: Basic Books, 2007).

the emerging neoconservative movement. Building on the profiles of

leading neoconservatives, Steinfels presents an inclusive picture of

neoconservative thinking and hints at the end of his book, albeit

vaguely but quite presciently, where neoconservative thinking may

lead.

The great danger posed by and to neoconservatism is that it will

become nothing more than the legitimising and lubricating

ideology of the oligarchic America where essential decisions

are made by corporate elites, where great inequalities are

rationalised by straitened circumstances and a system of

meritocratic hierarchy, and where democracy becomes an

occasional, ritualistic gesture. Whether neoconservatism will

end by playing this sinister and unhappy role, or whether it will

end as a permanent, creative, and constructive element in

American politics, is only partially in the hands of

neoconservatives themselves. It will also be determined by the

vigor, intelligence, and dedication of their critics and

opponents.22

By the end of the first decade of the twenty-first century, the answer is

not quite conclusive but there is little doubt that the neoconservatives’

role has indeed been ‘sinister’ and the consequences rather ‘unhappy’.

Since Steinfels’ book was published, neoconservatism has

rapidly progressed, particularly in terms of its influence. A new

generation of neoconservative players have appeared. A few are the

sons and daughters of those that can be considered the founding fathers

(and mothers) of neoconservatism. Neoconservatives themselves

documented much of this progress, sometimes from a personal

viewpoint as in Irving Kristol’s well-known Neoconservatism: The

Autobiography of an Idea23

and sometimes from a more objective

22 Steinfels, The Neoconservatives, p. 294. 23 Irving Kristol, Neoconservatism: The Autobiography of an Idea, (New York: Free

Press, 1995).

viewpoint such as Mark Gerson’s The Neoconservative Vision: From

the Cold war to the Culture Wars.24

There have also been a number of

other books about the development and history of neoconservatism, but

by far the most informative of them are John Ehrman’s

Neoconservatism: Intellectuals and Foreign Affairs, 1945-199425

,

published in 1995 and, bringing neoconservative history and evolution

right up to date, Jacob Heilbrunn’s They Knew They Were Right: The

Rise of the Neocons26

, published in 2008.

To date, there have been a number of works by the major

players involved in the era of the neoconservatives of the twenty-first

century. One would have hoped that those that have so far emerged

would have thrown some much needed light on the events in which

their authors were involved. These revelations, however, have been

disappointing and have tended to be more of a defence of their actions

during their period of office rather than an objective record and analysis

of events from their point of view.

Douglas Feith’s record of his role in the US Department of

Defense under Donald Rumsfeld, War and Decision: Inside the

Pentagon at the Dawn of the War on Terrorism27

, is little more than a

frantic attempt to justify the role he and his fellow neoconservatives

played in the invasion and occupation of Iraq. As Michael Scheuer,

former CIA operative and anonymous author of Imperial Hubris: Why

the West is Losing the War on Terror28

wrote in his review of Feith’s

book, it “is an old fashioned morality tale written by a man with little

24 Mark Gerson, The Neoconservative Vision: From the Cold War to the Culture wars,

(Lanham, MD: Madison Books, 1997). 25 John Ehrman, Neoconservatism: Intellectuals and foreign Affairs, 1945-1994, (New

Haven: Yale University Press, 1995). 26 Jacob Heilbrunn, They Knew They Were Right: The Rise of the Neocons, (New York:

Doubleday, 2008). 27 Douglas Feith, War and Decision: Inside the Pentagon at the Dawn of the War

Terrorism, (New York: Harper Collins, 2008). 28 Michael Scheuer, Imperial Hubris: Why the West is Losing the War on Terror,

(Dulles, VA: Brassey’s Inc., 2004).

discernible moral sense or any real concern for the truth”.29

Ironically,

similar words were used by Feith to describe George Tenet30

, CIA

director during the George W. Bush presidency, who also wrote his

memoirs of the period.

At the Center of the Storm: My Years at the CIA31

is a

somewhat naïve account of Tenet’s efforts to thwart Osama bin

Laden’s efforts to attack America prior to 9/11. Tenet expends some

three-quarters of the narrative giving what seems to be a simplistic

blow by blow account of his time in the CIA up to 9/11, while the

remainder of the book is essentially an account of the events covered by

Feith in War and Decision. Apportioning culpability dominates the

narrative of both books, with each blaming the other for the various

failures of the Iraq war and the lead up to it. Tenet desperately attempts

to distance himself from the neoconservatives in the Department of

Defense with regard to the question of Saddam’s connections to, and

role in, the events of 9/11.32

For Bob Woodward, however, At the Center of the Storm is a

“remarkable, important and often unintentionally damning memoir”.

Woodward praises some elements of Tenet’s book, particularly for its

revelations about al Qaeda’s alleged efforts to gain nuclear weapons,

but elsewhere he criticises Tenet for the lack of evidence supporting

some of his claims and criticises him over errors of detail.33

In They

Knew They Were Right, Jacob Heilbrunn claims that Tenet’s book was

a “self-exculpatory memoir” but offers no specific explanation.34

29 Michael Scheuer, “Douglas Feith’s War and Decision: Life in a Neocon’s Parallel

Universe”, Antiwar.com, 2 May 2008.

http://www.antiwar.com/scheuer/?articleid=12771 Accessed 6 May 2009. 30 In a review of George Tenet’s book At the Center of the Storm, Douglas Feith wrote

in the Wall Street Journal: “Anyone can make an honest mistake. But the problem with

George Tenet is that he doesn't seem to care to get his facts straight. He is not

meticulous. He is willing to make up stories that suit his purposes and to suppress

information that does not.” “Inside the Inside Story”, Wall Street Journal, 4 May 2007. 31 George Tenet, At the Center of the Storm: My Years at the CIA, (New York: Harper

Collins, 2007). 32 Tenet, At the Center of the Storm, pp. 305-311. 33 Bob Woodward, “Reaping the Whirlwind”, Washington Post, 6 May 2007. 34 Heilbrunn, They Knew They Were Right, p. 285.

Heilbrunn may have had in mind the whole chapter in At the Center of

the Storm in which Tenet finds it necessary to explain fully his version

of the events and the context of his famous claim to President George

W. Bush on 21 December 2002, just months before the invasion of Iraq,

that the evidence against Saddam Hussein was a “slam dunk”.35

So

important is this incident in Tenet’s life that he suggests that, had he not

said those words, he might not have written the book.36

Press Secretary, Scott McClellan, successor to Ari Fleischer,

has also written his memoirs of the period. The title, What Happened:

Inside the Bush White House and Washington’s Culture of Deception37

,

provides a clue to McClellan’s perspective of events of the period.

“History appears poised to confirm what most Americans today have

decided – that the decision to invade Iraq was a serious blunder”, he

writes. “No one, including me, can know with absolute certainty how

the war will be viewed decades from now when we can more fully

understand its impact. What I do know is that war should only be

waged when necessary, and the Iraq war was not necessary”.38

Unsurprisingly, McClellan’s book was severely criticised by his

contemporaries. Peter Wehner, a former deputy assistant to President

George W. Bush, wrote in his review of McClellan’s book, “what

appears to be Scott’s existential journey has led him to make sweeping

and reckless allegations that are at odds with reality… He would have

us believe that the Bush administration was, at bottom, massively and

deeply deceitful and corrupt – but this has only dawned on Scott as he

started writing his book, years after the fact.”39

Other detractors have

questioned the value of the book with regards to its historical

significance. “What may, in fact, be most revealing about McClellan’s

35 Tenet, At the Center of the Storm, pp. 359-367. 36 Tenet, At the Center of the Storm. p. 362. 37 Scott McClellan, What Happened: Inside the Bush White House and Washington’s

Culture of Deception, (New York: Public Affairs, 2008). 38 McClellan, What Happened, p. xiii. 39 Peter Wehner, “Scott’s Truth vs Reality: What Happened is an old Washington

game”, National Review Online, 29 May 2008.

http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=NWRkYjU2YTFiZjFiNmJjOWUxMjYyMWEwY

zU4OGZkNzA= Accessed 26 May 2009.

book”, Jacob Heilbrunn wrote in The New York Times Sunday Book

Review, “is not what it discloses about the head of state, but what it

says about the continuing devaluation of the political memoir as a

literary form. Paradoxical though it may seem, even as these books

have become more accusatory, they have also become less

illuminating.”40

Heilbrunn, whose work is generally objective,

nonetheless was self-confessedly close to the brink of being a

neoconservative himself,41

so his appraisal of McClellan’s work could

be considered biased to some extent. Certainly, one might go along

with Heilbrunn’s assessment if one read McClellan’s book in isolation

and not as part of an in-depth analysis of the period. When read in

conjunction with the myriad of other related works published,

McClellan’s book, like Feith’s and Tenet’s, has much to offer the

historian.

There are a number of books written by less senior participants

who played more specific, but nonetheless important, roles during this

period. Two of these, Michael Scheuer and Richard A. Clarke, worked

closely with George Tenet during his period in office and have written

revealing narratives about the activities of the intelligence community

just prior to 9/11 and during the post 9/11 Bush presidency.

Scheuer has written two books using the nom de plume (or

perhaps that should be nom de guerre) of ‘Anonymous’, that cover his

time working with the CIA. The first, Through Our Enemies’ Eyes:

Osama Bin Laden, Radical Islam and the Future of America,42

was

completed in June 2001 but was still being reviewed by the government

when 9/11 occurred43

and the first edition was not published until June

2002. Several updated editions have since been published. Scheuer’s

second book, Imperial Hubris: Why the West is Losing the War on

40 Jacob Heilbrunn, “Not My Fault”, The New York Times, 22 June 2008. 41 Heilbrunn, They Knew They Were Right, p.15. 42 Michael Scheuer, (‘Anonymous’), Through Our Enemies’ Eyes: Osama Bin Laden,

Radical Islam and the Future of America, (Dulles, VA: Potomac Books Inc., 2002). 43 Faye Bowers, “America’s greatest enemy keeps no secrets”, Christian Science

Monitor, 29 May 2003. http://www.csmonitor.com/2003/0529/p16s01-bogn.html#

Accessed 17 June 2009.

Terror, published in 2004 as a follow-up to his first, became a

controversial best seller because of its contradictory assessment of al

Qaeda. It exposed some of the myths perpetuated in the mainstream

media and used as propaganda by the US government and some of its

allies during the lead up to the invasion of Iraq. Essentially, both works

demonstrate that bin Laden, rather than a fanatical Islamic murdering

warrior wildly lashing out at the enemies of Islam, is a quite rational

actor with specific political aims to defend the world of Islam against

Western aggression. From the first paragraph in the introduction to

Imperial Hubris, Scheuer lays out his argument: that by attacking

Islamic fighters in Iraq and Afghanistan and elsewhere, the US and its

allies are succeeding in doing what bin Laden himself has been trying

to achieve for nearly two decades – “the radicalisation of the Islamic

world”.44

It is odd that, despite having been the CIA analyst who for

years headed up the “bin Laden issue station”, named ‘Alec Station’

after his son,45

Scheuer mentions his boss, Tenet, only once in Imperial

Hubris and then only in a passing reference to the ‘Tenet Plan’.46

Richard Clarke’s 2004 book, Against All Enemies: Inside

America’s War on Terror, tells a story that is at loggerheads with

Douglas Feith’s version of events regarding the lead up to the invasion

of Iraq. Clarke, who during this period was National Coordinator for

Security, Infrastructure Protection and Counter-terrorism with the

National Security Council (NSC), worked closely with Tenet, yet

accuses the CIA and the FBI of coming “late to realise that there was a

threat to the United States and who were unable to stop it even after

they agreed that the threat was real and significant.”47

At the time of its

publication, in an election year, Clarke’s book caused a major stir

because it cut straight to the chase about the Bush administration’s

obsession with Iraq. By 2004, many commentators and writers had

44 Scheuer, Imperial Hubris, p. xv. 45 Tenet, At the Center of the Storm, p. 100. 46 Scheuer, Imperial Hubris, p. 29. 47 Richard A. Clarke, Against All Enemies: Inside America’s War on Terror, (New

York: Free Press, 2004), p. x.

noted this obsession, but Richard A. Clarke was the most

authoritative.48

Bush’s obsession with Iraq and his determination to invade and

oust Saddam Hussein revolved mainly around the rhetoric of Iraq’s

Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMDs). Among the many role players

involved with the saga of Bush’s rhetoric, none were more critical to

Bush’s game plan than those involved in trying to find these weapons

and document their provenance. The existence, or proof of the

existence of WMDs, was crucial to Bush and his allies. Two of these

role players have since written of their experiences in Iraq: head of the

United Nations Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission

(UNMOVIC), Hans Blix, and ex-UN weapons inspector and outspoken

critic of the Iraq war, Scott Ritter.

Hans Blix, together with Mohamed El Baradei, Director-

General of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) and Blix’s

successor, were the pivot upon which Bush’s plans to invade Iraq

revolved. Blix’s book, Disarming Iraq, published in 2004,49

is a very

diplomatically written narrative of his experience during the critical

period leading up to the invasion of Iraq. Blix is scathing of Vice-

President Dick Cheney for ignoring the facts being presented to him

and, worse, for cherry-picking preconceived ideas of what Cheney

decided were the ‘facts’ and their use in his rhetoric to the American

people.50

Later, when giving evidence at the Chilcot inquiry in July

2010, Blix condemned the invasion of Iraq as being illegal in his

view.51

48 James Risen, “‘Against All Enemies’ and ‘Ghost Wars’: Connecting the Dots”, The

New York Times, 29 March 2004. 49 Hans Blix, Disarming Iraq, (New York: Pantheon Books, 2004). 50 Blix, Disarming Iraq, pp. 70-71. 51 The Iraq Inquiry, as it is officially called, but is also referred to as the “Chilcot

Inquiry” after its chairman Sir John Chilcot, was set up in the UK in June 2009 and

began public hearings into the role of the UK in the invasion of Iraq in 2003. Hans Blix

gave evidence to the inquiry on 27 July 2010. He told the enquiry he believed the

invasion was illegal. “Transcript of evidence to the Iraq Inquiry of Hans Blix”, 27 July

2010, p. 114. http://www.iraqinquiry.org.uk/media/48849/20100727pm-blix.pdf

Accessed 28 July 2010.

Scott Ritter, who had been a weapons inspector with the United

Nations Special Commission (UNSCOM) in Iraq in the post-First Gulf

War period, has written two pertinent books. The first, Iraq

Confidential: The Untold Story of the Intelligence Conspiracy to

Undermine the UN and Overthrow Saddam Hussein,52

published in

2005, was followed a year later by a sequel, Target Iran: The Truth

About the White House’s Plan for Regime Change.53

In Iraq Confidential, Ritter reinforces a now familiar story that

has been told by so many others about the ways in which Bush, Cheney

and the neoconservatives hyped up the ‘Iraq has WMDs’ meme that

preceded the country’s invasion. Iraq Confidential does need to be read

with care; it is yet another work that needs to be read in conjunction

with others that cover the same territory

In his follow-on book, Target Iran, Ritter presciently argues in

his conclusion that it is Israel that is pushing the US toward war against

Iran.

Israel has through a combination of ignorance, fear and

paranoia, elevated Iran to a threat status that it finds

unacceptable. Israel has engaged in policies that have further

inflamed the situation. Israel displays an arrogance and rigidity

when it comes to developing any diplomatic solution to the

Iranian issue. And Israel demands that the United States take

the lead in holding Iran to account. Israel threatens military

action against Iran, knowing only too well that in doing so

Israel would be committing America to war as well.54

At the time of writing, Ritter’s predictions have yet to be played out

but, as things are as of 2013, such a scenario is still very possible.

52 Scott Ritter, Iraq Confidential: The Untold Story of the Intelligence Conspiracy to

Undermine the UN and Overthrow Saddam Hussein, (New York: Nation Books, 2006). 53 Scott Ritter, Target Iran: The Truth About the White House’s Plans for Regime

Change, (New York: Nation Books, 2006). 54 Ritter, Target Iran, p. 210.

There have also been a large number of works written about

some of the other major players, including George W. Bush and Dick

Cheney.

One such work is Angler: The Cheney Vice Presidency by

Rhodes Scholar and reporter at The Washington Post, Barton

Gellman.55

Gellman’s work, as Jacob Heilbrunn says in his review of

the book, is “engrossing and informative”.56

It is engrossing inasmuch

as it tells as much about George W. Bush’s lackadaisical approach to

hierarchical management as it informs us about Cheney and his wily

ways.

Again, not unpredictably, the neoconservatives were scathing

in their criticism of Gellman’s book. “Angler is neither well written nor

particularly instructive on the motives and methods of a vice president

who has exercised enormous influence over the last eight years. Much

of the material on Cheney’s reticence with the press – surprise! – and

his conviction that the presidency has been weakened by an

overzealous Congress is deeply familiar”, writes Christopher Willcox in

The Weekly Standard. He sums up his review:

History may well judge this vice president and his boss harshly.

They certainly were dealt a turbulent eight years, and historians

will be sifting the evidence for years to come. But Angler won’t

be a must read for historians. Perhaps some fair-minded

journalism professor will serve it up someday as a case study in

media bias.57

Since, to date, the book is only one of two works that covers Cheney’s

role during his vice-Presidency, historians will have little alternative

55 Barton Gellman, Angler: The Cheney Vice Presidency, (New York: Penguin Press,

2008). 56 Jacob Heilbrunn, “The Shadow President”, The New York Times, 12 October 2008. 57 Christopher Willcox, “Veep-Hunting: Looking for the party line on Cheney? Here it

is”, The Weekly Standard, 29 December 2008.

http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Protected/Articles/000/000/015/937ljgez.asp?

pg=1 Accessed 15 June 2009.

but to read it. But, again, despite Willcox’s view, it is when the book is

read in conjunction with the other related works that it makes the most

sense and provides some answers.

The other major work on Cheney is Stephen F. Hayes’ Cheney:

The Untold Story of America’s Most Powerful and Controversial Vice

President.58

Hayes is a senior writer for the neoconservative Weekly

Standard and the work is a blatant propaganda piece that lacks any

objective historical merit. Notwithstanding Hayes’ bias, the book

demonstrates admirably the neoconservative mindset relating to events

that have forged neoconservative thinking in the first decade of the

twenty-first century. It also shows how neoconservatives have a

tendency to continue with their propaganda and rhetoric long after they

have been revealed to be based on complete falsehoods or even

deliberately staged propaganda events. An example of ignoring the

facts in order to perpetuate the propaganda is shown in the first two

paragraphs of Chapter Fourteen. Hayes writes, “Baghdad fell on April

9, 2003,” then continues,

An enduring image of the war took place that day when jubilant

Iraqis teamed with US Marines to topple a statue of Saddam

Hussein in al Firdos Square, in the heart of the Iraqi capital.

American troops had stormed into Baghdad, meeting

unexpectedly little resistance. In the square, they stopped to

wait for reinforcements, and when the Iraqis there could not

bring down the statue on their own, the Americans used their

heavy equipment to lend a hand. A rope was looped around the

neck of the statue, which was hauled to the ground before a

cheering crowd. It was a moment of triumph and hope. The

Iraqi people – at least the ones captured on camera that day –

were happy.59

58 Stephen F. Hayes, Cheney: The Untold Story of America’s Most Powerful and

Controversial Vice President, (New York: Harper Collins, 2007). 59 Hayes, Cheney, p. 394.

The fact that, in 2007, when Hayes wrote his biography of Cheney, it

was well known that the event had been staged with very few actual

Iraqi residents present is ignored completely.60

Such anomalies have not

gone unnoticed by others that have reviewed Hayes’ work. Karen De

Young, reviewing the book for Washington Post writes,

Hayes, a staff writer for the Weekly Standard, wrote a previous

book attempting to prove a close pre-war connection between

al-Qaeda and Saddam Hussein. Here he offers highly selective

versions of this and other Bush-era controversies, from

unwarranted wiretapping to Hussein’s alleged nuclear weapons

programs. He makes no energetic effort to get inside the

workings of the Bush administration and leaves out much of

what is already known.61

Dead Certain: The Presidency of George W. Bush,62

by Robert Draper,

was published in September 2007, so does not cover Bush’s entire

Presidency. Draper’s work gives much personal insight to the

personality of Bush due mainly to Draper’s long series of rarely given

personal interviews with the then President together with interviews

with Laura Bush, Dick Cheney, Condoleezza Rice, Donald Rumsfeld

and Karl Rove, among many others.63

As is so often the case when this

type of book is published, the narrative tells as much about some of the

other players involved as it does about the life, foibles and facts about

the main subject, and Draper’s work on George W. Bush and his

presidency is no exception. It is for this reason that the book was

reasonably well received by the neoconservative establishment,

60 David Zucchino, “Army Stage-Managed Fall of Hussein Statue”, Los Angeles Times,

3 July 2004. http://articles.latimes.com/2004/jul/03/nation/na-statue3 Accessed 24

August 2009. 61 Karen De Young, “American Enigma: A journalist attempts to plumb the depths of

our secretive vice-president”, Washington Post, 15 July 2007. 62 Robert Draper, Dead Certain: The Presidency of George W. Bush, (New York: Free

Press, 2007). 63 Michiko Kakutani, “Bush Profiled: Big Ideas, Tiny Details”, The New York Times, 5

September 2007.

although Draper is by no means a neoconservative himself. For Stephen

Hayes, writing a review in the Weekly Standard, it is as if Bush has

been painted by Draper almost, but not quite, in their image of

themselves. Endorsing Draper’s work, Hayes writes, “It is Draper’s

reporting on Bush and his closest advisors that makes this volume

worth reading”, adding that, “Dead Certain reflects the depth and

breadth of Draper’s understanding and includes fresh detail about the

main players and their often-complicated relationships with Bush and

with each other”.64

Many of the players that Draper interviewed for Dead Certain

were also the subjects of a plethora of books that have been published

about the formation and functioning of the administration and the role

of some of its main characters. One of the earliest, and still one of the

most informative, is James Mann’s Rise of the Vulcans: The History of

Bush’s War Cabinet, published in 2004.65

The work details how the

core of the Bush administration, comprising Cheney, Rice, Donald

Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, Colin Powell and Richard Armitage,

collectively known as the ‘Vulcans’66

, came together and how they

developed and functioned during the first term of Bush’s presidency.

About three-quarters of the book, however, is a painstaking account of

how these ‘Vulcans’ came together, with many of the stories of the

players going back to the Vietnam era. While the story of their actual

roles in the George W. Bush administration leading up to the invasion

of Iraq is only scantily told, the detailed narrative of how they were

brought together paints a very useful picture that does give background

to other narratives which do explain their interaction in more detail

during the period from 2000 to 2003.

64 Stephen F. Hayes, “Defining Dubya: A rough first draft of the Bush administration”,

Weekly Standard, 5 November 2007.

http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/014/271rprlm.asp?pg

=1 Accessed 24 June 2009. 65 James Mann, Rise of the Vulcans: The History of Bush’s War Cabinet, (New York:

Viking Penguin, 2004). 66 Mann, Rise of the Vulcans, pp. ix-x.

Bob Woodward is by far the most prolific writer of those

covering the era of the Bush presidency. Over a period of some six

years, Woodward wrote four major works. The first, published in late

2002, was Bush at War.67

It covered the immediate aftermath of the

events of 11 September 2001 that quickly led up to the invasion of

Afghanistan and the installation of Hamid Karzai as the Afghan

president on 22 December 2001. As Woodward noted, “Regime change

had been accomplished 102 days after the terrorist attacks in the United

States”.68

They are the same 102 days that Woodward covers in some

great detail in Bush at War, in which he depicts the meetings and

interactions of the Bush cabinet and administration in those formative

days when the administration finally came under the influence of the

neoconservatives that served within. When first published, elements of

it were difficult to confirm. However, with the passing of time, most of

what Woodward claimed has since been verified, which, in turn,

provides confidence in the veracity of claims made in his subsequent

works.

Woodward’s second book, Plan of Attack,69

published in April

2004, documents the events from 21 November 2001, when Bush first

asked Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld, to prepare a plan to

invade and occupy Iraq, up to the launch of the attack against Iraq in

March 2003.

State of Denial: Bush at War, Part Three70

which was

published in 2006, is an interesting work inasmuch that it is not really a

‘Part Three’ in the sense that it follows on chronologically from where

Plan of Attack left off. Rather, it reviews the previous works and the era

in the light of further revelations about the lead up to the wars with

Afghanistan and Iraq, revelations that seem mainly to come, somewhat

surprisingly, from George W. Bush’s Chief of Staff, Andy Card. State

of Denial highlights the incompetence of the Bush administration.

67 Bob Woodward, Bush at War, (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2002). 68 Woodward, Bush at War, p. 315. 69 Bob Woodward, Plan of Attack, (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2004). 70 Bob Woodward, State of Denial: Bush at War, Part Three, (New York: Simon &

Schuster, 2006).

Rumsfeld, in particular, is positively demonised, despite being one of

the few in the inner circle of the administration who was prepared to

submit himself to on-the-record interviews with Woodward for the

book.

In September 2008, Woodward’s fourth book depicting the

Bush presidency was published. The War Within: A Secret White House

History, 2006-2008,71

does little more than rake over ground that both

he and, by now, so many others have already covered. The book’s

usefulness rests essentially in the fact that it pulls together the

assumptions and conclusions that so many others have written about,

both in the media and in other books, on Bush’s presidency and the

tumultuous events of his era.

Standing out among those other books is James Bamford’s A

Pretext for War: 9/11, Iraq, and the Abuse of America’s Intelligence

Agencies72

in which Bamford highlights the struggle between the

realists in the intelligence community and in the State Department, and

the neoconservative ideologues in the Defense Department and

elsewhere throughout the administration. Bamford shows how the

neoconservatives ultimately prevailed in their quest to invade Iraq via

the use of a combination of propaganda that even Bush was ready to

believe and lies that were too inconvenient for Bush not to believe. It

clearly defines the rhetoric and propaganda used by the administration

and its allies in a desperate bid to gain the support of public opinion, as

opposed to the geo-political reality of the times. Bamford explains how

much of the neoconservatives’ agenda was concealed from public view

and that they manipulated the more conventional conservative members

of the administration and Congress to support that agenda by inventing

one that was more acceptable to public opinion. Bamford also

effectively demonstrates how the neoconservatives were able to take

71 Bob Woodward, The War Within: A Secret White House History, 2006-2008, (New

York: Simon & Schuster, 2008). 72 James Bamford, A Pretext for War: 9/11, Iraq, and the Abuse of America’s

Intelligence Agencies, (New York: Doubleday, 2004).

advantage of Bush’s well known hatred of Saddam Hussein73

and how

they used that to carefully steer Bush toward a war that would

ultimately remove Saddam as a threat to Israel.

A book that takes a similar line to Bamford’s is James Risen’s

somewhat lightweight but nonetheless revealing work, State of War:

The Secret History of the CIA and the Bush Administration, published

in early 2006.74

Risen’s main claim to fame was his December 2005

exposure of the Bush administration’s authorisation of the National

Security Agency (NSA) to conduct illegal wiretapping of domestic

telephone and email communications within the US.75

It is telling that

the Bush administration had actually asked The New York Times not to

publish some of Risen’s reporting, particularly about the wiretapping,

and that for a year The New York Times obliged. It was only when

Risen was about to publish his book that the newspaper’s editors

decided to publish Risen’s wiretapping article.76

In State of War, Risen devotes a chapter to the wiretapping

controversy77

and then takes a deeper look, based mainly on

anonymous sources, at the deeply flawed relationship between the CIA

and the Bush administration and explains how, in Risen’s opinion, “No

other institution failed so completely in its mission during the Bush

years as did the CIA”.78

He shows how, during the eighteen months

between 9/11 and the invasion of Iraq, “the political leaders within the

administration with the clearest answers and the greatest certainty and

the most persistence were quickly able to dominate the agenda”,

producing “a perfect environment for Dick Cheney and Don

Rumsfeld”.79

73 Bamford, A Pretext for War, pp. 259-260. 74 James Risen, State of War: The Secret History of the CIA and the Bush

Administration, (New York: Free Press, 2006). 75 James Risen and Eric Lichtblau, “Bush Let U.S. Spy on Callers Without Courts”, The

New York Times, 16 December 2005. 76 Walter Isaacson, “Spies and Spymasters”, The New York Times, 5 February 2006. 77 Risen, State of War, pp. 39-60. 78 Risen, State of War, p. 4. 79 Risen, State of War, p. 65.

In Bush League Diplomacy: How the Neoconservatives are

Putting the World at Risk,80

published in 2004, Craig Eisendrath, a

former diplomat, and Melvin Goodman, an ex-CIA officer, offer their

insights as to how the Bush administration developed its foreign policy.

They demonstrate how the neoconservatives exploited the events of

9/11 to propel their militarist foreign policy agenda, which overrode

more conventional diplomatic methods to formulate foreign policy and

deal with foreign policy crises. They successfully trace the evolution

from multilateral diplomacy to a policy of unilateral military pre-

emption.

Another standout book that is essential reading is Michael

Isikoff and David Corn’s major work, Hubris: The Inside Story of Spin,

Scandal and the Selling of the Iraq War,81

published in 2006. Isikoff

and Corn, experienced investigative journalists and writers, carefully

piece together the highly complex series of events that eventually

became Bush’s casus belli to attack Iraq. Isikoff and Corn describe how

the neoconservatives and the ranking members of the administration

began to believe their own propaganda as different elements of

concocted evidence were fed to each other and to a gullible and, in

many cases, complicit media. In particular, Isikoff and Corn highlight

Cheney’s ability to get Congress on side by personally convincing four

of its top leaders of his arguments and then allowing the trickle down

effect of seniority influence,82

together with pressure from the various

neoconservative and Israeli lobby groups, which Cheney was closely

associated with, to do the rest.83

80 Craig R. Eisendrath and Melvin A. Goodman, Bush League Diplomacy: How the

Neoconservatives are Putting the World at Risk, (New York: Prometheus Books, 2004). 81 Michael Isikoff and David Corn, Hubris: The Inside Story of Spin, Scandal and the

Selling of the Iraq War, (New York: Crown Publishing, 2006). 82 Isikoff and Corn, Hubris. pp. 23-25. 83 Before becoming part of the George W. Bush administration, Cheney had been a

member of the advisory board of the Jewish Institute of National Security Affairs

(JINSA) as well as being a member of the Project for the New American Century, a

pro-Israel lobby group. See: Joel Beinin, “Pro-Israel Hawks and the Second Gulf War”,

Middle East Research and Information Project, 6 April 2003.

http://www.merip.org/mero/mero040603 Accessed 6 June 2012.

In Worse than Watergate: The Secret Presidency of George W.

Bush, John W. Dean, an ex-Nixon administration lawyer who served a

prison sentence for his part in the Watergate affair, draws strong

parallels between Nixon’s and Bush’s deceitful behaviour. As the title

suggests, Dean considers that the course of action taken by Bush and

his administration to erode the democratic federal government process

by concentrating power within the small circle of White House

intimates was even more disgraceful than Watergate.

Arguably, the most controversial work to date that connects the

interests of American neoconservatives to the interests of right-wing

Israeli Zionists generally and Israel’s Likud party in particular, is John

Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt’s The Israel Lobby and US Foreign

Policy,84

published in 2007. This important book began life as an article

in the London Review of Books85

a year earlier. As soon as the article

appeared, it drew outrage from the Jewish right-wing and their

supporters in America and was condemned by pro-Zionists worldwide

as being ‘anti-Semitic’.86

Undaunted by the criticism, Mearsheimer and

Walt went on to extend and fully develop their case, in which they

argue that the uncritical support for Israel that was being promoted by

influential Jewish and pro-Israel lobbying organisations such as the

Anti-Defamation League (ADL) and the American Israel Public Affairs

Committee (AIPAC)87

does harm to both US and Israeli interests.

While the initial impact of the book has since waned,

particularly as we move into the Obama era, its 106 pages of references

remain a rich resource for scholars. Mearsheimer and Walt carefully

noted in detail the source of virtually all of the claims and quotes used

to support their arguments.88

84 John J. Mearsheimer and Stephen M. Walt, The Israel Lobby and US Foreign Policy,

(New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 2007). 85 Mearsheimer and Walt, “The Israel Lobby”, London Review of Books. 86 William Grimes, “A Prosecutorial Brief Against Israel and Its Supporters”, The New

York Times, 6 September 2007. 87 Mearsheimer and Walt, The Israel Lobby, pp. 117-120. 88 Mearsheimer and Walt, The Israel Lobby, pp. 357-463.

The accusations of anti-Semitism made by Mearsheimer and

Walt’s detractors, most notably Alan Dershowitz, a Harvard law

professor, and Abe Foxman, national director of the Anti-Defamation

League, were based on the simplistic notion, often favoured by Zionist

propagandists and their supporters, that ‘anti-Zionism is anti-Semitism’.

For most commentators, the accusation of anti-Semitism is seen as a

blatant and transparent attempt to distract from Mearsheimer and

Walt’s argument. Washington Post columnist, Richard Cohen, for

example, noted Dershowitz’s bizarre attempt to cast Mearsheimer and

Walt in the same mould as the likes of well-known anti-Semite David

Duke, former head of the Ku Klux Klan, by exclaiming that some

quotes from Mearsheimer and Walt’s work “appear on hate sites”

when, clearly, neither Mearsheimer or Walt have control over what

appears on ‘hate sites’ or anywhere else. As Richard Cohen says, “To

associate Mearsheimer and Walt with hate groups is rank guilt by

association and does not in any way rebut the argument made in their

paper on the Israel lobby.” 89

Richard Cohen’s piece, ‘No, It’s Not Anti-Semitism’, was a

response to an article in the Washington Post less than three weeks

earlier written by neoconservative and Johns Hopkins University

professor, Eliot A. Cohen, titled ‘Yes, It’s Anti-Semitism’, in which E.

Cohen repeats Dershowitz’s mantra about Mearsheimer and Walt’s

work having “won David Duke’s endorsement”.90

E. Cohen then

launches into a blistering attack on Mearsheimer and Walt’s work that

borders on frenzied and ultimately declares the paper to be anti-

Semitic.91

89 Richard Cohen, “No, It’s Not Anti-Semitic”, Washington Post, 25 April 2006. 90 Eliot A. Cohen, “Yes, It’s Anti-Semitic”, Washington Post, 5 April 2006. 91 Eliot Cohen writes, for example: “One of Mearsheimer's University of Chicago

colleagues has characterized this as "piss-poor, monocausal social science." It is indeed

a wretched piece of scholarship. Israeli citizenship rests "on the principle of blood

kinship," it says, and yet the country has a million non-Jewish citizens who vote.

Osama bin Laden's grievance with the United States begins with Israel, it says -- but in

fact his 1998 fatwa declaring war against this country began by denouncing the U.S.

presence in Saudi Arabia and the suffering of the people of Iraq. "Other ethnic lobbies

can only dream of having the political muscle" The Lobby has -- news to anyone

Abe Foxman’s Anti-Defamation League was no less scathing

of Mearsheimer and Walt’s paper. And, again, the bottom line – quite

literally – of the league’s demonising of Mearsheimer and Walt’s work

is that their paper is “a classical conspiratorial anti-Semitic analysis

invoking the canards of Jewish power and control”.

Left wing Jewish support for Mearsheimer and Walt’s work has

now effectively marginalised right-wing Zionist claims that anti-

Zionism is anti-Semitism, which was the knee-jerk reaction of Zionists

and their neoconservative supporters.92

Many left-wing academic Jews,

including Norman Finkelstein, Noam Chomsky and Tony Judt, while

not entirely uncritical of Mearsheimer and Walt’s work, have supported

them publicly.93

Yet another controversial work was published in September

2008. Dr. Stephen J. Sniegoski’s The Transparent Cabal: The

Neoconservative Agenda, War in the Middle East and the National

Interest of Israel,94

like Mearsheimer and Walt’s The Israel Lobby, has

been condemned by neoconservatives and Zionists as being anti-

advocating lifting the embargo on Fidel Castro's Cuba. The Iraq war stemmed from The

Lobby's conception of Israel's interest -- yet, oddly, the war attracted the support of

anti-Israel intellectuals such as Christopher Hitchens and mainstream publications such

as The Economist. America's anti-Iran policy reflects the dictates of The Lobby -- but

how to explain Europe's equally strong opposition to Iranian nuclear ambitions?” And

then: “Inept, even kooky academic work, then, but is it anti-Semitic? If by anti-

Semitism one means obsessive and irrationally hostile beliefs about Jews; if one

accuses them of disloyalty, subversion or treachery, of having occult powers and of

participating in secret combinations that manipulate institutions and governments; if

one systematically selects everything unfair, ugly or wrong about Jews as individuals or

a group and equally systematically suppresses any exculpatory information -- why, yes,

this paper is anti-Semitic.” 92 “Mearsheimer and Walt’s Anti-Jewish Screed: A Relentless Assault in Scholarly

Guise”, Anti-Defamation League, 24 March 2006.

http://www.adl.org/Israel/mearsheimer_walt.asp Accessed 7 July 2009. 93 Ben Harris, “Critics of Israel Lobby Gather on Mearsheimer’s Home Turf”, Jewish

Telegraphic Agency, 17 October 2007.

http://archive.jta.org/article/2007/10/17/2938335/crtics-of-israel-lobby-gather-on-

mearsheimers-home-turf Accessed 13 July 2009. 94 Stephen J. Sniegoski, The Transparent Cabal: The Neoconservative Agenda, War in

the Middle East, and the National Interest of Israel, (Norfolk, VA: Enigma Editions,

2008).

Semitic – albeit subtle, and as one detractor asserts, so subtle “that

many readers won’t see it”;95

not just because of its often blatantly

accusatory argument that the wars instigated by the neoconservatives

were for the benefit of Zionist Israelis and their supporters but, one

suspects, simply because Sniegoski actually provides very strong

evidence to support that argument; evidence that is difficult to refute

since much of it originates from the neoconservatives themselves.

Sniegoski is aware of the risk of being labelled an anti-Semite and says

as much early on in his work but, nonetheless, writes determinedly and

relentlessly to support his case.96

In his well documented book, American Armageddon: How the

Delusions of the Neoconservatives and the Christian Right Triggered

the Descent of America – and Still Imperil Our Future,97

Craig Unger

resourcefully shows how the neoconservatives clandestinely converged

with the American Christian right. In doing so, they became part of an

alliance that ultimately took America to war not just with Iraq but

against Islam itself as part of a grand effort to remake the Middle East

and elsewhere in the image of their idealised version of America

exceptionalism.

Books by the major players of the era, Tony Blair, George W.

Bush, John Howard and Donald Rumsfeld, did not appear until late

2010 and early 2011. The autobiographical memoirs of these leaders of

the Western alliance all appeared within months of each other between

September 2010 and February 2011. All have been disappointing

inasmuch that they provide few answers to the questions that most

historians are likely to ask. Like Feith’s, Tenet’s and McClellan’s

books discussed above, these seem far more useful to the historian

when read and examined collectively than individually.

95 Michelle Goldberg, “The Taboo Truths of the Conspiracy Minded”, Public Eye, Vol.

24, No. 2, Summer 2009. http://www.publiceye.org/magazine/v24n2/book-transparent-

cabal.html Accessed 27 July 2009. 96 Sniegoski, The Transparent Cabal, p. 11. 97 Craig Unger, American Armageddon: How the Delusions of the Neoconservatives

and the Christian Right Triggered the Descent of America – and Still Imperil Our

Future, (New York: Scribner, 2007).

UK Prime Minister Tony Blair published his autobiography in

September 2010. A Journey98

offers little by way of historical fact that

was not already known. Reviewing the book in The New Yorker, John

Lanchester noted, “It would be naïve to pick up a memoir of a recently

retired politician expecting total candor”, adding that, “Today’s retired

politicians are usually trying to rush out their memoirs before the

window of interest has narrowed, and they are more concerned with

keeping secrets than they are with telling them”.99

This is certainly the

case with Blair’s memoirs – and, indeed, the memoirs of Bush, Howard

and Rumsfeld.

The next ex-leader’s book to appear was Bush’s memoir,

Decision Points, which was published in November 2010.100

As George

Packer noted in The New Yorker, “Very few of its four hundred and

ninety-three pages are not self-serving”.101

In a review for The New

York Times, Michiko Kakutani writes in a similar vein: “It is a book

that is part spin, part mea culpa, part family scrapbook, part self-

conscious effort to (re)shape his political legacy.”102

Neoconservative reviewers, understandably, were more

supportive of Bush’s memoir but at least one finished up sitting on the

fence with regard to how Bush’s legacy would withstand the test of

time. Daniel Henninger, a neoconservative penning a review in the

Wall Street Journal writes:

More than most presidents, George W. Bush belongs to history.

History will judge him almost solely by what he did after a

98 Tony Blair, A Journey, (London: Hutchinson, 2010). 99 John Lanchester, “The Which Blair Project: A controversial prime minister seeks to

define his legacy”, The New Yorker, 13 September 2010.

http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/books/2010/09/13/100913crbo_books_lancheste

r?currentPage=all Accessed 22 September 2010. 100 George W. Bush, Decision Points, (New York: Crown Publishers, 2010). 101 George Packer, “Dead Certain: The Presidential Memoirs of George W. Bush”, The

New Yorker, 20 November 2010.

http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/books/2010/11/29/101129crbo_books_packer

Accessed 11 February 2011. 102 Michiko Kakutani, “In Bush Memoir, Policy Intersects With Personality”, The New

York Times, 3 November 2010.

single historic day, Sept. 11, 2001—in short, by the war on

terror and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. If in time they

succeed, he was a good president. If they fail, his presidency

falls. For everyone's sake, one should hope that he was a good

president.103

Neoconservative writer Michael Barone, writing his review of Bush’s

memoirs for the neoconservative online journal National Review

Online, boldly tells his readers:

Decision Points, as the title suggests, does not purport to be the

full story of Bush’s life or his administration. It “provides data

points for future historians”.104

However, Jonathan Yardley, writing for the Washington Post, told it as

it is:

This should come as no surprise. The presidential memoir as it

has evolved, especially in the wake of recent presidencies, is

not a memoir as the term is commonly understood – an attempt

to examine and interpret the writer's life – but an attempt to

write history before the historians get their hands on it.105

Bush’s book was closely followed by former Australian Prime Minister

John Howard’s autobiography, Lazarus Rising: A Personal and

Political Autobiography, which was also published in November

103 Daniel Henninger, “Looking Back: The virtues and hazards of going ‘all in’ at

moments of crisis”, Wall Street Journal, 9 November 2010.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703514904575602542935259532.htm

l Accessed 11 February 2011. 104 Michael Barone, “Bush’s Decision Points”, National Review Online, 15 November

2010. http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/253281/bush-s-idecision-pointsi-

michael-barone Accessed 11 February 2011. 105 Jonathan Yardley, “George W. Bush’s ‘Decision Points’: Competent, readable and

flat”, Washington Post, 8 November 2010. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-

dyn/content/article/2010/11/06/AR2010110602835.html Accessed 11 February 2011.

2010.106

Howard’s book shows clearly how, as a direct result of his

being in Washington on 11 September 2001, he became utterly and

emotionally committed to George W. Bush’s cause and, by extension,

the cause of the neoconservatives.107

When he attempts to explain his

consequent actions, Howard lapses into a plodding narrative that, like

the works of the other allied leaders, attempts only to record his version

of his place in history before historians do so.

Donald Rumsfeld’s Known and Unknown: A Memoir was

published in February 2011.108

While Rumsfeld also attempts to write

his own history, he has made a better effort of it by accompanying the

narrative with annotations. While the extent of annotation is moderate,

it does include many memos and official documents, all of which are

also presented on a website designed specifically to complement the

hard-copy book. Many of these memos and documents have been

scanned and are presented in a portable document file (pdf) format

online.109

All of these players and writers and many others that will be

referred to throughout this work, are able to demonstrate, wittingly or

otherwise, the extent to which the neoconservatives influenced the

Bush administration. Between them they weave a narrative that

demonstrates how deeply the neoconservatives had penetrated the most

inner workings and highest offices of the Bush administration. They

show how neoconservatives were able to wield their influence directly,

by virtue of being officers in the administration, and indirectly through

their intellectual influence via think-tanks and commentary and

ideologically sympathetic lobby groups within a tight-knit yet

informally organised network of fellow travellers.

106 John Howard, Lazarus Rising: A Personal and Political Autobiography, (Sydney:

HarperCollins, 2010). 107 Howard, Lazarus Rising, Chapter 31. 108 Donald Rumsfeld, Known and Unknown: A Memoir, (New York: Sentinel/Penguin,

2011). 109 Donald Rumsfeld, The Rumsfeld Papers. http://www.rumsfeld.com Accessed 14

February 2011.

3. NARRATIVE STRUCTURE

While neoconservatives will argue that their actions were a

consequence of the actions of ‘terrorists’, this work will show that 9/11

was used merely as an excuse to bring about a war against Islamic

extremists, to destroy the power of Saddam Hussein in Iraq and to bring

about regime change in Iran. Further, it will demonstrate how this was

contrived in order to benefit the cause of Zionism in Israel. It will be

shown how the neoconservatives’ longstanding and close association

with Israel, both directly via Israeli political parties, particularly the

Likud party, and indirectly via lobby groups in the US, has been used to

influence US foreign policy for the express purpose of supporting

Israel’s own foreign policy interests including their interests in the

occupied West Bank, the Gaza Strip and their dealings with the

Palestinians, the Lebanese and the Syrians.

The work will examine the long history of pre-George W. Bush

era neoconservative intellectual support for Israeli Zionism, including

its support for Israeli expansionism and neoconservative notions of

cultural links with the United States and how those links served Israeli

purposes. It will show how the neoconservatives not only exploited the

cultural divide between the Christian-Judaism of the West and the

world of Islam but actively sought to widen it by highlighting the

misdeeds of Islamic extremists to demonise Islam generally. It will

examine the role of those Americans who were not Jewish, yet used the

alliance created by the neoconservatives to further the interests of US

foreign policy in the Middle East as well as the US corporations that

would benefit from such policies.

The work will begin with overviews of neoconservatism and

neoconservatives, although it will not go into the history of

neoconservatism except where it is necessary to provide background or

historical perspective to the era under discussion. Chapter One will also

explore the Zionist roots of neoconservatism and will describe how and

why those who were not Jewish found themselves allied to the

neoconservative cause.

The second chapter will trace the evolution of twenty-first

century neoconservative foreign policy and will demonstrate how

neoconservatives have intrinsically linked Israel’s interests with those

of the US, using shared values and the ideals of democracy as the basis

for an exceptional, bordering on exclusive, relationship. This section

will show how neoconservatives developed paranoia about anti-

Semitism which they used increasingly in their rhetoric and propaganda

to demonise the left and Islamic radicals. It will also discuss the ways

in which the anti-Semite label has been used by neoconservatives and

Zionists in response to the anti-Zionist trend that developed as a result

of the 2006 Lebanon War and the 2008/2009 Israeli war against Hamas

and the Palestinian people in the Gaza Strip.

Chapter Two will also discuss how the end of the Cold War

brought about a barely perceptible but definite rift in neoconservative

debate triggered to some extent by Francis Fukuyama’s 1998 essay

“The End of History”.110

The rift, as shall be shown in Chapter Three,

was healed as Samuel P. Huntington’s essay “The Clash of

Civilisations?”111

appeared in 1993.

Chapter Three will examine how and why other right-wing

orientated, but diversely motivated organisations and individuals

became allied and subordinate to the neoconservative cause. Some,

such as right-wing religious fundamentalists, were driven by ideology,

while others were motivated by the financial inducements associated

with future wars that they envisaged the neoconservatives seeking.

Chapter Four will examine the events of 9/11 from the

neoconservative point of view and will discuss their controversial role

in the lead up to the invasion of Iraq. It will demonstrate the ways in

which the neoconservatives and their supporters used the events of 9/11

in virtually all of their rhetoric and propaganda to garner both public

and United Nations support for their policies in order to justify the

invasion of Iraq.

110 Francis Fukuyama, “The End of History?” The National Interest, Summer 1989. 111 Samuel P. Huntington, “The Clash of Civilizations?” Foreign Affairs, Vol. 72, No.

3, Summer 1993.

Chapter Five will show how the hopes of the neoconservatives

were dashed in the 2008 Presidential Election and how they have

reacted to a Democratic president. It will also show how the hopes of

the neoconservatives were then re-invigorated by the formation of a

right-wing Zionist government under Likud party leader and Israeli

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. It will demonstrate how the

neoconservatives have attempted to manipulate and influence the

Obama administration in its dealing with Israel’s arch enemy, Iran, who

the right-wing Zionists see as a hurdle to their aspirations for a Greater

Israel that includes the West Bank, the Golan Heights, the Gaza Strip

and, for some, even south Lebanon up to the Litani River, ultimately

being annexed to Israel just as the Golan Heights were after the 1967

war.

Chapter Five will also examine how the Obama administration

has proved to be a thorn in Israel’s side and, as a result, an anathema to

the neoconservatives and their allies. It will examine how the results of

their polices compare with the ideologies and policies that they set out

with and what went wrong with them from their point of view and how

the failure of many of their policies has led to the fracturing of the

neoconservative movement. It will demonstrate how the demise of the

Bush administration and the rise of Netanyahu’s right-wing government

in Israel have exposed the primary motives, and even loyalties, of

neoconservatism, and how the dynamics of Netanyahu-Obama relations

posit the neoconservatives firmly in the Israeli Zionist camp with

regard to US foreign policy in the Middle East particularly with regard

to Israel’s conflict with Iran which runs at odds with Obama’s apparent

policy of diplomacy. It will show how the neoconservatives are using

the rhetoric of Iran’s alleged nuclear weapons program to help the

Israelis convince President Obama – and the rest of the world – that

Iran needs to be attacked in order to effect regime change in order to

bring about ‘peace’ in the Middle East. Finally, the chapter will show

how the neoconservatives hope that the fait accompli of an Israeli pre-

emptive strike against Iran will trigger US action to help the Israelis

bring about regime change in Iran.

Finally, Chapter Six will examine how the neoconservatives

have fared thus far in their cause and show to what extent

neoconservative policy and its consequences were contrived and

preconceived. Some details of this policy were formally adjusted

according to prevailing circumstances, while others evolved

spontaneously as events unfolded in the war against Iraq.

One of the criticisms that has been raised by those that attempt

to debunk the view of many writers who argue that neoconservatives

have used their various positions both within and outside of the Bush

administration to support the Israeli Zionist cause, is that the resources

used as evidence to support such argument have not been fully qualified

and comes mostly from work already in the public domain. This

argument, however, is simply an attempt for political purposes to de-

legitimise work that explores this period of history. While it is true that

there is much yet to be revealed for the historian to build an accurate

narrative of events of the times, historians anxious now to begin that

narrative have far more available to them via the use of the Internet and

electronic archives now than ever they have had before.

By far the greatest resource on neoconservatism is from the

neoconservatives themselves, who seem to have a penchant for

recording every detail of neoconservative thinking and philosophy. One

needs to be aware, however, especially when assessing their views on

foreign policy matters, that there is also a propensity to distort the truth

and even lie in their efforts to manipulate public and political opinion.

For neoconservatives, this is a quite legitimate political technique and a

method espoused by academic Leo Strauss, whose notions regarding

the ‘noble lie’ for a ‘noble cause’ influenced many neoconservatives

who went on to influence the course of events examined in this

study.112

It is unlikely that the official archives of states will allow

historians access to their files soon; nonetheless, there is already

112 Jim George, “The Contradictions of Empire: Leo Strauss, Neoconservatism and US

Foreign Policy: Esoteric Nihilism and the Bush Doctrine”, International Politics, Vol.

42, No. 2, June 2005, pp. 174-202.

abundant evidence available for historians to produce a reasonably

accurate narrative of recent history. In modern times, secrets have a

habit of revealing themselves before officialdom has decided such

secrets may be revealed. The ability for individuals to travel and seek

refuge from retribution has given whistleblowers the courage to tell all,

often revealing secrets their home-state would find embarrassing and

even contradictory to official policy. The Internet has enabled them to

widely disperse knowledge and secrets that could not have been so

easily accessed even a decade ago.

Using the comparatively unprecedented abundance of evidence

which the advent of the Internet has made possible, this work will show

how neoconservatives, by mutual agreement with the Christian right-

wing allied with American-led global corporate elitists together with

right-wing Western governments, attempted to control global affairs in

such a way that they would benefit the interests of all of the parties

involved, but especially the interests of the United States and Israeli

Zionism. It will also show how and why the attempt failed and, by

referring to their contemporary writing, ponder the course they may

take in the future. Central to this is the fact that they still consider

affairs relating to the Middle East, particularly Iran, as ‘unfinished

business’, just as they did at the end of the George H.W. Bush

presidency, when they regarded the continuation of Saddam Hussein’s

power in Iraq after the First Gulf War as ‘unfinished business’.