[ Friday, April 11, 2003 ]
THE WAR BEHIND CLOSED DOORS
PBS VIDEO LINK BELOW: EXCELLENT! Make yourselves a nice cup of coffee
and watch this enlightening video (like visine for the brain) about
what the HAWKS (the RUMSFELDS and the WOLFOWITZES)(the two top
christian and jewish Zionists)(THE A-TEAM of ZIONISTS) hidden agendas
are all about.
While the U.S. stands at war with Iraq, many are now warning about
the potential consequences: the danger of getting bogged down in
Baghdad, the prospect of longtime allies leaving America's side, the
possibility of chaos in the Middle East, the threat of renewed
terrorism.
But the Bush administration insiders who helped define the "Bush
Doctrine," and who have argued most forcefully for war, are
determined to set a course that will remake America's role in the
world. Having served three Republican presidents over the course of
two decades, this group of close advisers -- among them Vice
President Dick Cheney, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, and
perhaps most importantly, Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz -
- believe that the removal of Saddam Hussein is the necessary first
act of a new era.
In "The War Behind Closed Doors," FRONTLINE traces the inside story
of how those advisers -- calling themselves "neo-Reaganites," "neo-
conservatives," or simply "hawks" -- set out to achieve the most
dramatic change in American foreign policy in half a century: a grand
strategy, formally articulated in the National Security Strategy
released last September, that is based on preemption rather than
containment and calls for the bold assertion of American power and
influence around the world.
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Through interviews with key Republican insiders, foreign policy
analysts, and longtime White House observers, the report reveals how
America got to the brink of war with Iraq -- and how a war and its
aftermath will put these advisers' big idea to the test.
"The War Behind Closed Doors" follows a long-running policy battle
between two of Washington's most powerful insiders and the
philosophies they represent: Secretary of State Colin Powell and
Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz. Powell, who held the top
military job at the Pentagon under President George H.W. Bush and
other powerful posts at the highest levels of government, is a
cautious realist who represents the establishment's abiding belief in
diplomacy and the containment of foreign enemies. Wolfowitz, who
built a career as a smart and tough hardliner at the Departments of
State and Defense, champions the idea of preemption, striking first
to defend America and to project its democratic values.
At the time the Gulf War ended in 1991, Powell was the chairman of
the Joint Chiefs of Staff and Wolfowitz was deputy secretary of
defense for policy, the third-highest ranking civilian in then-
Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney's Pentagon. Powell was instrumental
in stopping the war short of going to Baghdad and removing Saddam
Hussein. Wolfowitz and other hardliners were less than enthusiastic
about that decision.
"Paul Wolfowitz believed then that it was a mistake to end the war,"
says Richard Perle, chairman of the influential Defense Policy Board
and a veteran of the Reagan administration. "They underestimated the
way in which Saddam was able to cling to power, and the means he
would use to remain in power. That was the mistake."
Soon after the Gulf War, Wolfowitz supervised the drafting of a set
of classified policy guidelines, called a Defense Planning Guidance,
for how the U.S. should deal with Saddam Hussein and the rest of the
world in the post-Cold War era. Wolfowitz believed containment was an
old idea -- a relic of the Cold War -- and that America should use
its overwhelming military might preemptively, and unilaterally, if
need be. His draft of these policy guidelines was leaked to the press
in 1992.
"Inside the U.S. defense planning establishment, there were people
who thought this thing was nuts," Barton Gellman of The Washington
Post tells FRONTLINE. "The first draft said that the United States
would be prepared to preempt the use of nuclear, biological, or
chemical weapons by any other nation, even, the document said, 'Where
our interests are otherwise not engaged.' ... It spoke of punishing
or retaliating for that use, but it also said 'preempt.' This was the
first time."
"Wolfowitz basically authored a doctrine of American hegemony," says
historian and foreign policy expert John Lewis Gaddis, "a doctrine in
which the United States would seek to maintain the position that it
came out of the Cold War with, at which there were no obvious or
plausible challengers to the United States. That was considered quite
shocking in 1992. So shocking, in fact, that the Bush administration,
at that time, disavowed it."
As the first President Bush left office, Wolfowitz's draft plan went
into the bottom drawer, but it would not be forgotten.
"The War Behind Closed Doors" goes on to recount how the Clinton
administration struggled to deal with Saddam Hussein's defiance of
U.S. and U.N. containment policies, while hawks in the
neoconservative wing of the Republican Party grew increasingly
impatient.
With the election of George W. Bush in 2000, however, the hawks saw a
new opportunity to implement a stronger, forward-leaning American
stance in the world. Yet during the new president's first year in
office, skirmishing between Colin Powell's State Department and
Rumsfeld's Pentagon -- where Wolfowitz is now the second-ranking
civilian -- left the adminstration's foreign policy stalled in a kind
of internal gridlock.
All that would change on Sept. 11, 2001.
Four days after the attacks on New York and the Pentagon, President
Bush and his Cabinet held a war council at Camp David. "From the
first moments after Sept. 11, there was a group of people, both
inside the administration and out, who believed that the war on
terrorism should target Iraq -- in fact, should target Iraq first,"
says Kenneth Pollack, author of The Threatening Storm: The Case for
Invading Iraq (2002) and a former member of the National Security
Council staff in the Clinton administration.
But Colin Powell and Gen. Henry Shelton, chairman of the Joint
Chiefs, were determined to rein in the hawks. Powell's argument --
that an international coalition could only be assembled for a war
against Al Qaeda and the Taliban in Afghanistan, not an invasion of
Iraq -- won the day, and Iraq was put on the back burner.
Yet President Bush had made it clear that the U.S. would not stop at
pursuing terrorists and bringing them to justice. "We will make no
distinction between the terrorists who committed these acts and those
who harbor them," the president told the nation on the evening of
Sept. 11.
Four months later, with the Taliban defeated and Al Qaeda largely
dispersed, Bush was ready to move on to the next phase of the war on
terrorism. In his State of the Union address, he laid the groundwork
for an invasion of Iraq, tying Saddam Hussein's regime to terrorism
and weapons of mass destruction.
"States like these," Bush declared, "and their terrorist allies
constitute an axis of evil arming to threaten the peace of the
world. ... The United States of America will not permit the world's
most dangerous regimes to threaten us with the world's most
destructive weapons."
The stage was set. Phase two was underway, and preemption would get
its test case. The president had set a course for the U.S. to use its
military power not only to topple Saddam Hussein but to promote
democracy in Iraq and the rest of the Middle East. Wolfowitz and the
hawks, by all appearances, had succeeded.
"I wrote a piece in the Post two days after the State of the Union,"
recalls William Kristol, editor of the influential neoconservative
magazine The Weekly Standard, "saying we've just been present at a
very unusual moment: the creation of a new American foreign policy."
In the thirteen months since that speech, the Bush administration has
moved steadily toward war with Iraq, though Colin Powell was able to
convince the president to seek U.N. backing. Whether that approval is
won or not, it is clear that this administration intends to alter
America's strategic relationship to the world.
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art [11:23 PM]
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