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Thursday, Nov 26, 2009
They're accused of being war-crazed fanatics. But the elite group calling for Saddam's destruction is driven by a deep sense of mission -- one now shared by President Bush.
Dec 5, 2001 | In a 12th-floor office suite full of foreign policy luminaries and embassy representatives nibbling sandwiches at white-linen-covered tables, James Woolsey, former director of the Central Intelligence Agency, was standing behind a lectern arguing his case for taking the war on terrorism to Iraq.
"It's the regime, stupid," Woolsey told his audience at the Nixon Center, a national-security-focused Washington think tank affiliated with the Nixon Library. "We should start with the mission: remove the Ba'athist regime of Saddam Hussein. Both of Saddam's sons kill people for fun. We need to get rid of the entire regime. Then we should go to our allies in the region and say, 'We're going to destroy Saddam's Baathist regime. Is there something you can do to help?'"
Woolsey, a former arms control negotiator who served unhappily in the first Clinton administration as CIA director until he resigned in 1995, has been making this case since he left public office, but suddenly he has new influence. With the election of President Bush, a half-dozen like-minded Iraq hard-liners who during Clinton's reign took to the op-ed pages, think tank panels and academia assumed key positions in the Pentagon, National Security Council and State Department, where they have managed to catapult Iraq to the top of the foreign policy agenda, in the midst of the war on terrorism.
Chief among them is Paul Wolfowitz, the brainy, Brooklyn-born deputy defense secretary who shortly after Sept. 11 established a special Pentagon commission that sent Woolsey to Britain to investigate claims of alleged links between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaida. Also prominent in the Iraq hawks group are Richard Perle, former assistant defense secretary of defense during the Reagan administration who now chairs the Defense Policy Board, a Pentagon advisory group; deputy National Security Council advisor Stephen Hadley, and Pentagon officials Doug Feith and Peter Rodman. Outside government are influential writers and intellectuals like Weekly Standard editor William Kristol; Tom Donnolly of the Project for the New American Century, a tiny but influential neo-conservative think tank; and Iraq expert Laurie Mylroie, whose book "Study of Revenge" made the case for Iraq's involvement in al-Qaida's 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center.
Most agree with Woolsey's prescription for Iraq: Don't invade the country, but instead aggressively back the Iraqi National Congress and other opposition groups seeking to topple Saddam Hussein. Woolsey's law firm, Shea & Gardner, happens to be the INC's registered lobbyist with the Justice Department, and Woolsey is a staunch defender of using the "Afghan model" in Iraq, by providing financial support, arms and training for the INC and other opposition groups, and eventually using air power and special ground forces to help target precision guided bombs -- much the way the U.S. has helped the Northern Alliance and other opposition leaders drive the Taliban out of key strongholds in Afghanistan.
These ideas aren't new: Wolfowitz and Woolsey advocated supporting the Iraqi opposition during the Gulf War. But then the first Bush administration abandoned its goal of toppling Saddam, despite earlier promises to support opposition groups, and those groups were subsequently crushed by the ruthless Iraqi dictator. The Clinton administration actually paid lip service to some of the hawks' ideas about nurturing the Iraqi opposition, but the group got its most sympathetic hearing with the new Bush administration. And since the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, the Iraq hawks have gone on the offensive.
With Wolfowitz, Hadley and other Iraq hard-liners inside government somewhat muzzled by their official roles in the administration -- which to date, despite sympathetic noises, is not committed to extending the war on terror to Iraq -- it's fallen to Woolsey and Perle, who serve as Pentagon consultants but are officially outside the administration, to lead the hawks' public relations blitz. They've mobilized an informal network of mostly Republican foreign policy hands, Iraqi opposition groups, neo-conservative international interventionists, and defenders of Israel, all of whom see in the destruction at ground zero and the subsequent U.S. war against terror a long-sought opportunity to put Iraq back at the top of the U.S. agenda.
"In many ways, [the confrontation with Saddam] is the first real conflict after the Cold War, and its resolution will set the tone for America's relations with the international community for a very long time," says Francis Brooke, an American advisor to the Iraqi National Congress. "A lot of people see it as a demonstration project for this very reason. If we don't show resolve this time with Saddam, it will cost us down the line. We should have resolved it. When you fight a war, you ought to finish it."
The Iraq hawks "are all obsessed with making America great," says Paul Glastris, editor in chief of the Washington Monthly, and a former Clinton speech writer. "It's all about the reemergence of America as an imperial power -- in a good way."
