I heard Gerard Henderson this morning on Radio National talking about the impact of the neo-cons on the Bush administration. I picked up my ears, as this word has filtered through the layers of media flows of late. I thought it would be interesting to see what he said, considering that he is marketed as having his finger on the political pulse of Australian political life. For those who don't know abou these things, Gerard has the inside running and he just a phone call away from the movers and shakers. We are meant to be impressed. So if anyone in Australia knew what the world looked from the eye of the US eagle it would be Gerard.

Gerard sold himself well in his few minutes on air. He mentioned names, background and personal encounters of the neo-con movement. It was impressive to someone like me whose lot in life is to live on the margins of academia and public life. He then discounted their influence on the Bush administration. There's no need to bother finding about them was the message that came across the airwaves. I went back to eating my breakfast.

Gerard made no mention of geopolitics, power strategies in the Middle East, or even the transfer of Palestinans by the Israeli state. Gerard also gave no indication of the theoretical strategic framework developed by the neo-cons within which the Bush adminstration is working. Gerard is good on assessing the political chit chat of the day but is poor on the concept. He has no idea about the movement of the concept that this weblog of public philosophy goes on about. From the perpective of some living on the margins and anxious to keep their criticsl distance from everything, Gerard sounded as if he was out of his depth on all the geo-political stuff. Then most commentators are. It is political philosophy, and few people in public life in Australia have much time for philosophy. Diehard empiricists one and all with no feeling for the conceptual structure of culture in my considered judgement.

The concerns of this article by Josh Marshall, who also works over at Talking Points Memo, is what Gerard should have addressed this morning, if he knew his stuff. Marshall addresses the possibility of future chaos in the Middle East, due to US neo-con geopolitical strategy in the region. This is what Josh Marshall says about the US neo-con Middle East strategy:

"In their view, invasion of Iraq was not merely, or even primarily, about getting rid of Saddam Hussein. Nor was it really about weapons of mass destruction, though their elimination was an important benefit. Rather, the administration sees the invasion as only the first move in a wider effort to reorder the power structure of the entire Middle East. Prior to the war, the president himself never quite said this openly. But hawkish neoconservatives within his administration gave strong hints.

In short, the administration is trying to roll the table--to use U.S. military force, or the threat of it, to reform or topple virtually every regime in the region, from foes like Syria to friends like Egypt, on the theory that it is the undemocratic nature of these regimes that ultimately breeds terrorism. So events that may seem negative--Hezbollah for the first time targeting American civilians; U.S. soldiers preparing for war with Syria--while unfortunate in themselves, are actually part of the hawks' broader agenda. Each crisis will draw U.S. forces further into the region and each countermove in turn will create problems that can only be fixed by still further American involvement, until democratic governments--or, failing that, U.S. troops--rule the entire Middle East."

This develops the view of Gary at his public opinion weblog. It provides the background to the thesis of blowback from the Iraqi war on the Indonesian region, and the impact this will have on Australia. Of course, blowback from the Iraqi war is what is denied by the Howard government; denied in the sense of a deception of the hawks in the Howard government deceiving the Australian citizens about pre-emptive strike, the destablizing of Indonesia, launching pre-emptive strikes in Indonesia, and making Islam the enemy. However, blowback is the reason why many foreign policy people, defence analysts, intelligence officers, including many in the Department of Foreign Affairs, view the Howard Government's foreign policy with alarm. And rightfully so.

Many reject the chaos scenario in the Middle East out of hand. They talk about bold American action in Iraq leading to the democratization of the Middle East. Theirs is an argument for hope. However, as Marshall says, it is the heady vision of the broad and radical neo-con initiative could also bring chaos and bloodshed on a massive scale. The Australian hawks have a quick response to this: a full-scale confrontation between the United States and political Islam is inevitable. So why not have it now, on our terms, rather than later, on theirs?Of course you never hear it spoken in public by a member of the Howard Government.

What Gerard Henderson did on Radio National was gatekeeping. He cover all of the above up, with his 'no need to worry' script that said the US neo-cons don't amount to much. In saying this he was basically following Howard's script of deflect, deflect; cover, cover, cover; dissemble, dissemble. Keep the wraps on. Keep the covers there. Blowback from the neo-strategy in the Middle East would not play well with Australian public opinion.

The strategic intellectual framework is important because it gives us an insight into how the Australian hawks (eg., John Howard) think. They basically accept the US neo-con view or political ideology.

Joshua Marshall is very clear on what this stands for in the Middle East.

Marshall describes the neo-con ideology as follows:

"The Middle East today is like the Soviet Union 30 years ago. Politically warped fundamentalism is the contemporary equivalent of communism or fascism. Terrorists with potential access to weapons of mass destruction are like an arsenal pointed at the United States. The primary cause of all this danger is the Arab world's endemic despotism, corruption, poverty, and economic stagnation. Repressive regimes channel dissent into the mosques, where the hopeless and disenfranchised are taught a brand of Islam that combines anti-modernism, anti-Americanism, and a worship of violence that borders on nihilism.

Unable to overthrow their own authoritarian rulers, the citizenry turns its fury against the foreign power that funds and supports these corrupt regimes to maintain stability and access to oil: the United States...Trying to "manage" this dysfunctional Islamic world, as Clinton attempted and Colin Powell counsels us to do, is as foolish, unproductive, and dangerous as détente was with the Soviets, the hawks believe. Nor is it necessary, given the unparalleled power of the American military. Using that power to confront Soviet communism led to the demise of that totalitarianism and the establishment of democratic (or at least non-threatening) regimes from the Black Sea to the Baltic Sea to the Bering Strait. Why not use that same power to upend the entire corrupt Middle East edifice and bring liberty, democracy, and the rule of law to the Arab world?"

One can add that Australian hawks have rejected the Hawke/Keating view of an independent foreign policy within the US alliance, regional cooperation and dialogue and working through the UN. They are in favor of using power against potentially hostile states and doing so in a unilateral fashion and getting the Islamic militants in Indonesia before these terrorists get us.

Marshall then draws attention to what is wrong with the US. necocon strategy. He makes some good points.

1. "every time a Western or non-Muslim country has put troops into Arab lands to stamp out violence and terror, it has awakened entire new terrorist organizations and a generation of recruits. Why will it be any different this time?"

2. The cavalier call for regime change, however, runs into a rather obvious problem of the tyrannies in the Middle East being home grown, and the U.S. government has supported them, rightly or wrongly, for decades, even as we've ignored (in the eyes of Arabs) the plight of the Palestinians. Topple the pro-Western autocracies in these countries, in other words, and you won't get pro-Western democracies but anti-Western tyrannies.

3.Laying down the law and being a global cop will not be enough. Keeping order to prevent chaos in an anarchic requires the creation of a de facto American empire in the Middle East. This will create political resistance in which radical Arab political movements try to drive the US out.

4. Iran will not take the establsihment of US power in the region lying down, nor will the conservative in power in Iraq embrace the deepening of liberal democracy in that country without a fight.

5. creating a democratic, self-governing Iraq will not easy given the ethnic conflict within Iraq between Kurds, Shi'ite and Sunni Muslems?

Marshall's judgement is that the Anglo-Americans are stepping into a hornets nest with this neo-con strategy---- what Marshall calls

"giving a few good whacks to a hornets' nest because you want to get them out in the open and have it out with them once and for all. Ridding the world of Islamic terrorism by rooting out its ultimate sources---Muslim fundamentalism...."

He then mentions a central problem. Bush, Howard or Blair have not leveled with their citizens that The Anglo-Americans are engaged in is a clean-sweep approach to the Middle East, neo-con style. All that these politicians have presented to their citizens is a war to depose Saddam Hussein in order to keep him from acquiring weapons of mass destruction. The eason for the deception? The Bush administration's grand neo-con geo-political strategy in the Middle East would be almost impossible to sell to the American public. The White House knows that.

Nor can John Howard sell it to Australian citizens. Tony Blair is in the same boat in Britain. So the Anglo-American leaders haven't really tried. Instead, they have focused on getting us into Iraq knowing that this action will set off a sequence of events with enormous conseqences, which they hope to be able to shape in line with their agenda. The problem for Australia is that the Indonesians and Malaysians know this. They've figured it out. And they are not happy.

Comments

Posted by: Eddie Thomas | March 30, 2003 12:41 AM