WORLD VIEW/Paul GillespieIn assessing President Bush's major speech on Iraq and the Middle East this week, it helps to know more about the American Enterprise Institute, where he delivered it on Wednesday night.
Its senior fellow is Lynne Cheney, wife of the Vice-President. The chairman of its foreign policy programme is Richard Perle, chief defence policy adviser to the Pentagon.
Some 20 of the institute's fellows are in the Bush administration, providing the core of the neo-conservative group which has fought to determine its foreign policy priorities.
Other prominent figures include the Deputy Defence Secretary, Paul Wolfowitz, the Defence Undersecretary, Douglas Feith, and State Department adviser David Wurmser.
Their policy proposals have been pursued with zeal and determination since the mid-1990s and have clearly now become the predominant influence on the President. Their principal positions can be summarised as follows:
- to bring the road to Middle East peace through Baghdad;
- to align US policy with the Likud Party in Israel;
- to cut ties with long-standing US allies Saudi Arabia and Pakistan;
- to oppose direct negotiations with North Korea;
- to provide direct security guarantees to Taiwan;
- to treat China as a security threat.
The preoccupation with Saddam Hussein's Iraq goes back at least to a strategy document Perle, Feith and Wurmser with five others wrote in 1996 for the then prime minister of Israel, Benjamin Netanyahu.
It raised the idea of toppling Saddam which, they said, "could affect the strategic balance in the Middle East profoundly".
Within 48 hours of the September 11th attacks, Perle connected Iraq to those responsible for the atrocity.
A week later, a letter from 40 associates of the Project for an American Century, which shares the institute's building in Washington, argued that the US "war on terror" proclaimed by President Bush must include ousting Saddam "even if evidence does not link him to the attack".
In the following months they built their case. This was done through their successful lobbying:
- for the "axis of evil" State of the Union speech in January 2002, identifying Iraq, Iran and North Korea as potential threats to US security by spreading terrorism;
- for US rejection of the informal Saudi plan for the Middle East one year ago, which revived the land for peace plan of successive UN resolutions and called on Israel to withdraw to its 1967 borders in return for normalisation with the Arab world;
- for indulging the Sharon government's confrontation with the Palestinians, its rejection of Yasser Arafat and its refusal to renew negotiations until violent resistance to its occupation completely stopped;
- for relentless pressure to refocus US policy towards confronting Iraq after the Afghanistan campaign failed to eliminate al-Qaeda, including a willingness to attack unilaterally if Saddam fails to disarm;
- for cherry-picking and dividing potential opposition to such US plans from the European Union's emerging common foreign and security policy as the major alternative pole balancing the US's international hegemony.
It has been an audacious long march through world politics - and a largely successful one.
News this week from North Korea - where the policy approach is being applied to the increased alarm of its neighbours and from Israel, where Sharon has fashioned a coalition with parties which flatly reject a Palestinian state - shows how active and potentially dangerous it is.
US commentators detect many elements of the neo-conservative programme in the Bush speech.
The major one spells out the positive case for regime change behind US plans, but which does not figure in calls at the UN that Iraq disarm.
Kenneth Pollack, a Clinton administration official who has long supported action against Iraq, said a stable and democratic regime there could be a positive example in the region, but that would happen only slowly. He questioned the wisdom of citing this as a rationale for war.
How credible is the demand for disarmament and how can it be evaluated if the real US motivation is regime change and democratic transformation? Such neo-Wilsonian rhetoric invoking post-war Japan and Europe serves to conceal the narrower neo-imperial objectives involved.
They include oil interests; but these should be seen as part of a wider fear which Pollack voiced a year ago in Foreign Affairs that "a nuclear-armed Saddam might wreak havoc in his region and beyond, together with the certainty that he will acquire such weapons eventually if left unchecked."
There is a contradiction between ends and means in the US approach.
While many in the region would welcome democratisation of the Middle East, they do not believe it is best achieved by a US-led regime change in Iraq. This would be more likely to galvanise anti-American nationalism among Arab intellectuals and in the Arab street than to encourage democratic change.
The longer the US presence the more they would be worried. Besides, elections would probably be won by Islamist parties in many countries.
Terrorism, too, would be boosted, not eliminated, in the Middle East, by a US occupation of Iraq, according to many commentators in the region. The longer the military campaign, the more that would be the case.
This would be all the more so given the administration's close political connections to Sharon's new Likud-led government and notwithstanding Bush's stated commitment to "support the creation of a viable Palestinian state".
In order to secure Turkish support, it has been necessary to give its military a guarantee to control operations in the Kurdish area of northern Iraq, reopening long-standing territorial claims.
And such a boost to the Turkish military has made it more difficult to reach an agreement in Cyprus this week, where they have opposed the UN plan for a settlement.
That brings us back to Europe and its agonising disagreements over Iraq. Such contradictions in the US approach mean war is still not inevitable. There remains space for an alternative political approach to disarming Iraq and encouraging change in the Middle East. It can come only from a Europe capable of overcoming its own contradictory approaches.