Transforming the Middle East… or Hogwash?

A Common Sense Editorial

 Jesse Lee

www.opednews.com

With its stated reasons for going to war kaput, namely the MIA WMD and the utterly unsubstantiated link to Al Qaeda, the administration has launched a new PR campaign, attempting to frame the war in Iraq as part of Grand Plan to democratize the Middle East. To those in Washington who had followed the run-up to war, this rhetoric sounds distastefully familiar. It echoes the ideology of the so-called Neoconservative movement, which has been spearheaded by a handful of prominent and behind-the-scenes think tanks, most notably the Project for a New American Century, or PNAC. PNAC has been calling for war in Iraq for many years, deep into the Clinton presidency, and obviously well before 9/11. Their roster has included Wolfowitz, Rumsfeld, Cheney, Perle, and perhaps a dozen other high-ranking administration officials. Don’t believe us? See for your self at:
www.newamericancentury.org/statementofprinciples.htm

A handful of commentators have dared entertain the obvious possibility that the war was motivated by this ideology, and not by the WMD that the administration harped on for over a year. This sort of bait-and-switch would be dastardly enough. To sell the American people on sending their sons and daughters to kill and die on anything short of the real and true rationale is an act as abhorrent as any an American president could undertake. Does Common Sense think that this is the case, and that some Grand Plan for democracy in the Middle East was the real, secret motivation for the war? No. We think it is worse than that.

Let us take a good look at the Middle East and evaluate whether such Grand Plans are at all realistic. When political movers and shakers speak of the Middle East, they are implicitly speaking of one country above all others: Saudi Arabia. Saudi Arabia provided 15 of the 19 hijackers for 9/11, and is by far the greatest breeding ground for anti-American fundamentalism. It also holds 1/3 of the world’s oil underneath its sands. A dangerous combination.
So what would happen if we were to bring democracy to this nation, whose citizens hold approximately a 2-3% approval rating of the US? Robert Baer, a former CIA analyst in the Middle East provides one answer: “Osama bin Laden would be elected in a landslide”. If there were free elections, fundamentalists would be easily elected, and could then use their mind-boggling oil reserves as a powerful political weapon. America’s posture of domination in the region would come to an abrupt halt, and the threat of the Saudis destroying their own oil infrastructure, thereby crippling both the American and world economies, would be a threat equivalent to a nuclear bomb. Especially to an administration which includes 41 oil executives.

So if there are such Grand Plans, the administration better find a way to fence democracy out of Saudi Arabia. Same goes for the United Arab Emirates and Qatar. In fact, throughout the Middle East, even in Syria, the populations of those countries are far more hostile to American interests than are the dictators. Does Mr. Bush really mean to say that he will allow fundamentalists to take control of all of the Middle East oil reserves, and that he will allow them to have fully functioning armies, perhaps including chemical and biological weapons?

No, he doesn’t, and that is why his talk of Grand Plans includes not a single iota of new policy. And are we really to believe that while they were busy crafting grand plans to instill democracy across the entire region, they simply forgot to lay out a plan for how they would do that in Iraq. Don’t forget, there was no plan. Nothing.

Well, that’s not exactly true. There were indeed detailed plans for protecting the oil infrastructure. And with the Saudi Arabian royal family teetering on the brink of being overcome by the fundamentalists in their mists, the real motivation for the war might be apparent.

Faced with the coming possibility that Saudi Arabia would be taken over by fundamentalists, the administration was faced with two possibile options:

1)       Begin a genuine attempt to win the hearts and minds of the Arab people.  If democracy is ever to come to the region, and certainly we all hope it does, then at some point the only tactical option to prevent those nations from becoming fervent ememies of the United States would be to befriend those people, to win their trust, and to gradually bring them into the free human family.

2)       Begin a fierce campaign to dominate the Middle East.  Invading Iraq secured as much as 20% of the world’s oil under US control with Halliburton equipment.  As Robert Kagan, a leading neoconservative said, “We will probably need a major concentration of forces in the Middle East over a long period of time…When we have economic problems, it's been caused by disruptions in our oil supply. If we have a force in Iraq, there will be no disruption in oil supplies.” The war would also establish an intimidating military presence, ready to pounce if things got out of control in Saudi Arabia or elsewhere.

The administration took the second option, and unfortunately it will be very difficult to change course now.  It would be nice if they could restrain themselves from giving their cronies billion dollar contracts (the GOP recently stripped an anti-profiteering amendment from the $87B Iraq spending bill), but it is even more important to shift perspectives.  The administration is now in over its head, it needs to ask for help, and it needs to change course.

Above all though, it is time to start leveling with the American people.  By posing as some sort of Churchill, visionary figure, and by pretending that they did not sell the war on an imminent threat, they insult the American people and disgrace the brave men and women who have put their lives at risk without receiving an honest reason for doing so.

Common Sense is a newsletter containing a bulleted news summary of the most damning mainstream news stories and one opinion piece, chosen or written to be poignant but not strident in tone.  Common Sense is operated by Jesse Lee in conjunction with Rob Kall of www.opednews.com . To receive Common Sense in your inbox every two weeks, email Jesse at commonsense@opednews.com. He co-operates the blog www.moneyjungle.org and is a founding contributor to the platform of 2020 Democrats. This article is copyright by Jesse Lee,published by OpEdNews.com, but permission is granted for reprint in print, email, blog, or web media so long as this entire credit paragraph is attached