(Fwd) Wolfy 2: Crits from the principled-Right

[Patrick Bond <pbond@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

(Anti-imperialist conservatives are generally good value.)

----- Original Message -----
From: Memo on the Margin
To: Wanniski.com Subscribers
Sent: Friday, March 18, 2005 10:03 PM
Subject: Letter from Lisbon, re Wolfowitz

Letter from Lisbon, re Wolfowitz

Mar 18 2005

Memo To: Website Fans, Browsers, Clients
From: Jude Wanniski
Re: A European View

Earlier this month I spent a weekend in Lisbon, Portugal, at a NATO workshop
organized by Dr. Mendo Castro Henriques, director of the Portugal`s National
Defense Institute. Paul Wolfowitz was discussed in the course of the
proceedings, attended by scholars, military men, political figures from the
Mediterranean states. Someone even brought up the rumor that Wolfowitz was
being considered for the World Bank, but I noted another report that he was
going to remain at the Pentagon. The room seemed cheered by my observation
that the neo-cons might be in decline given the appointment of Bob Zoellick
to be deputy to Condoleezza Rice at State. When I wrote my memo on the
margin earlier this week about Wolfowitz actually getting the World Bank
appointment, I sent a copy to Professor Henriques and asked if he would
share his view with me. Here is his most thoughtful response, with
surprising references to George Kennen, the legendary American diplomat and
Cold War strategist, who died just yesterday at 101.

Dear Jude:

I read your brilliant note on the margin about Wolfowitz` election to the
World Bank and I am answering to your solicitation of my view. Of course you
know better than me the implications of his choice and you prove how the
non-expert is a good tool for the dark forces behind him. On the other hand,
he may be the inevitable man. The correlation of forces that enabled him to
be chosen indicates that, perhaps no alternative was possible. Let me say
why.

In Washington, the neo-cons pretend to make grand new policy. In fact, it is
perhaps just another day in US hegemony, with a big difference, of course,
because it is becoming increasingly malignant. In 1949, after George
Kennan`s Long Telegram, NSC 68 announced global hegemony. Only the U.S.
government had resources to maintain world order, which required a massive
warfare state and a permanent global military and CIA presence. In 1949, the
U.S. elite established global institutions, such as a world court, a world
central bank, (Wolfowitz` heritage) a world economic planner, and a world
police force. That was contention Number 1.

There was a second dimension in Kennan`s contention: Contain yourselves in
order not to imitate the preposterous procedures of the Soviet empire. That
would be contention Number 2. Yet, no one doubted the glories of the
escalating welfare-warfare-national security state. The only critics were
Marxists. No isolationists; no La Follette`s independents with the Wisconsin
idea; no Southern Agrarians. No anti-socialist element in American life
could be anything other than pro-expansion.

George Kennan`s two meanings of contention were abided during the Cold War
and the system worked until there were no more adversaries. The Cold War was
a Western civil war: democratic-liberal States and political parties against
socialist-democratic States and parties. A Peace Treaty did not follow the
end of Cold War. As you say, Jude, diplomacy did not substitute for warfare.

In Europe de-marxization was cynical and the old Left imperialist cronies
united with the new Right neo-con trendies. The US was unable to avoid
international political conflicts. Meanwhile, the moral legitimacy of
government, its officials, and its policies was on the wane. Politicians as
a class, and not just one party, are deeply distrusted and detested.

Non-voting - and switching vote - became a form of secession from a system
that offers the illusion of democratic participation.

In the 80`s, Jude, your group won the "supply-side economics" battle. The US
economy recuperated and the world benefited. Technological developments
outpaced the ability of government to control them. The public rushed for
the capital markets. Private arbitration replaced government courts. Market
forces overwhelm government power on a daily basis. Nobody in Washington
believes in Keynesian fiscal planning.

Yet, in the 90`s , in the wake of the "War that was not concluded by a
Peace" came Bosnia, Gulf I, Somalia, Liberia, and the US government switched
from welfare state to warfare state. The growth in government spending in
arms procurements increased dramatically. 9/11 was just an upgrading of the
process. The power elite became disconnected from government. They make
fortunes by attention to the needs of the consumer, and through a
competitive struggle. They witnessed the power of the market economy to
transform society and individual lives, and have seen nothing but failure
from government programs. This corporate elite is disconnected from the idea
and regulatory apparatus of the nation. (see Mel Gibson`s Patriot).

So there can be an economic boom, a soaring stock market, and a very low
unemployment rate, but the Fed keeps boosting the money supply and
petro-dollars are all round. The old ladies in Tokyo, the astute wahabite
Saudis and Gulf people and now Chinese "capitalist patriots" in Shangai or
Singapore are supporting the declining value of the dollar on international
exchange. You, and the Mundell school - know better how poor states in the
world keep paying for the 1971deregulation.

In time, the boom will bust. In the next recession, the forces of government
may be unable to impose the fiscal and regulatory planning that they once
enacted. Why? Because the state is in the wane, absolutely eroded. To impose
a reversal of trends in government power requires a consensus in favor of
government "solutions" that no longer exists. The "state is too small for
big issues, and too big for small ones"

We witness again the process that began in the late 1980s, when socialist
regimes crumbled despite every prediction about their permanence. The
anti-state forces are working out in different and unpredictable ways. The
foundations of all-round statism collapsed. A malign US Empire is the
inevitable solution to keep big government and an artificial good economy.

In this context, Wolfowitz is the inevitable man and he stands as another
icon for the expiring of freedom in our time. If pseudo-intellectuals like
Wolfowitz -and businessmen like Shultz and others you mention - become money
grabbers instead of law abiders; and if real intellectuals are silenced or
put into dissidence, the U.S power elite becomes singularly cynic and may
provoke a real tragedy, a conflict with no issue. Pearl Harbour, Vietnam and
9/11 were followed by victories. They were no tragedies. I think you must be
prepared for real tragedies, at home or abroad. American dissidents are the
most important to the world because the US is atop the pyramid of power.
Shall we see them winning or just resisting?

Mendo

* * * * *

Wolfowitz at the World Bank

Memo To: Website Fans, Browsers, Clients
From: Jude Wanniski
Re: A Perfect Fit

If you really don't know what the "World Bank" is all about, you would think
that President Bush was joking in nominating Paul Wolfowitz to be the new
president of the Bank, replacing Jim Wolfensohn. One of the chief architects
of the Iraq war, Wolfowitz is a political theorist, a 61-year-old man who
spent most of his adult life at blackboards and lecterns teaching students
about international politics. He may know how to operate an Automatic Teller
Machine when in need of ready cash, but he knows absolutely nothing about
banking. Wolfensohn, who was a New York investment banker before President
Clinton named him to the post a decade ago, at least knows something about
banking. His partner in New York, to which I suppose he will return, is Paul
Volcker, the former chairman of the Federal Reserve, our nation's central
bank. Wolfie the Warrior, by contrast, is the lifetime sidekick, even
protégé, of Richard Perle, probably the most important intellectual in the
service of the military-industrial complex. If you want to know how
Professor Wolfowitz got the job, follow the money.

That's what the World Bank is all about. It was created as an adjunct of the
United Nations at the end of World War II, along with its brother
institution, the International Monetary Fund. On paper, its function was to
lend money to developing countries to help them grow. Its real job has been
to serve the interests of the major money-center banks and the multinational
corporations who make the big bucks in World Bank development projects. The
Bank, which is really a "fund," persuades a poor country like Ghana, for
example, to build a new industrial complex in order make stuff for export.
It will lend the money to Ghana -- which it gets from global taxpayers
including you and me -- and arrange for the complex to be built by one of
the favored corporations in the military-industrial complex. The list always
includes Bechtel Corporation, Halliburton, and Kellogg Brown & Root, a
division of Halliburton. These outfits go in and build the projects because
the locals have no expertise.

In my January 23 memo in this space, "Confessions of an Economic Hit Man," I
remarked on the recent book by John Perkins, who explains in some detail the
mechanics of this gigantic money machine. It not only promotes unnecessary
industrial complexes in Ghana, which rust away in bankruptcy when they prove
to be uneconomic. The aim of the military-industrial complex is not only
"industrial," but also military. The name most closely associated with
Halliburton, of course, is Vice President Cheney, who was Defense Secretary
in the first Gulf War, with Paul Wolfowitz even then at his side (urging
all-out war with Iraq even after Saddam put up the white flag and retreated
to Baghdad before the war began!!) Rats.

The name most associated with Bechtel is George P. Shultz, once its top dog,
now a mere director. Shultz was Treasury Secretary under Richard Nixon
(helping talk him into floating the U.S. dollar), Secretary of State under
Ronald Reagan, and currently a member of the Defense Policy Board, which
until last year Richard Perle chaired.

Shultz also introduced Governor George W. Bush to Condoleezza Rice, who in
turn introduced Paul Wolfowitz to Governor Bush back in 1999. Shultz of
course knew at the time that Wolfie and Perle and their neo-con Cabal were
planning a war in Iraq, and we know nice, little "doable" wars (Wolfie's
word), are meat and potatoes for the military-industrial complex. Instead of
squeezing nickels and dimes out of the taxpayers to persuade Ghana to build
a steel mill it doesn't need and can't run, even little wars run into the
billions. And everyone gets into the act. The arms makers who produce
airplanes, tanks, guns, jeeps and humvees get to blow up a country (like
Iraq) and Bechtel and Halliburton come in right behind to rebuild it. In
announcing the Wolfowitz appointment today, President Bush said the World
Bank is a big organization and Wolfowitz has experience running a big
organization, the Pentagon!! As far as the military-industrial complex is
concerned, Wolfowitz did a FANTASTIC job. He was only expected to plan for a
$30 billion war and he screwed up so badly that it is now a $200 billion
war, and counting. Anyone who can screw up that badly deserves a promotion,
to the World Bank.

So you see it doesn't really matter that Wolfowitz doesn't know the first
thing about banking or the economics of development projects. He will sit
behind the biggest desk at the Bank and take the telephone calls from the
Big Banks and the Multinationals, telling him what to do, and providing him
with experts like John Perkins, who did the actual dirty work as an economic
hit man, and now writes his confessions. When the White House needs a big
favor for one of its big hitters, it need only put in a call to Wolfie, who
will throw the right switch. That's exactly the way it worked with Jim
Wolfensohn these past ten years, and if you don't believe me, look around
and you will note how many poor countries got poorer during his reign, and
how many big bucks were made at Bechtel and Halliburton.

There will of course be complaints from various global diplomats about the
obvious incompetence of Wolfowitz, just as there were puzzled
head-scratchings around the world about the incompetence of Condi Rice as
Secretary of State or John Bolton as UN Ambassador. But money talks in all
the places where the directors of the World Bank live, and they will be
advised to clam up by the local military-industrial money machines. Perle
will also have his pals at The Weekly Standard and Fox News speculate that
when Condi is President, Wolfie will be her veep (which is how it happened
we've seen talk of Condi for President in 2008). Nor can we expect any
complaints from Congress, because in one way or another there is too much
money at stake, too many reputations looking toward bigtime lobbying jobs
when its time to give up a seat in Congress.

If this seems harsh, as if I'm writing about something new under the rocks
on which our Uncle Sam perches, I suggest you read my 1978 book, "The Way
the World Works," which describes how the British Empire worked in exactly
this fashion. My best example was the first multinational corporations, the
British railroad builders. Once they ran out of places to build rail lines
in the U.K., they persuaded Parliament to promote railroads in the colonies,
and were enormously successful in talking the Raj into criss-crossing India
with railroads in the mid-19th century. It was one thing in England, where
the companies could only build where there was a clear sign the line would
be profitable, because it was their own money at risk. In India, the locals
borrowed the money from the Bank of England and hired the builders to put in
rail lines that couldn't possibly be profitable. India was burdened with
debts from these schemes well into the 20th century.

Even after it gained independence in 1948, India was persuaded by British
and American economists to keep tax rates high and to devalue the rupee, to
keep them poor and unable to compete with the big guys. Who did the British
and American economists work for? Why the World Bank, of course, and also
the IMF, whose job is to go into the poor countries when they can't pay back
their loans, and lend them the money to do so -- as long as they agree to
raise taxes again, devalue their currency, and build new industrial
complexes that are constructed by Bechtel and Halliburton.

So you see why it makes perfect sense to have Wolfowitz at the World Bank.
He's terrific at doing wars, and wars are much more profitable than
nickel-and-dime industrial projects. That's the way the world works. Always
has been.

* * * * *

Catastrophic success
The problem with Paul Wolfowitz isn't that he's an evil genius -- it's that
he has been consistently wrong about foreign policy for 30 years.
- - - - - - - - - - - -
By Michael Lind

March 17, 2005  |  The nomination of Paul Wolfowitz to be president of the
World Bank, following his commission of a long and costly series of blunders
as deputy secretary of defense in George W. Bush's first term, comes as no
surprise to those familiar with his career. Wolfowitz is the Mr. Magoo of
American foreign policy. Like the myopic cartoon character, Wolfowitz
stumbles onward blindly and serenely, leaving wreckage and confusion behind.
Critics are wrong to portray Wolfowitz as a malevolent genius. In fact, he's
friendly, soft-spoken, well meaning and thoughtful. He would be the model of
a scholar and a statesman but for one fact: He is completely inept. His
three-decade career in U.S. foreign policy can be summed up by the term that
President Bush coined to describe the war in Iraq that Wolfowitz promoted
and helped to oversee: a "catastrophic success."
Even the greatest statesman makes some mistakes. But Wolfowitz is perfectly
incompetent. He is the Mozart of ineptitude, the Einstein of incapacity. To
be sure, he has his virtues, the foremost of which is consistency. He has
been consistently wrong about foreign policy for 30 years.
In the 1970s and 1980s, as a member of the Committee on the Present Danger
and "Team B," Wolfowitz and his allies, such as Richard Perle, argued that
the decrepit Soviet Union was vastly more powerful than the CIA claimed it
was. After the Soviet Union dissolved, it turned out that the CIA had
exaggerated Soviet strength.
More than anyone else, Wolfowitz is associated with the neoconservative
fantasy of a planetary Pax Americana. This strategy, originally called
"reassurance," first surfaced in leaked Pentagon planning documents in 1992,
in which Wolfowitz, working for then Defense Secretary Dick Cheney, had a
hand. The rest of the world reacted with outrage to the implication that
Europe and Asia should remain permanent American protectorates. Embarrassed,
the first president Bush and Secretary of State James Baker hastily
disavowed this strategy.
Unfortunately, no bad idea ever dies. Wolfowitz spent the Clinton years,
while he was the dean of the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced
Strategic Studies, at the center of a network of neoconservative policy
intellectuals, political appointees and mouthpieces like William Kristol and
Charles Krauthammer devoted to maintaining U.S. hegemony in a "unipolar
world." The influence of Wolfowitz and his fellow neoconservatives is clear
in President Bush's 2002 National Security Strategy, which calls for the
United States to dissuade "potential adversaries from pursuing a military
build-up in the hopes of surpassing, or equaling, the power of the United
States." Note the language. Not "surpassing, or equaling, the power" of a
coalition of states, like the alliances in which America took part in the
world wars and the Cold War. No, the United States had to adopt as its motto
the explanation of the single Texas Ranger dispatched to quell a mob: "One
riot, one Ranger."
Inadvertently proving that talent always skips a generation, Wolfowitz and
his neoconservative allies persuaded Bush to pursue two policies his wiser
father had rejected as imprudent: a bid for unilateral world domination and
going all the way to Baghdad. By adopting the unilateral hegemony strategy
that Wolfowitz favored, the younger Bush alienated most of America's
traditional allies and gave credibility to anti-Americans everywhere. By
going to Baghdad, as Wolfowitz wanted, the younger Bush exposed the limits
of U.S. military power to America's enemies and the world as a whole. That
not inconsiderable asset, the mystique of American power, is a casualty of
the Iraq war.
At least Wolfowitz and his neoconservative allies have been consistent.
Since the Cold War ended, they have exaggerated American power in the same
way that they exaggerated Soviet power during the Cold War. As if to prove
the old adage that people come to resemble their enemies, these former cold
warriors treat the United States as a twin of the Soviet Union -- a military
empire contemptuous of international law, with satellites instead of allies,
justifying wars in its spheres of influence by appeals to ideology
("democracy" rather than "socialism"). In the form of the concentration
camps for detainees in Cuba, Iraq and elsewhere run by Donald Rumsfeld's and
Wolfowitz's Pentagon, the neoconservatives even provided the United States
with a gulag of its own.
Wrong about geopolitics in general, Wolfowitz has been wrong about Iraq in
particular. Unembarrassed by their ridiculous overestimation of Soviet
strength, Wolfowitz and other veterans of the Committee for the Present
Danger in the late 1990s took part in the Project for the New American
Century. They proceeded to exaggerate the alleged threat to the U.S. from
the bankrupt statelet left in Saddam Hussein's hands after the Gulf War even
more shamelessly than they had hyped the Soviet menace. Focusing on Saddam
and regional threats to Israel, Wolfowitz and the other strategic geniuses
of the PNAC circle never mentioned Osama bin Laden.
With myopia worthy of Mr. Magoo, Wolfowitz focused on Saddam, not bin Laden,
as the major terrorist threat to the United States. According to Laurie
Mylroie, the crackpot conspiracy theorist at the American Enterprise
Insititute who continues to insist on a Saddam-bin Laden connection,
Wolfowitz "provided crucial support" for her book "Study of Revenge: Saddam
Hussein's Unfinished War Against America," published in 2000. The following
year, shortly after 9/11, according to Bob Woodward, Wolfowitz told a
Cabinet meeting that there was a 10 to 50 percent chance that Saddam was
involved. According to former counterterrorism chief Richard Clarke,
describing another occasion, "I could not believe it, but Wolfowitz was
spouting the Laurie Mylroie theory that Iraq was behind the 1993 truck bomb
at the World Trade Center, a theory that had been ... found to be totally
untrue." As late as October 2002, Wolfowitz spoke of the Saddam regime's
"training of al Qaeda members in bomb-making, poisons and deadly gasses."
This had no basis in reality.
Weapons of mass destruction? Wolfowitz claimed: "Iraq is exploring ways of
using these UAVs [unmanned aerial vehicles] for missions targeting the
United States." Was Kansas in danger of being nuked by robot drones from
Baghdad? Since the war ended, the Bush administration reluctantly has
admitted that prewar skeptics were correct to argue that neither the weapons
of mass destruction nor the robot planes capable of "targeting the United
States" ever existed.
It is unclear whether Wolfowitz actually believed what he said in public on
this subject. As he told Sam Tanenhaus in a now-famous Vanity Fair
interview, "The truth is that for reasons that have a lot to do with the
U.S. government bureaucracy itself, we settled on the one issue that
everyone would agree on, which was weapons of mass destruction as the core
reason, but -- Hold on for one second." (At this point in the official
Pentagon transcript a handler intervenes, evidently afraid that Wolfowitz
has spilled one bean too many.)
In military matters, this deputy secretary of defense displayed a level of
ignorance without precedent in the history of civilian appointees to the
Pentagon. (Even Robert McNamara's much-maligned "whiz kids" got some things
right.) During the Clinton years Wolfowitz peddled the fantasy that
American-supported rebels in Iraq could set up a base camp in one region and
proceed to depose Saddam with minimal U.S. involvement. With the Bay of Pigs
fiasco in mind, Gen. Anthony Zinni described this as the "Bay of Goats"
strategy. When Gen. Eric Shinseki predicted that Iraq could not be pacified
without hundreds of thousands of U.S. troops, Wolfowitz told Congress that
Shinseki was "wildly off the mark."
"To assume we're going to have to pay for it all is just wrong," Wolfowitz
declared, alluding to Iraqi oil revenues that could defray the costs of
occupation and reconstruction. It is now clear that the hundreds of billions
of dollars the United States will spend in Iraq will come from the pockets
of American taxpayers.
No summary of Wolfowitz's catastrophically successful career would be
complete without acknowledgment that he was one of the major American
sponsors of the disgraced Ahmed Chalabi, whom Paul Bremer's administration
in Baghdad accused of involvement in Iranian espionage. Last but not least,
following Wolfowitz's diplomatic mission to Turkey to obtain support for the
forthcoming U.S. invasion of Iraq, Turkey decided to have nothing to do with
the war.
Diplomat, military tactician, grand strategist -- as I said, Paul Wolfowitz
is perfectly incompetent.
We live in a country in which privates are punished for the crimes of
generals, so it is only natural that Wolfowitz should be rewarded for the
blunders, errors and miscalculations that have cost the American and Iraqi
people so much by promotion to the World Bank. That's the way it is with Mr.
Magoo. Whenever he steps blindly out of a building he has accidentally set
on fire, a truck is always conveniently passing by.

About the writer
Michael Lind is the Whitehead Senior Fellow at the New America Foundation in
Washington.