Tag Archives: Bill Clinton

THE PATIENT RISE TO POWER OF THE NEOCONSERVATIVES part 3 of 3

Posted on by
Reply

Story continued from the previous post.

green sky at night (Adrian Kingsley-Hughes)Perhaps the boldest move by neoconservatives during the 1990s, when they were rethinking their political involvement in U.S. foreign policy, was their January 26, 1998 letter to President Clinton that called for regime change in Iraq. Written on Project for a New American Century stationery, the formal letter argued that “the aim of American foreign policy” should be “removing Saddam Hussein and his regime from power.”

“We urge you to articulate this aim,” the letter concluded. “We stand ready to offer our full support in this difficult but necessary endeavor.” It was signed by Elliot Abrams, John Bolton, Francis Fukuyama, Robert Kagan, William Kristol, Richard Perle, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, and eleven other influential political allies.

Many analysts have concluded that Clinton ignored the PNAC letter. Maybe. Certainly he never made any attempt to remove Saddam Hussein from power. But regime change takes time. Consider what did take place quietly in the halls of power. In September 1998, just nine months after Clinton received the PNAC letter, a bill was introduced to both the House and the Senate under the cumbersome title: “To establish a program to support a transition to democracy in Iraq.” It sailed through Congress and was signed into law by President Clinton on October 31 as “The Iraq Liberation Act.”

The implication ought to give us pause. Conventional wisdom lays the decision to change the regime in Iraq squarely at the feet of President George W. Bush, who used the U.S. military to remove Saddam Hussein from power in early 2003, but the policy had in fact become official U.S. policy under Clinton, who, with Congressional sanction, got the ball rolling by signing the bill.

So we may never know just what occurred. As Al Gore once told Washington Post journalist Bob Woodward, the public only knows one percent of what goes on at the White House (The Charlie Rose Show, PBS-TV, July 16, 2009).

2000-2004. For the neocon intellectuals and professional who were in place as high-level advisers to secretary of defense Donald Rumsfeld at the Pentagon, the September 11, 2001 terrorist attack on America was their “Aha!” foreign policy moment. Several things converged in a short space of time to give them the opportunity they had been waiting for to showcase their militaristic foreign policy in real time.

The first thing was the terrorist attack itself. “In an instant,” writes Andrew Bacevich, “the world was once again divided into two opposing and irreconcilable camps” (Bacevich, American Empire: The Reality and Consequences of U.S. Diplomacy). And this was going to be “the world’s fight,” President Bush told Congress and the nation on September 20. “Either you are with us or you are with the terrorists,” Bush warned.

skyscraper at night (Jon Herbert)The neocons warmed to the president’s words. Voilà! Right before their very eyes, a replacement enemy to the collapsed Soviet threat had suddenly materialized – Osama bin Laden and his al Qaeda network – over against which they could seek to put the militarism of their worldview to test in real time.

Unknown to most people at the time, however, the neocons immediately pushed for invading Iraq and removing Saddam Hussein instead of going after al Qaeda, bin Laden, and the Taliban government  in Afghanistan. As investigative journalist Bob Woodward writes: “the Pentagon had been working for months on developing a military option for Iraq,” and Paul Wolfowitz, Rumsfled’s deputy secretary of defense and a leading neoconservative thinker, was committed to a policy that “would make Iraq a principal target of the first round in the war on terrorism” (Woodward, Bush at War).

During the highest-level discussions at the White House and Camp David between September 12-15, on how best to respond to the terrorist attack, Wolfowitz and Rumsfeld suggested striking Iraq. Secretary of state Colin Powell voiced his opposition, and President Bush nixed the idea for the time being, saying that the American people “want us to do something about al Qaeda” in Afghanistan (Bush at War; see also: Thomas Ricks, Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq).

By the time bin Laden, al Qaeda, and the Taliban had been driven from power in Afghanistan, there was widespread acceptance across the political spectrum in America and in Congress for removing Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq – the primary reason, of course, being the continual circulation by the CIA and the American mainstream media “proving” a threat to the United States from Iraq’s WMD.

Story continued in the next post.

©2014 by Charles Strohmer

Images by Adrian Kingsley-Hughes & Jon Herbert respectively (permission via Creative Commons)

THE PATIENT RISE TO POWER OF THE NEOCONSERVATIVES part 2 of 3

Posted on by
Reply

Story continued from the previous post.

Brandenburg Gate1970s-1980s. The neoconservatives now shift from the Democrat to the Republican Party. The move made some sense. For one thing, in 1975, President Gerald Ford, a Republican, had appointed Daniel Patrick Moynihan, a political neoconservative, as U.S. ambassador to the UN. Also, neoconservatives in general were not fans of the human rights foreign policy of U.S. President Jimmy Carter (1976-1980). And by 1980, as the Carter – Reagan presidential election loomed, most had become convinced that they would never become lieutenants of power in the Democrat Party. During the Carter – Reagan presidential campaign, many transferred “their hopes to Ronald Reagan and the Republicans, expecting that a conservative victory would bring them all the opportunities and rewards they had been denied by the Democrats” (John Ehrman, The Rise of Neoconservatism).

But that was not to be. The stars had yet to align. After Reagan won the presidency he did bring in the neoconservative intellectual Jeane Kirkpatrick as a foreign policy advisor and in 1981 named her U.S. ambassador to the UN. As with Gerald Ford, this gave neoconservatives at least one high-level access to the Reagan administration. But then in 1983, Reagan, during the Lebanese civil war, acted on reports from the Department of Defense and the NSA and withdrew U.S. troops from Lebanon after a terrorist bombing in Beirut killed 241 American servicemen. Removing those troops did not set well with neoconservatives.

It became clear to the neoconservatives that President Reagan was never going to buy into their political philosophy. This was especially true regarding their foreign policy. Reagan may have gone so far as to call the Soviet Union an evil empire and promote the development of a bizarre “Star Wars” missile defense system against the Soviet threat, but he avoided neoconservative ideas for rolling back communism through military interventions.

In fact, Reagan was the U.S. president who, reached out skillfully diplomatically to the Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev. Over a several year period, and against great political pushback in both countries, they hammered out and signed nuclear arms control treaties. Further, Reagan and Gorbachev are key players for anyone wishing to understand the end of the Soviet Union.

Losing their perennial enemy. With Gorbachev’s policies of perestroika (“restructuring”) and glasnost (“opening”), the fall of the Berlin Wall, and the formal dissolution in of the Soviet Union, or USSR, neoconservatism by the end of 1991 had lost the perennial communist enemy over against which much of its foreign policy had been organized. The net result, politically, was that whatever appeal neoconservatives may been accumulating during the Cold War decades as  dependable guides for U.S. foreign policy dwindled considerably.

engineers (Seattle Municial Archives)1990s. Clinton and the neoconservatives. Their political marginalization was ensured with the election of Bill Clinton to the White House in 1992. Clinton, a liberal internationalist and a Democrat, had no time for “the neocons.” But they had time for themselves, and they spent it rethinking their image. Although small in numbers compared to realist and idealist networks, neoconservatives are well-funded and resourceful. Garaged during Clinton’s two terms in office (1992-2000), they plied their time, re-engineering their basic political philosophy in a language and with policy proposals suited to what now occupied everyone’s mind in Washington: America’s changing role in the world – what would it be, now that the world was no longer divided into two opposing superpower camps?

Neoconservative thinkers addressed this by rolling out their views through the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), a respected and influential right-wing think tank, and in National Interest, a foreign affairs journal founded in 1985 by Irving Kristol. Another outlet, The Weekly Standard, was founded in 1995 by William Kristol (son of Irving). These three outlets provided public platforms for a new generation of keen neoconservative intellects, including Elliot Abrahams, William Kristol, Robert Kagan, and Charles Krauthammer, to disseminate their views.

In 1997, several influential neoconservatives, led by William Kristol and Robert Kagan, founded the Project for a New American Century (PNAC), which promoted an aggressive U.S. foreign policy that they called neo-Reaganite. In America at the Crossroads: Democracy, Power, and the Neoconservative Legacy, former neoconservative thinker Francis Fukuyama writes that the 1990s, neoconservative intellectuals “proposed a foreign policy agenda involving concepts like regime change, benevolent hegemony, uni-polarity, preemption, and American exceptionalism.”

Perhaps their boldest move during these years of their marginalization and rethinking was when they sent a formal letter to President Clinton in 1998 arguing for regime change in Iraq. We’ll pick up the story here in the next post.

©2014 by Charles Strohmer

Images by Werner Kunz & Seattle Municipal Archives respectively (permissions via Creative Commons)

IRAN & THE U.S., THE SECRET YEARS OF DIALOGUE & COOPERATION part 1 of 2

Posted on by
Reply

red and green building patternThe history of U.S. – Iran relations has traveled rough and tumble roads since 1979, when direct bilateral diplomatic relations ended with the seizure of the U.S. embassy in Tehran. But between 1997 and 2003, those relations were becoming a bit smoother. Unknown to most Americans, U.S. – Iran relations had been quietly, albeit gingerly, becoming slightly more cooperative during the closing years of the Clinton presidency when Madeleine Albright was U.S. Secretary of State.

This cautiously improving context was the one in which the George W. Bush White House snubbed the Iranian diplomatic reachout to the U.S. in May 2003. It soon became commonplace to blame that decision on the strong neoconservative element in the Bush administration. That seems right, and I want to explain why in a future post. But many people do not see the snub as foolish, largely, I think, because they are unaware that beginning in 1997 certain events and decisions taken by the U.S. and Iran were starting to thaw their relations. So I want us to look at that larger context here. We’ll return to the neoconservatives afterward.

Before there was the ranting sixth president of Iran, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, there was the peaceable reformist politician and fifth president, Seyyed Mohammed Khatami (1997-2005). A surprise landslide election (70% of the vote) carried him into office and changed the tenor of Iranian politics.

Dialogue of civilizations. Khatami shaped a foreign policy around a remarkable initiative that he called “a dialogue of civilizations” and reached out regionally to the Sunni Arab world. As that began to lessen tensions between Shiite Persian Iran and Arab states, Khatami then too his dialogue farther afield and reached out to Europe and America. EU – Iranian relations improved, and a number of public speeches and warm comments from Khatami about the United States were reciprocated by President Clinton and Secretary of State Albright.

The signals being sent by both states were noteworthy, even if they indicated only the possibilities of a new beginning. But small practical steps ensued, although, as diplomatic correspondent Barbara Slavin puts it, Iran and the U.S. remained out of sync. In her book Bitter Friends, Bosom Enemies Slavin discusses this wobbly dance between the U.S. and Iran during the Clinton – Khatami years.

Early in 1998, when he was unveiling his dialogue of civilizations, Khatami, in a major interview with Iranian-born CNN reporter Christiane Amanpour, proposed cultural exchanges with the U.S. to chip away at what he called “the bulky wall of mistrust” between the two nations. In response, writes Slavin, the Clinton administration gave visas to Iranian filmmakers and university professors, and, wrestling being a popular sport in Iran, a team of U.S. wrestlers and their coaches flew to Tehran to compete in an international competition.

autumn cathedralIn September 1998, when Khatami was visiting America for the first time, attending the annual UN General Assembly, he praised President Clinton and got everyone’s attention when he said that the Iranian government would not carry out the death sentence (issued nearly ten years earlier by Ayatollah Khomeini) against Salman Rushdie. The Rushdie affair, he said, should be regarded as “completely finished.” Some commentators questioned why Khatami, as president, did not rescind the fatwa, or religious order, until they learned that since Khomenei had issued the fatwa only he could rescind it, and he had died shortly after he had issued it.

In 1999, the Clinton administration softened some U.S. sanctions on Iran, and on St. Patrick’s Day 2000, four days before the Persian New Year, Secretary Albright stunned the Iranians in a major speech in which she apologized for the role of the CIA in overthrowing Iran’s democratically-elected Prime Minister Mossadegh in 1953 and reinstalling the shah. She also said that U.S. support for Saddam Hussein [in the Iran – Iraq war, 1980-1989] had been “regrettably short-sighted,” and she hinted at a further easing of sanctions.

Albright also listed areas of mutual interest to the United States and Iran and hoped that the two nations could put aside their differences and “plant the seeds for anew and better future.” Although Albright also carefully include U.S. grievances against Iran, the speech, as Slavin writes, was “a major attempt to turn” Khatami’s dialogue of civilizations between America and Iran “into a true reconciliation.”

A number of Iranian gestures toward America ensued. Tehran stopped helping Baghdad smuggle oil in violation of UN sanctions. It toned down its anti-Israel rhetoric. It agreed to accept whatever final agreement the Palestinian leadership hammered out with Israel. The latter item was huge. By implying that it would in principle recognize a two-state solution, should that be the case, Khatami’s government was indirectly granting Israel recognition. Slavin recounts a conversation in which Javad Zarif, Iran’s then UN ambassador, and currently Iran’s Minister of Foreign Affairs under President Rouhani, affirmed that very point. Zarif said that although Iran does not officially recognize Israel, “We believe that that position is not incompatible with accepting whatever solution the Palestinians come up with.”

Ever hear the media or the pundits on talk radio discussing this stuff? I didn’t think so. I don’t want to give the impression that the picture turned rosy. Many thorny issues remained. But the progress was noteworthy enough that the gingerly improving bilateral relations, believe it or not, continued with President George W. Bush. We will pick up that part of this fascinating wobbly dance in the next post.

©2014 by Charles Strohmer

Images by Ars Electronica & Nick Kenrick respectively (permissions via Creative Commons)