[Peace-discuss] Bush's evil genii

[C. G. Estabrook]

Two men driving Bush into war 

Ed Vulliamy in New York profiles the religious figures behind a 'Texanised
presidency' who believe war will mean America is respected in the Islamic
world

	Ed Vulliamy
	Sunday February 23, 2003
	The Observer

Behind President George W. Bush's charge to war against Iraq, there is a
carefully devised mission, drawn up by people who work over the shoulders
of those whom America calls 'The Principals'.

Lurking in the background behind Bush, his Vice-President, Dick Cheney,
and Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld are the people propelling US policy.
And behind them, the masterminds of the Bush presidency as it arrived at
the White House from Texas, are Karl Rove and Paul Wolfowitz.

It is too simple to explain the upcoming war as 'blood for oil', as did
millions of placards last weekend, for Rove and Wolfowitz are ideologists
beyond the imperatives of profit. They represent an unlikely and
formidable alliance forged between the gritty Texan Republicans who took
over America, fuelled by fierce conservative Christianity, and a faction
of the East Coast intelligentsia with roots in Ronald Reagan's time,
devoted to achieving raw, unilateral power.

Rove and Wolfowitz have worked for decades to reach their moment, and that
moment has come as war draws near. Bush calls Rove, depending on his mood,
'Boy Genius' or 'Turd Blossom'. Rove is one of a new political breed - the
master craftsmen - nurturing a 24-year political campaign of his own
design, but careful not to expose who he really is.

His Christian faith is a weapon of devastating cogency, but he never
discusses it; no one knows if his politics are religious or politics are
his religion. A Christmas Day child born in Denver, as a boy he had a
poster above his bed reading 'Wake Up, America!' As a student, he was a
fervent young Republican who pitched himself against the peace movement.

His first bonding with Bush was not over politics, but the two men's
ideological and moral distaste for the Sixties - after Bush's born-again
conversion from alcoholism to Christianity. Rove was courted by George
Bush Snr during his unsuccessful bid to be the Republican presidential
candidate for 1980.

But Rove's genius would show later, on Bush senior's election to the White
House in 1988, when he co-opted the right-wing Christian Coalition - wary
of Bush's lack of theocratic stridency - into the family camp.

Conservative Southern Protestantism was a constituency Bush Jr befriended
and kept all the way to Washington, defining both his own political
personality and the new-look Republican Party.

When Rove answered the call to come to Texas in 1978, every state office
was held by a Democrat. Now, almost all of them are Republican. Every
Republican campaign was run by Rove and in 1994 his client - challenging
for the state governorship - was a man he knew well: George W. Bush.

'Rove and Bush came to an important strategic conclusion,' writes Lou
Dubose, Rove's biographer. 'To govern on behalf of the corporate Right,
they would have to appease the Christian Right.'

Bush's six years as Texas governor were a dry run for national domestic
policy - steered by Rove - as President: lavish favours to the energy
industry, tax breaks for the upper income brackets and social policy
driven by evangelical zeal.

Bush had been governor for only a year when, as Rove says, it 'dawned on
me' he should run for President; two years later, in 1997, he began
secretly planning the campaign. In March 1999, Bush ordered Rove to sell
his consulting firm - 'he wanted 120 per cent of his attention,' says a
former employee, 'full-time, day and night'.

Rove hatched and ran the presidential campaign, deploying the Bush family
Rolodex and the might of the oil industry and unleashing the most vigorous
direct-mailing blizzard of all time. 'If the devil is in the details,'
writes Dubose, 'he had found Rove waiting to greet him when he got there.'

By the time George W. became President, Rove was the hub of a Texan wheel
connecting the family, the party, the Christian Right and the energy
industry. A single episode serves as metaphor: during the Enron scandal
last year, a shadow was cast over Rove when it was revealed that he had
sold $100,000 of Enron stock just before the firm went bankrupt.

More intriguing, however, was the fact that Rove had personally arranged
for the former leader of the Christian Coalition, Ralph Reed, to take up a
consultancy at Enron - Bush's biggest single financial backer - worth
between $10,000 and $20,000 a month.

This was the machine of perpetual motion that Rove built. His
accomplishment was the 'Texanisation' of the national Republican Party
under the leadership of the Bush family and to take that party back to
presidential office after eight years. Rove is unquestionably the most
powerful policy adviser in the White House.

Militant Islam was another world from Rove's. However, on 11 September,
2001, it became a new piece of political raw material needing urgent
attention. Rove and Bush had been isolationists, wanting as little to do
with the Middle East - or any other corner of the planet - as possible.
But suddenly there was a new arena in which to work for political results:
and, as Rove entered it, he met and was greeted by a group of people who
had for years been as busy as he in crafting their political model; this
time, the export of unchallenged American power across the world.

Rove in theory has no role in foreign policy, but Washington insiders
agree he is now as preoccupied with global affairs as he is with those at
home. In a recent book, conservative staff speech writer David Frum
recalls the approach of the presidency towards Islam after the attacks and
criticises Bush as being 'soft on Islam' for his emphasis on a 'religion
of peace'.

Rove, writes Frum, was 'drawn to a very different answer'. Islam, Rove
argued, 'was one of the world's great empires' which had 'never
reconciled... to the loss of power and dominion'. In response, he said,
'the United States should recognise that, although it cannot expect to be
loved, it can enforce respect'.

Rove's position dovetailed with the beliefs of Paul Wolfowitz, and the
axis between conservative Southern Protestantism and fervent, highly
intellectual, East Coast Zionism was forged - each as zealous about their
religion as the other.

There is a shorthand view of Wolfowitz as a firebrand hawk, but he is more
like Rove than that - patient, calculating, logical, soft-spoken and
deliberate. Wolfowitz was a Jewish son of academe, a brilliant scholar of
mathematics and a diplomat. When he joined the Pentagon after the Yom
Kippur war, he set about laying out what is now US policy in the Middle
East.

In 1992, just before Bush's father was defeated by Bill Clinton, Wolfowitz
wrote a blueprint to 'set the nation's direction for the next century',
which is now the foreign policy of George W. Bush. Entitled 'Defence
Planning Guidance', it put an onus on the Pentagon to 'establish and
protect a new order' under unchallenged American authority.

The US, it said, must be sure of 'deterring potential competitors from
even aspiring to a larger regional or global role' - including Germany and
Japan. It contemplated the use of nuclear, biological and chemical
weaponry pre-emptively, 'even in conflicts that do not directly engage US
interests'.

Wolfowitz's group formalised itself into a group called Project for the
New American Century, which included Cheney and another old friend, former
Pentagon Under-Secretary for Policy under Reagan, Richard Perle.

In a document two years ago, the Project pondered that what was needed to
assure US global power was 'some catastrophic and catalysing event, like a
new Pearl Harbor'. The document had noted that 'while the unresolved
conflict with Iraq provides immediate justification' for intervention,
'the need for a substantial American force presence in the Gulf transcends
the issue of the regime of Saddam Hussein'.

At a graduation speech to the Military Academy at West Point, Bush last
June affirmed the Wolfowitz doctrine as official policy. 'America has, and
intends to keep,' he said, 'military strengths beyond challenge.'

At the Pentagon, Wolfowitz and his boss Rumsfeld set up an intelligence
group under Abram Schulsky and the Under-Secretary for Defence, Douglas
Feith, both old friends of Wolfowitz. The group's public face is the
semi-official Defence Policy Board, headed by Perle. Perle and Feith wrote
a paper in 1996 called 'A Clean Break' for the then leader of Israel's
Likud bloc, Binyamin Netanyahu; the clean break was from the Oslo peace
process. Israel's 'claim to the land (including the West Bank) is
legitimate and noble,' said the paper. 'Only the unconditional acceptance
by Arabs of our rights is a solid basis for the future.' At the State
Department, the 'Arabist' faction of regional experts favouring the
diplomacy of alliances in the area was drowned out by the hawks, markedly
by another new unit with favoured access to the White House.

And in Rove's White House, with his backing, the circle was closed and the
last piece of the jigsaw was put in place, with the appointment of Elliot
Abrams to handle policy for the Middle East, for the National Security
Council.

Abrams is another veteran of Reagan days and the 'dirty wars' in Central
America, convicted by Congress for lying alongside Colonel Oliver North
over the Iran-Contra scandal, but pardoned by President Bush's father.

He has since written a book warning that American Jewry faces extinction
through intermarriage and has counselled against the peace process and for
the righteousness of Ariel Sharon's Israel. He is Wolfowitz's man, talking
every day to his office neighbour, Rove.


Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2003