Lev Navrozov
NewsMax.com, Friday, Jan. 6, 2006
On July 10, 2003, Ron Paul, a conservative Republican member of the House of Representatives, delivered a mammoth speech in the House against those whom he called "neo-conservatives." The speech was published under the title "Neo-Conned!," playing on the double meaning of the word "con." In particular, Ron Paul was against the war in Iraq, conceived and launched, in his opinion, by the "neo-cons."
Recently, "Light in the Darkness Publications" in Vienna, Virginia, has published two volumes (1,304 pages in all) entitled "Neo-Conned!"
The first volume is subtitled "Just War Principles: A Condemnation of War in Iraq," and the second, "Hypocrisy, Lawl essness and the Rape of Iraq." This is a massive revolt of conservatives, including Catholic clergymen and military officers, against the two wars in Iraq with twelve years of "sanctions" in between them.
The two wars in Iraq are being compared today to the Vietnam War. I find the comparison absurd. To stop the war in Vietnam between its totalitarian North, aided by Stalin and Mao, and the South, supported by the West, Vietnam was divided – just as Korea – into two countries. When the Stalinist and Maoist North of Korea attacked in 1950 the pro-Western South, the U.N. troops repulsed the aggression successfully, owing in particular to the military genius of Gen. Douglas MacArthur, who stopped the Chinese offensive. But in Vietnam the West failed.
As is characteristic of a democracy, initially the attempt to stop the aggression of the pro-Soviet and pro-Chinese North Vietnam was hailed in the United States (see the New York Times for 1964). But as the numb er of U.S. combat deaths grew, the anti-war movement became stronger and finally forced the U.S. government to withdraw from Vietnam. It is only in this respect that the war in Iraq is typically similar to the Vietnam War. Otherwise there is nothing in common between them.
Iraq was not a country befriended by Communist China and Soviet Russia as their ideological child and military bridgehead. The first volume of "Neo-Conned!" begins with a 74-page interview given by Jude Wanniski, an adviser to Ronald Reagan and later the associate editor of the Wall Street Journal. His interview is entitled "The (Bogus) Case Against Saddam." As early as 1997, Wanniski publicly denied Hussein's possession of "weapons of mass destruction" after 1991. It took seven years for the "neo-cons" to admit that they had been telling a lie, used as a pretext for "the preemptive war" against Iraq. W anniski' s interview disproves everything that has been told by the "neo-cons" about Hussein since 1990.
A reader may disagree with some of Wanniski's arguments. Yet it is undeniable that Wanniski's interview is the first "defense lawyer's brief" in 15 years, while visible hitherto had been only prosecutors of Saddam since 1990, when the U.S. approval of Hussein was replaced by cumulative hatred – a kind of vicious propaganda, growing in volume and animosity.
I supported the Vietnam War from the beginning to the end. When I came to the United States in 1972, Americans who promoted my articles and lectures about the Soviet danger tried to assure me that the Vietnam War was all wrong. "Excuse me," I said to one of them, a young lady, "you can say that the independence of South Vietnam is not worth 50,000 U.S. battle deaths. But it is hypocrisy not to say it, but instead to say that the war is wrong."
She burst into tears and sai d that the young man she was in love with was in Vietnam and might be killed any day.
"Then say: ‘The independence of South Vietnam is not worth the life of the young man I love.'"
As for the war in Iraq, I opposed it ever since 1990, when Saddam Hussein was provoked into the invasion of Kuwait via April Glaspie, the newly appointed U.S. ambassador, who conveyed to him on July 25 the opinion of the State Department that his relations with Kuwait were no concern of the United States. But when Saddam invaded Kuwait, he was represented in the United States as the new Hitler, and the war, which has gone on for 15 years, began.
Small wonder that in the two volumes of "Neo-Conned!" I found much that I have discovered since 1990. Thus, the National Assembly of Kuwait can be dissolved at any time by the omnipotent emir, yet only 15 percent of the inhabitants have the right to elect that august body . On the other hand, here is one paragraph about Iraq (vol. 2, p. 665) from an interview with Fr. Jean-Marie Benjamin, a leading cleric in France:
From the Ba'ath Revolution of 1968, Iraq had a Constitution guaranteeing the same rights to all Iraqi citizens of the three monotheistic religions: Christians, Muslims, and Jews. Women had the same rights as the men, and took up positions of responsibility, even within the government. It was the foremost Arab country in terms of having the highest number of women in ministries, embassies and in positions of public office. The Republic of Iraq was a secular republic – that is, a state without any one official religion – and the Ba'ath Party ensured that the secular nature of the state was completely respected. Islamic extremists were prosecuted and driven from the country – a hard experience for the Shiites. School education was entirely free. For the poor villages of the south, electricity was also free. Social welfare was a vailable to all classes in society. The Iraqi dinar was one of the strongest currencies in the world. Then, one Iraqi dinar was worth three American dollars. Today, one American dollar is worth 1,800 dinars.
In his article "Oil, War, and Things Worth Fighting For" at the beginning of the second volume, Scott Ritter, former chief weapons inspector of the U.N. Special Commission, first of all quotes Richard Perle speaking against Dennis Kucinich in a TV debate on NBC's "Meet the Press" on Feb. 23, 2003. In the 1970s, I met privately with Richard Perle and asked him who he was ethnically. "An American Indian," he quipped, to avoid the answer that he was a Jew. I had to tell him that in his drive for "war for world democracy," he mistook the inhabitants of Russia for Russian-speaking Americans. The history of Russia under Putin has proved how wrong he was. Today Russia, an ally of China, is sliding into dictatorship.
Yet just as Perle was sure in the 1970s that it was enough to "liberate Russia" for Russia to become Russian-speaking USA, so, too, he has been sure that it is enough to "liberate Iraq" for Iraq to become a miniature Arabic-speaking USA, though it is not clear why Iraq did not become an Arabic-speaking England after it had been liberated by England, as were many other countries whose overall territory once exceeded that of England 91 times and then split back into so many former countries.
Ritter begins (p. xix) by quoting the "arch-hawk" Perle's passionate rebuke of Dennis Kucinich, who dared to suggest that "oil represents the strongest incentive" in going to war against Iraq:
I find the accusation that this administration has embarked upon this policy for oil to be an outrageous, scurrilous charge for which, when you asked for the evidence, you will note there was none. There was simply the suggestion that, because there is oil in the ground and some administration officials have had connections with the oil industry in the past, therefore, it is the policy of the United States to take control of Iraqi oil. It is a lie, Congressman. It is an out and out lie.
But "Neo-Conned!" correctly recalls the book of documents, collected by Paul O'Neill, U.S. treasury secretary, and published in 2004 under the title "The Price of Loyalty." According to these documents, the decision to invade Iraq and overthrow Hussein (a socialist who was for the Iraqi state extraction of oil) was taken at the beginning of 2001, before the 9/11 terrorist act and all the accusations of Saddam, as well as all grand global goals to justify the invasion. So the question is: Why the invasion of Iraq, and not of Cuba or Vietnam or Burma or Belarus or Zimbabwe? Perle is absolutely correct that there is no evidence in the public domain that, say, Vice President Cheney will, for example, receive from Hallibu rton after 2008 his former top post – with a much higher salary, and/or "x" billion dollars as a sign of tacit gratitude for "y" billion dollars Halliburton has made and will make in Iraq owing to the invasion of it.
But the fact is that such deals are oral or are not even expressed by either side, though may be implied by both.
I am not interested in Perle per se, yet here are just a couple of relevant examples from his own biography.
According to the New York Times of April 7 and 21, 1983, Perle recommended that the U.S. Army purchase an armament system from a specific Israeli company. The latter paid him $50,000. The NYT articles were based on intuition and/or common sense, not on legal evidence like a written contract.
Similarly, on March 9, 2003, Seymour Hersh published in the New Yorker an article, claiming that Perle as chairman of the Defense Policy Board Advisory Committee stood to profit financially by influencing governmen t policy . Hersh linked Perle with Trireme Partners, a firm that stood to profit from the war in Iraq.
Perle threatened to bring a libel suit against Hersh but never did. On March 27, 2003, he resigned as chairman of the Defense Policy Board.
The difference between Trireme Partners and Halliburton is that Trireme and Perle are small fry and perhaps insufficiently circumspect, and while the "payments by implication" to him may amount to a pathetic $50,000, "payments by implication" from U.S. companies in Iraq like Halliburton may run into billions of dollars.
I learned about "Neo-Conned!" by sheer accident and ordered the two volumes from Barnes & Noble. But I have not seen a single review of it and not a single contributor to it invited for a TV interview. The neo-con conformity has been intact, while the Sunni guerrilla war in Iraq is going on.
One aspect of "Neo-Conned!" is worth noting. China in alliance with Put in's Russia is not even mentioned in the two volumes. The impression is that the world issue is between the United States and Iraq, which some contributors even interpret as the neo-con war for world hegemony! Not the dictatorship of China, but the U.S. neo-cons are seeking world domination –through the war in Iraq, which Pat Buchanan, one of the contributors to "Neo-Conned!," justly called long ago a small Third World country (that can be annihilated, let me add, by nuclear weapons within half an hour).
- The link to my book online is www.levnavrozov.com.
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