Rice v. PNAC

Patrick Doherty

September 13, 2005

For those wondering whether the secretary of state is a loyal ideologue or a policymaker capable of changing her stance in the face of overwhelming evidence, the answer is in. Rice was quoted in this morning's New York Times praising Pakistani President Musharraf for his education and economic policies "to discourage militancy." She went on, "There are parts of Pakistan that are extremely poor where you get breeding grounds for this kind of extremism."

Is Condi Rice finally recognizing that global poverty is a major contributing factor to the rise in extremism? Perhaps, but it may not matter too much. Her subordinate, Ambassador John Bolton, is right now gutting the kind of U.N. reform necessary for raising, as the Millennium Development Goals seek to do, one billion people out of the worst poverty and so draining the swamp extremists need to flourish.

Bolton's efforts demonstrate the continued power of the neoconservatives in this administration. Neocons are still holding the reins in key operational positions that will determine, to a large extent, how much we can undo the mess of the first five years of the Bush administration. To change anything, Condi will have to force a major putsch.

That's not likely. In addition to Bolton, she'll have to get rid of Zalmay Khalilzad, the U.S. envoy in Baghdad. Khalilzad, a protege of Paul Wolfowitz, is also on the march under the neocon banner. Khalilzad yesterday made an impassioned plea for Americans to pay attention to Iraq in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. Apparently the administration thinks they're doing better in Iraq than in New Orleans.

But he made his plea not by saying just how close we are to civil war in Iraq, nor by saying that in the wake of Katrina's damage the global oil sector is one catastrophe away from meltdown raising the stakes considerably in the Gulf. Instead, Khalilzad called attention to Iraq by calling attention to...Syria.

Writing in the New York Times, Joel Brinkley reports that the Iraq envoy claimed that the Syrian "government continued to allow terrorists to operate training camps within Syria that have sent hundreds of insurgents into Iraq." This despite the decades-long existential conflict between the ruling Alawite clan of Syria and the local Sunni extremist group, the Muslim Brotherhood. To support insurgents would be to undermine its own regime.

It appears the Bush administration needs a scape goat for an insurgency it is not willing to address politically.

Supporting that scapegoat theory is Gary Schmidt's op-ed in today's Washington Post . Schmidt, executive director of the Project for a New American Century, the neoconservative think tank, echoes Khalilzad's anti-insurgent message with his own anti-Sunni argument. Together, the two are trying to both downplay the idea that there is any better political deal to be had, and to pre-empt what may well be a politically devastating vote against the draft constitution next month.

Schmidt, being out of office, has to do the heavy rhetorical lifting. In his article, Schmidt reveals the neoconservative take on Iraq: the Sunnis should be grateful for the Iraqi constitution but instead have responded by becoming insurgents. The draft Iraqi constitution, "Is about as good as it gets, and far better for the country's minorities than the Sunnis should have expected, given the ruthlessness of their own rule over the past several decades."

So, Schmidt argues, the Sunnis should not exercise their meager transitional rights to register to vote and then vote down the constitution and thus trigger a new round of political negotiations. "Contrary to most commentary, then, the key to succeeding in Iraq is no longer putting in place a grand political bargain in which Iraqis of all sectarian stripes live happily ever after."

Schmidt has had enough of the Sunnis. "Politics cannot solve what ails Iraq now. It can help, and certainly the constitution is an important step in that direction. But at the end of the day, it's only when the so-called dead-enders are either dead or vanquished that one can count on the political process moving decisively forward as most Iraqis desire."

Instead of engaging Sunni nationalists who have been excluded from the constitutional drafting process, Schmidt wants to kill them. And that's how he would secure his goal: "To create a political order by which Iraq is made relatively stable and the normal democratic politics of give-and-take are made possible." That's not democracy, it's not diplomacy, it's not American and it will come back to haunt us. Again.

So while it is heartening to hear Secretary Rice recognize that poverty is at the root of extremism, it's not going to be enough. Her representative at the U.N. is undermining that body's ability to address poverty. Her representative in Iraq is undermining democracy in Iraq. And the neocon HQ is placing op-eds in The Washington Post  that argue not for democracy in Iraq, but for a ruthless tyranny of the majority.

The neoconservatives have lost their idealism. This is significant.