William Hartung interview

[August 29, 2003]

from the book

Hijacking Catastrophe

9/11, Fear and the Selling of American Empire

edited by Sut Jhally and Jeremy Earp

Olive Branch Press, 2004, paper

p118
JE . Can you talk about the influence of neoconservativism on this ' administration since 9/11? I'm wondering f you see the turn US foreign policy has taken, especially the decision to go to war in Iraq, as driven by the ideological, moral vision of the neocons, by a more realist foreign policy sensibility or by American corporate interests? Maybe a mix of all three?

There's something different about this group around Bush. They are a special kind of Republican. They're against international institutions, they don't trust our allies, they prefer to use force over diplomacy, and, of course, they don't mind profiting from all of this while they're doing it. But even a guy like Richard Perle, whose hand's so deep into the cookie jar that he needs surgery to get it removed, is actually motivated more by ideology than by the money.

Their worldview really goes back to the Henry Jackson school of thought. Henry Jackson was a conservative Democrat in the '70s, a combination of pro-Israel and harshly anti-Soviet. He was the backbone in setting the stage for the Reagan revolution. A lot of guys who worked for Henry Jackson-like Richard Perle and Frank Gaffney, who runs the Center for Security Policy (the full-time cheerleading outfit for Star Wars and multi-tiered missile defense and so forth)-went from being moderate Democrats to conservative Democrats to Reaganites, and it had to do with their notion that you couldn't really do business with the Soviet Union. They believed that detente wasn't going to work; you had to be able to beat them militarily. In 1980, Keith Payne co-authored an article called "Victory is Possible" about how you could win a nuclear war. He said that in a war against the Soviets, maybe we'd lose 20 million people, but we could prevail. His argument was, "If you're gonna play the nuclear game, you've got to play to win."

That sentiment was rejected by Reagan himself in his second term, when he made these deals with Gorbachev. He made a statement in which he said a nuclear war can never be won and should never be fought, and that was partly his own beliefs coming around and it was partly his response to the peace movement that was taking on his policies. But the neoconservatives-their attitudes didn't change. Reagan changed with the times, he adjusted, he made deals with Gorbachev, he wanted to get rid of nuclear weapons, and he put Star Wars on the backburner. Guys like Frank Gaffney who were in Reagan's Pentagon were so outraged about this that they resigned. They went into these conservative think tanks, funded by Richard Mellon Scaife, the Coors family and, in Gaffney's case, also by weapons contractors like Lockheed Martin and so forth.

The neocons honed these "peace-through-strength," unilateral positions from the late '80s, through the Clinton era, culminating in the Project for the New American Century, which was founded in Clinton's second term. They wanted to return to the Ronald Reagan of the first term. This was the Ronald Reagan who joked around before his weekly radio address about nuclear war, saying "the bombing starts in five minutes"; this is the Ronald Reagan who said that the Soviet Union was an "evil empire" that could never be bargained with. They're still stuck in that moment in time. They never made the transition that Reagan made, and so they spent the '80s and '90s refining those unilateralist positions. Then in Herbert Walker Bush's administration, Wolfowitz and I. Lewis Libby, who was Cheney's deputy, and a number of the others actually drafted a national security strategy based on the idea that the United States should not only dominate our adversaries, but we should have so much military power that even our friends are afraid of us. This caused uproar when it was leaked and the Europeans got upset, and people like Cohn Powell and George Herbert Walker Bush and, to some extent, even Cheney, said, This is kind of out there, guys. You've got to tone that down, because the end of cold war is not necessarily a green light for us to go ballistic in building up our military and pushing countries around, using the sword rather than diplomacy. But these guys never let go of that.

They refined these ideas in conservative think tanks, and they found a soul mate in George W. Bush, because he's more in tune with the Reagan of the first term than he is with his own father. In fact, when his advisers used to give him suggestions about things that he might do when he was campaigning, they said he always pushed them to go further. He didn't care about the ABM Treaty; he wanted missile defense. He asked them why we need an army, which seems to have an interesting reformist bent to it. But if you look at that statement in light of these fights between Rumsfeld and the army, it's clear they don't like the army because the army is grounded in some reality. They have to occupy countries; they have to deal with people face to face. Rumsfeld and the others want to do things at a distance; they want to have weapons in space; they want to bomb from 15,000 feet. They don't want to get down into the messy politics of these countries, which is why they're trying to run Iraq like some sort of privatized 51st state, and it's just not working.

JE: Some people have down-played the "neo" aspect of what the neoconservatives are doing and have argued that what we are seeing now is just an extreme example of "crony capitalism. "How would you respond to that?

They're giving all these contracts to their buddies, like Halliburton and Bechtel and so forth, but they're not even delivering the goods. There's been articles recently saying that our troops don't even have enough water to drink. They get limited to a liter and a half a day because Halliburton can't handle the job. But they've got a no-bid contract with the army that was renewed. Dick Cheney (who went on to become

CEO at Halliburton) as secretary of defense under H. W Bush, created this opportunity. He's the one who said, "Let's privatize the logistics of our overseas forces. Let's have private companies do essentially military planning for us. Let's have them maintain our vehicles, feed our troops, create the showers, build the bases..." He created that model of privatizing it, then, a few years later, he goes to work for the company that's benefiting from it, Halliburton. Halliburton then lost the contract while Cheney was CEO and regained it after Cheney was vice president. One of the reasons they got that contract back is because the folks in the Pentagon were saying, "Well, maybe this will sit well with the V.P.," and so forth. Even if he didn't intervene directly, the fact that it's the vice president's former company, the fact that he's still getting checks from them because his golden parachute was so huge, is very influential. They couldn't figure out how many different ways to slice and dice it, so on his financial disclosure form he says, "Well, actually I get somewhere between $180 thousand and a million dollars a year from Halliburton as part of my golden parachute I got when I left the company." His wife, Lynn, who's a neocon in her own right, spent seven years on the board of Lockheed Martin and is getting deferred compensation from the nation's largest military contractor. The Cheney family is essentially still on the payroll of the military industrial complex.

Similarly, George W. Bush's father gets 100 thousand dollars a pop to go give overseas speeches for the Carlyle group, which invests in military companies and is run by Frank Carlucci, Donald Rumsfeld's college roommate at Princeton.

These guys are thick as thieves, but I think it's not so much greed - they feel it's a sense of entitlement. They think they're the chosen ones who are supposed to be running the world. As part of that, since they believe in free markets and entrepreneurship and so forth, they feel that all of this money that keeps landing in their lap is just a nice byproduct of the fact that they're better and better everyday in every way, fighting the good fight for humanity. They have huge blind spots and they don't understand that the stuff they're doing looks corrupt to almost everybody else in the world. The first contract for the rebuilding of Iraq was a no-bid, secret contract that went to the company that the vice president of the United States used to run, while neither our own allies, the British, who helped capture some of that territory, nor other American companies that could have done a better job, got to bid.

Perle and Woolsey and that whole gang around Rumsfeld are ideologues first. Even if you look at their business careers, most of their business connections are through a sort of crony capitalism. It's not because Dick Cheney was an excellent manager that they hired him at Halliburton. He went on a fishing trip with the head of the company and they said, Wow, everybody knows him in the Middle East, because he was the guy that helped win the Gulf War. He could open a lot of doors for us. But it wasn't because he was a fantastic manager. In fact, he almost bankrupted the company because he decided to buy Dresser Industries, which had all these unfunded liabilities related to asbestos. If he hadn't been busy pulling strings to get them government contracts, they might well have gone under-under his tenure.

Even Rumsfeld, who's got this kind of aura of having been this wonderful business executive, his first big job was handed to him by a guy named Ted Forstmann. Forstmann was a take-over specialist who help fund Empower America, one of the right-wing, neoconservative think tanks that Rumsfeld is on the board of, which, among other things, took out ads against Democratic senators in the '90s, questioning their patriotism for not supporting the full-bore Republican version of Star Wars. Forstmann took over this company, General Instrument, and installed Rumsfeld as the CEO. This is not Rumsfeld climbing the corporate ladder, this is not Rumsfeld showing his acumen as a businessman, this is Rumsfeld just having a buddy of his that he did political work with say, "Oh, here's a company to run." They run Washington the way Suharto used to run Indonesia. It's crony capitalism at its worst-and you can do that for a while, but eventually you're going to start hollowing out our economy. You're going to undermine people's faith in our democracy.

That's the point we're coming to now, where we can't just accept these guys based on the images they're projecting. We have to look very carefully at what it is they're doing. When Eisenhower warned about the military industrial complex, this is the kind of thing he was talking about, but he said we have to watch out for influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military industrial complex-by virtue of how large it is, it will inhabit space, accumulate power, and so forth. This is different. These guys are consciously using the military industrial complex as a tool to extend their own power, and I don't think even Eisenhower anticipated that anyone would be that bold and that brash. But Bush, he's doing his military industrial complex tour; after he landed on the carrier, he gave a speech the next day at United Defense

in front of the big sign that said "United Defense." United Defense is owned by the Carlyle Group, which employs his father on retainer and James Baker, who is the one who helped him push through in the elections in Florida.

p127

JE: In your view, what is the invasion of Iraq really about?

A lot of people have asked, "If Iraq wasn't about fighting terrorism, what was it about?" Some people have said it's about oil and that's not quite right. It's about power. It gives them power in several ways. Right now they control the tap on Iraqi oil. Not only will there be monetary benefits, more importantly, there will be global power benefits. If they have their thumb on that Middle East oil tap, they can use it also to leverage the Saudis, to get them a little more into line, a little less misbehaving with their folks funding terrorists and so forth. If they've got control of that Middle East region in the geopolitical sense, they also have much more leverage over our European allies, over allies in Asia, and it's a way of short-circuiting the fact that their overall policy for the economy is a mess.

In one sense, they're using Iraq as a little cash machine to fund their re-election, to give contracts to their friends, to bail out the US economy from the various miscues of their own economic policies. They want to remake the map of the world and they want compliant governments that are going to be run the way they want to see them run. One of the reasons they're not working with the UN in Iraq is that people like Wolfowitz and others in this administration have said that they don't want the UN in there, or the French and the Germans, because God forbid Iraq starts having German labor practices-unions and things like that. They view Iraq as a little laboratory for trying out their ideas about privatization, about free markets, their notion of democracy, which is a very diminished notion of democracy, much like they employed here when they seized the election in Florida-they didn't care whether the votes got counted. They want people in power that they can control; they don't want just any old person from Iraq who happens to be a democrat running that new government.

It's the power to use military and energy resources to reshape the globe in the way they think it should be shaped that motivates them.

If you see the pictures of Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz looking at the map of the world in the situation room, joking around, you can tell this is what they live for. It's not just the money: it's the power, and you can't have the power unless you control the US military machine, which is why they went from these very high-paying jobs in industry back into this administration. They think this is their last chance to put their stamp on the world and they are intent on doing it, and unless we stop them, they will.

Hijacking Catastrophe

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