POLITICS-U.S.: Imperial Dreams Sink in Iraqi Quagmire

POLITICS-U.S.: Imperial Dreams Sink in Iraqi Quagmire: "Analysis - By Jim Lobe


WASHINGTON, May 18 (IPS) - The coalition of Bush administration hawks that was empowered by the Sep. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks on New York and the Pentagon agreed on three main strategic objectives.

The neo-conservatives and Christian Right wanted to decisively shift the balance of power in the Middle East in favour of Israel, so that it could effectively impose peace terms on the Palestinians and Syria and anyone else that resisted U.S. regional hegemony or Israel's legitimacy and territorial claims.

The more-globally-oriented strategists -- sometimes called ''assertive nationalists'' or Machtpolitikers -- wanted to show ''rogue states'', particularly those with weapons of mass destruction (WMD), like North Korea -- that the United States could and, more importantly, would take pre-emptive military action to either change their regimes or crush them.

They also wanted to demonstrate to any possible future rival powers that Washington could, and would, intervene militarily in the Persian Gulf region to deny them essential energy supplies as a way of reminding nations of the indispensability of friendly ties with the United States.

All three objectives, it was swiftly agreed by the ascendant hawks, could be achieved by invading and then ''transforming'' Iraq into a pro-western, if not democratic, Arab state.

Moreover, the likely acquisition of more or less permanent access to military bases in Iraq that would fit into a larger, global network of scores of military facilities stretching from East Asia through Central Asia, and from Arabia and the Caucasus through the Mediterranean and the Horn all the way to West Africa would make it even clearer to all that breaking ''Pax Americana'' would risk economic or military ruin.

But in order to achieve these objectives, the United States not only had to invade Iraq and remove Saddam Hussein from power, it also had to occupy the country, and occupy it in a way that would not require many U.S. soldiers, who would be deployed elsewhere along the globe-straddling ''arc of crisis'' to guard the peace.

''The global strategy -- all their assumptions -- rested on the ability of U.S. forces to move fast, win quickly with overwhelming force, and move out'', according to one official. ''Any prolonged conflict or occupation -- like what we see in Iraq -- threatened the whole structure because we don't have that many forces''.

For reasons that are likely to be debated by historians, political scientists, and possibly psychiatrists, for decades the hawks -- most of them based in the offices of Pentagon chief Donald Rumsfeld and Vice President Dick Cheney, but probably President George W Bush as well -- firmly believed that Iraqis would either be so grateful for their ''liberation'' from the depredations of Hussein or so awed by the show of U.S. military power that they would support, or at least not actively oppose, a post-war occupation. "