Nicholas F. Benton: A Messianic Obcession

While U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld was reduced to shrugging his shoulders by some tough questions from U.S. soldiers about to head into harm’s way in Iraq yesterday, it is worth reviewing exactly why the U.S. rushed into Iraq last year with, as Rumsfeld put it, the unprepared, understaffed and ill-equipped “Army you have rather than the Army you want.”

Recall that it was done because there were allegedly “weapons of mass destruction” that posed an imminent threat to vital U.S. interests and even the U.S., itself. Rumsfeld said he knew exactly where to find them. We all know now, of course (except for blindly loyal Bush supporters who still may be unclear), that no such weapons have ever been found.

But recall that it didn’t take a military invasion of Iraq to find that out. There were many people, including those on United Nations inspection teams, insisting all along that there was no evidence of such weapons.

As for the administration’s claim that there was a link between Saddam Hussein and the al Qaeda terrorists responsible for the attacks of 9/11, every credible intelligence operative and diplomatic professional laughed at the idea, and subsequently, not a shred of evidence has emerged to justify it.

Yet, the administration continued to assert a seamless continuity between 9/11 and the invasion of Iraq throughout its re-election campaign this year, and a stunning number of those who voted for Bush still believe that non-existent link exists. So what, then, was the real motive for the ill-timed, unprovoked invasion?

Recall that the neoconservative critics of the Bush, the father, were chomping at the bit in 1991 when Desert Storm stopped with the expulsion of the Iraqis from Kuwait. Back then, they were trying to generate a drumbeat to compel President Bush, Sr., to chase the Iraqi forces back to Baghdad and to hunt down Saddam Hussein.

But Bush, Sr., would not violate the trust of the solid international coalition allies he’d assembled to thwart the Iraqi aggression then. To the Neocons, however, such a violation would have been just the point. And they have been lobbying and building pressure for another shot at invading Iraq ever since. When the Neocon brain trust formed itself as the Project for a New American Century in the mid-1990s, it held the conquest of Iraq as a cornerstone of enacting its new global strategy.

The strategy is to dismantle or denude all the military and strategic alliances the U.S. helped form and strengthen following World War II and through the Cold War period. It envisions a “New American Century,” which could also be called a “New American Planet.”

The assertion: With the end of the Cold War, there is only one global superpower, and the U.S. needs to assert itself in that role. It needs to do it not through strengthening alliances and cooperative institutions, but by demolishing them and doing it all its own way.

There is more to this thinking than mere chauvinism or the kind of fundamentalist religious fervor that identifies the role of the U.S. in the world with the advancement of God’s will. That cartoonish way of thinking may work for mobilizing the masses, but for those ultimately calling the shots, there’s more at stake, and it’s not the advancement of democracy, either.

Namely, for them, it is a simple question of resources, and who controls them. There are a handful of mutually independent political centers in the world that are capable of, or imminently capable of, commanding a significant flow of the globe’s natural resources: Europe, Russia, China and the U.S being the most important.

There could be a global, ecumenical approach to cooperation in optimizing the flow of resources to jointly develop the planet, cultivate its resources, protect its environment, and systematically lift its backward and poverty-stricken areas.

But this is not the vision of the Neocons. There’s a messianic obsession with monopolizing under their own political control the flow of all the globe’s important resources. Thus, they must sever alliances and begin by cutting off the northward flow of Iraq’s vital oil resources to Europe and Russia.

There is no amount of war, misery or terrorism that will deter this effort. Their task domestically is to remain in control so they can continue their push, no matter how ugly it gets, overseas. Their domestic agenda is self-preservation, not security and prosperity. In fact, they harbor all the psychological features of a common schoolyard bully. Unfortunately, just as they miscalculated the insurgency they’ve encountered in Iraq, so they’re sorely miscalculating where their messianic fantasy will ultimately lead, as well.

Nicholas Benton may be emailed at nfbenton@fcnp.com