December 25, 2003	Thursday	Ziqa’ad 1, 1424

WASHINGTON: While most of the world is still trying to come to terms with the neo-imperial ambitions of the post-Sept 11 Bush administration, US political analysts, particularly those on the libertarian right and the left, have been trying to map out the various forces behind the administration’s hawks in order to better understand and counter-act them.

Most analysts have identified three main components to the coalition behind Bush’s aggressive foreign policy: right-wing militarists, of whom Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld is the exemplar; neo-conservatives, led by former Defence Policy Board (DPB) chairman Richard Perle, whose worldview is similar to that of Israel’s Likud Party; and Christian Right forces whose leaders are influential with Bush’s political guru, Karl Rove.

While these forces are often depicted in the abstract, they constitute a network of flesh-and-blood people who have worked together closely and openly — both in and out of government — for more than 30 years in some cases.

Over that period, they built up what analyst Tom Barry of the Interhemispheric Resource Centre (IRC) has called an “infrastructure of the (right-wing) counter-establishment”, of key individuals, institutions, think tanks and publications that has emerged as the dominant power in the Republican Party — and not only with respect to foreign policy.

Two of the structure’s most remarkable characteristics are how few people it includes and how adept they have been in creating new institutions and front groups that act as a vast echo chamber for each other and for the media, particularly in media-obsessed Washington.

In this, the neo-conservatives, who lack any grassroots constituency, have been especially effective.

In fact, the network consists of a very small elite, much smaller for example than the post-World War II internationalist “establishment” that includes such institutions as the Council on Foreign Relations, the foreign service and the Wall Street lawyers, financiers and business executives who have long dominated US foreign policy.

To understand its dimensions and the way it works, Barry and the IRC (for which this author has written articles for compensation) compare it to a spider’s web — hence the name of their latest Internet website, Right Web, probably the most comprehensive and integrated effort yet to link the various connections and relationships that have given the “Right” its power and influence.

The site, which is still being developed, covers some 175 individuals and dozens of organisations that have constituted the network over the past quarter century. Even a brief meander through the site demonstrates both just how small and incestuous this network has been and how ambitious are its goals, both in foreign and domestic policy.

Chances are, for example, that you have never heard of the Foundation for Community, Faith-Centred Enterprise, an innocent- sounding initiative that suggests church-based community organising or perhaps a philanthropic group that awards grants to church-related business initiatives.

In fact, the foundation and its sister group, Americans for Community and Faith-Centred Enterprise, were founded in mid-2001 by Michael Joyce, a right-wing king pin who helped turn the Bradley Foundation into the rainmaker of an ever-growing network of institutes, publications and think tanks.

Joyce told the ‘Washington Post’ in June 2001 that he launched the two groups at the behest of Rove, who was looking for ways to bolster public support for Bush’s efforts to fund religious organisations that provide social services.

Its associates include William Kristol, the editor of Rupert Murdoch’s ‘Weekly Standard’ and chairman of the Project for the New American Century (PNAC) and another neo-conservative, former education secretary William Bennett, for whom Kristol once worked.

Midge Decter, another prominent neo-conservative who co-headed (with Rumsfeld) the Committee for the Free World during the Reagan administration, currently serves on the foundation’s board of visitors, while Jeffrey Bell, former president of another neo- conservative think tank, the Manhattan Institute, serves as the group’s Washington lobbyist.

You will find further that all of these individuals have supported the work of PNAC, which played a key role in pushing Bush to war in Iraq, and whose founding statement in 1997 was signed by Rumsfeld, Vice President Dick Cheney and more than half a dozen other top Bush foreign-policy figures, all identified as key hawks.

If you click on a different group, say Americans for Victory Over Terrorism, you might expect to find a different cast of characters. But this group is headed by Bennett, and among its associates and advisers are L. Paul Bremer, currently the chief of the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) in Iraq; Centre for Security Policy (CSP) Director Frank Gaffney; real estate baron Lawrence Kadish; and former CIA director James Woolsey.

If you click on each of these names, you will find that they all have supported PNAC, and when you read Gaffney’s profile you will see that he, like Perle, once worked for Washington State Senator Henry Jackson and, indeed, for Perle himself, when the “Dark Prince” toiled at the Pentagon under Reagan.—Dawn/The InterPress News Service.