The Madness of Empire

Recently the novelist John le Carré wrote in the Times of London that the United States has entered a “period of madness” that dwarfs McCarthyism or the Vietnam intervention in intensity. One generally would not pay much attention to the cynical British spy-tale weaver, never especially friendly to America. But concern about America’s mental health is more broadly in the air, spreading well beyond the usual professional anti-Americans. It is now pervasive in Europe, and growing in Asia, and when Matt Drudge posted le Carré’s piece prominently on his website, it got passed around and talked about here in ways it never would have five years ago.

The proximate cause of le Carré’s diagnosis is Washington’s plan for a pre-emptive war against Iraq, a nation whose weapons pose no threat to the United States and that has no substantial links to al-Qaeda or 9/11. The U.S. would fight this war virtually without allies, though a few countries might be dragged into the fray against the will of their populations. But mad or not, this drive toward war is not mania of sudden onset but ratification of a neo-imperialist strategy that has been germinating in neoconservative circles since the end of the Cold War.

A new war against Iraq was a gleam in the eye of a small but influential group long before 9/11. In 1998, the newly established Project for a New American Century (PNAC), an advocacy group chaired by Weekly Standard editor Bill Kristol, began sending open letters from prominent foreign policy hawks. First, it wrote to the Clinton administration calling upon the United States to “remove Saddam’s regime.” When its advice was ignored, PNAC asked Republican Congressional leaders to push for war. The signatories included Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz (now number two at the Pentagon), Elliott Abrams (recently appointed to the National Security Council as a director of Mid-East policy), William Bennett, John Bolton (now Undersecretary of State), and the ubiquitous Richard Perle, chairman of the Defense Policy Board and often considered the central figure the interlocking web of neoconservative think tanks.