Neo-cons in disarray

The inexorable rise over the past five years of the neo-conservatives as a potent and illiberal political force in the United States has set off a chain of events that culminated last week in the grand jury indictment of Lewis “Scooter” Libby, the 54-year-old former chief of staff of US vice-president Dick Cheney and a lynchpin of the American neo-conservative establishment.

Iran and Iraq are central to the events being played out today in Washington where, like in the early Watergate-Nixon years, the vultures have begun circling over the Bush White House, smelling the delicious whiff of deeper scandals. For India, with president George W Bush scheduled to visit New Delhi in just over three months, the events currently unfolding in Washington bear close watching.

Consider: Libby’s indictment on five counts including perjury, obstruction of justice and making false statements means that vice-president Cheney himself is now irrevocably tainted.

Libby’s grand jury indictment will almost certainly lead to a public trial in the next few months. Karl Rove, Bush’s chief strategist, remains under investigation and the betting in Washington is that he too will face prosecution.

The Libby affair appears complex but is actually simple. Shortly after Bush invaded Iraq in March 2003, Joseph Wilson, a senior US diplomat, said publicly that the war on Baghdad was unjustified. Within weeks a furious Libby let it be known through selective leaks to three senior journalists (from The New York Times, Time, and NBC News) that Wilson’s wife, Valerie Plame, was an undercover CIA agent.

The special prosecutor, Patrick Fitzgerald, who led the two-year investigation against Libby concluded last week that Libby had put Valerie’s life (and US national security interests) in jeopardy only in order to “punish” her husband for his anti-Iraq war remarks.

And who ordered Libby to expose his own undercover CIA operative? The three journalists to whom Libby outed Valerie are not talking publicly but the word in Washington is that Dick Cheney’s chief of staff could not have done it without the express knowledge, approval — and even instigation — of his immediate boss, i.e. the vice-president of the United States.

In turn, it is inconceivable that Dick Cheney could have launched such a high-risk vendetta operation against an American CIA agent, who had led a secret double life for more than 20 years, without authorisation from the very top — George W Bush himself.

Over the last five years, there has been a dramatic shift to the right in American politics. The neo-conservatives are now in firm control of the Bush White House. They have a specific agenda for both US domestic and foreign policy. In the US, they advocate a fiercely illiberal social agenda — anti-gay, anti-abortion, anti-affirmative action (anti-black). The extreme Christian evangelical right in the US (numbering perhaps four million members) provides the neo-cons with moral ballast.

The neo-con agenda in foreign policy is to encircle and de-nuclearise Iran, continue to defend Israel’s occupation of Palestine, keep the Arab autocrats of the Middle-East in power with US troops strategically deployed on their soil, convert occupied Iraq into a sterilised West-friendly zone, defang North Korea, contain China and continue to prop up convenient dictators like Pakistan’s Pervez Musharraf.

The indictment of Libby could blow a big hole in the neo-cons’ crafted domestic and foreign policy gameplan. If Karl Rove too is indicted, Bush will quickly become a lameduck president — perhaps even before he arrives in India in February 2006. India has so far, in meek, time-honoured manner, kept its head down as Iran, Israel and the US trade charges across the Persian Gulf. India wants its nuclear cooperation agreement with the US, signed during prime minister Manmohan Singh’s visit to Washington in July, to be implemented urgently before stocks of enriched uranium run out at Tarapur and other nuclear power plants.

But with the Bush White House in disarray over Libby’s indictment, the Iraq debacle and the exposure of the neo-cons as a collection of old, white, bigoted men who are likely to end up on the losing side of the next presidential election, Indian foreign policy-makers now have room for diplomatic maneouvre. India has always approached its relationship with the US as a slightly overawed junior partner. Time now to shed the timidity and, like China does, treat America as an absolute equal.

Email: minhazmerchant@business-leaders.com