Why The US Has Lost The Peace Before Winning The Iraq War; A Hobbesian World.

*** People, Even The World's Leader, Always Make Mistakes When They Think They Can Afford Them

*** If Bush Fails To Democratise Iraq Under A Viable Federal System, Will He Partition It? - Pumping Oil From The South And From The Kurdish North

*** The American Double-Standards Can Become Fatal Errors, Especially To Those Gaining From Them

*** Cheney And Rumsfeld Must Come Up With A Good Exit Strategy, To Be Well Edited By Condi Rice

NICOSIA - Richard Perle and Benjamin Netanyahu in 1996 were among the co-authors of a US position paper - "A Clean Break" - heralding President George W. Bush's scheme of re-ordering the world first by redrawing the political map of the Middle East. Before the 2000 US presidential elections, Perle had arranged for Ariel Sharon to chaperone Governor Bush of Texas during the latter's visit to Israel. Soon after his February 2001 election as Prime Minister of Israel, Sharon discarded the Arab peace plan of Saudi Crown Prince Abdullah and said he was to discuss with President Bush at the White House "the big picture", a perspective which he told a fellow Israeli hawk was something beyond the intellect of current Arab rulers.

In the morning of March 21, 2003 - in Iraq one day after the US-led war against Saddam Hussein's Baathist regime had begun, Perle and fellow American neo-conservatives were having an American Enterprise Institute (AEI) breakfast to celebrate "victory". They said the next targets for war and regime change after Iraq were to be Iran, Syria and North Korea. By then Bashar Al Assad's Baathist regime in Damascus had been well briefed on the reasons why the neo-conservatives had elevated Syria to membership in Bush's "axis of evil". When on March 28 US Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld warned Damascus to stop aiding Saddam's forces, Assad's regime had prepared itself already to deliver "US invaders" in Syria blows as shocking as those they were receiving in Iraq.

The US is in a trap which, because of 9/11, the Bush administration will not perceive until it has become too late. The trap is not Iraq - it is unthinkable for the US to let Saddam win the war; it is not even the Middle East and the Muslim World. The trap lies in the unholy alliance between Bush Jr. and his neo-conservative adventurers on the one hand and Israel's Likud hawks on the other.

It is also a trap for Israel and world Jewry who, a highly-placed APS source says, "cannot even imagine the prospect of those Messianic visionaries bringing about an end to an American empire that was not yet prepared to act like credible Romans". To the latter, he says, "a certain Hitler might be lurking somewhere within the fog of the American empire".

Bush will have to solve the Arab-Israeli conflicts and come up with credible treaties before he wins the peace in the Middle East - never mind about a Hobbesian Iraq that might emerge after Saddam's regime collapses. He does not have much time if he wants to be re-elected in 2004. For him to achieve results satisfactory to the Arabs, he will have to act quickly on regime change in Israel. He will have to make sure that - in getting rid of Sharon in properly orchestrated elections of Israeli democratic vintage - he will not have Netanyahu at the helm. It is a tall order.

An exit strategy for Bush will be very difficult, if not impossible, because he has put himself and all his main options before the television screens across the globe, not to mention the Internet. There is one poor strategy which, hopefully, he will not adopt: getting the US troops and business interests out of the Middle East altogether. Such a "let them go to hell" position will quickly become a ghost that will haunt the US wherever it goes.

The problem for the Bush administration is that there is no middle road between the "let them go to hell" position and the one which requires a hands-on involvement in a meticulous and systematic restructuring of the Middle East. Bush is caught in a trap unwittingly set by the traditional Republican conservatives who want nothing to do with the Middle East and by the neo-conservatives who want to impose a more assertive Pax Americana - by force if necessary - on a case-by-case basis throughout the region, beginning with Iraq.

The neo-conservatives were influenced by the "big picture" perspective of Sharon, Netanyahu and other Likud hawks even before Bush decided to run for the presidency, but their positions were strengthened by 9/11. Their vision is that of a benign and stable Middle East policed by a new version of the old "Baghdad Pact", led by the US, stretching from East Europe and Turkey to the Indian sub-continent and with Greater Israel playing a central role.

There are men within and around the Bush administration who understand the risks underlying the neo-conservative line backed by the Likud - men like Secretary of State Colin Powell, his predecessor under the elder Bush presidency James Baker, and former National Security adviser Brent Scowcroft. But they have not been able to withstand the intellectual assault of the neo-conservative clique which, godfathered by Vice President Dick Cheney and Secretary of Defence Donald Rumsfeld, is now dominant within the administration and wields influence through powerful lobbies and think tanks.

The neo-conservatives within the administration include Deputy Defence Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, seen as the chief ideologue; Undersecretary of State John Bolton, a hawk who has defended various elements of the interventionist approach in numerous public fora; Stephen Cambone, chief of the Pentagon's Office of Program, Analysis and Evaluation; Eliot Cohen and Devon Cross, members of the Defence Policy Board which advises Rumsfeld; I. Lewis Libby, chief of staff to Vice President Dick Cheney; and Dov Zakheim, who is comptroller for the Defense Department.

An equally influential group operates from outside the administration, moulding its approach to the Middle East in line with the "Clean Break" vision. Apart from Perle, who under the Reagan administration was an assistant secretary of defence and was known as the "Prince of Darkness" for his views on the former Soviet Union, this group draws on a Messianic and hawkish network which focused on the Cold War to bring about the collapse of Communism.

Men like Sovietologist Richard Pipes and Irving Kristol, publisher of CIA-funded Encounter magazine had argued that Soviet totalitarianism could not be beaten by compromise but rather by asserting American values. Their sons Daniel Pipes, an expert in Middle Eastern affairs and a hawkish commentator on Islam, and leading neo-conservative thinker William Kristol now argue that terrorism cannot be defeated by negotiation but rather by destroying or changing the structures that generate and sustain terrorists.

The idea of "regime change" in the Middle East derives from this logic, and has become a central factor in the way the Bush administration views the region, with both US allies and enemies worried that they may be next on the target list. But the thinking of the neo-conservatives extends well beyond the Middle East and aims to influence the way America views the world. The neo-conservative US historian Robert Kagan jointly wrote with William Kristol in 1996 (in the same year his colleagues authored "A Clean Break") that US "hegemony must be actively maintained, just as it was actively obtained. ... Any lessening of that influence will allow others to play a larger part in shaping the world to suit their needs". Now they want the UN Security Council to become irrelevant and be replaced by an enlarged NATO combining with new "Baghdad Pact" alliance.

The American push to secure Iraq's petroleum resources under its influence, if not total control, can be seen in this Hobbesian context. But what the neo-conservatives had not counted on, as shown by the AEI "victory" breakfast, was the extent to which Iraqis would oppose an external "liberation" force and forced democratisation. Nor had they counted on Saddam Hussein to learn the lessons of the 1991 Gulf War; he had dispatched Iraqi experts and key figures among his murderous Fedayeen Saddam to learn the way in which Hizbollah drove the Israelis out of South Lebanon, and the tactics being used by Hamas and Islamic Jihad to fight the Israelis to a stalemate in the Palestinian territories.

The result has been much slower progress than the US anticipated towards regime change in Baghdad, and the prospect of a drawn out guerrilla war within Iran. Bush cannot afford, however, to fight a long-drawn out war with suicide bombers in view of the negative impact it will have on the global economy, as well as his re-election prospects in 2004.

Regimes who fear they may be targeted for change know that, if the US has been dragged into a military quagmire in Iraq, the neo-conservatives will be discredited and future administrations will have little appetite for restructuring the Middle East. They can be expected to quietly encourage, in whatever way they can, those resisting US domination in Iraq.

Potential US targets for regime change like Syria and Iran, as suggested at the AEI breakfast, have long borders with Iraq.