1179 Duration: 14.61 seconds
Julian Borger:
In the US, you had an ideological constituency that came to power with George Bush in 2001that was determined to take on Saddam Hussein -- and to topple Saddam Hussein. It was all about unfinished business from the first Gulf War.
1184 Duration: 16.28 seconds
Julian Borger:
That coincided with a strong constituency within the Administration that was saying continually into George Bush's ear, "Iraq is the big problem." And so when those two came together, it produced an irresistible force to go into Iraq.
1186 Duration: 27.03 seconds
Julian Borger:
I don't think they would have gone into Iraq in the first -- at least in the first term -- if it hadn't been for 9/11. I may be wrong about that, and we'll never know. But I don't think the neo-cons and the Iraq revanchists would necessarily have had enough power inside the Administration to take the US into the same scale of war as it did in 2003.
1790 Duration: 17.95 seconds
Jim Lobe:
What the administration was doing in the immediate aftermath of 9/11 had very little to do with the war on Bin Laden or the Taliban, but was part of a much broader strategy. And a little research kind of confirmed my instincts about that.
1796 Duration: 29.43 seconds
Jim Lobe:
I mean, I’d already looked at what a lot of key people who were obviously very influential within the administration were writing. It was pretty clear to me that Iraq was indeed probably already conceived of as the major target of the quote War on Terror back in late 2001 already. So, by August of 2002 it was very, very clear indeed.
1798 Duration: 21.89 seconds
Jim Lobe:
So a lot of what I was writing in the summer of 2002 -- or in the late summer of 2002 -- was about how clear it had become that you had Cheney and Rumsfeld and neo-cons around both of them are going for war. And how clear it was that Powell was dragging his feet.
1857 Duration: 20.45 seconds
Jim Lobe:
And that I think was the principal motive of -- let's call them "the mainline neo-conservative movement" and the Christian right, which pretty much has deferred to the neo-conservatives on the issues having to do with Israel.
1868 Duration: 27.39 seconds
Jim Lobe:
The larger geostrategic strategy is not just a neo-conservative notion. I see neo-conservatives -- the core of the movement as revolving around and being based upon certain ideas around the fate of Jews after the Holocaust -- a very important aspect of which is Israel.
1869 Duration: 10.38 seconds
Jim Lobe:
And I should say these are neo-conservatives who are both Jews and Gentiles -- feel a special kind of moral obligation around that issue.
1871 Duration: 16.38 seconds
Jim Lobe:
The larger geostrategic issues -- or strategy is, as I say, is not solely neo-conservative. It's people like Donald Rumsfeld, who's certainly not a neo-conservative. They're enthusiastic about this.
1872 Duration: 19.22 seconds
Jim Lobe:
Aggressive American nationalists have always favored the idea of American domination or supremacy at the global level if possible. So to me this is not a particularly neo-conservative idea.
1873 Duration: 24.76 seconds
Jim Lobe:
However, in a sense, the search for the kind of security that is supposed to come with the idea of military supremacy and dominance, I think does come -- is also at the core of the neo-conservative movement. And personally, I believe also comes out of the experience of Jews -- particularly in the 20th century and particularly as relating to the Holocaust.
1874 Duration: 10.91 seconds
Jim Lobe:
There is a kind of need for absolute security, which they believe is ultimately -- will be determined by military force.
1875 Duration: 21.62 seconds
Jim Lobe:
That that's one of the lessons they take from the rise of Nazism, Munich and the Holocaust itself -- That you really need to -- That ultimately the only real way to really protect yourself is through force. And by having military power and military dominance, because then potential Hitlers will never dare to challenge you.
1876 Duration: 10.61 seconds
Jim Lobe:
And I think a part of that also, for neo-conservatives, is the belief that the United States is morally superior.
1878 Duration: 30.83 seconds
Jim Lobe:
It's better for there to be a dominant military power of the morality of the United States than to have a kind of multi-polar world in which powers that are not nearly as moral as the United States -- like France, like China, like Russia -- can actually get their way -- that that's necessarily going to be bad for the world.
1879 Duration: 7.47 seconds
Jim Lobe:
They equate American influence with goodness in the world.
1881 Duration: 12.65 seconds
Jim Lobe:
To me, neo-conservatives have a much, much more of a moral vision of foreign policy than a political vision. They exist in a moral world rather than in a world of politics
1884 Duration: 21.92 seconds
Jim Lobe:
The question of international law and multilateral institutions that are supposed to be reciprocal in nature and create international law together is a notion that illustrates the moral dimension of neo-conservative thought, in any event.
1885 Duration: 29.9 seconds
Jim Lobe:
I think again, neo-conservatives took the lessons of the Nazi period and the Holocaust as meaning that ultimately international law doesn't mean anything -- That ultimately it is just a piece of paper that can be torn up, and that what really matters is military force. And if Britain and France would have had overwhelming military power in the mid-to-late 30s and were willing to exercise that power, then Hitler would have gone nowhere.
1887 Duration: 25.23 seconds
Jim Lobe:
Therefore, they believe that it is the responsibility of democratic states -- which because they're democracies are already considered superior to autocratic states or totalitarian states in a moral sense -- it is for them to become militarily very powerful, to deter potential autocrats or Hitlers from getting anywhere.
1889 Duration: 68.23 seconds
Jim Lobe:
And as to the international law part -- or the multilateral institutions, I think their view is based more or less again on the sense of morality. They believe that the United States and Israel -- whose fates they say explicitly are kind of linked on a moral plane -- are bringers of good to the world. And that the United States on its own has the highest morality. And the more it extends its influence in the world the better off the rest of the world will be -- in a moral sense. And therefore, they would think that it's kind of "immoral" for the United States to constrain its freedom of action -- its freedom to bring goodness to the world by agreeing to restrain its actions by lesser powers who are not as moral as the United States
1893 Duration: 16.38 seconds
Jim Lobe:
They use democracy, I think, primarily as a way of rallying opinion behind them. I'm not sure they care that much about democracy. They prefer it to other forms. If all their other interests will be taken care of, democracy is really -- is a good thing.
1895 Duration: 26.73 seconds
Jim Lobe:
By definition, if the United States extends its influence, the world will be a better place in a moral sense -- the world will be more redeemed, to use a Puritan word that dates from the beginning of the country. This isn't just a neo-conservative idea about America's goodness and its mission in the world, but the neo-cons really adopted this in a big way -- or jumped on it.
1896 Duration: 27.39 seconds
Jim Lobe:
If the United States agrees to a piece of paper -- to abide by a piece of paper that, for example, would lead to its inability to have the most powerful weapons in the world -- It is, by definition, an immoral proposition. Because it means that the United States is constrained from being more powerful -- from being militarily dominant. And ultimately the world will be better if the United States is militarily dominant.
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