The Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon changed all that, Cheney said. They dictated a radical shift from the previous course if the U.S. rulers were to confront the challenges they faced abroad and, under the banner of the “global war on terrorism,” to defend U.S. strategic interests around the world.

Ultrarightist politician Patrick Buchanan, speaking September 5 on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” raised sharp criticism of the administration’s policy course in the Mideast, saying it is counterproductive to Washington’s interests. Expressing a view shared by a minority of the U.S. ruling class, he argued that the White House is conducting an “unnecessary war” in Iraq and called for “a strategic withdrawal” of U.S. troops from that country.

This debate reflects the most serious difference among the U.S. rulers on how to conduct the “war on terrorism” to advance Washington’s strategic interests.

In criticizing the Republican administration, Buchanan argued demagogically that a small group of “neoconservative” officials in the Defense Department has hijacked U.S. foreign policy and “imposed” it on Bush. He suggested that those officials are more loyal to the Israeli government than to Washington and that, through their influence, U.S. foreign policy serves the Israeli regime. Seizing on news leaks that the FBI has been questioning a Pentagon analyst over charges that he gave secret documents to a pro-Tel Aviv lobbying group, Buchanan called for an investigation about a possible “nest” of Israeli spies within the Defense Department who might be guilty of “treason.”

Buchanan’s target is not only “the Jews” in the Pentagon but above all Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld.  
 
Cheney defends ‘Bush Doctrine’
In a September 6 speech in St. Paul, Minnesota, Cheney contrasted the U.S. government’s current military strategy with the course followed by the last several administrations, from that of Republican Ronald Reagan to the Democratic White House under William Clinton. All of them taught “terrorists” that “they could strike us with relative impunity” and that “if they hit us hard enough, they could change our policy,” he said.

Cheney went down a list of attacks on U.S. targets that took place during the two decades before 9/11. He cited the 1983 car-bombing of the U.S. military barracks in Beirut that killed 241 Marines, the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center, the 1996 attack on the Khobar Towers in Saudi Arabia, the 1998 bombings of the U.S. embassies in Tanzania and Kenya, and the attack on the USS Cole in Yemen in 2000. The 1983 incident took place under the Reagan administration, and the others under Clinton. By inference, he was also alluding to the Republican administration of the senior George Bush as well as James Carter’s Democratic White House in 1977-81.

“What were the consequences of these attacks?” Cheney asked. “Not much. We fired off a few cruise missiles once. Basically they struck us with impunity and got away with it.”

The vice president has elaborated on this question—clearly with Bush’s approval—in a number of other speeches over the past year. In an August 12 speech in Joplin, Missouri, he noted that for decades Washington approached each of these incidents “as some kind of criminal enterprise” through police actions that put individuals in prison.

“Then the attack of 9/11, and, of course, it changed everything. I think everybody came to realize at that moment that we were, in fact, at war—that we’d been at war for some time, ” Cheney said. Until then, “we hadn’t really as a nation come to grips with that basic fundamental proposition.”

These carefully worded remarks, which amounted to saying that the Bush administration shared responsibility for what led to September 11 along with several previous governments, were an appeal to Democrats as well as Republicans to come on board.

Cheney asserted that the U.S. government won the Cold War by the opening of the 1990s and that Washington acted over the following years as if it had less need for waging wars. It took the U.S. rulers about a decade to figure out that the “peace dividend” from the end of the Cold War, which included scaling back military spending, was over and an adjustment was needed to meet the challenge of “the new enemy.”

The Bush administration, he said, did learn the lesson of 9/11 and has since applied it through the so-called Bush Doctrine. He said this policy means that any government or individual deemed to be protecting “terrorists” will be targeted, and Washington will “preemptively” attack opponents, “not wait for the next attack.”

Cheney said Washington has made progress with this approach. He cited the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq and the establishment of regimes favorable to U.S. interests there. Subsequently, the Libyan government gave up its weapons program and the government of Pakistan arrested a top scientist there who allegedly sold nuclear material abroad.

Most recently, the governments of Yemen and Indonesia have taken steps to eliminate “anti-American terrorists” in those countries.

Cheney said Washington was in for a long struggle, with serious dangers ahead. Its new strategy has “set the course for the nation maybe for the next half century…. We have a very long way to go.”  
 
Kerry’s position
In a September 8 speech in Des Moines, Iowa, the vice president attacked Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry’s position. Kerry “said that he would use military force. He’d like to do it in the fairly traditional way, when the U.S. is attacked,” Cheney stated. If Washington falls back “into the pre-9/11 mindset” that “these terrorist attacks are just criminal acts, and that we’re not really at war,” he said, the United States will be attacked again and again. “We’re now at that point where we’re making that kind of decision for the next 30 or 40 years, and it’s absolutely essential that eight weeks from today, on November 2nd, we make the right choice. Because if we make the wrong choice, then the danger is that we’ll get hit again.”

While Democrats immediately howled that Cheney had slandered Kerry, the vice president was in fact offering a coherent explanation for the course that Washington has taken and the challenges it faces. Because there is no alternative course today to the U.S. government’s “global war on terrorism,” the Bush administration’s position has majority support among the American ruling families and thus in public opinion.

Kerry and other Democratic politicians have supported the basic war policies followed by the White House, raising tactical disagreements only over how to carry them out. The disadvantage for Kerry is that the incumbent president has a consistent three-year record of implementing this course, while Kerry has appeared to vacillate in his position, something that liberal commentators have publicly complained about and that Republicans have taken full advantage of.

As a result, the Democratic contender has gained no traction on the issue of Iraq and appears headed for defeat in November, despite mounting attacks in Iraq on the Anglo-American occupation forces and a death toll of more than 1,000 U.S. soldiers.

The closest to an alternative position among the liberal Democrats was the one taken by former presidential candidate Howard Dean. Before last year’s invasion of Iraq, Dean said he would support a U.S. military assault to overthrow the Saddam Hussein regime only as part of a United Nations-sponsored intervention and disagreed with doing so “unilaterally.” Today, Dean supports the U.S.-led occupation of Iraq but calls for other foreign troops to share the responsibility and cost.

Nonetheless, the Democratic Party rejected Dean’s candidacy knowing that it would be an electoral disaster. And it rejects out of hand advocating the immediate or rapid withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq. That position would at least mobilize the most liberal vote, but Bush would still win by a landslide.  
 
Buchanan’s criticism of Iraq war
Within this ruling-class debate, ultrarightist politician Patrick Buchanan expresses most clearly an alternative foreign policy course for Washington, albeit a minority view in U.S. ruling circles.

Appearing on “Meet the Press” September 5, Buchanan insisted that the U.S.-led war on Iraq “is an unnecessary war; it is an unjust war.” The proof, he said, is that the question posed by U.S. defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld—“Have we been creating more terrorists than we are killing?”—has been answered affirmatively and that supporters of Osama bin Laden are gaining more support.

The armed opposition in Iraq to the U.S.-led occupation “could turn into a failed state in chaos and civil war,” Buchanan said. “I would execute a strategic withdrawal from Iraq.”

In an interview two days earlier on the cable TV program “Real Time,” Buchanan told host Bill Maher that he supported the U.S. invasion and occupation of Afghanistan because the Taliban-led government had been connected to al-Qaeda and the attack on the World Trade Center. But he said he had warned Bush before the 2003 assault on Baghdad that in occupying Iraq “we’re going to inherit our own West Bank, only it’s going to be 25 million Iraqis. And that’s exactly what happened.”

Patrick Buchanan is an incipient fascist politician who uses radical, often anticapitalist, demagogy to tap middle-class insecurities and resentments among broader layers of the population bred by the growing capitalist disorder. He has attacked both the Republican and Democratic parties for representing the “Beltway establishment” and betraying “the little guy.”

Buchanan has kept one foot in traditional bourgeois politics while seeking to recruit cadres to the longer-term goal of building a popular, rightist street movement that can eventually impose radical solutions to protect the interest of capital in times of acute crisis. In the 2000 elections he ran for president on the Reform Party ticket. He writes regular columns in his biweekly magazine, The American Conservative.

The ultrarightist recently issued his latest book, Where the Right Went Wrong: How Neoconservatives Subverted the Reagan Revolution and Hijacked the Bush Presidency. Taking an America First position, he denounces the Bush administration’s foreign policy as “the imperial edict of a superpower.” He argues that “terrorism is the price of empire. If we do not wish to pay it, we must give up the empire.”

In response to statements by Bush that the World Trade Center was attacked by forces who “hate what we stand for,” Buchanan contends, “We are hated for what we do. It is not our principles that have spawned pandemic hatred of America in the Islamic world. It is our policies.”  
 
Claims ‘neocons’ hijacked U.S. policy
Elaborating on the themes of his book, Buchanan argued on the NBC television program that it was a small group of “neoconservative war hawks [in the Pentagon] who planned, prepared, and propagandized for a war in Iraq as far back as 1996. This was their class project.” He added, “I believe they imposed it upon the president.”

In making these claims, Buchanan promotes a claim that has been repeated by a range of liberal, left-radical, and right-wing commentators and politicians who attack the Bush administration by attributing its foreign policy and military strategy to a small group of “neocons” in the Defense Department. They often point to Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, Undersecretary of Defense Douglas Feith, and former Pentagon advisor Richard Perle. Some go further, implying that a Jewish “cabal” is involved.

Buchanan has taken this argument to the hoop. On the September 5 “Meet the Press,” the show’s host, Tim Russert, quoted from Buchanan’s book: “We were attacked…because of our uncritical support of the Likud regime of Ariel Sharon.” Then Russert asked, “Are you suggesting that our alliance with Israel is one of the reasons that we were attacked on September 11.” Buchanan replied yes, and criticized the administration for “the refusal to condemn that wall snaking through the West Bank.”

Suggesting that the Bush administration is being run by “neocons” who are more loyal to the Israeli government than to Washington, Buchanan declared, “We also need to investigate whether there is a nest of Pollardites in the Pentagon who have been transmitting American secrets through AIPAC, the Israeli lobby, over to Reno Road, the Israeli embassy, to be transferred to Mr. Sharon.” He said, “We are getting dangerously close to the T-word,” meaning “treason,” and then added, “I’m sure the president has no involvement in this.”

“Pollardites”—a codeword meaning “Jewish spies for Israel”—refers to Jonathan Pollard, a U.S. Navy intelligence analyst who in 1987 was convicted and sentenced to life in prison on charges of selling classified U.S. government documents to the Israeli government. Supporters of Tel Aviv have campaigned for his pardon.

Buchanan was referring to recent news “leaks” that the FBI has been investigating Defense Intelligence Agency analyst Lawrence Franklin, who reportedly worked in the Pentagon under Feith and Wolfowitz, over charges that he gave “sensitive” U.S. documents on Iran to the American Israeli Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), a pro-Tel Aviv lobby group.

In a September 8 syndicated column, Buchanan called for investigating “Israeli espionage, and possible treason, against the United States.” He said, “If there has been a recurrence of Pollardism at the Pentagon, we need to know and the president needs to act, as Truman did not with Alger Hiss and Harry Dexter White.”

Hiss and White, officials in the Truman administration, were accused of being Soviet agents during the McCarthyite witch-hunt; White was not indicted while Hiss was convicted and jailed on charges of perjury for denying the spy charges.

Although Buchanan has a proven record as a Jew-hater, his main target in this case is not Jews but central officials in the Bush administration—Cheney and Rumsfeld, who are not Jewish. Cheney has been the main spokesman for the administration in recent weeks. As the top official of the Defense Department in the last two years, Rumsfeld has most forcefully advocated Washington’s new military strategy, especially the restructuring and repositioning of the U.S. military.

Many liberal politicians and middle-class radicals have also been demanding Rumsfeld’s resignation and have targeted Cheney for most of the evils of the Bush administration. This is one point of convergence between ultrarightists like Buchanan and left-liberals such as “independent” presidential candidate Ralph Nader. Buchanan, in fact, is a bolder critic of the U.S.-led war on Iraq because, unlike liberals, he is not beholden to electing “Anyone But Bush,” that is, Kerry.

Buchanan is seeking to fan a witch-hunt campaign, under the banner of exposing “Zionist” (read: Jewish) spies in the government, to go after these “neocons.”

In the early 1950s, Sen. Joseph McCarthy, an incipient fascist politician, pushed a witch-hunt campaign around “Soviet spies” in the Truman and Eisenhower administrations. Like Buchanan, McCarthy was careful not to go after the commander-in-chief, but rather targeted figures in the State Department.  
 
No one challenges Buchanan
A notable aspect of the “Meet the Press” program was the lack of response by the other two panelists, Republican former House speaker Newton Gingrich and Democratic senator Robert Graham from Florida, both of whom exchanged views with Buchanan in a friendly tone. They did not challenge Buchanan’s diatribe about “neocons” acting as virtual Israeli spies. Graham said that the Bush administration was not “fully engaged” enough to help resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and that the White House should “come clean” on its ties to the Saudi government in response to 9/11.

Despite the wide media coverage of Buchanan’s statements, there has been no public outcry or answer to them outside of the most militant supporters of the Israeli regime. To a large extent this is due to the fact that the main object of Buchanan’s target in this case is not primarily Jews but figures like Cheney and Rumsfeld, against whom many liberal politicians and commentators have also aimed their fire.  
 
 
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