Tenet's resignation shows up small gaps in the neo-conservative intelligence and propaganda-based system, but the fundamental problems remain unchallenged, writes Mohamed Hakki Last Thursday, Central Intelligence Agency Director George Tenet announced his resignation, saying he was stepping down for "personal reasons". His departure is the first by a top-ranking official from the current United States administration's national security team. But his was not the head that most people expected to roll. It is true that the administration -- and the country -- is braced for a series of damning reports about the state of US intelligence: first from the commission investigating the 11 September 2001 terrorist attacks, and then from the two congressional committees investigating the intelligence failures over the existence of alleged Iraqi weapons of mass destruction. But the CIA was not the only branch of the government that "screwed up badly". So many other heads need to roll, chief among them Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, but his time has not come. Two weeks ago retired General Anthony Zinni, one of the most respected military leaders of the past two decades, delivered the most blistering attack against the "poor strategic thinking, poor operational planning and execution" of the war on Iraq. He put the blame squarely on Rumsfeld's shoulders. He said: "Well, it starts at the top. If you're the secretary of defense and you're responsible for that, if you're responsible for the planning and the execution on the ground, if you've assumed responsibility for the other elements, non-military, non-security, political, economic, social and everything else, then you bear responsibility... Certainly those in your ranks that foisted this strategy on us that is flawed; certainly they ought to be gone and replaced." Zinni then named names. He blamed all the neo-conservatives who viewed the invasion as a way to secure American interests in the region and to strengthen the position of Israel. Among those named were Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, Under Secretary of Defense Douglas Feith, former Defense Policy Board member Richard Perle, National Security Council member Eliot Abrams -- a convicted felon from the Iran- Contra scandal -- and Vice President Dick Cheney's Chief of Staff Lewis "Scooter" Libby. Zinni believes they are political ideologues who have hijacked American policy in Iraq. "I think it's the worst kept secret in Washington. That everybody -- everybody I talk to in Washington has known and fully knows what their agenda was and what they were trying to do... I know what strategy they promoted, and openly, and for a number of years. And what they have convinced the president and the secretary to do." He said he believed their aim was to change the Middle East, and that their strategy would be one of unilateral aggressive intervention by the US. Taking down Iraq was a priority in this strategy. "We are now being viewed not as an entity promising positive change, but as modern crusaders, the modern colonial power in that part of the world." Typically, when The Washington Post reported Zinni's TV appearance, it did not mention the fact that he had singled out those who "conned the American people into the war". But many other high ranking officials, like former Admiral William Crow, former chief of staff of the armed forces, have said exactly the same thing. When I asked a former assistant secretary of state why President George W Bush has not fired the guilty parties, he said: "That means he has to sacrifice Richard Cheney." When former President Ronald Reagan died on the anniversary of D-Day, television put up a wall of Ronald Reagan nostalgia "so thick that even the president who claims Reagan's mantle could barely break through", in the words of The New York Times. It was as though the legacy of the Great Communicator's era had suddenly been brought back to the foreground to show up Bush's errors of judgement. Certainly, Reagan was not a friend of the Arabs. But, unlike Bush, he was not wrapped around Israel's little finger. Reagan's deputy chief of staff from 1981 to 1985, Michael Deaver, tells the story of when he went into the Oval Office in 1982, telling the president: "I cannot take it any more." Reagan said: "What did I do now?" Deaver said the Israelis were bombing the hell out of Beirut, killing hundreds of civilians every day. The Americans were watching this on the news every night. Reagan said: "What can I do?" Deaver asked him to pick up the phone to tell Menachem Begin to stop, which he did. Twenty minutes later Begin called Reagan to say that the bombing had stopped. Reagan looked at Deaver saying: "I did not know I could do that." Reagan did not claim Israel had a right to defend itself. His aids were not necessarily friendly to the Arabs, but they were not ideologues who applied the Zionist agenda by the letter. Among the most memorable moments of his presidency was when, in Berlin, he ordered Mikhail Gorbachev to "tear down that wall". He was facing the USSR, a formidable superpower, not a client state. Bush, on the other hand, has never thought of telling the Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon to remove the obscene separation wall. It is a horrible irony that while the American people are, for the most part, aware that the neocons have hijacked US foreign policy, Bush himself does not get it. A network of think tanks, mass media writers, broadcasters and producers, and national security agents has long been accused of working solely to produce propaganda to provide legitimacy to neo-conservative politics. In a book that was published this week, James Bamforth -- author of two earlier studies on the most extensive US intelligence network, the National Security Agency -- talks about how Richard Perle, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz and Douglas Feith planned to wage a war long before the 11 September attacks. Bamforth charges that those four leading hawks manipulated the CIA, the Defense Intelligence Agency and the National Security Agency in a desperate attempt to justify a regime change in Iraq that they had been strategising for years. Some high ranking Republicans are already aware of the damage this group is doing to America. "We need to restrain what are growing US messianic instincts -- a sort of global social engineering where the United States feels it is both entitled and obligated to promote democracy by force if necessary," said Senator Pat Roberts, a conservative Kansas Republican and chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee. Unfortunately, with the Arab leaders so bent on furthering their own interests -- an aim which has worked very well so far in partnership with the current US administration -- it is difficult to envisage just who will enforce such restraint of US foreign policy.
