The superhawk behind the surge

The obscure Bush administration official charged with coordinating the president's new Iraq strategy has been a consistent advocate of armed US intervention everywhere from Cuba to North Korea. US President George W Bush is taking his advice from the most hawkish of his hawkish advisers

A Very Informative Article
By Jim Lobe
Asia Times

"WASHINGTON - When President George W Bush unveils his long-awaited new strategy on Iraq on Wednesday night eastern US time, he will be relying heavily on the counsel of one J D Crouch II, perhaps the most hardline - if most obscure - of his hawkish advisers.


Over the past 15 years, the generally low-profile Crouch has taken any number of controversial positions, from advocating military action against Cuba and North Korea to blaming the 1999 Columbine High School student massacre in Colorado on "30 years of liberal social policy".

As deputy national security adviser, Crouch, who has held three posts in the Bush administration, chaired the inter-agency group charged with mapping out Bush's new Iraq strategy, whose main feature, it is expected, will be to add some 20,000 new US troops to the 140,000 already there in hopes of stabilizing Baghdad and rebellious al-Anbar province.

Crouch, whose substantive expertise is in arms control - or, more precisely, how the US can evade or undermine international efforts to promote arms control - has long been a favorite of Vice President Dick Cheney, whose own national security adviser, neo-conservative John Hannah, has reportedly played a key role in the deliberations over Iraq.....

.....only to be appointed the following year as ambassador to Romania, a post he held for just eight months before being recalled to Washington in early 2005 as deputy national security adviser under Stephen Hadley.

His return was described by Washington Post columnist Jim Hoagland as evidence that Cheney was "charging ahead with undiminished influence and unshakable self-confidence".....

He moved in 1990 to the Pentagon, where he worked under then-under secretary of defense for policy Paul Wolfowitz. After the first Gulf War he was part of a team that included Wolfowitz; Cheney's future vice-presidential chief of staff until 2005, I Lewis Libby; and Washington's current ambassador to Iraq, Zalmay Khalilzad, and that prepared the draft DPG. Its leak to the New York Times sparked a major controversy that eventually prompted the Bush Sr administration to repudiate its more unilateralist proposals.....

He also joined the board of advisers of the ultra-hawkish Center for Security Policy, a lobby group funded by defense contractors and far-right Zionists associated with Israel's Likud Party and headed by hardline neo-conservative Frank Gaffney.

Other members of that board have included senior members of the current US administration, including Elliot Abrams, the senior Middle East director on the National Security Council; former Defense Policy Board chairman Richard Perle; former under secretary of defense for policy Douglas Feith; and a number of former and current SMSU faculty members, including Van Cleave, Charles Kupperman, Keith Payne, and the former head of Reagan's Star Wars program, Henry Cooper....

Although such positions generally do not reflect neo-conservative views, neo-cons, including Perle and Gaffney, have, like Cheney, been among Crouch's most enthusiastic boosters over the years.

"Knowing him as I do," Gaffney, whose list of US adversaries against which Washington should be much more confrontational runs from Iran, North Korea, Syria and Venezuela to China, Russia and France, told the St Louis Post Dispatch, "I'm almost certain that he is exercising influence, and influence that is reinforcing the most robust policies and positions of this administration." "