How We Got Into This Imperial Pickle
A PNAC Primer
by Bernard Weiner
Recently, I was the guest on a radio talk-show hosted by a
thoroughly decent far-right Republican. I got verbally battered, but
returned fire and, I think, held my own. Toward the end of the hour,
I mentioned that the National Security Strategy -- promulgated by
the Bush Administration in September 2002 -- now included attacking
possible future competitors first, assuming regional hegemony by
force of arms, controlling energy resources around the globe,
maintaining a permanent-war strategy, etc.
"I'm not making up this stuff," I said. "It's all talked about openly by the
neo-conservatives of the Project for the New American
Century -- who now are in charge of America's military and foreign policy -- and
published as official U.S. doctrine in the National Security Strategy of the United
States of America."
The talk-show host seemed to gulp, and then replied: "If you really
can demonstrate all that, you probably can deny George Bush a second
term in 2004."
. . . Mere hours after the 9/11 terrorist mass-murders, PNACer
Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld ordered his aides to begin planning
for an attack on Iraq, even though his intelligence officials told
him it was an al-Qaida operation and there was no connection between
Iraq and the attacks. "Go massive," the aides' notes quote him as
saying. "Sweep it all up. Things related and not." Rumsfeld leaned
heavily on the FBI and CIA to find any shred of evidence linking the
Iraq government to 9/11, but they weren't able to. So he set up his
own fact-finding group in the Pentagon that would provide him with
whatever shaky connections it could find or surmise.
[Further, the process of transformation, even if it brings revolutionary
change, is likely to be a long one, absent some catastrophic and catalyzing
event -- like a new Pearl Harbor.--"Rebuilding America's Defenses," The
Project for the New American Century (PNAC), September 2000, p51]
[In a little discussed speech titled "A Period of Consequences," given at
The Citadel military college in South Carolina on Sept. 23, 1999, then-Texas
Gov. George W. Bush laid out his plan for America. Bush"s speech succinctly
reflected the ideology of the Project for the New American Century (PNAC), a
neoconservative institute initiated in 1997 by The New Citizenship Project,
under the direction of its president, Sen. John McCain.
Bush's Citadel speech was mirrored by a report that PNAC produced in
September 2000, "Rebuilding
America's Defenses: Strategy, Forces, and Resources for a New
Century" ("RAD"). As noted by the authors of "RAD," PNAC was based on
the defense strategy outlined by Dick Cheney's Defense Department in the
1992 Defense Policy Guidance (DPG) at the end of the George H.W. Bush
administration.
The DPG (also known as the Wolfowitz Report) provided a "blueprint for
maintaining U.S. preeminence, precluding the rise of a great power rival,
and shaping the international security order in line with American
principles and interests."--Elliot Cohen, "Hell to
Pay," truthdig.com, October 30, 2008]