Reply #8: another primer...

[JackRiddler]

A PRIMER ON PNAC AND THE BUSH REGIME
(by Jack Riddler)

All antiwar activists need to know about PNAC - the Project for a New American Century.

The PNAC site: www.newamericancentury.org

Founded in the late 1990s, PNAC is an initiative of neoconservative think-tank academics and politicians. Its participants and endorsers include the men who planned and launched the invasion of Iraq - Rumsfeld, Cheney, Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle - and many other current high officials in the Bush regime, such as Iran-Contra retreads Elliot Abrams and Richard Armitage (both at the State Department), current Aghanistan envoy Zalmay Khalilzad, and Cheney's chief of staff, Lewis Libby.

PNAC formulated the foreign policy consensus of the later Bush regime (notwithstanding Colin Powell) and the basis for the Bush Doctrine of preventive war. PNAC manifests the intent to invade Iraq long in advance of Sept. 11, and proves that many of the reasons given for the invasion were dishonest. The PNAC documents are the Pentagon Papers of our time.

The PNAC mission statement of 1997 was endorsed by the governor of Florida and later manager of the 2000 coup d'etat, Jeb Bush. Several members of Perle's Defense Policy Board - the chickenhawk civilians at the Pentagon who directly advise Wolfowitz and Rumsfeld - also signed the mission statement, including Frank Gaffney and former VP Dan Quayle.
http://www.newamericancentury.org/statementofprinciples.htm

In addition, PNAC brought together the most committed group of right-wing pundits ever to fume and fulminate, including co-founder Robert Kagan, Paula Dobriansky, Midge Decter, Francis Fukuyama, Norman Podhoretz, William Kristol of the Weekly Standard...

PNAC began lobbying President Clinton to invade Iraq and effect immediate "regime change" six years ago, in 1997. In February 1998, Rumsfeld, Perle, Armitage and a further long list of influential neoconservatives and future and former regime members (among them former Secretaries of Defense Frank Carlucci and Casper Weinberger and former National Security Adviser Robert McFarlane) wrote Clinton to urge an immediate attack on Saddam. They called on the U.S. to "launch a systematic air campaign against the pillars of power" and "position U.S. ground force equipment in the region... as a last resort." They expressed confidence that "Kuwait, Turkey and Saudi Arabia... will give us the political and logistical support to succeed."

The signatories read like a union of the old Iran-Contra cabal under Reagan and Bush Sr. with some of the most committed American supporters of the Israeli Likud's hardline policies:
See http://www.cooperativeresearch.org/archive/1990s/openletter021998.htm

PNAC is a vision for aggressive U.S. military domination of the world, beginning with regime change, the occupation of Iraq, and a new order for the entire Middle East, where America's only true friend is thought to be Israel. PNAC looks to future conflicts with Syria, Iran and other rogue states. The underlying theory holds that the regimes in these countries will collapse at the "first whiff of gunpowder" (Perle on Iraq), that their peoples will all greet American invasions with open arms, and that the societies can be turned into liberal democracies overnight.

All that this great transformation requires is overwhelming American force and the will to use it. One word for this idea is hubris. It is hard to tell whether the PNACers themselves really believe it.

Possibly the best analysis of the Bush regime's PNAC agenda for the world appeared in an Indian journal of economics:
http://www.rupe-india.org/34/contents.html
Specifically this chapter:
http://www.rupe-india.org/34/agenda.html

PNAC was recently covered on Nightline:
http://abcnews.go.com/sections/nightline/DailyNews/pnac_030310.html

Its intellecutal originators and their fellow travelers are analyzed in the New York Times:
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/04/05/arts/05WARB.html?ex=1050563461&ei=1&en=539a0a8fbd1a2aac

Scholars from the American Enterprise Institute have played a key role:
http://www.aei.org/publications/pubID.16710,filter./pub_detail.asp

In an excellent Oct. 2002 article in Harper's ("Dick Cheney's Song of America: Drafting a plan for global dominance"), David Armstrong traces these Strangelovian visions of total dominance back to the early 1990s and the U.S. defense plans drafted at the time by Cheney and Wolfowitz, when they were last in charge of the Pentagon: http://www.its.caltech.edu/~johnsonm/harpers/harpers_0210_criticism.pdf

The idea of occupying the Persian Gulf dates all the way back to plans devised under the aegis of Henry Kissinger and the Ford Administration, who saw this as a practicable solution to U.S. dependence on Middle Eastern oil. See "The Thirty Year Itch" by Robert Dreyfuss, last month in Mother Jones magazine:
http://www.motherjones.com/news/feature/2003/10/ma_273_01.html

The October 2002 Idaho Observer published a good summary of PNAC by Neil Mackay of the Sunday Herald in Scotland, "Bush administration plotted 'War on Terrorism' before 2000 election":
http://proliberty.com/observer/20021015.htm

Project for a Chinese Century?

PNAC makes no bones about the aim of establishing a large and permanent U.S. military presence in the Middle East, regardless of whether Saddam is gone.

PNAC stands for unilateral American leadership of "coalitions of the willing," and shows open contempt for treaties, diplomacy and the troublesome United Nations, which PNAC hopes to make irrelevant. Ideas of international or multilateral partnership are simply naive in an essentially Hobbesian world. The United States alone has the moral authority to dictate the terms of international order, in every region of the world.

PNAC advocates massive increases in U.S. military power and the defense budget, "forward basing" in countries around the world, "full spectrum dominance" of the U.S. military against all comers in space, land, sea, air and cyberspace, and "preventive war" against designated enemy regimes.

PNAC aims to block the rise of any local hegemon that could challenge U.S. power in any "strategic region," and to assure that there will never again be a global challenger like Russia, Europe or China.

Of course, PNAC's reckless strategy is practically designed to plunge the world into a new century of arms races and wars, endangering the safety and true interests of the American people. With its open contempt for the rest of the world, the dream of PNAC is guaranteed to ultimately fail, and in the process to bog down and ultimately destroy American power.

Making the Enemy
(More to come on Rumsfeld, West and Russia arming both sides during the Iran-Iraq conflict, how the Bush-Reagan regimes literally saved Saddam twice in 86-87 and in 1991, and the one day in history when Wolfowitz was actually right: March 1, 1991.)

Business as Usual

Is it a coincidence that almost all of the PNAC boys in the administration previously worked as consultants or executives in the war and/or oil industries?

Even today, Cheney cashes in more than a million dollars a year from his former company, Halliburton. In the 1990s under Cheney as CEO, Halliburton rebuilt the Iraqi oil field infrastructure - the destruction of which Cheney had overseen as Secretary of Defense during the 1991 Gulf war. Cheney has now switched back to the task of destroying Iraq all over again, and Halliburton has lined up at the trough for the post-war rebuilding contracts. No doubt a top seat at Halliburton is waiting for Cheney after he leaves office.

Richard Perle, head of the hardline Defense Policy Board at the Pentagon, counts only as a "consultant" to the government, and simultaneously offers his services (influence peddling) to private Pentagon contractors, like Trireme Investments. In the 1990s he served as a consultant to then-Israeli premier Benjamin Netanyahu, advising him on how to undermine the peace process with the Palestinians.

Perle's dealings were exposed recently by Seymour Hersh in The New Yorker:
"LUNCH WITH THE CHAIRMAN. Why was Richard Perle meeting with Adnan Khashoggi?"
http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/?030317fa_fact

Following Hersh's blockbuster report, Perle tendered a resignation as head of the Defense Policy Board, but he still meets with the other DPB members at the Pentagon. His "resignation" is a transparent ruse, and Perle remains a constant presence in the media, pushing the chickenhawk line. In a CNN interview, he called Hersh a "terrorist":
http://www.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0303/09/le.00.html

Carlyle Group

Among the signatories to PNAC's open letter to Clinton was former Secretary of Defense Frank Carlucci. Since 1989 he has directed the Carlyle Group, currently the 12th largest Pentagon contractor. Carlucci's college roommate at Yale was the current head of the Pentagon, Donald Rumsfeld. A Carlyle Group subsidiary devised and sold to the Pentagon the original plan for "Shock and Awe" - the operation that last month rained hundreds of missiles on downtown Bagdad in a failed effort to topple the regime overnight.

An investment fund, Carlyle specializes in buying "undervalued" arms makers, magically turning them into arms-contract winners on the strength of its highly paid lobbyists, lawyers and directors. Among them are George H.W. Bush himself, former UK prime minister John Major and the former Secretary of State under Bush, James Baker, as well as other former heads of state and ministers. Carlyle helped finance companies belonging to George W. Bush, including the airline food supplier Caterair. Until the aftermath of the Sept. 11th attacks, the fund's veteran investors numbered members of the Saudi Binladin family - including two brothers of Osama, the world's most famous lapsed CIA asset.

The New York Times, May 2001: "In a really peculiar way, George W. Bush could, some day, benefit financially from his own administration's decisions, through his father's investments. The average American doesn't know that and, to me, that's a jaw-dropper."
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/03/05/politics/05CARL.html

An in-depth report on Carlyle ("Carlyle's way. Making a mint inside "the iron triangle" of defense, government, and industry" by Dan Briody) was published by the business magazine Red Herring. It opens by describing the group's annual 2001 meeting, on the morning of Sept. 11:

"Like everyone else in the United States, the group stood transfixed as the events of September 11 unfolded. Present were former secretary of defense Frank Carlucci, former secretary of state James Baker III, and representatives of the bin Laden family. This was not some underground presidential bunker or Central Intelligence Agency interrogation room. It was the Ritz-Carlton in Washington, D.C., the plush setting for the annual investor conference of one of the most powerful, well-connected, and secretive companies in the world: the Carlyle Group. And since September 11, this little-known company has become unexpectedly important."
http://servedfor.valuead.com/code?pid=88&gid=1&oin=0&rid=479079561&dom=5&dow=6&hod=0

Hitting the Trifecta

Before Sept. 11th, the policies advocated by PNAC and its associated initiatives would have seemed extreme and dangerous to most Americans.

Although PNAC included his brother and the key national security figures in his regime, George W. Bush did not run his 2000 election campaign on the PNAC platform. Candidate Bush instead warned that Clinton had overextended U.S. forces around the world and called for a more "modest America": an America that does not engage in nation building and worldwide intervention, an America that lives at peace with other countries and avoids foreign entanglements.

Of course, as soon as the Bush regime came to power, they dropped the soothing rhetoric and immediately blustered and blundered their way into international isolation. Bush set the tone on Dec. 18, 2000, when he commented on his selection to the presidency by a 5-4 vote of the Supreme Court as follows: "This would be easier if it were a dictatorship... but only if I was the dictator." This was supposed to be a joke?

From that moment, the U.S. undermined or withdrew from the ABM treaty with Russia, the biowarfare convention, efforts at nuclear proliferation, and many other treaties and convents. By Sept. 11, the Bush regime was already treated like a joke at home and faced an imminent series of scandals, including Enron and the publishing of the U.S. media consortium's Florida recount results.

Given the initial unpopularity of their ideas, how exactly were the PNAC crew planning, long in advance of the 2000 election, to make their megalomania fly with the American people?

A quote from the PNAC site reads: "...the process of transformation" of American policy, "even if it brings revolutionary change, is likely to be a long one, absent some catastrophic and catalyzing event - like a new Pearl Harbor."
Characteristically, this little bombshell is buried on Page 51 of the report (page 63 of the PDF document):
http://www.newamericancentury.org/RebuildingAmericasDefenses.pdf

As we now know, they got their Pearl Harbor.

Although every attempt until now to establish a connection between the crime of 9/11 and the Saddam regime has been exposed as sheer fabrication, the Bush regime is still using the Sept. 11th attacks as infinite casus belli to justify the very same series of wars that the PNAC crew and their neoconservative allies had planned long in advance - starting with Iraq.

The cavalier instrumentalization of Sept. 11 is perhaps best exemplified in one of Bush's oft-repeated "jokes" for Republican audiences during late 2001. Noting he had promised not to dip into the Social Security fund or run a federal budget deficit except in the case of war, national emergency or a recession, Bush declaimed: "Lucky me. I guess I hit the trifecta!"

The Crusade Continues

Now in discussion as a future U.S. plenipotentiary of Iraq is James Woolsey, former head of the CIA under Clinton. Not a PNACer himself, he is fully in tune with the line. At a UCLA campus speaking engagement of a group called "Americans for Victory Over Terrorism," Woolsey declared that "the United States is engaged in World War IV." The third world war, for those who missed it, was the cold war with the Soviets.

Woolsey: "This fourth world war, I think, will last considerably longer than either World Wars I or II did for us. Hopefully not the full four-plus decades of the Cold War." As the enemies, Woolsey defines the Shi'a rulers of Iran, the "fascists of Iraq and Syria," and Al Qaeda. "As we move toward a new Middle East over the years and, I think, over the decades to come ... we will make a lot of people very nervous."

CNN wrote: "Singling out Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak and the leaders of Saudi Arabia, said, 'We want you nervous. We want you to realize now, for the fourth time in a hundred years, this country and its allies are on the march and that we are on the side of those whom you -- the Mubaraks, the Saudi Royal family -- most fear: We're on the side of your own people.'"
http://edition.cnn.com/2003/US/04/03/sprj.irq.woolsey.world.war/

Woolsey thus seems to have all of the major Arab Muslim countries in his sights. This is the man who may soon be running Iraq, which is only one stop in the regime's plans for a new crusade.

None of this can be described accurately as conservative. PNAC is a radical plan to transform the face of the planet, downright Bolshevik in its ambitions, and it has even come under fire on the American right, among the rising movement of "paleoconservatives."* The goal, as the initiative's grandiose name declares, is to secure unquestioned U.S. geostrategic dominance of the planet for the next century. If that takes a thirty-year war, so be it.
---

John Pilger on PNAC and Richard Perle:
"What America needed was 'a new Pearl Harbor'" http://pilger.carlton.com/print/124759

PNAC additional info, history, and resources
from the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace
Origins of Regime Change in Iraq
http://www.ceip.org/files/nonprolif/templates/Publications.asp?p=8&PublicationID=1214
Resources and support documents
http://www.ceip.org/files/Iraq/index.htm#regime_change

For insight into the "paleoconservative" view, see www.antiwar.com. This extremely useful site is updated daily, with links to the day's best war-related stories and many interesting columns. We can only wish them success in their endeavor to strip conservative support away from the radical Bush regime.