PNAC Links Archive (Redux)

[Stephanie]

The old PNAC Archive seems more relevant now than ever, so I'm recreating it. Forgive me if I don't attribute all the posters who contributed links - this Archive was created by many diligent DUers. And please continue to add your links as the story unfolds. Thanks!

Original thread: http://www.democraticunderground.com/duforum/DCForumID1...

http://www.newamericancentury.org/publicationsreports.h...

"Rebuilding America's Defenses: Strategy, Forces and Resources For a New Century," September 2000. A Report of the Project for the New American Century.

<snip>The United States cannot simply declare a strategic pause while experimenting with new technologies and operational concepts. Nor can it choose to pursue a transformation strategy that would decouple American and allied interests. A transformation strategy that solely pursued capabilities for projecting force from the United States, for example, and sacrificed forward basing and presence, would be at odds with larger American policy goals and would trouble American allies.

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. Domestic politics and industrial policy will shape the pace and content of transformation as much as the requirements of current missions. A decision to suspend or terminate aircraft carrier production, as recommended by this report and as justified by the clear direction of military technology, will cause great upheaval. Likewise, systems entering production today - the F-22 fighter, for example - will be in service inventories for decades to come. Wise management of this process will consist in large measure of figuring out the right moments to halt production of current-paradigm weapons and shift to radically new designs. The expense associated with some programs can make them roadblocks to the larger process of transformation - the Joint Strike Fighter program, at a total of approximately $200 billion, seems an unwise investment. Thus, this report advocates a two-stage process of change - transition and transformation - over the coming decades.</snip>


http://truthout.org/docs_02/022203A.htm

Of Gods and Mortals and Empire
By William Rivers Pitt
t r u t h o u t | Perspective

Friday 21 February 2003

<snip>Vice President Dick Cheney is a founding member of PNAC, along with Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Defense Policy Board chairman Richard Perle. Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz is the ideological father of the group. Bruce Jackson, a PNAC director, served as a Pentagon official for Ronald Reagan before leaving government service to take a leading position with the weapons manufacturer Lockheed Martin.

PNAC is staffed by men who previously served with groups like Friends of the Democratic Center in Central America, which supported America's bloody gamesmanship in Nicaragua and El Salvador, and with groups like The Committee for the Present Danger, which spent years advocating that a nuclear war with the Soviet Union was "winnable."

PNAC has recently given birth to a new group, The Committee for the Liberation of Iraq, which met with National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice in order to formulate a plan to "educate" the American populace about the need for war in Iraq. CLI has funneled millions of taxpayer dollars to support the Iraqi National Congress and the Iraqi heir presumptive, Ahmed Chalabi. Chalabi was sentenced in absentia by a Jordanian court in 1992 to 22 years in prison for bank fraud after the collapse of Petra Bank, which he founded in 1977. Chalabi has not set foot in Iraq since 1956, but his Enron-like business credentials apparently make him a good match for the Bush administration's plans.

PNAC's "Rebuilding America's Defenses" report is the institutionalization of plans and ideologies that have been formulated for decades by the men currently running American government. The PNAC Statement of Principles is signed by Cheney, Wolfowitz and Rumsfeld, as well as by Eliot Abrams, Jeb Bush, Bush's special envoy to Afghanistan Zalmay Khalilzad, and many others. William Kristol, famed conservative writer for the Weekly Standard, is also a co-founder of the group. The Weekly Standard is owned by Ruppert Murdoch, who also owns international media giant Fox News

The desire for these freshly empowered PNAC men to extend American hegemony by force of arms across the globe has been there since day one of the Bush administration, and is in no small part a central reason for the Florida electoral battle in 2000. Note that while many have said that Gore and Bush are ideologically identical, Mr. Gore had no ties whatsoever to the fellows at PNAC. George W. Bush had to win that election by any means necessary, and PNAC signatory Jeb Bush was in the perfect position to ensure the rise to prominence of his fellow imperialists. Desire for such action, however, is by no means translatable into workable policy. Americans enjoy their comforts, but don't cotton to the idea of being some sort of Neo-Rome.

On September 11th, the fellows from PNAC saw a door of opportunity open wide before them, and stormed right through it. </snip>


http://truthout.org/docs_03/022803A.shtml

Blood Money
By William Rivers Pitt
t r u t h o u t | Perspective

Thursday 27 February 2003

"In the counsels of Government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the Military Industrial Complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists, and will persist. We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes."
- President Dwight Eisenhower, January 1961.

George W. Bush gave a speech Wednesday night before the Godfather of conservative Washington think tanks, the American Enterprise Institute. In his speech, Bush quantified his coming war with Iraq as part of a larger struggle to bring pro-western governments into power in the Middle East. Couched in hopeful language describing peace and freedom for all, the speech was in fact the closest articulation of the actual plan for Iraq that has yet been heard from the administration.

In a previous truthout article from February 21, the ideological connections between an extremist right-wing Washington think tank and the foreign policy aspirations of the Bush administration were detailed.

The Project for a New American Century, or PNAC, is a group founded in 1997 that has been agitating since its inception for a war with Iraq. PNAC was the driving force behind the drafting and passage of the Iraqi Liberation Act, a bill that painted a veneer of legality over the ultimate designs behind such a conflict. The names of every prominent PNAC member were on a letter delivered to President Clinton in 1998 which castigated him for not implementing the Act by driving troops into Baghdad. <more at link>


http://www.observer.co.uk/iraq/story/0,12239,905990,00....

Could Tony Blair look at the internet now, please?
Why is the British Prime Minister the only person who seems to be unaware of the US hawks' agenda.
Terry Jones
Sunday March 2, 2003

<snip>They don't split hairs at the PNAC. George W. Bush and his advisers' stated aim is to ensure that America and American interests dominate the entire world for the foreseeable future. And what's more they make no bones of the fact that they intend to achieve this without diplomacy - that's old hat. What PNAC intend to do is enforce the Pax Americana through military might.

Does Tony Blair know that? Has Tony Blair read the PNAC Report called "Rebuilding Americas Defenses 2000"? It refers to the new technologies of warfare and goes on: "Potential rivals such as China are anxious to exploit these transformational technologies broadly, while adversaries like Iran, Iraq and North Korea are rushing to develop ballistic missiles and nuclear weapons as a deterrent to American intervention in regions they seek to dominate."

So when George Bush and his colleagues talk about Saddam Hussein posing a "threat" to America - they don't mean he's going to drop bombs on Washington (how on earth could he without committing national suicide?) - what they mean is that he poses a threat to American military dominance in the Middle East.

Does Tony Blair know that's what they mean?

In fact, does Tony Blair know that President Bush's advisers regard Saddam Hussein as merely an excuse for military action in the area? The PNAC Report of 2000 states: "the United States has for decades sought to play a more permanent role in Gulf regional security. While the unresolved conflict with Iraq provides the immediate justification, the need for a substantial American force presence in the Gulf transcends the issue of the regime of Saddam Hussein."</snip>

[T Roosevelt]

1. We NEED to recover this thread from DU1

There are sooooo many threads on the old software that need to be brought over, and this is one of them.

[Stephanie]

3. It's in process

I've copied everything and I'm re-posting. Should be done shortly. Thanks!

[Stephanie]

2. PNAC references in NY Times Op-Eds 03/02/03 (Dowd, Friedman)

http://www.nytimes.com/2003/03/02/opinion/02DOWD.html
Bush Ex Machina
By MAUREEN DOWD

<snip>Conservatives began drawing up steroid-fueled plans to reorder the world a decade ago, imperial blueprints fantastical enough to make "Star Wars" look achievable.

In 1992, Dick Cheney, the defense secretary for Bush 41, and his aides, Paul Wolfowitz and Scooter Libby, drafted a document asserting that America should prepare to cast off formal alliances and throw its military weight around to prevent the rise of any "potential future global competitor" and to preclude the spread of nuclear weapons.

The solipsistic grandiosity of the plan was offputting to 41, who loved nothing better than chatting up the other members of the global club. To Poppy and Colin Powell, this looked like voodoo foreign policy, and they splashed cold water on it.

In 1996, Richard Perle, now a Pentagon adviser, and Douglas Feith, now a Rumsfeld aide, helped write a report about how Israel could transcend the problems with the Palestinians by changing the "balance of power" in the Middle East, and by replacing Saddam.

The hawks saw their big chance after 9/11, but they feared that it would be hard to sell a eschatological scheme to stomp out Islamic terrorism by recreating the Arab world. So they found Saddam guilty of a crime he could commit later: helping Osama unleash hell on us.</snip>


http://www.nytimes.com/2003/03/02/opinion/02FRIE.html
The Long Bomb
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN

<snip>My dilemma is that while I believe in such a bold project, I fear that Mr. Bush has failed to create a context for his boldness to succeed, a context that could maximize support for his vision — support vital to seeing it through. He and his team are the only people who would ever have conceived this project, but they may be the worst people to implement it. The only place they've been bold is in their military preparations (which have at least gotten Saddam to begin disarming).

What do I mean? I mean that if taking out Saddam and rebuilding Iraq had been my goal from the minute I took office (as it was for the Bush team), I would not have angered all of Europe by trashing the Kyoto global warming treaty without offering an alternative. I would not have alienated the entire Russian national security elite by telling the Russians that we were ripping up the ABM treaty and that they would just have to get used to it. (You're now seeing their revenge.) I would not have proposed one radical tax cut on top of another on the eve of a huge, costly nation-building marathon abroad.</snip>

[Stephanie]

4. Carnegie Endowment for International Peace

thanks to peacey:

Carnegie Endowment for International Peace 'Crisis In Iraq' Website:

http://www.ceip.org/files/Iraq/index.htm

To help media, policy makers, scholars, and the public better follow the complicated situation in Iraq, the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace launched CRISIS IN IRAQ. Updated daily, this comprehensive web site offers expert analysis, information about US policy in the Middle East, a news archive and links.

[Stephanie]

5. "It's the Kissinger plan" - Mother Jones - March/April 2003

http://www.motherjones.com/news/feature/2003/10/ma_273_...

The Thirty-Year Itch
Three decades ago, in the throes of the energy crisis, Washington's hawks conceived of a strategy for US control of the Persian Gulf's oil. Now, with the same strategists firmly in control of the White House, the Bush administration is playing out their script for global dominance.

By Robert Dreyfuss
March/April 2003 Issue
P L U S :
Oil and Arms: An In-Depth Look

If you were to spin the globe and look for real estate critical to building an American empire, your first stop would have to be the Persian Gulf. The desert sands of this region hold two of every three barrels of oil in the world -- Iraq's reserves alone are equal, by some estimates, to those of Russia, the United States, China, and Mexico combined. For the past 30 years, the Gulf has been in the crosshairs of an influential group of Washington foreign-policy strategists, who believe that in order to ensure its global dominance, the United States must seize control of the region and its oil. Born during the energy crisis of the 1970s and refined since then by a generation of policymakers, this approach is finding its boldest expression yet in the Bush administration -- which, with its plan to invade Iraq and install a regime beholden to Washington, has moved closer than any of its predecessors to transforming the Gulf into an American protectorate.

<snip>

Ever since the oil shocks of the 1970s, the United States has steadily been accumulating military muscle in the Gulf by building bases, selling weaponry, and forging military partnerships. Now, it is poised to consolidate its might in a place that will be a fulcrum of the world's balance of power for decades to come. At a stroke, by taking control of Iraq, the Bush administration can solidify a long-running strategic design. "It's the Kissinger plan," says James Akins, a former U.S. diplomat. "I thought it had been killed, but it's back." <more>

[Stephanie]

6. CLI Welcomes Sen. Bayh (& Lieberman) - Press Release 2/14/03

http://www.usnewswire.com/topnews/qtr1_2003/0214-115.ht...

Welcomes Sen. Bayh; Adds to Bipartisan Consensus
U.S. Newswire
14 Feb 12:12
CLI Welcomes Sen. Bayh; Adds to Bipartisan Consensus
To: National Desk
Contact: Jim Hale of the Committee for the Liberation of Iraq,
202-543-1037 or 703-475-1291
Web site: http:/ / www.liberationiraq.org

WASHINGTON, Feb. 14 /U.S. Newswire/ -- The Committee for the
Liberation of Iraq (CLI) is pleased to welcome Senator Evan Bayh
(D-Ind.) as an Honorary Co-Chairman. Bayh becomes the third U.S.
Senator to join the committee after Senators Joe Lieberman
(D-Conn.) and John McCain (R-Ariz.) announced their participation
on Jan. 28.

"To remove weapons of mass destruction, we must remove the
regime of Saddam Hussein," said Bayh. "To think anything else is
to delude ourselves." Senator Bayh was a leading sponsor of the
congressional resolution authorizing the use of military force in
Iraq (P.L. 107-243), and was a driving force in securing the
overwhelming vote in the Senate on Oct. 11, 2002.

During the Senate debate on Iraq, Bayh made a compelling case
for action: "It is my heartfelt conviction that weapons of mass
death in the hands of a brutal dictator such as Saddam Hussein,
combined with suicidal terrorist organizations that would all too
eagerly use these instruments of mass destructions against us,
represent an unacceptable risk for the safety and well-being of the
American people." <more>

[Stephanie]

7. Guardian 2/26/03 - "Decisions, decisions" (re designs for US hegemony)

http://www.guardian.co.uk/usa/story/0,12271,903075,00.h...
Decisions, decisions
While we agonise about whether to go to war, the US has moved on to a different question: what next?

Jonathan Freedland
Wednesday February 26, 2003
The Guardian

<snip>If, however, the American victors insist on a much more robust level of US control - restructuring Iraq entirely, studding it with countless military bases - then we could start drawing rather different conclusions as to the true motive of this campaign. We might agree with those who detect in the Iraq adventure the opening move of a much grander American design: the establishing of US hegemony for the next 100 years.

This is not just twitchy, anti-war conspiracy talk. An outfit exists on 17th Street in Washington, DC, called the Project for the New American Century, explicitly committed to US mastery of the globe for the coming age. Its acolytes speak of "full spectrum dominance", meaning American invincibility in every field of warfare - land, sea, air and space - and a world in which no two nations' relationship with each other will be more important than their relationship with the US. There will be no place on earth, or the heavens for that matter, where Washington's writ does not run supreme. To that end, a ring of US military bases should surround China, with liberation of the People's Republic considered the ultimate prize. As one enthusiast puts it concisely: "After Baghdad, Beijing."

If this sounds like the harmless delusions of an eccentric fringe, think again. The founder members of the project, launched in 1997 as a Republican assault on the Clinton presidency, form a rollcall of today's Bush inner circle. Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, Jeb Bush, Richard Perle - they're all there. So too is Zalmay Khalilzad, now the White House's "special envoy and ambassador-at-large for free Iraqis". </snip>

[Stephanie]

8. New Nat'l Sec'y Strategy: Pre-emptive Strikes (NYT, WP, Guardian)

thanks to Romberry:

Bush has codified PNAC in the National Security Strategy of the United States. The full text of the National Security Strategy of the United States can be found on line at http://www.nytimes.com/2002/09/20/politics/20STEXT_FULL... if you would like to verify what these authors are saying.


http://www.nytimes.com/2002/09/20/international/20STRA....
Bush to Outline Doctrine of Striking Foes First

WASHINGTON, Sept. 19 — On Friday, the Bush administration will publish its first comprehensive rationale for shifting American military strategy toward pre-emptive action against hostile states and terrorist groups developing weapons of mass destruction. The strategy document will also state, for the first time, that the United States will never allow its military supremacy to be challenged the way it was during the cold war.

In the 33-page document, Mr. Bush also seeks to answer the critics of growing American muscle-flexing by insisting that the United States will exploit its military and economic power to encourage "free and open societies," rather than seek "unilateral advantage." It calls this union of values and national interests "a distinctly American internationalism."

The document, titled "The National Security Strategy of the United States," is one that every president is required to submit to Congress. It is the first comprehensive explanation of the administration's foreign policy, from defense strategy to global warming. A copy of the final draft was obtained by The New York Times.


http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A43744-20...
Bush Shifts Strategy From Deterrence to Dominance

In a muscular new statement of U.S. strategic priorities, President Bush declared yesterday that the United States must maintain unchallenged military superiority to win the fight against terrorism and weapons of mass destruction that now pose the greatest threat to U.S. national security.

Deterrence and containment, the previous foundations of U.S. strategy, are no longer valid, Bush said in a 31-page document titled "The National Security Strategy of the United States of America."


http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,2763,796192,00.h...
Bush vows to snuff out potential enemies

US plans for pre-emptive strikes
Oliver Burkeman in New York and Nick Paton Walsh in Moscow
Saturday September 21, 2002
The Guardian

The United States will not hesitate to strike pre-emptively against its enemies, even if it faces international opposition, and will never again allow its military supremacy to be threatened by a rival superpower, President George Bush declared yesterday in a document setting out an aggressive new vision for America's foreign policy.

"As a matter of common sense and self-defence, America will act against such emerging threats before they are fully formed," Mr Bush wrote in the introduction to a text which bears the unmistakeable imprint of the hawks in his administration - Vice-President Dick Cheney, the national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, and Donald Rumsfeld, the defence secretary - and takes a sceptical view of multilateral action and international treaties.

http://www.chron.com/cs/CDA/story.hts/editorial/outlook...

Molly Ivins:
No. This is not acceptable. This is not the country we want to be.

AUSTIN -- No. This is not acceptable. This is not the country we want to be. This is not the world we want to make.

The United States of America is still run by its citizens. The government works for us. Rank imperialism and warmongering are not American traditions or values. We do not need to dominate the world. We want and need to work with other nations. We want to find solutions other than killing people. Not in our name, not with our money, not with our children's blood.

I rarely use the word "we" because it's so arrogant for one citizen to presume to speak for all of us -- and besides, Americans famously can't agree on the time of day. But on this one, I know we want to find a way so that killing is the last resort, not the first. We would rather put our time, energy, money and even blood into making peace than making war. </snip>

[Dancing_Dave]

77. I love Molly Ivins!

She Rocks!

[Stephanie]

9. A think tank war: Why old Europe says no - SMH (from Der Spiegel) 3/7/03

http://smh.com.au/articles/2003/03/07/1046826528748.htm...

A think tank war: Why old Europe says no
By Margo Kingston
March 7 2003

Reader Alun Breward writes: "I found this article on the website of German news magazine Der Spiegel this week. I thought it was one of the best pieces of journalism on the Iraq conflict I have read and so I translated it." Thanks Alun! Here we go.

***

This war came from a think tank

by Jochen Boelsche, spiegel

It was in no way a conspiracy. As far back as 1998, ultra right US think tanks had developed and published plans for an era of US world domination, sidelining the UN and attacking Iraq. These people were not taken seriously. But now they are calling the tune.

German commentators and correspondents have been confused. Washington has tossed around so many types of reasons for war on Baghdad "that it could make the rest of the world dizzy", said the South German Times.

And the Nuremburg News reported on public statements last week by Presidential spokesman Ari Fleischer to an inner circle in the US that war can only be avoided if Saddam not only disarms, but also leaves office.

Regime change is a condition that is in none of the barely remembered 18 UN resolutions. The Nuremburg News asked in astonishment whether Fleischer had made the biggest Freudian slip of his career or whether he spoke with the President's authority.

It's not about Saddam's weapons

So it goes. Across the world critics of President Bush are convinced that a second Gulf War is actually about replacing Saddam, whether the dictator is involved with WMD or not. "It's not about his WMD," writes the German born Israeli peace campaigner, Uri Avnery, "its purely a war about world domination, in business, politics, defence and culture".

There are real models for this. They were already under development by far right Think Tanks in the 1990s, organisations in which cold-war warriors from the inner circle of the secret services, from evangelical churches, from weapons corporations and oil companies forged shocking plans for a new world order.

....................lots more

[Stephanie]

10. The Bush lies pushing the world to the brink-Robert Scheer - Salon 3/5/03

http://www.salon.com/news/col/scheer/2003/03/05/bushlie...

The Bush lies pushing the world to the brink
The biggest one: A war on Iraq will make the Middle East an oasis of peace and security.
- - - - - - - - - - - -
By Robert Scheer
March 5, 2003 |

Abraham Lincoln once observed that even a free people can be fooled for a time -- and this, mind you, was long before Fox News existed. And in his chaotic two-year presidency, George W. Bush has pushed the Big Lie approach so far that we are seeing dramatic signs of its cracking: an international backlash, a domestic peace movement, and whistle-blowing from inside our own intelligence and diplomatic corps.

"We have not seen such systematic distortion of intelligence, such systematic manipulation of the American people, since the war in Vietnam," wrote John Brady Kiesling, a 20-year veteran of the U.S. Foreign Service in his letter of resignation last week to Secretary of State Colin Powell. Kiesling, who was political counselor in U.S. embassies throughout the Mideast, added that "until this administration, it had been possible to believe that by upholding the policies of my president, I was also upholding the interests of the American people and the world. I believe it no longer."

And this brave man is not the only one who has caught on. The entire world is astonished that our president is lying not about a personal indiscretion but about the most sacred duty of the leader of the most powerful nation in human history not to recklessly endanger the lives of his own or the world's people. Yet lie he has. <more>

[Stephanie]

11. Real Reasons for the US Invasion - Rupe-India, 12/02

thanks to Old and In the Way

http://www.rupe-india.org/34/military.html

Real Reasons for the US Invasion:Military Solution to an Economic Crisis

Indeed the US has taken the contrary course. It plans to reverse the various trends mentioned above by seizing the world’s richest oil-producing regions. This it deems necessary for three related reasons.

1. Securing US supplies: First, the US itself is increasingly dependent on oil imports—already a little over half its daily consumption of 20 million barrels is imported. It imports its oil from a variety of sources—Canada, Venezuela, Nigeria, Saudi Arabia, even Iraq. But its own production is falling, and will continue to fall steadily, even as its consumption continues to grow. In future, inevitably, it will become increasingly dependent on oil from west Asia-north Africa—a region where the masses of ordinary people despise the US, where three of the leading oil producers (Iraq, Iran and Libya) are professedly anti-American, and the others (Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, the United Arab Emirates) are in danger of being toppled by anti-American forces. The US of course doing its best to tie up or seize supplies from other regions—west Africa, northern Latin America, the Caspian region. And yet the US cannot escape the simple arithmetic:

“The US Department of Energy and the International Energy Agency both project that global oil demand could grow from the current 77 million barrels a day (mbd) to 120 mbd in 20 years, driven by the US and the emerging markets of south and east Asia. The agencies assume that most of the supply required to meet this demand must come from OPEC, whose production is expected to jump from 28 mbd in 1998 to 60 mbd in 2020. Virtually all of this increase would come from the Middle East, especially Saudi Arabia.

(snip)

· A major consideration in the US’s great oil grab is its desire to check China. In coming years, China, like the US, will become a major importer of oil and gas: it is projected to import 10 million barrels a day by 2030—more than eight per cent of world oil demand. (The US currently imports a little over 10 million barrels of its daily requirement of 20 million barrels.) As China attempts to arrange its future oil supplies, it finds itself checked at each point by the US:

(snip)

[Stephanie]

12. John Pilger on Perle & PNAC - 12/12/02

http://pilger.carlton.com/print/124759

Two years ago a project set up by the men who now surround George W Bush said what America needed was "a new Pearl Harbor". Its published aims have, alarmingly, come true.
John Pilger :12 Dec 2002

The threat posed by US terrorism to the security of nations and individuals was outlined in prophetic detail in a document written more than two years ago and disclosed only recently. What was needed for America to dominate much of humanity and the world's resources, it said, was "some catastrophic and catalysing event - like a new Pearl Harbor". The attacks of 11 September 2001 provided the "new Pearl Harbor", described as "the opportunity of ages". The extremists who have since exploited 11 September come from the era of Ronald Reagan, when far-right groups and "think-tanks" were established to avenge the American "defeat" in Vietnam. In the 1990s, there was an added agenda: to justify the denial of a "peace dividend" following the cold war. The Project for the New American Century was formed, along with the American Enterprise Institute, the Hudson Institute and others that have since merged the ambitions of the Reagan administration with those of the current Bush regime.

One of George W Bush's "thinkers" is Richard Perle. I interviewed Perle when he was advising Reagan; and when he spoke about "total war", I mistakenly dismissed him as mad. He recently used the term again in describing America's "war on terror". "No stages," he said. "This is total war. We are fighting a variety of enemies. There are lots of them out there. All this talk about first we are going to do Afghanistan, then we will do Iraq... this is entirely the wrong way to go about it. If we just let our vision of the world go forth, and we embrace it entirely and we don't try to piece together clever diplomacy, but just wage a total war... our children will sing great songs about us years from now."

Perle is one of the founders of the Project for the New American Century, the PNAC. Other founders include Dick Cheney, now vice-president, Donald Rumsfeld, defence secretary, Paul Wolfowitz, deputy defence secretary, I Lewis Libby, Cheney's chief of staff, William J Bennett, Reagan's education secretary, and Zalmay Khalilzad, Bush's ambassador to Afghanistan. These are the modern chartists of American terrorism. The PNAC's seminal report, Rebuilding America's Defences: strategy, forces and resources for a new century, was a blueprint of American aims in all but name. Two years ago it recommended an increase in arms-spending by $48bn so that Washington could "fight and win multiple, simultaneous major theatre wars". This has happened. It said the United States should develop "bunker-buster" nuclear weapons and make "star wars" a national priority. This is happening. It said that, in the event of Bush taking power, Iraq should be a target. And so it is.

As for Iraq's alleged "weapons of mass destruction", these were dismissed, in so many words, as a convenient excuse, which it is. "While the unresolved conflict with Iraq provides the immediate justification," it says, "the need for a substantial American force presence in the Gulf transcends the issue of the regime of Saddam Hussein." How has this grand strategy been implemented? A series of articles in the Washington Post, co-authored by Bob Woodward of Watergate fame and based on long interviews with senior members of the Bush administration, reveals how 11 September was manipulated. <more at link>

[Stephanie]

13. The president's real goal in Iraq - Atlanta Journal Constitution 9/29/02

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article2319.ht...
< The Atlanta Journal-Constitution: 9/29/02 >

The president's real goal in Iraq
By JAY BOOKMAN

The official story on Iraq has never made sense. The connection that the Bush administration has tried to draw between Iraq and al-Qaida has always seemed contrived and artificial. In fact, it was hard to believe that smart people in the Bush administration would start a major war based on such flimsy evidence.

The pieces just didn't fit. Something else had to be going on; something was missing.

In recent days, those missing pieces have finally begun to fall into place. As it turns out, this is not really about Iraq. It is not about weapons of mass destruction, or terrorism, or Saddam, or U.N. resolutions.

This war, should it come, is intended to mark the official emergence of the United States as a full-fledged global empire, seizing sole responsibility and authority as planetary policeman. It would be the culmination of a plan 10 years or more in the making, carried out by those who believe the United States must seize the opportunity for global domination, even if it means becoming the "American imperialists" that our enemies always claimed we were.

Once that is understood, other mysteries solve themselves. For example, why does the administration seem unconcerned about an exit strategy from Iraq once Saddam is toppled?

Because we won't be leaving. Having conquered Iraq, the United States will create permanent military bases in that country from which to dominate the Middle East, including neighboring Iran. <much more at link, including bios of PNAC members and links to reports>

[Stephanie]

14. The Plan - ABC News Nightline 3/10/03

ABC News Nightline
video available at link

http://abcnews.go.com/sections/nightline/DailyNews/pnac...

The Plan
Were Neo-Conservatives’ 1998 Memos a Blueprint for Iraq War?

March 10 — Years before George W. Bush entered the White House, and years before the Sept. 11 attacks set the direction of his presidency, a group of influential neo-conservatives hatched a plan to get Saddam Hussein out of power.

The group, the Project for the New American Century, or PNAC, was founded in 1997. Among its supporters were three Republican former officials who were sitting out the Democratic presidency of Bill Clinton: Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney and Paul Wolfowitz.
In open letters to Clinton and GOP congressional leaders the next year, the group called for "the removal of Saddam Hussein's regime from power" and a shift toward a more assertive U.S. policy in the Middle East, including the use of force if necessary to unseat Saddam.

And in a report just before the 2000 election that would bring Bush to power, the group predicted that the shift would come about slowly, unless there were "some catastrophic and catalyzing event, like a new Pearl Harbor."

That event came on Sept. 11, 2001. By that time, Cheney was vice president, Rumsfeld was secretary of defense, and Wolfowitz his deputy at the Pentagon. <more at link>

[Stephanie]

15. Lunch With The Chairman (Perle) - Seymour Hersh-New Yorker 3/17/03

http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/?030317fa_fact

LUNCH WITH THE CHAIRMAN
by SEYMOUR M. HERSH
Why was Richard Perle meeting with Adnan Khashoggi?
Issue of 2003-03-17
Posted 2003-03-10

<snip>Khashoggi is still brokering. In January of this year, he arranged a private lunch, in France, to bring together Harb Saleh al-Zuhair, a Saudi industrialist whose family fortune includes extensive holdings in construction, electronics, and engineering companies throughout the Middle East, and Richard N. Perle, the chairman of the Defense Policy Board, who is one of the most outspoken and influential American advocates of war with Iraq.

The Defense Policy Board is a Defense Department advisory group composed primarily of highly respected former government officials, retired military officers, and academics. Its members, who serve without pay, include former national-security advisers, Secretaries of Defense, and heads of the C.I.A. The board meets several times a year at the Pentagon to review and assess the country’s strategic defense policies.

Perle is also a managing partner in a venture-capital company called Trireme Partners L.P., which was registered in November, 2001, in Delaware. Trireme’s main business, according to a two-page letter that one of its representatives sent to Khashoggi last November, is to invest in companies dealing in technology, goods, and services that are of value to homeland security and defense. The letter argued that the fear of terrorism would increase the demand for such products in Europe and in countries like Saudi Arabia and Singapore.

The letter mentioned the firm’s government connections prominently: “Three of Trireme’s Management Group members currently advise the U.S. Secretary of Defense by serving on the U.S. Defense Policy Board, and one of Trireme’s principals, Richard Perle, is chairman of that Board.” The two other policy-board members associated with Trireme are Henry Kissinger, the former Secretary of State (who is, in fact, only a member of Trireme’s advisory group and is not involved in its management), and Gerald Hillman, an investor and a close business associate of Perle’s who handles matters in Trireme’s New York office. The letter said that forty-five million dollars had already been raised, including twenty million dollars from Boeing; the purpose, clearly, was to attract more investors, such as Khashoggi and Zuhair.</snip>

[Stephanie]

16. The latest Richard Perle outrage - Joe Conason, Salon 3/10/03

http://www.salon.com/opinion/conason/2003/03/10/hersh/i...
Joe Conason's Journal

The latest Richard Perle outrage: The Bush foreign policy adviser should resign for calling a journalist a "terrorist" -- and the Senate should investigate his fishy business deal. Plus: Another Horowitz outrage.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
March 10, 2003 |

The latest Richard Perle outrage

<snip> According to Hersh, Trireme has raised $20 million from Boeing, one of the three largest Pentagon contractors. That's a scandal in itself, although Hersh focuses instead on an embarrassing luncheon in Marseilles where Perle met with Iran-contra and BCCI scandal figure Adnan Khashoggi and another Saudi businessman. These were curious potential partners for Perle, who has frequently excoriated both the Saudis and Americans who do business with them.

<snip> Now Perle already has done much to embarrass the United States in his privileged role at the Pentagon, where he wields great influence with little accountability. By popping off at various times, he has instigated diplomatic incidents with the Saudis, the Germans and the French. In the past, his financial entanglements with the Government of Turkey and Israeli defense contractors have raised questions about his role in American policy-making, a history that Hersh reviews in the New Yorker. A business relationship between him and Boeing would be unethical on its face and a possible violation of federal rules.

At the moment we have no way of knowing how unethical Perle's conduct may have been, because the minutes of the Defense Policy Board's meetings are secret. (The presence of Dr. Henry "Conflict" Kissinger in this unappetizing scenario is scarcely reassuring; nor is that of lobbyist Newt Gingrich, another DPB member.) A DPB member told Hersh that Perle had failed to inform the board about Trireme.

Perle arguably should be required to resign because of his grossly intemperate public attack on Hersh; and Rumsfeld should certainly demand that he apologize.

But in any case, Perle's mixing of business and policy at the Pentagon deserves immediate scrutiny by the Senate Armed Services Committee. Indeed, what may be in order is a probe of the Defense Policy Board, its influence over policy and procurement, its secrecy and its lax ethical standards.

[Stephanie]

17. Invading Iraq not a new idea for Bush clique - Philadelphia Daily News

PNAC's Rummy plans for Iraq attack on 9/11/01

http://www.philly.com/mld/dailynews/2003/01/27/news/loc...

Invading Iraq not a new idea for Bush clique
4 years before 9/11, plan was set
By WILLIAM BUNCH
[e-mail]

It was 2:40 p.m. on Sept. 11, 2001, and rescue crews were still scouring the ravaged section of the Pentagon that hijacked American Airlines Flight 77 had destroyed just five hours earlier. On the other side of the still-smoldering Pentagon complex, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld was poring through incoming intelligence reports and jotting down notes. Although most Americans were still shell-shocked, Rumsfeld's thoughts had already turned to a longstanding foe.

Rumsfeld wrote, according to a later CBS News report, that he wanted "best info fast. Judge whether good enough hit S.H. at the same time. Not only UBL" - meaning Osama bin Laden. He added: "Go massive. Sweep it all up. Things related and not."

"S.H.," of course, is Saddam Hussein. The White House has long insisted its strategy for a war against Saddam's Iraq - a war that could now begin in a matter of days - arose from the rubble of the deadly attack that day.

But in reality, Rumsfeld, Vice President Dick Cheney, and a small band of conservative ideologues had begun making the case for an American invasion of Iraq as early as 1997 - nearly four years before the Sept. 11 attacks and three years before President Bush took office.<more at link>

[Stephanie]

18. Plans For Iraq Attack Began On 9/11- CBS News 9/4/02

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2002/09/04/september11/m...

Plans For Iraq Attack Began On 9/11
WASHINGTON, Sept. 4, 2002

(CBS) CBS News has learned that barely five hours after American Airlines Flight 77 plowed into the Pentagon, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld was telling his aides to come up with plans for striking Iraq — even though there was no evidence linking Saddam Hussein to the attacks.

That's according to notes taken by aides who were with Rumsfeld in the National Military Command Center on Sept. 11 – notes that show exactly where the road toward war with Iraq began, reports CBS News National Security Correspondent David Martin.

<snip>

With the intelligence all pointing toward bin Laden, Rumsfeld ordered the military to begin working on strike plans. And at 2:40 p.m., the notes quote Rumsfeld as saying he wanted "best info fast. Judge whether good enough hit S.H." – meaning Saddam Hussein – "at same time. Not only UBL" – the initials used to identify Osama bin Laden.

Now, nearly one year later, there is still very little evidence Iraq was involved in the Sept. 11 attacks. But if these notes are accurate, that didn't matter to Rumsfeld.

"Go massive," the notes quote him as saying. "Sweep it all up. Things related and not."<more>

[Stephanie]

19. 7/13/2000 Guardian: Anger at peace talks 'meddling'(Perle sabotages talks)

http://www.guardian.co.uk/israel/Story/0,2763,342857,00...

Anger at peace talks 'meddling'
Political scandal in US as Bush advisers tell Israelis to be ready to walk out of Camp David negotiations

Israel and the Middle East: special report

Julian Borger in Washington
Thursday July 13, 2000
The Guardian

The Middle East peace talks at Camp David became the subject of a political scandal in the US last night when reports emerged that one of George W Bush's foreign policy advisers had warned the Israeli delegation to be prepared to walk out of negotiations.

Richard Perle, a veteran cold war warrior and former assistant secretary of state, urged the Israeli prime minister, Ehud Barak, not to agree to any settlement which left the future status of Jerusalem unresolved, according to the New York Post website.

The website quoted a message received by Mr Barak yesterday from two of his emissaries, Yoram Ben-Ze'ev and Yossi Alpher. The two men said Mr Perle "asked us to send a clear message" to Mr Barak that it would be a "catastrophe" if the Jerusalem question was not dealt with, and urged him "to walk away" from the Camp David negotiations if faced with that outcome.

Mr Bush's office had no comment on the report yesterday. Mr Ben-Ze'ev, contacted by mobile phone, said he was in Houston, Texas - Governor Bush's home state - but would not explain the purpose of his visit and also refused to comment on the newspaper report. <more at link>

[Stephanie]

20. A Wilful Blindness - George Monbiot - London Guardian 03/11/03

http://www.guardian.co.uk/Columnists/Column/0,5673,9117...
A wilful blindness
Why can't liberal interventionists see that Iraq is part of a bid to cement US global power?

George Monbiot
Tuesday March 11, 2003
The Guardian

<snip>Immediately after the attack on New York, the US government began establishing "forward bases" in Asia. As the assistant secretary of state, Elizabeth Jones, noted: "When the Afghan conflict is over we will not leave Central Asia. We have long-term plans and interests in this region." The US now has bases in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgystan, Tajikistan and Georgia. Their presence has, in effect, destroyed the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation which Russia and China had established in an attempt to develop a regional alternative to US power.

In January, the US moved into Djibouti, ostensibly to widen its war against terror, while accidentally gaining strategic control over the Bab al-Mandab - one of the world's two most important oil shipping lanes. It already controls the other one, the straits of Hormuz. Two weeks ago, under the same pretext, it sent 3,000 soldiers to the Philippines. Last year it began negotiations to establish a military base in Sao Tome and Principe, from which it can, if it chooses, dominate West Africa's principal oilfields. By pure good fortune, the US government now exercises strategic control over almost all the world's major oil producing regions and oil transport corridors.

It has also used its national tragedy as an excuse for developing new nuclear and biological weapons, while ripping up the global treaties designed to contain them. All this is as the project prescribed. Among other policies, it has called for the development of a new generation of biological agents, which will attack people with particular genetic characteristics.

Why do the supporters of this war find it so hard to see what is happening? Why do the conservatives who go berserk when the European Union tries to change the content of our chocolate bars look the other way when the US seeks to reduce us to a vassal state? Why do the liberal interventionists who fear that Saddam Hussein might one day deploy a weapon of mass destruction refuse to see that George Bush is threatening to do just this against an ever-growing number of states? Is it because they cannot face the scale of the threat, and the scale of the resistance necessary to confront it? Is it because these brave troopers cannot look the real terror in the eye? </snip>

[Stephanie]

21. n/t

n/t

[Stephanie]

22. 9/11 gave life to U.S. imperial ambitions - Japan Times - 3/14/03

thanks to protect freedom impeach bush now

14Mar 2003 JapanTimes Editorial - 9-11 and PNAC
http://www.japantimes.co.jp/cgi-bin/geted.pl5?eo2003031...

Friday, March 14, 2003
9/11 gave life to U.S. imperial ambitions
By BRAHMA CHELLANEY

NEW DELHI -- As U.S. President George W. Bush readies a war on Iraq without any direct provocation, the United States faces international opprobrium and isolation........

(snip)

Such is the size of this gamble that its outcome is likely to have worldwide consequences, determining the shape of international relations and the future of the United Nations, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and America's place in the world.

Even before the invasion of Iraq has begun, the U.S. has shed its cultivated image as a benevolent superpower in the eyes of much of the world. The expected U.S. attack on Iraq will have little to do with international terrorism, or with weapons of mass destruction, or with Washington's professed love for democracy.

(snip).........

........members of the Bush core team were closely associated with the first Bush administration. Since the end of the Cold War, most of these men have been itching for the U.S. to seize the unipolar moment to create an empire in the true, historical sense.

As president, George H.W. Bush had to repudiate a Pentagon report authored by several of these global empire-builders after its leaked recommendations created a public furor in 1992. The report, drafted by then Defense Undersecretary for Policy Paul Wolfowitz, with the support of then-Defense Secretary Dick Cheney, recommended a Pax Americana that enforced its will on other nations and remade the world in its own image.

Those controversial ideas were regurgitated in a new report eight years later by a group calling itself the "Project for the New American Century," and now form the undeclared blueprint of what Bush is seeking to do. ...

.................more

[Stephanie]

23. Bush planned Iraq 'regime change' before becoming Pres. - Herald-9/15/02

http://www.sundayherald.com/27735
Sunday Herald - 15 September 2002
Bush planned Iraq 'regime change' before becoming President
By Neil Mackay

A SECRET blueprint for US global domination reveals that President Bush and his cabinet were planning a premeditated attack on Iraq to secure 'regime change' even before he took power in January 2001.

The blueprint, uncovered by the Sunday Herald, for the creation of a 'global Pax Americana' was drawn up for Dick Cheney (now vice- president), Donald Rumsfeld (defence secretary), Paul Wolfowitz (Rumsfeld's deputy), George W Bush's younger brother Jeb and Lewis Libby (Cheney's chief of staff). The document, entitled Rebuilding America's Defences: Strategies, Forces And Resources For A New Century, was written in September 2000 by the neo-conservative think-tank Project for the New American Century (PNAC).

The plan shows Bush's cabinet intended to take military control of the Gulf region whether or not Saddam Hussein was in power. It says: 'The United States has for decades sought to play a more permanent role in Gulf regional security. While the unresolved conflict with Iraq provides the immediate justification, the need for a substantial American force presence in the Gulf transcends the issue of the regime of Saddam Hussein.'

The PNAC document supports a 'blueprint for maintaining global US pre-eminence, precluding the rise of a great power rival, and shaping the international security order in line with American principles and interests'.<more at link>

[Stephanie]

24. A world safe for democracy, or perpetual war? - Star Tribune 3/16/03

thanks to voted4wellstone:

http://www.startribune.com/stories/1762/3758290.html

StarTribune Analysis
A world safe for democracy, or perpetual war?
Eric Black, Star Tribune
Published March 16, 2003 FORP16


An influential group of foreign policy thinkers sees the possibly imminent overthrow of Saddam Hussein as just one early step in an ambitious blueprint to spread democracy throughout the world and eliminate threats to the United States.

Although they developed their thinking long before the Sept. 11 attacks, the strategists, often called neoconservatives or neocons, have increased their influence over the Bush administration since Sept. 11, many foreign policy analysts say.

<SNIP>

Who are these guys?

A coterie of Republican foreign policy heavyweights, including Vice President Dick Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, have signed on to some of the neocon views.

Weber said the key players have been William Kristol, editor of the Weekly Standard; Richard Perle, chairman of the Defense Policy Board, and Paul Wolfowitz, deputy secretary of defense. Weber said Kristol is the group's political strategist, Perle is the chief geostrategic thinker and Wolfowitz is the group's key member within the administration. Wolfowitz is widely credited with putting the overthrow of Saddam Hussein onto the front burner of administration goals.

They are no secret cabal. Through an organization called the Project for a New American Century (PNAC), and through the pages of the Weekly Standard, they publish their views, sometimes in the form of open letters to the president.<more>

[Stephanie]

25. Is Iraq the opening salvo in a war to remake the world? - TAP 3/18/03

http://www.prospect.org/print/V14/4/dreyfuss-r.html

The American Prospect
Just the Beginning
Is Iraq the opening salvo in a war to remake the world?

By Robert Dreyfuss
Issue Date: 4.1.03

For months Americans have been told that the United States is going to war against Iraq in order to disarm Saddam Hussein, remove him from power, eliminate Iraq's alleged stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction, and prevent Baghdad from blackmailing its neighbors or aiding terrorist groups. But the Bush administration's hawks, especially the neoconservatives who provide the driving force for war, see the conflict with Iraq as much more than that. It is a signal event, designed to create cataclysmic shock waves throughout the region and around the world, ushering in a new era of American imperial power. It is also likely to bring the United States into conflict with several states in the Middle East. Those who think that U.S. armed forces can complete a tidy war in Iraq, without the battle spreading beyond Iraq's borders, are likely to be mistaken.

"I think we're going to be obliged to fight a regional war, whether we want to or not," says Michael Ledeen, a former U.S. national-security official and a key strategist among the ascendant flock of neoconservative hawks, many of whom have taken up perches inside the U.S. government. Asserting that the war against Iraq can't be contained, Ledeen says that the very logic of the global war on terrorism will drive the United States to confront an expanding network of enemies in the region. "As soon as we land in Iraq, we're going to face the whole terrorist network," he says, including the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), Hezbollah, Hamas, Islamic Jihad and a collection of militant splinter groups backed by nations -- Iran, Syria and Saudi Arabia -- that he calls "the terror masters."

"It may turn out to be a war to remake the world," says Ledeen.

In the Middle East, impending "regime change" in Iraq is just the first step in a wholesale reordering of the entire region, according to neoconservatives -- who've begun almost gleefully referring to themselves as a "cabal." Like dominoes, the regimes in the region -- first Iran, Syria and Saudi Arabia, then Lebanon and the PLO, and finally Sudan, Libya, Yemen and Somalia -- are slated to capitulate, collapse or face U.S. military action. To those states, says cabal ringleader Richard Perle, a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) and chairman of the Defense Policy Board, an influential Pentagon advisory committee, "We could deliver a short message, a two-word message: 'You're next.'" In the aftermath, several of those states, including Iraq, Syria and Saudi Arabia, may end up as dismantled, unstable shards in the form of mini-states that resemble Yugoslavia's piecemeal wreckage. And despite the Wilsonian rhetoric from the president and his advisers about bringing democracy to the Middle East, at bottom it's clear that their version of democracy might have to be imposed by force of arms. <much more at link>

[Stephanie]

26. White House Claims: A Pattern of Deceit-Inst. for Public Accuracy 3/18/03

http://www.accuracy.org/press_releases/PR031803.htm
Institute for Public Accuracy
March 18, 2003
White House Claims: A Pattern of Deceit


President George Bush, March 17: "Under Resolutions 678 and 687 -- both still in effect -- the U.S. and our allies are authorized to use force in ridding Iraq of weapons of mass destruction.... Last September, I went to the U.N. General Assembly and urged the nations of the world to unite and bring an end to this danger. On November 8th, the Security Council unanimously passed Resolution 1441, finding Iraq in material breach of its obligations, and vowing serious consequences if Iraq did not fully and immediately disarm."

John Negroponte, U.S. Ambassador to the U.N., urging support for Resolution 1441, quoted in Los Angeles Times, November 8, 2002: "There's no 'automaticity' and this is a two-stage process, and in that regard we have met the principal concerns that have been expressed for the resolution." He added: "Whatever violation there is, or is judged to exist, will be dealt with in the Council, and the Council will have an opportunity to consider the matter before any other action is taken." www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-fg-uniraq8no...


President Bush, March 17: "And it has aided, trained and harbored terrorists, including operatives of al Qaeda." President Bush, March 6: "He has trained and financed al Qaeda-type organizations before, al Qaeda and other terrorist organizations." According to several polls, a majority of the U.S. public still believes that there is an Iraq link to 9-11.

No evidence establishing such a link has been offered. The New York Times reported on February 9, 2003 that intelligence officials have "pointed out that neither the Bush administration nor the British government, which has also championed the Qaeda-Baghdad connection, has produced direct evidence of Iraqi involvement with the terrorist network." See also: "Allies Find No Links Between Iraq, Al Qaeda," Los Angeles Times, November 4, 2002; "Terrorism experts doubt bin Laden, Baghdad link," Toronto Globe and Mail, February 6, 2003. Globe and Mail


President Bush, March 17: "For more than a decade, the United States and other nations have pursued patient and honorable efforts to disarm the Iraqi regime without war."

Resolution 687: Once Iraq complies with the weapons inspection regime, the economic sanctions "shall have no further force or effect." The U.S. government reneged on this, saying that the sanctions would stay in place regardless of compliance with weapons inspectors. May 20, 1991, President George H. W. Bush: "At this juncture, my view is we don't want to lift these sanctions as long as Saddam Hussein is in power." www.accuracy.org/press_releases/PR031103.htm

<much more at link>

[Stephanie]

27. All the PNAC links brought together, by paul thompson

thanks to paulthompson, reposting his entire post:

Hi,

I'm interested in this issue of reporting on PNAC, so using Lexis-Nexus and Google News, I collected them all and made a new entry for my 9/11 timeline:

February-March 20, 2003: With war against Iraq imminent, numerous media outlets finally begin reporting on the Project for the New American Century (PNAC) think tank and its role in influencing Iraq policy and US foreign policy generally. PNAC's plans for global domination had been noted before 9/11 (see for instance, Washington Post, 8/21/01), and PNAC's 2000 report recommending the conquest of Iraq even if Saddam Hussein is not in power was first reported on in September 2002 (see September 2000 and (Sunday Herald, 9/7/02)), but there were few follow up mentions until February (only: (Atlanta Journal-Constitution, 9/29/02, Bangor Daily News, 10/18/02, New Statesman, 12/16/02, Los Angeles Times, 1/12/03)). Many of these articles use PNAC to suggest that global and regional domination is the real reason for the Iraq war. Coverage increases as war gets nearer, but many media outlets still have not done any reporting on this, and some of the reporting that has been done not prominently placed (for instance, a New York Times article on the topic is buried in the Arts section! See (New York Times, 3/11/03)). ABC is the only major US network to bring up the topic in prime time television (see (ABC, 3/10/03)). One Newsweek editorial notes that "not until the last few days" before war have many reasons against the war been brought up. It calls this "too little, too late" to make an impact (Newsweek, 3/18/03) (articles that discuss PNAC: (Philadelphia Daily News, 1/27/03, New York Times, 2/1/03, PBS Frontline, 2/20/03, Observer, 2/23/03, Bergen Record, 2/23/03, Guardian, 2/26/03, Mother Jones, 3/03, BBC, 3/2/03, Observer, 3/2/03, Der Spiegel, 3/4/03, ABC, 3/5/03 (B), Salon, 3/5/03, Independent, 3/8/03, Toronto Star, 3/9/03, ABC, 3/10/03, Australian Broadcasting Corp., 3/10/03, CNN, 3/10/03, Guardian 3/11/03, New York Times, 3/11/03, American Prospect, 3/12/03, Chicago Tribune, 3/12/03, Globe and Mail, 3/14/03, Japan Times, 3/14/03, Sydney Morning Herald, 3/15/03, Salt Lake Tribune, 3/15/03, Minneapolis Star Tribune, 3/16/03, Observer, 3/16/03, Sunday Herald, 3/16/03, Toronto Star, 3/16/03, Canadian Broadcasting Corp., 3/17/03, Globe and Mail, 3/19/03, Asia Times, 3/20/03, The Age, 3/20/03)).

You can also find it here, where you'll be able to click on all the links, and see a pic of Janeane Garafolo as well. Go to the very bottom of the page:

http://www.unansweredquestions.net/timeline/main/timeli...

Note that there are some new ones there, from the Age, Globe and Mail and Asia Times.

http://www.globeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.2003031...

http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/EC20Ak07.html

http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2003/03/19/1047749824...

[Stephanie]

28. Some Evidence on Iraq Called Fake (Niger Docs) - WP 3/8/03

Link is dead but archived ($$) article will turn up in a search.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn?pagename=artic... ¬Found=true
Some Evidence on Iraq Called Fake
U.N. Nuclear Inspector Says Documents on Purchases Were Forged

By Joby Warrick
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, March 8, 2003; Page A01


A key piece of evidence linking Iraq to a nuclear weapons program appears to have been fabricated, the United Nations' chief nuclear inspector said yesterday in a report that called into question U.S. and British claims about Iraq's secret nuclear ambitions.

Documents that purportedly showed Iraqi officials shopping for uranium in Africa two years ago were deemed "not authentic" after careful scrutiny by U.N. and independent experts, Mohamed ElBaradei, director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), told the U.N. Security Council.

ElBaradei also rejected a key Bush administration claim -- made twice by the president in major speeches and repeated by Secretary of State Colin L. Powell yesterday -- that Iraq had tried to purchase high-strength aluminum tubes to use in centrifuges for uranium enrichment. Also, ElBaradei reported finding no evidence of banned weapons or nuclear material in an extensive sweep of Iraq using advanced radiation detectors.

"There is no indication of resumed nuclear activities," ElBaradei said.

Knowledgeable sources familiar with the forgery investigation described the faked evidence as a series of letters between Iraqi agents and officials in the central African nation of Niger. The documents had been given to the U.N. inspectors by Britain and reviewed extensively by U.S. intelligence. The forgers had made relatively crude errors that eventually gave them away -- including names and titles that did not match up with the individuals who held office at the time the letters were purportedly written, the officials said.<more>

[Stephanie]

29. The Men From JINSA and CSP - The Nation, August 15, 2002

thanks to underpants

http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20020902&s=vest&c=...

article | Posted August 15, 2002
The Men From JINSA and CSP
by Jason Vest

<snip>On no issue is the JINSA/CSP hard line more evident than in its relentless campaign for war--not just with Iraq, but "total war," as Michael Ledeen, one of the most influential JINSAns in Washington, put it last year. For this crew, "regime change" by any means necessary in Iraq, Iran, Syria, Saudi Arabia and the Palestinian Authority is an urgent imperative. Anyone who dissents--be it Colin Powell's State Department, the CIA or career military officers--is committing heresy against articles of faith that effectively hold there is no difference between US and Israeli national security interests, and that the only way to assure continued safety and prosperity for both countries is through hegemony in the Middle East--a hegemony achieved with the traditional cold war recipe of feints, force, clientism and covert action.

For example, the Pentagon's Defense Policy Board--chaired by JINSA/CSP adviser and former Reagan Administration Defense Department official Richard Perle, and stacked with advisers from both groups--recently made news by listening to a briefing that cast Saudi Arabia as an enemy to be brought to heel through a number of potential mechanisms, many of which mirror JINSA's recommendations, and which reflect the JINSA/CSP crowd's preoccupation with Egypt. (The final slide of the Defense Policy Board presentation proposed that "Grand Strategy for the Middle East" should concentrate on "Iraq as the tactical pivot, Saudi Arabia as the strategic pivot (and) Egypt as the prize.") Ledeen has been leading the charge for regime change in Iran, while old comrades like Andrew Marshall and Harold Rhode in the Pentagon's Office of Net Assessment actively tinker with ways to re-engineer both the Iranian and Saudi governments. JINSA is also cheering the US military on as it tries to secure basing rights in the strategic Red Sea country of Eritrea, happily failing to mention that the once-promising secular regime of President Isaiais Afewerki continues to slide into the kind of repressive authoritarianism practiced by the "axis of evil" and its adjuncts. </more>

[Stephanie]

30. This war is brought to you by ... Asia Times 3/20/03

thanks to peacey:

3/20/03 Asia Times

http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/EC20Ak07.html
This war is brought to you by ...

By Pepe Escobar
excerpt:

ALEXANDRIA, Egypt - They've won. They got their war against Afghanistan (planned before September 11). They're getting their war against Iraq (planned slightly after September 11). After Iraq, they plan to get their wars against Syria, Lebanon, Iran and Saudi Arabia. Last Sunday, one of them, Vice President Dick Cheney, said that President George W Bush would have to make "a very difficult decision" on Iraq. Not really. The decision had already been taken for him in the autumn of 2001.

As far as their "showdown Iraq" is concerned, it's not about weapons of mass destruction, nor United Nations inspections, nor non-compliance, nor a virtual connection between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda, nor the liberation of the Iraqi people, nor a Middle East living in "democracy and liberty".

The American corporate media are not inclined to spell it out, and the absolute majority of American public opinion is anesthetized non-stop by a barrage of technical, bureaucratic and totally peripheral aspects of the war against Iraq. For all the president's (sales)men, the whole game is about global preeminence, if not unilateral world domination - military, economic, political and cultural.

continued...

[Stephanie]

31. (Perle) Also Advising Global Crossing - NYTimes-03/21/03

http://query.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=F10D10F7...
Business/Financial Desk | March 21, 2003, Friday
Pentagon Adviser Is Also Advising Global Crossing

By STEPHEN LABATON (NYT) 1179 words

Even as he advises the Pentagon on war matters, Richard N. Perle, chairman of the influential Defense Policy Board, has been retained by the telecommunications company Global Crossing to help overcome Defense Department resistance to its proposed sale to a foreign firm, Mr. Perle and lawyers involved in the case said today.

Mr. Perle, an assistant defense secretary in the Reagan administration, is close to many senior officials, including Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, who appointed him to lead the policy board in 2001. Though the board does not pay its members and is technically not a government agency, it wields tremendous influence in policy circles. And its chairman is considered a "special government employee," subject to federal ethics rules, including one that bars anyone from using public office for private gain.

<snip>

"This was a clerical error, and not my clerical error," he said.

<snip>

"I'm not using public office for private gain because the Defense Policy Board has nothing to do with the CFIUS process," he said.

But other lawyers and advisers to the companies involved in the deal said that Mr. Perle had been brought in precisely because he has access to top officials. They noted that Mr. Perle's fee was largely contingent on the deal's being approved, an unusual arrangement in Washington legal circles. And they noted that he was retained after Global Crossing, which has a history of using well-connected lobbyists, had realized that many of the other lawyers and lobbyists had strong Democratic ties but no solid Republican ones.

<snip>

Mr. Perle, who as chairman of the Defense Policy Board has been a leading advocate of the United States' invasion of Iraq, spoke on Wednesday in a conference call sponsored by Goldman Sachs, in which he advised participants on possible investment opportunities arising from the war. The conference's title was "Implications of an Imminent War: Iraq Now. North Korea Next?"

[Stephanie]

32. Pentagon Strategy Creates Rift Among Hawks - Alternet 3/21/03

thanks to remfan

http://www.alternet.org/story.html?StoryID=15439

Pentagon Strategy Creates Rift Among Hawks
By Jim Lobe, AlterNet
March 21, 2003

-snip-

The disagreement over military strategy is the first sign of a disagreement within the powerful alliance that has shaped U.S. foreign policy since the 9/11 attacks. The coalition consists of three main components: hard right-wing, or nationalist Republicans like the Pentagon chief Donald Rumsfeld and vice president Dick Cheney; neo-conservatives like Perle and most of Rumsfeld's and Cheney's immediate subordinates, such as Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz; and the Christian Right, whose concerns have been represented most forcefully within the White House itself, particularly among Bush's domestic advisers.

Over the past eighteen months, these groups have agreed that the "war on terrorism" must include the ouster of Saddam Hussein, beating the war drums against Baghdad moments after the dust settled in lower Manhattan. While they have been unanimous on key issues of tactics, such as marginalizing Secretary of State Colin Powell and other "realist" veterans of the first Bush administration, and strategy, such as ousting Hussein, they have never agreed on what happens once Hussein is removed.

"The earliest and most salient rift (in the hawks' coalition) will be the hard-right nationalists, like Rumsfeld and Cheney, and the neo-conservatives," according to Charles Kupchan, a foreign-policy analyst at the Council on Foreign Relations and National Security Council strategist under former President Bill Clinton. "For the hard right, this is really about getting Saddam Hussein and weapons of mass destruction. Once that's done, they're going to say, 'Okay, we've done our job, now let's get the hell out and go home".

But the neo-conservatives, on the other hand, want to stick around to use Iraq as a base from which to exert pressure on other presumably hostile regimes, particularly Syria, Iran, and even Saudi Arabia. The third wing of the coalition, the Christian Right, is more likely to side with Rumsfeld and Cheney than the neo-conservatives in Kupchan's view, creating a split that "will complicate George Bush's life immensely".

more...

[Stephanie]

33. Pre-emption: Idea With a Lineage Whose Time Has Come | NYT | 3/23

thanks to peacey:

Pre-emption: Idea With a Lineage Whose Time Has Come
excerpt from democrats.com:

NY Times Finally Reports on the PNAC Global Conquest Conspiracy

NY Times finally reports, "The origins of the current war are rooted in a series of policy pronouncements by ... conservative intellectuals that date from the early 1990's, after the end of the cold war and the inconclusive end of the gulf war in 1991, which left Mr. Hussein in power.

kept alive the cause of deposing Saddam Hussein during the mid- and late 1990's through scholarly conferences, foreign policy magazines and forums at research institutions. Then, when many of them returned to power in the administration of George W. Bush, their views ended up dominating the administration's policy, defining an important shift in United States foreign policy thinking...

There is little doubt that the fundamental debate will continue. 'This is just the beginning,' an administration official said. 'I would not rule out the same sequence of events for Iran and North Korea as for Iraq, but circumstances do not compel you to end up in the same place.'"

http://www.nytimes.com/2003/03/23/international/worldsp...

[Stephanie]

34. US thinktanks give lessons in foreign policy - UK Guardian 8/02

http://www.guardian.co.uk/elsewhere/journalist/story/0,...

US thinktanks give lessons in foreign policy
Brian Whitaker reports on the network of research institutes whose views and TV appearances are supplanting all other experts on Middle Eastern issues

Monday August 19, 2002

A little-known fact about Richard Perle, the leading advocate of hardline policies at the Pentagon, is that he once wrote a political thriller. The book, appropriately called Hard Line, is set in the days of the cold war with the Soviet Union. Its hero is a male senior official at the Pentagon, working late into the night and battling almost single-handedly to rescue the US from liberal wimps at the state department who want to sign away America's nuclear deterrent in a disarmament deal with the Russians.
Ten years on Mr Perle finds himself cast in the real-life role of his fictional hero - except that the Russians are no longer a threat, so he has to make do with the Iraqis, the Saudis and terrorism in general.

In real life too, Mr Perle is not fighting his battle single-handed. Around him there is a cosy and cleverly-constructed network of Middle East "experts" who share his neo-conservative outlook and who pop up as talking heads on US television, in newspapers, books, testimonies to congressional committees, and at lunchtime gatherings in Washington.

The network centres on research institutes - thinktanks that attempt to influence government policy and are funded by tax-deductible gifts from unidentified donors.

When he is not too busy at the Pentagon, or too busy running Hollinger Digital - part of the group that publishes the Daily Telegraph in Britain - or at board meetings of the Jerusalem Post, Mr Perle is "resident fellow" at one of the thinktanks - the American Enterprise Institute (AEI).

<more at link, including the funding of these thinktanks, the bogus credentials they issue, and the fact that these "experts" are displacing actual ME scholars as tv commentators and op-ed writers>

[Stephanie]

35. The Madness of Empire - The American Conservative

thanks to T Roosevelt

Two more links to add

{This one's not specific to PNAC, but provides a good background for their goals}

The US and Eurasia: End Game for the Industrial Era?
by Richard Heinberg
http://www.museletter.com/archive/132.html

With the dawn of the 21st century the world has entered a new stage of geopolitical struggle. The first half of the 20th century can be understood as one long war between Britain (and shifting allies) and Germany (and shifting allies) for European supremacy. The second half of the century was dominated by a Cold War between the US, which emerged as the world's foremost industrial-military power following World War II, and the Soviet Union and its bloc of protectorates. The US wars in Afghanistan (in 2001-2002) and Iraq (which, counting economic sanctions and periodic bombings, has continued from 1990 to the present) have ushered in the latest stage, which promises to be the final geopolitical struggle of the industrial period - a struggle for the control of Eurasia and its energy resources.<more>

{And from a bastion of conservatism:}
The Madness of Empire
The War Party’s militarized strategy will unite the world against us.
By Scott McConnell
http://www.amconmag.com/02_24_03/cover.html

Recently the novelist John le Carré wrote in the Times of London that the United States has entered a “period of madness” that dwarfs McCarthyism or the Vietnam intervention in intensity. One generally would not pay much attention to the cynical British spy-tale weaver, never especially friendly to America. But concern about America’s mental health is more broadly in the air, spreading well beyond the usual professional anti-Americans. It is now pervasive in Europe, and growing in Asia, and when Matt Drudge posted le Carré’s piece prominently on his website, it got passed around and talked about here in ways it never would have five years ago.<more>

[Stephanie]

36. Disinfopedia on Richard Perle

thanks to Trajan:

Richard Perle ....
And the American Enterprise Institute ....

The AEI are blood brothers with the PNAC ....


From the Disinfopedia website:

AEI - http://www.disinfopedia.org/wiki.phtml?title=American_E...

American Enterprise Institute

From Disinfopedia, the encyclopedia of propaganda.

The American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research is a think tank founded in 1943 whose stated mission is to support the "foundations of freedom - limited government, private enterprise, vital cultural and political institutions, and a strong foreign policy and national defense." It has emerged as one of the leading architects of the Bush administration's foreign policy. AEI rents space to the Project for a New American Century, one of the leading voices pushing the Bush administration's plan for "regime change" through war in Iraq. AEI reps have also aggressively denied that the war has anything to do with oil.

Personnel

Douglas J. Besharov, Resident Scholar and a Professor in the School of Public Affairs at the University of Maryland.
Robert H. Bork, Senior Fellow and rejected Reagan Supreme Court nominee.
Karlyn Bowman, Resident Fellow.
Montgomery Brown, publication staff member.
Virginia Bryant, publication staff member.
Kathryn Burrows, publication staff member.
Lynne Cheney, the wife of U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney, is an AEI senior fellow.
Richard Cohen penned a vociferous response to Dennis Kucinich's assertion that the war is about oil.
Diana Furchtgott-Roth, Resident Fellow and co-author of Women’s Figures.
Michael Fumento works at AEI.
Newt Gingrich, Senior Fellow and former Speaker of the House <1995-1999>.
Jeane J. Kirkpatrick, Senior Fellow and former U.S. Representative to the United Nations
<1981-1985>.
Kenneth Krattenmaker, publication staff member.
Michael Ledeen works at AEI.
Juyne Linger, editor.
John R. Lott, Jr. is a relentless opponent of gun control and the author of a book titled
"More Guns, Less Crime."
Michael Novak has spent the past twenty years or so working to build a new American Catholicism; one that revolves around unhinged capitalism and the power of the CEO, and countering the religion's traditional mission of social justice and service to the poor.
Richard Perle is also a vocal media supporter of the war.
Lee Raymond, CEO of ExxonMobil, is the vice chair of AEI's board of trustees.
Nazanin Samari, Research Assistant.
Leigh Tripoli
Ben J. Wattenberg, Senior Fellow and host of the PBS series Think Tank.

Current list of Scholors and Fellows is available here.

Funding

Between 1985 and 2001, AEI received $29,653,933 from the following funding sources:

Castle Rock Foundation
Earhart Foundation
John M. Olin Foundation, Inc.
Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation
Philip M. McKenna Foundation, Inc.
Scaife Foundations (Scaife Family, Sarah Mellon Scaife, Carthage)
Smith Richardson Foundation

Amounts contributed by the Coors Foundation are not included.

Coors Foundation

-SNIP-


Perle - http://www.disinfopedia.org/wiki.phtml?title=Richard_N....

Richard N. Perle

From Disinfopedia, the encyclopedia of propaganda.

Long-time Washington cold warrior Richard N. Perle is a man of many hats: Pentagon policy adviser, former Likud policy adviser, media manager, international investor, op-ed writer, talk show guest, think tank expert and, most of all, a man who ardently wants Saddam Hussein
toppled. Perle is associated with the American Enterprise Institute and the Project for a New American Century, both of which have been prominent behind-the-scenes architects of the Bush administration's foreign policy, in particular its push for war with Iraq. He is closely allied with Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, another Iraq hawk. Perle is also a vocal supporter of Israel and a critic of Saudi Arabia. Perle is also chairman of the Defense Policy Board, a Defense Department advisory group composed primarily of former government officials, retired military officers, and academics.

<more at link>

[Stephanie]

37. n/t

n/t

[Stephanie]

38. (Senate Should Investigate Perle) - Conason & Arianna 3/26/03

http://www.salon.com/opinion/huffington/2003/03/26/perl... /
Having your souffle and eating it too
Today's new breed of public servants prefers to cash in while still stalking the halls of power.

- - - - - - - - - - - -
By Arianna Huffington

<snip>Perle's latest deal finds him on the payroll of Global Crossing. The bankrupt telecommunications company is struggling to win government approval for its proposed sale to Asian investors. The Defense Department and the FBI are both opposed to the $250 million deal since it would place Global's fiber-optic network -- which is used by the U.S. government -- under the control of Hutchison Whampoa, a Hong Kong firm with close ties to those freedom-loving folks in Beijing.

Enter Richard Perle. Global is hoping he can convince his good buddies in the Defense Department to put their national security concerns aside and let the dicey deal go through. And Perle is clearly confident that he can deliver: In a highly unusual arrangement for a Washington gun-for-hire, he's agreed to make $600,000 of his $725,000 fee contingent on his bringing home the bacon.

<snip>

Adding insult to injury is the fact that Perle's windfall is coming from the coffers of a disgraced company that was among the worst of the corporate crooks. He's lining his pockets at the expense of the 10,000 laid-off Global employees who saw $32 million in severance pay wiped out -- and the shareholders who lost $57 billion in equity -- when the company declared bankruptcy.

The hubris is unfathomable. In legal documents drafted in connection with the proposed Global sale, Perle couldn't have been clearer about what the telecom company would be buying with its fat fee. "As chairman of the Defense Policy Board," declared Perle in an affidavit, "I have a unique perspective on and intimate knowledge of the national defense and security issues" likely to be raised by the governmental review of the sale. Knowledge, he pointedly pointed out, "that is not and could not be available" to the other lobbyists trying to get the deal approved.

<snip>

First he tried the classic Bush administration Plan A -- the simple, 180 degree lie. He just told reporters that he never signed the statement. That didn't work, so onto Plan B -- claiming ignorance, admitting that he had signed it but insisting he hadn't read it. Finally, no doubt realizing this all sounded a bit too much like "the dog ate my affidavit," Perle declared that none of it mattered anyway, since his position on the DPB actually, now that you mention it, had "nothing to do" with the Global deal -- so how could he possibly be using his public office for private gain? </snip>


http://www.salon.com/opinion/conason/2003/03/26/perle/i...

Joe Conason's Journal
Will the Senate investigate top hawk Richard Perle's questionable conduct at the Defense Policy Board?

- - - - - - - - - - - -

March 26, 2003 | A Perle of great price

Two weeks ago I suggested that Richard Perle's commingling of public service and private profit deserves the scrutiny of the Senate Armed Services Committee. Evidence has been growing since then that Perle, the chairman of the Pentagon's Defense Policy Board, is using his immense clout in the Bush administration as a business calling card. Yesterday, the New York Times reported that Rep. John Conyers has asked the Pentagon inspector general to investigate Perle, and that an unnamed "prominent Democratic member of the Senate" is "considering making a similar request." But rather than simply punting Perle over to the inspector general, the Senate itself ought to act in this case.

The first exposé of Perle's business affairs appeared in a New Yorker article by Seymour Hersh, who Perle then memorably smeared as a "terrorist" for having the temerity to report on his peculiar dealings with Adnan Khashoggi, the billionaire Saudi arms dealer, oilman and Iran-contra scandal figure. (Iran-contra scandal figures are a key talent pool for the Bush administration, the latest example being neocon publicist Michael Ledeen. Josh Marshall provides a photo of Ledeen and Perle at a Washington kaffeeklatsche, along with some of Ledeen's inane commentary, but omits his unsavory role in the arms-for-hostages fiasco.)

Following the Hersh story, which examined Perle's role in a defense-oriented venture called Trireme Partners L.P., other aspects of his business portfolio have emerged, including a directorship in Autonomy, a British information technology contractor for the Defense Department, the Department of Homeland Security and other federal agencies; a directorship in DigitalNet, a Virginia-based communications company with U.S. Army and Defense Department contracts; and a consulting deal with bankrupt Global Crossing, which is paying him big money to grease its acquisition by Hong Kong's Hutchison Whampoa Ltd. <more at link>

[Stephanie]

39. The Wraps Come Off Bush's Colonialist Agenda - LA Times 3/25

thanks to peacey:

<original link is archived>
http://www.commondreams.org/views03/0325-04.htm
The Wraps Come Off Bush's Colonialist Agenda
by Robert Scheer

excerpt:

The post-Hussein strategy, formed by a neoconservative clique close to the White House, is another indicator that this is in no way a war "to disarm Iraq." If disarmament were the central goal, the U.S.-British alliance would need to control Iraq for only months, not years. That would be enough time for its weapons inspectors to do what it said the United Nations could not accomplish.

Instead, unable to produce any real evidence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq before the invasion or since it began, the administration publicly shifted its rationale from disarmament to the "nation-building" that Bush properly derided during the 2000 election.

However, there is ample evidence that "regime change" and redrawing the map of the Mideast were the goals of the Bush administration's neoconservative core all along.

The Carnegie Endowment (www.ceip.org ) last week published "Origins of Regime Change in Iraq," a thorough portrait of this "textbook case of how a small, organized group can determine policy in a large nation, even when the majority of officials and experts originally scorned their views."

Continued...

[Stephanie]

40. Practice to Deceive - Wash. Monthly -Joshua Micah Marshall 4/03-"

http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/features/2003/0304.mar...
Practice to Deceive
Chaos in the Middle East is not the Bush hawks' nightmare scenario--it's their plan.
April 2003
By Joshua Micah Marshall

<snip>In their view, invasion of Iraq was not merely, or even primarily, about getting rid of Saddam Hussein. Nor was it really about weapons of mass destruction, though their elimination was an important benefit. Rather, the administration sees the invasion as only the first move in a wider effort to reorder the power structure of the entire Middle East. Prior to the war, the president himself never quite said this openly. But hawkish neoconservatives within his administration gave strong hints. In February, Undersecretary of State John Bolton told Israeli officials that after defeating Iraq, the United States would "deal with" Iran, Syria, and North Korea. Meanwhile, neoconservative journalists have been channeling the administration's thinking. Late last month, The Weekly Standard's Jeffrey Bell reported that the administration has in mind a "world war between the United States and a political wing of Islamic fundamentalism ... a war of such reach and magnitude the invasion of Iraq, or the capture of top al Qaeda commanders, should be seen as tactical events in a series of moves and countermoves stretching well into the future."

<snip>

Whacking the Hornet's Nest

If the Bush administration has thought through these various negative scenarios--and we must presume, or at least pray, that it has--it certainly has not shared them with the American people. More to the point, the president has not even leveled with the public that such a clean-sweep approach to the Middle East is, in fact, their plan. This breaks new ground in the history of pre-war presidential deception. Franklin Roosevelt said he was trying to keep the United States out of World War II even as he--in some key ways--courted a confrontation with the Axis powers that he saw as both inevitable and necessary. History has judged him well for this. Far more brazenly, Lyndon Johnson's administration greatly exaggerated the Gulf of Tonkin incident to gin up support for full-throttle engagement in Vietnam. The war proved to be Johnson's undoing. When President Clinton used American troops to quell the fighting in Bosnia he said publicly that our troops would be there no longer than a year, even though it was widely understood that they would be there far longer. But in the case of these deceptions, the public was at least told what the goals of the wars were and whom and where we would be fighting.

Today, however, the great majority of the American people have no concept of what kind of conflict the president is leading them into. The White House has presented this as a war to depose Saddam Hussein in order to keep him from acquiring weapons of mass destruction--a goal that the majority of Americans support. But the White House really has in mind an enterprise of a scale, cost, and scope that would be almost impossible to sell to the American public. The White House knows that. So it hasn't even tried. Instead, it's focused on getting us into Iraq with the hope of setting off a sequence of events that will draw us inexorably towards the agenda they have in mind.

The brazenness of this approach would be hard to believe if it weren't entirely in line with how the administration has pursued so many of its other policy goals. Its preferred method has been to use deceit to create faits accomplis, facts on the ground that then make the administration's broader agenda almost impossible not to pursue. During and after the 2000 campaign, the president called for major education and prescription drug programs plus a huge tax cut, saying America could easily afford them all because of large budget surpluses. Critics said it wasn't true, and the growing budget deficits have proven them right. But the administration now uses the existence of big budget deficits as a way to put the squeeze on social programs--part of its plan all along. Strip away the presidential seal and the fancy titles, and it's just a straight-up con. </snip>

[Stephanie]

41. Defense Adviser Perle Resigns (Conyers wants investigation) - WP 3/27

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A38829-20...

Defense Adviser Perle Resigns
By Walter Pincus and Christopher Lee
Washington Post Staff Writers
Thursday, March 27, 2003; 6:45 PM

<snip>Rep. John Conyers, the ranking Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee, called the move "a small step in the right direction" but said he would press on with his request that the Pentagon's Inspector General investigate Perle's business dealings.

"If he is continuing as Member of the Board, that continues to be a problem," Conyers said.

Charles Lewis, executive director of the Center for Public Integrity, a government watchdog group, agreed. And he said the advisory board's ethical failings reach beyond Perle.

At least 10 of the panel's 31 members are executives or lobbyists with private companies that have tens of billions of dollars' worth of contracts with the Defense Department and other government agencies, according to a report to be released by the center Friday.

"The problems of the Defense Policy Board run much deeper than Richard Perle," Lewis said. "To the public it looks like you have folks feathering their nest. . . . I'm shocked and awed by audacity of who has been selected and who is serving on this board. There really is a tin ear when it comes to ethical appearance considerations."

<snip>Members of the board are appointed to one-year terms, are unpaid and serve as special government employees. They are covered both by federal ethics laws and regulations known as the Standards of Ethical Conduct, which, among other things, prohibit financial conflicts of interest and using one's public position for private gain.<more at link>

[Stephanie]

42. Pentagon Adviser Is Stepping Down (Perle) - NYT-3/28

http://www.nytimes.com/2003/03/28/business/28GLOB.html?...

March 28, 2003
Pentagon Adviser Is Stepping Down
By STEPHEN LABATON

<snip>In an affidavit that he signed but that was never filed in the bankruptcy proceeding, Mr. Perle said he was retained by Global Crossing to gain the approval of the transaction by the committee because of his former job as an assistant defense secretary in the Reagan administration and his current position on the Defense Policy Board.

"As the chairman of the Defense Policy Board, I have a unique perspective on and intimate knowledge of the national defense and security issues that will be raised by the C.F.I.U.S. review process that is not and could not be available to the other C.F.I.U.S. professionals," he said, referring to the committee.

Mr. Perle said that he had not read the affidavit carefully before he signed it and that the reference in the affidavit to the Defense Policy Board had been "a clerical error" that should have been deleted.

In recent days, criticism began to rise from Democratic lawmakers. Mr. Conyers asked the inspector general at the Pentagon to examine Mr. Perle's business dealings. And Senator Levin sent a letter to Mr. Rumsfeld expressing "deep concern" about the reports of Mr. Perle's business relationships.

"I believe that Mr. Perle should be asked to make a choice," Mr. Levin wrote, "between stepping down from the Defense Policy Board or making a commitment not to have any further contact with D.O.D. officials on behalf of a client, not to allow his name to be used in connection with any such contact, and not to accept any fee that is contingent upon an action of the Department of Defense."

Through a senior aide, Mr. Conyers said today that Mr. Perle's decision "is a step in the right direction, but it doesn't eliminate the problem" until he leaves the board.

[Stephanie]

43. Woolsey: U.S. faces 'World War IV' - CNN - 4/3/03

http://www.cnn.com/2003/US/04/03/sprj.irq.woolsey.world...

Ex-CIA director: U.S. faces 'World War IV'
From Charles Feldman and Stan Wilson
CNN
Thursday, April 3, 2003 Posted: 2:21 PM EST (1921 GMT)

LOS ANGELES, California (CNN) -- Former CIA director James Woolsey said Wednesday that the United States is engaged in World War IV, and that it could continue for years.

<snip>

Woolsey has been named in news reports as possible candidate for a key position in the reconstruction of a post-war Iraq.

He said the new war is actually against three enemies: the religious rulers of Iran, the "fascists" of Iraq and Syria, and Islamic extremists like al Qaeda.

<snip>

Singling out Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak and the leaders of Saudi Arabia, he 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." <more>

[Stephanie]

44. Road to Baghdad Paved by 'Scoop' Jackson - Seattle PI 4/6/03

http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/opinion/115505_focus06.sh...
Sunday, April 6, 2003

P-I Focus: The road the U.S. traveled to Baghdad was paved by 'Scoop' Jackson
The hawks' hawk

ROGER MORRIS

<snip>It was then, 40 years ago, that Jackson began to be linked directly, if furtively, to some of the uglier and little-known origins of the war on Iraq in 2003. Overseeing the CIA's "black budget" for covert operations and interventions from a subcommittee of Armed Services, he was one of a handful of senators who gave a nod to two U.S.-backed coups in Iraq, one in 1963 and again in 1968. Those plots brought Saddam Hussein to power amid bloodbaths in which the CIA, exacting the price for its support, handed Saddam and his Baath Party cohorts lists of supposed anti-U.S. Iraqis to be killed.

The result was the systematic murder of several hundred and as many as several thousand people, in which Saddam himself participated. Whatever the toll, accounts agree that CIA killing lists comprised much of Iraq's young educated elite -- doctors, teachers, technicians, lawyers and other professionals as well as military officers and political figures -- Iraqis who would not be there to oppose Saddam's growing tyranny over ensuing years or to help rebuild or govern Iraq, as the United States now hopes to do, after the current war.

By 1969, Jackson was so prominent in military and national security affairs, and so at odds on those issues with many in his own party, that newly elected Republican Richard Nixon thought to name the Washington Democrat his secretary of defense, though the senator declined the job.

But Snohomish County's favorite son coveted the White House himself and was soon a sharp critic of Nixon's arms control and détente. Added to his cold warring was even greater zeal for Israel, a certainty that the United States should endorse the Israelis' own hard line -- absorbing the West Bank after its conquest in the 1967 Middle East War, the long-term subjugation of Palestine and an abiding hostility to Iraq and other Arab states.

As Jackson grew nationally prominent, he attracted the inevitable ambitious staffers and partisans boarding his coattails to advance both their own hawkish views and themselves. Among them was a recent graduate of the University of Southern California who was fanatic about amassing and projecting U.S. power, especially on behalf of Israel, and not least about his own strategic genius. The young New Yorker named Richard Perle became Jackson's chief assistant from 1969 to 1980. </snip>

[Stephanie]

45. Neoconservative clout seen in U.S. Iraq policy-Milwaukee Journal Sentinal

http://www.jsonline.com/news/gen/apr03/131523.asp

Neoconservative clout seen in U.S. Iraq policy
By BRUCE MURPHY
[e-mail]
April 6, 2003

Question: Why are we in Iraq?

Answer: The neoconservatives made us do it.

The buzz in Washington and beyond has been that President Bush's attack on Iraq came straight from the playbook of the neoconservatives, a group of mostly Republican strategists, many of whom have gotten funding from Milwaukee's Bradley Foundation. The neoconservatives differ from traditional conservatives in favoring a more activist role for government and a more aggressive foreign policy.

Led by Weekly Standard editor William Kristol, the neoconservatives have offered a sweeping new vision for U.S. foreign policy: to restructure the Middle East and supplant dictators around the world, using pre-emptive attacks when necessary against any countries seen as potential threats. Traditional conservatives, such as Heritage Foundation fellow John C. Hulsman, suggest that this will lead to "endless war," while Jessica Mathews of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace has charged that "announcing a global crusade on behalf of democracy is arrogant." <more>

[Stephanie]

46. Carnegie Endowment for International Peace - links galore

Tons of info here - I recommend checking out the Terri Gross interview with Joseph Cirincione, for one.

A small sample of what's available (not formatted, sorry, you have to go to the page to get the links):


http://www.ceip.org/files/Iraq/index.htm#regime_change
Origins of Regime Change
Analysis

"The Evolution of the Bush Administration's Policy Toward Iraq," Joseph Cirincione on Fresh Air with Terry Gross, April 1, 2003

"Why We Are in Iraq," Speech by Carnegie Senior Associate Joseph Cirincione at American University Teach-In, March 23, 2003 (pdf)

"Origins of Regime Change in Iraq," Carnegie Issue Brief by Joseph Cirincione, March 19, 2003

"Quick Transformation to Democratic Middle East is Fantasy," Tom Carothers and Bethany Lacina, Seattle Post-Intelligencer, March 16, 2003

"Promoting Democracy in the Middle East: The Problem of U.S. Credibility," Carnegie Working Paper by Marina Ottaway, March 2003

"The New American Colonialism," by Joseph Cirincione, San Francisco Chronicle Op-Ed, 23 February 2003

"Democratic Mirage in the Middle East," Carnegie Policy Brief #20 by Marina Ottaway, Thomas Carothers, Amy Hawthorne, Daniel Brumberg, October 2002

"Dreaming of Democracy," New York Times Magazine, March 2, 2003

"How it Came to War," by Nicholas Lehmann, the New Yorker, 27 March 2003

"First Stop, Iraq," Time, March 25, 2003

"Democracy Domino Theory 'Not Credible," Los Angeles Times, March 14, 2003


"Frontline: The War Behind Closed Doors," This informative website contains interviews, documents, and a history of the Administration's strategic thinking on Iraq and the Middle East. 20 February 2003

"After Iraq," by Nicholas Lehmann, the New Yorker, 17 February 2003

"The President's Real Goal in Iraq," by Jay Bookman, Atlanta Journal-Constitution Op-Ed, 29 September 2002

Project for the New American Century This website presents analysis on Iraq and the Middle East from conservative thinkers.


"The Next World Order," by Nicholas Lehmann, the New Yorker, 1 April 2002 (pdf)


Key Documents on the Administration's Plans for Regime Change


Excerpts from 1992 Draft "Defense Planning Guidance," A policy statement on America's mission in the post-Cold War era drafted under Paul Wolfowitz, then-under secretary of defense for policy. 1992

"A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm" In a memo to then-Irsaeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Richard Perle, Douglas Feith and others present a bold new strategy for Israel that focuses on removing Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq. July 1996

Letter to President Clinton on Iraq Conservative thinkers, many of whom became senior officials in the Bush Administration, articulate to then-President Clinton the urgent need to depose Saddam, 26 January 1998

"Rebuilding America's Defenses" A report by the Project for the New American Century coauthored by among others, six key defense and foreign policy officials now serving in the Bush administration. This report seems to have become a blueprint for Bush's foreign and defense policies. September 2000

"The National Security Strategy of the United States of America," This report outlines the administration's approach to defending the country. This strategy marks a significant departure from previous approaches, a change that it attributes largely to the attacks of Sept. 11. 20 September 2002

Richard Perle on NBC's Meet the Press Richard Perle argues that a democratic Iraq could unleash the spread of democracy in the Middle East, 23 February 2003

"The Future of Iraq" President Bush Outlines his vision for Iraq and the Middle East in a Speech at the American Enterprise Institute. 26 February 2003

[Stephanie]

47. How neoconservatives conquered Washington - Salon 4/9/03

http://www.salon.com/opinion/feature/2003/04/09/neocons /

How neoconservatives conquered Washington -- and launched a war
First they converted an ignorant, inexperienced president to their pro-Israel, hawkish worldview. Then 9/11 allowed them to claim Iraq threatened the U.S. The rest is on CNN tonight.
- - - - - - - - - - - -
By Michael Lind

April 9, 2003 | America's allies and enemies alike are baffled. What is going on in the United States? Who is making foreign policy? And what are they trying to achieve? Quasi-Marxist explanations involving big oil or American capitalism are mistaken. Yes, American oil companies and contractors will accept the spoils of the kill in Iraq. But the oil business, with its Arabist bias, did not push for this war any more than it supports the Bush administration's close alliance with Ariel Sharon. Further, President Bush and Vice President Cheney are not genuine "Texas oil men" but career politicians who, in between stints in public life, would have used their connections to enrich themselves as figureheads in the wheat business, if they had been residents of Kansas, or in tech companies, had they been Californians.

<snip>

It is not clear that George W fully understands the grand strategy that Wolfowitz and other aides are unfolding. He seems genuinely to believe that there was an imminent threat to the U.S. from Saddam Hussein's "weapons of mass destruction," something the leading neocons say in public but are far too intelligent to believe themselves. The Project for the New American Century urged an invasion of Iraq throughout the Clinton years, for reasons that had nothing to do with possible links between Saddam and Osama bin Laden. Public letters signed by Wolfowitz and others called on the U.S. to invade and occupy Iraq, to bomb Hezbollah bases in Lebanon, and to threaten states such as Syria and Iran with U.S. attacks if they continued to sponsor terrorism. Claims that the purpose is not to protect the American people but to make the Middle East safe for Israel are dismissed by the neocons as vicious anti-Semitism. Yet Syria, Iran and Iraq are bitter enemies, with their weapons pointed at each other, and the terrorists they sponsor target Israel rather than the U.S. The neocons urge war with Iran next, though by any rational measurement North Korea's new nuclear arsenal is, for the U.S., a far greater problem.

So that is the bizarre story of how neoconservatives took over Washington and steered the U.S. into a Middle Eastern war unrelated to any plausible threat to the U.S. and opposed by the public of every country in the world except Israel. The frightening thing is the role of happenstance and personality. After the al-Qaida attacks, any U.S. president would likely have gone to war to topple bin Laden's Taliban protectors in Afghanistan. But everything that the U.S. has done since then would have been different had America's 18th century electoral rules not given Bush the presidency and had Cheney not used the transition period to turn the foreign policy executive into a PNAC reunion.

For a British equivalent, one would have to imagine a Tory government, with Downing Street and Whitehall controlled by followers of the Rev. Ian Paisley, extreme Euroskeptics, empire loyalists and Blimpish military types -- all determined, for a variety of strategic or religious reasons, to invade Egypt. Their aim would be to regain the Suez Canal as the first step in a campaign to restore the British empire. Yes, it really is that weird.

[Stephanie]

48. Bush ready to fight war on two fronts - Guardian 4/13/03

http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,2763,935812,00.h...

Bush ready to fight war on two fronts
Ed Vulliamy in Washington
Sunday April 13, 2003
The Observer

The last shot of the war in Iraq will be the starting pistol for two further campaigns by the administration of President George W Bush. One will be fought in the region: no one really believes America's project is confined to Iraq. The toppling of Saddam is first base in what Michael Ledeen, leading thinker among the neo-conservatives driving foreign policy, calls 'a war to remake the world'.

<snip>

America's continuing 'war on terrorism' aims to secure Iraq, but then focus on fresh enemies: Syria and Iran. When an aide told Bush last week that Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld had fired a verbal warning shot at Syria, the President said: 'Good'.

William Kristol, a long-time friend of Bush from Yale days, wrote in a book he co-authored: 'The mission begins in Baghdad, but it does not end there. We stand at the cusp of a new historical era. It is so clearly about more than Iraq. It is about more even than the future of the Middle East. It is about what sort of role the United States intends to play in the twenty-first century.'

<snip>

Grand plans for continuing war are devised by neo-conservatives on the edges of the administration, but the group includes key players, not least Vice-President Dick Cheney and eputy Defence Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, regarded as the real architects of war and its aftermath. 'There will have to be change in Syria,' said Wolfowitz last week. And John Bolton, number three at the State Department, warned countries the US has accused of pursuing weapons of mass destruction - including Iran and Syria - to 'draw the appropriate lesson from Iraq'.

[Stephanie]

49. Privatization in Disguise - The Nation 4/10/03

http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20030428&s=klein
column

Posted April 10, 2003
THE NATION

LOOKOUT
by Naomi Klein
Privatization in Disguise

On April 6, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz spelled it out: There will be no role for the United Nations in setting up an interim government in Iraq. The US-run regime will last at least six months, "probably...longer than that."

And by the time the Iraqi people have a say in choosing a government, the key economic decisions about their country's future will have been made by their occupiers. "There has got to be an effective administration from day one," Wolfowitz said. "People need water and food and medicine, and the sewers have to work, the electricity has to work. And that's a coalition responsibility."

The process of getting all this infrastructure to work is usually called "reconstruction." But American plans for Iraq's future economy go well beyond that. Rather, the country is being treated as a blank slate on which the most ideological Washington neoliberals can design their dream economy: fully privatized, foreign-owned and open for business.

Some highlights: The $4.8 million management contract for the port in Umm Qasr has already gone to a US company, Stevedoring Services of America, and the airports are on the auction block. The US Agency for International Development has invited US multinationals to bid on everything from rebuilding roads and bridges to printing textbooks. Most of these contracts are for about a year, but some have options that extend up to four. How long before they meld into long-term contracts for privatized water services, transit systems, roads, schools and phones? When does reconstruction turn into privatization in disguise?

<snip>

It goes further than one unlucky country. Investors are openly predicting that once privatization of Iraq takes root, Iran, Saudi Arabia and Kuwait will be forced to compete by privatizing their oil. "In Iran, it would just catch like wildfire," S. Rob Sobhani, an energy consultant, told the Wall Street Journal. Soon, America may have bombed its way into a whole new free-trade zone. <more at link>

[Stephanie]

50. The Strategist and the Philosopher (Strauss) - Le Monde (via truthout)

http://truthout.org/docs_03/042003H.shtml
The Strategist and the Philosopher
Alain Frachon and Daniel Vernet
Le Monde

Tuesday 15 April 2003

Who are these Neoconservatives who play an essential role in the United States President's choices alongside the Christian Fundamentalists? And who were their master thinkers, Albert Wohlstetter and Leo Strauss ?

It was said in a tone of sincere praise: "You are some of the best brains in the country''; so good, added George W. Bush, that "my government employs twenty of you''. The President addressed the American Enterprise Institute in Washington on February 26 (See Le Monde of March 20). He was honoring a "Think Tank'' that is one of the bastions of the American Neoconservative movement. He saluted a school of thought that marks his administration and declared all that he owes to the intellectual current of predominant influence today. He recognized that he is surrounded by Neoconservatives and credited them with an essential role in his political choices.

In the beginning of the sixties, John F. Kennedy recruited from the center left, notably from Harvard University, certain professors chosen from "the best and the brightest" - to take up the expression of essayist David Halberstam. President George Bush would himself govern with those, who, starting in the sixties, lashed out from the stretchers of this centrist consensus with a social democratic coloration, then dominant.

Who are they? What is their history? Who were their master thinkers? What are the intellectual sources of Bushian Neo-conservatism?

The Neoconservatives shouldn't be confused with the Christian Fundamentalists who are also found in George Bush's entourage. They have nothing to do with the renaissance of Protestant fundamentalism in the Southern, "Bible Belt'' States which is one of the rising forces in today's Republican Party. Neo-conservatism is East Coast and a little Californian also. Its sources of inspiration have an "intellectual'' profile, often New Yorkers, often Jewish, who started out "on the left''. Some still call themselves Democrats. They have a political or literary magazine in hand, not the Bible; they wear tweed jackets, not the double-breasted blue green suits of the Southern televangelists. Usually they profess liberal ideas regarding social and moral issues. Their goal is neither to prohibit abortion nor to impose prayer in the schools. Their ambition is other.

more...

[Stephanie]

51. Hawks Rip Into Mideast Plan - LA Times

thanks to Tinoire

Archived
Neoconservatives and like-minded lawmakers blast State Department.

Hawks Rip Into Mideast Plan

WASHINGTON -- Emboldened by the U.S. military victory in Iraq, neoconservatives and their allies in Congress are mounting a preemptive campaign against the U.S. plan to implement a so-called road map for settling the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

<snip re Gingrich attacking State Dept & Powell>


House Majority Leader Tom DeLay (R-Texas) also has inveighed against the road map, calling it "a confluence of deluded thinking between European elites, elements within the State Department bureaucracy and a significant segment of the American intellectual community."

<snip>

Gingrich made his remarks at the American Enterprise Institute, a think tank that has provided much of the ideological underpinnings of the Bush administration.

<snip>

The dispute is about more than the hope of pro-Israel forces that they can block any attempt by the White House to pressure Israel into making concessions to the Palestinians. It also reflects a bruising debate within the administration — intensified by the quick military victory in Iraq — about how muscular U.S. foreign policy should be and the extent to which the United Nations and other international organizations should influence — or constrain — U.S. actions around the world.

The debate is focused at the moment on the Middle East, where neoconservatives see the quick U.S. victory in Iraq opening up the potential for remaking the region. But it is also raging over other trouble spots, including North Korea.

<snip>

Neoconservatives take issue with the fact that it is a collaborative effort with the European Union, Russia and the United Nations.

<snip>

[Stephanie]

52. Whose war is this? | Pat Buchanan USA Today 09/26/2001

http://www.usatoday.com/news/opinion/2001-09-27-ncguest...

Whose war is this?
Editorial
By Patrick J. Buchanan

In his resolve to hunt down and kill the Osama bin Laden terrorists he says committed the Sept. 11 massacres, President Bush has behind him a nation more unified than it has been since Pearl Harbor. But now Bush has been put on notice that this war cannot end with the head of bin Laden and the overthrow of the Taliban.

The shot across Bush's bow came in an "Open Letter" co-signed by 41 foreign-policy scholars, including William Bennett, Jeane Kirkpatrick, the publisher of The Weekly Standard and the editor in chief of The New Republic — essentially, the entire neoconservative establishment.

What must Bush do to retain their support? Target Hezbollah for destruction and retaliate against Syria and Iran if they refuse to cut all ties to Hezbollah and move militarily to overthrow Iraq's Saddam Hussein. Failure to attack Iraq, the neocons warn Bush, "will constitute an early and perhaps decisive surrender in the war on international terrorism."<more>

[Stephanie]

53. Why look in the crystal ball? - Terry Jones, Guardian 5/4/03

http://observer.guardian.co.uk/worldview/story/0,11581,...

Why look in the crystal ball?
Terry Jones
Sunday May 4, 2003

<snip>"I see US spending on the military rising to 3.5 and 3.9% of the GNP. I see the US waging 'multiple simultaneous large-scale wars'. I see US planes making pre-emptive strikes on any nation that might threaten American superiority. I see the US destroying any ballistic missiles and WMD that might 'allow lesser states to deter US military action by threatening US allies and the American homeland itself.'"
"O Far Seeing One! You could tell all this simply from seeing George W. Bush interviewed on NBC News?"

"No, I was quoting from Rebuilding America's Defenses the blueprint for the present US Government's foreign policy. And, blessed as I am with the gift of foresight, it scares the shit out of me."

[Stephanie]

54. "Rebuilding America's Defenses" – A Summary (PNAC Cliff's Notes)

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article3249.ht...

"Rebuilding America's Defenses" – A Summary
Blueprint of the PNAC Plan for U.S. Global Hegemony

Some people have compared it to Hitler's publication of Mein Kampf, which was ignored
until after the war was over.

Full text of Rebuilding America's Defenses here

Compiled by Bette Stockbauer

05/06/03: When the Bush administration started lobbying for war with Iraq, they used as rationale a definition of preemption (generally meaning anticipatory use of force in the face of an imminent attack) that was broadened to allow for the waging of a preventive war in which force may be used even without evidence of an imminent attack. They also were able to convince much of the American public that Saddam Hussein had something to do with the attacks of 9/11, despite the fact that no evidence of a link has been uncovered. Consequently, many people supported the war on the basis of 1) a policy that has no legal basis in international law and 2) a totally unfounded claim of Iraqi guilt.

What most people do not know, however, is that certain high ranking officials in the Bush administration have been working for regime change in Iraq for the past decade, long before terrorism became an important issue for our country. In 1997 they formed an organization called the Project for the New American Century (PNAC). They have sought the establishment of a much stronger U.S. presence throughout the Mideast and Iraq's Saddam Hussein has been their number one target for regime change. Members of this group drafted and successfully passed through Congress the Iraqi Liberation Act, giving legal sanctions for an invasion of the country, and funneled millions of taxpayer dollars to Hussein opposition groups called the Iraqi National Congress and The Committee for the Liberation of Iraq.

The PNAC philosophy was formed in response to the ending of Cold War hostilities with Russia and the emergence of America as the world's only preeminent superpower. Claiming that this is a "strategic moment" that should not be squandered, members of PNAC say that America should use its position to advance its power and interests into all areas of the globe. They believe the time is ripe for establishing democracies in regimes considered hostile to U.S. interests and are not hesitant to advise the use of military means to achieve those ends.

PNAC members on the Bush team include Vice-President Dick Cheney and his top national security assistant, I. Lewis Libby; Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld; Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz; National Security Council member Eliot Abrams; Undersecretary for Arms Control and International Security John Bolton; and former Chairman of the Defense Policy Board, Richard Perle. Other PNAC members exerting influence on U.S. policy are the President of the Committee for the Liberation of Iraq Randy Scheunemann, Republican Party leader Bruce Jackson and current PNAC chairman William Kristol, conservative writer for the Weekly Standard. Jeb Bush, the president's brother and governor of Florida, is also a member.

Their campaign to overthrow Hussein was unsuccessful during the Clinton presidency and early days of Bush's term, but on 9/11 they found the event they needed to push for the overthrow of Hussein. Within 24 hours both Wolfowitz and Cheney were calling for an invasion of Iraq, even before anyone knew who had been responsible for the attacks.<more>

[Stephanie]

55. Perle Briefed Seminar on How to Profit From Iraq - AP 5/7/03

Report: Pentagon Adviser in Seminar Flap
Report: Pentagon Consultant Perle Briefed Seminar on How to Profit From Iraq and Korea Conflicts
The Associated Press

http://abcnews.go.com/wire/Politics/ap20030507_540.html

LOS ANGELES May 7 —
Pentagon adviser Richard Perle briefed an investment seminar on ways to profit from conflicts in Iraq and North Korea just weeks after he received a top-secret government briefing on the crises in the two countries, the Los Angeles Times reported Wednesday.

Perle, who until March was chairman of the Defense Policy Board, a group of outside advisers to the Pentagon, also serves on the board of several defense contractors. The revelation raises concerns about conflicts of interest.

The Times reported that Perle attended a Defense Intelligence Agency briefing in February and three weeks later participated in a Goldman Sachs conference call in which he advised investors in a talk titled "Implications of an Imminent War: Iraq Now. North Korea Next?"

Perle did not return phone calls or e-mails from the newspaper seeking comment.<more>

[Stephanie]

56. Consulting and Policy Overlap (Perle) - LA Times | 5/7/03

http://www.latimes.com/la-na-perle7may07,1,5452752.stor...

Consulting and Policy Overlap
Advisor Perle has given seminars on ways to profit from possible conflicts discussed by defense board he sits on.

By Ken Silverstein and Chuck Neubauer, Times Staff Writers

WASHINGTON -- Last February, the Defense Policy Board, a group of outside advisors to the Pentagon, received a classified presentation from the super-secret Defense Intelligence Agency on the crises in North Korea and Iraq.

Three weeks later, the then-chairman of the board, Richard N. Perle, offered a briefing of his own at an investment seminar on ways to profit from possible conflicts with both countries.

Perle and his fellow advisors also heard a classified address about high-tech military communications systems at the same closed-door session in February. He runs a venture capital firm that has been exploring investments in that very area.

<snip>

On Feb. 27, 2003, two speakers — Henry D. Sokolski of the Nonproliferation Policy Education Center and Michael Pillsbury, a Pentagon advisor under Feith — gave presentations to the Defense Policy Board on the risks and prospects of U.S. conflict with North Korea. The same day, the Defense Intelligence Agency, which works for the Pentagon, also briefed the board on North Korea and Iraq among other subjects, according to several people in attendance.

Three weeks later, Perle participated in a Goldman Sachs conference call in which he advised investors on opportunities tied to the war in Iraq. Perle's talk was called "Implications of an Imminent War: Iraq Now. North Korea Next?" <more>

[Stephanie]

57. Strong Must Rule the Weak, said Neo-Cons' Muse (Strauss) - Truthout | 5/8/

http://www.truthout.org/docs_03/050903I.shtml

Strong Must Rule the Weak, said Neo-Cons' Muse
by Jim Lobe
Inter Press

Thursday 08 May 2003

WASHINGTON - Is U.S. foreign policy being run by followers of an obscure German Jewish political philosopher whose views were elitist, amoral and hostile to democratic government?

Suddenly, political Washington is abuzz about Leo Strauss, who arrived in the United States in 1938 and taught at several major universities before his death in 1973.

Thanks to the ”Week in Review'' section of last Sunday's 'New York Times' and another investigative article in this week's 'New Yorker' magazine, the cognoscenti have suddenly been made aware that key neo-conservative strategists behind the Bush administration's aggressive foreign and military policy consider themselves to be followers of Strauss, although the philosopher - an expert on Plato and Aristotle - rarely addressed current events in his writings.

The most prominent is Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, now widely known as ''Wolfowitz of Arabia'' for his obsession with ousting Iraq's Saddam Hussein as the first step in transforming the entire Arab Middle East. Wolfowitz is also seen as the chief architect of Washington's post-9/11 global strategy, including its controversial pre-emption policy.

Two other very influential Straussians include 'Weekly Standard' Chief Editor William Kristol and Gary Schmitt, founder, chairman and director of the Project for the New American Century (PNAC), a six-year-old neo-conservative group whose alumni include Vice President Dick Cheney and Pentagon chief Donald Rumsfeld, as well as a number of other senior foreign policy officials.<more at link>

[Stephanie]

58. The Philosopher (Strauss) - Boston Globe | 5/11/03

The Philosopher
The late Leo Strauss has emerged as the thinker of the moment in Washington, but his ideas remain mysterious. Was he an ardent opponent of tyranny, or an apologist for the abuse of power?
By Jeet Heer, 5/11/2003
Boston Globe

http://www.boston.com/globe/sunday/print_archives/05110...
<or: http://www.mail-archive.com/[e-mail]/msg10... >

<snip>

In his book ''The Anatomy of Antiliberalism,'' Stephen Holmes maintains that, in Strauss's view, only philosophers can handle the truth: that nature is indifferent to human values and needs.

So where did Strauss really stand? ''He was an atheist,'' says Stanley Rosen flatly. ''They all are. They are epicureans and atheists.'' (The epicurean comment is perhaps a reference to the late Allan Bloom, who was legendary for his enjoyment of the high life. After his death, Bloom's esoteric life as a closeted gay man turned out to be very different from his outward posture as a proponent of traditional values.)

While some Straussians dispute the idea that the master was a godless cynic, it does seem that Strauss wanted a regime where the elite lived by a code of stoic fortitude while governing over a population that subscribes to superstitious religious beliefs. ''He agreed with Marx that religion was the opium of the masses,'' says Shadia Drury. ''But he believed that the masses need their opium.'' Sociologically, Strauss's approach would seem to work well for the Republican Party, which has a grass-roots base of born-again Christians and a much more secular elite leadership-at least in its foreign-policy wing. <more>

[Stephanie]

59. Radio Interview with Jeet Heer, on Strauss - WNYC 5/22/03

Great radio interview - archived here. Emphasizes Strauss's dictate that an elite ruling class must LIE to the masses.

http://www.wnyc.org/shows/bl/episodes/05222003
The Brian Lehrer Show
Thursday, May 22 2003
The House of Strauss

Jeet Heer, graduate student at York University in history and frequent contributor to the Boston Globe on American culture, explains the influence of the intellectual icon, Leo Strauss.

[Stephanie]

60. SELECTIVE INTELLIGENCE - S. Hersh, The New Yorker 5/12/03

http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/?030512fa_fact

SELECTIVE INTELLIGENCE
by SEYMOUR M. HERSH
Donald Rumsfeld has his own special sources. Are they reliable?
Issue of 2003-05-12
Posted 2003-05-05

They call themselves, self-mockingly, the Cabal—a small cluster of policy advisers and analysts now based in the Pentagon’s Office of Special Plans. In the past year, according to former and present Bush Administration officials, their operation, which was conceived by Paul Wolfowitz, the Deputy Secretary of Defense, has brought about a crucial change of direction in the American intelligence community. These advisers and analysts, who began their work in the days after September 11, 2001, have produced a skein of intelligence reviews that have helped to shape public opinion and American policy toward Iraq. They relied on data gathered by other intelligence agencies and also on information provided by the Iraqi National Congress, or I.N.C., the exile group headed by Ahmad Chalabi. By last fall, the operation rivalled both the C.I.A. and the Pentagon’s own Defense Intelligence Agency, the D.I.A., as President Bush’s main source of intelligence regarding Iraq’s possible possession of weapons of mass destruction and connection with Al Qaeda. As of last week, no such weapons had been found. And although many people, within the Administration and outside it, profess confidence that something will turn up, the integrity of much of that intelligence is now in question.

The director of the Special Plans operation is Abram Shulsky, a scholarly expert in the works of the political philosopher Leo Strauss. Shulsky has been quietly working on intelligence and foreign-policy issues for three decades; he was on the staff of the Senate Intelligence Com-mittee in the early nineteen-eighties and served in the Pentagon under Assistant Secretary of Defense Richard Perle during the Reagan Administration, after which he joined the Rand Corporation. The Office of Special Plans is overseen by Under-Secretary of Defense William Luti, a retired Navy captain. Luti was an early advocate of military action against Iraq, and, as the Administration moved toward war and policymaking power shifted toward the civilians in the Pentagon, he took on increasingly important responsibilities.

W. Patrick Lang, the former chief of Middle East intelligence at the D.I.A., said, “The Pentagon has banded together to dominate the government’s foreign policy, and they’ve pulled it off. They’re running Chalabi. The D.I.A. has been intimidated and beaten to a pulp. And there’s no guts at all in the C.I.A.”

The hostility goes both ways. A Pentagon official who works for Luti told me, “I did a job when the intelligence community wasn’t doing theirs. We recognized the fact that they hadn’t done the analysis. We were providing information to Wolfowitz that he hadn’t seen before. The intelligence community is still looking for a mission like they had in the Cold War, when they spoon-fed the policymakers.”

<snip>
According to the Pentagon adviser, Special Plans was created in order to find evidence of what Wolfowitz and his boss, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, believed to be true—that Saddam Hussein had close ties to Al Qaeda, and that Iraq had an enormous arsenal of chemical, biological, and possibly even nuclear weapons that threatened the region and, potentially, the United States.<more>

[Stephanie]

61. Father Strauss Knows Best - NYT | 5/4/03

Large Graphic, sort of a PNAC Family Tree.

http://www.nytimes.com/imagepages/2003/05/04/weekinrevi...

And here's a website devoted to Strauss:

http://straussian.net /

[Stephanie]

62. A Dream Only American Power Can Inspire | May 16, 2003

from peacey:

A Dream Only American Power Can Inspire
The Project for the New American Century’s vision of global military dominance

by Dru Oja Jay - http://dominionpaper.ca


excerpts:

Indeed, PNAC is in this case not much different from Bill Clinton, who declared that the US would act "multilaterally when possible but unilaterally when necessary." PNAC and the Bush Administration differ only to the extent to which they have shed any veneer of multilateral intention.

But PNAC's vision of "global American leadership" goes beyond the mere denial of limits on American power. In almost every article or publication that bears its name, PNAC insists on massive increases in defense spending. "Rebuilding America's Defenses," a 75 page report authored by PNAC members in 2000, calls for raising US defense spending to "a minimum level of 3.5 to 3.8 percent of gross domestic product, adding $15 billion to $20 billion to total defense spending annually." The year following September 11, the Bush Administration has shown increased enthusiasm for PNAC's plan, calling for a $48 billion defense budget increase in 2002.


----------------

“Advanced forms of biological warfare that can ‘target’ specific genotypes may transform biological warfare from the realm of terror to a politically useful tool.” —PNAC

-------

alternate link:

http://ontario.indymedia.org/front.php3?article_id=1896...

[Stephanie]

63. www.PNAC.info - Exposing the Project for the New American Century

http://www.pnac.info /
from the site:

Welcome to PNAC.Info - an effort to investigate, analyze, and expose the Project for the New American Century*, and its plan for a "unipolar" world.

In the coming days we will be compiling information and analysis geared toward exposing the big-picture plan behind the current war in Iraq, and other foreign policy decisions of the current administration.

If you have any comments, links, or ideas, please feel free to post a comment below this message here.

Thank you for your visit.

Be well, be free,

Lance M. Brown

[Stephanie]

64. http://pnacrevealed.com/

http://pnacrevealed.com / - new site by DU's trumad, includes many articles, and bios of the PNAC signatories

[Stephanie]

65. From Eloriel: LEO STRAUSS AND THE NEO-CONS

please note: THIS POST IS BY ELORIEL, and reposted with permission.

originally posted in this thread:
http://www.democraticunderground.com/cgi-bin/duforum/du...

<I'm posting this information I posted in another thread separately. I want EVERYONE, esp. every DUer to know about all about this:

* Though he died in 1973, Leo Strauss's influence probably began to be felt most keenly in the 1980s, right on through to today.

* Strauss, a German Jew, was entirely comfortable and even supportive of fascism, but left Germany in 1938 because of Nazism's rabid and brutal anti-Semitic focus. Strauss preferred what he called "universal fascism" which was a fascism that included Jews. One of Strauss's students, neo-con Michael Ledeen, has even referred to himself as a "universal fascist."

* Strauss was a philosopher, not a political scientist, who focused on the classics (esp. Plato) but who was infuenced by Germans who also influenced Hitler's thinking including Nietsche and Heidegger.

* A number of neo-cons, including Paul Wolfowitz and many others who populate the halls of the Pentagon and a good many Washington think tanks as well as the halls of academe across the country, studied under Strauss or his more prominent protogees such as Alan Bloom.

* Other prominent Straussians include William Kristol, Norman Podhoretz, Victor Davis Hanson (who seems to a primary influence of Donald Rumsfeld), Richard Perle, Daniel Pipes, Gary Schmitt the founder of PNAC, Abram Shulsky who runs the OSP at the Pentagon (the ones who came up with all that "proof" of WMD in Iraq, despite CIA protestations to the contrary), Robert BOrk, Clarence Thomas, Alan Keyes,William Bennett, and many others. (A complete list of Straussian students and followers would be quite a boon!)

* What is most pertinent about Strauss and his students and protogees is a set of principles which one can readily see operative in this administration. There are several articles that outline these principles very well. An understanding of what the Straussians believe is imperative to understand what is going on in this administration.

Leo Strauss' Philosophy of Deception
http://www.alternet.org/story.html?StoryID=15935

Rule One: Deception

It's hardly surprising then why Strauss is so popular in an administration obsessed with secrecy, especially when it comes to matters of foreign policy. Not only did Strauss have few qualms about using deception in politics, he saw it as a necessity. While professing deep respect for American democracy, Strauss believed that societies should be hierarchical – divided between an elite who should lead, and the masses who should follow. But unlike fellow elitists like Plato, he was less concerned with the moral character of these leaders. According to Shadia Drury, who teaches politics at the University of Calgary, Strauss believed that "those who are fit to rule are those who realize there is no morality and that there is only one natural right – the right of the superior to rule over the inferior."

snip

Second Principle: Power of Religion


According to Drury, Strauss had a "huge contempt" for secular democracy. Nazism, he believed, was a nihilistic reaction to the irreligious and liberal nature of the Weimar Republic. Among other neoconservatives, Irving Kristol has long argued for a much greater role for religion in the public sphere, even suggesting that the Founding Fathers of the American Republic made a major mistake by insisting on the separation of church and state. And why? Because Strauss viewed religion as absolutely essential in order to impose moral law on the masses who otherwise would be out of control.


At the same time, he stressed that religion was for the masses alone; the rulers need not be bound by it. Indeed, it would be absurd if they were, since the truths proclaimed by religion were "a pious fraud." As Ronald Bailey, science correspondent for Reason magazine points out, "Neoconservatives are pro-religion even though they themselves may not be believers."


"Secular society in their view is the worst possible thing,'' Drury says, because it leads to individualism, liberalism, and relativism, precisely those traits that may promote dissent that in turn could dangerously weaken society's ability to cope with external threats. Bailey argues that it is this firm belief in the political utility of religion as an "opiate of the masses" that helps explain why secular Jews like Kristol in 'Commentary' magazine and other neoconservative journals have allied themselves with the Christian Right and even taken on Darwin's theory of evolution.


Third Principle: Aggressive Nationalism


Like Thomas Hobbes, Strauss believed that the inherently aggressive nature of human beings could only be restrained by a powerful nationalistic state. "Because mankind is intrinsically wicked, he has to be governed," he once wrote. "Such governance can only be established, however, when men are united – and they can only be united against other people."


Not surprisingly, Strauss' attitude toward foreign policy was distinctly Machiavellian. "Strauss thinks that a political order can be stable only if it is united by an external threat," Drury wrote in her book. "Following Machiavelli, he maintained that if no external threat exists then one has to be manufactured (emphases added)."


"Perpetual war, not perpetual peace, is what Straussians believe in," says Drury. The idea easily translates into, in her words, an "aggressive, belligerent foreign policy," of the kind that has been advocated by neocon groups like PNAC and AEI scholars – not to mention Wolfowitz and other administration hawks who have called for a world order dominated by U.S. military power. Strauss' neoconservative students see foreign policy as a means to fulfill a "national destiny" – as Irving Kristol defined it already in 1983 – that goes far beyond the narrow confines of a " myopic national security."

-----

Neocons Dance a Strauss Waltz
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/EE09Ak01.html

snip

Kristol's father Irving, the godfather of neoconservatism who sits on the board of the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), where a number of prominent hawks, including former defense Policy Board chairman Richard Perle, are based, has also credited Strauss with being one of the main influences on his thinking.

While a New York Times article introduced readers to Strauss and his disciples in Washington, interest was further piqued this week by a lengthy article by The New Yorker's legendary investigative reporter, Seymour Hersh, who noted that Abram Shulsky, a close Perle associate who has run a special intelligence unit in Rumsfeld's office, is also a Straussian.

His unit, according to Hersh, re-interpreted evidence of Iraq's alleged links to Osama bin Laden's al-Qaeda terrorist network and possession of weapons of mass destruction to support those in the administration determined to go to war with Baghdad. The article also identified Stephen Cambone, one of Rumsfeld's closest aides who heads the new post of undersecretary of defense for intelligence, as a Strauss follower.

In his article, Hersh wrote that Strauss believed the world to be a place where "isolated liberal democracies live in constant danger from hostile elements abroad", and where policy advisers may have to deceive their own publics and even their rulers in order to protect their countries.

Shadia Drury, author of 1999's Leo Strauss and the American Right, says that Hersh is right on the second count but dead wrong on the first. "Strauss was neither a liberal nor a democrat," she said in a telephone interview from her office at the University of Calgary in Canada. "Perpetual deception of the citizens by those in power is critical because they need to be led, and they need strong rulers to tell them what's good for them.

"The Weimar Republic was his model of liberal democracy for which he had huge contempt," added Drury. Liberalism in Weimar, in Strauss's view, led ultimately to the Nazi Holocaust against the Jews.

Like Plato, Strauss taught that within societies, "some are fit to lead, and others to be led", according to Drury. But, unlike Plato, who believed that leaders had to be people with such high moral standards that they could resist the temptations of power, Strauss thought that "those who are fit to rule are those who realize there is no morality and that there is only one natural right, the right of the superior to rule over the inferior".

--------

From an admiring neo-con, Robert Locke:
Leo Strauss, Conservative Mastermind
http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID...

snip

The key Straussian concept is the Straussian text, which is a piece of philosophical writing that is deliberately written so that the average reader will understand it as saying one ("exoteric") thing but the special few for whom it is intended will grasp its real ("esoteric") meaning. The reason for this is that philosophy is dangerous. Philosophy calls into question the conventional morality upon which civil order in society depends; it also reveals ugly truths that weaken men’s attachment to their societies. Ideally, it then offers an alternative based on reason, but understanding the reasoning is difficult and many people who read it will only understand the "calling into question" part and not the latter part that reconstructs ethics. Worse, it is unclear whether philosophy really can construct a rational basis for ethics. Therefore philosophy has a tendency to promote nihilism in mediocre minds, and they must be prevented from being exposed to it. The civil authorities are frequently aware of this, and therefore they persecute and seek to silence philosophers. Strauss shockingly admits, contrary to generations of liberal professors who have taught him as a martyr to the First Amendment, that the prosecution of Socrates was not entirely without point. This honesty about the dangers of philosophy gives Straussian thought a seriousness lacking in much contemporary philosophy; it is also a sign of the conviction that philosophy, contrary to the mythology of our "practical" (though sodden with ideology and quick to take offense at ideas) age, matters.

Strauss not only believed that the great thinkers of the past wrote Straussian texts, he approved of this. It is a kind of class system of the intellect, which mirrors the class systems of rulers and ruled, owners and workers, creators and audiences, which exist in politics, economics, and culture.

----

Other articles:

The Strategist and the Philosopher
Alain Frachon and Daniel Vernet
Le Monde
http://truthout.org/docs_03/042003H.shtml


The Philosopher
http://www.boston.com/dailyglobe2/131/focus/The_Philoso...


Philosopher's Ideas Nurture U.S. President's Warrior Class
http://www.canada.com/vancouver/vancouversun/columnists...


Eloriel

[Stephanie]

66. A PNAC Primer: How We Got Into This Mess - Bernard Weiner, Counterpunch

http://www.counterpunch.org/weiner05282003.html

NAC Primer: How We Got Into This Mess
How We Got Into This Mess
By BERNARD WEINER
May 28, 2003

Recently, I was the guest on a radio talk-show hosted by a thoroughly decent far-right Republician. 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 neoconservatives 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."

Two things became apparent in that exchange: 1) Even a well-educated, intelligent radio commentator was unaware of some of this information; and, 2) Once presented with it, this conservative icon understood immediately the implications of what would happen if the American voting public found out about these policies.

<snip>

[Stephanie]

67. Five steps to the world according to Bush-Neil Mckay Sunday Herald 6/1/03

from Tinoire:

http://www.sundayherald.com/34271

No weapons in Iraq? We'll find them in Iran
Iraq: They told us Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, but they've found none. Were they lying?
By Neil Mackay

THE spooks are on the offensive. In their eyes, it still remains to be seen whether Tony Blair lied to the British public by claiming that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction (WMDs), but as the Prime Minister's own intelligence officers now say, Parliament was misled and subjected to spin, exaggeration and bare-faced flim-flammery.


<snip>

Five steps to the world according to Bush

1. PNAC
The ultra-hawkish neo-conservative think-tank, the Project for the New American Century, was set up in 1997 by the likes of Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney, Jeb Bush (George W's brother) and Paul Wolfowitz. Its over-arching aim is the establishment of a 'global Pax Americana' -- a re-ordered world squarely under the control of the USA. To achieve this grand strategic goal, the PNAC says these steps must be achieved:

Saddam deposed

Afghanistan invaded

Arafat isolated

Syria cowed

UN sidelined

Iran punished
As the world has seen, nearly all of these aims have been achieved.

2. The Office of Special Plans
This new intelligence agency was set up in the aftermath of the September 11 attacks by US defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld.
Frustrated by the failure of conventional spying organisations such as the CIA to come up with proof that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction and was linked to Osama bin Laden, the OSP cherry-picked intelligence from mountains of raw data to build the intelligence picture its political masters required. 3. Bush and Blair
With Bush fully briefed by Rumsfeld using intelligence from the OSP, the US was convinced it had a case to prosecute a war against Iraq. But could America take its allies with it? Blair was briefed at length by Bush and other leading members of the US administration using OSP information. The British intelligence services were not coming up with the same sort of information that the OSP were collating. Nevertheless, Blair threw his lot in with Bush, banking on the OSP intelligence.

4. Troops and conflict
With Afghanistan under US control after the first major battle in the seemingly endless war on terror, Bush and Blair were able to topple Saddam using the OSP intelligence to take the public with them. With Iraq occupied, the hawks have turned their attentions to Iran, with claims that the 'Mullahcracy', in the words of the neo-conservatives, had a weapons of mass destruction programme and was tied to al-Qaeda. Sound familiar?

5. Pax Americana
This is the ultimate aim of the neo-conservatives now running the United States. America stands as the world's policeman, the US has no powerful rivals and global capitalism flourishes: the PNAC's project is complete.<more>

[Stephanie]

68. PNAC WATCH + DEM THINK THANK

from Tinoire:

Starting a Progressive Counterpart to the Neocon's Most Powerful Weapon-- the Policy Creation and Advocacy Think Tank; Join the Grassroots Effort to Build One
Rob Kall

Think of the neocon think tanks as machine guns, spraying neoncon bullets of ideas, persuasion and influence. They’ve been building these “Political Weapons” for over 20 years. The Democrats and the progressive left don’t have a clue. They’re still fighting with bows and arrows. The progressive think tanks (TTs) just don’t do what the right wing think tanks do. The progressive TTs focus on specific issues and work towards advocacy on those issues. They get their funding based on those issues and that keeps the left unfocused, disorganized, without a clear, easy to understand and, more important, express, embrace and enthusiastically get behind.
The left is fighting with obsolete weapons. The question is no longer why. Poor leadership, selling out to corporatism and the middle, failure to see the power and effectiveness, the huge leap in political technology that the neocon think tanks represent all add up to the current situation where the cave men are fighting the marines. It’s that stark a difference and it is time that we do something about it.

There’s been talk that John Podesta, president Clinton’s last chief of staff, is doing something along these lines, called the American Majority Institute <http://www.camlc.org/press-374.html >. It was announced last fall. If he is doing it, then it’s VERY low on the radar. Try Googling it, or what is apparently it’s fundraising counterpart, the American Majority Fund, which involved Harold Ickes and Morton H. Halperin. But it is also very low on the radar. In their early stages, that may be where they want to stay for a while.

Even if Podesta, Ickes and Halperin have their funded started and under way, there's still room for, perhaps need for another one. There are at least five major right wing TTs. it will probably be necessary to start at least ten TTs to end up with five strong, effective ones ten years from now.

Why not start one from the grass roots? The progressive movement is one of the people, not of the powerful. Why not start a progressive TT that is built from the bottom up? Look at what moveon has done from such small beginnings. Already there are a handful of us working on this project. Soon, we'll list some of the recognizable names who have committed. In the meantime, we can use help fleshing out the territory. Drop me a line and we'll put you to work. This project is going to take a lot of money. Right this minute, we are building the framework. We need someone to come up with the first $1000-$1500 it will take to apply for a 501 C3 not profit status. And then, we'll need millions more. The strongest rightwing TTs operate on $15-$25 million a year. Compare that with under $5 million for most progressive TTs. The strongest TTs have assets that can approach a quarter billion dollars or more.

But we have to start somewhere. Here's a clearer picture of what the rightwing TTs do.

The Republicans stole the presidency with the help of Supreme Court Judges influenced by decades of Right wing neocon think tank “influence.”

The mid-term elections were won using Policy and Platform positions created and fine tuned by neocon think tanks.

The right wing talk shows are fed propaganda and talking points by the neocon think tanks.

The right wing fundmentalist religious groups are presented with talking point presentations of neocon think tank material to persuade them to get behind neocon think tank policies.

The neocons have created organizations to bring college students into the neocon world.

The neocon think tanks provide research for thousands of state level republican legislators. They’ve also created an organization that supports them.

The neocon think tanks have recording studios in their Washington offices so their high name recognition spokespeople can be more easily interviewed by visiting media.

The neocon think tanks generate hundreds of OpEd articles to be fed to mainstream media.

The neocon think tanks sponsor “educational” seminars for right wing judges—holding them in vacation locations. The goal is to get the judges to see cases through the perspective of the neocon philosophy.

Okay. So you want to help build, for the progressive movement, a weapon like the one the Republicans have used to decimate democrats, progressives, democracy, the environment, human rights….. the policy think tank?

Here are a few ways you can help:

1) Do some research on the Right wing think tanks. Assemble a list. Off the top of my head, they include PNAC, American Enterprise Institute, Cato Foundation… I need to get a complete list of the top five or ten, and remember them. I think there’s one that is the Manhattan Inst.

Anyway, dig into their websites. Identify what they do, how they promote their policies and positions. We need a complete list of all the strategies they use.

2) Dig up research on the neocon think tanks—let’s assemble a comprehensive collection of links to good articles and reports, like we’ve started to do on the PNAC Watch <http://www.opednews.com/pnacwatch.htm > .

3) Identify left wing, liberal, progressive organizations that operate as think tanks, that are funding sources—Foundations, individual contributors… Potential contributors to our project once it’s further along.

4) Suggest names of potential members of the think tank. We need administrators, organizers, researchers, writers….. I am starting with columnists because it takes columnists to communicate the ideas and get them published. But we need to identify all kinds of people. Look at the list of people in the PNAC and use them as examples.

5) Help raise money. Think of fund raising ideas. Do you know someone who could be a major contributor? Do you know someone who knows someone. I just spoke to someone today who knows the music instructor for a well known philanthropist.
6) At the least, just drop us a note that you support what we're doing, with permission to add the note to our blurbs. Encouragement goes a long way.

We will build a weapon to fight the right at an equal technology level. And we will win. There are more democrats and greens than there are Republicans. And we have one secret weapon they will never own... hearts.

Rob Kall [e-mail] is publisher of progressive news and opinion website www.opednews.com and organizer of cutting edge meetings that bring together world leaders, such as the Winter Brain Meeting and the Summit Meeting on the Art, Science and Application of Story

This article is copyright by Rob Kall, but permission is granted for reprint in print, email, blog, or web media so long as this credit is attached

Other writings of Rob Kall http://www.opednews.com/archives%20kall.htm ((Awesome site!! ))

http://www.opednews.com/kall%20starting_a_progressive_c...

[Tinoire]

71. Active link for PNAC Watch

http://www.opednews.com/pnacwatch.htm

An absolute wealth of information and links

http://www.opednews.com / great site for liberal news & issues. Am still looking at it- astounded at everything they have

[yankhadenuf]

153. IASPS~ Israel's "parent think tank" of the PNAC ?!

http://www.iasps.org/strat1.htm

"A Clean Break:
A New Strategy for Securing the Realm


Following is a report prepared by The Institute for Advanced Strategic and Political Studies’ "Study Group on a New Israeli Strategy Toward 2000." The main substantive ideas in this paper emerge from a discussion in which prominent opinion makers, including Richard Perle, James Colbert, Charles Fairbanks, Jr., Douglas Feith, Robert Loewenberg, David Wurmser, and Meyrav Wurmser participated. The report, entitled "A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm," is the framework for a series of follow-up reports on strategy. ...."

[Stephanie]

69. A mission in Iraq built on a lie - Sydney Morning Herald 6/16/03

from party_line:

http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2003/06/15/1055615673779...

Sydney Morning Herald:
"A mission in Iraq built on a lie"
June 16 2003

When Bush wondered what to do about September 11 an ultra-right lobby group was there to tell him, writes Robert Manne.

It is gradually becoming transparent that the endlessly repeated claim used to justify the invasion of Iraq - that Saddam Hussein possessed a vast arsenal of weapons of mass destruction - was false.

The 200 most plausible sites for the storage of such weapons have been inspected. Many of the most senior military, intelligence and scientific figures in the regime have been captured and interrogated. Yet not one weapon of mass destruction has so far been found.

The spurious justification constitutes, in my opinion, one of the greatest foreign policy scandals involving Western governments since 1945.

It is surely imperative for all those who care about democracy - whether or not they supported the war - to try to discover an explanation for the deception and the true causes of what has occurred.

One important moment on the road that led to the invasion of Iraq can be found in the formation in 1997 of the Project for the New American Century. This lobby group represented almost all the most powerful figures associated with the defence and foreign policy wing of American neo-conservatism: Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Richard Perle, Paul Wolfowitz and William Kristol.


more................

[Stephanie]

70. The spies who pushed for war (OSP) - Guardian, 7/17/03

http://www.guardian.co.uk/international/story/0,3604,99...

The spies who pushed for war
Julian Borger reports on the shadow rightwing intelligence network set up in Washington to second-guess the CIA and deliver a justification for toppling Saddam Hussein by force
Thursday July 17, 2003
The Guardian

<snip>In the days after September 11, Mr Rumsfeld and his deputy, Paul Wolfowitz, mounted an attempt to include Iraq in the war against terror. When the established agencies came up with nothing concrete to link Iraq and al-Qaida, the OSP was given the task of looking more carefully.

William Luti, a former navy officer and ex-aide to Mr Cheney, runs the day-to-day operations, answering to Douglas Feith, a defence undersecretary and a former Reagan official.

The OSP had access to a huge amount of raw intelligence. It came in part from "report officers" in the CIA's directorate of operations whose job is to sift through reports from agents around the world, filtering out the unsubstantiated and the incredible. Under pressure from the hawks such as Mr Cheney and Mr Gingrich, those officers became reluctant to discard anything, no matter how far-fetched. The OSP also sucked in countless tips from the Iraqi National Congress and other opposition groups, which were viewed with far more scepticism by the CIA and the state department.

There was a mountain of documentation to look through and not much time. The administration wanted to use the momentum gained in Afghanistan to deal with Iraq once and for all. The OSP itself had less than 10 full-time staff, so to help deal with the load, the office hired scores of temporary "consultants". They included lawyers, congressional staffers, and policy wonks from the numerous rightwing thinktanks in Washington. Few had experience in intelligence.

"Most of the people they had in that office were off the books, on personal services contracts. At one time, there were over 100 of them," said an intelligence source. The contracts allow a department to hire individuals, without specifying a job description. <more>

[Tinoire]

72. Seymore Hersch - Who Lied To Whom (New Yorker Mar 2003)

WHO LIED TO WHOM?
by SEYMOUR M. HERSH
Why did the Administration endorse a forgery about Iraq’s nuclear program?
Issue of 2003-03-31
Posted 2003-07-14

On December 19th, Washington, for the first time, publicly identified Niger as the alleged seller of the nuclear materials, in a State Department position paper that rhetorically asked, “Why is the Iraqi regime hiding their uranium procurement?” (The charge was denied by both Iraq and Niger.) A former high-level intelligence official told me that the information on Niger was judged serious enough to include in the President’s Daily Brief, known as the P.D.B., one of the most sensitive intelligence documents in the American system. Its information is supposed to be carefully analyzed, or “scrubbed.” Distribution of the two- or three-page early-morning report, which is prepared by the C.I.A., is limited to the President and a few other senior officials. The P.D.B. is not made available, for example, to any members of the Senate or House Intelligence Committees. “I don’t think anybody here sees that thing,” a State Department analyst told me. “You only know what’s in the P.D.B. because it echoes—people talk about it.”

<snip>

Then the story fell apart. On March 7th, Mohamed ElBaradei, the director-general of the International Atomic Energy Agency, in Vienna, told the U.N. Security Council that the documents involving the Niger-Iraq uranium sale were fakes. “The I.A.E.A. has concluded, with the concurrence of outside experts, that these documents . . . are in fact not authentic,” ElBaradei said.

<snip>

It took Baute’s team only a few hours to determine that the documents were fake. The agency had been given about a half-dozen letters and other communications between officials in Niger and Iraq, many of them written on letterheads of the Niger government. The problems were glaring. One letter, dated October 10, 2000, was signed with the name of Allele Habibou, a Niger Minister of Foreign Affairs and Coöperation, who had been out of office since 1989. Another letter, allegedly from Tandja Mamadou, the President of Niger, had a signature that had obviously been faked and a text with inaccuracies so egregious, the senior I.A.E.A. official said, that “they could be spotted by someone using Google on the Internet.”

<snip>

This official told me that the I.A.E.A. has not been able to determine who actually prepared the documents. “It could be someone who intercepted faxes in Israel, or someone at the headquarters of the Niger Foreign Ministry, in Niamey. We just don’t know,” the official said. “Somebody got old letterheads and signatures, and cut and pasted.” Some I.A.E.A. investigators suspected that the inspiration for the documents was a trip that the Iraqi Ambassador to Italy took to several African countries, including Niger, in February, 1999. They also speculated that MI6—the branch of British intelligence responsible for foreign operations—had become involved, perhaps through contacts in Italy, after the Ambassador’s return to Rome.

<snip>

http://www.newyorker.com/archive/content/?030714fr_arch...

[Stephanie]

73. Are Neocons cooking their own goose? - Sacramento Bee 7/27/03

http://www.sacbee.com/content/opinion/story/7112547p-80...

Are Neocons cooking their own goose?
By Roger Patching -- Special to The Bee
Published 2:15 a.m. PDT Sunday, July 27, 2003

While many debate the wisdom of current efforts by neoconservatives in the Republican Party to create their vision of Pax Americana, I wonder if the historical outcome hasn't already been determined.

That is, while Republicans on all sides worry about "containing" what was once considered a war behind closed doors between unilateralist hawks (the neocons) and multilateralist moderates in the party over a policy based upon U.S. hegemony -- world dominance -- I wonder if it isn't an already irreversibly failed policy simply because the American people were never seriously included by anyone, even the media, in the discussion.

I wonder if the worldview of Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, his deputy, Paul Wolfowitz, Vice President Richard Cheney, Richard Perle, columnists William Kristol, Lawrence Kaplan, Robert Kagan and other members and leaders of the Defense Policy Board, American Enterprise Institute and The Project for a New American Century is already dead because not only did they not make a case for hegemony to the public, they never seriously attempted to even define the term or explain the concept.

And, now, it is too late. Because the public has little understanding of the depth and breadth of their vision of global politics and is already growing weary of American involvement in Iraq, the neocons' grander plan seems destined to never come to fruition. By choosing to not present it directly to the public at large and thereby commence an examination and debate, they have unwittingly undermined it as a viable theory and now we are witnessing the manifestations of its slow and costly death.

<snip>

Americans want to do the right thing and have their government do the right thing, but are becoming increasingly confused. They don't know that Iraq was targeted for our hegemonic expansion, along with other regions, well before Sept. 11, 2001. They don't know that Iraqi oil reserves were central to U.S. energy planning by this administration prior to the attack by mostly Saudis on the Twin Towers. They don't know that we invaded Iraq without an exit strategy because hegemons don't leave and that Iraqi sovereignty is not part of the agenda. They are not aware that there is a global theory at work and Iraq is just part of it.

<more>

[Tinoire]

74. Career officer does eye-opening stint inside Pentagon

Thanks to Donsu

Posted on Thu, Jul. 31, 2003

Career officer does eye-opening stint inside Pentagon
By Karen Kwiatkowski, a recently retired Air Force Lieutenant colonel.


<snip>

Functional isolation of the professional corps. Civil service and active-duty military professionals assigned to the USDP/NESA and SP were noticeably uninvolved in key areas of interest to Undersecretary for Policy Douglas Feith, Deputy Secretary Paul Wolfowitz and Rumsfeld. These included Israel, Iraq and to a lesser extent, Saudi Arabia.

When the New York Times broke the story last summer of Richard Perle's invitation of Laurent Muraviec to brief the Defense Policy Board on Saudi Arabia as the next enemy of the United States, this briefing was news to the Saudi desk officer. He even had some difficulty getting a copy of it, while receiving assignments related to it.

In terms of Israel and Iraq, all primary staff work was conducted by political appointees, in the case of Israel a desk officer appointee from the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, and in the case of Iraq, Abe Shulsky and several other appointees. These personnel may be exceptionally qualified; Shulsky authored a 1993 textbook Silent Warfare: Understanding the World of Intelligence.

<snip>

• Cross-agency cliques: Much has been written about the role of the founding members of the Project for a New American Century, the Center for Security Policy and the American Enterprise Institute and their new positions in the Bush administration. Certainly, appointees sharing particular viewpoints are expected to congregate, and an overwhelming number of these appointees having such organizational ties is neither conspiratorial nor unusual. What is unusual is the way this network operates solely with its membership across the various agencies -- in particular the State Department, the National Security Council and the Office of the Vice President.

<snip>

http://www.ohio.com/mld/beaconjournal/news/editorial/64...

[Stephanie]

75. Get real | Guardian 8/26/03

http://www.guardian.co.uk/elsewhere/journalist/story/0,...

Get real

Driven by a neo-conservative dream, the US is loath to relinquish control in Iraq. But the price for Washington's stubbornness may be failure, writes Brian Whitaker

Tuesday August 26, 2003

Talk of impending failure in Iraq may sound like whinging when it comes from those who opposed the war, but last week the unspeakable seven-letter F-word was uttered by one of the bastions of US neo-conservative hawkery.

Under the headline "Do what it takes in Iraq", an editorial in the Weekly Standard called for a huge commitment of more troops, more money and more civilian workers to fend off disaster.

<snip>

The neo-conservative solution is to devote to Iraq whatever it takes and for as long as it takes, for a whole generation if necessary. The Weekly Standard wants an immediate allocation of $60bn (£38.4bn) for reconstruction. If the Bush administration is serious, "then this is the necessary down payment," it said, while the official Washington line has been that reconstruction will be funded by Iraq's (still largely non-existent) oil revenue.

Only total commitment on a scale not seen since the end of the second world war can ensure US success in Iraq, the Weekly Standard insisted, but the problem for George Bush is that he can't give that commitment, at least not if he values his presidency.

Many US voters don't share the neo-conservatives' obsession with redesigning the Middle East with Texas as a model, and they can quite reasonably ask what they are getting for their money. For the $100bn or so spent on the invasion, they have seen the welcome departure of Saddam Hussein, but that was supposed to be the grand finale of the war, not the overture. Instead, they are stuck with an open-ended military occupation costing $4bn a month and which could drag on for years.<more>

[Dancing_Dave]

76. Thanks for bringing this back up

We can understand the ongoing crisis in Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as the real reasons for 9/11 happening, much better if we know the PNAC agenda of these Neo-con artists who have taken over the Whitehouse and the Pentagon and now want to take over the planet!