|
Please if you see anything I left out that would help the overall piece, feel free to tell me. I want to help reveal to those at the school what the major media has been ignoring. Thanks!
The Bush administration and the American mainstream media have been shaking up the 8-ball lately, coming up with a new reason to justify our occupation of Iraq nearly every week. The American people have been given reckless allegations of ties between Saddam Hussein’s regime and al-Qaeda, unsupported claims that Iraq posed a direct threat to the United States, and have been told that our invasion was a crusade to free the people of Iraq. While these reasons have been argued time and time again, the media has failed to delve into previous statements made by or endorsed by neoconservative members of the Bush administration concerning military intervention in Iraq less than a decade ago.
Established in 1997, the Project for a New American Century (PNAC), a neoconservative think-tank, set forth with their hawkish views to directly influence American foreign policy. Neoconservatives mainly support an alternate form of conservatism that focuses less on social and economic issues and more on intervention in foreign nations to spread democracy (predominately by militaristic force). While think-tanks are abundant in American politics, the analysis of PNAC remains incredibly crucial to understanding the current situation in Iraq.
After all, at least nine of the original members of PNAC are or have been serving in the Bush administration. Lesser-known members of PNAC include former Director of Central Intelligence and member of the Defense Policy Board James Woolsey, Senior Director for Near East, Southwest Asian, and North African Affairs and member of the National Security Council Elliot Abrams, Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Affairs Peter Rodman, and Under Secretary of State for Arms Control and International Security John Bolton. More well-known figures include Chief of Staff for the Office of Vice-President Lewis Libby, Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage, Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. Last but not least, the most prominent member of all, Mr. Vice-President himself, Dick Cheney.
In January of 1998, PNAC wrote President Bill Clinton asking for the removal of Saddam Hussein from power “to protect our vital interests in the Gulf”. In an unfortunate incident of irony, they claimed that “in the not-too-distant future we will be unable to determine with any reasonable level of confidence whether Iraq does or does not possess such weapons”. President Bush is fortunate that this claim didn’t surface in early 2003, when Bush was using Hussein’s supposed possession of WMDs to justify the current war.
The fundamentalist group clearly stated their four major objectives in a 1997 “Statement of Principles”:
• we need to increase defense spending significantly if we are to carry out our global responsibilities today and modernize our armed forces for the future;
• we need to strengthen our ties to democratic allies and to challenge regimes hostile to our interests and values;
• we need to promote the cause of political and economic freedom abroad;
• we need to accept responsibility for America's unique role in preserving and extending an international order friendly to our security, our prosperity, and our principles.
The members of PNAC were none-too-secretive about their goal: to spread American values and American democracy to the Middle East using our military. In a rare media mentioning of PNAC on a March 5, 2003 episode of ABC’s “Nightline”, Ted Koppel reported “ predicted that the shift would come about slowly, unless there were ‘some catastrophic and catalyzing event, like a new Pearl Harbor.’”
One day after September 11, 2001, our generation’s Pearl Harbor, then-Counterterrorism Coordinator Richard Clarke claimed that former PNAC member and current Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld “was saying we needed to bomb Iraq”. After counterterrorism experts attempted to correct him, pointing out that al-Qaeda is in Afghanistan, Rumsfeld replied “there aren't any good targets in Afghanistan and there are lots of good targets in Iraq”.
Over one-thousand American lives have been lost in Iraq and over twenty-thousand Iraqis, many of them civilians, have also perished. Many who originally supported the war are now calling it a disaster. George W. Bush, the man who led us into war, claimed in a 1999 presidential debate “I don’t think nation-building missions are worthwhile.” It’s unfortunate that many of those in the Bush administration, many who have had a tremendous role in the tailoring of our foreign policy, tend to disagree. While Bush himself is not considered a neoconservative, he has time and time again proven that when it comes to serving the American people or serving the fundamentalists of the PNAC, he will most definitely do the latter.
|
Printer-friendly format
Email this thread to a friend
Bookmark this thread
(505 posts)
Send PM |
Profile |
Ignore
