May 28, 2003
CounterPunch

How We Got Into This Imperial Pickle
A PNAC Primer

by Bernard Weiner

Recently, I was the guest on a radio talk-show hosted by a thoroughly decent far-right Republican. I got verbally battered, but returned fire and, I think, held my own. Toward the end of the hour, I mentioned that the National Security Strategy -- promulgated by the Bush Administration in September 2002 -- now included attacking possible future competitors first, assuming regional hegemony by force of arms, controlling energy resources around the globe, maintaining a permanent-war strategy, etc.

"I'm not making up this stuff," I said. "It's all talked about openly by the neo-conservatives of the Project for the New American Century -- who now are in charge of America's military and foreign policy -- and published as official U.S. doctrine in the National Security Strategy of the United States of America."

The talk-show host seemed to gulp, and then replied: "If you really can demonstrate all that, you probably can deny George Bush a second term in 2004."

. . . Mere hours after the 9/11 terrorist mass-murders, PNACer Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld ordered his aides to begin planning for an attack on Iraq, even though his intelligence officials told him it was an al-Qaida operation and there was no connection between Iraq and the attacks. "Go massive," the aides' notes quote him as saying. "Sweep it all up. Things related and not." Rumsfeld leaned heavily on the FBI and CIA to find any shred of evidence linking the Iraq government to 9/11, but they weren't able to. So he set up his own fact-finding group in the Pentagon that would provide him with whatever shaky connections it could find or surmise.

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[Further, the process of transformation, even if it brings revolutionary change, is likely to be a long one, absent some catastrophic and catalyzing event -- like a new Pearl Harbor.--"Rebuilding America's Defenses," The Project for the New American Century (PNAC), September 2000, p51]

Joe Klein, "Jewish Writers Claim Powerful Zionists Drove USA Into Mid-East War for Sake of Israel!," Weekly Informant, February 5, 2003

Andrew Gumbel, "Growing Evidence of Deception by Washington," Independent (UK), April 20, 2003

E. J. Dionne Jr., "Inevitably, The Politics Of Terror," Washington Post, May 25, 2003

Patrick Seale, "A Costly Friendship," The Nation, July 2, 2003

George Monbiot, "America is a religion," Guardian, July 29, 2003

[In a little discussed speech titled "A Period of Consequences," given at The Citadel military college in South Carolina on Sept. 23, 1999, then-Texas Gov. George W. Bush laid out his plan for America. Bush"s speech succinctly reflected the ideology of the Project for the New American Century (PNAC), a neoconservative institute initiated in 1997 by The New Citizenship Project, under the direction of its president, Sen. John McCain.

Bush's Citadel speech was mirrored by a report that PNAC produced in September 2000, "Rebuilding America's Defenses: Strategy, Forces, and Resources for a New Century" ("RAD"). As noted by the authors of "RAD," PNAC was based on the defense strategy outlined by Dick Cheney's Defense Department in the 1992 Defense Policy Guidance (DPG) at the end of the George H.W. Bush administration.

The DPG (also known as the Wolfowitz Report) provided a "blueprint for maintaining U.S. preeminence, precluding the rise of a great power rival, and shaping the international security order in line with American principles and interests."--Elliot Cohen, "Hell to Pay," truthdig.com, October 30, 2008]

"The New American Century," 2009

Cynthia McKinney, New York, September 11, 2013

Enver Masud, "Talk at Million American March," The Wisdom Fund, September 11, 2013