From: Pat Fallon (pfallon@ptd.net)
Date: Tue Jun 03 2003 - 09:24:48 MDT
>The term "neo-conservative" has been around since the early 1980s
>and has been widely used in political science since then.
>It refers to a group of intellectuals
>who were at one time supporters of the Democrats
>(some had even earlier been on the far left)
>who moved towards the Republican party
>and conservatism in the late 1970s/early 1980s
I think there is good evidence for this characterization.
>The neocons have their agenda
And they have been remarkably successful in seeing it implemented.
They should be proud [instead of suddenly disowning the "neo-con"
label]...they did exactly what they said they were going to do.
Whether you call them "neo-cons" or not, in 1997 a group of Right wing
Republicans formed The Project for the New American Century (PNAC); their
aim was to prepare for the day when the Republicans regained control of the
White House - and, it was hoped, the other two branches of government as
well - so that their vision of how the U.S. should move in the world would
be in place and ready to go, straight off-the-shelf into official policy.
This PNAC group was led by Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney, James Woolsey, Paul
Wolfowitz, Richard Perle, Bill Kristol, James Bolton, Zalmay M. Khalilzad,
William Bennett, Dan Quayle, Jeb Bush, most of whom were movers-and-shakers
in previous Administrations, then in exile, while Clinton was in the White
House.
With the selection of George W. Bush in 2000. The "outsiders" from PNAC were
now powerful "insiders," placed in important positions from which they could
exert maximum pressure on U.S. policy: Cheney is Vice President, Rumsfeld is
Defense Secretary, Wolfowitz is Deputy Defense Secretary, I. Lewis Libby is
Cheney's Chief of Staff, Elliot Abrams is in charge of Middle East policy at
the National Security Council, Dov Zakheim is comptroller for the Defense
Department, John Bolton is Undersecretary of State, Richard Perle is chair
of the Defense Policy advisory board at the Pentagon, former CIA director
James Woolsey is on that panel as well, etc. etc. (PNAC's chairman, Bill
Kristol, is the editor of Rupert Murdoch's The Weekly Standard.)
One doesn't have to speculate what the PNAC guys might think, since they're
quite open and proud of their theories and strategies. Indeed, they've left
a long, public record that lays out quite openly what they're up to.
A shorthand summary of PNAC strategies that have become U.S. policy[*]:
1. In 1992, then-Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney had a strategy report
drafted for the Department of Defense, written by Paul Wolfowitz, then
Under-Secretary of Defense for Policy. In it, the U.S. government was urged,
as the world's sole remaining Superpower, to move aggressively and
militarily around the globe. The report called for pre-emptive attacks and
ad hoc coalitions, but said that the U.S. should be ready to act alone when
"collective action cannot be orchestrated." The central strategy was to
"establish and protect a new order" that accounts "sufficiently for the
interests of the advanced industrial nations to discourage them from
challenging our leadership," while at the same time maintaining a military
dominance capable of "deterring potential competitors from even aspiring to
a larger regional or global role." Wolfowitz outlined plans for military
intervention in Iraq as an action necessary to assure "access to vital raw
material, primarily Persian Gulf oil" and to prevent the proliferation of
weapons of mass destruction and threats from terrorism.
Somehow, this report leaked to the press; the negative response was
immediate. Senator Robert Byrd led the Democratic charge, calling the
recommended Pentagon strategy "myopic, shallow and disappointing....The
basic thrust of the document seems to be this: We love being the sole
remaining superpower in the world and we want so much to remain that way
that we are willing to put at risk the basic health of our economy and
well-being of our people to do so." Clearly, the objective political forces
hadn't yet coalesced in the U.S. that could support this policy free of
major resistance, and so President Bush the Elder publicly repudiated the
paper and sent it back to the drawing boards. (For the essence of the draft
text, see Barton Gellman's "Keeping the U.S. First; Pentagon Would Preclude
a Rival Superpower" in the Washington Post.)
2. Various HardRight intellectuals outside the government were spelling out
the new PNAC policy in books and influential journals. Zalmay M. Khalilzad
(formerly associated with big oil companies, currently U.S. Special Envoy to
Afghanistan & Iraq ) wrote an important volume in 1995, "From Containment to
Global Leadership: America & the World After the Cold War," the import of
which was identifying a way for the U.S. to move aggressively in the world
and thus to exercise effective control over the planet's natural resources.
A year later, in 1996, neo-conservative leaders Bill Kristol and Robert
Kagan, in their Foreign Affairs article "Towards a Neo-Reaganite Foreign
Policy," came right out and said the goal for the U.S. had to be nothing
less than "benevolent global hegemony," a euphemism for total U.S.
domination, but "benevolently" exercised, of course.
3. In 1998, PNAC unsuccessfully lobbied President Clinton to attack Iraq and
remove Saddam Hussein from power. The January letter from PNAC urged America
to initiate that war even if the U.S. could not muster full support from the
Security Council at the United Nations. Sound familiar? (President Clinton
replied that he was focusing on dealing with al-Qaida terrorist cells.)
4. In September of 2000, PNAC, sensing a GOP victory in the upcoming
presidential election, issued its white paper on "Rebuilding America's
Defenses: Strategy, Forces and Resources for the New Century." The PNAC
report was quite frank about why the U.S. would want to move toward
imperialist militarism, a Pax Americana, because with the Soviet Union out
of the picture, now is the time most "conducive to American interests and
ideals...The challenge of this coming century is to preserve and enhance
this 'American peace'." And how to preserve and enhance the Pax Americana?
The answer is to "fight and decisively win multiple, simultaneous
major-theater wars."
In serving as world "constable," the PNAC report went on, no other
countervailing forces will be permitted to get in the way. Such actions
"demand American political leadership rather than that of the United
Nations," for example. No country will be permitted to get close to parity
with the U.S. when it comes to weaponry or influence; therefore, more U.S.
military bases will be established in the various regions of the globe. (A
post-Saddam Iraq may well serve as one of those advance military bases.)
Currently, it is estimated that the U.S. now has nearly 150 military bases
and deployments in different countries around the world, with the most
recent major increase being in the Caspian Sea/Afghanistan/Middle East
areas.
5. George W. Bush moved into the White House in January of 2001. Shortly
thereafter, a report by the Administration-friendly Council on Foreign
Relations was prepared, "Strategic Energy Policy Challenges for the 21st
Century,"that advocated a more aggressive U.S. posture in the world and
called for a "reassessment of the role of energy in American foreign
policy," with access to oil repeatedly cited as a "security imperative."
(It's possible that inside Cheney's energy-policy papers - which he refuses
to release to Congress or the American people - are references to
foreign-policy plans for how to gain military control of oilfields abroad.)
6. 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.
7. Feeling confident that all plans were on track for moving aggressively in
the world, the Bush Administration in September of 2002 published its
"National Security Strategy of the United States of America." The official
policy of the U.S. government, as proudly proclaimed in this major document,
is virtually identical to the policy proposals in the various white papers
of the Project for the New American Century and others like it over the past
decade.
Chief among them are: 1) the policy of "pre-emptive" war - i.e., whenever
the U.S. thinks a country may be amassing too much power and/or could
provide some sort of competition in the "benevolent hegemony" region, it can
be attacked, without provocation. (A later corollary would rethink the
country's atomic policy: nuclear weapons would no longer be considered
defensive, but could be used offensively in support of political/economic
ends; so-called "mini-nukes" could be employed in these regional wars.) 2)
international treaties and opinion will be ignored whenever they are not
seen to serve U.S. imperial goals. 3) The new policies "will require bases
and stations within and beyond Western Europe and Northeast Asia."
In short, the Bush Administration seems to see the U.S., admiringly, as a
New Rome, an empire with its foreign legions (and threat of "shock&awe"
attacks, including nuclear weapons) keeping the outlying colonies, and
potential competitors, in line. Those who aren't fully in accord with these
goals better get out of the way; "you're either with us or against us."
As I say, it was all laid out years ago, but nobody took such extreme talk
seriously; now that they're in power, actually making the policy they only
dreamed about a decade or so ago - with all sorts of consequences for
America and the rest of the world - we need to educate ourselves quickly as
to how the PNACers work and what their future plans might be.
Pat Fallon
[*] excerpted from A PNAC Primer by Bernard Weiner
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