[thechat] Project for the New American Century

[isaac]

I found this very interesting (and entirely believable).

I'm interested to know what people think, and if others think this is what's
happening, is there any way it can be stopped?


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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.

On the morning of 12 September 2001, without any evidence of who the
hijackers were, Rumsfeld demanded that the US attack Iraq. According to
Woodward, Rumsfeld told a cabinet meeting that Iraq should be "a principal
target of the first round in the war against terrorism". Iraq was
temporarily spared only because Colin Powell, the secretary of state,
persuaded Bush that "public opinion has to be prepared before a move against
Iraq is possible". Afghanistan was chosen as the softer option. If Jonathan
Steele's estimate in the Guardian is correct, some 20,000 people in
Afghanistan paid the price of this debate with their lives.



Time and again, 11 September is described as an "opportunity". In last
April's New Yorker, the investigative reporter Nicholas Lemann wrote that
Bush's most senior adviser, Condoleezza Rice, told him she had called
together senior members of the National Security Council and asked them "to
think about 'how do you capitalise on these opportunities'", which she
compared with those of "1945 to 1947": the start of the cold war. Since 11
September, America has established bases at the gateways to all the major
sources of fossil fuels, especially central Asia. The Unocal oil company is
to build a pipeline across Afghanistan. Bush has scrapped the Kyoto Protocol
on greenhouse gas emissions, the war crimes provisions of the International
Criminal Court and the anti-ballistic missile treaty. He has said he will
use nuclear weapons against non-nuclear states "if necessary". Under cover
of propaganda about Iraq's alleged weapons of mass destruction, the Bush
regime is developing new weapons of mass destruction that undermine
international treaties on biological and chemical warfare

In the Los Angeles Times, the military analyst William Arkin describes a
secret army set up by Donald Rumsfeld, similar to those run by Richard Nixon
and Henry Kissinger and which Congress outlawed. This "super-intelligence
support activity" will bring together the "CIA and military covert action,
information warfare, and deception". According to a classified document
prepared for Rumsfeld, the new organisation, known by its Orwellian moniker
as the Proactive Pre-emptive Operations Group, or P2OG, will provoke
terrorist attacks which would then require "counter-attack" by the United
States on countries "harbouring the terrorists".



In other words, innocent people will be killed by the United States. This is
reminiscent of Operation Northwoods, the plan put to President Kennedy by
his military chiefs for a phoney terrorist campaign - complete with
bombings, hijackings, plane crashes and dead Americans - as justification
for an invasion of Cuba. Kennedy rejected it. He was assassinated a few
months later. Now Rumsfeld has resurrected Northwoods, but with resources
undreamt of in 1963 and with no global rival to invite caution. You have to
keep reminding yourself this is not fantasy: that truly dangerous men, such
as Perle and Rumsfeld and Cheney, have power. The thread running through
their ruminations is the importance of the media: "the prioritised task of
bringing on board journalists of repute to accept our position".

"Our position" is code for lying. Certainly, as a journalist, I have never
known official lying to be more pervasive than today. We may laugh at the
vacuities in Tony Blair's "Iraq dossier" and Jack Straw's inept lie that
Iraq has developed a nuclear bomb (which his minions rushed to "explain").
But the more insidious lies, justifying an unprovoked attack on Iraq and
linking it to would-be terrorists who are said to lurk in every Tube
station, are routinely channelled as news. They are not news; they are black
propaganda. This corruption makes journalists and broadcasters mere
ventriloquists' dummies. An attack on a nation of 22 million suffering
people is discussed by liberal commentators as if it were a subject at an
academic seminar, at which pieces can be pushed around a map, as the old
imperialists used to do. The issue for these humanitarians is not primarily
the brutality of modern imperial domination, but how "bad" Saddam Hussein
is. There is no admission that their decision to join the war party further
seals the fate of perhaps thousands of innocent Iraqis condemned to wait on
America's international death row. Their doublethink will not work. You
cannot support murderous piracy in the name of humanitarianism. Moreover,
the extremes of American fundamentalism that we now face have been staring
at us for too long for those of good heart and sense not to recognise them.
With thanks to Norm Dixon and Chris Floyd