A Failed Project for the New American Century?
By Tim Buchholz
It was early morning (for me) when my roommate got a call from his mother
in Wisconsin telling
him to turn on the TV. That’s when we saw the first building on fire. We
ran to our roof in
Brooklyn that overlooked Manhattan and saw the plumes of smoke filling the
air, and that’s when
we saw the second plane hit. We were in shock; we couldn’t believe what we
just saw. We thought
the world was ending.
As soon as the trains were running again, my friend and I went in to the
city and got off at
Union Square/14th Street, where anything below 14th was blocked off.
Make****ft hospitals lined
the streets as gurney’s rushed past us with bleeding bodies through the
smoke clouded air.
“How could this have happened?” we asked ourselves as a soldier motioned
with his machine gun
that we could not go any further.
I’m sure we all have stories of where we were on 9/11; even those numbers
will never be the
same to us again. And there are just as many theories as to why it
happened, and who is to
blame. I’m not going to try to answer those questions, but 9/11 did set
into motion a military
plan that seemed to have been waiting for it to happen.
In 1997, many of the names we have seen so often since the War in Iraq
began were listed as
members of a neoconservative think tank called “Project for a New American
Century,” or PNAC.
Founded by William Kristol (not the comedian) and Robert Kagan, its stated
goal according to
Wikipedia was “to promote American global leader****p. Fundamental to the
PNAC are the views
that American leader****p is both good for America and good for the world
and sup****t for a
Reaganite policy of military strength and moral clarity.” And their
Statement of Principle ends
with, “While such a Reaganite policy of military strength and moral
clarity may not be
fa****onable today, it is necessary if the United States is to build on the
successes of this
past century and to ensure our security and our greatness in the next.”
They felt that America
was the most powerful country in the world and it was their duty to keep
it that way,
protecting the world while serving the interests of the United States.
PNAC called for an
increase in military spending, and a redeployment of our troops oversees
to meet modern needs.
In January 1998, in a letter to Bill Clinton, written in part by Donald
Rumsfeld and Paul
Wolfowitz, PNAC called for the US Military to remove Saddam Hussein from
power, and later
criticized the December 1998 bombing attempts the Clinton Administration
had made in Iraq,
calling them ineffective. But PNAC was about to get a stronger voice in
Wa****ngton.
George W. Bush was elected in 2000, and his Vice President (Dick Cheney),
the VP’s Chief of
Staff (I. Lewis Scootter Libby), Secretary of Defense (Donald Rumsfeld),
Deputy Secretary of
Defense (Paul Wolfowitz), Deputy Secretary of State (Richard Armitage),
and his appointed
Ambassador to the UN (John R. Bolton) were all members of PNAC, as well as
many members of his
cabinet and his brother Jeb, who was Governor of Florida during the
recount that made him
president. PNAC published a 90 page re****t entitled “Rebuilding America’s
Defenses: Strategies,
Forces, and Resources for a New Century” which explains exactly how they
planned to implement
their program, and also states, “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.” They knew the American people wouldn’t go for
the plan without a
major catastrophe, and they were about to get it. But let’s backtrack just
a bit.
Dick Cheney had been Secretary of Defense under George Bush Sr., and as we
all know moved on to
Halliburton after Bush Sr.’s presidency. During the Clinton
Administration, the stock value for
Halliburton dropped significantly, and they were rumored to be doing
business through their
subsidiary businesses with Iran, even though sanctions forbid such
dealings. George Jr. asked
Cheney to help him pick a VP for his presidential run, and Cheney
suggested … Cheney.
Once elected, Bush put Cheney in charge of a national energy policy team
called “National
Energy Policy Development Group (NEPDG).” According to
http://www.halliburtonwatch.org,
Cheney’s group “met secretly with lobbyists and representatives of the
petroleum, coal,
nuclear, natural gas, and electricity industries. Many of these
individuals work for energy
companies which gave large campaign contributions to Bush/Cheney 2000.
Environmental groups
were mostly excluded from the task force.”
Congress asked Cheney to release the information from these meetings, and
he declined.
Judicial Watch sued under “The Freedom of Information Act” to make these
re****ts public, and
finally managed to get some released in July 2003. According to
http://www.halliburtonwatch.org,
“Those do***ents include maps of Iraqi
and other mid-east
oilfields, pipelines, refineries and terminals, two charts detailing
various Iraqi oil and gas
projects, and a March 2001 list of “Foreign Suitors for Iraqi Oilfield
Contracts.” They also
sate that, “In January 2003, The Wall Street Journal re****ted that
representatives from
Halliburton, Exxon Mobil Corp., Chevron-Texaco Corp. and Conoco-Phillips,
among others, had met
with Vice President Cheney’s staff to plan the post-war revival of Iraq’s
oil industry.
However, both Cheney and the companies deny the meeting took place.” The
War didn’t begin until
March 2003, but we already had maps showing who would get Iraq’s Oil
Fields when the war was
over, drawn up in meetings held between January and May, 2001.
According to “Crossing the Rubicon - Simplifying the case against Dick
Cheney” by Michael Kane,
“On May 8, 2001 - four months prior to 9/11 - the president placed Dick
Cheney in charge of all
federal programs dealing with weapons of mass destruction consequence
management within the
Departments of Defense, Health and Human Services, Justice, and Energy,
the Environmental
Protection Agency, and other federal agencies… This included all training
and planning which
needed to be seamlessly integrated, harmonious and comprehensive in order
to maximize
effectiveness. This mandate created the Office of National Preparedness in
FEMA, overseen by
Dick Cheney.”
Michael Kane goes on to say that Cheney and the Secret Service were
running War Games on 9/11,
“that placed ‘false blips’ on FAA radar screens. These war games eerily
mirrored the real
events of 9/11 to the point of the Air Force running drills involving
hijacked aircraft as the
9/11 plot actually unfolded. The war games & terror drills played a
critical role in ensuring
no Air Force fighter jocks - who had trained their entire lives for this
moment - would be able
to prevent the attacks from succeeding. These exercises were under Dick
Cheney’s management.”
As the planes hit, Dick Cheney was rushed to a secret bunker/command
center, while George W.
Bush read to school children. Who was really in charge that day? And was
this the new “Pearl
Harbor” that PNAC had said it would take to implement their plans?
After 9/11, we started to hear links between Al Qaeda and Hussein, mainly
from Members of PNAC
who happened to be in Bush’s administration, like Donald Rumsfeld and Paul
Wolfowitz. Then we
heard the re****ts of the WMD’s and the PNAC plan to invade Iraq was set
into motion.
The question now is - how did The Project for the New American Century go?
PNAC had stated that
removing Hussein from power would be good for American interests. Well,
our economy is in a
recession, we are spending 275 million dollars a day in the war, the
dollar is hitting record
lows, and there are rumors of oil reaching $150.00 a barrel in just a few
weeks time. Bush’s
approval rating has gone from close to 70% at the start of the war to 67%
disapproval. Donald
Rumsfeld was forced to resign. Scooter Libby was implicated in the Valerie
Plame scandal, which
some say was an attack on her husband for his views about the US’s desires
to go to war. Paul
Wolfowitz went on to lead The World Bank, till he was forced to resign
amidst scandal.
Republicans are distancing themselves from the Bush Administration, and a
new re****t was just
issued by the Senate Intelligence Committee stating the administration
“led the nation to war
on false premises,” and, “statements that Iraq had a partner****p with Al
Qaeda were wrong and
unsup****ted by intelligence.”
So far, not so good.
But, according to http://www.halliburtonwatch.org,
Halliburton’s stock
price tripled since the
Iraq invasion from $20 to $63 as of 2005. They have since leveled off to
around $50.00 today.
Cheney still has stock options from Halliburton, but he gives the profits
to charity. Then in
March of 2007, amidst scandals for no-bid contracts and overcharging our
troops, they moved
their headquarters out of the United States and to the United Arab
Emirates, which means they
are no longer an American based company or pay American taxes. Exxon
Mobile beat its own 2006
record profit by 3%, and according to a U.S. News re****t from February
2008 called “Exxon’s
Profits: Measuring a Record Windfall” by Marianne Lavelle, “If Exxon Mobil
were a country, its
2007 profit would exceed the gross domestic product of nearly two thirds
of the 183 nations in
the World Bank’s economic rankings. It would be right in there behind the
likes of Angola and
Qatar—two oil-producing nations, incidentally, where Exxon has major
operations.” She also
says, “Exxon Mobil’s profits are 80 percent higher than those of General
Electric, which used
to be the largest U.S. company by market capitalization before Exxon left
it in the dust in
2005. Microsoft earns about a third as much money. And next to Exxon, the
world’s largest
retailer, Wal-Mart, looks like a quaint boutique, with annual profits of
about $11 billion.” It
is interesting to note that their headquarters are in Bush’s home state of
Texas. According to
Ms. Lavelle, Exxon-Mobile was not the only oil company to profit; the
major oil companies
combined profits for 2007 surpassed 100 billion.
The members of The Project for the New American Century felt that America
was in a prime
position atop the rest of the world in 1998, and called for an increase in
military spending to
keep that position. According to Gordon Lubold of The Christian Science
Monitor; “Since the
terrorist attacks of 2001, the defense budget has ballooned about 35
percent.” He goes on to
say, “For the 2009 fiscal year, the Defense Department is asking for $515
billion and a
separate $70 billion to cover war costs into the early months of a new
administration. Those
amounts combined would represent the highest level of military spending
since the end of World
War II (adjusted for inflation).” He says that we are currently spending
4% of our GDP on
Defense, (as much as the rest of the world put together) which The
Pentagon wants to keep as
the new “floor” for Defense spending. But Mr. Lubold goes on to say that
this trend is coming
to an end. He quotes Steven Kosiak, a senior budget analyst at the Center
for Strategic and
Budgetary *****sments, another think tank in Wa****ngton as saying “Under
this plan, between
fiscal year 2010 and 2013, The Defense Department’s base budget would be
cut by 1.5 percent.
Thus, the administration is proposing that the buildup, begun in earnest
after the terrorist
attacks of September 2001, should come to an end in fiscal 2010.”
So the war in Iraq led to an increase in the short term, but looks like it
will lead to a
decrease in the future. The dollar is reaching new lows and people are
starting to invest in
Euros and Yen instead. Our housing market has crashed. Our deficit
continues to grow. China and
India’s economies are growing and threatening to overtake our prime spot
on top. It has been
suggested by our own Senate in a Bipartisan re****t that we went to war
under false pretense. An
article in today’s Los Angeles Times states that “Monthly growth in
unemployment rate is
biggest in over 20 years,” and the Dow Jones dropped sharply after this
re****t and another rise
in oil prices. And even PNAC’s website, http://www.newamericancentury.org,
has been taken down,
saying only “This account has been suspended. Please contact the
billing/sup****t department as
soon as possible.”
Do not forget, PNAC also said that their, “Reaganite policy of military
strength and moral
clarity” was good for the world too. Noam Chomsky, interviewed by Gabriel
Mathew Schivone in
May 2008’s “Monthly Review” states, “There was a recent study by two
leading terrorism experts
(using RAND Cor****ation government data) which concluded that what they
called the “Iraq
effect”—meaning, the effect of the Iraq invasion on incidents of terror in
the world—was huge.
In fact, they found that terror increased about seven-fold after the
invasion of Iraq.” The
rise in oil prices has led to a food crisis all over the world. According
to “2008: The Year of
Global Food Crisis” By Kate Smith and Rob Edwards, “Millions more of the
world’s most
vulnerable people are facing starvation as food shortages loom and crop
prices spiral ever
upwards. And for the first time in history, say experts, the impact is
spreading from the
developing to the developed world.”
How did it go? I guess it all depends on whose interests you’re interested
in.
Tim Buchholz is a freelance writer living in Ohio
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SEE ALSO
Project for the New American Century (PNAC) on Wickipedia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_for_the_New_American_Century
PNAC on sourcewatch
http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Project_for_the_New_American_Century
PNAC by William Rivers Pitt
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article1665.htm
The Surprising End of the New American Century by Mike Whitney
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article15042.htm
“New American Century” Project Ends with a Whimper by Jim Lobe
http://www.ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=33584
The Project for a New American Empire by Duane Shank
http://www.sojo.net/index.cfm?action=magazine.article&issue=soj0309&article=030911
PNAC Overview http://www.oldamericancentury.org/pnac.htm
PNAC Overview http://www.globalresearch.ca/articles/NAC304A.html
PNAC Primer http://www.crisispapers.org/Editorials/PNAC-Primer.htm
PNAC & Top Neocon Thinktanks
http://www.csmonitor.com/specials/neocon/spheresInfluence.html
PNAC Info & Sources http://www.opednews.com/new%20american%20century.htm
PNAC: Signatories of 1997 Statement of Purpose
http://www.fpif.org/papers/02right/box1_body.html
How neoconservatives conquered Wa****ngton—and launched a war by Michael
Lind
http://dir.salon.com/story/opinion/feature/2003/04/09/neocons/index.html
PNAC by Arundhati Roy http://www.commondreams.org/views04/0122-14.htm
The Men Who Stole the Show by Jim Lobe
http://www.alternet.org/story/14450/
VIDEO on the PNAC http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9sg_NRC8ozk
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** Posted from http://www.teranews.com
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