PNAC’s Trainwreck

“We’re not in a recession,” Bush said in response to a reporter’s question at a press conference Tuesday in New Orleans with the prime minister of Canada and president of Mexico. “We’re in a slowdown. We grew in the fourth quarter of last year. We haven’t had first quarter growth statistics yet. But there’s no question we’re in a slowdown. And people are concerned about it, obviously. I’m — of all the three of us standing up here, I’m probably the most concerned about the slowdown.”

Slowdown? That’s like saying two trains traveling at 100 miles per hour that crash is keeping them from moving forward.

Yet I think that this idiocy has penetrated the mindset of all three presidential candidates. One is a weathervane neocon; one is manipulative neocon light; and the third is an eloquent windbag. None of them has convinced me he or she is fit to lead the nation in these unprecedented times of challenge. In fact, no pundit has yet convinced me that whomever gets “elected” in the fall will steer America in a new direction or move to rectify the mounting atrocities in Southwest Asia. I see the entire election fiasco, the hundreds of hours of radio, television, print, and digital media devoted to elections as a huge distraction, Like watching cats hump while the house burns down. My sense is that all three candidates are all elitist, regardless of rhetoric, and that they are all clueless about the planet’s critical, I daresay dire, situation. Nothing will change because money, corruption, and outdated practices (i.e. electoral college) have taken over the entire process.

How did these trains collide? Back on April 14 William Rivers Pitt wrote a piece that sheds more light on the conspiracy of idiots with their plan to bring America (and the rest of the planet) to its knees. It hints at a collusion between everyone who gets a paycheck from taxpayers in Washington against the populace he or she was “elected” to serve. Instead, they are all three beholden to the invisible puppeteers. The truth is that money drives all politicos (regardless of eloquence) forward while the threat of getting snuffed pushes them from behind. And big oil’s fingerprints are all over this. Big Oil (and Big Fascists like G.H.W. Bush and Cheney) has kept the truth of the end of cheap, abundant oil out of the light.

Think about it. Every time you pump fuel into your vehicle, you’re actually financing terrorism because the Saudis (who furnish most of the U.S. oil supply) are financing known terrorist operations all over the planet. The same Saudis who the Bush administration flew out of the U.S. when all other planes were grounded after 9/11. There is an abundance of evidence that Bush and and Saudis were complicit in the attack.

Exerpt from Mr. Pitt’s article:

Before delivering his State of the Union address in January of 1998, President Clinton received a letter containing one explicit demand: invade Iraq immediately and overthrow the regime of Saddam Hussein.

“The only acceptable strategy,” read this letter, “is one that eliminates the possibility that Iraq will be able to use or threaten to use weapons of mass destruction. In the near term, this means a willingness to undertake military action as diplomacy is clearly failing. In the long term, it means removing Saddam Hussein and his regime from power. That now needs to become the aim of American foreign policy. We urge you to articulate this aim, and to turn your Administration’s attention to implementing a strategy for removing Saddam’s regime from power.”

The letter was written by a group called the Project for the New American Century (PNAC), a right-wing organization originally formed by William Kristol, Republican pundit and son of neoconservative movement founder Irving Kristol, and by long-time GOP think-tanker Gary Schmitt. PNAC’s original sources of funding in 1998 included notorious far-right groups such as the Scaife Foundations, the Olin Foundation and the Bradley Foundation.

Nobody had ever heard of PNAC in 1998, and thanks to the assertions and demands written in their January letter to Clinton, nobody really took them seriously after hearing of them. Invade Iraq? Were they serious? The very same year this PNAC letter was delivered to Clinton, a book co-authored by former President George H. W. Bush and his NSA Director Brent Scowcroft, articulated the consensus foreign policy opinion on the matter, specifically by explaining their decision not to occupy Iraq and topple its government during the first Gulf War.

“Trying to eliminate Saddam,” Bush Sr. and Scowcroft wrote in 1998, “extending the ground war into an occupation of Iraq, would have violated our guideline about not changing objectives in midstream, engaging in ‘mission creep,’ and would have incurred incalculable human and political costs … We would have been forced to occupy Baghdad and, in effect, rule Iraq. The coalition would instantly have collapsed, the Arabs deserting it in anger and other allies pulling out as well.”

“Under those circumstances, furthermore,” they continued, “we had been self-consciously trying to set a pattern for handling aggression in the post-cold war world. Going in and occupying Iraq, thus unilaterally exceeding the U.N.’s mandate, would have destroyed the precedent of international response to aggression we hoped to establish. Had we gone the invasion route, the U.S. could conceivably still be an occupying power in a bitterly hostile land. It would have been a dramatically different - and perhaps barren - outcome.”

Sane people in all areas of government agreed with this analysis, leaving PNAC to wriggle in ridiculed obscurity for another two years. A trio of events transpired upon the advent of this new millennium, however, that served to catapult PNAC into power and prominence. First, the group delivered its flagship policy argument in September of 2000, in a report titled “Rebuilding America’s Defenses: Strategy, Forces and Resources for a New Century.” Three months later, the Supreme Court delivered the White House into the hands of both GOP presidential candidate George W. Bush and his vice president, Dick Cheney. Third, the attacks of 9/11 delivered the United States and the world into the hands of madmen, all of whom turned out to be PNAC alumni.

Among these were:

• Bush’s current vice president, Dick Cheney;
• Cheney’s former chief of staff, I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby;
• Bush’s former defense secretary, Donald Rumsfeld;
• Bush’s former deputy defense secretary, Paul Wolfowitz;
• Bush’s former special assistant and senior national security adviser, Elliot Abrams;
• Bush’s former ambassador to Iraq and Afghanistan, Zalmay Khalilzad;
• Bush’s former deputy secretary of state, Richard Armitage;
• Bush’s former UN ambassador, John Bolton;
• Bush’s former assistant defense secretary and member of the Defense Policy Board, Richard Perle;
• Bush’s former deputy secretary of state, Robert Zoellick; and,
• Bush’s former defense policy adviser, Eliot Cohen.

The Republican Party’s 2000 presidential platform was eerily similar in both tone and content to PNAC’s September report of that year, and the Bush administration’s national security policy doctrine, published just after the 9/11 attacks, almost copied the precepts of that PNAC report wholesale.

What specifically did this September 2000 PNAC report argue in favor of? As stated on p. 26 of “Rebuilding America’s Defenses,” the Hussein regime in Iraq provided a ready excuse for, but not reason for, invasion and occupation. “While the unresolved conflict with Iraq provides the immediate justification,” argued the report, “the need for a substantial American force presence in the Gulf transcends the issue of the regime of Saddam Hussein.”

The removal of Saddam Hussein and the establishment of an American protectorate in Iraq, by way of American military attack, actually served three larger PNAC purposes: 1) restructure America’s budgetary priorities by stripping funds from myriad domestic policies and redistributing those funds into a massive increase in military spending; 2) establish a massive and permanent American presence in Iraq by building several US military bases within that occupied nation; and, 3) use these bases as the staging area for the invasion and overthrow of other Middle Eastern regimes, including allies of the United States. Read the rest>>