The
Project for the New American Century
Its Agenda and Accomplishments
Judith A. Hess
August 2005
(Special thanks to Raw Story for portions of this timeline)
The Project for the New American Century is a think tank formed of
associates, some of
whom have known each other for 30 years.
The motives of the individuals may vary, but
the aims are the same, i.e., to establish an American Foreign and Defense
policy which is
dedicated to the proposition that the United States should dominate world
affairs and use
force where necessary to do it.
Many,
though not all, are students of Leo Strauss and his disciples, who
espoused the notion
that all persons are evil by nature, and government should not concern
itself with honesty
toward the governed. His
primary student in our government was Paul Wolfowitz, who
recruited others to become “Straussians”.
(See The Straussians, attached)
Strauss
believed that men were divided into 3 classes—
1) the philosophers, who knew
the truth that there is no God, and self-interest
is the
overarching imperative for a person and a nation,
2) the gentlemen, who did not
need to be told the truth but who were used by the philosophers
to accomplish their goals, and
3) the wretched masses.
He was
Jewish and German, but the benefactor who helped him get to the
Carl Schmitt, the author of the legal justification to allow Hitler to ascend
to dictatorship. After
he left
England
University
affected American policy.
1992
Secretary of Defense Richard Cheney has “Defense Planning
Guidance” prepared by Paul
Wolfowitz, Under Secretary of Defense for Policy.
Wolfowitz outlines plans for military
intervention in
United States must assure “access
to vital raw materials, primarily Persian Gulf oil”, and to
prevent the
proliferation of weapons of mass destruction and threats from terrorism.
NY
Times, Feb. 1992
1995
Zalmay Khalilzad (oil industry) publishes, “From Containment to
Global Leadership”.
The
United States
to move aggressively in the world and thus exercise effective control over the
world’s resources.
goal – a very clear
statement of purpose “benevolent global
hegemony”
1997
Project for the New American Century is formed.
Among its goals are to “strengthen our
ties to democratic allies and to challenge regimes hostile to our interests and
values”. Founding
signatories to the Statement of Principles are Elliott Abrams, Gary Bauer, William J.
Bennett,
Jeb Bush, Dick Cheney, Eliot
A. Cohen, Midge Decter, Paula
Dobriansky, Steve Forbes,
Aaron Friedberg, Francis
Fukuyama, Frank
Gaffney, Fred C. Ikle, Donald Kagan, Zalmay
Khalilzad, I. Lewis Libby, Norman Podhoretz, Dan
Quayle, Peter W. Rodman, Stephen P.
Rosen, Henry S. Rowen, Donald Rumsfeld, Vin Weber, George
Weigel, and Paul Wolfowitz.
1998 January--
Project for the New American Century sends letter to President
Clinton urging
ouster of Saddam Hussein in
eliminates the possibility that
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.”
Signers are Elliott Abrams, Richard Armitage, William Bennett, Jeffrey Bergner, John
Bolton, Paula Dobrianski, Francis Fugiyama,
Robert Kagan, Zalmay Khalilzad, William Kristol,
Richard Perle, Peter W. Rodman, Donald
Rumsfeld, William Schneider, Jr., Vin Weber, Paul
Wolfowitz, R. James Woolsey, and Robert B. Zoellick
1999
“He [George W. Bush] was thinking about invading
Mickey Herskowitz. “It was on his mind. He said to me: ‘One of the keys to
being seen as a
great leader is to be seen as a commander-in-chief.’ ..He said, ‘If I have a chance to
invade….
if I had that much capital, I’m not going to waste it. I’m going to get everything passed that I
want to
get passed and I’m going to have a successful presidency.’” Russ
Baker
Dec. 3 George
W. Bush, campaigning in
Republican Party, says about Saddam’s weapons stash, “I’d take ‘em out,”[Bush]
grinned
cavalierly, “take out the weapons of mass destruction…I’m surprised he’s still there”.
Nylan,
2000
September Project
for the New American Century publishes its “Rebuilding America’s
Defenses…” which
states, “Indeed, the
permanent role in Gulf regional security. While the unresolved conflict with
immediate justification, the need for a
substantial American force presence in the Gulf transcends
the issue of
the regime of Saddam Hussein.”
It
articulates four core missions for the United States
military, namely,
• defend the American homeland;
•
fight and decisively win multiple, simultaneous major theater wars;
•
perform the “constabulary” duties associated with shaping the
security
environment in critical
regions;
• transform
(See PNAC papers at its website at www.newamericancentury.org)
October Cheney,
in Vice-Presidential debate with Lieberman, states a Bush Administration
might "have to take military action to
forcibly remove Saddam Hussein from power.”
(Cato
Institute Daily Dispatch, Oct. 6.)
2001
January Bush’s
first cabinet meeting. Invasion
of
Secretary of the Treasury
January Testifying
at his Senate confirmation hearing former General Colin Powell, who was
chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff during the
Gulf War, said Bush wanted to “re-energize the
sanctions regime”
and increase support to Iraqi groups trying to overthrow Hussein. Powell also
said Hussein, “is
not going to be around in a few years time.” (Air
Force Magazine Online)
February Secretary
of State, Colin Powell, in news conference in
Saddam, “He has not developed any significant capability
with respect to weapons of mass
destruction. He is unable to
project conventional power against his neighbors.
So in effect,
our policies have strengthened the security of
the neighbors of
http://www.thememoryhole.org/war/powell-no-wmd.htm
February Only one month after the first
Bush-Cheney inauguration, the State Department's
Pam Quanrud organizes a secret confab in
and removal of Saddam.
interview would-be replacements for a new
Newsnight, Aljibury himself explained, "It
is an invasion, but it will act like a coup.
The
original plan was to liberate Iraq
from the Saddamists and from the regime."
Greg Palast
March-- The
but managing to install Unocal’s Karzei as its President, and Zalmay Khalilzad as the US
Emissary
there.
March Vice-President
Dick Cheney meets with oil company executives and reviews oil field
maps of
has since learned their plan and purpose – in 2003 Harper's and BBC obtained
the plans despite
official denial of their existence, then footdragging when confronted with the evidence of
the report's
existence… a
323-page plan, "Options for [the] Iraqi Oil Industry." Per the industry
plan, the
forces
extortionate price for petroleum. Palast—
Harper’s
Challenges For The 21st
Century describes
It targets Saddam as
a threat to American
interests because of his control of Iraqi oilfields and
recommends the use of 'military
intervention' a full five months
before September 11.
It
advocated a policy of using military force against an enemy
such as Iraq
to secure
and control of Middle Eastern oil fields.
Times Herald.
Secretary… What's our
level of concern about the progress of Saddam Hussein's chemical and
biological weapons programs?
Secretary Powell: The sanctions… have succeeded over the last
10 years, not in
deterring him
from moving in that direction, but from actually being able to move
in
that direction. The
Iraqi regime militarily
remains fairly weak…. . It doesn't have the capacity
it had 10 or 12
years ago. It has been contained…”
terms of Saddam Hussein being there… He does not control the northern
part of his country.
We are
able to keep arms from him. His military forces
have not been rebuilt.”
September
11. 5
hours after attacks, Rumsfeld instructs his commanders to draw up plans
for the invasion of
§ September 12.
Bush Cabinet meets – Wolfowitz pushes invasion of
determined to get information that
Paul O’Neill.
what the next attacks could be, what our vulnerabilities were, what we
could do about them in the
short term. Instead, I walked into a series of
discussions about
sharp physical pain that Rumsfeld and
Wolfowitz were going to try to take advantage of this
national tragedy to
promote their agenda about
§ September
12. By
the afternoon on Wednesday [after Sept. 11], Secretary
Rumsfeld was
talking about broadening the objectives of our
response and "getting
12th, I left the video conferencing center and there, wandering alone around the situation room,
was the president. He
looked like he wanted something to do. He grabbed a few of us and closed
the door to the conference room. "Look," he told us, "I know you
have a lot to do and all, but I
want you, as soon as you can, to go back over everything,
everything. See if Saddam did this. See
if he's linked in any way." "I
was once again taken aback, incredulous, and it showed. "But, Mr.
President, Al Qaeda did
this." "I
know, I know, but - see if Saddam was involved. Just look.
I want to
know any shred--" Against All Enemies: Inside America's
War on Terror",by
Richard A. Clarke
§ September 13. Two
days later, Wolfowitz expands on the president's words at a Pentagon
briefing. He seems to signal that the
"I think one has to say it's… a matter of …ending states who
sponsor terrorism."
§ Colin Powell and others are
alarmed by what they view as Wolfowitz's inflammatory words about
"ending states." Powell later
responds during a press briefing: "We're after ending terrorism. And
if there are
states and regimes, nations
that support terrorism, we hope to persuade them that it is
in their
interest to stop doing that. But I think ending terrorism is where I would
like to leave it, and
let Mr. Wolfowitz speak for himself." (PBS)
§ September 15.
Four days after the Sept. 11 attacks, Bush gathers his
national security
team at
Camp David
sponsors of terrorism, including Iraq.
But Powell tells the president that an
international coalition
would only come together for an attack on Al Qaeda and the Taliban in
invasion of
that the war's first phase will be
§ September 16.
According to a 60 Minutes piece, citing Bob Woodward:
“just five
days after
Sept. 11, President Bush indicated to Condoleezza Rice that
while he had to do
he was also determined to do something about Saddam Hussein.
"There's some pressure to go
after Saddam Hussein. Don Rumsfeld has
said, ‘This is an opportunity to take out Saddam Hussein,
perhaps.
We
should consider it.’ And the president says to Condi Rice meeting head
to head,
‘We won't do
Iraq
▪ October Office
of Special Plans is in place in the Pentagon.
"They call themselves, self-mockingly,
the Cabal—a
small cluster of policy advisers and analysts now based in the
Pentagon’s Office of
Special Plans. In the past year, according to
former and present Bush Administration officials, their
operation, which
was conceived by Paul Wolfowitz, the Deputy Secretary of Defense, has
brought
about a crucial change of direction in the American intelligence
community. These advisers and analysts,
who began their work in the days
after September 11, 2001, have produced a skein of intelligence
reviews that have helped to shape public opinion and American policy toward
gathered by other intelligence agencies and also on
information provided by the Iraqi National Congress,
or I.N.C., the exile
group headed by Ahmad Chalabi.”
to the Pentagon adviser, Special Plans was created in order to find
evidence of what Wolfowitz and his
boss, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld,
believed to be true—that Saddam Hussein had close ties to
Al Qaeda, and
that Iraq had an enormous arsenal of chemical, biological, and possibly
even nuclear
weapons that threatened the region and, potentially, the
United States.” (New
Yorker)
▪ Fall of 2001,
“an unsupported allegation by Italian intelligence that Iraq had
been attempting to buy
uranium from Niger in 1999 was snatched up by
Cheney: Sometime after
he first saw it, Cheney
brought it up at his regularly scheduled daily
briefing from the C.I.A., Martin said. “He asked the briefer
a question.
The briefer came back a day or two later and said, ‘We do have a report,
but there’s a lack
of details.’ ” The Vice-President was further
told that it was known that Iraq had acquired uranium ore
from Niger in
the early nineteen-eighties but that that material had been placed in
secure storage by the
I.A.E.A., which was monitoring it. “End of
story,” Martin added. “That’s all we know.” According to a
former
high-level C.I.A. official, however, Cheney was dissatisfied with the
initial response, and asked
the agency to review the matter once again. It
was the beginning of what turned out to be a year-long t
ug-of-war between
the C.I.A. and the Vice-President’s office.” (
▪ November 21.
Bob Woodward: “President Bush, after a National Security
Council meeting, takes
Don Rumsfeld aside, collars him physically, and
takes him into a little cubbyhole room and closes the
door and says,
‘What have you got in terms of plans for Iraq? What is the status of the
war plan? I
want you to get on it. I want you to keep it secret.’"
(60 Minutes)
▪ November Woodward
says immediately after that, Rumsfeld told Gen. Tommy Franks to develop
a
war plan to invade Iraq and remove Saddam - and that Rumsfeld gave Franks
a blank check,"
Woodward says. (CBS
News)
▪ December
By the end of
2001, diplomats were discussing how to enlist the support of Arab
allies,
the military was sharpening its troop estimates, and the communications
team was plotting
how to sell an attack to the American public. The whole
purpose of putting
State of the Union address, as part of the "axis of
evil," was to begin the debate about a possible
invasion. (Time
Magazine)
2002
February “In
late February, the C.I.A. persuaded retired Ambassador Joseph Wilson
to fly to
Niger
he had been deputy chief of mission in
worked in the
White House for the National Security Council. He was known as an
independent
diplomat
who had put himself in harm’s way to help American citizens
abroad. Wilson
told me he
was informed at the time that the mission had come about because the
Vice-President’s office was
interested in the Italian intelligence report.
produced nothing.
He learned that any memorandum of understanding to sell yellowcake
would
have required the signatures of
“I saw everybody out there,”
document
purporting to be about the sale
contained those signatures, it would not be authentic.”
Wilson
Japanese and European
consortium partners….
report.
It was circulated, he said, but “I heard nothing about what the Vice-President’s office
thought about it.”
▪ March
“By early March, 2002, a former White House official told me,
it was understood
by
many in the White House that the President had decided in his own mind, to go to war…”
Seymour
▪ March
“…a group of Republican and Democratic Senators went to the
White House
to meet
with Condoleezza Rice, the President's National Security
Adviser. Bush was not scheduled to
attend but poked his head in anyway —
and soon turned the discussion to
President…
showed little interest in debating what to do about Saddam. Instead, he became
notably animated,
according to one person in the room, used a vulgar epithet to refer to Saddam
and
concluded with four words that left no one in doubt about Bush's intentions:
“We’re taking him
out… The Senators laughed uncomfortably; Rice
flashed a knowing smile.” Time Magazine
(posted May 5, 2002).
March
Sir Christopher Meyer, British ambassador to the
The next day, he reports to Manning: "On
you used with Condi
rice last week. We backed regime change, but the plan had to be clever and
failure was not an option. It would be a tough sell for us domestically,
and probably tougher elsewhere
in
to be a strategy for building support for military action against
Saddam. I then went through the need
to wrongfoot Saddam on the
inspectors."
Telegraph)
March
By mid-March 2002, a year before the invasion of Iraq, top British officials were already
so resigned to a war that they seemed
preoccupied mostly with building international support and
finding a legal
justification. Knight Ridder—
▪
March “Dick
Cheney … dropped by a Senate Republican policy lunch soon after his 10-day
tour of the Middle East …Before he spoke, he
said no one should repeat
what he said, and
Senators and staff members promptly put down their pens and pencils. Then he gave them some
surprising news. The
question was no longer if the
question was when.”
Time Magazine
(posted May 5, 2002).
▪
April Blair
visits Bush at the
invasion of Iraq
▪
May "Rumsfeld
has been so determined to find a rationale for an attack that on 10 separate
occasions he asked the CIA to find evidence linking
Iraq
to the terror attacks of Sept. 11. The
intelligence agency repeatedly came back
empty-handed. The best hope for Iraqi ties to the
attack —
a report that lead
hijacker Mohamed Atta met with an Iraqi intelligence official in the
Czech Republic
— was discredited
last week.” The
White House’s biggest fear is that UN
weapons inspectors be
allowed to go in," says a top Senate foreign
policy aide. (TimeMagazine)
▪ May
US/UK bombing of Iraq intensifies: Despite strict No-Fly Zone
guildeines, Rumsfeld
had ordered a more aggressive approach… a British
Foreign Officers' remark told more: In reality,
the "spikes of
activity" were designed "to put pressure on the regime." (Sunday
Times)
▪
May Karen
Kwiatkowski says: "From May 2002 until February 2003, I observed
firsthand
the formation of the Pentagon's Office of Special Plans and
watched the latter stages of the
neoconservative capture of the
policy-intelligence nexus in the run-up to the invasion of Iraq... I
saw a
narrow and deeply flawed policy favored by some executive appointees in
the Pentagon
used to manipulate and pressurize the traditional
relationship between policymakers in the
Pentagon and
within
OSP usurp measured and carefully considered assessments, and through
suppression
and distortion of intelligence analysis promulgate what were
in fact falsehoods to both Congress
and the executive office of the
president. (Salon)
▪
June In
a speech at West Point, Bush commits the
"Our security will require all
Americans…[to] be ready for preemptive action when necessary to
defend
our liberty and to defend our lives." (White
House)
▪ July
Downing Street Meeting “…
minutes of an official high-level meeting between British
and American
officials: British intel MI6 director Sir Richard Dearlove "reported
on his recent talks
in Washington
... Military action was now seen as inevitable. Bush wanted to remove
Saddam,
through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism
and WMD. But the intelligence and
facts were being fixed around the
policy. The NSC had no patience with the UN route, and no
enthusiasm for
publishing material on the Iraqi regime's record. There was little
discussion in
Washington
"The Defense
Secretary said that the
on the
regime. No decisions had been taken, but he thought the most likely timing
in US minds
for military action to begin was January, with the timeline
beginning 30 days before the
Congressional elections.
"It seemed clear
that Bush had made up his mind to take military action, even if the timing
was
not yet decided. But the case was thin. Saddam was not threatening his
neighbours, and his
WMD capability was less than that of
a plan for an ultimatum to Saddam to allow back in the
UN weapons inspectors. This would
also help with the legal justification
for the use of force.” Sunday
Times on the
Street
▪ July
"At
the end of July 2002, they need $700 million, a large amount of money for
all
these tasks. And the president approves it. But Congress doesn't know
and it is done. They
get the money from a supplemental appropriation for
the Afghan War, which Congress has
approved. …Some people are gonna look
at a document called the Constitution which says
that no money will be
drawn from the Treasury unless appropriated by Congress. Congress
was
totally in the dark on this." (CBS
News)
▪
August (2)
Scott Ritter states: “Are the weapons that were loaded up with VX
destroyed?
Yes. Is the equipment used to produce VX on a large scale
destroyed? Yes…. The fact Tony
Blair cannot put on the table any
substantive facts about a re-constituted Iraqi chemical weapons
programme
is proof positive that no such evidence exists.” (Tribune)
▪
August (7)
Cheney says of Saddam Hussein, “What we know now, from various
sources,
is that he... continues to pursue a nuclear weapon.” (New
Yorker)
▪ August
from May, six months before the United Nations resolution that Tony Blair
and Lord Goldsmith,
the attorney-general, argued gave the coalition the
legal basis for war. By the end of August the
raids had become a full air
offensive. (Sunday
Times)
▪
August (26)
Cheney suggests Saddam had a nuclear capability that could directly
threaten
“anyone he chooses, in his own region or beyond.” (New
Yorker)
▪
September (5) Cheney
tells a TV interviewer, “We do know, with absolute certainty, that
[Saddam] is using his procurement system to acquire the equipment he needs
in order to enrich
uranium to build a nuclear weapon….Condoleezza Rice
says, “We don’t want the smoking gun
to be a mushroom cloud”—a
formulation that was taken up by hawks in the Administration.
(New
Yorker)
▪
September (9)
The International Institute for Strategic Studies releases a report
that says
Iraq was, "only months away if it were able to get hold of
weapons grade uranium . . . from a
foreign source." The IISS had bad
information. Their argument was compounded by a UK
Dossier that relied on
the IISS report. (US
News)
▪ September (14)
Bush says, “Saddam Hussein has the scientists and infrastructure
for a
nuclear-weapons program, and has illicitly sought to purchase the
equipment needed to
enrich uranium for a nuclear weapon.” There was no
confirmed intelligence for the President’s
assertion. (New
Yorker)
▪
September (16)
▪
September
(17) Bush's
National Security
Strategy asserts that the
its military supremacy to be challenged and
embraces unilateral preemptive military strikes.
(White House)
▪
September (19) Washington Post cites the IISS report to show that the aluminum
tubes
sought by
▪
September (26)
Rice says Qaeda operatives have found refuge in
Hussein of helping Osama bin Laden's followers develop
chemical weapons. (CBS
News)
▪
October (2)
Panorama’s editor-in-chief, Carlo Rossella, who is known for his
ties to the
Berlusconi government… told Burba to turn the documents
[connecting Saddam Hussein to the
purchase of uranium in Africa] over to
the American Embassy for authentication. Burba dutifully
took a copy of
the papers to the Embassy on October 9th.
George Tenet clearly was
ambivalent about the information: in early
October, he intervened to prevent the President
from referring to
fight, and Saddam’s desire for
uranium from
public case for going to war. (New
Yorker)
▪
October (10)
Congress passes the Joint Resolution to Authorize the Use of United
States
Armed Forces Against Iraq. (White
House)
▪ October
(22) In October
2002, in a notable front-page article titled "For Bush, Facts
Are
Malleable" (10/22/02), Washington Post reporter Dana Milbank noted
two dubious Bush claims
about Iraq: his citing of a United Nations
International Atomic Energy report alleging that Iraq was
"six months
away" from developing a nuclear weapon; and that Iraq maintained a
growing fleet of
unmanned aircraft that could be used, in Bush's words,
"for missions targeting the United States."
While these
assertions "were powerful arguments for the actions Bush
sought," Milbank concluded
they "were dubious, if not wrong.
Further information revealed that the aircraft lack the range to
reach the
2003 March
19
US and allies invade
oil reserves in
the
■
Zalmay Khalilzad is appointed
2004
The
PNAC Zalmay Khalilzad is reassigned Ambassador to
■
Four permanent bases are constructed in
“securing” the
largest oil reserves in the
■
PNAC Wolfowitz ascends to the global position of President of the
World Bank.
■
PNAC and Project Director for the authorship of “Rebuilding
America’s Defenses”, John Bolton,
is appointed, over the objections of
the US Senate, to the global position of Ambassador to the UN.
■
PNACs have their eyes on
■
The US administration is considering the unprecedented move of
refusing a visa to
the new
President of Iran to enter the
United States
to address the United Nations.
■
■
July 1. Presidents
of
countries which are expanding their domination over
regions and interfering in the
internal affairs of individual countries.
Indicate the UN
as the authority to mediate
international disputes.
■
Aug. 9 Venezuelan
President Hugo Chavez told thousands of visiting students
that
if U.S. forces were to invade the South American country, they would be soundly defeated.
■
Aug. 11 Renowned
journalist Bob Woodward predicts Dick Cheney will be the Republican
Party's presidential nominee in 2008 and that the vice
president could face
Democratic Sen.
Hillary Clinton in a dramatic partisan showdown.