HardRight, several wealthy billionaires and corporations helped set up
far-right think-tanks, and bought up various media outlets -- newspapers,
magazines, TV networks, radio talk shows, cable channels, etc. -- in
support of that day when all the political tumblers would click into place
and the HardRight cabal and their supporters could assume control.
That moment arrived with the Supreme Court's selection of George W. Bush
in 2000. The temporary "outsiders" from PNAC were once again 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 up until last year was Deputy Defense
Secretary (now president of the World Bank), I. Lewis Libby (now under
indictment in the Plamegate scandal) was Cheney's Chief of Staff, Elliot
Abrams was put in charge of Middle East policy at the National Security
Council (and is now a Deputy Secretary of State), Dov Zakheim was named
comptroller for the Defense Department, John Bolton (now U.S. Ambassador
to the United Nations) was Undersecretary of State, Richard Perle was
chair of the important Defense Policy Board at the Pentagon, former CIA
director James Woolsey was on that panel as well, etc. etc. PNAC's
chairman, Bill Kristol, is the editor of The Weekly Standard. In short,
PNAC had a lock on foreign/military policy-creation in the Bush
Administration.
But, in order to unleash their foreign/military campaigns without taking
all sorts of flak from the traditional wing of the conservative GOP, they
needed a context that would permit them free rein. The events of 9/11 rode
to their rescue. In one of their major reports, written in 2000, PNAC
noted that "the process of [military] 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."
The Bush Administration, which came to see 9/11 as an "opportunity," used
9/11 and the fear that it generated in the general populace as their cover
for enacting all sorts of draconian measures domestically and as their
rationalization for launching military campaigns abroad. The Patriot Act,
drafted earlier, was rushed through a frightened Congress in the days
following 9/11 and the mysterious anthrax attack; few members even had
read the huge document. The Authorization to Use Military Force (AUMF) to
go after al Qaida in Afghanistan now is hauled out by the White House to
justify torture, domestic eavesdropping, and anything else the
"commander-in-chief" wants to authorize during "wartime."
Today, the Bush manipulators, led by Karl Rove, continue to utilize fear,
hyped-up patriotism and a permanent "war on terrorism" as the basis for
their policy agenda, just as they did in 2004 to get Bush re-elected.
This, in order to continue to fulfill their primary objectives, not the
least of which is to roll back and, where possible, decimate and eliminate
domestic social programs that the far-right has hated since the New
Deal/Great Society days, and to free corporate ambitions from government
regulation. In short, a great leap backward to turn-of-the-(20th)-century
laissez-faire policy.
By and large, these long-established social programs (Social Security,
Medicare, Head Start, etc.) are popular with Americans, so Bush&Co. can't
attack them frontally. However, if all the monies are tied up in wars,
defense, tax cuts, etc., they can go to the public and, in effect, say:
"We'd love to continue to fund education and environmental protection and
drugs for the elderly, but you see there's simply no extra money left over
after we go after the bad guys. It's not our fault."
Up until recently, that stealth strategy has worked. But, as Bush's
fast-falling approval ratings suggest, the public is not buying that line
so unquestioningly any more. Even so, Rove seems wedded to what's worked
so well for the White House in the past, and so continues to use fear of
terrorism as the main selling-point to the American public.
Don't get me wrong. Islamist fanatics dedicated to killing are real and
deadly and must be stopped. The question is: How to do that in ways that
enhance rather than endanger America's long-term national interests, and
in ways that protect the very liberties and freedoms the terrorists
allegedly are against, and what the neo-cons claim to be defending? The
Bush approach is to use a howitzer in hunting for gnats; after all, Bush
said, the Constitution is
just a goddamned piece of paper."
One doesn't have to guess what the PNAC guys might be thinking, since
they're quite open and proud of their theories and strategies. Indeed,
their writings lay out quite openly what they're up to, but few 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
scarifying consequences for America and the rest of the world, we need to
educate ourselves quickly as to how PNAC, and other HardRight think-tanks,
work and what their future plans might be.
Given the absolute mess the Bush Administration has made in Iraq, the
neo-cons, whose ideology underpinned the invasion and occupation of that
country, are somewhat in disfavor these days. But, importantly, they
haven't given up on their ultimate goal of transforming the geopolitics of
various key regions in the world, and installing U.S.-friendly
governments, by force if necessary. The policy of setting up new
"democracies," however, comes with a caveat: Your country had better elect
the right candidates, meaning those that will accommodate U.S. desires.
Look how the Bush Administration is punishing Hamas in Palestine, Prime
Minister Al-Jaafari in Iraq, President Chavez in Venezuela. All
democratically elected but not quite what the Bush White House had in
mind.
PNAC'S PROUD PAPER TRAIL
So let's take a quick, chronological look at PNAC, to see how we got from
there to here. Some of these PNAC documents and strategies, which now are
official U.S. policy, you may have heard about before, but I've expanded
and updated as much as possible.
1. In 1992, then-Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney had a
strategy report
drafted for the Pentagon, written by Paul Wolfowitz, then
Under-Secretary of Defense for Policy. (Both men would later help found
PNAC.) In the report, 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, whereupon the negative response
was immediate. Senator Robert Byrd led the Democratic charge: "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 that
could support this policy free of major resistance hadn't yet coalesced in
the U.S. And so President Bush the Elder repudiated the paper and sent it
back to the drawing boards.
2. Various neo-con/HardRight intellectuals outside the government were
spelling out the new PNAC policy in books and influential journals. Zalmay
Khalilzad (formerly associated with big oil companies, currently U.S.
ambassador to Iraq) wrote an important volume in 1995, "From Containment
to Global Leadership: America & the World After the Cold War"; the import
of this book was to urge 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.
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