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CounterPunch
February
27, 2003
Hell-Bent for War
For
Six Years, Rightwing Think Tanks Have Been Pushing an Invasion
of Iraq
by JASON LEOPOLD
Never before in the history of the United States
presidency has a think tank had such an impact on shaping U.S.
foreign policy as the Project for the New American Century has
on helping President George W. Bush set foreign policy goals
for his Administration, particularly dictating exactly how Bush
should deal with Iraq and its President, Saddam Hussein.
For the past six years, PNAC has lobbied
former President Clinton and Bush heavily to initiate a war in
Iraq and remove Saddam Hussein from power, claiming the country
poses a serious threat to the U.S. and its allies because of
its ability to develop weapons of mass destruction. Clinton rebuffed
the advice by PNAC members during the last four years of his
presidency, but Bush has virtually used, word for word, the written
statements by PNAC members when he speaks publicly about Iraq
crisis.
PNAC, which says its goal is to promote
Americais foreign and defense policies, has been written about
in dribs and drabs over the past year in the foreign press, but
has yet to crack any of the big mainstream newspapers and magazines
here. It operated below the radar while Clinton was in office
and has recently resurfaced because of the uncanny similarities
between its policies and that of the Bush Administration on matters
relating to national defense to Asia and the Middle East.
Most of its members cut their teeth in
the Reagan and the first Bush Administrations. However, many
of its former members, notably Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz
and Dick Cheney, are working in the current Bush Administration.
William Kristol, the editor of the ultra-conservative magazine
The Weekly Standard, heads PNAC.
In the past year, the organization has
succeeded in getting the Bush Administration to scrap the Armyis
Crusader Artillery Program and to ask Congress for a one-year
increase of more than $48 billion for national defense. But itis
PNAC's position to drive America into a war with Iraq that has
influenced Bush the most.
Dozens of letters and reports by PNAC
members concerning Iraq are posted on its website, www.newamericancentury.org,
and lays out in startling detail how war is the only way to deal
with the so-called threat that Iraq poses to the U.S. Bush has
drawn upon many of these letters to publicly make a case for
war. Reading through the letters, the impression it leaves is
not that the U.S. is in imminent danger but that the people that
run PNAC have been hell-bent for war for six years and they finally
got a president who will listen to them.
Robert Kagan, co-chair of PNAC and a
former Deputy for Policy in the State Department's Bureau for
Inter-American Affairs during Reagan's presidency, wrote in 1999
that the U.S. should "complete the unfinished business of
the 1991 Gulf War and get rid of Saddam."
It's simply not enough to increase inspections
by the United Nations, PNAC says, or to think that "we can
contain Saddam inside a box" to ensure the safety of the
U.S. and our allies. It has to be war.
"Above all, only ground forces can
remove Saddam and his regime from power and open the way for
a new post-Saddam Iraq whose intentions can safely be assumed
to be benign," Kristol said in a PNAC report in 1997. Containment
and inspections won't work, Kristol said
Consider the impact Kristol had on Cheney
when the Vice President spoke about Iraq before the Veterans
of Foreign Wars in Nashville last August.
"This is the same dictator who dispatched
a team of assassins to murder former President Bush as he traveled
abroad," Cheney said. "A person would be right to question
any suggestion that we should just get inspectors back into Iraq,
and then our worries will be over. Saddam has perfected the game
of cheat and retreat, and is very skilled in the art of denial
and deception. A return of inspectors would provide no assurance
whatsoever of his compliance with U.N. resolutions. On the contrary,
there is a great danger that it would provide false comfort that
Saddam was somehow back in his box."
"Meanwhile, he would continue to
plot. Nothing in the last dozen years has stopped him -- not
his agreements; not the discoveries of the inspectors; not the
revelations by defectors; not criticism or ostracism by the international
community; and not four days of bombings by the U.S. in 1998.
What he wants is time and more time to husband his resources,
to invest in his ongoing chemical and biological weapons programs,
and to gain possession of nuclear arms,"Cheney said.
But the mere fact that many of these
letters and policy statements about Iraq were drafted while Clinton
was President raises a number of serious questions: for one,
where's the evidence that suggests the U.S. is in imminent danger
of being attacked by Iraq? No one at PNAC would respond to these
or other questions about the organization. The one thing that
is crystal clear, however, is that neither PNAC nor the Bush
Administration has been able to produce a shred of evidence that
justifies the U.S. going to war with Iraq. Only through a coordinated
effort of injecting fear into the minds of Americans has PNAC
and the Bush Administration been able to win the little support
it has to start a war.
Jason Leopold
can be reached at: jasonleopold@hotmail.com
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