Iraq and PNAC

Copyright 2006 Bart Stewart

To future generations of Americans looking back at our times, the great mystery of the Bush years will be why nobody ever mentioned the PNAC. The media never mentions this organization. Oddly enough, even the most outspoken critics of the Bush administration never mention them. And the PNAC is only the intellectual driving force of the Bush White House. They are merely running the Executive Branch of your government. It is not as if they aren’t newsworthy. And from the beginning they have always made their positions public! There is no secret about what the PNAC wants.

The PNAC (Project for the New American Century) was a think tank headed by Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, Bill Kristol, Richard Perle and other right wing Republicans. They were arguably the leaders of the so-called neo-conservative movement. They wrote political theory papers before Bush heard the call from on high to become president, and afterwards they wrote policy for this country as top officials of the Bush White House.

In essence the PNAC believes the American military should be used not just in defense of our country but also as a means to establish a global American Empire. They prefer the term “Unipolar World,” and other jargon, but it is Empire by any other name that they are talking about. One PNAC honcho said in an interview that if people want to use the term Empire, that’s fine with him.

Countries we don't like were to be unilaterally invaded, one at a time. Iraq was to be the easy first step down this road, with our troops being welcomed as liberators. Friendly countries were to be rewarded, but otherwise manipulated as much as possible. America's biggest corporations were to rule the world, with our troops as the cannon fodder to make it happen. You have likely never heard of this before; it is not in the news. But it is no secret. All of it is to be found in the public writings of the PNAC, and nobody will mention it, even after these men entered the White House and began putting their dreams into action. Not even now, after the scheme has run into some snags, will anyone speak in any depth about the PNAC. And remember that nobody ever voted for the PNAC dream. GW Bush never once mentioned invading Iraq or the aspirations of the PNAC during the 2000 campaign.

In any case, the invasion of Iraq was on the minds of the PNAC membership, in a very big way, for a very long time. Long before GW Bush entered your TV screen, the PNAC was urging President Clinton to stage a ground invasion of Iraq. This was long before the 9-11 attacks ultimately provided the political climate in this country that made the invasion possible. Despite wanting a regime change in Iraq, Clinton turned down the idea of a ground invasion. He preferred to oppose Saddam through CIA operations and sanctions. Apparently Clinton had the wimpy notion than a ground invasion would be too costly in money and lives. He was not convinced that the PNAC folks were correct about our troops being showered with rose petals and welcomed as liberators in Iraq. After Clinton left office, a more macho attitude came to the fore.

More than one former official of the Bush administration has said that they came into the White House looking for an excuse to invade Iraq. The best known of these were Richard Clarke and Paul O’Neill. Clarke was a top ranking anti-terrorism official with a career in that field dating back to the Reagan years. In his book, Against All Enemies: Inside America’s War on Terror, Clarke levels the charge that the Bush administration was doing a “terrible job combating terrorism,” and was entirely fixated on invading Iraq from Day One.

Former Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill served almost two years in the Bush Cabinet, and was the main source for the Ron Suskind book, The Price of Loyalty: George W. Bush, the White House, and the Education of Paul O’Neill. He states unequivocally that the Bush administration was planning the invasion of Iraq within days of entering office in January of 2001. He spoke of seeing a memo marked “Secret” that was entitled “Plan For Post-Saddam Iraq,” and a Pentagon document called “Foreign Suitors For Iraqi Oilfield Contracts.” The latter outlined areas of oil exploration in Iraq, and referred to contractors from forty countries around the world that might have intentions on Iraqi oil. O’Neill said in the book he was surprised that no one in a National Security Council meeting ever asked why Iraq was to be invaded.

“It was all about finding a way to do it. That was the tone of it. The president saying ‘Go find me a way to do this.” O’Neill said.

None of this should come as a surprise, given the background and the stated objectives of the PNAC members who were setting policy in the administration. But to this day we argue about the motives for the invasion of Iraq. The administration’s version has changed more than once. First was the flawed Weapons of Mass Destruction rationale. This famously never went anywhere. But right wingers on talk radio and elsewhere continue to claim that old rusting, leaking, degraded chemical weapon dumps from the 1980s Iran-Iraq war represent the long-sought WMD. As late as June of 2006, Senator Rick Santorum was making such claims about such a cache found buried in the desert. The ironic thing is that the U.S. gave Saddam those weapons, to use against Iran. He used them against Iran as well as his own people, of course. In any case, none of these old weapons have been usable for years, and they are not a reason for the war.

Then there was the implied rationale of a link between Saddam and the 9-11 attacks. This has never stood up to serious scrutiny. Saddam was a secularist-leaning Sunni and Osama was a Shiite theocrat. They were essentially enemies. Most recently the Bush administration has been denying they ever made any linkage at all between Saddam and the 9-11 attacks.

Then there was the rationale that we invaded Iraq to liberate those 22 million people from a tyranny. But are we supposed to militarily invade every tyranny on earth? There is a tyranny 90 miles off our coast. There is another one close by in Haiti. The world is teeming with tyrannies. Some we award with Most Favored Nation trade status.

Another shaky line of thought promoted by the Bush administration regarding Iraq is the “Flypaper Theory.” This holds that we are safer in America today because all the terrorists are bottled up fighting us in Iraq. Bush frequently says we are fighting them over there so we don’t have to fight them on American soil. But it only took 19 individuals to launch the 9-11 attacks. Let’s say that it would take more than that to do it now, since our security awareness has increased so much. (Although report after report paints a dismal picture of current security standards in American airports, chemical plants, nuclear plants, and other big targets.) Is it really the case that Al Qaida could not spare the manpower to strike us again? The 9-11 attacks were in the planning stages for years. If another big attack is coming, it may be that they are again taking their time going about it. And the administration has said many times that another attack is “inevitable,” which tends to undermine their theory that all the bad guys are stuck in Iraq. An awful lot of American soldiers are stuck in Iraq. No debate about that.

The larger reality is that Iraq is positioned in the center of the Middle East, and sits squarely on top of what has been described as an “ocean” of oil. Its oil reserves are second only to Saudi Arabia. Is it so cynical to think that this played some small role in the decision to invade the place, at least as much as the liberating of 22 million people from a tyrant? (Whose tyranny never bothered us in the 1980s.)

In any event, with the 9-11 attacks, the Bush administration got the political environment for an Iraqi war. The American people were ready for a fight, and any rag head would do. Saddam was a monster of the Hitlerian level, and no one shed a tear at his demise. Also, contrary to what some Bush critics charge, the war was not technically illegal. Saddam had blown the utter hell out of the peace treaty that ended the first Gulf War by his continuous shooting at our planes and other violations of the No Fly Zone. In legal terms the first Gulf War had been switched on again.

It is not the legality of the Iraq invasion that is so much a question as the overall wisdom of launching it. The Afghanistan campaign was an entirely different situation. That was a genuine war on Al Qaida terrorists, and you may recall there was never a fraction of the protests of that intervention, here or abroad, that there was over Iraq. One has to wonder, if we had remained focused entirely on the head of the Al Qaida serpent in Afghanistan, and not diverted away on this PNAC adventure in Iraq, what would our situation be today?

Chances are you have never heard of the PNAC, even once. Future generations will wonder why that is, even if you don't.