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make Iraqi regime-change a top goal well before the September 11, 2001, terror attacks. In a January 11, 2004, interview for 60 Minutes, a popular U.S. TV program, the former Bush Treasury secretary stated that early in 2001, Bush began to focus on how to topple Iraq’s government. ‘From the very beginning, there was a conviction that Saddam Hussein was a bad person, and that he needed to go,’ O’Neill recalled. ‘For me, the notion of preemption, that the U.S. has the unilateral right to do whatever we decide to do is a really huge leap.’ O’Neill, known for his stubborn honesty if not for his diplomacy, claimed that ten days after Bush took office, ‘topic A’ was Iraq. Eight months before Osama bin Laden and the war on terrorism were in the forefront, Bush and Cheney and the cabinet were looking at military options for removing Saddam Hussein. Baker’s group was by no means the first to put the spotlight on the need for regime change in Iraq. Nor were the attacks of September 11, 2001, the first occasion for senior U.S. industry, military, energy and political elites to discuss how to maintain their unique global hegemony.1 ‘THE NEW AMERICAN CENTURY’ A little-known Washington think tank issued a policy paper in September 2000, weeks before the U.S. presidential elections and a year before 9/11. The paper, titled ‘Rebuilding America’s Defenses,’ was clearly meant to shape the policy of the next administration. The document had been prepared by an influential Republican group calling itself the Project for the New American Century, or PNAC. Among the members of the PNAC were the same men who were to shape policy in the coming administration. The group included Halliburton chief Cheney, Don Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz, who later became Rumsfeld’s deputy defense secretary and a leading Iraq war hawk. It also included Cheney’s later chief of staff, Lewis Libby, and Karl Rove, who went on to become George W. Bush’s most powerful political strategist. Senior executives, such as Bruce Jackson of Lockheed Martin, one of the world’s biggest defense firms, Richard Perle, and Florida Governor Jeb Bush, were involved too. The PNAC chairman was William Kristol, who had built a hawkish media empire around his Weekly Standard, with the help of a generous $10 million from London Times publisher Rupert Murdoch. Given these
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