‘The New American Century’

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 offi ce, ‘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 fi rst to put the spotlight on the need for regime change in Iraq. Nor were the attacks of September 11, 2001, the fi rst 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 infl uential 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 fi rms, 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

powerful backers, the PNAC report was worth careful reading. Few did so before September 11.

That PNAC report began with a simple question: ‘Does the United States have the resolve to shape a new century favorable to American principles and interests?’ They declared:

The United States is the world’s only superpower … At present the United States faces no global rival … America’s grand strategy should aim to preserve and extend this advantageous position as far into the future as possible. There are, however, potentially powerful states dissatisfi ed with the current situation and eager to change it, if they can …

The report made it clear that they had in mind various Eurasian powers, from Europe to the Pacifi c.

The Project for the New American Century praised a 1992 strategic white paper that Wolfowitz had written for Cheney, back when Cheney had been defense secretary during the fi rst Iraq war, stating, ‘The Defense Policy Guidance drafted in the early months of 1992 provided a blueprint for maintaining U.S. pre-eminence, precluding the rise of a great power rival and shaping the international security order in line with American principles and interests.’ Bush ordered that 1992 policy paper to be buried. It became far too hot after a copy was leaked to the New York Times in early 1992. It had called for precisely the form of preemptive wars, to ‘preclude’ a great power rival, that George W. Bush made offi cial as the U.S. national security strategy, the Bush doctrine, in September 2002.

Cheney and company now restated that 1992 imperial agenda for America in the post-cold war era. They declared that the United States ‘must discourage advanced industrial nations from challenging our leadership, or even aspiring to a larger regional or global role.’

The PNAC group were not content only to dominate the earth, proposing that Washington create a ‘worldwide command and control system.’ They also called for the creation of ‘U.S. space forces’ to dominate space, for total control of cyberspace, and for the development of biological weapons ‘that can target specifi c genotypes and may transform biological warfare from the realm of terror to a politically useful tool.’ Biological warfare as a politically useful tool? Even George Orwell would have been shocked.

With uncanny prescience, that September 2000 PNAC report went on to identify what later became immortalized by George W. Bush as