"Pre-emptive war was invented by Adolf Hitler. To be perfectly
honest, I wouldn't take anyone who came up with such a thing
seriously". --Dwight David Eisenhower in 1953

If we don't stop extending our troops all around the world and
nation building missions, then we're going to have a serious
problem coming down the road. --GWB in 2000

"They had flowers in their minds."
--Doug Feith on Iraqi attitudes

FDR, Pearl Harbor and the U.N. In a long editorial in Life magazine entitled ‘The American Century,’ publisher Henry Luce noted the ‘golden opportunity’ for world leadership that the United States had passed up in 1919, and called on the American people to help Roosevelt succeed where Wilson had failed. It was now the time, Luce wrote, to accept ‘our duty and our opportunity as the most powerful and vital nation in the world.’

Criticism of the term "neoconservative" Some of those identified as neoconservatives refuse to embrace the term.

Origins of the Species Neo-Con

The Politics of 'Creative Destruction' by Chris Moore -July 14, 2005

The Plan Were Neo-Conservatives’ 1998 Memos a Blueprint for Iraq War?

There is a growing awareness that a reclusive German émigré philosopher is the inspiration behind the reigning neoconservative ideology of the Republican Party. Leo Strauss has long been a cult figure within the North American academy. And even though he had a profound antipathy to both liberalism and democracy, his disciples have gone to great lengths to conceal the fact.

The blueprint for what has happened since 9/11 was drawn up years earlier, by the Project for the New American Century (PNAC), a think tank formed in 1997 "to promote American global leadership." Its founders are a who's who of the neoconservative movement, which seamlessly morphed into the top officialdom of the Bush II administration: Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, Vice President Dick Cheney, Cheney's chief of staff L.Scooter Libby, Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, Defense Policy Board member Richard Perle, and National Security Council staff member (and convicted liar) Elliot Abrams, among others.

The FBI has intensified its investigation of senior members of what was formerly known as the Pentagon's Office of Special Plans on suspicion that one of them passed highly classified U.S. military information to the government of Israel, according to federal law enforcement officials.

The "lie of convenience" is based on the neocon argument that the US needed a "footprint" in the Middle East to both secure our oil supplies and provide military security to Israel. But it ignores the many nations in the region where we now have military bases (some huge), the power and ability of our navy, and the power of Israel's military. And it doesn't explain how our getting bogged down in Iraq could possibly advance our interests at home or around the world.

From Communism to Terrorism by Jacob G. Hornberger, June 13, 2005

The largest controversy of Feith's Pentagon career concerned his role in the lead-up to the war. Feith created two new units within his policy shop: the Office of Special Plans and the Policy Counterterrorism Evaluation Group. Special Plans was the name given to a new subregional office focussed on Iraq. The Ian Fleming-like label was chosen, Feith said, to obscure its mission; at the time, the Bush Administration was publicly pursuing a diplomatic solution to the Iraq crisis, and the Pentagon did not want to advertise that it was engaged in planning for postwar Iraq.

"Dear Mr. President: We are writing you because we are convinced that current American policy toward Iraq is not succeeding, and that we may soon face a threat in the Middle East more serious than any we have known since the end of the Cold War."

The president has not always been as much of a neocon as his speech Thursday suggested. When he first ran for president in 2000, Rice, then his top foreign policy advisor, wrote an article promising that Bush would pursue a modest, limited foreign policy, and criticized the attempts at democratization and "nation-building" of the Democratic administration of President Clinton. -- January 22, 2005

PNAC, You've Come a Long Way, Baby January 20, 2004

Who's Behind the Oil-for-Food Scandal? by Jude Wanniski

PsychoanalystsOpposeWar.org: IRAQ Occupation and Resistance Report

The Anniversary of a Neo-Imperial Moment

Were Neo-Conservatives' 1998 Memos a Blueprint for Iraq War?

Of even further interest is the ironic and direct link between Richard Perle and terrorism. A recent fundraiser in support of the victims of the Iranian earthquake in Bam, sponsored by the Mujahedin-e-Khalq, asked Richard Perle to be their keynote speaker. Despite rejections by other groups to speak at the event, based upon the US state department’s official designation that the MEK is an officially designated “foreign terrorist organization”, Richard Perle knew of the designation, ignored it, and was happy to oblige and raise monies - monies which were immediately seized after the event by U.S. Treasury agents. The MEK is the same terrorist organization that attempted to assassinate Richard Nixon in 1972.

A subtext of PNAC, called Rebuilding America's Defenses, extended the goal to unchallengeable US global domination, supported by a quiet, accepting electorate at home. To achieve the needed level of (fear-driven) popular support, they actually stated, would require the equivalent of "a new Pear Harbor." After such a cataclysmic event, the ensuing fear would make it easy to get popular support for anything that could be advertised as "defending our freedom."

An antiwar group in Brussels created a shadow international tribunal that convicted the Project for the New American Century, a neoconservative think tank founded by Kristol, for war crimes.

Wikipedia, a free, openly-editable encyclopedia, has an entry for the PNAC, which has quite a few helpful links, and provides a pretty straightforward overview. I take issue with the contention there that the PNAC is "right-wing" -- there's not much that's legitimately conservative about the PNAC's embrace of government power and growth, and neither pre-emptive war or "liberating" foreign countries are right-wing any more than they are left-wing tendencies.

SELECTIVE INTELLIGENCE by SEYMOUR M. HERSH Donald Rumsfeld has his own special sources. Are they reliable? "They call themselves, self-mockingly, the Cabal—a small cluster of policy advisers and analysts now based in the Pentagon’s Office of Special Plans. In the past year, according to former and present Bush Administration officials, their operation, which was conceived by Paul Wolfowitz, the Deputy Secretary of Defense, has brought about a crucial change of direction in the American intelligence community. These advisers and analysts, who began their work in the days after September 11, 2001, have produced a skein of intelligence reviews that have helped to shape public opinion and American policy toward Iraq. They relied on data gathered by other intelligence agencies and also on information provided by the Iraqi National Congress, or I.N.C., the exile group headed by Ahmad Chalabi. By last fall, the operation rivalled both the C.I.A. and the Pentagon’s own Defense Intelligence Agency, the D.I.A., as President Bush’s main source of intelligence regarding Iraq’s possible possession of weapons of mass destruction and connection with Al Qaeda. As of last week, no such weapons had been found. And although many people, within the Administration and outside it, profess confidence that something will turn up, the integrity of much of that intelligence is now in question."

Pre-emptive action is the moral code of despots Tuesday, October 21, 2003 Most Americans believe that Bush doctrine policies are in response to the terrorist attacks of 9-11. Although its long-term goals of extending freedom and democracy and crushing terrorism are laudable, the means are dangerous and ill-advised, and have alienated countries around the globe.

America's Messianic War Cult We have met the hegemony, and he is us by Matthew Hogan hoganzeroes@aol.com HIJACKING NATIONAL SECURITY: THE WAR PARTY Who's flying the plane? --- The probable terrifying final thoughts of many September 11, 2001 victims. Today, many are asking the same thing about the Bush Administration's subsequent foreign policy. Despite failing to secure Osama bin-Laden's fate, the Administration now careens in search of ever-expanding Executive Branch-initiated war against an "axis of evil." First stop, Iraq.

Bin Laden set the trap, and think-tank refugees from the American Enterprise Institute walked U.S. troops into it.

The president's real goal in Iraq

"Rebuilding America's Defenses" A Summary Blueprint of the PNAC Plan for U.S. Global Hegemony Some people have compared it to Hitler's publication of Mein Kampf, which was ignored until after the war was over. Compiled by Bette Stockbauer '"Advanced forms of biological warfare that can target specific genotypes may transform biological warfare from the realm of terror to a politically useful tool" (p. 60).'

Project for the New American Century From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

Leon Trotsky's FASCISM What It Is and How To Fight It

Bush Planned Iraq 'Regime Change' Before Becoming President Sunday, September 15, 2002 The Sunday Herald (Scotland)

Congressman Abraham Lincoln on President James K. Polk and his Mexican War:
"Allow the President to invade a neighboring nation, whenever he shall
deem it necessary to repel an invasion, and you allow him to do so,
whenever he may choose to say he deems it necessary for such a purpose --
and you allow him to make war at pleasure.

Study to see if you can fix any limit to his power in this respect,
after you have given him so much.

If, today, he should choose to say he thinks it necessary to invade
Canada, to prevent the British from invading us, how could you stop him?

You may say to him, 'I see no probability of the British invading us'
but he will say to you, 'Be silent; I see it, if you don't.'"

(Lincoln: Speeches and Writings 1832-1858, The Library of America)

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