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THE REPORT THAT LAID OUT THE
EMINENCE OF WAR
Prior to Bush’s 2000 election, a think tank directed by Bush-Cheney hawks outlined the expansion of “forward-based” U.S. military forces as key to preserving “the global Pax Americana.”
by John-David Morgan
March 31, 2005
More than two years have passed since President George W. Bush, on St. Patrick’s Day 2003, gave Saddam Hussein a 48-hour deadline to give up his weapons of mass destruction or stand to be invaded. More than 100,000 are now dead in Iraq, 1,500 US soldiers among them. No weapons of mass destruction have been found.
It is increasingly apparent that the existence WMD’s in Iraq was incidental to the larger Persian Gulf military goals of the hawks in the inner circle of the Bush Administration. In the field, Gen. John Abizaid, commander of the U.S. troops in Iraq and Afghanistan, has taken to calling the war the “long war” against Islamic extremism, which he sees as the conflict being fought in “Afghanistan, Pakistan, Uzbekistan, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Algeria, Egypt.” In a recent interview Abizaid gave to U.S. News and World Report, there is but one mention of Saddam Hussein: A note that the U.S. failed to see the importance of Hussein’s religious turn in recent years, as he sanctioned the growth of a more radicalized strain of Islam that continues to hurt the occupation effort.
Abizaid’s “long war” was not a war the Bush Administration prepared the public for, but that’s not what matters most in the long run, says William Kristol, editor of the conservative Weekly Standard, acknowledging that public disapproval about the decision to go to war is stronger than ever. In Kristol’s opinion, the use of the threat of weapons of mass destruction as the reason to invade, and then to never find any, also matters less than other events.
“If Iraq is pretty stable and democratic and things are improving noticeably in the Middle East, that will be the fundamental judgment of the war,” Kristol told The Washington Post as year two in Iraq was coming to a close.
“PAX AMERICANA” IN THE 21st CENTURY
If Kristol seems to be shrugging off the American people’s disdain for “spreading democracy at the point of a bayonet,” as one leading critic of the Bush foreign policy put it recently, that should come as no surprise. Kristol is also chairman and co-founder of
Project for the New American Century (PNAC), the neoconservative think tank that proposed a new mission of “global leadership” for the U.S. military prior to the election of Bush in 2000. To the broader military mission in the Persion Gulf, outlined in the 90-page report “Rebuilding America’s Defenses: Strategy, Forces and Resources For a New Century,” the regime of Saddam Hussein was incidental.
The PNAC report, as it has been referred to, was published in September 2000, and was crafted with input from top level Bush advisors, including Paul Wolfowitz, who became deputy to Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and was recently appointed by Bush to head the World Bank; and I. Lewis Libby, Vice President Dick Cheney’s chief of staff.
“In broad terms, we saw the project as building upon the defense strategy outlined [in 1992] by the Cheney Defense Department in the waning days of the Bush Administration,” the authors write in their introduction.
The report outlines a four-pronged “core mission” for the post-Cold War U.S. military -- a period of global leadership hailed as the “Pax Americana.” To “preserve and enhance this ‘American Peace,’” the first mission is homeland defense; the second is to “fight and decisively win multiple, simultaneous major theater wars.” Iraq and North Korea are cited prominently as the potential theaters, and at the time of the analysis, were used as the Pentagon’s model theaters for testing military capability.
The report calls for global military expansion to “maintain American military preeminence” and presumes conflict over a beef-up of forces in Kuwait. PNAC prescribes that “a permanent unit should be based in the Persian Gulf region,” a necessity that supersedes objections from the Saudis, the presence of Saddam Hussein and the possibility of improved relations with Iran.
“Although Saudi domestic sensibilities demand that the forces based in the Kingdom nominally remain rotational forces, it has become apparent that this is now [as of 2000] a semi-permanent mission,” the authors posit. “From an American perspective, the value of such bases would endure even should Saddam pass from the scene. Over the long term, Iran may well prove as large a threat to U.S. interests in the Gulf as Iraq has. And even should U.S.-Iranian relations improve, retaining forward-based forces in the region would still be an essential element in U.S. security strategy given the longstanding American interests in the region.”
Although it is not suggested how Saddam might “pass from the scene,” the PNAC authors declare the understanding of Iraq as a temporary duty after the first Gulf War to be “the fiction” perpetuated by the Clinton Administration. Iraq is treated throughout the report as a preeminent war. PNAC advises “a substantial permanent Army ground presence in Kuwait.”
MEET THE NEW CAPTAIN AMERICA
PNAC is no ordinary Washington D.C. think tank, pitching ideas to sympathetic friends in the White House. Their policy is the Bush policy. PNAC was instigated by Cheney, who, along with his Defense Department cronies, fell out of power during the Clinton 1990’s. PNAC’s participants and members are the chief architects of the Iraq War and the Bush foreign policy: global leadership through military preeminence. If the quote above on the Persian Gulf sounds as if it was ripped from Bush’s second inaugural address, that is because the inaugural address was ripped from the 5-year-old PNAC report, complete with the saber rattling toward Iran.
Signing on to the Project for a New American Century’s founding mission statement in 1997 was the gang that would head to the White House in 2000 to run Bush’s war cabinet: Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld, and their key deputies, Libby and Wolfowitz. Also signing on were Florida Gov. Jeb Bush; Kristol’s former boss, Reagan-Bush cabinet member Bennett; former Vice President Dan Quayle; billionaire Steve Forbes; and widely published neoconservative intellectuals such as Stephen Rosen of Harvard University and Yale’s Donald Kagan, who co-chaired the authoring of the “Rebuilding America’s Defenses” with PNAC Executive Director Gary Schmitt.
PNAC’s chairman and co-founder Kristol was Reagan Secretary of Education William J. Bennett’s chief of staff before moving to the Bush White House to run Vice President Dan Quayle’s staff. When Clinton took office, Kristol moved on to head the Project for the Republican Future, a think tank that helped promote Newt Gingrich’s “Contract With America” and the GOP congressional takeover in 1994.
The Project was founded to promote a “Reaganite policy of military strength and moral clarity,” according to PNAC’s statement of principles. This means across-the-board increases in military spending; foreign policy that “boldly and purposefully promotes American principles abroad”; and leadership that “accepts the United States' global responsibilities.”
This neoconservative, Wilsonian ideology makes traditional conservatives cringe; to liberals it is the very definition of jingoism. Tom Dalyell, a Labor Party leader in the British Parliament, describes the PNAC report as “the thought processes of fantasist Americans who want to control the world.” With “Rebuilding America’s Defenses,” PNAC set out to shape the mantra of the new Captain America, globetrotting with red, white and blue shield lashed to his forearm.
Over two years in the making, the report was overseen by Kristol, Kagan and Schmitt, with participation and input from Wolfowitz and Libby; and a cabal of military-industrial complex policy experts affiliated with the Defense Department, the Army, the U.S. Naval War College, the Nitze School of Advanced International Studies, the RAND Corporation and the National Defense University.
The report’s principal author is Thomas Donnelly, a military historian, longtime journalist and editor of Army Times, author of two books: Operation Just Cause: The Storming of Panama, a history of the 1989 U.S. invasion; and Clash of Chariots: A History of Armored Warfare (Berkeley Books, 1996). When the Gingrich-led Republicans seized Congress in 1994, Donnelly went to work for the House Armed Services Committee, and became the committee’s policy guru on the Clinton Administration peacekeeping actions in the Balkans and host of other post-Cold War security interests.
“Our report is published in a presidential election year,” the PNAC authors note in their introduction. “… We hope that the Project’s report will be useful as a road map for the nation’s immediate and future defense plans. We believe we have set forth a defense program that is justified by the evidence, rests on an honest examination of the problems and possibilities, and does not flinch from facing the true cost of security.”
Considering that the report was prepared with input from the men who would become architects of the Iraq War, dedicated advocates for the use of military might to spread democracy, the “hope” that PNAC’s advice would be heeded was offered in the event that Al Gore became the next president. Fast forward to October 2002 and U.S. Senate vote on the Iraq War resolution, and the reservations of Sen. John Kerry about the war become clearer. “Rebuilding America’s Defenses” was no secret report and should not be viewed as an internal document recently revealed; it was widely known, and has been the “road map” for the Bush foreign policy.
That Sen. Kerry, who voted against the first Gulf War, voted in favor of this Iraq War seems now rather inexplicable. Many veteran Democratic U.S. Senators -- Robert Byrd (W.Va.), Russ Feingold (Wis.), Ted Kennedy (Mass.), Patrick Leahy (Vt.), Barbara Boxer (Calif.), the late Paul Wellstone (Minn.), and 15 others, along with Independent Jim Jeffords (Vt.) and Republican Lincoln Chafee (R.I.) -- were not so confused.
DIPLOMACY IS NOT AN OPTION
Contrary to what was reported in British papers and suggested by ABC News in 2003, a month before the war, the PNAC report does not directly advocate regime change in Iraq -- that should be made clear. But to deny that regime change was a goal of hawks in Congress or the Cheney Defense Department of G. Herbert Walker Bush’s presidency is to ignore the obvious. Under Clinton, the U.S. bombed Hussein’s palace in Baghdad with the approval of Congress.
The PNAC report introduces a broad array of missions and recommendations for all four branches of the armed services, with four central core missions. Homeland security and “fighting and winning multiple simultaneous large-scale wars” top the mission list. Listed third are the “constabulary” or peacekeeping duties that most Americans, when polled, view as the role of the U.S. Military. Fourthly, the authors note that there is an ongoing technology revolution that the military must adapt to.
As part of both “large scale war” and peacekeeping missions, PNAC proposes expansion. The goal is to “retain forces able to rapidly deploy and win multiple simultaneous large-scale wars and also to be able to respond to unanticipated contingencies in regions where it does not maintain forward-based forces.”
The “Axis of Evil” is identified clearly, with words that would appear later in Bush speeches: “We cannot allow North Korea, Iran, Iraq or similar states to undermine American leadership, intimidate American allies or threaten the American homeland itself.”
The idea of a land grab by the military in the Persian Gulf is treated as a “preeminent” event, and it happens to be the most boldly stated proposal in the report. Piecing together the rationale, one comes to the conclusion that the PNAC goals could only be achieved by provoking a war.
In first Gulf War, political policy limited the Army, and there was a reluctance to fight on the ground in Kuwait, the report says. That operation “paled in comparison to the long-term effort to stabilize Kosovo” during the Clinton Administration. “…The value of land power continues to appeal to a global superpower, whose security interests rest upon maintaining and expanding a world-wide system of alliances as well as on the ability to win wars.”
“Elements of U.S. Army Europe should be redeployed to Southeast Europe, while a permanent unit should be based in the Persian Gulf region.” This should occur despite Saudi opposition to anything but rotational, temporary forces, and would include Air Force presence. The authors rationalize that, with ground-based air forces, the Naval and Marine presence could be scaled back. “As recent strikes against Iraq demonstrate, the preferred weapon for punitive raids is the cruise missile, supplemented by stealthy strike aircraft and longer-range Air Force strike aircraft.”
As the report takes the reader from recommendation to recommendation, there is very little that would fail to upset other nations. PNAC proposes a plan to “complete Europe” by redeploying Army forces and beefing up presence in the Balkans. There is much hand-wringing over China and a stated global mission to “deter rise of new great-power competitor.” In Southeast Asia, “rapidly mobile U.S. ground and air forces in the region will be required.” This will ensure that the U.S. can “constrain a Chinese challenge,” the report states. [LINK HERE to SABER RATTLING IN ASIA: Facing down China and North Korea]
By casting America in the role of global leader, responsible for guaranteeing “the American peace,” the PNAC authors don’t leave much room for diplomacy and don’t treat it as a viable option when the larger mission is in question. Bush’s appointment this year of PNAC participant and Iraq architect Wolfowitz to lead the World Bank was understandably met with alarm by European and Japanese investors critical of the war. So too, was Bush’s nomination of hawk John R. Bolton to the U.S. ambassador’s post at the United Nations earlier this year.
REAGAN-SIZE DEFENSE, REAGAN-SIZED DEBT
The overriding goal of the PNAC report is to build justification for a heavy reinvestment in defense, across the board. The Clinton Administration had led “the decade of neglect” in defense, the authors argue, and was “living off the Reagan investment.”
Yet the economy was booming while defense spending remained flat during the Clinton years; it finally dipping below 3 percent of Gross Domestic Product by 2000. This had not happened since before the Depression, according to PNAC. Yet Clinton also ran balanced budgets, and reduced the deficit over his presidency. In the Reagan Years, the military budget had climbed to more than $330 billion, which happened to be about the annual budget deficit he ran. The overall Reagan national debt ran into the trillions.
The Clinton economy offered the best of all worlds: booming economy and projected budget surpluses. By year 2000, the Pentagon wanted its share. The PNAC remedy was to increase military spending to nearly 4 percent of GDP by 2005-06, an increase of nearly a full percent of national wealth. PNAC proposes “a sensible plan” to add $15 billion to $20 billion per year to defense spending, resulting in a $75 billion to $100 billion increase over five years. This would be offset, the authors surmise, by on-budget surpluses of $700 billion projected for those five years.
But those projected surpluses would not be in the coffers when Bush took office, as the economy headed south. The Bush Administration closed fiscal year 2004 with a $445 billion debt, about the level of the Bush military budget. It looks remarkably similar to the Reaganite defense-deficit formula, only the numbers are bigger.
THE BEST LAID PLANS OF HAWKS AND PRESIDENTS
This has not been an attempt to rewrite “Rebuilding America’s Defenses” or to cover all of the ground that it covers. The hope is that people will read it for themselves, and there is plenty incentive to do so. It’s an instructive, sometimes alarming look at the thought processes of the Cheney defense hawks running the country. For example:
“The Clinton Administration’s adherence to the 1972 ABM Treaty has frustrated development of useful ballistic missile defenses.” Wasn’t that what the ABM Treaty with the Soviet Union was designed to do?
Bush-Cheney quickly backed the U.S. out of the ABN Treaty, ostensibly to work on and implement Son of Star Wars, a ground-based a missile defense system that is a treaty violation but also a high PNAC priority. Son of Star Wars’ sire, Star Wars, was also a violation of the treaty but that didn’t stop the Reagan Administration hawks from going ahead with the program, or, as the PNAC authors imply, stop developing new missiles.
There are other sections to note, from building a military presence in space, to talk of cyber-war and other future visions. On some levels, the report is a wish list, a fantasy written by and for prominent American hawks whose disdain for diplomacy has been proven. On other levels, the report is filled with hard-line, real world recommendations. By and large, the report outlines “the road map” that the Bush Administration is using to chart its defense and foreign affairs strategies.
The United States, in many ways, is right where PNAC envisioned the country would be when it published the report five years ago. The land for the “forward-based” permanent forces in the Persian Gulf has been acquired and then some; and Bush has set his sights on Iran. While the cost of Iraq has limited the PNAC expansions into Southeast Asia and Europe, the military now has a foothold in Central Asian Afghanistan. The “Reaganite investment” in the military is being made.
Once Bush was elected, it was never a question of whether Bush-Cheney would get there; it was a question of how. The tragedy of 9-11 provided an unanticipated solution. The authors who proposed “Rebuilding America’s Defenses” as “a road map” could not have dreamed that the road taken would become such a rough ride.
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