The New American Century: Rest in
peace By Jim Lobe
WASHINGTON - Is the Project for the New
American Century (PNAC), which did so much to
promote the invasion of Iraq and an
Israel-centered "global war on terror", closing
down?
In the absence of an official
announcement and the failure since late last year
of a live person to answer its telephone, a
Washington Post obituary would seem to be
definitive. And, sure enough, the Post quoted one
unidentified source presumably linked to PNAC as
saying the group was "heading toward closing" with
the feeling of "goal accomplished".
In
fact, the nine-year-old group, whose 27 founders
included Vice President Dick Cheney and Pentagon
chief Donald Rumsfeld, among at least half a dozen
of the most powerful hawks in the George W Bush
administration's first term, has been inactive
since January 2005, when it
issued the last of its "statements", an appeal to
increase significantly the size of the US Army and
Marine Corps to cope with the growing demands of
the kind of "pax Americana" it had done so much to
promote.
As a platform for the three-part
coalition that was most enthusiastic about war in
Iraq - aggressive nationalists such as Cheney,
Christian Zionists of the religious right, and
Israel-centered neo-conservatives - PNAC actually
began breaking down shortly after the invasion of
Iraq.
It was then that the group's
predominantly neo-conservative leadership - Weekly
Standard editor William Kristol, PNAC director
Gary Schmitt, and Carnegie Endowment for
International Peace analyst Robert Kagan - began
attacking Rumsfeld, in particular, for failing to
deploy enough troops to pacify Iraq and launch a
true nation-building exercise, as in post-World
War II Germany and Japan.
It was the first
of a number of policy splits that, along with the
deepening quagmire in Iraq itself, have
debilitated the hawks, forcing neo-conservatives
in the group to reach out to liberal
interventionists with whom they sponsored a series
of joint statements extolling the virtues of
nation-building and a larger army, or calling for
a tougher US stance toward Russia and China.
PNAC was launched by Kristol and Kagan in
1997, shortly after their publication of an
article in Foreign Affairs magazine titled "Toward
a neo-Reaganite foreign policy", in which they
called for Washington to exercise "benevolent
global hegemony" to be sustained "as far into the
future as possible".
While critical of
then-president Bill Clinton, the article was
directed more against a Republican Congress that,
in their view, had grown increasingly
isolationist, particularly after the precipitous
US withdrawal from Somalia in 1994 and strong
Republican opposition to intervention in the
Balkans against Serbian president Slobodan
Milosevic.
It was in this spirit that the
two co-founded PNAC, whose charter was signed by
leading neo-conservatives, including Cheney's
future chief of staff, I Lewis Libby; Rumsfeld's
future deputy, Paul Wolfowitz; Bush's future top
Middle East aide, Elliott Abrams; his future
ambassador to Afghanistan and Iraq, Zalmay
Khalilzad; Rumsfeld's future top international
security official, Peter Rodman; American
Enterprise Institute (AEI) fellow and neo-con
impresario Richard Perle; and Florida Governor Jeb
Bush, as well as Cheney and Rumsfeld themselves.
The PNAC charter's few specifics, as well
as follow-up reports published by the group -
"Rebuilding America's Defenses" and "Present
Dangers", both published in 2000 to influence the
foreign-policy debate during the US presidential
campaign that year - were based to a great extent
on an infamous "Defense Planning Guidance" draft
produced under Cheney when he served as secretary
of defense under president George H W Bush in
1992.
That paper, which was developed by
then-under secretary of defense Wolfowitz, Libby,
Khalilzad, and the current deputy national
security adviser, J D Crouch, with assistance from
Perle and other like-minded defense specialists,
called for the "benevolent domination by one
power" (the US) to replace "collective
internationalism" and for Washington to ensure
that domination, particularly in Eurasia, to
prevent the emergence, by confrontation if
necessary, of any possible regional or global
rival.
It was PNAC's role to sustain and
propagate these ideas through its reports, its
periodic letters and statements signed by
right-wing notables, and a steady flow of opinion
pieces and essays, which acted as part of a larger
neo-conservative "echo chamber" that included
Kristol's Weekly Standard, Fox News, the
Washington Times, and the editorial pages of the
Wall Street Journal, to frame debates in official
Washington and the mainstream media.
In
this sense, PNAC was more of a "letterhead
organization" that acted as a mechanism for
developing consensus on issues among different
political forces - in its case, Republican hawks -
and then pushing them in public, than as a
think-tank.
Indeed, the fact that several
of its half-dozen staff members - most recently,
PNAC director Schmitt - have taken posts at the
much-larger AEI just five floors above PNAC's
offices helps illustrate the incestuous nature of
the larger network. Nonetheless, PNAC was the
first to call publicly (in 1998) for Washington to
pursue "regime change" in Iraq by military means
in conjunction with the Iraqi National Congress of
Ahmad Chalabi, who would later play a key role in
the propaganda campaign against Saddam Hussein in
the run-up to the 2003 invasion.
But
perhaps its most notable letter was sent to Bush
on September 20, 2001, just nine days after the
September 11 attacks. In addition to calling for
the ouster of the Taliban and war on al-Qaeda, the
letter called for waging a broader and more
ambitious "war on terrorism" that would include
cutting off the Palestinian Authority under Yasser
Arafat, taking on Hezbollah, threatening Syria and
Iran and, most important, ousting Saddam
regardless of his relationship to the attacks or
al-Qaeda.
"It may be that the Iraqi
government provided assistance in some form to the
recent attack on the United States," it said. "But
even if evidence does not link Iraq directly to
the attack, any strategy aiming at the eradication
of terrorism and its sponsors must include a
determined effort to remove Saddam Hussein from
power. Failure to undertake such an effort will
constitute an early and perhaps decisive surrender
in the war on international terrorism."
The letter was signed by 38 members of the
predominantly neo-conservative Washington echo
chamber, many of whom - especially Kristol, Kagan,
Defense Policy Board members Perle, Woolsey, Eliot
Cohen, Center for Security Policy president Frank
Gaffney, former education secretary William
Bennett, syndicated columnist Charles Krauthammer,
and Foundation for the Defense of Democracies
director Clifford May - would emerge, along with
Woolsey, as the most ubiquitous champions of war
with Iraq outside the US administration.
Seven months later, PNAC issued another
letter signed by many of the same people urging
Bush to step up preparations for war with Iraq,
sever all ties to the Palestinian Authority under
Arafat, and give full backing to Israeli prime
minister Ariel Sharon's efforts to crush the
Palestinian intifada.
"Israel's fight
against terrorism is our fight. Israel's victory
is an important part of our victory," the letter
noted. "For reasons both moral and strategic, we
need to stand with Israel in its fight against
terrorism." Bush complied two months later.
That period - September 20, 2001, to the
run-up to the Iraq war in early 2003 - marked the
high-water mark of PNAC's existence. Since then,
things have generally gone downhill, as the hawks
they represented, including the group's dominant
neo-conservatives, have fallen prey to internal
disagreements: over Rumsfeld's stewardship of Iraq
and the Pentagon; over the wisdom of democratic
"transformation" in the Arab Middle East; over
Sharon's Gaza-disengagement plan; over China; and
even over the latest Bush administration moves on
Iran.
All of which has made it far more
difficult to forge consensus - and compose letters
- in these areas.
