'New American Century'
In early 1997, William Kristol and Robert Kagan, two of the leading neo-con "Straussian intellectuals" in Washington, joined forces with collaborators at the AEI to shove the "Clean Break" policy down the throat of the Clinton Administration. Using office space on the fifth floor of the AEI headquarters, Kristol and company launched a new tax-exempt front group, the Project for the New American Century (PNAC), specifically to promote the buildup of American military force to unilaterally police the globe—starting with the overthrow of Saddam Hussein.
On June 3, 1997, PNAC released a Statement of Principle, which was signed by Elliott Abrams, Gary Bauer, William Bennett, Florida Governor Jeb Bush, Dick Cheney, Midge Decter, Francis Fukuyama, Lewis Libby, Norman Podhoretz, Peter Rodman, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, and others.
The Statement of Principle was based on an article co-authored by William Kristol and Robert Kagan, published in the July/August 1996 issue of Foreign Affairs, the journal of the New York Council on Foreign Relations—simultaneous with the Perle-Feith-Wurmser release of "Clean Break." Kristol and Kagan called for a "Neo-Reaganite Foreign Policy." This was a willfully dishonest choice of terms, given that President Reagan's most noteworthy foreign and national security policy achievement had been his collaboration with Lyndon LaRouche in launching the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), which Reagan envisioned as a joint, cooperative effort with the Soviet Union, to bring about the end of the era of "mutually assured destruction." When Soviet General Secretary Yuri Andropov rejected Reagan's generous offer of scientific and technological cooperation to build a global defense against nuclear weapons, the collapse of the Soviet empire was guaranteed, as LaRouche forecast in 1984, and again in a now-famous October 1988 speech in West Berlin, in which he anticipated the fall of the Berlin Wall a year later.
Kristol and Kagan defined their "neo-Reaganite foreign policy" as "benevolent global hegemony," based on a massive buildup of American military might. The authors were reviving the 1991 Wolfowitz doctrine of unilateral preventive war, explicitly stating, "The appropriate goal of American foreign policy is to preserve that hegemony as far into the future as possible."
Kristol and Kagan specifically called for the overthrow of more than 200 years of American anti-colonialist tradition, singling out John Quincy Adams as their particular nemesis: "Conservatives these days," they wrote, "succumb easily to the charming old metaphor of the United States as a 'city on a hill.' They hark back ... to the admonition of John Quincy Adams that America ought not go 'abroad in search of monsters to destroy.' But why not? The alternative is to leave monsters on the loose, ravaging and pillaging to their hearts' content, as Americans stand by and watch. What may have been wise counsel in 1823, when America was a small, isolated power in a world of European giants, is no longer so, when America is the giant. Because America has the capacity to contain or destroy many of the world's monsters, most of which can be found without much searching, and because the responsibility for the peace and security of the international order rests so heavily on America's shoulders, a policy of sitting atop a hill and leading by example becomes in practice a policy of cowardice and dishonor."
On Jan. 26, 1998, PNAC issued an Open Letter to President Clinton, calling for immediate "regime change" in Iraq, based on the bogus claim that Saddam was about to launch weapons of mass destruction against the United States and America's allies. Among the signators on the Open Letter were the following individuals, all of whom are now in the "Bush 43" Administration: Abrams, Richard Armitage, John Bolton, Fukuyama, Khalilzad, Perle, Peter Rodman, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, and Robert Zoellick. Other signators included Kristol, Kagan, and James Woolsey, who briefly served as President Clinton's Director of Central Intelligence, and who was, at the time the PNAC letter was issued, already the attorney representing the Iraqi National Congress.
In September 2000, on the eve of the Presidential elections, pitting George W. Bush against Al Gore, PNAC issued a lengthy study, "Rebuilding America's Defenses—Strategy, Force and Resources for a New Century," which revived at great length the Cheney-Wolfowitz 1991-93 preventive war strategy. Among the "usual suspects" who contributed to the "Rebuilding" study was Wolfowitz protégé Lewis Libby. He had just completed a stint as the general counsel to the Cox Commission, which was promoting a strategic showdown in North Asia with China and North Korea; he would soon be Vice President Cheney's chief of staff. While out of government, Libby had also been the personal attorney of Marc Rich, the Russian "Mafiya" godfather who had been convicted in absentia in Federal court for tax evasion and "trading with the enemy"—Iran's Ayatollah Khomeini—during the American hostage crisis of 1979-80. Libby was the behind-the-scenes Svengali responsible for the disastrous Clinton Presidential pardon of Rich, working directly with "former" Mossad operatives Zvi Rafiah and Avner Azulay.
Despite the proliferation of Straussians and neo-cons inside the George W. Bush national security team, the Iraq war lobby made very little headway until the event that Vice President Cheney termed "the historic watershed."
The Sept. 11, 2001 attacks on the Pentagon and the World Trade Center triggered an instant response from the neo-cons in and around the Bush Administration. Just four days after the attacks, Paul Wolfowitz attended a Sept. 15 National Security Council session with President Bush at Camp David, where he delivered a pitch for an immediate U.S. invasion of Iraq. For reasons that still remain in dispute, the President, the Vice President, and even Defense Secretary Rumsfeld rejected the Wolfowitz proposal as "premature." However, several days later, in a Presidential national security order authorizing the attack on Afghanistan, President Bush did authorize the CIA and the military to begin developing contingency plans for dealing with Saddam.
'Chickenhawk Intelligence Agency' Is Born
A week after Wolfowitz's "premature" war pitch, Richard Perle convened a session of the Defense Policy Board addressed by British Arab Bureau veteran spook Dr. Bernard Lewis, and INC founder Dr. Ahmed Chalabi, a bank swindler and protégé of Albert Wohlstetter at the University of Chicago, who was the Zionist Lobby and the Israeli right wing's hand-picked successor to Saddam Hussein. At the CIA and the State Department, Chalabi was considered virtually persona non grata, and his INC umbrella was viewed as a collection of martini-slurping professional exiles, with virtually no assets on the ground inside Iraq. Perle and Bernard Lewis had been introduced to Chalabi in the early 1980s, and the former banker, who faces a 20-year prison sentence in Jordan for bank fraud and currency manipulation, has been a pet project of JINSA and AEI ever since.
In a candid moment shortly before Sept. 11, 2001, Defense Secretary Rumsfeld had confided to associates that he was thinking about resigning his Cabinet post and returning to Chicago. His explanation was revealing: "The Likud has taken over the building," he told friends, referring to the Wolfowitz-Perle cabal that had run circles around him in the early months of the "Bush 43" Administration. Sources familiar with Rumsfeld describe the Secretary as a "control freak" and micro-manager, who had presumed that his participation in a Clinton-era commission on missile proliferation had sufficiently offset his quarter-century absence from Washington, and that he would be able to maintain a tight grip on the vast Pentagon bureaucracy, including the uniformed military command, centered at the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
Through the personal efforts of former Secretary of State and "Chicago School" ideologue George Shultz, Deputy Defense Secretary Wolfowitz had been inserted in the inner circle of George W. Bush campaign policy tutors, the so-called "Vulcans," which enabled him to bring Perle and the whole neo-con crowd to Austin, Texas for personal mis-education sessions with the President-to-be. Wolfowitz parlayed that personal relationship with the new President, and staffed Rumsfeld's office with a veritable army of like-minded Strauss disciples and Likudniks.
In June 1988, EIR had revealed that then-Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger's general counsel office had compiled a list of suspected members of the "X Committee," the network of Israeli spies and agents-of-influence who had penetrated the Reagan-Bush Administration's national security establishment, and were believed to have directed the espionage efforts of Jonathan Jay Pollard. Among the dozen leading "X Committee" suspects being probed by the general counsel team were: Wolfowitz, Perle, Feith, Wohlstetter, Fred Iklé, Stephen Bryen, Michael Ledeen, Frank Gaffney, John Lehman, and Henry Rowen.
Under Wolfowitz, the "Bush 43" Pentagon once again became a hub of "X Committee" influence and penetration.
Nevertheless, the intelligence coming out of the CIA, the DIA, and the State Department firmly rejected any evidence of linkage between Saddam Hussein and the attacks of [EMAIL PROTECTED] The overwhelming evidence also suggested that Iraq posed no immediate or near-term threat to the United States or any of its neighbors. Early in the Bush Administration, Secretary of State Colin Powell had proposed a revision of sanctions, called "smart sanctions," recognizing that international support for the continuing isolation of Iraq was wearing thin.
To seize upon the dramatic shift that occurred on Sept. 11, 2001, Wolfowitz and Deputy Secretary of Defense for Policy Doug Feith, one of the most rabid of the Jabotinskyites in the Pentagon civilian bureaucracy, launched a secret intelligence unit. Its mission was to provide Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld—who had abandoned his [EMAIL PROTECTED] plans to retire, and was now fully in synch with the Wolfowitz cabal—with a constant flow of "intelligence" to counter the CIA/DIA resistance to the "Get Saddam" agenda of the "Clean Break" crowd. One of the principal sources of this unvetted "intelligence" was to be Chalabi's discredited INC.
Wolfowitz and Feith chose Abram Shulsky to head the secret cell, which was buried in the maze of civilian Pentagon bureaucracy under the Assistant Secretary for Policy. A Strauss disciple, Shulsky had been a professional staffer for Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan (D-N.Y.), along with Elliott Abrams and Gary Schmitt—now the President of Bill Kristol's and Robert Kagan's tax-front, PNAC. Shulsky had served on the staff of the Senate Intelligence Oversight Committee. He had been an underling of neo-con wunderkind and Iran-Contra operative Roy Godson at the Consortium for the Study of Intelligence, a project of the New York City-based National Strategy Information Center. And Shulsky had co-authored, with Zalmay Khalilzad and others, a 1999 RAND Corporation study, "The United States and a Rising China," which promoted the idea that China, more than any other nation, posed a direct challenge to American global and regional military primacy, and would have to be directly confronted.
Who Makes This 'Intelligence'?
Others identified with the Shulsky "chickenhawks intelligence agency" included:
Harold Rhode, the Middle East specialist in Dr. Andrew Marshall's Pentagon Office of Net Assessments (ONA). Marshall was a founder, with Albert Wohlstetter, of the RAND Corporation at the close of World War II. He was installed at the Pentagon in 1975 by then-Secretary of Defense James Rodney Schlesinger, who created the ONA specifically to house Marshall and his team of RAND systems analysis and game theory utopians. At the very outset of the "Bush 43" Administration, Marshall had grabbed the ear of Rumsfeld, provoking a near revolt of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who considered Marshall to be the driver behind the dangerously incompetent "revolution in military affairs."
Michael Ledeen, in his recent book-length rant, The War Against the Terror Masters (New York: St. Martins Press, 2002), described Rhode as his "guru on the Middle East for nearly 20 years." In 1991, Rhode was in the Pentagon Office of International Security Policy, covering Turkey, at a time that Perle and Feith were running an international consulting operation, selling Israeli military hardware to the Turkish Army. Wolfowitz has described Rhode as his "Islamic affairs advisor" at ONA; and according to one account, Rhodes, in a meeting during the early months of the Bush Administration, had staged a noisy in-your-face confrontation with a top Saudi official, vowing that the historical U.S.-Saudi partnership was a thing of the past. The incident reportedly cost Rhode a more senior—and visible—post inside the Wolfowitz-Feith Pentagon bureaucracy.
Rhode, according to several sources, has travelled, on several occasions, to London, with Richard Perle, Chairman, until recently, of the Defense Policy Board, to gather "intelligence" from INC officials, which has been funneled through Shulsky's shop to Rumsfeld—without first being evaluated and cross-checked by CIA or Defense Intelligence Agency professionals.
William Luti, formerly an advisor to Vice President Cheney, more recently named as the Deputy Under Secretary of Defense for Special Plans and Near East and South Asian Affairs, has been described by a recent visitor to his office as a man crazed with the mission to eliminate Saddam Hussein. "He reminded me of a serial killer, right out of a Hollywood horror flick," according to the source, who described Luti's Pentagon office as covered from floor to ceiling with desecrated photographs and news clippings of Saddam Hussein and his inner core. A retired Navy Captain and pilot who served during Operation Desert Storm, Luti was described, in a March 11, 2002 New Yorker story by Seymour Hersh, as "so obsessed with an immediate overthrow of Saddam Hussein that he hasn't thought through the consequences." Despite these psychological profiles, Luti has been one of the Pentagon civilian point-men, working with the Iraqi "opposition" on both intelligence and operations. According to accounts in the New York Times, Luti was dispatched to London in November and December 2002, to meet with Chalabi and other Iraqi exiles.
On Dec. 17, Luti and Maj. Gen. David Barno met secretely with 11 Iraqi opposition figures in London, and selected the initial group of Iraqis to be trained in Hungary to participate in any military operation, as the indigenist "window dressing" on what would, in reality, be an all-American or Anglo-American military invasion.
In a Washington speech on Oct. 16, 2002, Luti had promoted, aggressively, the need for the United States to adopt a new, imperial interventionist policy, which he dubbed "anticipatory self-defense."
Reuel Marc Gerecht, a retired CIA officer, has been identified as one of the secret liaisons between the Shulsky "chickenhawk intelligence agency" at DOD and the Iraqi oppositionists in London and elsewhere in Europe. Based most of the time in Brussels, along with Robert Kagan, Gerecht is a senior fellow at AEI, and is the Director of the Middle East Initiative at PNAC, working directly under Kristol, Kagan, and Shulsky's close associate Gary Schmitt.
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