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A news article
Apr. 22nd, 2003 10:40 amI wanted to post this.. a month or so ago, but my mom threw it out.
This appeared in the Buffalo News on 3/10
Thanks to![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
draci for helping me refind it.
Reading this article was... most disconcerting...
WASHINGTON - The 350 American reporters recruited by the Pentagon to cover the upcoming war against Iraq, and now jammed into staging areas in Kuwait, are understandably anxious about the mechanics of covering the conflict.
Back here, some of us civilians in the press corps are still searching for clues as to how we got into this situation.
Last Thursday night, President Bush said he will make war, whether anybody else is with us, and he wants a regime change in Iraq. This is pretty much where he was during the Republicans' successful midterm campaign for the House and Senate.
Bush later took some minor detours in an unsuccessful effort to bring our traditional allies into this - such as he really wasn't for regime change as much as he wanted disarmament.
But this current posture returns him to perfect sync, as it happens, with the radical views voiced publicly by a small, but well-heeled, think tank that opened its doors during the Clinton administration a few blocks from the White House.
This little shop of conceit is called the Project for the New American Century.
At its birth, the PNAC chided the Clinton administration for its "timidity," saying that the United States was in a military position to set global policy now that its might was no longer challenged by the Soviet Union.
All in the name of democracy and world peace, of course. It was, and is, for creation of a Pax Americana - a benign world domination.
I wish I could say I discovered this group on my own. No, ABC's "Nightline" unit under Ted Koppel did a riveting spread on the PNAC Wednesday night. Koppel's production was coolheaded, detached and fair.
And pretty frightening to those who had embraced the concept of national self-determination by the world community, and collective security arrangements under Presidents Eisenhower, Kennedy, Nixon and the first Bush.
In the short time allotted, Koppel had to rely on the knowledge of his most sophisticated viewers. He cited the names of some of the alumni of the PNAC, names that ring familiar mainly to those who closely watch the Bush administration.
For example, among those who penned a Jan. 26, 1998, letter to then president Bill Clinton urging military action against Iraq for regime change were Richard L. Armitage, who is now deputy secretary of state under Bush.
At the PNAC's 1997 founding, a group of right-wing Republicans signed a PNAC manifesto calling on the government to "shape a new century favorable to American principles and interests." The signers included Christian moralist-politicians such as Gary Bauer and William J. Bennett.
But the real heavyweights on the charter included Richard B. Cheney, now vice president; Donald H. Rumsfeld, now secretary of defense; the president's brother Jeb; Paul Wolfowitz, deputy defense secretary; Elliott Abrams, a new Bush appointee to the National Security Council; and Peter W. Rodman, assistant secretary of state for international security affairs.
Among others who signed other PNAC jingoistic tracts were Richard Perle, a Pentagon adviser and militant apologist for war, former vice president Dan Quayle and Robert B. Zoelick, the U.S. trade representative.
There's nothing illegal or immoral about a group of out-of-power politicians creating a think tank and putting out policy positions via letter, fax and Web site.
What does deserve close scrutiny is how they and Bush found each other so quickly after the controversial 2000 election. Or was this his shadow cabinet all along?
If so, there was no hint in Bush's presidential campaign that he was about to embrace their policy of muscular unilateral military adventure.
Other than Secretary of State Colin Powell and National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, these PNAC alumni are Bush's entire team of foreign policy advisers. And their pugnacious views now comprise Bush foreign policy.
Sadly, the only member of Congress who has fully grasped the enormity of this cabal is Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif.
It would be nice to know who is paying the PNAC's bills. The think tank isn't required to disclose its sources of financing, but an aide there gave out a partial list that includes the mammoth defense contractor Lockheed-Martin, the ultra right-wing Sarah Scaife Foundation, the Taiwan-American Foundation and the Pew Charitable Trust.
The 1997 manifesto calls on America to "challenge regimes hostile to our interests and values."
Will this group determine the "interests and values" of the nation in a Bush second term? Its list of "hostile regimes" already includes Iran and North Korea. Might it be expanded to include France, Germany, Russia and perhaps Canada or any other nation that refuses to embrace "a Reaganite policy of military strength and moral clarity"?
How challenge? And at what cost in terms of life and treasure?
This appeared in the Buffalo News on 3/10
Thanks to
draci for helping me refind it.Reading this article was... most disconcerting...
Bush is in perfect sync with jingoistic think tank
By DOUGLAS TURNER
WASHINGTON - The 350 American reporters recruited by the Pentagon to cover the upcoming war against Iraq, and now jammed into staging areas in Kuwait, are understandably anxious about the mechanics of covering the conflict.
Back here, some of us civilians in the press corps are still searching for clues as to how we got into this situation.
Last Thursday night, President Bush said he will make war, whether anybody else is with us, and he wants a regime change in Iraq. This is pretty much where he was during the Republicans' successful midterm campaign for the House and Senate.
Bush later took some minor detours in an unsuccessful effort to bring our traditional allies into this - such as he really wasn't for regime change as much as he wanted disarmament.
But this current posture returns him to perfect sync, as it happens, with the radical views voiced publicly by a small, but well-heeled, think tank that opened its doors during the Clinton administration a few blocks from the White House.
This little shop of conceit is called the Project for the New American Century.
At its birth, the PNAC chided the Clinton administration for its "timidity," saying that the United States was in a military position to set global policy now that its might was no longer challenged by the Soviet Union.
All in the name of democracy and world peace, of course. It was, and is, for creation of a Pax Americana - a benign world domination.
I wish I could say I discovered this group on my own. No, ABC's "Nightline" unit under Ted Koppel did a riveting spread on the PNAC Wednesday night. Koppel's production was coolheaded, detached and fair.
And pretty frightening to those who had embraced the concept of national self-determination by the world community, and collective security arrangements under Presidents Eisenhower, Kennedy, Nixon and the first Bush.
In the short time allotted, Koppel had to rely on the knowledge of his most sophisticated viewers. He cited the names of some of the alumni of the PNAC, names that ring familiar mainly to those who closely watch the Bush administration.
For example, among those who penned a Jan. 26, 1998, letter to then president Bill Clinton urging military action against Iraq for regime change were Richard L. Armitage, who is now deputy secretary of state under Bush.
At the PNAC's 1997 founding, a group of right-wing Republicans signed a PNAC manifesto calling on the government to "shape a new century favorable to American principles and interests." The signers included Christian moralist-politicians such as Gary Bauer and William J. Bennett.
But the real heavyweights on the charter included Richard B. Cheney, now vice president; Donald H. Rumsfeld, now secretary of defense; the president's brother Jeb; Paul Wolfowitz, deputy defense secretary; Elliott Abrams, a new Bush appointee to the National Security Council; and Peter W. Rodman, assistant secretary of state for international security affairs.
Among others who signed other PNAC jingoistic tracts were Richard Perle, a Pentagon adviser and militant apologist for war, former vice president Dan Quayle and Robert B. Zoelick, the U.S. trade representative.
There's nothing illegal or immoral about a group of out-of-power politicians creating a think tank and putting out policy positions via letter, fax and Web site.
What does deserve close scrutiny is how they and Bush found each other so quickly after the controversial 2000 election. Or was this his shadow cabinet all along?
If so, there was no hint in Bush's presidential campaign that he was about to embrace their policy of muscular unilateral military adventure.
Other than Secretary of State Colin Powell and National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, these PNAC alumni are Bush's entire team of foreign policy advisers. And their pugnacious views now comprise Bush foreign policy.
Sadly, the only member of Congress who has fully grasped the enormity of this cabal is Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif.
It would be nice to know who is paying the PNAC's bills. The think tank isn't required to disclose its sources of financing, but an aide there gave out a partial list that includes the mammoth defense contractor Lockheed-Martin, the ultra right-wing Sarah Scaife Foundation, the Taiwan-American Foundation and the Pew Charitable Trust.
The 1997 manifesto calls on America to "challenge regimes hostile to our interests and values."
Will this group determine the "interests and values" of the nation in a Bush second term? Its list of "hostile regimes" already includes Iran and North Korea. Might it be expanded to include France, Germany, Russia and perhaps Canada or any other nation that refuses to embrace "a Reaganite policy of military strength and moral clarity"?
How challenge? And at what cost in terms of life and treasure?
