October 27, 2014
The U.S. government is not one thing or
one entity. It is a collection of powers and agencies, turfs and fiefdoms, each
of them being captured and used. Project for a New American Century (PNAC)
captured specific parts of the U.S. government and led America into an
aggression against Iraq. PNAC instigated a broad scale war crime. But such
captures are ongoing and much greater in number than this single case. The
point is much broader. The U.S. government’s powers are prizes, weapons and
resources to whatever groups or whoever is capable of capturing them and
wielding them at any given time. There are a thousand think tanks that want to
and do control and influence what is called social policy or public policy,
which are nothing more than domestic aggressions of one group or groups against
other groups. War policy is one of those social and public policies. The U.S.
government is always captured and is always being used to wield power on behalf
of those who are the capturers. PNAC’s capture is a specific case in which it
captured one important part of foreign policy, propaganda, war-making and its
financing.
David L. Atheide and Jennifer N. Grimes
document that Project for a New American Century (PNAC) was the key player that
instigated the U.S. attack on Iraq in 2003. Their article is “War Programming:
The Propaganda Project and the Iraq War”. It appears in The Sociological Quarterly, Vol. 46, No.
4 (Autumn, 2005). I quote one long paragraph:
“The PNAC was very influential in
changing U.S. foreign policy as well as promoting favorable news coverage about
going to war with Iraq following the attacks of 9/11. The Iraq War was informed
by these efforts and the resulting propaganda campaign to convince the American
people that attacking Iraq was tantamount to attacking ‘terrorists’ and others
who threatened the United States (Armstrong 2002). This organization was closely
related to several other prominent think tanks, including the American
Enterprise Institute (AEI), with its offices located on the fifth floor of the
AEI’s Washington building. Many members of the PNAC joined the Bush
administration and became credible claims makers, who constructed the frames
for shaping subsequent news reports. Among the members who signed many of the
proclamations laying the foundation for a new American empire (Kagan and
Kristol 2000; Bacevich 2002; Kagan 2003) were former and current governmental
officials, including Elliot Abrams, William Bennett, Jeb Bush, Dick Cheney,
Steve Forbes, Donald Kagan, Norman Podhoretz, Dan Quayle, Donald Rumsfeld, and
Paul Wolfowitz. The PNAC emphasized changing American foreign policy to become
a hegemon and police its international interests as a new kind of benevolent
American empire (Bacevich 2002; Barber 2003; Kaplan 2003; Mann 2003; Johnson
2004). This would include expanding the military, withdrawing from major
treaties, as well as engaging in preemptive strikes against those who would
threaten U.S. interests. Those messages, in turn, were carried by the mass
media for months leading up to the invasion of Iraq. The United States was well
on its way to justify attacking Iraq in 1992 when Dick Cheney and others, who
would occupy positions in the Bush administration eight years later, drafted
the Defense Planning Guidance document. An overview and analysis of the PNAC
and its role in shaping U.S. foreign policy was David Armstrong’s essay in
Harper’s in October 2002.”
The Armstrong
essay was titled “Dick Cheney’s Song of America”. It contained this
summary of what Cheney’s Plan covered:
“The plan is for the United States to
rule the world. The overt theme is unilateralism, but it is ultimately a story
of domination. It calls for the United States to maintain its overwhelming
military superiority and prevent new rivals from rising up to challenge it on
the world stage. It calls for dominion over friends and enemies alike. It says
not that the United States must be more powerful, or most powerful, but that it
must be absolutely powerful. (Armstrong 2002:76)”
The U.S. government’s war policy is
still captured and it will always be captured by some group or parties as long
as the powers to make war and command the resources to make war are present in
the federal government. This is because these powers and resources are
valuable, so that some human beings will always compete for them and use them
according to their own preferences.
Michael S. Rozeff [send him mail] is a retired Professor of
Finance living in East Amherst, New York. He is the author of the free e-book Essays on American Empire: Liberty vs.
Domination and the free e-book The
U.S. Constitution and Money: Corruption and Decline.
Previous article by Michael S. Rozeff: The
Failure of the Academic Community
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