Buzzsaw Haircut

Time to Get Scared: Welcome to the New American Century

By Owen Perry

“Dear Mr. President:
We are writing you because we are convinced that current American policy toward Iraq is not succeeding, and that we may soon face a threat in the Middle East more serious than any we have known since the end of the Cold War. In your upcoming State of the Union Address, you have an opportunity to chart a clear and determined course for meeting this threat. We urge you to seize that opportunity, and to enunciate a new strategy that would secure the interests of the U.S. and our friends and allies around the world. That strategy should aim, above all, at the removal of Saddam Hussein's regime from power. We stand ready to offer our full support in this difficult but necessary endeavor.”

That was the beginning of a letter to the President of the United States of America, not in 2002 before George W. Bush made his “Axis of Evil” speech. The letter was written in 1998, during Bill Clinton's administration-before September 11 and before the rush to “protect the Homeland.”

The authors of the letter did not get their way in 1998, but they obviously have now. Of course, most of the authors are better placed now to have the president's ear; they include Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, Defense Policy Board Chair Richard Perle, National Security Council Chair Elliott Abrams, and other high-ranking officials. These are a few of the members of what some say is the president's foreign policy team, The Project for the New American Century.

The members of PNAC are Reaganite Neo-Conservatives determined to ensure The United States role as the dominant global force. PNAC states on its Web site that its four major aims are:

1) to increase defense spending significantly if we are to carry out our global responsibilities today and modernize our armed forces for the future.
2) to strengthen our ties to
democratic allies and to
challenge regimes hostile to our interests and values.
3) to promote the cause of
political and economic freedom abroad.
4) to accept responsibility for America's unique role in preserving and extending an international order friendly to our security, our prosperity, and our principles.

But the essence of PNAC's ideology can be found in their 2000 White Paper titled “Rebuilding America's Defenses: Strategy, Forces and Resources for a New Century.” In it, PNAC outlines what is required of America to create the global empire they envision. PNAC says America must:

* Reposition permanently based forces to Southern Europe, Southeast Asia and the Middle East;
* Modernize U.S. forces,
including enhancing our fighter aircraft, submarine and surface fleet capabilities;
* Develop and deploy a global missile defense system and develop a strategic dominance of space;
* Control the “International Commons” of cyberspace;
* Increase defense spending to a minimum of 3.8 percent of gross domestic product, up from the 3 percent currently spent.

What these goals entail and what they mean for the future of the United States is up for interpretation and debate. And as the Bush administration appears more and more to be following PNAC's advice, that debate and interpretation has aroused.

PNAC members hold that the U.S. should indefinitely dominate Europe and East Asia,
in order to prevent Germany, Japan, France, and other allies to develop.

Michael Lind is a Senior Fellow of the New America Foundation (Don't confuse this with PNAC). He has been an editor or staff writer for The New Yorker, Harper's Magazine, and The National Interest.

He has also been a major critic of PNAC. “This policy naively assumes that America's former Cold War allies will indefinitely tolerate the use of their countries as launching-pads for actions in the Middle East and elsewhere of which they disapprove,” says Lind. “Equally naïve is the assumption that other major countries will defer to the U.S. in security matters-as the opposition of every significant great power except Britain to America's Iraq policy has now proven.”

Lind wrote in an article for the The New Statesmen wrote, “The neo-con defense intellectuals, as well as being in or around the actual Pentagon, are at the centre of a metaphorical 'pentagon' of the Israel lobby and the religious right, plus conservative think-tanks, foundations and media empires.”

Perhaps the most controversial side of Lind's pentagon is the Israel lobby and its connection to the religious right. Lind argues that Wolfowitz and Douglas Feith (Under Secretary of Defense for Policy) have close ties to the Jewish-American Israel lobby. Wolfowitz has served as the Bush administration's liaison to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee. Feith was given an award by the Zionist Organization of America. Feith and Perle wrote a policy paper that advised the Israeli government to end the Oslo peace process, reoccupy Palestinian territories and crush Yasser Arafat's government.

Lind writes that the most supportive members of Likud in the Republican Party are southern Christian fundamentalists. “The religious right believes that God gave all of Palestine to the Jews, and fundamentalist congregations spend millions to subsidise Jewish settlements in the occupied territories,” says Lind.

The other major corner of the neo-conservative pentagon is built of several right-wing media empires. Rupert Murdoch, while not a member of PNAC, still supports them. He controls Fox Television network. His magazine the Weekly Standard, edited by William Kristol, the former chief of staff of former Vice President Dan Quayle, “acts as a mouthpiece for defence intellectuals such as Perle, Wolfowitz, Feith and Woolsey as well as for Sharon's government,” says Lind.

Another media supporter of PNAC is The National Interest (of which Lind was executive editor from 1991-94). That publication is now funded by Conrad Black, who owns the Jerusalem Post and the Hollinger empire in Britain and Canada. Most of the groups praise comes form the Washington Times, owned by the South Korean Reverend Sun Myung Moon, which owns the newswire UPI. UPI is now run by John O'Sullivan (ghost-writer for Margaret Thatcher who once worked as an editor for Conrad Black in Canada). The connections between these people go on and on.

It is clear that these individuals dominate the policies of the Bush administration. Some see their ideas and actions as a blueprint for a new global empire. Whether this is true is yet to be seen. As cliché as the phrase has become, the world has changed since September 11. The War on Terrorism and the Bush Doctrine have changed war and diplomacy for the foreseeable future.

If Bush remains in power, how much more ingrained will the neo-conservative philosophy become in America? If America takes responsibility for the world militarily condition will it have to do so economically? And more importantly, do the 5.75 billion non-Americans of the world want it to?

Owen Perry is a senior journalism major. Email him at operry1@ithaca.edu, unless you are a Neo-Conservative.