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It's a golden opportunity to educate the general public more fully about why we invaded Iraq. THEN it will make more sense to everyone and expose those behind the insane plan. The excuse of WMDs, bringing democracy to Iraq, fighting terrorism, etc. have been window dressing and don't help connect the real dots about what Bushco has been doing post-9/11. I hope that, somehow, something about all this can be added. It would be hard to do, considering that this is the most under-reported story of this century so far, and I doubt there's any footage. What complicates it further, Pitt points out, is the Israel/Palestine entanglement and the implications of the neocon agenda on that. But Bushco opened up this can of worms and the American people deserve to know the truth. All of this is crucial for understanding this administration's actions! New York, You've Been Used
By William Rivers Pitt
t r u t h o u t | Perspective
Monday 15 September 2003 ...The Project for a New American Century was formed with a number of specific purposes in mind. The first, and foremost, was to fundamentally reorganize the foreign policy standards of the United States, to change forever the way America deals with the world. The first step in doing this, according to PNAC, was to attack, invade and take over the nation of Iraq. This plan was codified in a scolding letter sent to President Clinton in 1998 which chastised him for not rolling tanks on Baghdad. The next step in the process, according to PNAC, was to invade and take out friendly and unfriendly regimes alike in the Middle East, thus "Westernizing" the region through warfare and bringing our values to them. Implicit within this plan is the PNAC idea that open warfare and wholesale regime-change in the Middle East is all part of "Defending Israel." Unfortunately, the most common thing to see within the progressive community today is two people who agree on 99% of the issues screaming in fury at each other. 99% of the time, that screaming happens because of the fundamental differences between supporters of Israel and supporters of Palestine. This is the rift within the progressive community, and it is a mile wide, and PNAC falls right in the center of it. Now, there are 100 sides to these arguments and these issues. I am not here to stand and espouse one side or the other, beyond this: It is flat insanity to claim that theater-wide warfare and destabilization in the Mideast will do anything but make Israel less safe, and by proxy will cause further suffering and death within the Palestinian community. These are things we have to be able to talk about. We cannot discuss the Bush administration without discussing PNAC. We cannot discuss PNAC without discussing Israel and Palestine. If we cannot discuss Israel and Palestine without shredding each other, we will never be able to address this profound problem.
The PNAC plan was codified in the passage by the Gingrich-controlled Congress of the Iraqi Liberation Act in 1998, an act that made regime change in Iraq a matter of American law. The letter sent to Clinton in 1998, and the strident advocacy for the passage of the Iraqi Liberation Act, both bore the same signatures and fingerprints of the men and women who signed the PNAC Statement of Principles.
<snip>
So let's tie all these threads together, and find out why some wacky right-wing think tank is important. We'll start with the signatures on that Statement of Principles. Among those who signed on with the Project for a New American Century in 1997, who founded the Project, who stand by its ideologies and who press those ideologies out into an unwitting world, are:
Dick Cheney, Vice President, and former CEO of Halliburton Petroleum;
Donald Rumsfeld, Secretary of Defense;
Paul Wolfowitz, Assistant Secretary of Defense;
Elliot Abrams, senior member of the National Security Council, who pled guilty to the charge of lying to Congress in the Iran/Contra scandal;
Norman Podhoretz, a writer who described the PNAC mission and the war on Iraq as, "A process of the reformation and modernization of Islam;"
Bill Bennett, whom you?ve surely met if you've been to Vegas recently;
Lewis "Scooter" Libby, chief assistant to Dick Cheney.
<snip>
I told you, a moment ago, about the most disturbing part. I told you, also, that these PNAC plans were formulated in that "Rebuilding America's Defenses" report written long before September 11. I didn't tell you about page 51 of that report. Page 51 of a report that has become the basis for our war in Iraq, and our new and aggressive foreign policy stance. Page 51 of the report that is now the heart and soul and ideology of this government. Page 51, and one simple sentence: "The process of transformation, even if it brings revolutionary change, is likely to be a long one, absent some catastrophic and catalyzing event - like a new Pearl Harbor."
Please continue at: http://www.truthout.org/docs_03/091503A.shtmlSee also: America's Bid For Global Dominance by John Pilger; The New Statesman; December 12, 2002 One of George W Bush's "thinkers" is Richard Perle. I interviewed Perle when he was advising Reagan; and when he spoke about "total war", I mistakenly dismissed him as mad. He recently used the term again in describing America's "war on terror". "No stages," he said. "This is total war. We are fighting a variety of enemies. There are lots of them out there. All this talk about first we are going to do Afghanistan, then we will do Iraq... this is entirely the wrong way to go about it. If we just let our vision of the world go forth, and we embrace it entirely and we don't try to piece together clever diplomacy, but just wage a total war... our children will sing great songs about us years from now."
<snip>
...innocent people will be killed by the United States. This is reminiscent of Operation Northwoods, the plan put to President Kennedy by his military chiefs for a phoney terrorist campaign - complete with bombings, hijackings, plane crashes and dead Americans -as justification for an invasion of Cuba. Kennedy rejected it. He was assassinated a few months later. Now Rumsfeld has resurrected Northwoods, but with resources undreamt of in 1963 and with no global rival to invite caution. You have to keep reminding yourself this is not fantasy: that truly dangerous men, such as Perle and Rumsfeld and Cheney, have power. The thread running through their ruminations is the importance of the media: "the prioritised task of bringing on board journalists of repute to accept our position".
"Our position" is code for lying. Certainly, as a journalist, I have never known official lying to be more pervasive than today. We may laugh at the vacuities in Tony Blair's "Iraq dossier" and Jack Straw's inept lie that Iraq has developed a nuclear bomb (which his minions rushed to "explain"). But the more insidious lies, justifying an unprovoked attack on Iraq and linking it to would-be terrorists who are said to lurk in every Tube station, are routinely channelled as news. They are not news; they are black propaganda.
This corruption makes journalists and broadcasters mere ventriloquists' dummies. An attack on a nation of 22 million suffering people is discussed by liberal commentators as if it were a subject at an academic seminar, at which pieces can be pushed around a map, as the old imperialists used to do...Much more at: http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=49&ItemID=2744THE PNAC ARCHIVE - "Must-see" for all DUers at: http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_topic&forum=110&topic_id=80Further note: Took me awhile to gather this info and in the meantime, some of you on this thread and someone else on another thread had the same idea: http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=104x1877718 |
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