Bush follows the road map - Comment - radical foreign policy

Progressive, The, May, 2003

Long before September 11, some of the most powerful men in the Bush Administration had been dreaming up schemes for world domination. Blueprints have been on the drawing boards for more than a decade now that describe the outlines of Bush's interventionist policy. Drawn up by hawks in the waning days of the first Bush Administration, and recirculated by William Kristol and other leaders of the neoconservative movement in the last several years, these blueprints are revealing for two basic reasons. First, they show that September 11 served as pretext for ripping up the old designs of U.S. policy. And second, they demonstrate that the Iraq War is no aberration but merely a test case of the new policy. More wars are on the way.

The original, profoundly influential sketch of George W. Bush's new, radical foreign policy was written back in 1992 by a Pentagon official working under Dick Cheney, then the Secretary of Defense. That official was Paul Wolfowitz, who was Under Secretary of Defense for Policy. Wolfowitz is now Donald Rumsfeld's Deputy Secretary of Defense.

Wolfowitz drew up a draft document called the Defense Policy Guidance, and it bears an eerie resemblance to the new National Security Strategy that Bush adopted last fall.

Wolfowitz stressed the need for "deterring potential competitors from even aspiring to a larger regional or global role." Eleven years later, Bush's new strategy says, "The President has no intention of allowing any foreign power to catch up with the huge lead the United States has opened."

Wolfowitz also asserted the importance of "preemptive military intervention." Ten years later, Bush's new strategy says, "We will not hesitate to act alone, if necessary, to exercise our right of self-defense by acting preemptively."

Wolfowitz said the United States should use military power to protect "access to vital raw materials, primarily Persian Gulf oil." Bush's new doctrine is not that explicit about oil; it doesn't need to be. His war against Iraq speaks volumes.

Wolfowitz showed no interest in working through the United Nations. Instead, he advocated unilateral action when "collective action cannot be orchestrated." Bush himself crudely paraphrased this policy tenet in his March 6 press conference: "When it comes to our security, if we need to act, we will act, and we really don't need United Nations approval to do so," he said. "We really don't need anybody's permission."

So extreme was the Wolfowitz draft that when it leaked out, it caused a huge stir, and Secretary of State James Baker and National Security Adviser Brent Scowcroft ordered it diluted beyond recognition.

But Wolfowitz (and his master, Cheney) did not forget about the plan. Instead, it found a home a few years later in a new think tank, created in 1997, called the Project for the New American Century.

Chaired by William Kristol, editor of The Weekly Standard, the group in its founding statement articulated a strategy of preventive war. It talked about the need "to challenge regimes hostile to our interests." And it urged the President to "shape circumstances before crises emerge, and to meet threats before they become dire." Compare those words to Bush's statement on the eve of his invasion of Iraq: "We choose to meet that threat now, where it arises, before it can appear suddenly in our skies and cities."

The project's founding statement was signed by Wolfowitz, along with Cheney, Rumsfeld, I. Lewis Libby (Cheney's chief of staff, who worked with Wolfowitz on the 1992 document), and a host of conservative bigwigs, including Gary Bauer, William J. Bennett, Elliott Abrams (the disgraced Reagan official who is now at the National Security Council), Steve Forbes, Midge Decter, Norman Podhoretz, Dan Quayle, Zalmay Khalilzad (Bush's special envoy to Afghanistan and the Kurds), Francis Fukuyama, and Frank Gaffney. There was, by the way, a Bush on the list: Jeb.

On January 26, 1998, the Project for the New American Century sent a letter to President Clinton explicitly calling for "removing Saddam Hussein and his regime from power. That now needs to become the aim of American foreign policy." Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz signed this letter, as did many of the other original signatories. Newcomers were John Bolton (now one of Colin Powell's minders at the State Department), Richard Armitage (Powell's deputy), former CIA Director R. James Woolsey, and Richard Perle, who recently had to resign as head of Rumsfeld's Defense Advisory Board in response to allegations by Seymour Hersh and others that Perle was using his influence to lobby for foreign clients. (Perle remains on the board, however.)

Then, in September 2000, the Project for the New American Century put out a report entitled "Rebuilding America's Defenses." In its introduction, the report bowed to Wolfowitz. "The Defense Policy Guidance (DPG), drafted in the early months of 1992, provided for a blueprint for maintaining U.S. preeminence, precluding the rise of a great power rival.... The basic tenets of the DPG, in our judgment, remain sound."