PNAC
Would you believe that several very powerful Bush Administration insiders including Cheney wrote a paper a year before 9/11 proposing a massive increase in the military budget and a takeover of the oil rich parts of Asia and Iraq, and even described how American public opinion could be radically changed overnight to support such a war? They did. I kid you not.
Many Bush Administration insiders belonged to something called the Project for a New American Century. This has been covered in great detail on other websites and it is not our intention to attempt to cover it here.
However you can look up the PNAC website
In particular see this very important article called “Rebuilding America’s Defenses”.
As of November 2013 that website is down and there is an error message that says the account has been suspended. But you can download the article called “Rebuilding America’s Defenses” from this page:
RebuildingAmericasDefenses
The key sentence in here is where they say
“Further, 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.”
That is on page 51 of the document, which is page 63 in your viewer. You can do a search for the word “catastrophic” and you will find it.
They said they wanted a new Pearl Harbor in order to transform American public opinion so that Americans would support their huge military buildup and invasion and occupation of Asia. They got it on 9/11.
This was a conservative think tank created during the Clinton years. In the aftermath of the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989, military bases were closed under the BRAC (Base Realignment and Closure) process. Since our worldwide enemy for the last 44 years had just officially gone out of existence, military budgets were cut in the U.S. For the military industrial complex (to use a phrase from President Eisenhower in his farewell address to the nation), this was bad. They needed more power and more money, more authority to go and kill innocent people around the world. To do this they needed an enemy. Since we didn’t have a real worldwide enemy any more, one had to be created. This was the work of PNAC.
In a 2000 document called Rebuilding America’s Defenses, at a time when PNAC members included Dick Cheney and many others who became top Bush Administration insiders, PNAC described its grandiose vision for worldwide military domination and greatly increased military spending. It predicted that this would require a significant change in the thinking of the American people, and said this transformation would take a long time in the absence of a catastrophic and catalyzing event such as a new Pearl Harbor. September 11 was America’s New Pearl Harbor.
This is a reference to the idea that FDR had foreknowledge of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, in December 1941 but deliberately chose to allow the attack to succeed because he wanted to quickly transform U.S. public opinion from anti war to pro war. In the aftermath of World War I America was largely isolationist, and songs such as “I Didn’t Raise my Boy to be a Soldier” were popular.
