The day I finally realized I was never going to hear my voice or the voices of my peers resonating within the Bush administration was the day I learned about the Project for the New American Century. Call it naïve or euphemistically, optimistic, but I was willing to give them the benefit of the doubt. After all, almost half of all voters in 2000 had voted for George Bush and I know that at heart we are a good people who mean well, and besides, they were throwing around words like freedom and democracy and liberation. I was willing to believe that they actually intended to serve some greater good, albeit entirely misguidedly, by invading Iraq against the will of a large number of their citizens and the United Nations. I played games of guesswork and rationalization in which I let them come out on top and wrote off my fears and doubts.
This day of realization came during early March of last year in the weeks building up to the invasion of Iraq, when heated emails were flying back and forth and all anyone could talk about in San Francisco was the potential for war. I received a forward from a friend with a link to a website decrying, “Cheney’s Monstrous Scheme.” It was one of those sites that is seemingly based upon some kernel of truth that has caused the author to completely freak out and unfortunately cloud whatever information it may contain with a lefty conspiracy-theorist tinge. However, one organization’s name stood out and after a quick internet search, I was staring at the official site of the Project for the New American Century (PNAC).
As it turned out, PNAC (as I’ll refer to it from here on) is a conservative foreign policy think-tank formed back in 1997, many of whose founders have since risen to power positions in the Bush administration, notably Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, and Paul Wolfowitz, among others. In their statement of principles they outline their mission to build upon the "military investments and foreign policy achievements" of past administrations to shape a new century favorable to American principles and interests. In their minds, the assurance of continued U.S. global dominance depends upon “a military that is strong and ready to meet both present and future challenges; a foreign policy that boldly and purposefully promotes American principles abroad, and national leadership that accepts the United States' global responsibilities.”
In a policy paper entitled "Rebuilding America’s Defenses," they elaborate upon four core missions for U.S. military forces:
- Defend the American homeland.
- Fight and decisively win multiple, simultaneous major theater wars.
- Perform the "constabulary" duties associated with shaping the security environment in critical regions.
- Transform U.S. forces to exploit the "revolution in military affairs."
Pause. Go back. Reread.
Fight and decisively win multiple, simultaneous major theater wars.
They were planning on wars.
Other points include maintaining nuclear strategic superiority, increasing the military and defense spending, developing and deploying global missile defenses, creating the U.S. Space Forces to control space and cyberspace (no joke)… I could go on but you get the point. And that was the moment when it hit me, when I knew it was certain what I had only worried before was true: that no number of protesters in the streets, no number of letters to the editor and to politicians, no number of counter-arguments from the U.N. was going to stop Bush from bombing Iraq.
This was a war machine that was in the works long before I even knew it, and why would I have? PNAC’s ideology, which I could now see had unmistakably shaped the Bush administration’s foreign policy, was not a clear part of their platform during the Bush 2000 campaign. The PNAC founders themselves knew it wouldn’t be popular: “Such a Reaganite policy of military strength and moral clarity may not be fashionable today…” Theirs was a Cold War mentality with a worldview strikingly different from mine and that of my peers.
In our generation, many of us were raised in educational environments that emphasized the importance of respect for other cultures and tolerance for those who may seem different from us. We have come of age in an era of globalization. We are obsessed with travel. We have friends from other countries. Many of us have been to other countries on exchange programs and university semesters abroad. Many of us speak other languages. We are excited about our world and our neighbors and hungry to learn more about each other.
The view of the world implicit in the Project for the New American Century is of a dangerous place with threats lurking in every corner and in every corner a potential conquest. While its founders seem to believe we would all be safer were we to follow their plan and militarize our planet and our skies, a byproduct of their mechanism is a public that is scared out of its wits by each other: Look at your neighbor and see her as the other. Look at that country and see it as the enemy.
Though I disagree with their worldview, it would be ingenuous of me not to acknowledge that there are threats to our personal safety out there. As someone who lost a family friend on September 11th, 2001, I know this all too well. However, it is possible to address these threats without resorting to war-hawking and imperialism. To do so, it is necessary to build a foreign policy based upon mutual respect and cooperation among nations, especially in matters of war, rather than one rooted in empire and violence. I want my leaders to reflect this reality and to be responsive to the people they are supposed to be representing, and not to use one of the narrowest margins of victory in presidential election history as a mandate to advance an extremist agenda. To appropriate the language of the PNAC founders, "we are in danger of squandering the opportunity" for a more peaceful world built upon the achievements in tolerance of past decades: a generation that is willing to globally look each other in the eye.
I am no longer so naïve or optimistic about the Bush administration. In just under four years they have further divided our nation, divided nations from each other, and brought on a steady military and civilian death toll, amid other unenviable accomplishments. That is why participating in this election is so important, because the world that Cheney, Rumsfeld, and Wolfowitz envision, and are attempting to construct, is not one that I want to live in, and it is up to each one of us to create the world that we know is possible.
// posted by jenny at
01:04 PM
