Bush's vision: The PNAC manifesto

It has often been observed that Bush's unilateralist foreign policy is based to a large degree on ideas elaborated by the Project for a New American Century (PNAC) in its September 2000 report, "Rebuilding America's Defenses"(*.pdf file)

The 2000 report lists Donald Kagan and Gary Schmitt as project (PNAC) co-chairmen and Thomas Donnelly as the principal author.  Schmitt is also the executive director of PNAC.  In the introduction, they explain that they composed the paper through a series of seminars with "outstanding defense specialists," but they did not ask seminar participants to specifically approve the final product.

The project participants are listed at the end of the paper, and include names that have become much more familiar to the public in the four years since, like: I. Lewis ("Scooter") Libby (now Dick Cheney's chief of staff), Paul Wolfowitz (now Deputy Defense Secretary and one of the main architects of the Iraq War), Abram Shulsky (who directed the Office of Special Plans for Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz), Stephen Cambone (now Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence and according to Seymour Hersh a key player in setting up the torture system at Abu Ghuraib) , Eliot Cohen, Robert Kagan and William Kristol (of the Weekly Standard).

One finds very little about the problem of transnational terrorism in this report.  In fact, terrorism appears only as a peripheral problem in this outlook.  But the notion of the desirability of unilateral US action in foreign policy is elaborated clearly.  The Introduction declares:

The United States is the world’s only superpower, combining preeminent military power, global technological leadership, and the world’s largest economy. Moreover, America stands at the head of a system of alliances which includes the world’s other leading democratic powers. At present the United States faces no global rival. America’s grand strategy should aim to preserve and extend this advantageous position as far into the future as possible. There are, however, potentially powerful states dissatisfied with the current situation and eager to change it, if they can, in directions that endanger the relatively peaceful, prosperous and free condition the world enjoys today. Up to now, they have been deterred from doing so by the capability and global presence of American military power. But, as that power declines, relatively and absolutely, the happy conditions that follow from it will be inevitably undermined. [my emphasis]

The two notable features of this quotation are that PNAC (1) sees it desirable that the US should preserve its position of overwhelming dominance in the world, including "the global presence of American military power"; and, (2) the threat to that goal is made up of "potentially powerful states."

In effect, the PNAC outlook is an attempt to conceive the post-Cold War world in the same framework the world of the US-Soviet rivalry from 1945-1991.  The document highlights the statement:

At present the United States faces no global rival. America’s grand strategy should aim to preserve and extend this advantageous position as far into the future as possible.

PNAC predecessors

Two particularly important predecessors of the PNAC approach are "Team B" of George H.W. Bush's time as head of the CIA, and the Defense Policy Guidance group of the first President Bush's administration.

Tom Wicker succinctly describes Team B in his biography George Herbert Walker Bush (2004):

... [P]erhaps Bush's most significant act as director of intelligence [was] the acceptance of Team B as essentially a monitor of the CIA's work.  Team B was a group of supposedly nonpartisan authorities on national security, none of them goernment officials, chaired by Richard Pipes, an expatriate Russian and a harvard historian of the Soviet Union.  Team B was appointed to review CIA intelligence estimates, working from the same data as had the agency.  Bush's predecessors as DCI [director of central intelligence], including William Colby, had resisted such "threat reappraisal"; but when pressed by the Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board, Bush agreed to it with a typically breezy notation on a memo: "Let her fly! O.K. GB."

Like the Pentagon's misbegotten Office of Special Plans during the second President Bush's administration, which played such a large role in giving undue credibility to the fabricated claims of Iranian agent Ahmed Chalabi's Iraqi National Council, the idea behind Team B was to have militant hawks cherry-pick intelligence information to justify a far more exaggerated picture of foreign threats than the CIA's analyses showed was warranted.  Which, as Wicker explains, Team B was happy to do:

Team B proceeded to dispute CIA threat analyses, which then were focused on the Soviet Union, on almost every point - recommending higher defense spending in order to "catch up" with what it insisted was growing, if not superior, Soviet military strength. Team B's report was leaked and became the founding document of the so-called Committee on the Present Danger (CPD), composed of prestigious Republican and Democratic hawks.  The CPD drove home to the public during the Carter administration and the first Reagan administration the idea that a "window of vulnerability" existed, which the United States had to close or fall into second place militarily.

For those who heard the frightening string of reports about Saddam Hussein's thriving nuclear program and terrifying stockpile of chemical and biological weapons (all fictitional, we now know), the Team B approach will sound distinctly familiar.  As will Wicker's description of the immediate results of their work:

Team B and the CPD were egregiously wrong, as forthcomng events in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union were to demonstrate.  But the committee's credibility and the American public's fear of the supposed Communist superpower were so great that the Reagan administration - Reagan himself a willing listener - unleashed a wave of [higher] defense spending throughout the 1980s, most of it unnecessary (though widely and erroneously credited today with forcing the Soviet Union into collapse).  Team B's arguments also made a strong imprssion on George H.W. Bush - as wouldbe suggested in his first presidential campaign in 1980.

To complete the picture of the Team B approach: Team B and the Committee on the Present Danger bitterly criticized the CIA's estimates of Soviet capabilities for being too optimistic, for underestimating the threat from the USSR.  The CIA's estimates turned out to have been on the whole overly pessimistic, considerably overestimating the dangers presented by the Soviet opponent.

PNAC is explicit in linking their 2000 statement with an effort from the Defense Policy Guidance effort during the Bush I administration under then-Defense Secretary Dick Cheney.

In broad terms, we saw the project as building upon the defense strategy outlined by the Cheney Defense Department in the waning days of the Bush Administration. The Defense Policy Guidance (DPG) drafted in the early months of 1992 provided a blueprint for maintaining U.S. preeminence, precluding the rise of a great power rival, and shaping the international security order in line with American principles and interests. Leaked before it had been formally approved, the document was criticized as an effort by "cold warriors" to keep defense spending high and cuts in forces small despite the collapse of the Soviet Union; not surprisingly, it was subsequently buried by the new [Clinton] administration.

The association of the PNAC outlook with the DPG is helpful in understanding its perspective.  Besides a deep suspicion of international agreements and alliances as means for advancing American interests, this outlook also tookthe viewpoint of those nuclear strategists who insisted on worst case projections as the basis of policy, even to the point of grossly exaggerated the threat facingthe country.

A very frightening world

A more recent example of this Team B/DPG/PNAC perspective, and one in which its painfully easy to see the problems and risks, comes from Richard Perle, one of the chief architects of the Bush Doctrine and of the Iraq War in particular.  Testifying to a Senate Foreign Relations subcommitte in March 2001 - months before the 9/11 attack and ten months before Bush's "axis of evil" speech that moved war against Iraq to a top priority, Perle told the Senators:

Does Saddam now have weapons of mass destruction? Sure he does.  We know he has chemical weapons.  We know he has biological weapons. ... How far he's gone on the nuclear-weapons side I don't think we really know.  My guess is it's further than we think.  It's always further than we think, because we limit ourselves, as we think about this, to what we're able to prove and demonstrate. ... And unless you believe that we have uncovered everything, you have to assume there is more than we're able to report. (my emphasis; quoted in Seymour Hersh, Chain of Command [2004])

This aspect of the neoconservative vision is important to keep in mind.  While it may sound comforting to hear that America should always maintain its supremacy in the world (comforting to Americans anyway!), PNAC's approach is to paint the threats to this status in the most drastic terms.  Even to a point, as Perle put it so well, far beyond "'what we're able to prove and demonstrate."

The origins of this view are part their mode of strategic thinking, part cynical posturing to justify ever-expanding military spending, and part blind ideology and fanaticism.  A great part of its appeal comes from the strategic vision.  The cynicism leads to exaggeration and dishonesty - and, in Perle's case, to regular old-fashioned war profiteering.  The fanaticism makes them willing to take the country to war, as in Iraq, based on lies, fear-mongering and cooked intelligence.

The need for an enemy

The PNAC report in its Section 1 recognizes that the urgent need for more troops and weapons that is the main message of the report suffers from the lack of a central enemy against which all these armaments are so urgently needed:

After the victories of the past century – two world wars, the Cold War and most recently the Gulf War – the United States finds itself as the uniquely powerful leader of a coalition of free and prosperous states that faces no immediate great-power challenge.

But the PNAC vision sees no reason that the radical shift in the world strategic situation after the collapse of the Soviet Union should have diminished the pace of American preparation for war one iota.  Because war is America's permanent state, in the nightmarish PNAC view of the world:

Underlying the failed strategic and defense reviews of the past decade [i.e., Cheney's DPG and follow-on polemics from "neoconservative" hardliners] is the idea that the collapse of the Soviet Union had created a "strategic pause." In other words, until another great-power challenger emerges, the United States can enjoy a respite from the demands of international leadership. Like a boxer between championship bouts, America can afford to relax and live the good life, certain that there would be enough time to shape up for the next big challenge. Thus the United States could afford to reduce its military forces, close bases overseas, halt major weapons programs and reap the financial benefits of the "peace dividend." But as we have seen over the past decade, there has been no shortage of powers around the world who have taken the collapse of the Soviet empire as an opportunity to expand their own influence and challenge the American-led security order.

Bad  metaphors and tendentious historical analogies seem to be particular specialties of the neoconservative crowd, as I've suggested before.  But the image of the boxer here is at least revealing about PNAC's view.  An enduring period of international peace, or at least minimal involvement by the US in military conflicts, is simply not part of the picture for them.  Nor is some kind of international peace based on international law and multilateral institutions.  The see the US as a boxer, who must go from one global military challenge to the next.

Not having a Soviet-style enemy makes that difficult.  Their reference to the Gulf War suggests that a Saddam Hussein can suffice for short periods in that role.  But the 2000 PNAC report suggests that "the new strategic center of concern appears to be shifting to East Asia."  By that they appear to mean mostly China.  But it's important to remember that the PNAC program is at its core an endless arms race in search of enemies to justify it, and North Korea is one of the main justifications that has been used for the Star Wars missle defense program, a massively expensive boondoggle that the Bush administration has carried forward.

But they express their grand vision in terms of preserving American dominance.  The idea that American democratic values are also good to promote is there.  But it's cearly secondary to the notion of preserving American predominance in the world and preventing any potential rival or group of rivals from offering a serious challenge to that world dominance:

Over the decade of the post-Cold-War period, however, almost everything has changed. The Cold War world was a bipolar world; the 21st century world is – for the moment, at least – decidedly unipolar, with America as the world’s "sole superpower." America’s strategic goal used to be containment of the Soviet Union; today the task is to preserve an international security environment conducive to American interests and ideals. The military’s job during the Cold War was to deter Soviet expansionism. Today its task is to secure and expand the "zones of democratic peace;" to deter the rise of a new great-power competitor; defend key regions of Europe, East Asia and the Middle East; and to preserve American preeminence through the coming transformation of war made possible by new technologies.

And the PNAC vision includes the need for an endless series of wars to preserve that dominance, which includes the need to "defend key region of Europe, East Asian and the Middle East" against enemies yet to be defined. 

From 1945 to 1990, U.S. forces prepared themselves for a single, global war that might be fought across many theaters; in the new century, the prospect is for a variety of theater wars around the world, against separate and distinct adversaries pursuing separate and distinct goals.

The concept of The Terrorists as the global enemy was not part of PNAC's assumption; that was a 9/11 convenience.  In its application as the Bush Doctrine, PNAC's strategy focusing on a massive arms race and enemy states has been implemented, with The Terrorists used as the enemy still missing in the 2000 report.

The bulk of the "Rebuilding America's Defenses" report reads like a military-industrial-complex wish list for weapons systems.  Much of that argumentation is interesting and important.  But my focus here has been on PNAC vision statements.  So I'll conclude by mentioning PNAC's "four essential missions" for the United States:

HOMELAND DEFENSE. America must defend its homeland.  During the Cold War, nuclear deterrence was the key element in homeland defense; it remains essential. But the new century has brought with it new challenges. While reconfiguring its nuclear force, the United States also must counteract the effects of the proliferation of ballistic missiles and weapons of mass destruction that may soon allow lesser states to deter U.S. military action by threatening U.S. allies and the American homeland itself.  Of all the new and current missions for U.S. armed forces, this must have priority. (my emphasis)

This "essential mission"statement is particularly revealing, especially since now we have come to think of "homeland defense" much more in terms of anti-terrorism.  By "we," I mean the general public, and of course that's the way the Bush administration uses the term, as well.  But in terms of strategic priorities, the Bush administration is still operating on PNAC's 2000 approach, as stated there.  Terrorism is not mentioned as an element of "homeland defense" in the PNAC mission statement just quoted.  Homeland defense for PNAC means the Star Wars boondoggle.

LARGE WARS. Second, the United States must retain sufficient forces able to rapidly deploy and win multiple simultaneous large-scale wars and also to be able to respond to unanticipated contingencies in regions where it does not maintain forward-based forces. This resembles the "two-war" standard that has been the basis of U.S. force planning over the past decade. Yet this standard needs to be updated to account for new realities and potential new conflicts.

CONSTABULARY DUTIES. Third, the Pentagon must retain forces to preserve the current peace in ways that fall short of conduction major theater campaigns. A decade’s experience and the policies of two administrations have shown that such forces must be expanded to meet the needs of the new, long-term NATO mission in the Balkans, the continuing no-fly-zone and other missions in Southwest Asia, and other presence missions in vital regions of East Asia. These duties are today’s most frequent missions, requiring forces configured for combat but capable of long-term, independent constabulary operations.

This is one aspect of PNAC's approach in the 2000 report that Rumsfeld's version of "defense transformation" has not embraced, as we see in the catastrophic failures in the occupation phase of the Iraq War.  PNAC called for an increase of some 200,000 troops, which would almost certainly require a draft under today's conditions.  Rummy's faith in air power was his basis for believing the Afghan and Iraq Wars could be fought successfully with minimal "boots on the ground."

TRANSFORM U.S. ARMED FORCES. Finally, the Pentagon must begin now to exploit the so-called "revolution in military affairs," sparked by the introduction of advanced technologies into military systems; this must be regarded as a separate and critical mission worthy of a share of force structure and defense budgets.

"Transformation" has been a buzzword for a number of years now.  PNAC's version calls for more extensive high-tech weapons and communications systems, some of which are actually useful to the armed forces, and not solely to the manufacturers and software companies that sell them to the military.

That is the PNAC vision, a world in which the US maintains overwhelming dominance, and sees itself as the leading power not only in defending itself, but in Europe, the Middle East and Asia as well.  And the key to that position in PNAC's view is an endless arms race and an endless series of wars by the United States.  It sees international law and international organizations as more of a hindrance to these goal than a necessary element of American policy.

All that's missing in the PNAC vision in "Rebuilding America's Defenses" is a clearly-agreed-upon enemy against whom to direct this military/political strategy.

Tags: bush doctrine