last week on TV, (irish TV) on one of the many, many debates on the war, I heard someone remark that
“6 people, of which 4 are in the current Bush administration, wrote a letter to President Clinton in 1998 (or 1999, can’t remember), urging for a pre-emptive strike on Iraq”.
my question:
can someone point me in the general direction where I can find out if this is true or not?
And I’d like to know who all 6 were, aswell.
Obviously.
Key in that statement and others like it is the “protection of American INTERESTS.” This is Republican, corporate lingo that places issues of economics - i.e. profits - way ahead of any others, including moral and ethical issues involving the way people choose to live their lives, here and abroad. Scary times, indeed.
I think one of the most interesting sites is PBS’ Frontline, which seems to offer the most information on the evolution of the Bush Doctrine, if you can navigate the site.
The Wolfowitz-Rumsfeld letter is only the tip of the iceberg. Wolfowitz authored a draft document entitled Defense Planning Guidance. It scared the piss out of someone in the Department of Defense in 1992, parts of it were leaked, and Dick Cheney was tasked with re-writing it into a kinder, gentler document. The orginal was obviously picked back up and in September, 2002, the sentiment behind it became America’s formal policy.
]url=http://www.defenselink.mil/bios/depsecdef_bio.html]Dr. Paul Wolfowitz is currently the Deputy Secretary of Defense in the WII Administration.
Yes, thank you Sofa King, interesting sites, indeed.
especially the pbs.org one. A lot of info on it, there.
I can’t believe the newamericancentury people, I mean, are they for real? And why? Why oh why do you want the whole world to be like yourself? How boring would that be? Is this not getting dangerously close to admitting they want to govern the whole world? Why is there so little opposition to this? Do a lot of US citizens really think like this?
After all, the whole reaganite worldview is what they want to go back to, apparantly, but that was the 80’s, a decade that was notoriously greedy and corrupt. it was the era of the YUP for Mike’s sake. I thought public opinion had swung a bit more to the left, what with everyone needing to be PC and all that.
so where did it go wrong? And who are these people steering the world so close to the edge of a precipice? Do they not realize this whole thing is goingv to blow up in their faces? Do they really think they can pull this off?
I ask again, why?
(sorry, bit of a rant, I know, but i’m flabbergasted by this. Truly gobsmacked)
why is everyone so quiet about this? This is a genuine site, Jeb Bush is on it, so is Wolfowitz and Rumsfeld and Cheney… (i mean their names are used, I presume WITH their permission)
All people who decide the worlds future. Are they really just power mongers? or what is it?
Do people think that by ignoring it, it’ll go away?
It’s either that, or denial, or (I hardly dare even think it) they agree…
I’ve sent those links on to people I know, who’ll send it on who’ll send it on…
At least in Europe, I’ll raise some more awareness about the Bush administration’s “policies” and “standards”
At the risk of taking this into GD territory (which is where it looks to be headed, anyway), I’ve read through those documents, and can’t seem to find the really insidious parts.
The letter to Clinton says, in a nutshell, that Saddam isn’t complying with weapons inspectors. That as time progresses, it will be more difficult to check up on him. That we’re pretty damned sure he’s trying stockpile WMDs, and that the only solution seems to be to pre-emptively strike him, under the authority of the cease-fire we negotiated with him. And isn’t this pretty much the way it played out, over the course of the next decade? A bunch of people say that we should take out Saddam now, because if we don’t we’ll just have to take him out later, and this is supposed to be frightening? I suppose if you’re scared by the idea of conservatives being right, maybe, but you’ll have to excuse me for not shaking in my boots.
The excerpts from Wolfowitz’s “Defense Planning Guidance” is a little less diplomatic, but still pretty much an application of common sense from those who actually paid attention to the Cold War.
Yeah, and? Are you saying that letting our enemies become as powerful as us is a good thing? Doesn’t the idea of Saddam or Kim Il Jung controlling something with the scope of the USSR seem… troublesome?
Translation: Show other nations that they don’t need to be belligerent to play with the big boys. We won’t threaten their interests, so they don’t need to worry. Slobovia doesn’t need to fear that some other nation is going to come in and steal all their resources, and they don’t need to posture in order to prevent this from happening.
Okay, I take it back. These fascist thugs want to limit international violence? And encourage the spread of democracy?! Dear God, someone alert the media to this Hitlerian menace before it’s too late!
I can see how this would seem nefarious to those who hold the UN as some utopian ideal for how the world should work. Since I think the UN is one small step above useless at this point, I kind of agree. The UN certainly didn’t do anything of value with the Iraq problem. Why should we rely on them to address other threats?
So… umm… yeah. Not exactly a document rife with horrors. Maybe I’ve just already been tainted by the VRWC.
Jeff