PNAC Paper Explains Much about Bush Positions

If anyone else is confused as to why the United States gets mad when another country catches up to our 20 year old technology, please read the Rebuilding America’s Defenses document put out by the Project for the New American Century.

It helped explain our position on nuclear weapons, space weapons, controlling cyberspace, and the Middle East. Iraq is mentioned as the clear and present danger but Iran merits inclusion. “Over the long term, Iran may well prove as large a threat to U.S. interests in the Gulf as Iraq has.” (page 17)

A key U.S. armed forces mission of the future is “control of space and cyberspace” (page 51). This is needed to retain American global leadership. The document goes on to state “Much as control of the high seas—and the protection of international commerce—defined global powers in the past, so will control of the new “international commons” be a key for a world power in the future. An America incapable of protecting its interests or that of its allies in space or the “info-sphere” will find it difficult to exert global political leadership.

Now I know why the Bush administration got its undies in a wad over the Chinese missile taking out their unused weather satellite. U.S. control of the space commons is in jeopardy.

On page 52 is a list of regimes deeply hostile to America. It includes North Korea, Iraq, Iran, Libya and Syria. With North Korea isolated and starving, Libya converted, Iraq invaded and now the shining democracy of the region, this leaves Iran and Syria for U.S intervention. My guess is the troop buildup in Iraq and the Persian Gulf has as its aim containing any Iranian blowback after an Israeli raid on their nuclear enrichment facilities.

This would further another PNAC object, clear U.S. nuclear weapons superiority. In true Gordian knot fashion the report says this about nuclear weapons.

“But it is precisely because we have such power (nuclear weapons) that smaller adversarial states, looking for an equalizing advantage, are determined to acquire their own weapons of mass destruction.” (page 7)

In other words because we have them, smaller countries want them to reduce the power differential, therefore we need more to increase our power advantage. Huh? Who writes this hypocritical stuff?

“U.S. nuclear superiority is nothing to be ashamed of; rather, it will be an essential element in preserving American leadership in a more complex and chaotic world.” (page 8)

Someone might be ashamed. “And they will beat their swords into plowshares and train in ways of war no more…”

For a list of those who believe in war see the signers of their various position PNAC papers. It reads like a who’s who of the Bush administrations and includes Dick Cheney, Lewis Libby, Paul Wolfowitz, John Bolton, Frank Carlucci, Donald Rumsfeld, Bill Bennett, Zalmay Khalilzad, Richard Armitage, Robert Zoellick, Jeb Bush, Dan Quayle, Daniel Pipes, Peter Rodman, Paula Dobriansky and Elliott Abrams.