[ Tuesday, August 10, 2004 ]
THE PATH TO WAR
Neoconsevative Jewish Zionists Dancing In The Corridors of Power
During the 1990s the notion of toppling Saddam's regime was championed by a circle of neoconservative thinkers, led by Richard Perle, a former assistant secretary of defense for international-security policy under President Reagan, and Paul Wolfowitz, an undersecretary of defense for policy for George H. W. Bush.
The neoconservatives first gained notice for their hard-line views on dealing with the Soviet Union during George H. W. Bush's administration, in which Cheney served as secretary of defense. During the Clinton years, the neocons, quite a few of whom concerned themselves with hard-line defense policies for Israel, remained tied to one another and to Cheney through a number of right-wing think tanks and institutes. One of the most influential of them is the American Enterprise Institute (A.E.I.), whose alumni include Cheney, neoconservative godfather Irving Kristol, Perle, Newt Gingrich, and failed Supreme Court nominee Robert Bork.
In 1992, Wolfowitz's office drafted a document called the Defense Planning Guidance, which said that the U.S. might be faced with the question of whether to take military action to prevent the use or development of W.M.D.-a precursor to the so-called Bush Doctrine, supposedly formu-
lated by the current president. In 1998, Perle and Wolfowitz, along with Donald Rumsfeld and 15 others, sent a much-talked-about letter to President Bill Clinton urging regime change in Iraq and a more aggressive foreign policy in the Middle East.
art [4:05 AM]
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