Two years ago a project set up by the men who now surround George W Bush
said what America needed was “a new Pearl Harbor”. Its published aims
have come alarmingly true, writes John Pilger

The threat posed by US terrorism to the security of nations and
individuals was outlined in prophetic detail in a document written more
than two years ago and disclosed only recently. What was needed for
America to dominate much of humanity and the world’s resources, it said,
was “some catastrophic and catalysing event - like a new Pearl Harbor”.

The attacks of 11 September 2001 provided the “new Pearl Harbor”,
described as “the opportunity of ages”. The extremists who have since
exploited 11 September come from the era of Ronald Reagan, when
far-right groups and “think-tanks” were established to avenge the
American “defeat” in Vietnam. In the 1990s, there was an added agenda:
to justify the denial of a “peace dividend” following the cold war. The
Project for the New American Century was formed, along with the American
Enterprise Institute, the Hudson Institute and others that have since
merged the ambitions of the Reagan administration with those of the
current Bush regime.

One of George W Bush’s “thinkers” is Richard Perle. I interviewed Perle
when he was advising Reagan; and when he spoke about “total war”, I
mistakenly dismissed him as mad. He recently used the term again in
describing America’s “war on terror”. “No stages,” he said. "This is
total war. We are fighting a variety of enemies. There are lots of them
out there. All this talk about first we are going to do Afghanistan,
then we will do Iraq . . . this is entirely the wrong way to go about
it. If we just let our vision of the world go forth, and we embrace it
entirely and we don’t try to piece together clever diplomacy, but just
wage a total war . . . our children will sing great songs about us years
from now."

Perle is one of the founders of the Project for the New American
Century, the PNAC. Other founders include Dick Cheney, now
vice-president, Donald Rumsfeld, defence secretary, Paul Wolfowitz,
deputy defence secretary, I Lewis Libby, Cheney’s chief of staff,
William J Bennett, Reagan’s education secretary, and Zalmay Khalilzad,
Bush’s ambassador to Afghanistan. These are the modern chartists of
American terrorism.

The PNAC’s seminal report, Rebuilding America’s Defences: strategy,
forces and resources for a new century, was a blueprint of American aims
in all but name. Two years ago it recommended an increase in
arms-spending by $48bn so that Washington could "fight and win multiple,
simultaneous major theatre wars". This has happened. It said the United
States should develop “bunker-buster” nuclear weapons and make "star
wars" a national priority. This is happening. It said that, in the event
of Bush taking power, Iraq should be a target. And so it is.

As for Iraq’s alleged “weapons of mass destruction”, these were
dismissed, in so many words, as a convenient excuse, which it is. "While
the unresolved conflict with Iraq provides the immediate justification,“it says,”the need for a substantial American force presence in the Gulf
transcends the issue of the regime of Saddam Hussein."

How has this grand strategy been implemented? A series of articles in
the Washington Post, co-authored by Bob Woodward of Watergate fame and
based on long interviews with senior members of the Bush administration,
reveals how 11 September was manipulated.

On the morning of 12 September 2001, without any evidence of who the
hijackers were, Rumsfeld demanded that the US attack Iraq. According to
Woodward, Rumsfeld told a cabinet meeting that Iraq should be "a
principal target of the first round in the war against terrorism". Iraq
was temporarily spared only because Colin Powell, the secretary of
state, persuaded Bush that "public opinion has to be prepared before a
move against Iraq is possible". Afghanistan was chosen as the softer
option. If Jonathan Steele’s estimate in the Guardian is correct, some
20,000 people in Afghanistan paid the price of this debate with their
lives.

Time and again, 11 September is described as an “opportunity”. In last
April’s New Yorker, the investigative reporter Nicholas Lemann wrote
that Bush’s most senior adviser, Condoleezza Rice, told him she had
called together senior members of the National Security Council and
asked them "to think about ’how do you capitalise on these
opportunities’“, which she compared with those of”1945 to 1947": the
start of the cold war.

Since 11 September, America has established bases at the gateways to all
the major sources of fossil fuels, especially central Asia. The Unocal
oil company is to build a pipeline across Afghanistan. Bush has scrapped
the Kyoto Protocol on greenhouse gas emissions, the war crimes
provisions of the International Criminal Court and the anti-ballistic
missile treaty. He has said he will use nuclear weapons against
non-nuclear states “if necessary”. Under cover of propaganda about
Iraq’s alleged weapons of mass destruction, the Bush regime is
developing new weapons of mass destruction that undermine international
treaties on biological and chemical warfare.

In the Los Angeles Times, the military analyst William Arkin describes a
secret army set up by Donald Rumsfeld, similar to those run by Richard
Nixon and Henry Kissinger and which Congress outlawed. This
“super-intelligence support activity” will bring together the "CIA and
military covert action, information warfare, and deception". According
to a classified document prepared for Rumsfeld, the new organisation,
known by its Orwellian moniker as the Proactive Pre-emptive Operations
Group, or P2OG, will provoke terrorist attacks which would then require
“counter-attack” by the United States on countries "harbouring the
terrorists".

In other words, innocent people will be killed by the United States.
This is reminiscent of Operation Northwoods, the plan put to President
Kennedy by his military chiefs for a phoney terrorist campaign -
complete with bombings, hijackings, plane crashes and dead Americans -
as justification for an invasion of Cuba. Kennedy rejected it. He was
assassinated a few months later. Now Rumsfeld has resurrected
Northwoods, but with resources undreamt of in 1963 and with no global
rival to invite caution.

You have to keep reminding yourself this is not fantasy: that truly
dangerous men, such as Perle and Rumsfeld and Cheney, have power. The
thread running through their ruminations is the importance of the media:
"the prioritised task of bringing on board journalists of repute to
accept our position“.”Our position" is code for lying. Certainly, as a journalist, I have
never known official lying to be more pervasive than today. We may laugh
at the vacuities in Tony Blair’s “Iraq dossier” and Jack Straw’s inept
lie that Iraq has developed a nuclear bomb (which his minions rushed to
“explain”). But the more insidious lies, justifying an unprovoked attack
on Iraq and linking it to would-be terrorists who are said to lurk in
every Tube station, are routinely channelled as news. They are not news;
they are black propaganda.

This corruption makes journalists and broadcasters mere ventriloquists’
dummies. An attack on a nation of 22 million suffering people is
discussed by liberal commentators as if it were a subject at an academic
seminar, at which pieces can be pushed around a map, as the old
imperialists used to do.

The issue for these humanitarians is not primarily the brutality of
modern imperial domination, but how “bad” Saddam Hussein is. There is no
admission that their decision to join the war party further seals the
fate of perhaps thousands of innocent Iraqis condemned to wait on
America’s international death row. Their doublethink will not work. You
cannot support murderous piracy in the name of humanitarianism.
Moreover, the extremes of American fundamentalism that we now face have
been staring at us for too long for those of good heart and sense not to
recognise them.

With thanks to Norm Dixon and Chris Floyd