Ten Years Later

Tom Schaller alerts us to the fact that today is the tenth anniversary of the Project for a New American Century's statement of principles. All that has, naturally, worked out beautifully.

The actual statement is fairly useless propaganda. If you want a pretty decent "in their own words" statement of the neoconservative foreign policy agenda, I'd go back to the slightly older Bill Kristol / Bob Kagan collaboration "Toward a Neo-Reaganite Foreign Policy" which lays out the argument that, among other things, a foreign policy that creates a lot of dangerous crises will be politically helpful to Republicans. Charles Krauthammer's 1991 essay "The Unipolar Moment" and his 2002 followup "The Unipolar Moment Revisited" are also key texts.

Comments

you've ran your links together and they don't appear to work matt

Posted by edmund | June 5, 2007 12:50 PM

THe link is some javascript BS.

Posted by yoyo | June 5, 2007 1:06 PM

The main significance of the Statement lies in the signatories. Not only do you see pretty much the entire Bush foreign policy crew: Cheney, Rumsfield, Wolfowitz, Abrams, Libby, Khalilzad, you also got your culture warriors in Bauer, Bennett and others, and your intellectual wing of Fukuyama, Kagan and Podhoretz, and your outside hawks in Gaffney and Ikles.

Basically you have the entire cast of people who exercised the equivalent of a Constitutional coup signing their names three years in advance of carrying it out. It is an extraordinary list. You even have Steve Forbes and Dan Quayle.

Interestingly it would appear that George was considered the second string Bush. JEB making the cut and him not.

Posted by Bruce Webb | June 5, 2007 1:23 PM

Bruce,
Even Papi Bush himself said the Jebster was "The One". It all got screwed up because either the Jebster lost a primary or general election(I forget which). It allowed Commander Guy to leap frog him since Texas was dumb enough to elect him governor before the Jebster was finally elected governor in Florida.

Posted by Joe Klein's conscience | June 5, 2007 1:37 PM

Regarding the Jebster --

Supposedly, how he lost the election in 1994 was an interesting event (so I here from people who've been in FL longer than I have).

Chiles, the then-governor, had various health (both physical and mental) issues which were affecting how he was doing in the polls. The smart and smug Jeb Bush seemed sure to win. Then, at some point in some debate Chiles brings up a bit of supposed Southern folk wisdom -- "the old he-coon walks just before the light of day".

Jeb Bush had no idea what this ment. The audience had no idea what this ment. For all we know Chiles had no idea what this ment -- but as Jeb Bush struggled to pretend like he knew what these words of Southron wisdom were and not to be seen as an outsider, everyone then realized, evidently, how little he knew about FL.

Ann Richards I'm sure did the same sort of thing to GW Bush ... but somehow that Bush won? And I thought FL voters were addled ... remind me not to trust the TX electorate!

Posted by DAS | June 5, 2007 2:52 PM

I think W might not be on this list since (to my knowledge) none of these folks were sitting officeholders at the time.

Posted by Rob | June 5, 2007 3:36 PM

"Ann Richards I'm sure did the same sort of thing to GW Bush"

Yes, but if George spluttered some nonsense in response, it likely went unnoticed.

‘Fool me Once...shame on...shame on you...Folmuah can’t get fooled again’

Posted by Njorl | June 5, 2007 3:44 PM

While we're on inauspicious anniversaries, it's the thirty-ninth anniversary of Sirhan Sirhan's shooting of Robert F. Kennedy.

Posted by Tyrone Slothrop | June 5, 2007 4:16 PM

more auspiciously, it's the 60th anniversary of marshall's commencement address at harvard announcing the marshall plan

Posted by pt | June 5, 2007 4:25 PM

It would seem that this is, or at least was, a hegemonic window of time when the U.S. could push hard and smart to get a handle on WMD proliferation. We seem to have recently mixed in too much hard with not enough smart. Maybe there's still time to fix the mix.

Posted by ferd | June 5, 2007 5:12 PM