Letter to President Clinton on Iraq

We are writing you because we are convinced that current American policy toward Iraq is not succeeding, and that we may soon face a threat in the Middle East more serious than any we have known since the end of the Cold War. In your upcoming State of the Union Address, you have an opportunity to chart a clear and determined course for meeting this threat. We urge you to seize that opportunity, and to enunciate a new strategy that would secure the interests of the U.S. and our friends and allies around the world. That strategy should aim, above all, at the removal of Saddam Hussein’s regime from power. We stand ready to offer our full support in this difficult but necessary endeavor.

The policy of “containment” of Saddam Hussein has been steadily eroding over the past several months. As recent events have demonstrated, we can no longer depend on our partners in the Gulf War coalition to continue to uphold the sanctions or to punish Saddam when he blocks or evades UN inspections. Our ability to ensure that Saddam Hussein is not producing weapons of mass destruction, therefore, has substantially diminished. Even if full inspections were eventually to resume, which now seems highly unlikely, experience has shown that it is difficult if not impossible to monitor Iraq’s chemical and biological weapons production. The lengthy period during which the inspectors will have been unable to enter many Iraqi facilities has made it even less likely that they will be able to uncover all of Saddam’s secrets. As a result, in the not-too-distant future we will be unable to determine with any reasonable level of confidence whether Iraq does or does not possess such weapons.

Such uncertainty will, by itself, have a seriously destabilizing effect on the entire Middle East. It hardly needs to be added that if Saddam does acquire the capability to deliver weapons of mass destruction, as he is almost certain to do if we continue along the present course, the safety of American troops in the region, of our friends and allies like Israel and the moderate Arab states, and a significant portion of the world’s supply of oil will all be put at hazard. As you have rightly declared, Mr. President, the security of the world in the first part of the 21st century will be determined largely by how we handle this threat.

Given the magnitude of the threat, the current policy, which depends for its success upon the steadfastness of our coalition partners and upon the cooperation of Saddam Hussein, is dangerously inadequate. The only acceptable strategy is one that eliminates the possibility that Iraq will be able to use or threaten to use weapons of mass destruction. In the near term, this means a willingness to undertake military action as diplomacy is clearly failing. In the long term, it means removing Saddam Hussein and his regime from power. That now needs to become the aim of American foreign policy.

We urge you to articulate this aim, and to turn your Administration's attention to implementing a strategy for removing Saddam's regime from power. This will require a full complement of diplomatic, political and military efforts. Although we are fully aware of the dangers and difficulties in implementing this policy, we believe the dangers of failing to do so are far greater. We believe the U.S. has the authority under existing UN resolutions to take the necessary steps, including military steps, to protect our vital interests in the Gulf. In any case, American policy cannot continue to be crippled by a misguided insistence on unanimity in the UN Security Council.

We urge you to act decisively. If you act now to end the threat of weapons of mass destruction against the U.S. or its allies, you will be acting in the most fundamental national security interests of the country. If we accept a course of weakness and drift, we put our interests and our future at risk.

Elliott Abrams, Richard L. Armitage, William J. Bennett, Jeffrey Bergner, John Bolton, Paula Dobriansky, Francis Fukuyama, Robert Kagan, Zalmay Khalilzad, William Kristol, Richard Perle, Peter W. Rodman, Donald Rumsfeld, William Schneider, Jr., Vin Weber, Paul Wolfowitz, R. James Woolsey, Robert B. Zoellick

Historic day. January 26, 1998, was the day that Clinton shook his finger at the TV screen and said, "I did not have sexual relations with that woman................Miss Lewinsky. I never told anybody to lie, not a single time--never."

From The World Almanac 1999, "Chronology--January 1998": On Jan. 13, Iraq, for the 2d time in 2 months, forbade United Nations inspectors from searching for chemical and biological weapons. Iraqi officials claimed William Scott Ritter Jr., an American who headed the inspection team, was a spy. The UN Security Council protested Iraq's action.

Same source, "Chronology--February 1998": On Feb. 1, Sec. of State Madeleine Albright, in Kuwait, won that country's support for an attack on its larger neighbor, but Albright found that other Arab countries favored continuing diplomacy instead, as did France, Russia, and China. Pres. Bill Clinton said in a television address, Feb. 17, that he was prepared to order air strikes on Iraqi weapons sites. But doubts were cast on American public support for such strikes and the administration was put in an awkward position, Feb. 18, when Albright, Defense Sec. William Cohen, and National Security Adviser Samuel Berger came under harsh questioning during a town meeting at Ohio State University that was televised around the world.

Raw material for the future definitive work on the Clinton foreign policy, Annals of Fecklessness.

I am not fully sure where the term "PAX Americana" came from. In hearing discussions, and reading comments it seems to be a representation of the policy of retaining American superiority as a super power, using a policy of maintaining a pre-emptive stance. Here is a link to a Yahoo Search of the term:

http://search.yahoo.com/search?p=PAX+Americana

The Defense Department's current strategy seems to contain many of the concepts presented in the PNAC document; a 90 page document footnoted to support the 76 pages of the actiual text. Here is the list of participants, and the descriptor of what constituted participation.

Roger Barnett
U.S. Naval War College

Alvin Bernstein
National Defense University

Stephen Cambone
National Defense University

Eliot Cohen
Nitze School of Advanced International
Studies, Johns Hopkins University

Devon Gaffney Cross
Donors' Forum for International Affairs

Thomas Donnelly
Project for the New American Century

David Epstein
Office of Secretary of Defense,
Net Assessment

David Fautua
Lt. Col., U.S. Army

Dan Goure
Center for Strategic and International Studies

Donald Kagan
Yale University

Fred Kagan
U. S. Military Academy at West Point

Robert Kagan
Carnegie Endowment for International Peace

Robert Killebrew
Col., USA (Ret.)

William Kristol
The Weekly Standard

Mark Lagon
Senate Foreign Relations Committee

James Lasswell
GAMA Corporation

I. Lewis Libby
Dechert Price & Rhoads

Robert Martinage
Center for Strategic and Budgetary
Assessment

Phil Meilinger
U.S. Naval War College

Mackubin Owens
U.S. Naval War College

Steve Rosen
Harvard University

Gary Schmitt
Project for the New American Century

Abram Shulsky
The RAND Corporation

Michael Vickers
Center for Strategic and Budgetary
Assessment

Barry Watts
Northrop Grumman Corporation

Paul Wolfowitz
Nitze School of Advanced International
Studies, Johns Hopkins University

Dov Zakheim
System Planning Corporation

The above list of individuals participated in at least one project meeting or contributed a paper for discussion. The report is a product solely of the Project for the New American Century and does not necessarily represent the views of the project participants or their affiliated institutions.

Here is the P.N.A.C. Site
The Project for a New American Century

This project is apparently what inspired the concept known as PAX AMericana

http://www.newamericancentury.org/

The current Defense Department strategy is contained in a 31 page publication entitled National Security Strategy of the United States, and was released September 2002.

Here is a great resource for DOD info:
http://www.defenselink.mil/pubs/

Here is the link to the actual DOD National Security Strategy in .html format:
http://www.whitehouse.gov/nsc/nssall.html

Here is the link for the nss.pdf file. it will start the .pdf file download. If there is a way for you to left click it without redirection, you will have the opportunity to save the file for later reference.
http://www.whitehouse.gov/nsc/nss.pdf

PAX Americana, the PNAC and the NSS document have been used against the administration to support the dovish reaction to what is perceived to be a hawkish administration. I hope the trail I have provided here will portray the linkage I perceive to tie the documents together. I view the project and resulting NSS document with mixed emotions. I am for action in Iraq as a necessary evil, and agree that the liberation of the Iraqi people is admirable. However, I feel the bigger purpose of the action is to stop the EU from using ME oil producers to destruct the US Dollar through their campaign to have OPEC only accept payment for oil in Euros. At any rate, we have already defeated France and the EU by going outside the UN, which as apparently biased toward the EU's cause.

These may be weak linkages that I have provided. It is the best history I can provide for the evolution of ideas that I feel link the Letter to Clinton to the current Defense Strategy.

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LOL