Verbosities

Anyone who's read anything Irving Kristol ever wrote had the neoconservative ideas of proactive war-mongering laid out in theory, but in 1992 the neocon theory was laid atop our national defense policy by then-Under Secretary of Defense (and now right-wing neocon sympathizer) Paul Wolfowitz. His stunning "Defense Planning Guidance" document neatly tied all the neocon sole-superpower ideas together, and certainly provided a clue to anyone who might have wanted to ask what the people surrounding George Bush (Cheney, Wolfowitz, Bolton, Perle, et al) thought about foreign policy.

The report was acquired by The New York Times. Here's a clip from Wolfowitz's report:


1992 Wolfowitz U.S. Strategy Plan Document

While the U.S. cannot become the world’s “policeman,” by assuming responsibility for righting every wrong, we will retain the pre-eminent responsibility for addressing selectively those wrongs which threaten not only our interests, but those of our allies or friends, or which could seriously unsettle international relations. Various types of U.S. interests may be involved in such instances: access to vital raw materials, primarily Persian Gulf oil; proliferation of weapons of mass destruction and ballistic missiles, threats to U.S. citizens from terrorism or regional or local conflict, and threats to U.S. society from narcotics trafficking.

Quoting Irving Kristol (which I do extensively in this post,:

"'(N)ational interest' is not a geographical term... A smaller nation might appropriately feel that its national interest begins and ends at its borders, so that its foreign policy is almost always in a defensive mode. A larger nation has more extensive interests. And large nations, whose identity is ideological, like the Soviet Union of yesteryear and the United States of today, inevitably have ideological interests in addition to more material concerns...

Behind all this is a fact: the incredible military superiority of the United States vis-a-vis the nations of the rest of the world, in any imaginable combination...

(I)t is a fact that if you have the kind of power we now have, either you will find opportunities to use it or the world will discover them for you.

Anyway, we've been up and down this road before. The neoconservative ideology is a radical and militaristic take on imperialism designed to aggressively define our interests and prioritize our needs over those of the citizens and governments of other countries.

This isn't why I wanted to post about the Wolfowitz document.

I found the link via this Crooks and Liars post, where John Amato opines:

One wonders if the media would have looked at the cabinet Bush put together when he took office and then asked some real questions about Wolfie’s plan of world domination. I guess they had other things to do.

Indeed. The New York Times archives list a grand total of five articles when searching for "Paul Wolfowitz" & "Defense Planning," none of which exist between the original 1992 date of the report and his confirmation as Deputy Secretary of Defense in 2001.

On the other hand, there are 43 articles in the same archive for "Joycelyn Elders" & "Masturbation."

Nice priorities Fourth Estate.

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