Peace and Justice Post

As soon as the trains were running again, my friend and I went in to the city and got off at Union Square/14th Street, where anything below 14th was blocked off. Makeshift hospitals lined the streets as gurney’s rushed past us with bleeding bodies through the smoke clouded air.

“How could this have happened?” we asked ourselves as a soldier motioned with his machine gun that we could not go any further.

I’m sure we all have stories of where we were on 9/11; even those numbers will never be the same to us again. And there are just as many theories as to why it happened, and who is to blame. I’m not going to try to answer those questions, but 9/11 did set into motion a military plan that seemed to have been waiting for it to happen.

In 1997, many of the names we have seen so often since the War in Iraq began were listed as members of a neoconservative think tank called “Project for a New American Century,” or PNAC. Founded by William Kristol (not the comedian) and Robert Kagan, its stated goal according to Wikipedia was “to promote American global leadership. Fundamental to the PNAC are the views that American leadership is both good for America and good for the world and support for a Reaganite policy of military strength and moral clarity.” And their Statement of Principle ends with, “While such a Reaganite policy of military strength and moral clarity may not be fashionable today, it is necessary if the United States is to build on the successes of this past century and to ensure our security and our greatness in the next.” They felt that America was the most powerful country in the world and it was their duty to keep it that way, protecting the world while serving the interests of the United States. PNAC called for an increase in military spending, and a redeployment of our troops oversees to meet modern needs.

In January 1998, in a letter to Bill Clinton, written in part by Donald Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz, PNAC called for the US Military to remove Saddam Hussein from power, and later criticized the December 1998 bombing attempts the Clinton Administration had made in Iraq, calling them ineffective.

Continued . . .