Pearl Harbor.” It remains, however, a remarkable document for other reasons. In many ways canny about the direction war would take in the near future, ranging from the role of drones in air war to the onrushing possibility that cyberwar (or “Net-War,” as they called it) would be the style of future conflict, it was a clarion call to ensure this country’s “unchallenged supremacy” into the distant future by military means alone.
In 1983, in an address to the National Association of Evangelicals, President Ronald Reagan famously called the Soviet Union an “evil empire.” It wanted, as he saw it, what all dark empires (and every evildoer in any James Bond film) desires: unchallenged dominion over the planet—and it pursued that dominion in the name of a glorious “world revolution.” Now, in the name of American safety and the glories of global democracy, we were—so the PNAC people both pleaded and demanded—to do what only evil empires did and achieve global dominion beyond compare over planet Earth.
We could, they insisted, enforce an American peace, a Pax Americana , for decades to come, if only we poured our resources, untold billions (they refused to estimate what the real price might be) into war preparations and, if necessary, war itself, from the seven seas to the heavens, from manifold new “forward operating bases on land” to space and cyberspace. Pushing “the American security perimeter” ever farther into the distant reaches of the planet (and “patrolling” it via “constabulary missions”) was, they claimed, the only way that “U.S. military supremacy” could be translated into “American geopolitical preeminence.” It was also the only way that the “homeland”—yes, unlike 99.9 percent of Americans before 9/11, they were already using that term—could be effectively “defended.”
In making their pitch, they were perfectly willing to acknowledge that the United States was already a military giant among midgets, but they were also eager to suggest that our military situation was “deteriorating” fast, that we were “increasingly ill-prepared” or even in “retreat” on a planet without obvious enemies. They couldn’t have thought more globally. (They were, after all, visionaries, as druggies tend to be.) Nor could they have thought longer term. And on military matters, they couldn’t have been more up to date.
Yet on the most crucial issues, they—and their documents—couldn’t have been dumber or more misguided. They were fundamentalists when it came to the use of force and idolaters on the subject of the U.S. military. They believed it capable of doing just about anything. As a result, they made a massive miscalculation, mistaking military destructiveness for global might. Nor could they have been less interested in the sinews of global economic power (though they did imagine our future enemy to be China). Nor were they capable of imagining that the greatest military power on the planet might be stopped in its tracks—in the Greater Middle East, no less—by a ragtag crew of Iraqis and Afghans. To read “Rebuilding America’s Defenses” today is to see the rabbit hole down which, as if in a fever dream, we would soon disappear.
It was a genuine tragedy that they came to power and proceeded to put their military-first policies in place; that, on September 12 of the year that “changed everything,” the PNAC people seized the reins of defense and foreign policy, mobilized for war, began channeling American treasure into the military solution they had long desired, and surged. That urge to surge was infamously caught in notes based on Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld’s comments taken on September 11, 2001.
“[B]arely five hours after American Airlines Flight 77 plowed into the Pentagon. . . . Rumsfeld was telling his aides to come up with plans for striking Iraq,” even though he was already certain that al-Qaeda had launched the attack.
In 1983, in an address to the National Association of Evangelicals, President Ronald Reagan famously called the Soviet Union an “evil empire.” It wanted, as he saw it, what all dark empires (and every evildoer in any James Bond film) desires: unchallenged dominion over the planet—and it pursued that dominion in the name of a glorious “world revolution.” Now, in the name of American safety and the glories of global democracy, we were—so the PNAC people both pleaded and demanded—to do what only evil empires did and achieve global dominion beyond compare over planet Earth.
We could, they insisted, enforce an American peace, a Pax Americana , for decades to come, if only we poured our resources, untold billions (they refused to estimate what the real price might be) into war preparations and, if necessary, war itself, from the seven seas to the heavens, from manifold new “forward operating bases on land” to space and cyberspace. Pushing “the American security perimeter” ever farther into the distant reaches of the planet (and “patrolling” it via “constabulary missions”) was, they claimed, the only way that “U.S. military supremacy” could be translated into “American geopolitical preeminence.” It was also the only way that the “homeland”—yes, unlike 99.9 percent of Americans before 9/11, they were already using that term—could be effectively “defended.”
In making their pitch, they were perfectly willing to acknowledge that the United States was already a military giant among midgets, but they were also eager to suggest that our military situation was “deteriorating” fast, that we were “increasingly ill-prepared” or even in “retreat” on a planet without obvious enemies. They couldn’t have thought more globally. (They were, after all, visionaries, as druggies tend to be.) Nor could they have thought longer term. And on military matters, they couldn’t have been more up to date.
Yet on the most crucial issues, they—and their documents—couldn’t have been dumber or more misguided. They were fundamentalists when it came to the use of force and idolaters on the subject of the U.S. military. They believed it capable of doing just about anything. As a result, they made a massive miscalculation, mistaking military destructiveness for global might. Nor could they have been less interested in the sinews of global economic power (though they did imagine our future enemy to be China). Nor were they capable of imagining that the greatest military power on the planet might be stopped in its tracks—in the Greater Middle East, no less—by a ragtag crew of Iraqis and Afghans. To read “Rebuilding America’s Defenses” today is to see the rabbit hole down which, as if in a fever dream, we would soon disappear.
It was a genuine tragedy that they came to power and proceeded to put their military-first policies in place; that, on September 12 of the year that “changed everything,” the PNAC people seized the reins of defense and foreign policy, mobilized for war, began channeling American treasure into the military solution they had long desired, and surged. That urge to surge was infamously caught in notes based on Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld’s comments taken on September 11, 2001.
“[B]arely five hours after American Airlines Flight 77 plowed into the Pentagon. . . . Rumsfeld was telling his aides to come up with plans for striking Iraq,” even though he was already certain that al-Qaeda had launched the attack.
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