"All we need now is a new Pearl Harbor"

PNAC (Project for the New American Century) '...The terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, provided the “new Pearl Harbor”, described as “the opportunity of ages”. The extremists who have since exploited 9/11 come from the era of the Ronald Reagan presidency, when far-right groups and “think-tanks” were established to avenge the US “defeat” in Vietnam. In the 1990s, there was an added agenda: to justify the denial of a “peace dividend” following the Cold War. 'The Project for the New American Century (PNAC) was formed, along with the American Enterprise Institute, the Hudson Institute and other outfits that have since merged the ambitions of the Reagan administration with those of the current Bush regime. ... '...[Richard] Perle is one of the founders of the PNAC. Other founders include: Dick Cheney, now US vice president; Donald Rumsfeld, defence secretary; Paul Wolfowitz, deputy defence secretary; I Lewis Libby, Cheney's chief of staff; William Bennett, Reagan's education secretary; and Zalmay Khalilzad, Bush's ambassador to Afghanistan. These are the modern chartists of US terrorism. The PNAC's seminal 2000 report, Rebuilding America's Defenses: Strategy, Forces and Resources for A New Century, was a blueprint of US aims in all but name. Two years ago it recommended an increase in arms-spending of US $48 billion so that Washington could “fight and win multiple, simultaneous major theatre wars”. This has happened. It said the US should develop “bunker-buster” nuclear weapons and make “star wars” a national priority. This is happening. It said that, in the event of Bush taking power, Iraq should be a target.'

P2OG (Proactive Preemptive Operations Group) '...Since September 11, 2001, Washington has established military bases at the gateways to all the major sources of fossil fuels, especially central Asia. The UNOCAL oil company is to build a pipeline across Afghanistan. Bush has scrapped the Kyoto Protocol on greenhouse gas emissions, the war crimes provisions of the International Criminal Court and the anti-ballistic missile treaty. He has said he will use nuclear weapons against non-nuclear states “if necessary”. Under cover of propaganda about Iraq's alleged weapons of mass destruction, the Bush regime is developing new weapons of mass destruction that undermine international treaties on biological and chemical warfare. 'In the Los Angeles Times, the military analyst William Arkin describes a secret army set up by Rumsfeld, similar to those run by Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger and which Congress outlawed. This “super-intelligence support activity” will bring together the “CIA and military covert action, information warfare and deception”. According to a classified document prepared for Rumsfeld, the new organisation, known by its Orwellian moniker as the Proactive Pre-emptive Operations Group, or P2OG, will provoke terrorist attacks which would then require “counter-attack” by the US on countries “harbouring the terrorists”....'       John Pilger, Why Bush Lies About Iraq