Neocon Quotes: Wishing For 9/11 to Nuclear War With Russia

A Collection of Evidence To Be Printed Out

These are quotations I’ve collected. Sources include Rebuilding Americas Defenses by PNAC, The Terror Timeline by Paul Thompson, TV news clips and newspapers. Copy this and print it out for the future Tribunal in case all electronics are destroyed.

1. “The process of military transformation, even if it brings revolutionary change, is likely to be a long one absent some catastrophic and catalyzing event like a new Pearl Harbor.” –September 2000: Rebuilding America’s Defenses (PNAC)- Paul Wolfowitz (based upon the Defense Planning Guidance of 1992)

2. “History is replete with instances in which warnings signs were ignored and change resisted until an external ‘improbable’ event forced resistant bureaucracies to take action. The question is whether the US will be wise enough to act responsibly and soon enough to reduce US space vulnerability. Or whether, as in the past, a disabling attack against the country and its people - a space Pearl Harbor - will be the only event able to galvanize the nation and cause the US government to act.” -The Rumsfeld Commission (assigned to assess US National Security Space Management and Organization) January 11, 2001

3. “In the middle East and Persian Gulf, we seek to…safeguard our access to international air and seaways and to the region’s oil.” -March 8, 1992: Defense Planning Guidance (from the office of Defense Secretary Dick Cheney)

4. “It is my opinion that George W. Bush’s plan for pre-emptive strikes was formed back at the end of the first Bush administration with that 1992 report.” – Senator Lincoln Chafee(R) Rhode Island

5. “I want to be the bully on the block.” -Colin Powell (1992) Harpers 10/02

6. “In assessing the future utility and applicability of Rapid Dominance, it is crucial to consider the political context in which force is likely to be employed. As we enter the next century, the probability is low that an over-riding, massive, direct threat posed by a peer-competitor to the US will emerge in the near term.

Without compelling reasons, public tolerance toward American sacrifice abroad will remain low and may even decrease. This reluctance on the part of Americans to tolerate pain is directly correlated to perceptions of threat to US interests. Without a clear and present danger, the definition of national interest may remain narrow.”

“Many challenges or crises in the future are likely to be marginal to US interests and therefore may not be resolvable before American political staying power is exhausted. In this period, political micro-management and fine tuning are likely to be even more prevalent as administrations respond to public sentiments for minimizing casualties and, without a threat or compelling reason, US involvement.”

“Americans prefer not to intervene, especially when the direct threat to the US is ambiguous, tenuous, or difficult to define..”

“Second, it is relatively clear that current US military capability will shrink. Despite the pledges of the two major American political parties to maintain or expand the current level of defense capability, both the force structure and defense infrastructure are too large to be maintained at even the present levels and within the defense budgets that are likely to be approved. Unless a new menace materializes, defense is headed for ‘less of the same’. Such reductions may have no strategic consequences. However, that is an outcome that we believe should not be left to chance.”

“In both relative and absolute terms, since the end of World War II, the military strength and capability of the United States have never been greater. Yet this condition of virtual military superiority has created a paradox. Absent a massive threat or massive security challenge, it is not clear that this military advantage can always be translated into concrete political terms that advance American interests.”

“Beyond prudence, however, it is clear that without a major threat to generate consensus and to rally the country around defense and defense spending, the military posture of the United States will erode as the defense budget is cut.”

“The absence of a direct and daunting external security threat is, of course a most obvious aspect of the difficulty in defining the future defense posture of the nation. The United States has long resisted maintaining a large standing military and the Cold War years could prove an aberration to that history. Extending this historical observation of small standing forces, it is clear that there is no adversary on the horizon even remotely approaching the military power of the former USSR. While we might conjure up nominal regional contingencies against Korea or Iraq as sensible planning scenarios for establishing the building blocks for force structure, it will prove difficult to sustain the current defense program over the long term without a real threat materializing to rally and coalesce public support.”

- 1996 Shock and Awe: Achieving Rapid Dominance, National Defense University; Harlan K. Ullman and James P. Wade www.dodccrp.org/files/Ullman_Shock.pdf

7. “Former National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski publishes a book [in 1997] in which he portrays the Eurasian landmass as the key to world power, and Central Asia with its vast oil reserves as the key to domination of Eurasia…’The attitude of the American public toward the external projection of American power has been much more ambivalent. The public supported America’s engagement in World War II largely because of the shock effect of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.’, he says. Because of popular resistance to US military expansionism, his Central Asian strategy can not be implemented ‘except in the circumstance of a truly massive and widely perceived direct external threat.’ - From The Terror Timeline by Paul Thompson p.333

8. “You and other Democrats in Congress have voiced fear that you simply don’t have enough money for the large increase in defense that the Pentagon is seeking, especially for missile defense, and you fear that you’ll have to dip into the Social Security funds to pay for it. Does this sort of thing convince you that an emergency exists in this country to increase defense spending, to dip into Social Security, if necessary to pay for defense spending- increase defense spending?” - question by reporter to Senator Carl Levin (Department of Defense News Briefing, September 11, 2001, 6:42PM)

9. “To be truthful about it, there was no way we could have got the public consent to have suddenly launched a campaign on Afghanistan, but for what happened on September 11.” –Tony Blair (July 2002)

10. "Every official we questioned about the possibility of an invasion of Afghanistan said that it was almost unthinkable, absent a provocation such as 9/11...." - The 9/11 Commission Report, July 2004 (p 137)

11. “Officials we interviewed flatly said that neither Congress nor the American public would have supported large-scale military operations in Afghanistan before the shock of 9/11—despite repeated attacks and plots, including the embassy bombings, the Millennium plots, concerns about al Qaeda to acquire WMD, the U.S.S. Cole, and the summer 2001 threat spike. Deputy Secretary Wolfowitz warned that it would have been impossible to get Congress to support sending 10,000 U.S. troops into Afghanistan to do what the Soviet Union failed to do in the 1980s. Vice Admiral Scott Fry, the former operations director for the JCS, noted that “a two-or-four division plan would require a footprint [troop level] and force that was larger than the political leadership was willing to accept.” - 9/11 Commission The Military: Staff Statement No 6, 2004 p.12

12. "I can think of no faster way to unite the American people behind George W. Bush than a terrorist attack on an American target overseas. And I believe George W. Bush will quickly unite the American people through his foreign policy." - Henry Kissinger, appearing on CNBC, Dec 13, 2000

14. “In order to bring a nation to support the burdens of great military establishments, it is necessary to create an emotional state akin to psychology. There must be the portrayal of external menace. This involves the development of a nation-hero, nation-villain ideology and the arousing of the population to a sense of sacrifice.” - John Foster Dulles

15. “Today Americans would be outraged if U.N. troops entered Los Angeles to restore order; tomorrow they will be grateful. This is especially true if they were told there was an outside threat from beyond, whether real or promulgated, that threatened our very existence. It is then that all peoples of the world will plead with world leaders to deliver them from this evil. The one thing every man fears is the unknown. When presented with this scenario, individual rights will be willingly relinquished for the guarantee of their well being granted to them by their world government.” - Henry Kissinger speaking at Evian, France, May 21, 1992 Bilderburgers meeting.

16. “Let me tell ya, I've been around the block a few times. There will be another event. There will be another event.” - Donald Rumsfeld, two minutes before Flight 11 crashed into the WTC's North Tower at 8:46. That Rumsfeld made this statement was reported by Republican Representative Christopher Cox on September 12th, according to an Associated Press story of September 16, 2001. That morning, Cox joined a handful of other members of Congress for breakfast with Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld in the Pentagon. They were talking about Rumsfeld's efforts to transform the Pentagon when the conversation turned to the threat of terror attacks.

17. "On that September day, we were unprepared. As we detail in our report, this was a failure of policy, management, capability, and above all a failure of imagination." - Thomas Kean, 9/11 Commission Chairman, upon the release of The 9/11 Commission Report.

18. “[T]he most serious constraint on current policy is lack of imagination. An act of catastrophic terrorism that killed thousands or tens of thousands of people and/or disrupted the necessities of life for hundreds of thousands, or even millions, would be a watershed event in America’s history. It could involve loss of life and property unprecedented for peacetime and undermine Americans’ fundamental sense of security within their own borders in a manner akin to the 1949 Soviet atomic bomb test, or perhaps even worse. Constitutional liberties would be challenged as the United States sought to protect itself from further attacks by pressing against allowable limits in surveillance of citizens, detention of suspects, and the use of deadly force. More violence would follow, either as other terrorists seek to imitate this great "success" or as the United States strikes out at those considered responsible. Like Pearl Harbor, such an event would divide our past and future into a "before" and "after." The effort and resources we devote to averting or containing this threat now, in the "before" period, will seem woeful, even pathetic, when compared to what will happen "after." - Catastrophic Terrorism: Elements of a National Policy by Ashton B. Carter, John M. Deutch and Philip D. Zelikow. A Report of Visions of Governance for the Twenty-First Century. A Project of the John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University. 1998. Philip D. Zelikow would ultimately become Executive Director of the 9/11 Commission.

19. “There appears to be general agreement concerning the need to transform the U.S. military into a significantly different kind of force from that which emerged victorious from the Cold and Gulf Wars. Yet this verbal support has not been translated into a defense program supporting transformation" ... "the 'critical mass' needed to effect it has not yet been achieved. One may conclude that, in the absence of a strong external shock to the United States-a latter-day 'Pearl Harbor' of sorts-surmounting the barriers to transformation will likely prove a long, arduous process.” - Andrew Krepinevich, Executive Director of the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, testifying before the Senate Armed Services Subcommittee on Emerging Threats and Capabilities, March 3, 1999

20. "We all know that history is filled with instances where people were surprised. There were plenty of signals, plenty of warnings, plenty of cautions. But they weren't taken aboard. They didn't register. They weren't sufficient to cause a person to act on those. We know that the thing that tends to register on people is fear, and we know that that tends to happen after there's a Pearl Harbor, tends to happen after there's a crisis. And that's too late for us. We've got to be smarter than that. We've got to be wiser than that. We have to be more forward-looking." - Secretary of Defense-designate Donald Rumsfeld, at his confirmation hearing before the Senate Armed Services Committee as reported by CNN, January 11, 2001