The Assassins' Gate Read Online Free PDF

of a less auspicious moment for a foreign-policy manifesto than the summer of 1996. The Internet and the stock market bubble were expanding fast. The presidential race was a snooze. The Republican candidate Robert Dole was trying to claim, as Kagan and Kristol wrote, “that there really are differences in foreign policy between him and the president, appearances to the contrary notwithstanding.” In 1996, as far as most Americans were concerned, the rest of the world disappeared.
    Yet here were Kagan and Kristol summoning America to “benevolent global hegemony.” They had the advantage over their neoconservative fathers of having already seen a small, determined grouplet, writing combative articles in obscure journals, influence power in Washington. There was no reason to think it couldn’t happen again, with discipline and persistence and perhaps a bit of luck. The first goal was for their ideas to take over—or take back—the Republican Party. Then, in a few years, the nation. After that, the world. This is the lesson that the American right has fully absorbed and put into practice ever since the 1960s: Ideas matter. The focused efforts of a handful of organized ideologues can win the political war when the opposition is confused and the country distracted. But they have to be willing to fight, and often lose, obscure battles over years and even decades.
    The next year, in 1997, Kagan and Kristol helped found the Project for the New American Century, or PNAC, a pressure group of leading foreign-policy conservatives in the spirit of the Committee on the Present Danger. It included Donald Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Abrams, Richard Perle, William Bennett, and James Woolsey; more than half of the founding members would go on to assume high positions in the administration of George W. Bush. On January 26, 1998, PNAC put itself on the map in the form of an open letter to President Clinton urging him to make a change of regime in Iraq the nation’s policy. “The current policy, which depends for its success upon the steadfastness of our coalition partners and upon the cooperation of Saddam Hussein, is dangerously inadequate,” the letter’s signers wrote, not hesitating to embarrass the president. After its publication, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Perle, and one or two other signers went to the White House to discuss Iraq with Sandy Berger, Clinton’s national security adviser, and came away “appalled at the feebleness of the Clinton administration,” Perle said. The letter hadn’t specified exactly how Saddam and the Baath Party were to be overthrown; the signers disagreed about the means. But within a few months the Republican Congress overwhelmingly passed, and the Democratic president (besieged by the Monica Lewinsky affair) reluctantly signed, the Iraq Liberation Act. Regime change in Iraq became official American policy.
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    WHY DID IRAQ become the leading cause of the hawks? It had received no special attention in the Defense Planning Guidance; it was barely mentioned in the writings of Kagan and Kristol. A year after the letter to Clinton, in 1999, Kosovo replaced Iraq as the overriding concern of PNAC. Still, by 1998 Saddam was beginning to slip out of the constraints imposed on him after the Gulf War and get away with it. Economic sanctions were breaking down, and some European countries, especially Iraq’s leading trading partners, France and Russia, were making noises about lifting them altogether. UN weapons inspectors were withdrawn from Iraq for security reasons after Saddam refused to continue cooperating with them; then he denied them reentry. Saddam was increasingly, in foreign-policy jargon, “out of his box”—apparently free to pursue the unconventional weapons that had been his long-standing desire.
    Perhaps the most important name on the PNAC letter was Paul Wolfowitz. Iraq had been on Wolfowitz’s mind since the