Date: Tue, 1 Oct 2002 18:35:03 -0400
From: Doug Henwood <dhenwood-AT-panix.com>
Subject: Re: AUT: Fw: Cheney Had It All Planned (Courtesy of Blue Ear


cwright wrote:

>Kind of intersting for propaganda purposes.
>
><http://www.sundayherald.com/27735>http://www.sundayherald.com/27735

Nicholas Lemann reported all this in The New Yorker for April 1, 2002 
<http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/?020401fa_FACT1>.

An excerpt:

>After the fall of the Berlin Wall, Dick Cheney, then the Secretary 
>of Defense, set up a "shop," as they say, to think about American 
>foreign policy after the Cold War, at the grand strategic level. The 
>project, whose existence was kept quiet, included people who are now 
>back in the game, at a higher level: among them, Paul Wolfowitz, the 
>Deputy Secretary of Defense; Lewis Libby, Cheney's chief of staff; 
>and Eric Edelman, a senior foreign-policy adviser to 
>Cheney-generally speaking, a cohesive group of conservatives who 
>regard themselves as bigger-thinking, tougher-minded, and 
>intellectually bolder than most other people in Washington. (Donald 
>Rumsfeld, the Secretary of Defense, shares these characteristics, 
>and has been closely associated with Cheney for more than thirty 
>years.) Colin Powell, then the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of 
>Staff, mounted a competing, and presumably more ideologically 
>moderate, effort to reimagine American foreign policy and defense. A 
>date was set-May 21, 1990-on which each team would brief Cheney for 
>an hour; Cheney would then brief President Bush, after which Bush 
>would make a foreign-policy address unveiling the new grand strategy.
>
>Everybody worked for months on the "five-twenty-one brief," with a 
>sense that the shape of the post-Cold War world was at stake. When 
>Wolfowitz and Powell arrived at Cheney's office on May 21st, 
>Wolfowitz went first, but his briefing lasted far beyond the 
>allotted hour, and Cheney (a hawk who, perhaps, liked what he was 
>hearing) did not call time on him. Powell didn't get to present his 
>alternate version of the future of the United States in the world 
>until a couple of weeks later. Cheney briefed President Bush, using 
>material mostly from Wolfowitz, and Bush prepared his major 
>foreign-policy address. But he delivered it on August 2, 1990, the 
>day that Iraq invaded Kuwait, so nobody noticed.
>
>The team kept working. In 1992, the Times got its hands on a version 
>of the material, and published a front-page story saying that the 
>Pentagon envisioned a future in which the United States could, and 
>should, prevent any other nation or alliance from becoming a great 
>power. A few weeks of controversy ensued about the Bush 
>Administration's hawks being "unilateral"-controversy that Cheney's 
>people put an end to with denials and the counter-leak of an edited, 
>softer version of the same material.
>
>As it became apparent that Bush was going to lose to Clinton, the 
>Cheney team's efforts took on the quality of a parting shot. The 
>report that the senior official handed me at lunch had been issued 
>only a few days before Clinton took office. It is a somewhat bland, 
>opaque document-a "scrubbed," meaning unclassified, version of 
>something more candid-but it contained the essential ideas of 
>"shaping," rather than reacting to, the rest of the world, and of 
>preventing the rise of other superpowers. Its tone is one of 
>skepticism about diplomatic partnerships. A more forthright version 
>of the same ideas can be found in a short book titled "From 
>Containment to Global Leadership?," which Zalmay Khalilzad, who 
>joined Cheney's team in 1991 and is now special envoy to 
>Afghanistan, published a couple of years into the Clinton 
>Administration, when he was out of government. It recommends that 
>the United States "preclude the rise of another global rival for the 
>indefinite future." Khalilzad writes, "It is a vital U.S. interest 
>to preclude such a development-i.e., to be willing to use force if 
>necessary for the purpose."
>


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