The New Klingons Part III: The lies proliferate

We have seen that the new Klingons at the Project for the New American Century were hungering for another war against Iraq almost to the day Gulf War I ended with Saddam remaining in power and the U.S. no further in control of that nation's oil wealth than before.

The PNACers were no friends of George H. W. Bush, whom they believed chickened out by refusing to take over Iraq. And even though Bill Clinton signed a bill officially proclaiming the overthrow of Saddam as a key element of U.S. foreign policy, and would launch a few missiles here and there when Iraqi pilots threatened U.S. pilots, the new Klingons considered the Democrat too weak for their tastes as well.

But they found a willing ear in George W. Bush, who enlisted two top Klingons, Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld, as his two key advisers for the 2000 election campaign. Whether Bush shared the views of the Klingons and willingly invited them into his inner corps or whether it was the Klingons themselves who selected Bush as their front man is a question for historians to decide. But during the election, he clearly gave tough talk after tough talk on the need to build up America's military might.

However, by the summer of his first presidential year, foreign policy took a decided rumble seat to Bush's No. 1 priority -- a tax cut. All he talked about was taxes, which irked many of the Klingons. As we saw with their seminal military policy paper, "Rebuilding America's Defenses," they were concerned that the massive rearmament they were demanding wouldn't take place -- unless, in the words of the paper, there were to be another Pearl Harbor. September 11, 2001, was that Pearl Harbor.

According to former White House terrorist czar Richard Clarke, the Bush policymakers started talking Iraq almost as soon as the Twin Towers fell. (For a stunning recollection of those hours, see Clarke's book, Against All Enemies.) In an editorial in the Weekly Standard, Gary Schmitt, began:

Shortly before getting on a plane to fly to New Jersey from Europe in June 2000, Mohamed Atta, the lead hijacker of the first jet airliner to slam into the World Trade Center and, apparently, the lead conspirator in the attacks of September 11, met with a senior Iraqi intelligence official. This was no chance encounter. Rather than take a flight from Germany, where he had been living, Atta traveled to Prague, almost certainly for the purpose of meeting there with Iraqi intelligence operative Ahmed Samir Ahani.

There was only one problem with this; whether such a meeting had ever taken placewas far from incontrovertible. But this doubt -- or any skepticism about plans for a war on Iraq -- wouldn't be raised so close to the 2002 election. The U.S. snooze media refused to accept the notion that Americans (!) were actually beating war drums. A notable exception was CBS News, which ran this story on its website:

With the intelligence all pointing toward bin Laden, Rumsfeld ordered the military to begin working on strike plans. And at 2:40 p.m., the notes quote Rumsfeld as saying he wanted "best info fast. Judge whether good enough hit S.H." ? meaning Saddam Hussein ? "at same time. Not only UBL" ? the initials used to identify Osama bin Laden.

Now, nearly one year later, there is still very little evidence Iraq was involved in the Sept. 11 attacks. But if these notes are accurate, that didn't matter to Rumsfeld.

"Go massive," the notes quote him as saying. "Sweep it all up. Things related and not."

An entire library of books will be written on the massive implosion of the fourth estate to fully investigate the evidence cited as the justification for the Iraq war. But what is also clear is that not only did the Klingons intimidate the lapdog press, but high-level cabinet officers as well:

US News and World Report magazine said the first draft of the speech was prepared for Powell by Vice President Richard Cheney's chief of staff, Lewis "Scooter" Libby, in late January.

According to the report, the draft contained such questionable material that Powell lost his temper, throwing several pages in the air and declaring, "I'm not reading this. This is bullshit."

Bullshit or not, Powell was a good soldier, showing the U.N. and the world photographs of what he said were missile sites and chemical weapons factories. Congress went right along.

So today, with 130,000 troops on the ground in Iraq and a puppet government preparing to "run the country" (while insisting on the need for U.S. forces to remain to avoid a civil war), the New Klingons should be in high heaven; they got what they wanted: an American foreign policy bent on world domination.

Not quite.

Next: Iran, Syria and North Korea