John R. Bolton testifies during the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Subcommittee on Federal Financial Management, Government Information, and International Security hearing on the UN Headquarters renovation on June 20, 2006.(Photo: Scott J. Ferrell / Congressional Quarterly / Getty Images)
John Bolton is now the National Security Adviser. Helter skelter, baby!
—Charles P. Pierce
Of all the gin joints in all the towns in all the world, he walks into mine.
A long time ago, I did some of the first reporting on a far-right think tank called The Project for a New American Century, or PNAC. An offspring of the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), PNAC was considered by most Republicans at the time to be little more than a factory for daft, dangerous foreign policy ideas.
Few members of PNAC were taken seriously within government circles, but they kept busy regardless. During the Clinton administration, they snuggled up to an Iraqi ex-pat named Ahmad Chalabi, who was convicted of bank fraud before offering himself to PNAC signatory Donald Rumsfeld as the perfect replacement for Saddam Hussein. All they needed was a war.
A funny thing happened to PNAC, the country and the world when the millennium turned. All those Y2K fears about melting computers and airplanes falling from the sky were never realized. Nevertheless, the world as we know it ended on the evening of December 12, 2000, when the Supreme Court gave the Executive Branch to George W. Bush and Dick Cheney. Like as not, Bush had never heard of PNAC. Cheney was a charter member.
Bolton became the dream weaver for the Iraq war, the loudest advocate for false intelligence on Iraq’s weapons capabilities.
The world ended, and after September 11 — the “new Pearl Harbor” envisioned in Rebuilding America’s Defenses, PNAC’s blueprint for world domination — the world was born again in the fires of “Shock & Awe.” From top to bottom, the White House was staffed with PNAC ideologues who envisioned total war in…