1. The Neo Con Factor in American Foreign Policy

2. Who Are the Neo-Cons?
Inside the government, the chief neo con intellectuals include:
Paul Wolfowitz, the deputy secretary of defense. He is the defense mastermind of the Bush administration;
Donald Rumsfeld is an elderly figurehead who holds the position of defense secretary only because Wolfowitz himself is too controversial.
Others include Douglas Feith, No. 3 at the Pentagon;
Stephen Cambone, Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence;
Abram Shulsky Director of the Pentagon's Office of Special Plans
Lewis "Scooter" Libby, a Wolfowitz protégé who is Vice President Cheney's chief of staff;
David Wurmser, Middle East Advisor to Vice President Cheney
John R. Bolton, Under Secretary of State for Arms Control; and
Elliott Abrams, who heads Middle East policy at the National Security Council.

3. Who Are the Neo Cons? On the outside are:
James Woolsey, the former CIA director, who has tried repeatedly to link both 9/11 and the anthrax letters in the U.S. to Saddam Hussein, and
Richard Perle, who resigned his unpaid chairmanship of a defense department advisory body after a lobbying scandal.
Gary Schmitt and William Kristol, the directors of the influential Project for the New American Century (PNAC),

4. Signers of the Statement of Principles of the Project for the New American Century
Elliott Abrams Gary Bauer William J. Bennett
Jeb Bush Dick Cheney Eliot A. Cohen Midge Decter
Paula Dobriansky Steve Forbes Aaron Friedberg Francis Fukuyama Frank Gaffney
Fred C. Ikle Donald Kagan Zalmay Khalilzad I. Lewis Libby
Norman Podhoretz Dan Quayle Peter W. Rodman Stephen P. Rosen
Henry S. Rowen Donald Rumsfeld Vin Weber George Weigel
Paul Wolfowitz

5. Other Neo Con Outsiders
Think tanks such as the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) provide homes for neo con "in-and-outers" when they are out of government.
The money comes not so much from corporations as from decades-old conservative foundations, such as the Bradley and Olin foundations.
Neoconservative foreign policy does not reflect business interests in any direct way. The neo cons are ideologues, not entrepreneurs.
Neither are neo cons Wilsonians: they do not believe in self determination for other peoples, rather in the remaking of others according to the neo con agenda and values.

6. Neo Con Factions: The Zionists
The neo con group itself is divided into Jewish and Christian wings. Perle, Wolfowitz, Wurmser, and Feith have close ties to the Jewish-American Israel lobby.
Wolfowitz has served as the Bush administration's liaison to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee.
Feith was given an award by the Zionist Organization of America, citing him as a "pro-Israel activist." While out of power in the Clinton years, Feith collaborated with Perle to coauthor a policy paper for Likud that advised the Israeli government to end the Oslo peace process, reoccupy the territories, and crush Yasser Arafat's government.
Such neo cons are not typical of Jewish-Americans, who mostly voted for Gore in 2000.

7. Neo Con Faction: The Fundamentalist Christians
The most fervent supporters of neo con principles in the Republican electorate are Southern Protestant fundamentalists like Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson.
The religious right believes that God gave all of Palestine to the Jews, and fundamentalist congregations spend millions to subsidize Jewish settlements in the occupied territories.
This group also supports neo con moral stands against abortion, gay marriages etc.

8. Neo Con Faction: The Media
Rupert Murdoch supports the neo con agenda through his Fox television network. His magazine, The Weekly Standard -- edited by William Kristol, the former chief of staff of Dan Quayle – provides a forum for defense intellectuals such as Perle, Wolfowitz, Feith and Woolsey as well as for Sharon's government.
The National Interest, another neo con journal, is funded by Conrad Black, who owns the Jerusalem Post and the Hollinger empire in Britain and Canada.
Strangest of all is the media network centered on The Washington Times -- owned by the South Korean messiah (and ex-convict) the Rev. Sun Myung Moon -- which owns the newswire UPI. UPI is now run by John O'Sullivan, the ghostwriter for Margaret Thatcher who once worked as an editor for Conrad Black in Canada.

9. The Central Coordinator
The factions of the neoconservative pentagon were linked together in the 1990s by the Project for the New American Century (PNAC), run by William Kristol out of the Weekly Standard offices.
The PNAC neo cons published a series of public letters whose signatories often included Wolfowitz and other future members of the Bush foreign policy team.
They called for the U.S. to invade and occupy Iraq and to support Israel's campaigns against the Palestinians. Dire warnings about China were another favorite.

10. PNAC Publications
In 1996, in a strategy paper crafted for Israel's Bibi Netanyahu, Richard Perle, Douglas Feith and David Wurmser urged him to "focus on removing Saddam Hussein from power" as an "Israeli strategic objective."
In 1998, eight members of Bush's future foreign policy team, including Perle, Wolfowitz and Rumsfeld, wrote Clinton urging upon him a strategy that "should aim, above all, at the removal of Saddam Hussein."
On Jan. 1, 2001, nine months before 9-11, David Wurmser called for U.S.-Israeli attacks "to broaden the [Middle East] conflict to strike fatally ... the regimes of Damascus, Baghdad, Tripoli, Teheran and Gaza ... to establish the recognition that fighting with either the United States or Israel is suicidal." .

11. “Rebuilding America's Defenses: Strategies, Forces And Resources for A New Century”
Written in 2000 by Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, Jeb Bush, and Lewis Libby.
The document outlines a "blueprint for maintaining global US preeminence, precluding the rise of a great power rival, and shaping the international security order in line with American principles and interests. This American grand strategy must be advanced as far into the future as possible."
The plan calls our military, "the cavalry on the new American frontier."

12. Regarding Iraq, The Document Says
"The United States has for decades sought to play a more permanent role in Gulf regional security. While the unresolved conflict with Iraq provides the immediate justification, the need for a substantial American force presence in the Gulf transcends the issue of the regime of Saddam Hussein."

13. Neo Con Philosophy
Richard Perle, James Woolsey, and Paul Wolfowitz are all disciples of the late Albert Wohlstetter, a University of Chicago professor who worked for the RAND corporation and later taught at the University of California.
Wohlstetter was a protégé of another University of Chicago Professor, Leo Strauss.
Throughout the cold war Wohlstetter argued that nuclear deterrence wasn't sufficient—that the US had to actually plan to fight a nuclear war in order to deter it. He strongly advocated the view that the military power of the USSR was underrated.
Wolfowitz earned his Ph.D. under Wohlstetter;
Later, Wohlstetter invited Perle, then a graduate student at Princeton, to Washington to work with Wolfowitz on a paper about the proposed Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, which Wohlstetter opposed and which has been abandoned by the Bush administration.

14. The Neo Con Philosophy
Wohlstetter introduced Perle to Democratic Senator Henry ("Scoop") Jackson of Washington, an aggressive cold warrior and champion of Israel's interests.
Woolsey (who calls himself "a Scoop Jackson Democrat") came to know Wohlstetter in 1980, when they both served on a Pentagon panel.
Of Wohlstetter Woolsey said, "A key to understanding how Richard and Paul and I think is Albert. He's had a major impact on us."

15. The Intellectual Base: Leo Strauss
The main intellectual influence on the neoconservatives has been the philosopher Leo Strauss, who left Germany in 1938 and taught for many years at the University of Chicago.
Strauss believed that the essential truths about human society and history should be held by an elite, and withheld from others who lack the fortitude to deal with truth. Society, Strauss thought, needs consoling lies.
He also argued that truth is too hard for people to bear. Hence it is necessary to tell lies to people about the nature of political reality.
An elite recognizes the truth, however, and keeps it to itself. This gives it insight, and implicitly power that others do not possess.

16. Strauss: The Need for Deception
Strauss believed the world to be a place where policy advisers may have to deceive their own publics and even their rulers in order to protect their countries.
Perpetual deception of the citizens by those in power is critical because they need to be led, and they need strong rulers to tell them what's good for them.

17. Strauss: The Role of Morality
Strauss viewed religion as absolutely essential in order to impose moral law on the masses who otherwise would be out of control.
At the same time, he stressed that religion was for the masses alone; the rulers need not be bound by it. Indeed, it would be absurd if they were, since the truths proclaimed by religion were "a pious fraud."
Strauss thought that "those who are fit to rule are those who realise there is no morality and that there is only one natural right, the right of the superior to rule over the inferior".
“A central truth is that expediency works; there is no certain God to punish wrongdoing; and virtue is unattainable by most people anyway.”

18. Strauss: The Role of Nationalism
Strauss believed that the inherently aggressive nature of human beings could only be restrained by a powerful nationalistic state.
"Because mankind is intrinsically wicked, he has to be governed. Such governance can only be established, however, when men are united – and they can only be united against other people."
Political order can be stable only if it is united by an external threat. If no external threat exists then one has to be manufactured (emphases added).

19. But Are the Neo Cons True to Strauss?
Strauss, who died in 1973, was no friend of hegemony, American or otherwise.
He said "no human being and no group of human beings can rule the whole of the human race justly."
His concern during the Cold War was that Soviet universalism invited an alternative American claim to world rule.
His real appeal to the neoconservatives, is that his elitism presents a principled rationalization for policy expediency, and for "necessary lies" told to those whom the truth would demoralize.

20. How Did the Neo Cons Gain Power?
Few neo cons supported George W. Bush during the presidential primaries. They feared that the second Bush would be like the first – “a wimp” who had failed to occupy Baghdad in the first Gulf War and who had pressured Israel into the Oslo peace process -- and that his administration, again like his father's, would be dominated by moderate Republican realists such as Powell, James Baker and Brent Scowcroft.
They supported the maverick senator John McCain until it became clear that Bush would get the nomination.

21. How the Neo Cons Gained Power
Then they had a stroke of luck – Dick Cheney was put in charge of the presidential transition. Cheney used this opportunity to stack the administration with his hard-line allies.
Instead of becoming the de facto president in foreign policy, as many had expected, Secretary of State Powell found himself boxed in by Cheney's right-wing network, including Wolfowitz, Perle, Feith, Bolton and Libby.

22. How the Neo Cons Gained Power
The neo cons took advantage of George W. Bush's inexperience. Unlike his father, a Second World War veteran who had been ambassador to China, director of the CIA, and vice president, George W. was thinly educated in international matters.
Richard Perle wrote in his recent book An End to Evil , “Two things struck me about George W. Bush when I first met him: He didn’t know anything and he wasn’t afraid to admit it.”

23. How the Neo Cons Gained Power
There were signs that G.W. Bush was tilting away from Powell and toward Wolfowitz ("Wolfie," as he calls him) even before 9/11.
There were also signs of estrangement between the cautious George H.W. Bush and his crusading son:
In the month before the launch of the Iraq war, veterans of the first Bush administration, including Baker, Scowcroft and Lawrence Eagleburger, warned publicly against an invasion of Iraq without authorization from Congress and the U.N.

24. Who’s In Charge?
It is not clear that George W fully understands the grand strategy that Wolfowitz and other aides are unfolding.
He seems genuinely to believe that there was an imminent threat to the U.S. from Saddam Hussein's "weapons of mass destruction.“
Bush took office as a traditional conservative skeptical of "nation-building" and calling for a more "humble" foreign policy, after 9-11, he was captured by the neo cons and converted to an agenda they had worked up years before. Suddenly, he sounded just like them, threatening wars on "axis-of-evil" nations that had nothing to do with 9-11.
Some of his non neo con friends need to talk to him.

25. The Neo Con Factor in American Foreign Policy