A lot of people, especially people that think 9/11 was an inside job, have pointed to statements made by neo-conservatives that we needed a new Pearl Harbor to wake people up to our national security needs. Even Zbigniew Brzezinski thought this. He spelled it out quite clearly in his 1997 book, The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy and Its Geostrategic Imperatives:
“For America, the chief geopolitical prize is Eurasia… Now a non-Eurasian power is preeminent in Eurasia – and America’s global primacy is directly dependent on how long and how effectively its preponderance on the Eurasian continent is sustained.” (p.30)
“America’s withdrawal from the world or because of the sudden emergence of a successful rival – would produce massive international instability. It would prompt global anarchy.” (p. 30)
“Moreover, as America becomes an increasingly multi-cultural society, it may find it more difficult to fashion a consensus on foreign policy issues, except in the circumstance of a truly massive and widely perceived direct external threat.” (p. 211)
“The attitude of the American public toward the external projection of American power has been much more ambivalent. The public supported America’s engagement in World War II largely because of the shock effect of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.” (pp 24-5)
Brzezinski is not a neo-conservative…he represents more of the consensus view of the Washington foreign policy establishment…especially of the Clinton years. He wasn’t literally hoping for a Pearl Harbor event. But he sure as hell was suggesting that if a Pearl Harbor event should come along, it damn well better be put to full advantage.
But the opposite is also true. We never would have been able to pass the first campaign finance laws, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), re-open the JFK and MLK Jr. assassination investigations, or pry the family jewels from the CIA, if we hadn’t had the catastrophic event of Watergate.
We are suffering under a steady erosion of our privacy rights in this country. There is no will in Congress to do anything about it. And it’s up to the people that care about privacy (mainly libertarians and civil libertarians) to take advantage of revelations of governmental overreach.
When 9/11 happened, the Patriot Act was already sitting there…ready to be introduced as a bill. People on the right were thinking ahead. We need our own Patriot Act. And when Bush is out of office, we need to open up the full extent of his privacy crimes. And we need to use the ensuing public outrage to put in new tough laws that protect America’s fourth amendment rights.
It’s a Brave New World out there, and the courts are afraid to tell the government that they can’t have whatever they want. The FBI doesn’t show any restraint, issuing National Security Letters like they are M&M’s. The CIA is out kidnapping people, torturing them, and sending them to Syria to be tortured. We’ve had American citizens held without charges for over three years. This has to stop. But it isn’t going to stop until there is some major event that crystallizes the threat in the minds of Americans.
That was the great mistake in how the Democrats reacted to the December 2005 news that the president was routinely violating the FISA law. The Democrats should have called it what it was…an impeachable offense. And they should have ran for election on putting an end to it and getting to the bottom of it, and holding anyone that committed crimes accountable.
When 9/11 came, the Republicans were ready. They had been planning for an event that they could use to implement policies the American people would never buy under normal circumstances. As Brzezinski explained:
“For America, the chief geopolitical prize is Eurasia…In that context, how America ‘manages’ Eurasia is critical. Eurasia is the globe’s largest continent and is geopolitically axial. A power that dominates Eurasia would control two of the world’s three most advanced and economically productive regions. A mere glance at the map also suggests that control over Eurasia would almost automatically entail Africa’s subordination, rendering the Western Hemisphere and Oceania geopolitically peripheral to the world’s central continent. About 75 per cent of the world’s people live in Eurasia, and most of the world’s physical wealth is there as well, both in its enterprises and underneath its soil. Eurasia accounts for 60 per cent of the world’s GNP and about three-fourths of the world’s known energy resources.”
Or, as PNAC put it:
“Further, the process of transformation, even if it brings revolutionary change, is likely to be a long one, absent some catastrophic and catalyzing event––like a new Pearl Harbor”
They were ready. Are we?