Neocons' PNAC - Project for a New American City - Foiled By Bin Laden

At Common Dreams, Jim Lobe has an article entitled "9/11: Al Qaeda's Project for Ending the American Century Succeeded"

Led within the administration by Vice President Dick Cheney, Pentagon chief Donald Rumsfeld and their mostly neo-conservative aides and supporters, the hawks had four years before joined the Project for the New American Century (PNAC). The letter-head organization was co- founded by neo-conservative ideologues William Kristol and Robert Kagan, who, in an important 1996 article, called for the U.S. to preserve its post-Cold War "hegemony as far into the future as possible."

Excerpts:

So, instead of focusing on capturing bin Laden and other Al Qaeda leaders and providing the kind of security and material assistance needed to pacify and begin rebuilding Afghanistan, Bush turned his attention -- and diverted U.S. military and intelligence resources -- to preparing for war against Iraq.

That decision is now seen universally -- with the exception of Cheney and his die-hard PNAC supporters -- as perhaps the single most disastrous foreign policy decision by a U.S. president in the past decade, if not the past century.

Part of a 2004 recording from Bin Laden:

"We, alongside the mujahedeen, bled Russia for 10 years until it went bankrupt and was forced to withdraw in defeat," he said in a 2004 video-tape describing what he called a "war of attrition."

"We are continuing this policy in bleeding America to the point of bankruptcy," he added. "All that we have to do is to send two mujahedeen to the furthest point east to raise a piece of cloth on which is written 'Al Qaeda', in order to make generals race there and to cause America to suffer human, economic and political losses without their achieving anything of note other than some benefits for their private corporations," he went on.

And while the U.S. military remains by far the strongest in the world, its veil of invincibility has been irreparably pierced by the success with which rag-tag groups of guerrillas have defied and frustrated it. The result, according to conservative New York Times columnist Ross Douthat, has been "a steady erosion of America's position in the world," which Obama has so far been unable to reverse.

I've long maintained that on that night of "shock and awe" in Baghdad in 2003, the happiest man on the planet was Osama bin Laden.