The Project for a New American Century (PNAC)—founded by, amongst others, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, John Bolton, Zalmay Khalilzad, Richard Armitage, and Scooter Libby (all future Bush administration principals and officials)— releases its first public letter where it demands that President Clinton undertake the “removal of Saddam Hussein’s regime” in Iraq, labeling containment “dangerously inadequate.”

The Project for a New American Century is later labeled “neocon” and influential in setting up a war with Saddam Hussein but the Clinton administration started down this path to a final showdown, both overstating the WMD threat and declaring that regime change was the only path to normalization of relations.

 

President-elect George W. Bush is briefed in the famous and highly secure JCS “tank” at the Pentagon—on the national security situation and the immediate threats ahead.

The focus is on the immediate threat from Iraq, the absence of U.N. inspectors, the unravelling of international sanctions, the continued build-up of weapons of mass destruction, the hardening of Iraq’s air defense and communications infrastructure with buried fiber optics, Iraqi relations with terrorists, and Saddam’s Hussein’s human rights record. It is a bracing and single-minded presentation. In other words, Iraq wasn’t just some concoction of Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, and Paul Wolfowitz. It was the number one threat as conceived by the Pentagon.