PNAC Redux in Wikileaks Syria Document

If there is there anybody reading this who has not read the Project for the New American Century (PNAC) 2000 document, 'Rebuilding America's Defenses [sic], I urge you to do so; it can be read on their own website here.

If you haven't got time (and it is rapidly running out), the salient points from it are that it was sponsored by some extremely Machiavellian individuals and it includes the infamous line:

'A transformation strategy that solely pursued capabilities for projecting force from the United States, for example, and sacrificed forward basing and presence, would be at odds with larger American policy goals and would trouble American allies.

Further, the process of transformation, even if it brings revolutionary change, is likely to be a long one, absent some catastrophic and catalyzing [sic] event - like a new Pearl Harbor.'

This one sentence has been focal to much speculation surrounding the events of 11th September 2001 and subsequent US military misadventures. The attacks have been called the New Pearl Harbor and the phrase was used in the title of a book by Professor David Ray Griffin which presented many convincing arguments that the US Government or elements therein had been involved in order to manufacture domestic support for neocolonial wars of aggression.

It was with a sense of deja vu that I read a blog from Channel Four News reporter Alex Thompson about one of the Wikileaks documents from 'a military officer writing up a report on a meeting with US military intelligence officers and gives telling insight into their view of matters inside Syria. It was written at 00:49am, 7 December 2011.' It read:

'There still seems to be a lot of confusion over what a military intervention involving an air campaign would be designed to achieve. It isn’t clear cut for them geographically like in Libya, and you can’t just create an NFZ (no fly zone) over Homs, Hama region. This would entail a countrywide SEAD (suppression of enemy air defenses [sic]) campaign lasting the duration of the war. They don’t believe air intervention would happen unless there was enough media attention on a massacre, like the Gaddafi move against Benghazi.'

I guess we just experienced the prerequisite media attention on a massacre. No doubt the air intervention will follow shortly.

Further reading:

BBC News uses 'Iraq photo to illustrate Syrian massacre'
Daily Telegraph 27th May 2012