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American Dreamers

With the the U.S. presidential order to invade Iraq perhaps just days away, Four Corners looks behind the oft-stated reasons for war - Saddam's alleged weapons of mass destruction, America's oil ambitions - to profile a tight knit group of Washington hawks.

JONATHAN HOLMES, REPORTER: On September 14, 2001, President George W. Bush made a promise to rescue workers in the rubble of the World Trade Center.

PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH, OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA: I can hear you. The rest of the world hears you. And the people... And the people who knocked these buildings down will hear all of us soon.

CROWD CHEERS

JONATHAN HOLMES: Later that day, the President flew directly from New York City to Camp David - his weekend retreat outside Washington, DC. The next morning he was joined by his National Security Council.

PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH: We're at war. There has been an act of war declared upon America, by terrorists, and we will respond accordingly.

JONATHAN HOLMES: There was to be intense debate that morning about where and how to strike back. The minutes of the meeting were later leaked to 'The Washington Post'.

FROM 'THE WASHINGTON POST': CIA Director George Tenet "brought with him a detailed master plan for covert war in Afghanistan."

JONATHAN HOLMES: Al-Qaeda and its Taliban hosts in Afghanistan were the obvious targets. But some in the room argued instead for an all-out attack on Iraq.

FROM 'THE WASHINGTON POST': The Iraq strategy's principal advocate in the group was Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz. He "argued that the real source of all the trouble and terrorism was probably Saddam Hussein. The terrorist attacks of September 11 created an opportunity to strike."

JONATHAN HOLMES: 18 months later, American forces are poised in Kuwait to pour northward over the border into Iraq. When they do, it will signal victory for a tiny, unelected network of veteran Washington operators who for 12 long years have had Saddam Hussein at the top of their agenda and who, for three decades, have been calling for the untrammelled use of American military power in the service of American ideals.

AUSTRALIAN PROTESTORS: No war! No war! No war! No war! No war!

JONATHAN HOLMES: Both polls and protests can have left George W. Bush in no doubt the gamble he is taking is immense.

AUSTRALIAN PROTESTORS: No war! No war! No war! No war! No war!

FRENCH PROTESTORS: On ne veut pas la guerre, la guerre!

JONATHAN HOLMES: Never has an American President voluntarily gone to war in the face of such opposition - domestic and global.

FRENCH PROTESTORS: Non! Non! Non! Bush, ta guerre, on n'en veut pas. Tout ca pour le petrole.

JONATHAN HOLMES: But this President has already shown that, like Ronald Reagan, he's a conviction politician. Bush the elder was famously suspicious of 'the vision thing'. Bush the younger sees the world in stark black and white.

PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH: The ambitions of Hitlerism, militarism and communism were defeated by the will of free peoples, by the strength of great alliances and by the might of the United States of America. Once again, we are called to defend the safety of our people and the hopes of all mankind, and we accept this responsibility.

JONATHAN HOLMES: The President's moral certainties are passionately shared by the so-called neo-conservatives. They're a tight-knit and effective Washington network, with tentacles in the Congress, in think tanks, in newspaper offices and TV talk shows. They sat out the Clinton years in growing frustration. Now many of them are back in power, with direct access to the man in the Oval Office.

DR KURT CAMPBELL, US DEPUTY ASSISTANT SECRETARY OF DEFENSE 1995-2000: Ultimately, um...this group of sort of the hard conservatives are, um...powerful largely because I think that they have won the battle for the heart and mind of the President of the United States.

JONATHAN HOLMES: Jim Lobe is emphatically not a neo-conservative. But he is a journalist who's spent much of his working life studying the backroom power plays and undercover intrigue that's the stuff of life in Washington, DC.

JIM LOBE, JOURNALIST, INTER PRESS SERVICE: They're neo-conservatives because they weren't born conservatives and they weren't raised as conservatives. Many of their parents, or in some cases they themselves, came from Eastern Europe and fell in love, as many immigrants do, with the United States, but their background was...was...was on the left. They generally came from the left wing of the Democratic Party, uh...and they moved, over a period of time, but particularly in the '60s, to the right, and many of them have been moving right ever since.

JONATHAN HOLMES: For 30 years Lobe has watched the neo-cons struggle for power and influence in a city which cares about little else.

JIM LOBE: They organise extremely well, and when they're in opposition they inevitably always inexorably create new coalitions that include powerful people and politically powerful tendencies.

JONATHAN HOLMES: This morning, the American Enterprise Institute - a classic neo-conservative Washington think tank, is hosting a little seminar in support of war on Iraq.

CHAIRWOMAN: Thank you, David. Richard, can we turn to you next?

RICHARD PERLE, US ASSISTANT SECRETARY OF DEFENSE 1981-1987: Good...good morning. If I may begin with my usual disclaimer - I'm happily here today as an AEI fellow and speaking only for myself.

JONATHAN HOLMES: As well as an AEI fellow, Richard Perle is a former assistant secretary of defense, and the current chairman of the Defense Policy Board, a group of distinguished civilians that gives policy advice to the Secretary of Defense. He is also the archetypal neo-con.

RICHARD PERLE: The burden of the 18th resolution proposed by the United States is that enough is enough.

JONATHAN HOLMES: For 35 years, Perle says, he's been motivated by one simple core belief.

RICHARD PERLE: It is the belief that democracies must confront totalitarian rule when they find it. That was true of the Nazis. It was true of the communists. Takes a slightly different form now, because it's also true of the terrorists.

RICHARD PERLE ON TELEPHONE: Following our conversations, I thought it might be useful if I were to put in writing some of the key points I've made in response to your questions. OK.

JONATHAN HOLMES: Perle, these days, seems to relish his status as propagandist for the neo-con cause - close enough to the Administration to have influence, not so close as to be gagged. But many of his fellow neo-conservatives now hold crucial positions inside the tent. The most senior and influential has been a friend of Perle's since 1969 - the Deputy Secretary of Defense, Paul Wolfowitz.

DR KURT CAMPBELL: Paul Wolfowitz, I think, is a classic case study of someone who has extraordinarily powerful views, the courage to insist upon, uh...being heard and the, um...desire to stay with it, even through thick and thin.

PROFESSOR ELIOT COHEN, DIRECTOR OF STRATEGIC STUDIES, JOHNS HOPKINS UNIVERSITY: He's a much more important figure, not only in the Defense Department, but, I would say, in the Administration, than is normally the case for, uh...a deputy secretary of defense. Uh...without any disrespect to the other people in the Administration, I would say he's probably the most forceful intellect.

JIM LOBE: Wolfowitz, who's slightly younger than Richard Perle, uh...nonetheless knew him at least since 1969 when they were both, uh...student at the University of Chicago studying foreign policy and strategy. Uh...and so, when they both moved to Washington, Perle to work for 'Scoop' Jackson, Wolfowitz to enter the government, I think initially in the State Department where he worked on arms control issues, they were already very close both, um...personally and ideologically.

JONATHAN HOLMES: Senator Henry 'Scoop' Jackson of Washington state was the godfatherof neo-conservatism. A hawkish Democrat, he'd used his position on the powerful Senate Armed Services Committee to campaign against what he saw as the cynical pragmatism of Henry Kissinger. From his position on Jackson's staff, Richard Perle orchestrated the neo-con network.

JIM LOBE: They were very, very anticommunist, very, very pro-Israel. And that is their kind of common denominator.

RICHARD PERLE: I think, for many of us, the, uh...the rise of Nazi Germany, the appeasement that permitted Hitler to get as far as he got, the Holocaust, the terrible suffering, was...was one of those seminal events that it had formed a whole generation, not just neo-conservatives. It was very important for Scoop Jackson. Um, he had...he had been with the American forces that liberated Buchenwald. It was a searing experience.

JONATHAN HOLMES: The young neo-conservatives were almost all Jews whose parents had emigrated from Eastern Europe. Most of Paul Wolfowitz's extended family perished in the death camps.

JIM LOBE: Their history often reduces itself to Munich and the Holocaust, with Munich being the cause and the Holocaust being the result. They see every conflict, in a sense, as a test similar to the test that Chamberlain faced and failed at Munich in 1938. And that therefore, the potential result is this...a second Holocaust which they feel has to be avoided at all costs.

JONATHAN HOLMES: For the neo-conservatives, Henry Kissinger's policy of arms control and detente with the Soviet Union smacked of appeasement. In the face of what they saw as a vast and aggressive Soviet threat, they thought Nixon cynical, Ford naive and Carter weak. Ronald Reagan, on the other hand, was a president after their own heart.

RONALD REAGAN, FORMER PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA: I urge you to beware the temptation of pride, the temptation of blithely...declaring yourselves above it all and label both sides equally at fault. To ignore the facts of history and the aggressive impulses of an evil empire, to simply...

JONATHAN HOLMES: The famous phrase shocked the foreign-policy establishment but it delighted the neo-conservatives.

RONALD REAGAN: ..struggle between right and wrong.

RICHARD PERLE: Bravo. It's about time somebody said it. I don't believe the Cold War could have been won without that moral ideological offensive. That's the single most important thing Ronald Reagan did.

JONATHAN HOLMES: The Soviet Union was the main enemy in the '70s and early '80s. But there were others too. In 1979, a certain Saddam Hussein became dictator in Baghdad. That year in the Pentagon, Paul Wolfowitz was studying America's war plans for the Persian Gulf. He and his assistant Dennis Ross warned that the new Iraqi leader could soon become a threat to the oil-rich Gulf States.

DENNIS ROSS, FORMER US MIDDLE EAST NEGOTIATOR: At that point, the Arab neighbours were looking at Iraq as a kind of bulwark against the Iranians. We were looking beyond that, saying, "Look, we're not so sure that Iraq has such benign intentions towards its neighbours. And if it becomes very powerful, we're going to find that it may use its power either directly or coercively."

JONATHAN HOLMES: You actually recommended effectively setting up what became Central Command, didn't you?

DENNIS ROSS: Absolutely. Much of what we subsequently did in the Gulf and the basis for what we even do today was drawn from that study which Paul directed.

JONATHAN HOLMES: But within a year, a much more dangerous challenge had appeared in the Gulf. The Iranian Revolution replaced America's closest friend, the Shah, with a charismatic and implacable enemy, the Ayatollah Khomeini. As Saddam Hussein fought a bloody eight-year war against Iran, the Reagan Administration overcame its moral distaste for tyrants. He was treated as a favoured American ally.

PHYLLIS BENNIS, INSTITUTE FOR POLICY STUDIES: Throughout the1980s, it was United States resources from a...particularly from a country right here outside of Washington, DC, a small company called the American Type Culture Collection, that sold Iraq the seed stock for biological weapons, the seed stock for E. coli, for anthrax, for botulism, for a host of horrific diseases. And even at that time, it was known that Iraq had used chemical weapons against Iranian troops and against Kurdish civilians. And yet, Donald Rumsfeld, who was then a special envoy of President Reagan, went to Baghdad simply to shake hands with Saddam Hussein and urge the reopening of full diplomatic relations.

FRANK GAFFNEY, US DEPUTY ASSISTANT SECRETARY OF DEFENSE 1983-1987: I don't defend it. I thought it, uh...distasteful and ill-advised at the time. The argument that was made at the time was he was the lesser of two evils.

JONATHAN HOLMES: Like Richard Perle, Frank Gaffney was an aide to Scoop Jackson in the '70s and a Pentagon official in the '80s.

FRANK GAFFNEY: We did not want to see the Iranians under the Ayatollah Khomeini prevail in this struggle. And we were trying as best we could to prevent that from happening.

DENNIS ROSS: I think Paul was able to restrain his enthusiasm for that particular policy.

JONATHAN HOLMES: Fortunately perhaps for Paul Wolfowitz, he spent most of the '80s concentrating on South-East Asia. For three years he was US ambassador in Jakarta, dealing both with President Suharto and with his political opponents. According to his friend Fouad Ajami, it was a defining experience.

PROFESSOR FOUAD AJAMI, MIDDLE EAST STUDIES, JOHNS HOPKINS UNIVERSITY: It was there in Indonesia where he bonded with Abdurrahman Wahid and the so-called Gus Dur. And he generally took to the idea of reform in the Islamic world. Unlike a lot of neo-conservatives, who believe there is a contradiction between democracy and the world of Islam, Paul is generally committed to the idea that these ideas are global. They travel everywhere. They are not a property of Americans or Canadians or Australians, that actually even everyone can partake of them.

JONATHAN HOLMES: By the time of the Gulf War three years later, Wolfowitz was back at the Pentagon as Undersecretary of Defense. When defeat turned into rout for the Iraqi Army, President George Bush Sr ordered a stop to the slaughter. According to Fouad Ajami, Wolfowitz thought that a golden opportunity had been missed to bring democracy to the Arab world.

PROFESSOR FOUAD AJAMI: He genuinely believed in 1991 that we should finish this war, finish off the regime of Saddam Hussein, assume a kind of stewardship of Iraq. He lost that argument.

JONATHAN HOLMES: Instead, Saddam's security forces bloodily repressed rebellions in the south and the north of Iraq while America stood by, to the fury of Paul Wolfowitz and most of the neo-conservatives.

DENNIS ROSS: After General Schwarzkopf worked out a cease-fire arrangement with the Iraqi generals and they requested the use of helicopters for humanitarian purposes and those helicopters then were used not for humanitarian purposes, but to put down the revolts in the south and in the north, Paul and I were against continuing to recognise that cease-fire arrangement. We felt we should have acted against the helicopters, forced them either not to fly or shot them down. We did enter into an effort to try to get us to do that, but we lost on that one.

JONATHAN HOLMES: The expectation of most in the Bush Administration was that Saddam Hussein's regime would fall without American intervention. But Saddam survived. And over time, Paul Wolfowitz's boss, Defense Secretary Dick Cheney, came to agree with the neo-conservatives that the decision to stop the war had been a mistake.

BILL CLINTON, FORMER PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA: I have to say a special word of thanks to my magnificent running mate, Senator Al Gore, and his family.

JONATHAN HOLMES: The neo-cons would have eight long years in opposition to brood about Iraq. Eight years of sanctions, of cat-and-mouse games with the UN inspectors, of threats and backdowns by President Clinton.

BILL CLINTON: If Iraq fails to comply this time to provide immediate unrestricted unconditional access to the weapons inspectors, there will be serious consequences.

JONATHAN HOLMES: Paul Wolfowitz watched it all from the dean's office at the School of Advanced International Studies, just down the road from the Australian embassy.

DENNIS ROSS: He had a very strong view that, in fact, it was a mistake not to act against Saddam, that the containment regime that had been put together was already fraying. The more it eroded, the more he would be able to acquire weapons of mass destruction. And once again, he would present a threat, only this time he would present a threat with weapons of mass destruction and being vent on wreaking vengeance, which is who he is.

JONATHAN HOLMES: Wolfowitz was not alone. In February 1998, the Center for Security Policy, a neo-con think tank, sent an open letter to the President. It contained a now-familiar phrase.

FROM THE LETTER: "Only a determined program to change the regime in Baghdad will bring the Iraqi crisis to a satisfactory conclusion."

SIGNATORIES TO THE LETTER PRESENTED ONSCREEN:

Hon. Stephen Solarz
Former Member Foreign Affairs Committee, US House of Representatives.

Hon. Richard Perle
Resident Fellow, American Enterprise Institute
Former Assistant Secretary of Defense.

Hon. Elliot Abrams
President, Ethics & Public Policy Center
Former Assistant Secretary of State.

Richard V. Allen
Former National Security Advisor.

Hon. Richard Armitage
President, Armitage Associates, L.C.
Former Assistant Secretary of Defense.

Jeffrey T. Bergner
President, Bergner, Bockorny, Clough& Brain
Former Staff Director, Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

Hon. John Bolton
Senior Vice-President, American Enterprise Institute
Former Assistant Secretary of State.

Stephen Bryen
Former Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense.

Hon. Richard Burt
Chairman, IEP Advisors, Inc.
Former US Ambassador to Germany
Former Assistant Secretary of State for European Affairs.

Hon. Frank Carlucci
Former Secretary of Defense.

Hon. Judge William Clark
Former National Security Advisor.

Paula J. Dobriansky
Vice-President, Director of Washington Office,
Council on Foreign Relations
Former Member National Security Council.

Doug Feith
Managing Attorney, Feith & Zell P.C.
Former Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Negotiations Policy.

Frank Gaffney
Director, Center for Security Policy
Former Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Nuclear Forces.

Jeffrey Gedmin
Executive Director, New Atlantic Initiative
Research Fellow, American Enterprise Institute.

Hon. Fred C. Ikle
Former Undersecretary of Defense.

Robert Kagan
Senior Associate, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

Zalmay M. Khalilzad
Director, Strategy and Doctrine, RAND Corporation.

Sven F. Kraemer
Former Director of Arms Control, National Security Council.

William Kristol
Editor, 'The Weekly Standard'.

Michael Ledeen
Resident Scholar, American Enterprise Institute
Former Special Advisor to the Secretary of State.

Bernard Lewis
Professor Emeritus of Middle Eastern and Ottoman Studies, Princeton University.

R. Admiral Frederick L. Lewis
US Navy, retired.

Maj. Gen. Jarvis Lynch
US Marine Corps, retired.

Hon. Robert C. McFarlane
Former National Security Advisor.

Joshua Muravchik
Resident Scholar, American Enterprise Institute.

Robert A. Pastor
Former Special Assistant to President Carter for Inter-American Affairs.

Martin Peretz
Editor-in-Chief, 'The New Republic'.

Roger Robinson
Former Senior Director of International Economic Affairs, National Security Council.

Peter Rodman
Director of National Security Programs, Nixon Center for Peace and Freedom, Former Director, Policy Planning Staff, US Department of State.

Hon. Peter Rosenblatt
Former Ambassador to the Trust Territories of the Pacific.

Hon. Donald Rumsfeld
Former Secretary of Defense.

Gary Schmitt
Executive Director, Project for the New American Century,
Former Executive Director, President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board.

Max Singer
President, The Potomac Organization
Former President, The Hudson Institute.

Hon. Helmut Sonnenfeldt
Guest Scholar, The Brookings Institution
Former Counsellor, US Department of State.

Hon. Caspar Weinberger
Former Secretary of Defense.

Leon Wienseltier
Literary Editor, 'The New Republic'.

Hon. Paul Wolfowitz
Dean, Johns Hopkins SAIS
Former Undersecretary of Defense.

David Wurmser
Director, Middle East Program AEI
Research Fellow, American Enterprise Institute.

Dov S. Zakheim
Former Deputy Undersecretary of Defense.

JONATHAN HOLMES: The signatures showed that a new coalition had been formed. As well as 30-odd neo-conservatives, including Richard Perle and Paul Wolfowitz, there were crusty Republican hardliners like Caspar Weinberger and Donald Rumsfeld.

FRANK GAFFNEY, PRESIDENT, CENTER FOR SECURITY POLICY: What that letter did, I believe, was lay out a very practical, eminently doable road map for ending the threat posed by Saddam Hussein's regime. I regret more than I can tell you that the Clinton Administration did nothing to implement this strategy.

JONATHAN HOLMES: But for the neo-cons of the 1990s, it wasn't enough to lobby the Clinton Administration here in Washington. Many of them for decades had been fervent supporters of the State of Israel, with close links to the right-wing Likud Party. In 1996, a group of them banded together to give some frank and radical strategic advice to the man who was campaigning to be the next Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu. The new strategy presented to Netanyahu by an Israeli think tank was called 'A Clean Break'.

PHYLLIS BENNIS: It was a rather extraordinary document and it included such things as essentially abandoning the Oslo process, abandoning the principle of land for peace in favour of peace through strength. It called for the unseating of Saddam Hussein, the...what they called bringing democracy to Iraq as a first step, then to go after Iran and after Syria.

JONATHAN HOLMES: The advice was too radical, even for the hardline Bibi Netanyahu. But the similarities between the ambitions for a new Middle East outlined in 'A Clean Break' and the stated goals of today's American policies are remarkable. One of the signatories to the report was Richard Perle. Another was Douglas Feith,a lifelong Zionist, and now number three in the civilian hierarchy of the Pentagon. Feith confirmed to Four Corners that after Iraq, America will need to deal with Iran and Syria.

DOUGLAS FEITH, US UNDERSECRETARY OF DEFENSE (POLICY): Iran is a...is a serious problem country. It has, uh... It is a state sponsor of terrorism. It's one of the principle supporters of Hezbollah. And it has a very dangerous nuclear weapons program. And, uh...Syria, likewise, is one of the main sponsors of Hezbollah and also has weapons of mass destruction programs. It's been quite active, in particular, in the chemical weapons field. So those countries are...are problems.

JONATHAN HOLMES: In 1996, you were one of a group of people who gave some strategic advice to Benjamin Netanyahu. Given that, is it perhaps not surprising that some of the opponents of the current US policy are claiming that there is a sort of hidden agenda going on here?

DOUGLAS FEITH: I think our...our agenda, the agenda of the United States Government, is pretty transparent and it's been laid out by President Bush. And it's...I think it's there for all the world to see.

RICHARD PERLE, FELLOW, AMERICAN ENTERPRISE INSTITUTE: Our consistent theme was to defend Western democracy in...in the region, as in the world. I mean, I...I simply don't accept that the Arab world has to live under totalitarian rule, under dictatorial rule. And I don't think most Arabs would accept that either.

JONATHAN HOLMES: Four years later, Richard Perle was offering strategic advice to another campaigning politician.

GEORGE W. BUSH, GOVERNOR OF TEXAS: ..to raise our sights and lift our spirits, to call upon the best of this great nation. I will also swear to uphold the honour and the integrity of the office to which I've been elected, so help me God. Thank you, everyone. Thank you!

JONATHAN HOLMES: Both Perle and Paul Wolfowitz were on the team that advised Governor George W. Bush of Texas on foreign and security affairs.

RICHARD PERLE: I think it's true that George Bush did not know much about foreign affairs when he came into office. But he had a terrific instinct for getting to the heart of an issue and an eagerness to learn and the self-confidence to ask questions. He's a very intelligent man. I mean, the people who underestimate him are the same people who underestimated Ronald Reagan.

PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH: I, George Walker Bush, do solemnly swear that I will faithfully execute the office of President of the United States.

MAN: So help me, God.

PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH: So help me, God.

MAN: Congratulations!

JONATHAN HOLMES: Bush's victory was contested, his mandate paper-thin. But his appointments show that he views with favour the coalition forged between neo-cons and old Republican hardliners. In Defense, the Secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, is supported by Deputy Secretary Paul Wolfowitz and Undersecretary Doug Feith. Vice-President Dick Cheney's Chief of Staff is Wolfowitz's close friend, Lewis Libby. In the White House, National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice is sympathetic to the coalition. And neo-conservative Elliott Abrams is in charge of Middle East policy. Even at the State Department, whose Secretary Colin Powell represents the cautious realism of the older Bush, there's Assistant Secretary John Bolton, one of the most radical neo-conservatives. But for the first few months of Bush Jr's presidency, the neo-cons found the going hard. On Iraq, for example, the stalemate continued. Endless sanctions. Endless patrolling the no-fly zones. Endless defiance from Saddam Hussein. In the Pentagon, Paul Wolfowitz
could barely conceal his frustration.

CNN INTERVIEWER: Mr Secretary, the Iraqis have been trying to hit US planes, almost knocked down a U-2 the other day. What is the answer? Should the United States really go after Saddam Hussein or just bow out and abandon the no-fly zone?

PAUL WOLFOWITZ, US DEPUTY DEFENSE SECRETARY: I think we can't bow out. This man is a menace. He's not just interested in American planes. That's bad enough. He's interested in overthrowing his neighbours. He's interested in acquiring weapons of mass destruction. As long as he's...

CNN INTERVIEWER: Will you go after him?

PAUL WOLFOWITZ: When we find the right way to do it, I believe we should.

JONATHAN HOLMES: Then came September 11 and the conservative coalition seized its opportunity.

PROFESSOR FOUAD AJAMI: Well, 'opportunity' may be too strong a word. I think September 11, 2001 perhaps bore them out. September 11, 2001 convinced other people that there is an evil out there stalking America and September 11, 2001 gave them a hearing and it gave them the confidence to argue for their viewpoint.

DR KURT CAMPBELL: Most of the senior advisers to the President said, "This must be Iraq and we've got to hit back at Iraq," um, and I think it's not, er, in any way a secret that a lot of these guys have carried a torch for Saddam for a considerable period of time.

DOUGLAS FEITH: I'm not endorsing that, er, that notion. I do know that immediately after September 11, it occurred to a number of us that for years we had been thinking about the problem of terrorism and recognized that it was a danger, and for years we had been thinking about the problem of...the spread of chemical and biological and nuclear weapons and missile technology around the world. And what September 11 did was it made people think about those two things together because it was clear that there are terrorist groups who would be happy to kill absolutely as many people as they could.

JONATHAN HOLMES: Within hours of the attacks the struggle was on or the President's ear. Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz were arguing in private for an immediate assault on Iraq. They were backed in public by the entire neo-con network, which on September 20 wrote an open letter to the President.

FROM THE LETTER: "Even if evidence does not link Iraq directly to the attack, any strategy aiming at the eradication of terrorism and its sponsors must include a determined effort to remove Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq."

JONATHAN HOLMES: It was left to Secretary of State Colin Powell to argue that without proof of direct Iraqi involvement in the terrorist attacks, a move against Saddam Hussein would imperil the global support America was enjoying.

RICHARD HAASS, DIRECTOR OF POLICY PLANNING, US STATE DEPARTMENT: We don't necessarily get into the details of our in-house conversations or debates or disagreements. What matters is not where people stand going into a meeting, it's where the President decides and where people come out at the end of a meeting.

JONATHAN HOLMES: Not for the last time Colin Powell won the battle, but not the campaign.

MUSLIM FIGHTERS: Allah akbar!

JONATHAN HOLMES: The President chose to deal with Afghanistan first. America and its Afghan allies routed the Taliban with astonishing swiftness. But as the Northern Alliance entered Kabul, Osama bin Laden disappeared, not just from Afghanistan but from the President's rhetoric.

PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH: Terrorists who once occupied Afghanistan now occupy cells at Guantanamo Bay.

JONATHAN HOLMES: In the State of the Union address in January 2002, bin Laden didn't rate a mention. Instead, three new potential enemies made a surprise appearance - North Korea, Iran and Iraq.

PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH: States like these, and their terrorist allies, constitute an axis of evil, arming to threaten the peace of the world. By seeking weapons of mass destruction, these regimes pose a grave and growing danger. They could provide these arms to terrorists, giving them the means to match their hatred.

JONATHAN HOLMES: And that has been the ostensible rationale ever since for the President's determination to achieve regime change in Iraq. Despite the fact that few outside his own administration accept that Iraq has any real links with al-Qaeda.

PHYLLIS BENNIS: There simply has been no evidence shown of those links. Hans Blix has said he has seen no links, Mohamed el-Baradei has seen...has said he sees no links, the, er, foreign intelligence services of no other country have claimed that such links exist.

DOUGLAS FEITH: People who do not see the link are just not familiar with, er, with the evidence.

JONATHAN HOLMES: But according to Kurt Campbell, a former assistant secretary of defense, such evidence as US intelligence has produced has been the result of pressure from above.

DR KURT CAMPBELL: I think the pressure coming from various quarters in this administration, both on the military and in the intelligence services, is both uncomfortable, almost unprecedented, and it is having some effect.

PRIME MINISTER JOHN HOWARD OF AUSTRALIA: I said to the Congress yesterday that America had no better friend anywhere in the world than Australia.

JONATHAN HOLMES: John Howard has never doubted the force of the argument against Iraq.

PRIME MINISTER JOHN HOWARD: Clearly, Iraq's behaviour has been - in relation to the weapons of mass destruction - has been offensive to many countries including the United States and Australia, but, er...

JONATHAN HOLMES: The Prime Minister had been in Washington on September 11, 2001. He was back in the Oval Office in June last year. By that time it was obvious that Saddam Hussein was next in the President's sights.

PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH: This is a person who gassed his own people, and possesses weapons of mass destruction. And so, as I told the American people, and I told John, we'll use all the tools at our disposal to deal with him.

JONATHAN HOLMES: Getting Iraq onto the frontburner was not the neo-cons' only triumph last year. They've had a more fundamental influence on Bush's strategy. The President chose the graduation ceremony last June at West Point, America's oldest military academy, to outline his new national security strategy.

PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH: We have our best chance since the rise of the nation state in the 17th century to build a world where the great powers compete in peace instead of prepare for war.

JONATHAN HOLMES: America would abolish world conflict, George Bush proclaimed, by maintaining its own total military dominance.

PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH: America has, and intends to keep, military strengths beyond challenge.

JONATHAN HOLMES: It's an audacious claim, but not unprecedented. 11 years ago this week, someone in the Pentagon leaked to 'The New York Times' a secret memorandum containing the same ambitious goal. Its principal author was Paul Wolfowitz.

DR KURT CAMPBELL: One of the most powerful options that he put out was to sustain American hegemony or sort of American supremacy and that, as an end in and of itself, was something that the United States should aspire to. When that became public, it was leaked, it was an absolute sensation, and frankly Wolfowitz almost lost his job - that's a decade ago. Let's jump forward a decade. It is now the law of the land or it's now the foreign policy of the land in terms of, um... You know, it's made quite s-spectacularly clear in the National Security Strategy, and Wolfowitz is the acknowledged intellectual heir to that tradition.

JONATHAN HOLMES: The new National Security Strategy was formally published last September. Many of its more radical ideas can be found in Paul Wolfowitz's 1992 draft paper.

JIM LOBE: Another element was a doctrine of pre-emption, um, which basically said that the United States kind of reserved unto itself the right to pre-empt possible attack, or the creation of a capability for weapons of mass destruction on the part of rogue states, for example.

PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH: If we wait for threats to fully materialize, we will have waited too long.

JONATHAN HOLMES: And then there's a common negative. The President's West Point speech made no mention of the UN Security Council - for over half a century, the only legal arbiter of matters of war and peace. Paul Wolfowitz's 1992 memo didn't mention it either. And nor does the National Security Strategy.

DR KURT CAMPBELL: I think many in the hardline camp have very little use for some of these institutions and believe that if anything they undermine American purpose rather than enhance it.

JONATHAN HOLMES: When President Bush went to the UN last September to call for a new resolution on Iraq, it was regarded as a vital win for Colin Powell and a defeat for the hardliners.

PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH: My nation will work with the UN Security Council to meet our common challenge.

JONATHAN HOLMES: But the Security Council has proved less amenable than Colin Powell hoped. The opposition of France and Russia in particular has infuriated the neo-conservatives.

DOMINIQUE DE VILLEPIN, FRENCH FOREIGN MINISTER: What is at stake here is war and peace. And we are willing to try to give peace a chance.

JONATHAN HOLMES: The Security Council, they say, is a fraud.

FRANK GAFFNEY: I'm sorry to say even the Bush Administration has catered to this fraud by subordinating the authority even of the United States congress to the whim of the French, of the Russians, of the Chinese, to say nothing of, you know, the Syrians and the Germans and others - countries that have consistently over the past 12 years protected Saddam Hussein.

RICHARD PERLE: It's not a judicial body. It's not a body constituted to render judgments that are fair or reasonable, that comport with one value system or another. These are independent countries voting their own interest as they see it, and the idea that that is somehow a...the moral arbiter seems to me quite wrong.

DR KURT CAMPBELL: I fear that on some level that these hardliners appeal to the President in a way that it's harder for sort of the internationalists to do.

JONATHAN HOLMES: Indeed, the President made plain three days ago, as he's done countless times in recent weeks, that he does not consider America bound by any UN decision.

PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH: The American people understand that when it comes to our security if we need to act, we will act, and we really don't need United Nations approval to do so.

AUSTRALIAN PROTESTORS: One, two, three, four, we don't want this crazy war. One, two, three, four, we don't want this crazy war.

JONATHAN HOLMES: It's at least partly anger at what they see as American arrogance that's brought millions worldwide onto the streets in protest.

AUSTRALIAN PROTESTORS: No war! No war! No war! No war! No war! No war! No war! No war!

JONATHAN HOLMES: But there's also the feeling that the arguments for war just don't add up -that there must be a hidden agenda. For most peace protesters the obvious candidate is oil.

AUSTRALIAN PROTESTORS: No war for oil! No war for oil! No war for oil! No war for oil! No war for oil!

JONATHAN HOLMES: Yet among active players in Washington - both supporters and opponents of the Administration's drive towards war - there's near-unanimity. Oil is not the motive.

RICHARD PERLE: If it were about Iraqi oil, we would lift the sanctions and say, "Please produce more oil, we'll buy it." It may be about Iraqi oil for Jacques Chirac, but it isn't for us.

DR KURT CAMPBELL: I mean, imagine how much money this is going to cost, you know, $100 billion. You could use $100 billion for a lot of different things, and it certainly would be worth more than a couple more buckets of oil that you'll pump out of the ground.

JONATHAN HOLMES: And yet, as the armoured brigades and the carrier battle groups muster in the gulf, it's become clear that there IS an agenda beyond Saddam's alleged arsenal of chemical and biological weapons - a quintessentially neo-con agenda, though it was first stated publicly last August by Vice-President Dick Cheney.

VICE-PRESIDENT DICK CHENEY OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA: Regime change in Iraq would bring about a number of benefits to the region. The Middle East expert Professor Fouad Ajami predicts that after liberation, the streets in Basra and Baghdad are "sure to erupt in joy in the same way throngs in Kabul greeted the Americans." Extremists in the region would have to rethink their strategy of jihad.

JONATHAN HOLMES: Fouad Ajami is more than a friend and colleague of Wolfowitz's at the SAIS in Washington. He's a media celebrity in his own right - a Lebanese-born Shi'ite Muslim whose jaundiced view of the Arab world has made him a favourite with American conservatives.

PROFESSOR FOUAD AJAMI: I think an idea has been born, an idea is attached to this war, there is no doubt about it, and that is if you were part of the Wolfowitz idea and part of the Wolfowitz belief, it really is about the reform, not only of Iraq but possibly an attempt at some reform of the Arab world, an attempt to tackle the malignancies of the Arab world, an attempt to show the Egyptians and the Saudis and others that there is another way of organising political life.

JONATHAN HOLMES: As Fouad Ajami says, it's an idea that's been driving Paul Wolfowitz for at least a dozen years - in some ways, for all his political life.

PAUL WOLFOWITZ: When Saddam Hussein and his regime are nothing more than a horrible memory, the United States will remain committed to helping the Iraqi people establish a free, prosperous and peaceful Iraq that can serve as a beacon for the entire region.

JONATHAN HOLMES: And 12 days ago, the President officially signed on to the vision. The man who came to office declaring that American forces should not get involved in nation-building has committed his country to the most ambitious nation-building exercise since Macarthur ruled Japan. Significantly, Bush was speaking to the members of the neo-cons' own think tank - the American Enterprise Institute.

PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH: A liberated Iraq can show the power of freedom to transform that vital region, by bringing hope and progress into the lives of millions. America's interests in security and America's belief in liberty both lead in the same direction - to a free and peaceful Iraq.

JONATHAN HOLMES: To many foreign-policy veterans in Washington, these visions smack almost of fantasy.

DOUGLAS FEITH: We've begun our thinking. We've laid down some principles.

JONATHAN HOLMES: Two weeks ago, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee gave the Administration a bi-partisan grilling. It was grossly underestimating, the senators clearly felt, the risks and likely costs of the commitment that America is now making in Iraq.

SENATOR JOSEPH BIDEN, DEMOCRAT, DELAWARE: Are we gonna make sure we don't do what we've done in Afghanistan? We have now safely committed the fate of Afghanistan, in a large part, to the warlords. To state the obvious, Iraq is a heck of a lot more complicated, a heck of a lot more sophisticated and they live in a neighbourhood that is very, very, very, very complex.

JONATHAN HOLMES: The Administration hasn't warned the American people, the senators complained, of the need for a long and expensive postwar occupation.

SENATOR RICHARD LUGAR, REPUBLICAN, INDIANA: A huge number are not with us on what we're talking about today. In other words, they haven't even come to the table of understanding.

JONATHAN HOLMES: It's being overoptimistic about America's likely reception in Iraq.

SENATOR RUSSELL FEINGOLD, DEMOCRAT, WISCONSIN: The United States may well find itself asserting authority over what may well be a substantially hostile people.

JONATHAN HOLMES: And it's left America's allies deeply sceptical of its postwar vision.

SENATOR JOSEPH BIDEN: Every European leader I've met with the last year is worried you don't have any plan. Because they've heard all this rhetoric about no nation-building, heard all this rhetoric about we're warriors, we're going to fight the war and leave. They've heard all this rhetoric, and guess what. They believe our rhetoric. Fortunately, we don't. But they believe it.

JONATHAN HOLMES: On September 12,2001, a wave of sympathy for America swept around the world. But now the Muslim world is hostile and suspicious, millions are marching in the streets of Western capitals and both NATO and the UN Security Council are bitterly divided.

DR KURT CAMPBELL: I believe the frittering away of this enormous groundswell of public support in Asia, in Europe and elsewhere for American causes and purposes is one of the most significant failures of the United States in the last 50 years.

JONATHAN HOLMES: And yet the neo-conservatives' faith in the exercise of raw American power is undiminished. September 11 vindicated the moralistic creed they've been propounding for 30 years. They, and the President who leads them, are determined to seize the day.

PROFESSOR FOUAD AJAMI: A different wind blows in this country after September 11, 2001...and the Arabs have an expression I like, when you say 'something is written'. You know, it's written that America now will defend international order, and it's written that people will take that protection and resent America for doing it. And it's this...this American destiny today.

<http://abc.net.au/4corners/content/2003/transcripts/s801456.htm>

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