The Plan: Were Neo-Conservatives� 1998 Memos a Blueprint for Iraq War?:
March 10 � Years before George W. Bush entered the White House, and years before the Sept. 11 attacks set the direction of his presidency, a group of influential neo-conservatives hatched a plan to get Saddam Hussein out of power. …
And in a report just before the 2000 election that would bring Bush to power, the group predicted that the shift would come about slowly, unless there were “some catastrophic and catalyzing event, like a new Pearl Harbor.”
Some critics of the Bush administration’s foreign policy, especially in Europe, have portrayed PNAC as, in the words of Scotland’s Sunday Herald, “a secret blueprint for U.S. global domination.”
The group was never secret about its aims. In its 1998 open letter to Clinton, the group openly advocated unilateral U.S. action against Iraq because “we can no longer depend on our partners in the Gulf War coalition” to enforce the inspections regime.