ABSTRACT
As in the 1890s craving for markets, the New American Century Project spoke to an underlying economic crisis, resulting from the fact that America's domestic oil fields were becoming less and less productive. After formulating a plan of national expansion, they were stirred to action by an event involving the violent death of a large number of Americans. When questioned about occupying Iraq, America's president, vice president, and cabinet secretaries have repeatedly likened it to the occupation of Germany and Japan after the Second World War. By 1997, the New American Century Project advocated a remaking of the Middle East, including the invasion of Iraq. In The Price of Loyalty, then Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill confides that the agenda of George W. Bush's meeting with the National Security Council was the invasion of Iraq. Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, through his Defence Intelligence Agency, had circulated maps and inventories of Iraq's enormous oil fields and oil reserves, together with lists of potential contractors to exploit the resource.
