Think Progress
November 10, 2008

In 1997, Bill Kristol and Robert Kagan co-founded the Project for a New American Century, a neoconservative organization meant “to promote American global leadership” through “military strength and moral clarity.” The organization, whose statement of principles was signed by right-wing luminaries such as Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz, is largely credited with putting America on the path to a preventative invasion of Iraq.

In an interview with Hugh Hewitt yesterday, Kristol said that he would like to set up a similar organization to operate during an Obama presidency:

HH: And I think he will be very concerned with the two issues I’m going to raise with you – national security and immigration. Now I believe the Committee On the Present Danger filled a need in the 70s which we need to reorganize an equivalent now. But what do you think, Bill Kristol?
BK: Oh, I agree, and we did a little of that in the 90s with the Project For the New American Century. And I actually think there are people talking about this. And there’s a lot of good foreign policy and defense thinking on our side, the Fred Kagans and Bob Kagans and Reuel Gerechts of the world, Victor Davis Hanson, et cetera. But a little bit of a political organization for them wouldn’t be bad. And I think we should support Obama, incidentally, if he does the right thing.

Listen here:

Not surprisingly, two of the conservative foreign policy thinkers mentioned by Kristol, Bob Kagan and Reuel Gerecht, were employed by the original PNAC. Fred Kagan and Victor Davis Hanson are currently at the American Enterprise Institute and the Hoover Institution, respectively.

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