Wolfowitz Warns of 'Surprise like Pearl Harbor' Months Before 9/11 Attacks

Aaron Dykes / Jones Report | February 9, 2007

Video posted recently on Live Leak shows now World Bank President Paul Wolfowitz delivering a June 2001 West Point commencement speech wherein he focused on surprise attacks-- making heavy reference to Pearl Harbor.

Wolfowitz illustrated, just months before the infamous 9/11 attacks, that Pearl Harbor is interesting in that it was "preceded by an astonishing number of unheeded warnings and missed signals."

This surfacing video only reinforces the pre-meditation established by the Project for a New American Century (PNAC). Wolfowitz helped to pen the think tank's September 2000 document 'Rebuilding America's Defenses' which stated on pg. 51, amidst a larger call for dramatic military build-up, that:

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

Pearl Harbor is mentioned again later in the document in arguing for not only accelerated military spending, but for updated, state-of-the-art equipment, vehicles and Navy vessels. "Absent a rigorous program of experimentation to investigate the nature of the revolution in military affairs as it applies to war at sea, the Navy might face a future Pearl Harbor – as unprepared for war in the post-carrier era as it was unprepared for war at the dawn of the carrier age." This veiled threat evokes memories of a long-line of iconic false-flag attacks on U.S. ships-- including the Maine and the Gulf of Tonkin-- which, like Pearl Harbor, also launched profitable wars. During his June 2001 speech, Wolfowitz commented on the role of such unanticipated events: "Military history is full of surprises, even if few are as dramatic or memorable as Pearl Harbor. Surprises happen so often, that is is surprising that we're still surprised by it." At least since his 1992 'Wolfowitz Doctrine' under George H.W. Bush, he has called for a sharp transformation of military capabilities into an unilateral and pre-emptive security arm for world conflicts-- solidifying U.S. primacy in the world order and ensuring control over mid-east oil. One year after the goal of military escalation was reaffirmed in the PNAC documents-- written largely by members of the Bush administration-- the 9/11 'surprise' attack happened and Wolfowitz saw his dream of military build-up come to fruition-- including massive increases in budget, far beyond even the $100 billion increase Wolfowitz called for a decade earlier. Remember, President Bush had the orders to launch war in Afghanistan on his desk two days prior to 9/11, but didn't sign them until after the attacks. Wolfowitz seemed to expect an unexpected war could be just around the corner during his June 2001 speech. He went into some detail about the tendency of governments to get into a "routine of obsession with familiar dangers"-- explaining why a multitude of threats and signals can be overlooked and fail to prevent surprise attacks like that on Pearl Harbor. He illustrates the rather ironic story of David Starr Jordan, who predicted-- just before the start of World War I-- that nations would not go to war in the future because banks would not find them to be profitable. Nearly a century later, Wolfowitz warns us that we should: "use hindsight to replace the poverty of expectations with anticipation of the unfamiliar and the unlikely." He reiterated those words in the closing remarks of his address to West Point graduates: "Be prepared to be surprised. Have courage." Now in the comfort of hindsight, it is chilling to realize that such an unexpected war was just beyond Wolfowitz's warning-- the unlikely 9/11 attack was just around the corner and indeed, there was a heavy atmosphere of unheeded warnings in the intelligence community leading up to the surprise attack. Fortunately for Wolfowitz, he was not embarrassing wrong as Jordan had been before World War I. He was, in fact, surprisingly dead on-- so much so, that one would swear he had prior knowledge. (Wolfowitz, like fellow PNAC member William Kristol, is seen as an heir apparent to Leo Strauss, who believes openly in deceiving the public-- that it is not only acceptable, but necessary. Paul Wolfowitz chose the University of Chicago over Harvard in order to study under Strauss, who held a professorship there.)