While the American right has been telling New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani to stay away from the city’s 25th anniversary memorial for September 11th because he is Muslim, it is a good time to remind ourselves that the predecessor to Project 2025 was the “Project for the New American Century” and pay homage to other elements of their rampant hypocrisy.
The September, 2000, document released by the project, entitled “Rebuilding America’s Defenses,” stated plainly: “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.”
It was narrower in scope than Project 2025, but, like the more recent document, the authors of the New American Century’s work were central to the administration of President George W. Bush.
It was not the Muslim world, much less future mayor Mamdani’s family, who called for revolutionary change, even if it meant American deaths. It was people like Florida governor Jeb Bush, president Bush’s brother, Dan Quayle, the vice president under their father George H. W. Bush, Dick Cheney, George W. Bush’s own vice president, and Donald Rumsfeld, Bush’s defence secretary. Those were all among the 25 white men who signed the Statement of Principles at the core of the Project for the New American Century, many other of whose names you may remember from the Bush administration.
It was an era and a mission of American hegemony before the advent of social media, Russian interference in western politics, and the widespread disinformation currently undermining our democracies.
Bush won the 2000 election against Al Gore on a supreme court case around which ballots to recount in Florida, on the meaning of hanging chads, and the voting intentions of those provided with a deliberately confusing ballot, and whether democracy would even be served by recounting those ballots. The whole effort should be seen as trial and error practice for Trump’s efforts to steal the 2020 and current elections.
The Bush administration, elected on the thinnest of margins and with then-historically low popularity, filled itself with hawks who specifically advocated for a massive increase in military spending and assertion of overseas power, but lacking the public will and mandate to do so.
He, and they, turned the cataclysmic, Pearl Harbor-like event of 9/11 into long wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, invoking NATO article 5 for the first time, dragging their allies into their worldview. These wars killed orders of magnitude more people than died in the attack, yet they accomplished nothing toward world stability or even American dominance. Iraq is still a mess. They were outright defeated in Afghanistan, with the Taliban now back fully in control. They are now in another forever war with Iran.
After 9/11, then New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani claimed the air in New York City was safe to breathe. Giuliani, who went on to be Donald Trump’s lawyer through the Big Lie where Trump claimed to have won a 2020 election he clearly lost, was hiding important information, and tens of thousands of New Yorkers are suffering long term health consequences from it.
But it took today’s mayor Mamdani to release 170,000 pages of previously hidden documents showing the reality.
On the day of the attack, Canada took in tens of thousands of travellers across hundreds of grounded aircraft, as memorialised in the play Come From Away. We, as a country and as a people, were there for the Americans in every way.
Today, the Republican-controlled American government, the direct descendant and spiritual heir of George W. Bush’s administration, have been attacking and undermining Canada’s very existence. While their overseas activities and forever wars have made the past and current Republican presidents’ closest supporters unimaginably wealthy, the United States has lost its global standing, its global power, and virtually every positive aspect of its once mighty global reputation.
They no longer have the power or the ability to assert their power anywhere else. After 25 years of the New American Century, the United States needs to attack their closest neighbour and ally, Canada, because they still need to feel strong and mighty when they are no longer either of those things.
After spending a year and a half insulting his host country, US Ambassador to Canada Pete Hoekstra is in Gander to mark the anniversary of 9/11 at the epicentre of Canada’s aid to and compassion for his country on that day.
If there were ever to be anyone who should be told to stay away from a memorial for the September 11th attacks, it is not Zohran Mamdani, it is people like Pete Hoekstra, disbarred Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani, and everyone and everything they represent.