Most of the gang of adventurers who hold strategic positions in the Bush II administration honed their Machiavellian skills in the Reagan and Bush I administrations. Some such as Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld go back to the Ford administration in the mid-1970s. In their political exile during the Clinton terms many of them found employment in an incestuous network of right-wing think tanks and quasi-academic institutions plotting their return to power while advancing an imperial agenda. These outfits include the American Enterprise Institute, the Heritage Foundation, the Manhattan Institute, the Hudson Institute, the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, the Nitze School of Advanced International Studies, the Center of Strategic and International Studies, the Baker Institute for Public Policy, and the Olin Institute of Strategic Studies.
Financial support for this network is partially coordinated by the Philanthropy Roundtable, a collection of over 650 right- wing foundations and individual donors. William Simon, former treasury secretary in the Nixon/Ford administrations, is credited with institutionalizing the practice of targeted, strategic “philanthropy.” The Roundtable is run by a board of directors that includes the heads of the notoriously conservative Olin, Bradley and Scaife foundations.
The Council on National Policy is the other major clearinghouse for funds used to mobilize right-wing Christian networks to get behind an “apocalyptic” agenda. The recent appointment of Lt. General William G. Boykin to the new position of deputy undersecretary of defense for intelligence represents a tangible thank you to the religious right for their invaluable support of the “war against terrorism.” This past June General Boykin delivered a sermon at the Good Shepherd Community Church in Sandy, Oregon, displaying slides of Osama bin Laden and North Korea’s Kim Jung II. Boykin asked rhetorically, “Why do they hate us?” “[B]ecause we’re a Christian nation. We are hated because we are a nation of believers.” Continuing, Boykin said our “spiritual enemy will only be defeated if we come against them in the name of Jesus.” Serving up such rhetoric insures that the Council on National Policy will receive more donations to support Christian media and their broadcast of war propaganda.
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