The PNACers ar packing it in: Mission Accomplished in Iraq!

I happened to look at the Wikipedia entry for the PNAC, and noticed that the final external reference commented that the last update to their website was in December 2005, their email box is full, and their search function doesn't work. Sure enough, this is true (I haven't tried the email). So, 4 months with no apparent activity? Perhaps they've just lost their webmaster; but perhaps they really have gone into hibernation - or have even given up producing anything new at all.

The reason for suspecting the latter was the strange case of the "Committee for a Strong Europe". In October 2005, Pascal Riché, a journalist for Liberation in France, noted this new group, in TPM Cafe, and included confirmation from Gary Schmitt, of the PNAC, of the 'Committee' and its links to the PNAC. Other websites seemed to talk about the PNAC "ceasing its existence last week, to be replaced the next day by the Committee for a Strong Europe", or being "discretely dissolved 2 weeks ago" (though that was in French, so something may have been lost in my translation). See the DU thread about this at the time. The honorary presidents were said to be Jose Maria Aznar (right wing, Iraq-war-supporting ex-Prime Minister of Spain) and John McCain.

But the web presence of the CfaSE seems to be zero since this initial story. Perhaps it never existed as anything more than a dream of Schmitt. However, another group has appeared - the Henry Jackson Society. Although named after the neocons' favourite Democratic senator, it's based in Britain, and the Organising Committee is a bunch of twenty-something history PhD candidates at Cambridge. But they got a large list of moderately well-known British politicians (Conservative and Blairite Labour), journalists (mostly from Murdoch's Times), professors and retired MI6 and NATO personnel to sign their Statement of Principles, and their 'international patrons' are stuffed with PNAC people - James Woolsey, Richard Perle, Joshua Muravchik (despite the 'socialist' tag), Clifford May, William Kristol, Robert Kagan and Bruce P. Jackson. The only 2 who aren't PNACers are General Jack Sheehan (vice-president of war profiteers Bechtel) and Michael McFaul (liberal hawk who wrote a WSJ article advocating regime change in Iran in 2004, quoted approvingly on the PNAC website).
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A pretty good match, really. The HJS gives a nod to a few limits on capitalism and preservation of civil liberties, which the Committee doesn't mention. While the Henry Jackson Society came into being in March 2005, it appears to have stayed as a Cambridge University society until November, when it got a London launch, courtesy of its MP members. That got coverage in national newspapers. Did the Committee for a Strong Europe fizzle out, and the rebirth of the PNAC get transferred to a convenient University think-tank? Gary Schmitt did talk to them in August. Is the PNAC passing its baton to the dinner tables of Cambridge University and a new generation of article writers pushing for invasions?

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