My "main man" William Rivers Pitt gave an excellent speech the other day which very thoroughly introduced the Project For The New American Century and how they relate to current geopolitical events:

In 1997, this think tank was formed. Their principal goals were to radically change American foreign policy and the basic concept of how and why we go to war. By proxy, they wanted to take Iraq over and establish a permanent military presence there. From there, they wanted to take over, basically, the entire Middle East. One broken election later, the prime and powerful advocates for these clearly documented and clearly fringe concepts became the Vice President (Cheney), the Secretary of Defense (Rumsfeld), the Assistant Secretary of Defense (Wolfowitz), the chairman of the Pentagon’s Defense Policy Board (Perle), and the head of the National Security Council (Abrams). In short, the prime movers of this group became the foreign policy, military, and national security establishment of the United States government.

He ultimately concludes:

They believe we can defeat terrorism by kicking ass and taking names, by being violent and unilateral, by basically shoving the worst aspects of our country and our system into the international community’s face and demanding, at gunpoint, that they be with us or against us. Machiavelli said, long ago, that given such a choice, the attacked would always choose to be against. Kicking ass in Iraq, while being exposed as liars and bullies, has proven to be the greatest recruiting poster al Qaeda could have ever asked for. We can defeat these thugs if we go after them properly. We can cut off their funds and their ability to bring in people who will die for the privilege of watching you die. But when we do what we have been doing, when we follow the PNAC plan, we create an unending tide of furious humanity that will, in the end, bury us.

Needless to say, if you're interested in gaining a clearer understanding as to why our foreign policy seems to have gone off the deep end, and why a growing number of citizens cringe every time one of our leaders describes "the real reasons" we are engaged in Iraq, getting to know the PNAC is a must.