A clean break.

'A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm' was prepared by the Institute for Advanced Strategic and Political Studies' 'Study Group on a New Israeli Strategy Toward 2000,' as advice to incoming Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu. Its participants, per the paper's own text, included Richard Perle (who led the group), Douglas Feith, David Wurmser, Meyrav Wurmser, James Colbert, Charles Fairbanks Jr., and Robert Loewenberg. It urged Israel to make 'a clean break' from the Oslo process and argued Israeli security would be best served by regime change in surrounding states — explicitly framing 'removing Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq' as an Israeli strategic objective. The document is public; Feith hosts it on his own website.

• A Clean Break — primary text (hosted on Douglas Feith's own site): the IASPS study group and participant list
• Wikipedia — A Clean Break: Feith and Perle advised Netanyahu to break from Oslo and pursue regional regime change

The Project for the New American Century, founded in 1997 by William Kristol and Robert Kagan, campaigned for US military primacy and regime change in Iraq — sending President Clinton a 1998 letter urging Saddam's removal. Its September 2000 report, 'Rebuilding America's Defenses,' contains the line quoted ever since. In a section on how slow military 'transformation' would be, it reads: '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.' That is the exact, verbatim text (page 51 of the report).

“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.”

• Rebuilding America's Defenses (PNAC, Sept 2000) — full report scan, the 'new Pearl Harbor' passage on p. 51

The papers became personnel. In the George W. Bush administration, Richard Perle chaired the Defense Policy Board, Paul Wolfowitz was Deputy Secretary of Defense, Douglas Feith was Under Secretary of Defense for Policy (running the Office of Special Plans), and David Wurmser advised the vice president's office. In 2003 the United States invaded Iraq and removed Saddam Hussein — the objective both the 1996 paper (for Israel) and the PNAC campaign (for America) had named years earlier. The continuity from document to office to war is a matter of record.

• Wikipedia — Project for the New American Century (membership, the 1998 Clinton letter, and the Bush-era appointments)

Benjamin Netanyahu has, on the record, twice noted that the September 11 attacks worked to Israel's benefit. On September 11, 2001, the former prime minister was asked by the New York Times what the attacks meant for US–Israel relations and answered, 'It's very good,' then edited himself: 'Well, not very good, but it will generate immediate sympathy.' In 2008, at a Bar-Ilan University conference reported by Ma'ariv and Haaretz, he said, 'We are benefiting from one thing, and that is the attack on the Twin Towers and Pentagon, and the American struggle in Iraq,' adding that the events 'swung American public opinion in our favor.' We grade only what he said: candid, even callous, observations that the attacks shifted US sympathy toward Israel. They are NOT evidence — and we do not present them as evidence — that Israel or Netanyahu caused, planned, or foreknew the attacks. Benefiting from an event is not the same as causing it, and the distinction is the whole point.

“We are benefiting from one thing, and that is the attack on the Twin Towers and Pentagon, and the American struggle in Iraq.”

• New York Times (Sept. 12, 2001, James Bennet) — Netanyahu on 9/11: 'It's very good... it will generate immediate sympathy'
• Haaretz (April 16, 2008) — 'Report: Netanyahu says 9/11 terror attacks good for Israel' (reporting the Bar-Ilan remarks via Ma'ariv)
• Wikiquote — Benjamin Netanyahu (both quotations with their original citations)

This is the overreach we reject outright. The line appears in a dry passage arguing that modernizing the military would be slow unless something dramatic accelerated it — a descriptive prediction about the pace of change, not a wish, a plan, or a call for an attack. There is no evidence in the document, or anywhere else, that PNAC's authors wanted, foresaw, or orchestrated the September 11 attacks. Treating a sentence about the difficulty of defense reform as proof of a false-flag plot is a conspiracy theory, and we grade it as pure speculation with nothing behind it. The verbatim quote is striking on its own; it does not need, and cannot bear, that weight.

• Rebuilding America's Defenses — the quote in its actual context (a section on the slowness of military transformation)

Here is the defensible core. A group of American strategists wrote regime-change advice for a foreign government, then advanced a materially identical agenda from inside the US government, and got the war they'd argued for. That overlap of interests is documented and worth scrutiny — it is fair to ask whose 'realm' the 'securing' was for. But the honest version stops well short of the antisemitic shorthand it often collapses into: this is a specific, named set of people and papers, not 'the Jews,' and the authors sincerely held that toppling Saddam served American primacy too, not only Israel's. We grade the documented overlap and the question it raises as PROBABLY TRUE, and we refuse to launder it into a dual-loyalty smear.

• Black Book Audit — In Their Own Words (the discipline: name specific actors and documents, never an identity group)