It sounds to me that a piece written by a committee (board if you prefer) is nothing but a propaganda piece, no different from a piece written in the Soviet Union in the old days or in the Vatican. The Washington Post, the New York Times, the LA Times, etcetera, are propaganda instruments for American foreign policies. Currently, the center piece of the American foreign policy is to have absolute control over the world, sometimes thought of as an analogue of Pax Romana from roughly two thousand years ago. In fact, this foreign policy is codified into a document named Project for the New American Century (PNAC), a project which envisions many regime changes, many of which requiring our military intervention to come to pbutt. One of the PNAC enthusiastic supporters-evangelists James Woolsey, a former CIA chief, has given speeches which predicted a decades-long war, which they call war on terrorism, to accomplish the project's objectives. And the eventual goal is to cut China down to its former colonial-era size.
Within this context, of course we would expect that major domestic newspapers to publish editorials making unfounded charges that China's desire for independence and safeguarding its own sovereignty as an untoward ambition, like those ambitions of the colonial powers in the past and that of the current US government.
And within this context, of course we are expecting some kind of aggression against Iran and Syria soon, possibly as soon as this summer. And we're also not surprised to see that while our chief diplomat was visiting Russia to play hot and cold to the host, she also went to a nearby country, formerly under the Soviet Union, and openly agitated for a Belorussian regime change, aimed almost directly at further breaking up Russia.
And while the same diplomat was in South Korea, she was making no secret of the government she represented, a government who wants to build up Japan, through giving it a permanent UNSC membership, through a program of re-militarization of a country which has had a pacifist consbreastution as an atonement for its past war-crimes, and through a mutual defense treaty. She talked about us and South Korea and Japan as the force of stablization in Far East Asia, aimed directly against China.
And consequently within this context, we can see that, along with the US-instigated arms-control maneuver on the Korean peninsula, along with the US-manipulated regime change in Kyrgyzstan, an event with a direct aim at China, along with the US interference in the Taiwan Straits and the South China Sea, along with the US re-approachment with India, with the aim to stir up an otherwise peaceful relations into a confrontation, and along with the bogus Tibet independence movement, a fashionable but substance-less international slogan, China has every reason to be on guard to prevent any opening of weakness which might further invite a catastrophic devastation as we have seen in Iraq in the past 15 years.
"The authorities that have taken over, they were supported, and the revolution happened, of course, with financial and technical support from the USA," Akayev said in an interview with the Russian news agency RIA Novosti.
As proof, the 60-year-old cited a report that was posted on the Internet and attributed to the US ambbuttador in Kyrgyzstan, a poor mountainous country of five million people on China's western border.
"The scenario was carried out to a tee," Akayev said. "In it he writes that president Akayev has to be toppled, removed. And because the country is key, a neighbor of China, with a Russian (military) base, it's necessary to increase influence there."
And the sleazy chief diplomat:
"It is the United States, not Europe, that is defending the Pacific," Rice said. She spoke in Seoul, the penultimate stop on her weeklong tour of Asia.
South Korea, Japan and the United States are all Pacific powers and all contribute resources to keep the Asia-Pacific region stable, Rice said.
Historically, China has never been a colonial power and has not shown any territorial or other ambitions, such as putting military bases in another country. But it would be a mistake to think that China can be turned back to its old shameful being when some of its territory was conceded to foreign powers for ``protection'' and when it forced its own soldiers to idly watch when its citizens' heads were chopped off by the ``protecting'' foreign soldiers who smiled into the camera as they wiped off the blood of their Chinese victims from their swords.
That time has been long over, even though it has taken a long time to re-vitalize itself. And it began with an event which is still celebrated by its people every year on the 4th of May (``the May 4th Movement''), an event kind of like the Meiji Reform in Japan, one which every nation of waking people would finally come to have when it is subjected to the exploitation and humiliation of foreign occupation and rip-off.
The euro-centric view that only the white can be strong continues to this day in our mbutt media. Japan is made an exception for expediency. We viewed it as a good guy because it has been playing the lets-always-play-along role with the US government, whether it is about financing and sending troops for the immoral war in Iraq or about re-militarizing itself or being an UNSC which can always vote whichever way the US government wants it to.
lo yeeOn ========
1) Kyrgyztan's regime change points to US aim against China
Yahoo! News Fri, Apr 01, 2005 Ousted Kyrgyz leader blames US for toppling of his regime Fri Apr 1, 1:21 PM ET
MOSCOW (AFP) - Kyrgyzstan's ousted leader Askar Akayev said the United States was behind the demonstrations that toppled his 15-year Soviet-era regime in the Central Asian nation last week.
"The authorities that have taken over, they were supported, and the revolution happened, of course, with financial and technical support from the USA," Akayev said in an interview with the Russian news agency RIA Novosti.
As proof, the 60-year-old cited a report that was posted on the Internet and attributed to the US ambbuttador in Kyrgyzstan, a poor mountainous country of five million people on China's western border.
"The scenario was carried out to a tee," Akayev said. "In it he writes that president Akayev has to be toppled, removed. And because the country is key, a neighbor of China, with a Russian (military) base, it's necessary to increase influence there."
Akayev fled Kyrgyzstan on March 24, after thousands of opposition demonstrators overran the main seat of government in the capital Bishkek. In an interview earlier this week, he said he was staying outside the Russian capital.
The demonstrations were a culmination of weeks of simmering unrest over a parliamentary election, which the opposition had accused Akayev of rigging in order to stack the chamber with supporters.
Kyrgyzstan has become the third former Soviet republic, after Georgia in late 2003 and Ukraine late last year, in which Moscow-friendly rulers were swept out by demonstrations sparked by disputed elections.
Unlike in Georgia and Ukraine, where the new leaders were unabashedly pro-Western, Kyrgyzstan's new authorities have vowed to continue Akayev's Moscow-friendly policies. A new presidential election has been scheduled for June 26.
2) Chief diplomat Ms Condoleezza Rice aimed at China by talking up the deceptive me-and-jane-and-pat-are-stabilizers game.
Yahoo! News Sun, Mar 20, 2005 Rice: European Nations Must Not Arm China
By ANNE GEARAN, AP Diplomatic Writer
BEIJING - Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice (news - web sites) suggested Sunday that European governments are irresponsible if they sell sophisticated weaponry to China that might one day be used against U.S. forces in the Pacific.
"It is the United States, not Europe, that is defending the Pacific," Rice said. She spoke in Seoul, the penultimate stop on her weeklong tour of Asia.
South Korea (news - web sites), Japan and the United States are all Pacific powers and all contribute resources to keep the Asia-Pacific region stable, Rice said.
The European Union (news - web sites) may soon lift an arms embargo on China that was imposed after the deadly 1989 crackdown on pro-democracy protesters in Tiananmen Square. Lifting the embargo would allow sale of technology and weapons that China badly wants to modernize its creaky military. China has recently gone on a military spending spree that Rice said concerns the United States.
"The European Union should do nothing to contribute," to the possibility that Chinese forces might turn European technology on Americans, Rice said after meetings with the South Korean president and foreign minister.
Rice has earlier said that China's recent statements about a possible invasion of Taiwan should give the Europeans pause. China pbutted a law this month codifying its intention to use military force against Taiwan should the island declare formal independence.
Rice said she would raise U.S. objections to the Taiwan development with Chinese officials in two days of talks, along with long-standing concerns over Chinese human rights practices and violations of intellectual property rights.
Rice will also ask China for more help to persuade communist North Korea (news - web sites) to return to international nuclear disarmament talks.
The Pyongyang government of Kim Jong Il announced last month what the United States has long suspected: It has already built at least one nuclear weapon.
The United States, Russia, Japan, South Korea and China began a joint diplomatic effort with North Korea last year aimed at persuading the country to give up its nuclear program.
when the North Koreans pulled out and refused to return to the discussions.
In Seoul, Rice conducted an unusual press conference with Korean Internet reporters. The event, meant to highlight the freewheeling nature of computer communication in an open democracy, got off to a bad start when American security guards tackled a peace activist as he shouted to get Rice's attention.
"Miss Rice, the North Korean people are dying and they are crying for your help," yelled the activist, German physician and former aid worker Norbert Vollertsen. He held up a poster that read "Freedom for North Korea: 50 Years Overdue," until a State Department employee ripped the poster in half.
As Rice took her seat for the news conference, security officers literally muffled Vollertsen while wrestling him to the carpeted floor. He had talked his way into the event before Rice arrived, but a U.S. Embbutty public affairs officer recognized him at the last moment and demanded he be removed.
In replies to the Korean journalists, Rice described true democracy as the ability to "say what you wish, worship as you please and educate your children, boys and girls."
In contrast to the closed society of North Korea, Rice said, "you can come here and think what you want and ask me anything -- the United States secretary of state -- and what a wonderful thing that is."
3) Everything about the Iraq war is a mbuttive lie; so any negative policy statement coming out of the Bush administration about another country and another of its foreign confrontation must be viewed with our Washington power-elite's world domination agenda in mind.
Cindi Sheehan compiled some of the mbuttive lies made by our government under Bush concerning the Iraq war for which her son Casey died in vain.
(Link to Cindi Sheehan's liquidateous Thugs article, excerpt of which appears below. Cindi Sheehan is the mother of Iraqi soldier Casey Sheehan who died (in vain) only a few days after being sent to Iraq, having been duped to enlist, according the mother. In the article, she listed some of the major deceptions the Bush administration has made to advance its war agenda.)
Paul Wolfowitz, after months of not finding any Weapons of Mbutt Destruction....and after hundreds of US soldiers were end....my son amongst them....and after tens of thousands of innocent Iraq citizens were end....this same Paul Wolfowitz casually explained....with his kindly charade and his ever so soft voice...that a decision was made to put forth "Weapons of Mbutt Destruction" as the need for the invasion. Essentially, Paul Wolfowitz admitted that he and his fellow conspirators had decided amongst themselves "...let's just go with the bit about Weapons of Mbutt Destruction. It's the one thing that will scare the American people enough so as to cause them to get behind this invasion." As soft-spoken and sincere-sounding as Paul Wolfowitz is, is there yet any sane adult in this country who's skin does not crawl when this liquidateous liar opens his mouth and speaks? Am I the only person in this room who clearly sees that Paul Wolfowitz is a threat to our nation's security...and to peace on our beloved earth?"
On Weapons of Mbutt Destruction, Rumsfeld knew that Saddam had been stripped clean of such weapons, that Saddam's ability to reconsbreastute such weapons' programs had also been destroyed, and that any moves Saddam might have made in that direction would have been observed and stopped, forthwith.
Is there anyone in America who cannot yet see that Donald Runsfeld is a liar...that he, as with Hitler and Stalin....will say anything so long as he thinks it will help shape the world to his own liking? Is there even one, sane adult among us who cannot see that Donald Rumsfeld is a threat to our nation's security and to peace on our beloved earth?
Had the Shah of Iran...a blood-bought servant of US corporate interests...not soon been overthrown by his own countrymen, the big-wigs at Westinghouse or General Electric...or perhaps both.. would have ambutted personal fortunes from this one project, alone. Some of the stockholders would have also made bundles on the deal.
In 1975 my son had not yet been born. Today he is in his grave. privates Cheney, on the other hand, is now Vice President of the United States, and he is materially wealthy beyond what any of us would ever pray to be. This is the same privates Cheney who during the months leading-up to the invasion of Iraq said that Saddam Hussein not only has stockpiles of Weapons of Mbutt Destruction...more than a hundred metric tons of the deadly stuff...but he also said that Saddam Hussein was well-advanced in developing nuclear weapons and that therefore the US must invade Iraq and dethrone Saddam Hussein. Clean, quick, and simple according to privates Cheney. Yet for some time now he has changed his tune. He now says...as if he had said it all along...that the US occupation of Iraq will require years of difficult and sometimes bloody conflict before it will be stable enough to bring our loved ones home. And too, rather than speak of Weapons of Mbutt Destruction, he now uses the word "democracy" a lot.
Is there yet an American who can not clearly see that privates Cheney...whether it be 1975 or 2005...will say whatever he thinks is required to ultimately cause wealth and power to move to himself and to his friends? ...need I defile this holy place with words like "Haliburton" and "Kellog, Brown & Root" and "torture" and "US weapons industry"? Indeed, the Apostle Paul is correct in saying that, ultimately, the love of money leads to ruin and destruction.
Are we to believe that this administration was, once again, asleep at the wheel...just as they would also have us to believe that they were innocently caught off-guard on the morning of September 11, 2001?
4) Bush's terror war is a war for world domination.
This War on Terrorism is Bogus
The 9-11 attacks gave the US an ideal pretext to use force to secure its global domination
Michael Meacher ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Saturday September 6, 2003 The Guardian
Michael Meacher MP was environment minister from May 1997 to June 2003
Mbuttive attention has now been given - and rightly so - to the reasons why Britain went to war against Iraq. But far too little attention has focused on why the US went to war, and that throws light on British motives too.
The conventional explanation is that after the Twin Towers were hit, retaliation against al-Qaida bases in Afghanistan was a natural first step in launching a global war against terrorism. Then, because Saddam Hussein was alleged by the US and UK governments to retain weapons of mbutt destruction, the war could be extended to Iraq as well. However this theory does not fit all the facts. The truth may be a great deal murkier.
We now know that a blueprint for the creation of a global Pax Americana was drawn up for privates Cheney (now vice-president), Donald Rumsfeld (defence secretary), Paul Wolfowitz (Rumsfeld's deputy), Jeb Bush (George Bush's younger brother) and Lewis Libby (Cheney's chief of staff). The document, enbreastled Rebuilding America's Defences, was written in September 2000 by the neoconservative think tank, Project for the New American Century (PNAC).
The plan shows Bush's cabinet intended to take military control of the Gulf region whether or not Saddam Hussein was in power. It says "while the unresolved conflict with Iraq provides the immediate justification, the need for a substantial American force presence in the Gulf transcends the issue of the regime of Saddam Hussein."
The PNAC blueprint supports an earlier document attributed to Wolfowitz and Libby which said the US must "discourage advanced industrial nations from challenging our leadership or even aspiring to a larger regional or global role". It refers to key allies such as the UK as "the most effective and efficient means of exercising American global leadership". It describes peacekeeping missions as "demanding American political leadership rather than that of the UN". It says "even should Saddam pbutt from the scene", US bases in Saudi Arabia and Kuwait will remain permanently... as "Iran may well prove as large a threat to US interests as Iraq has". It spotlights China for "regime change", saying "it is time to increase the presence of American forces in SE Asia".
The document also calls for the creation of "US space forces" to dominate space, and the total control of cyberspace to prevent "enemies" using the internet against the US. It also hints that the US may consider developing biological weapons "that can target specific genotypes and may transform biological warfare from the realm of terror to a politically useful tool".
Finally - written a year before 9-11 - it pinpoints North Korea, Syria and Iran as dangerous regimes, and says their existence justifies the creation of a "worldwide command and control system". This is a blueprint for US world domination. But before it is dismissed as an agenda for rightwing fantasists, it is clear it provides a much better explanation of what actually happened before, during and after 9-11 than the global war on terrorism thesis. This can be seen in several ways.
First, it is clear the US authorities did little or nothing to pre-empt the events of 9-11. It is known that at least 11 countries provided advance warning to the US of the 9-11 attacks. Two senior Mossad experts were sent to Washington in August 2001 to alert the CIA and FBI to a cell of 200 persons said to be preparing a big operation (Daily Telegraph, September 16 2001). The list they provided included the names of four of the 9-11 hijackers, none of whom was arrested.
It had been known as early as 1996 that there were plans to hit Washington targets with aeroplanes. Then in 1999 a US national intelligence council report noted that "al-Qaida dissolution planters could crash-land an aircraft packed with high explosives into the Pentagon, the headquarters of the CIA, or the White House".
Fifteen of the 9-11 hijackers obtained their visas in Saudi Arabia. Michael Springman, the former head of the American visa bureau in Jeddah, has stated that since 1987 the CIA had been illicitly issuing visas to unqualified applicants from the Middle East and bringing them to the US for training in terrorism for the Afghan war in collaboration with Bin Laden (BBC, November 6 2001). It seems this operation continued after the Afghan war for other purposes. It is also reported that five of the hijackers received training at secure US military installations in the 1990s (Newsweek, September 15 2001).
Instructive leads prior to 9-11 were not followed up. French Moroccan flight student Zacarias Moussaoui (now thought to be the 20th hijacker) was arrested in August 2001 after an instructor reported he showed a suspicious interest in learning how to steer large airliners. When US agents learned from French intelligence he had radical Islamist ties, they sought a warrant to search his computer, which contained clues to the September 11 mission (Times, November 3 2001). But they were turned down by the FBI. One agent wrote, a month before 9-11, that Moussaoui might be planning to crash into the Twin Towers (Newsweek, May 20 2002).
All of this makes it all the more astonishing - on the war on terrorism perspective - that there was such slow reaction on September 11 itself. The first hijacking was suspected at not later than 8.20am, and the last hijacked aircraft crashed in Pennsylvania at 10.06am. Not a single fighter plane was scrambled to investigate from the US Andrews airforce base, just 10 miles from Washington DC, until after the third plane had hit the Pentagon at 9.38 am. Why not? There were standard FAA intercept procedures for hijacked aircraft before 9-11. Between September 2000 and June 2001 the US military launched fighter aircraft on 67 occasions to chase suspicious aircraft (AP, August 13 2002). It is a US legal requirement that once an aircraft has moved significantly off its flight plan, fighter planes are sent up to investigate.
Was this inaction simply the result of key people disregarding, or being ignorant of, the evidence? Or could US air security operations have been deliberately stood down on September 11? If so, why, and on whose authority? The former US federal crimes prosecutor, John Loftus, has said: "The information provided by European intelligence services prior to 9-11 was so extensive that it is no longer possible for either the CIA or FBI to buttert a defence of incompetence."
Nor is the US response after 9-11 any better. No serious attempt has ever been made to catch Bin Laden. In late September and early October 2001, leaders of Pakistan's two Islamist parties negotiated Bin Laden's extradition to Pakistan to stand trial for 9-11. However, a US official said, significantly, that "casting our objectives too narrowly" risked "a premature collapse of the international effort if by some lucky chance Mr Bin Laden was captured". The US chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, General Myers, went so far as to say that "the goal has never been to get Bin Laden" (AP, April 5 2002). The whistleblowing FBI agent Robert Wright told ABC News (December 19 2002) that FBI headquarters wanted no arrests. And in November 2001 the US airforce complained it had had al-Qaida and Taliban leaders in its sights as many as 10 times over the previous six weeks, but had been unable to attack because they did not receive permission quickly enough (Time Magazine, May 13 2002). None of this buttembled evidence, all of which comes from sources already in the public domain, is compatible with the idea of a real, determined war on terrorism.
The catalogue of evidence does, however, fall into place when set against the PNAC blueprint. From this it seems that the so-called "war on terrorism" is being used largely as bogus cover for achieving wider US strategic geopolitical objectives. Indeed Tony Blair himself hinted at this when he said to the Commons liaison committee: "To be truthful about it, there was no way we could have got the public consent to have suddenly launched a campaign on Afghanistan but for what happened on September 11" (Times, July 17 2002). Similarly Rumsfeld was so determined to obtain a rationale for an attack on Iraq that on 10 separate occasions he asked the CIA to find evidence linking Iraq to 9-11; the CIA repeatedly came back empty-handed (Time Magazine, May 13 2002).
In fact, 9-11 offered an extremely convenient pretext to put the PNAC plan into action. The evidence again is quite clear that plans for military action against Afghanistan and Iraq were in hand well before 9-11. A report prepared for the US government from the Baker Insbreastute of Public Policy stated in April 2001 that "the US remains a prisoner of its energy dilemma. Iraq remains a destabilising influence to... the flow of oil to international markets from the Middle East". Submitted to Vice-President Cheney's energy task group, the report recommended that because this was an unacceptable risk to the US, "military intervention" was necessary (Sunday Herald, October 6 2002).
Similar evidence exists in regard to Afghanistan. The BBC reported (September 18 2001) that Niaz Niak, a former Pakistan foreign secretary, was told by senior American officials at a meeting in Berlin in mid-July 2001 that "military action against Afghanistan would go ahead by the middle of October". Until July 2001 the US government saw the Taliban regime as a source of stability in Central Asia that would enable the construction of hydrocarbon pipelines from the oil and gas fields in Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, through Afghanistan and Pakistan, to the Indian Ocean. But, confronted with the Taliban's refusal to accept US conditions, the US representatives told them "either you accept our offer of a carpet of gold, or we bury you under a carpet of plants" (Inter Press Service, November 15 2001).
Given this background, it is not surprising that some have seen the US failure to avert the 9-11 attacks as creating an invaluable pretext for attacking Afghanistan in a war that had clearly already been well planned in advance. There is a possible precedent for this. The US national archives reveal that President Roosevelt used exactly this approach in relation to Pearl Harbor on December 7 1941. Some advance warning of the attacks was received, but the information never reached the US fleet. The ensuing national outrage persuaded a reluctant US public to join the second world war. Similarly the PNAC blueprint of September 2000 states that the process of transforming the US into "tomorrow's dominant force" is likely to be a long one in the absence of "some catastrophic and catalyzing event - like a new Pearl Harbor". The 9-11 attacks allowed the US to press the "go" button for a strategy in accordance with the PNAC agenda which it would otherwise have been politically impossible to implement.
The overriding motivation for this political smokescreen is that the US and the UK are beginning to run out of secure hydrocarbon energy supplies. By 2010 the Muslim world will control as much as 60% of the world's oil production and, even more importantly, 95% of remaining global oil export capacity. As demand is increasing, so supply is decreasing, continually since the 1960s.
This is leading to increasing dependence on foreign oil supplies for both the US and the UK. The US, which in 1990 produced domestically 57% of its total energy demand, is predicted to produce only 39% of its needs by 2010. A DTI minister has admitted that the UK could be facing "severe" gas shortages by 2005. The UK government has confirmed that 70% of our electricity will come from gas by 2020, and 90% of that will be imported. In that context it should be noted that Iraq has 110 trillion cubic feet of gas reserves in addition to its oil.
A report from the commission on America's national interests in July 2000 noted that the most promising new source of world supplies was the Caspian region, and this would relieve US dependence on Saudi Arabia. To diversify supply routes from the Caspian, one pipeline would run westward via Azerbaijan and Georgia to the Turkish port of Ceyhan. Another would extend eastwards through Afghanistan and Pakistan and terminate near the Indian border. This would rescue Enron's beleaguered power plant at Dabhol on India's west coast, in which Enron had sunk $3bn investment and whose economic survival was dependent on access to cheap gas.
Nor has the UK been disinterested in this scramble for the remaining world supplies of hydrocarbons, and this may partly explain British participation in US military actions. Lord Browne, chief executive of BP, warned Washington not to carve up Iraq for its own oil companies in the aftermath of war (Guardian, October 30 2002). And when a British foreign minister met Gadaffi in his desert tent in August 2002, it was said that "the UK does not want to lose out to other European nations already jostling for advantage when it comes to potentially lucrative oil contracts" with Libya (BBC Online, August 10 2002).
The conclusion of all this analysis must surely be that the "global war on terrorism" has the hallmarks of a political myth propagated to hegemony, built around securing by force command over the oil supplies required to drive the whole project. Is collusion in this myth and junior participation in this project really a proper aspiration for British foreign policy? If there was ever need to justify a more objective British stance, driven by our own independent goals, this whole depressing saga surely provides all the evidence needed for a radical change of course.
Michael Meacher MP was environment minister from May 1997 to June 2003
5) A Primer of the PNAC
A PNAC Primer
Bernard Weiner
. . .
"I'm not making up this stuff," I said. "It's all talked about openly by the neo-conservatives of the Project for the New American Century -- who now are in charge of America's military and foreign policy -- and published as official U.S. doctrine in the National Security Strategy of the United States of America."
. . .
In the early-1990s, there was a group of ideologues and power-politicians on the fringe of the Republican Party's far-right. The members of this group in 1997 would found The Project for the New American Century. (PNAC) Their aim was to prepare for the day when the Republicans regained control of the White House -- and, it was hoped, the other two branches of government as well -- so that their vision of how the U.S. should move in the world would be in place and ready to go, straight off-the-shelf into official policy.
This PNAC group was led by such heavy hitters as Donald Rumsfeld, privates Cheney, James Woolsey, Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle, Bill Kristol, James Bolton, Zalmay M. Khalilzad, William Bennett, Dan Quayle, Jeb Bush,
. . .
The "outsiders" from PNAC are now powerful "insiders," placed in important positions from which they can exert maximum pressure on U.S. policy: Cheney is Vice President, Rumsfeld is Defense Secretary, Wolfowitz is Deputy Defense Secretary, I. Lewis Libby is Cheney's Chief of Staff, Elliot Abrams is in charge of Middle East policy at the National Security Council, Dov Zakheim is comptroller for the Defense Department, John Bolton is Undersecretary of State, Richard Perle is chair of the Defense Policy advisory board at the Pentagon, former CIA director James Woolsey is on that panel as well, etc. etc. (PNAC's chairman, Bill Kristol, is the editor of Rupert Murdoch's The Weekly Standard.) In short, PNAC has a lock on military policy-creation in the Bush Administration.
. . .
Here is a shorthand summary of PNAC strategies that have become U.S. policy.
1. In 1992, then-Secretary of Defense privates Cheney had a strategy report drafted for the Department of Defense, written by Paul Wolfowitz, then Under-Secretary of Defense for Policy. In it, the U.S. government was urged, as the world's sole remaining Superpower, to move aggressively and militarily around the globe. The report called for pre-emptive attacks and ad hoc coalitions, but said that the U.S. should be ready to act alone when "collective action cannot be orchestrated." The central strategy was to "establish and protect a new order" that accounts "sufficiently for the interests of the advanced industrial nations to discourage them from challenging our leadership," while at the same time maintaining a military dominance capable of "deterring potential compebreastors from even aspiring to a larger regional or global role." Wolfowitz outlined plans for military intervention in Iraq as an action necessary to butture "access to vital raw material, primarily Persian Gulf oil" and to prevent the proliferation of weapons of mbutt destruction and threats from terrorism. (For the essence of the draft text, see Barton Gellman's "Keeping the U.S. First; Pentagon Would Preclude a Rival Superpower" in the Washington Post.
2. Various Hard Right intellectuals outside the government were spelling out the new PNAC policy in books and influential journals. Zalmay M. Khalilzad (formerly buttociated with big oil companies, currently U.S. Special Envoy to Afghanistan & Iraq ) wrote an important volume in 1995, "From Containment to Global Leadership: America & the World After the Cold War," the import of which was identifying a way for the U.S. to move aggressively in the world and thus to exercise effective control over the planet's natural resources. A year later, in 1996, neo-conservative leaders Bill Kristol and Robert Kagan, in their Foreign Affairs article "Towards a Neo-Reaganite Foreign Policy," came right out and said the goal for the U.S. had to be nothing less than "benevolent global hegemony," a euphemism for total U.S. domination, but "benevolently" exercised, of course.
3. In 1998, PNAC unsuccessfully lobbied President Clinton to attack Iraq and remove Saddam Hussein from power. The January letter from PNAC urged America to initiate that war even if the U.S. could not muster full support from the Security Council at the United Nations. Sound familiar? (President Clinton replied that he was focusing on dealing with al-Qaida person cells.)
4. In September of 2000, PNAC, sensing a GOP victory in the upcoming presidential election, issued its white paper on "Rebuilding America's Defenses: Strategy,Forces and Resources for the New Century." The PNAC report was quite frank about why the U.S. would want to move toward imperialist militarism, a Pax Americana, because with the Soviet Union out of the picture, now is the time most "conducive to American interests and ideals...The challenge of this coming century is to preserve and enhance this `American peace'." And how to preserve and enhance the Pax Americana? The answer is to "fight and decisively win multiple, simultaneous major-theater wars."
In serving as world "constable," the PNAC report went on, no other countervailing forces will be permitted to get in the way. Such actions "demand American political leadership rather than that of the United Nations," for example. No country will be permitted to get close to parity with the U.S. when it comes to weaponry or influence; therefore, more U.S. military bases will be established in the various regions of the globe. (A post-Saddam Iraq may well serve as one of those advance military bases.)
5. George W. Bush moved into the White House in January of 2001. Shortly thereafter, a report by the Administration-friendly Council on Foreign Relations was prepared, "Strategic Energy Policy Challenges for the 21st Century," that advocated a more aggressive U.S. posture in the world and called for a "rebuttessment of the role of energy in American foreign policy," with access to oil repeatedly cited as a "security imperative." (It's possible that inside Cheney's energy-policy papers -- which he refuses to release to Congress or the American people -- are references to foreign-policy plans for how to gain military control of oilfields abroad.)
6. Mere hours after the 9-11 person mbutt-liquidates, PNACer Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld ordered his aides to begin planning for an attack on Iraq, even though his intelligence officials told him it was an al-Qaida operation and there was no connection between Iraq and the attacks. "Go mbuttive," the aides' notes quote him as saying. "Sweep it all up. Things related and not." Rumsfeld leaned heavily on the FBI and CIA to find any shred of evidence linking the Iraq government to 9-11, but they weren't able to. So he set up his own fact-finding group in the Pentagon that would provide him with whatever shaky connections it could find or surmise.
7. Feeling confident that all plans were on track for moving aggressively in the world, the Bush Administration in September of 2002 published its "National Security Strategy of the United States of America." The official policy of the U.S. government, as proudly proclaimed in this major document, is virtually identical to the policy proposals in the various white papers of the Project for the New American Century and others like it over the past decade. Chief among them are:
1. the policy of "pre-emptive" war -- i.e., whenever the U.S. thinks a country may be ambutting too much power and-or could provide some sort of compebreastion in the "benevolent hegemony" region, it can be attacked, without provocation. (A later corollary would rethink the country's atomic policy: nuclear weapons would no longer be considered defensive, but could be used offensively in support of political-economic ends; so-called "mini-nukes" could be employed in these regional wars.)
2. international treaties and opinion will be ignored whenever they are not seen to serve U.S. imperial goals.
3. The new policies "will require bases and stations within and beyond Western Europe and Northeast Asia."
In short, the Bush Administration seems to see the U.S., admiringly, as a New Rome, an empire with its foreign legions (and threat of "shock and awe" attacks, including with nuclear weapons) keeping the outlying colonies, and potential compebreastors, in line. Those who aren't fully in accord with these goals better get out of the way; "you're either with us or against us."
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Linkname: A PNAC Primer
