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For Anyone Who Is Still <s>ASLEEP</s> <s>CONFUSED</s> STUPID</font>
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Hijacking Catastrophe</FONT>
<font color="#ff0000" face="Arial black" size="4">9/11 Fear & the Selling of American Empire</font></CENTER><p>
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This film examines in detail how a radical fringe of the Republican Party used the trauma of the 9/11 terror attacks to DELIBERATELY LIE to the American people about a non-existent imminent threat from Weapons of Mass Destruction from Iraq to advance their pre-existing agenda to radically transform American foreign policy while rolling back civil liberties, ending social programs at home, and engaging the US into a Perpetual War for Global domination. The deliberate false justifications for Invading & Occupying Iraq are contextualized within the larger three-decade struggle by the lunatic neoconservatives led by Cheney & Rumsfeld to seize TOTAL CONTROL OF AMERICA and THE WORLD by means of an Unchecked Unilateral Military Intelligence Security Apparatus. This unrestrained force would no longer respect national sovereignty, would no longer respect human rights, and would hand-pick its corporate allies in its quest for total global domination. Fortunately like previous global fascist schemes they will ultimately be defeated.<p><p>
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<img src="http://dickcheneyfanclub.com/photos/Rumsfeld-cheney1975.jpg"><br>
<font face="arial" size="3" color="#FFFFFF"><b>Cheney and Rumsfeld in 1975 when both of them worked for President Ford.
<br>President Ford rejected their "Let's take over the world" neo-con plan in 1975. Papa Bush also rejected the neo-con plan in 1990. These guys along with chief Ideologue Paul Wolfowitz have been having wet dreams about Unilateral American Hegemony imposed via military power for decades.</b></font</td></tr></table><p>
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For those of you who read & actually want to know the details.
You know who you are QueEx, tehuti, Makkonnen, Dolemite etc....
The excerpt below from author T.D. Allman below outlines the history of the brutish barbarism that the neo-cons call "Foreign Policy". As you will see for yourself, their uncivilized “We Own The World” wet dreams are nothing more than fascism. </font>
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<b>by T.D. Allman</b>
CHENEY AND RUMSFELD WERE capos of the ideological clique that, right from the start, gave the George W. Bush presidency its peculiarly nasty taste. Sharing a chip-on-the-shoulder attitude toward the outside world, including America's allies, as well as a sneering contempt for human rights and international law, these ideological apparatchiks were embedded by the score in key appointive posts. It didn't take them long to turn the United States from the most respected into the most resented nation on earth. The first casualty of this unprovoked war on the world as it is was trust in America.
The Bush spinners call all this breaking and trashing ''conservatism." It's actually a petulant crusade to destroy time-tested policies, as well as decades-old strategic relationships, that anyone who truly valued America's security would strive to conserve. This isn't "standing up for America," as George W. Bush claims at his fundraisers. It's giving the world the finger.
With George W. Bush in the White House, there was no situation too big or too small to turn into a global wedge issue. Millions of illiterate, malnourished women in Africa would get AIDS. They would pass the virus on to unwanted children born of avoidable pregnancies, because the Bush administration snatched health care funds away from village clinics that had provided information on abortion. Playing politics with AIDS in Africa made for terrific soundbites about family values. It also produced, during a stopover in Nigeria, one of the classic George W. Bush laugh-or-cry moments.
To a vast assembly of Africans —mostly young and poor, many of them too poor even to afford condoms —George W. Bush pledged the following: "We will support abstinence-based education for young people in schools and churches and community centers." This was his born-again riff on what practically every American bigot thinks at one time or another, though very few say it out loud: Forget family-planning clinics, IUDs, birth-control pills, or condoms. If we can only teach these people to control their sex urges, they won't need our charity.
International agreements that had staved off nuclear holocaust were also trashed. For more than fifty years, American statesmen had labored to construct a system that would limit testing and deployment of the most terrifying of all weapons of mass destruction —nuclear warheads fired at long range in ballistic missiles. Wrecking this system became George W. Bush's strategic goal. First step: turning the United States into the first nation in history to repudiate a nuclear-arms limitation treaty, opening the way to multitrillion dollar development of the unworkable "Star Wars" missile defense systems.
Land mines? Let little children play hopscotch on 'em! War crimes? Let mass murderers go free! The ozone layer? Keep those chemicals belching into the stratosphere; that'll show outer space who's in charge down here. Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld provided the vision. But when it came to the lower levels of government, where things actually get done and undone, the totemic figure in all this destructiveness and disruptiveness was a bland-looking, middle-aged "defense intellectual" with a reassuringly deep voice and honest-looking eyes named Paul Wolfowitz. Until George W. Bush made Wolfowitz's dangerous ideas US strategic doctrine, Wolfowitz—like Rumsfeld—had been out of power a long time, operating on the far fringes of the intellectually respectable in the think tanks of Washington, D.C.
Wolfowitz had been a longtime protege of Dick Cheney, just as Cheney had started out as Rumsfeld's protege. All three had become fixated on the idea of invading and occupying Iraq long before George W. Bush decided to use 9/11 as the pretext for an attack. Wolfowitz's official title in George W. Bush's administration was Deputy Secretary of Defense, but WARNING TO THE WORLD should have been stenciled on the door of his Pentagon office. He personified the deep need of the Bush crowd, above all of George W. Bush himself, to start a war. Like Bush, Wolfowitz was a chip-on-the-shoulder Ivy Leaguer (not some Sunbelt cowboy), in his case from Cornell. In addition, Wolfowitz had that tell-tale qualification shared by so many of George W. Bush's most trusted pro-war appointees —avoidance of service in the US military. Like Dick Cheney and almost all of the George W. Bush war hawks, he had been a persistent and successful Vietnam war draft-dodger.
Once in the saddle, George W. Bush would rough-ride across the globe like a tourist atop one of those coin-operated broncos in a Texas theme park. Then, in Iraq, he would embark on the most juvenile and unjustified overseas US military adventure since the 1970 Cambodia invasion. Wolfowitz, backed by Rumsfeld and encouraged by Cheney, came up with the strategic gobbledygook used to rationalize Bush's recklessness.
In the Bush-generated crises to come, Wolfowitz would be to the doctrine of "pre-emption" what Ptolemy had been to the idea that the sun revolved around the earth: chief theoretician of a system that defied reality. Secretary of State Colin Powell would play the Galileo figure. He knew how the world really moved, but when called before the Oval Office curia, Powell — the only one of them with any firsthand knowledge of war, and much else—would mumble acquiescently, letting Cardinal Cheney, Archbishop Rumsfeld, and Monsignor Wolfowitz have their way. Did Powell imagine that, in the end, reason and reality would prevail, once George W. Bush thought things over? If so, that was his illusion.
Power to shape the strategic thinking of a president of the United States had been a long time coming for Paul Wolfowitz. As early as 1992, he had urged that the United States adopt as strategic doctrine the notion that world law and world order counted for nothing when the United States wished to violate the one and overturn the other. This made him quite a thinker so far as the ultraradical neocon pamphleteers were concerned. According to the media propagandist William Kristol, Wolfowitz was "ahead of his time," "prophetic," and "vindicated by history" for having been among the first to propose a unilateral US invasion of Iraq.
George W. Bush's father knew better. When Wolfowitzs boss and mentor during that first Bush administration, then-secretary of defense Dick Cheney, presented Wolfowitz's policy proposals to him for approval, Bush the elder rejected this first draft of what later would become the blueprint for his son's "for-us-or-against-us" foreign policy. Then, tellingly, he ordered Cheney, not Wolfowitz, to rewrite it. Cheney retailored the words to fit the prevailing expediency. A less offensive approach to military policy, for the time being, remained in force, but Cheney never would have slipped Wolfowitz's document onto the president's desk if Wolfowitz's vision hadn't reflected his own views, as would become clear eight years later, when he became vice president.
Whatever his limitations, the elder Bush, a combat veteran of World War II, had grasped that Wolfowitz's strategic nostrums, which he and his staff churned out so copiously at US government expense, weren't just dumb; they were recipes for disaster— a threat in themselves to America's security. It is a measure of the difference between father and son that George W. Bush adopted as his own the same proposals his father had recognized as dangerous and foolish.
In the interval between the two Bush administrations, Wolfowitz remained a little-noticed figure outside ultraradical circles. Then George W. Bush rebestowed presidential favor upon him. Like the resuscitated Rumsfeld, he acquired cult status in Washington. The proposals that had been rejected earlier received the scrutiny normally reserved for Dead Sea Scrolls. The (Ur-document in the Wolfowitz dossier, however, is his official Defense Department curriculum vitae. It's the resume of a life as dangerously divorced from the world's realities as the Bush foreign policy has turned out to be.
When Wolfowitz graduated from Cornell with a degree in mathematics in 1965, the United States was already deeply divided by the Vietnam war. Among strategic thinkers the great controversy was whether to escalate in Vietnam. Wolfowitz played no part in the cut and thrust of that debate. Instead, at a time when other young Americans were either fighting the Vietnam war or protesting it, Wolfowitz —like Cheney—began learning how to use the internal levers of government to realize his own agenda, in this case how to evade involvement in the traumas of Vietnam entirely.
Wolfowitz not only dodged the draft; he got the federal government to pay him for doing it. Right out of college, he collected his first government paycheck, along with his first deferment. "A year as a Management Intern at the Bureau of the Budget (1966-67)" is how the future presidential adviser on strategic warfare describes his first work experience in a career that would never involve meeting a payroll, turning a profit, or producing something of actual use to the American public. One thing Wolfowitz could have learned at the Bureau of the Budget, though he evidently did not, is how an unnecessary war can bust a nation's finances.
Graduate studies could not be hurried during those war years, which included the Tet Offensive and the Kent State killings, as well as Nixon's Vietnamizaton program. Following his government internship, Wolfowitz spent the subsequent five years holed up in select ivory towers, including Yale and the University of Chicago, where work on a PhD thesis helped keep his draft deferment in order for half a decade.
Besides avoiding military service, Chicago allowed Wolfowitz to immerse himself in the quasi-superman, negative-Platonic theories of the neoconservative guru, Leo Strauss, who supervised his doctoral thesis. The sad history of nineteenth- and twentieth-century political philosophy can be read, in part, as the story of a series of gypsy-moth German philosophers who, having failed either to halt or to explain the triumph of intellectual barbarism in Germany itself, then went on to addle impressionable grad students from Chicago to kingdom come. Think of Strauss as an emigre Midwestern anti-Marx, and Wolfowitz, the son of a mathematics professor in upstate New York,as the anticommunist suburban equivalent of all those callow grad students who, back in the sixties, thought Che and Mar-cuse were so neat, and you get the idea. As Strauss saw it, America's love of freedom and its protests against an unjust war were signs that America, the nation which had defeated Hitler and saved him and so many others from persecution and death in their own homelands, was turning into another Weimar Republic. It's an interesting prefiguration: Wolfowitz soaking up Strauss' notion that America is decadent, while the professor authorizes his draft deferment.
After passing his twenty-sixth birthday, it was time for Paul Wolfowitz to get back on the federal payroll: "Four years (1973-77) m me Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, working on the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks and a number of nuclear nonproliferation issues" is the way his resume describes it. In Washington, Wolfowitz met other young ideologues who also had decided that the thoughts of (philosophy department) chairman Leo Strauss provided a key to the global use of American power. These "defense intellectuals" included Richard Perle, whose prescription for the Middle East was, always and inevitably, to place US might entirely and unques-tioningly at the service of whatever Israel, at any one moment, happened to think it wanted to do. Another figure in this circle was Elliott Abrams, whose idea of the proper exercise of US power was inciting terrorism (the neocons called it "Low Intensity Warfare") against Third World nations of whose governmental philosophy Leo Strauss would have disapproved. Abrams later would be indicted (though have his conviction reversed on appeal) as a result of his involvement in the Reagan scandal with the Contra insurgents in Central America.
For the next quarter-century Leo Strauss was to this clique of busy Washington neocons what Ayn Rand was to the Fountain-head nuts. There was always, also, the whiff of Tolkein and his hobbits about them, as well as Superman (Nietzche, but also the comic book). Though these guys imagined themselves to be deep thinkers, they were actually steeped in the modern cultural trivializations of Plato and Homer —Leo Strauss, not The Republic, Lord of the Rings, not the Trojan wars. Decades later, the Iraq war would be launched by a bunch of post-docs who, all too clearly, never had bothered to read The Iliad, and understand what it reveals about war, and what war does to human beings, during all that time they were avoiding their military service. The diplomatic analyst William Pfaff later described the Wolfowitz crowd in the following terms: "They have a political philosophy, and the arrogance and intolerance of their actions reflect their conviction that they possess a realism and truth others lack." Their future obsession with taking out Saddam Hussein would be their kitschy, post-modern trivialization of Kierkegaard's Purity of Heart Is to Will One Thing.
While preparing for the day when George W. Bush would give him the actual power to enforce his ideological notions, Wolfowitz passed the time writing policy proposals. In the Washington world of staff-generated policy papers —the kind of documents that mean nothing unless and until someone with real power picks them up and takes them seriously—one talent all successful strategic scriptwriters must have is a knack for making sure events like presidential elections don't disrupt the steady output of their position papers. This was a skill Wolfowitz displayed very early on. As far as most Americans were concerned, Jimmy Carter's election to the presidency in 1976 marked a big change—away from the Nixon-Kissinger conception of US power, to one based on human rights. But under Carter, as later under Reagan, Wolfowitz's career marched on regardless of how Americans voted or what happened around the world. So did his proposals. Whoever was President, Wolfowitz's approach to power remained simplistically arithmetical: The more weapons America had, and the more it used them, the better (whether or not there was any strategic or moral justification). It is this inflexible approach to America's "national security," unchanging over the decades and impervious to geopolitical reality, which, like some harmless hamster in a sci-fi film, would grow into an earth-threatening monster once bombarded by the radioactive attention of George W. Bush.
It was under the peaceable Jimmy Carter, however, that Wolfowitz got the breakthrough job that would lead to all that. While still in his early thirties, he was named deputy secretary of defense for regional programs. The recent US defeat in Indochina had started out as a regional problem. Then, through more than a decade of body counts, the Johnson and Nixon administrations had escalated it into a global humiliation for the United States. Following that self-inflicted catastrophe, the United States certainly needed new approaches to regional problems. Nowhere was the old domino-theory approach more outdated than in the vast Indian Ocean region, stretching from southeast Asia through the Indian subcontinent and Iran to the Arab world and Israel. Here the traditional US approach, emphasizing military "solutions" to economic and social problems, combined with political support for local dictators, was more than wrong. It was meaningless.
Change was in the air after the Indochina defeat. A new kind of strategic understanding, not just new kinds of weapons systems, would be needed if the United States was to avoid further disasters. All this was as lost on Wolfowitz as it was on Rumsfeld and Cheney and, later, George W. Bush. Wolfowitz described his actions back then to forge a new American regional approach, following the military disaster in Vietnam, as helping to "create the force that later became the United States Central Command and initiated the Maritime Pre-positioning Ships, the backbone of the initial US deployment twelve years later in Operation Desert Shield."
This technically proficient military-mechanical exercise did foreshadow the unbounded faith America's strategic planners would place in techno-wars over the next quarter-century. It did nothing to separate US regional interests from the fate of the Shah of Iran. He, like various other US-supported despots, remained "a pillar of stability" in the US strategic approach — until in 1979 his own people overthrew him. Entirely unforeseen by America's national security mandarins, the fall of the Shah led, among other things, to the ayatollahs' seizure of power in Iran, Saddam Hussein's invasion of Iran, and the Iran/contra scandals, to say nothing of the two Iraq wars the United States would later fight.
Billions spent on weapons hadn't made the Shah's regime viable, let alone a pillar of stability. Wolfowitz's warships positioned in the Indian Ocean would not stop the rise of Islamic fundamentalism, either. They couldn't even stop demonstrators from taking over the US embassy in Tehran and keeping the American staff there prisoners for more than a year. The revolutionaries of Iran —like Osama bin Laden twenty years later— were simply undeterred by the Wolfowitz-Rumsfeld-Cheney and (eventually) the George W. Bush strategy of "projecting" America's billion-dollar weapons systems into the Indian Ocean. Then as later, Wolfowitz along with the rest of them hadn't a clue as to how US military force really connected—and even more important, failed to connect—with the real world. As often happens in Washington, Wolfowitz's detachment from reality turned out to be an enormous career advantage. It freed him up to generate just the kind of "strategic" fantasy nonsense that Rumsfeld, Cheney, and George W. Bush love to find in their In boxes.
For most Americans, the shift from the approach to the world Jimmy Carter embodied to the one personified by Ronald Reagan was another big change. For Paul Wolfowitz it meant changing his commute. In spite of his complete lack of diplomatic experience, he was shifted from the Department of Defense to the Department of State, where he was made head of the policy planning staff. This always is a frustrating post since US foreign policy never gets planned, at least not in the State Department, but it served as a stepping stone to Wolfowitz's biggest preferment yet, assistant secretary of state for East Asian and Pacific affairs.
This appointment was a bizarre illustration of how Washington actually works. It wasn't just that Wolfowitz had completely absented himself from the war in Vietnam and now was being put in charge of America's relations with the whole of the Pacific Rim, including Indochina. He had no academic, or diplomatic, or personal experience of any part of the Far East; he didn't even know it as a tourist. More than that, Wolfowitz had never represented the United States abroad in any capacity. He didn't know what it was like to fight or make peace in an Asian country, or for that matter run the branch office of a US business. Yet now, in Wolfowitz's own words, he "was in charge of US relations with more than twenty countries," including China and Japan, in the post-Vietnam war era.
During Ronald Reagan's second term, Wolfowitz finally got some limousine-level experience of the world beyond America's shores. He was named ambassador to Indonesia. This remains the only government post George W. Bush's chief strategic theoretician ever has ever held that has involved him performing some actual service for the taxpayers and citizens of the United States. Being ambassador to a vast, fascinating land like Indonesia was a form of exile from what, for Wolfowitz, really mattered: generating war plans in Washington. He was ambassador in Jakarta during 1986, 1987, 1988, and 1989. The principal triumph he lists as resulting from his ambassadorship there is that "during his tenure, Embassy Jakarta was cited as one of the four best-managed embassies inspected in 1988."
Wolfowitz's workday changed dramatically when Dick Cheney became Bush the elder's secretary of defense in 1989, and called Wolfowitz back to the Pentagon to be his under secretary of defense. In the Washington mandarinate, being an assistant secretary is nice. Being named under secretary is almost Heaven. The Pentagon prose sings as Wolfowitz describes what happened once his Indonesia exile ended: "From 1989 to 1993, Dr. Wolfowitz served as Under Secretary of Defense for Policy in charge of the 700-person defense policy team that was responsible to Secretary Dick Cheney for matters concerning strategy, plans, and policy. During this period Secretary Wolfowitz and his staff had major responsibilities for the reshaping of strategy and force posture at the end of the Cold War."
The key phrase to grasp there is "the end of the Cold War," which posed a bigger threat to the Pentagon's purse and power than the schemers in the Kremlin ever had. At Cheney's behest, Wolfowitz and his policy spinners spent millions of man-hours conjuring up ways to increase US military spending even though, with the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Communist menace had vaporized without the United States having to fire a shot. The best boondoggle of them all —Star Wars —had been invented by wily old Ronald Reagan, all by himself. But lock 700 "defense intellectuals" in their offices at the Pentagon. Then inform them that unless and until they dream up enough spurious new threats to America's security, along with the new multibillion-dollar weapon systems necessary to counter them to ensure that US military spending cannot possibly be reduced, they won't get their next promotion. Before you know it, you'll have a "defense" budget guaranteed to ensure that not one red cent of the post-Cold War "peace dividend" ever gets back to the people of America. That's the nerdy work Wolfowitz and his minions were busily doing when, on August 2, 1990, Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait. This event caught Wolfowitz, Cheney, and the rest of them as totally unaware as the attacks of September 11, 2001 later would.
The American turnaround after the Kuwait invasion was magnificent. Not since World War II had America's military might been so perfectly wedded to a legitimate military purpose. The liberation of Kuwait in February 1991, kick-started what, back then, even Republicans proudly called the New World Order. As well as a military victory, the Kuwait war was a historic diplomatic triumph for the United States. Both the elder Bush and his secretary of state, James Baker, had seen to that. They understood that, in order to succeed, any new, post-Cold War international order would have to be based on right as well as might, and they had organized the United Nations-sanctioned, US-led effort to reverse Saddam's aggression on that basis. That was why George H.W. Bush in 1991, unlike George W. Bush in 2003, was able to assemble a genuine coalition of the willing. Nations ranging from Argentina to Syria, and from France to Turkey enthusiastically helped fight, and also to pay for that first Iraq war because it was fought for reasons they understood, to defend principles they shared —and because then, unlike later, the United States didn't act like a bully. A decade later, the same countries would keep their wallets closed and sit on their hands. There was an additional reason US efforts were so successful in 1991. Back then, the United States treated other countries with respect.
The swift totality of that first Iraq victory was stunning, but nothing impressed the world more than the principled approach the United States took once Saddam was defeated. US forces could have surged on to Baghdad. Instead, the first President Bush won the world's admiration with his decision not to transform the United Nations-authorized liberation of Kuwait into an American conquest of Iraq. It was a painful as well as principled decision to stop the war before Saddam Hussein was toppled, but Bush the elder understood that upholding the rule of law among nations was more important than settling scores with an unsavory dictator. Unlike George W. Bush later, he also understood that a unilateral, unauthorized US assault on Iraq, followed by a US military occupation of the country, would undermine American security by turning most of the Arab and Muslim world against the United States.
Wolfowitz and his 700 paper-pushers played no role in the stunning Kuwait victory. While they'd been churning up strategic "doctrine," the actual war was planned, run, and won by military professionals like Colin Powell. That didn't stop Wolfowitz from deciding that he should be the one to ordain what US national security policy should be in light of that decisive victory. More than a year after Operation Desert Storm had already demonstrated the best way for the United States to fight,and win wars in the post-Cold War era, Wolfowitz weighed in with a radically different counterproposal. It was the same blueprint for disaster that eleven years later would play itself out under George W. Bush.
Wolfowitz's war plan bore an innocuous-sounding label. He called his prescription for destroying the postwar international security system "Defense Planning Guidance." Even had its contents not been pernicious, its existence would have been redundant. In the form of Operation Desert Storm, Powell and the others had already created and successfully tested the paradigm of successful US action that, following the 9/11 attacks ten years later, would serve the United States as well in Afghanistan as it had in Kuwait. The key to both the 1991 Kuwait triumph and the 2002 success in Afghanistan was not America's overwhelming technological superiority in modern warfare. The key to success was that America's overwhelming superiority was used legitimately, in pursuit of a worthwhile objective, supported by the overwhelming majority of the nations of the earth.
"Defense Planning Guidance" took the form of a forty-six-page pamphlet that repudiated both the proven military-diplomatic success of the Desert Storm model of warfare and the democratic ideals and strategic conceptions—from the Four Freedoms to containment—which had, through all the follies and dangers, managed to save America and the world from utter disaster during the first half-century of the nuclear age. The Kuwait victory had been a victory for the internationalists and multilateralists within the Republican Party—for all those wimps, ranging from Kissinger to Powell, that Rumsfeld and Cheney had first tried to purge from power during their 1975 Holloween Massacre. "Defense Planning Guidance" was the opening gambit in a campaign which would only achieve success in 2001, when George W. Bush, deftly guided by Dick Cheney, brought Donald Rumsfeld back from the political wilderness, and Rumsfeld, in turn, put Wolfowitz in charge of putting an intellectual gloss on their nutty policy of ceaseless provocation all over the world.
By the time "Defense Planning Guidance" appeared in 1992, the world in which Paul Wolfowitz and the rest of us live had changed enormously. Many strategic theories had been tested by events, and proven wrong. The Vietnam war, for example, had been lost. Yet even after the United States was defeated, the dominoes had not fallen. It was Communism that fell after America lost the war it supposedly had been necessary to fight in order to halt Communism's otherwise inexorable advance. In the course of Wolfowitz's own unelected rise to a degree of power few elected public officials ever achieve in a democracy, a multitude of other gigantic, unforeseeable events had reduced to rubble the strategic conceptions that had guided —and all too often, misguided—American policy-makers for decades.
What was the result of these changes? Somehow, the United States not only had survived the "Communist threat" and all the other supposed menaces. It had remained the most powerful nation on earth. There were great lessons to be learned from these unforeseen turns of events. As Under Secretary of Defense for Policy, Wolfowitz was in charge of trying to think through what the nagging discrepancy between America's strategic preconceptions and what actually happened in the world meant when it came to the United States spending trillions of dollars on weapons. Instead he ginned up a proposal for US military-industrial domination of the world.
Later, the damage-control folks in the George W. Bush administration tried to make it seem like Wolfowitz had only been kicking around some ideas. But "Defense Planning Guidance," as its title states, is a set of explicit instructions, from Wolfowitz to his staff, providing guidance as to how they should plan policy following the great changes that marked the beginning of the post-Cold War era. By then, many believed a new era of global relations, transcending the old nationalist and ideological rivalries, was at hand, in which no one nation would try to dominate the others. They believed it was America's responsibility as the world's most powerful nation, as well as in America's own national security interest, to nurture the emergence of this new era of globalization. In this new era, it was hoped, something other, and better, than nation-state arrogance would determine the world's response to problems ranging from political terrorism to the emergence of new, global health threats. Furthermore, for billions of ordinary people around the world —and billions had watched the Gulf War on TV—the recent victory over Saddam in Kuwait had provided the model for maintaining global law and order in the new era.
In "Defense Planning Guidance," Wolfowitz threw out that whole successful approach, with its emphasis on multilateralism and the rule of law. He propounded an opposite, dark paradigm — of a world in which only one nation, the United States, would dominate the world the way the Soviet Union once had dominated eastern Europe. All these years later, "Defense Planning Guidance" still makes chilling reading. It combines the objectives of the Brezhnev Doctrine with the rhetoric of Imperial Japan's Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere. It's hard to believe, reading it, that such conceptions could emanate from an American mind at all. The first President Bush was right to slap down Cheney, when he brought him Wolfowitz's proposal.
"Defense Planning Guidance" would have been an alarming document if it had been discovered in the KGB archives. Coming from an American, it was shocking. Americans grow up believing it's their destiny to save everyone else from the bully on the block. The strategic objective Wolfowitz put forth in "Defense Planning Guidance" was to turn America into the global bully. The first step to permanent global domination, according to Wolfowitz, was to make sure no onejgot in America's way, ever. Over the next decade, America's most dangerous enemies would turn out to be infiltrating viruses (as AIDS had already shown), and groups of fanatics acting independent of any national authority (as 9/11 would show). Yet Wolfowitz was fixated on fighting a new Cold War against a new Soviet Union. Only this time the war wouldn't be cold, and America wouldn't settle for containment.
"Our first objective is to prevent the re-emergence of a new rival," Wolfowitz announced. (Throughout "Defense Planning Guidance," he writes "is," not "should be.") "This is," he continued, "a dominant consideration underlying the new regional defense strategy and requires that we endeavor to prevent any hostile power from dominating a region whose resources would, under consolidated control, be sufficient to generate global power." Here as throughout "Defense Planning Guidance," people don't count. Like George W. Bush later, he equates domination of "resources," notably oil, with "power," and the potential loss of control over those resources as defeat. People don't count, nor does rightful ownership of the resources the United States might decide to control. Also absent is the idea that the United States might eliminate "threats" to its national security by modifying its own behavior—for example, by consuming less imported oil —rather than by dominating others or resorting to military force. This approach, too, would become the George W. Bush approach. Not once during the invasion of Iraq, for example, would Americans be asked to support the war effort by driving fewer SUVs. George W. Bush's Iraq war would be a struggle in which Americans would be expected to sacrifice their lives, but not turn down their air-conditioners, give up their tax cuts, or buy less gas.
The overall US goal, Wolfowitz emphasizes in "Defense Planning Guidance," is not merely to retain control over oil supplies. Nor is the strategic objective to deter aggression, or even to contain it, as had been US strategy under every US president, Republican or Democrat, since the end of World War II. The goal, instead, is to impose a "new order" that will make it impossible for any country other than the United States "to generate global power" under any circumstances, for any reason.
Later, George W. Bush's petulance, as well as the arrogance he and those around him displayed, mystified many. Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld's outbursts against the "old Europe" especially startled people. Why did they get so ticked off simply because members of the United Nations Security Council, including America's allies on the council, disagreed with them? One reason Bush and those around him treated America's allies so contemptuously was that, by then, the ideas expressed in "Defense Planning Guidance" had been an ingrained part of their shared world view for years. As Wolfowitz himself had put it, "even aspiring to a larger regional or global role" on the part of "potential competitors," including America's allies, was not to be tolerated.
Combine this intolerant world view with George W. Bush's for-us-or-against-us approach and you have what, ten years after Wolfowitz wrote "Defense Policy Guidance," has become a self-fulfilling prophesy. By the time Bush invaded Iraq, it wasn't just the Russians and the Chinese, and all those Africans and Asians, and, as usual, the French who were "against us." Even Canada had turned into a "competitor."
Having defined the US objective as eliminating even the possibility of others aspiring to provide an alternative to American leadership, or even supplementing it on a regional basis, Wol-fowitz then proposed that the United States do away with the entire post-World War II system of collective security, epitomized by US cooperation with NATO and the United Nations. In his own words: "First the US must show the leadership necessary to establish and protect a new order that holds the promise of convincing potential competitors that they need not aspire to a greater role or pursue a more aggressive posture to protect their legitimate interests."
And then? "Second, in the non-defense areas," Wolfowitz continued, "we must account sufficiently for the interests of the advanced industrial nations to discourage them from challenging our leadership or seeking to overturn the established political and economic order." After pausing to consider what that last sentence actually means, it's hard, even now, to think of a statement by a US official more profoundly contemptuous — and ignorant—of the human and cultural, as well as military and strategic, realities of Europe, and of the rest of the world. Here we have, in words, what the Bush Doctrine became in deeds ten years later. While the United States decides what to do, where to do it, when to do it, and who will do it, the United States nonetheless will be magnanimous enough to "account sufficiently for the interests of the advanced industrial nations to discourage them from challenging our leadership."
It was one thing to propound universal US hegemony, as "Defense Planning Guidance" did in 1992. But how to achieve it? This was the question raised beginning in January 2001 when George W. Bush actually tried to put into practice Wolfowitz's megalomaniacal approach to world politics. As America's allies, among others, would try fruitlessly to make George W. Bush understand, it would be no cakewalk imposing US control even on one medium-sized Middle Eastern country, like Iraq. How, then, to achieve the global domination of which Cheney, Rumsfeld, and the other ultraradicals dreamed? And even if such dominance could be achieved, what would be the benefit for the people of America?
These were the practical questions "Defense Planning Guidance" raised but never answered. Fortunately, for the time being the United States had no serious global rivals —which was why George W. Bush, once he got into office, would have to create one, in the form of the "axis of evil." Russia was only a shambling giant after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Those uppity Europeans might in due course become the world's second democratic superpower, but that was unlikely to happen soon. On the other hand, it seemed not only likely but inevitable that—at the opposite end of Eurasia, facing America across the Pacific Ocean —China would become a "new rival," and not a friendly one, if the United States insisted on treating China's rise to great-power status as a "threat."
And that's exactly what any such development was, from the strategic perspective ordained in "Defense Planning Guidance"— a threat. It didn't matter if a modernized, prosperous China (or India, or Indonesia, for that matter) was friendly or not. Its mere emergence as a great power was a "threat" that the United States must prevent from arising. Indeed George W. Bush would start out labeling China as a "strategic competitor in the Pacific basin." Soon, however, even he had to recognize that cooperating with China was vital to US security in many matters, including dealings with North Korea.
That pointed to one fundamental problem with such a domineering approach. In the real world, as oppose^ to the world of radical neocon polemics, what is true for ordinary people is also true for nations. We may feel threatened when the neighbors get a bigger car, or install a bigger swimming pool, but if we don't want garbage dumped on our front lawn, it's better not to treat the neighbors with contempt, let alone announce to them that you, and you alone, are going decide from now on what goes on in the neighborhood. The same holds true at the level of global politics. Even countries as powerful as the United States normally have no choice but to treat other countries, including rival countries, as partners. The business of the world, including the business of pursuing US foreign policy goals, requires a cooperative approach. But suppose the United States chose to act abnormally? Suppose it actually decided to apply Wolfowitz's global version of the Brezhnev Doctrine to China? What could the United States actually do to stop China and its billion-plus people from rivaling and, indeed, someday outstripping the United States—the way, a century earlier, the United States had surpassed the British —to become the single most powerful nation in the world? What options would it have?
Even to mention the kinds of "options" that might actually result in the United States maintaining permanent superiority over China reveals the suicidal nuttiness of the "Defense Planning Guidance" approach. The United States, for instance, could bomb the Chinese back into the Stone Age, as had actually been proposed during the more hysterical phases of the Cold War. Nuclear attack on China's industrial heartland would indeed interrupt its emergence as a "potential rival" — though that was an option few American strategic thinkers still considered advisable, now that China's own nuclear missiles might reach Washington before US missiles reintroduced neolithic culture to the land where more advanced forms of human civilization had flourished for so long.
Another possible way, in Wolfowitz's words, "to prevent the re-emergence of a new rival" would be for the United States to encourage radical Maoists to reassert control in China. Unleashing another Cultural Revolution would quite probably retard China's capacity "to generate global power." It would also panic global finance markets, and destroy the vibrant Pacific Rim economy on which the US economy counts for future growth. What about less drastic forms of economic warfare? Reinstating the US trade embargo would slow down China's military as well as its economic development. But it would also destroy the World Trade Organization, and unleash a worldwide depression. It also would mean no more cheap, high-quality videogames and PCs down at the suburban malls, where Republican appeal to the swing vote is essential for keeping George W. Bush, as well as Paul Wolfowitz, on the federal payroll.
Yet Wolfowitz not only proposed preventing China's emergence as "another rival" but proposed precluding such an eventuality, or even the possibility of it ever arising, in "Western Europe, East Asia, the territory of the former Soviet Union, and Southwest Asia" as well. But how to lobotomize the rest of the world? Strategically speaking, that more or less was the grand global policy "Defense Planning Guidance" ordained.
"Finally," Wolfowitz wrote, "we must maintain the mechanisms for deterring potential competitors from even aspiring to a larger regional or global role." Even aspiring? US domination of the world, as propounded here, was not merely to be over the world and each region in it. It was to be a dominion over the world's aspirations as well. And what on earth did he mean by "mechanisms"? These are difficult questions. They are dangerous questions. Both before and after he mounted his mechanical bronco, these are the kinds of questions clueless George W. Bush never bothered to ask the neo-cons.
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