THE INTEGRAL POLITICS WEBSITE
Some Enlightening Documents
on American Neo-Imperialism
(gathered from Internet by Fred V. Cook)
I'm appending a rich post from Richard K Moore which documents some of my concerns about "the Fourth Reich" intentions of the Bush dynasty (representing a wing of the national security "community"). How many of you get RKM's cyberjournal? I think that our doing a really good job with integral politics could favorably influence the lives of our children, grandchildren, and the possibility of HAVING ANY great grand children.
Date: Fri, 20 Sep 2002 01:35:18 +0100
To: [email protected], [email protected],
[email protected]
From: "Richard K. Moore" <[email protected]>
Subject: secret blueprint for US global domination
Date: Sun, 15 Sep 2002 21:38:06 -0600
From: "GlobalCirclenet" <[email protected]>
To: [email protected]
Subject: "Smoking Gun" anyone?
"Smoking Gun" anyone?
Sunday Herald (Scotland)
[This is explosive -- read carefully and forward widely!]
Published on Sunday, September 15, 2002
Bush Planned Iraq 'Regime Change' Before Becoming President by Neil Mackay
A secret blueprint for US global domination reveals that President Bush and his cabinet were planning a premeditated attack on Iraq to secure 'regime change' even before he took power in January 2001.
The blueprint, uncovered by the Sunday Herald, for the creation of a 'global Pax Americana' was drawn up for Dick Cheney (now vice-president), Donald Rumsfeld (defense secretary), Paul Wolfowitz (Rumsfeld's deputy), George W Bush's younger brother Jeb and Lewis Libby (Cheney's chief of staff). The document, entitled Rebuilding America's Defenses: Strategies, Forces And Resources For A New Century, was written in September 2000 by the neo-conservative 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: 'The United States has for decades sought to play a more permanent role in Gulf regional security. 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 document supports a 'blueprint for maintaining global US pre-eminence, precluding the rise of a great power rival, and shaping the international security order in line with American principles and interests'.
This 'American grand strategy' must be advanced for 'as far into the future as possible', the report says. It also calls for the US to 'fight and decisively win multiple, simultaneous major theatre wars' as a 'core mission'.
The report describes American armed forces abroad as 'the cavalry on the new American frontier'. The PNAC blueprint supports an earlier document written by Wolfowitz and Libby that said the US must 'discourage advanced industrial nations from challenging our leadership or even aspiring to a larger regional or global role'.
The PNAC report also:
--refers to key allies such as the UK as 'the most effective and efficient means of exercising American global leadership';
--describes peace-keeping missions as 'demanding American political leadership rather than that of the United Nations';
--reveals worries in the administration that Europe could rival the USA;
--says 'even should Saddam pass from the scene' bases in Saudi Arabia and Kuwait will remain permanently -- despite domestic opposition in the Gulf regimes to the stationing of US troops -- as 'Iran may well prove as large a threat to US interests as Iraq has';
--spotlights China for 'regime change' saying 'it is time to increase the presence of American forces in southeast Asia'. This, it says, may lead to 'American and allied power providing the spur to the process of democratization in China';
--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;
--hints that, despite threatening war against Iraq for developing weapons of mass destruction, the US may consider developing biological weapons -- which the nation has banned -- in decades to come. It says: 'New methods of attack -- electronic, 'non-lethal', biological -- will be more widely available ... combat likely will take place in new dimensions, in space, cyberspace, and perhaps the world of microbes ... advanced forms of biological warfare that can 'target' specific genotypes may transform biological warfare from the realm of terror to a politically useful tool';
--and pinpoints North Korea, Libya, Syria and Iran as dangerous regimes and says their existence justifies the creation of a 'world- wide command-and-control system'.
Tam Dalyell, the Labour MP, father of the House of Commons and one of
the leading rebel voices against war with Iraq, said: 'This is garbage from right-wing think-tanks stuffed with chicken-hawks -- men who have never seen the horror of war but are in love with the idea of war. Men like Cheney, who were draft-dodgers in the Vietnam war.
'This is a blueprint for US world domination -- a new world order of their making. These are the thought processes of fantasist Americans who want to control the world. I am appalled that a British Labour Prime Minister should have got into bed with a crew which has this moral standing.'
Date: Sun, 15 Sep 2002 22:25:18 -0700
To: "Richard K. Moore" <[email protected]>
From: Joseph Antaree <[email protected]> (by way of Tom Atlee)
Subject: This is interesting
The Anniversary of a Neo-Imperial Moment
By Jim Lobe, AlterNet
September 12, 2002
When excerpts of the document first appeared in the New York Times in the spring of 1992, it created quite a stir. Sen. Joe Biden, now chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee was particularly outraged, calling it a prescription for "literally a Pax Americana," an American empire.
The details contained in the draft of the Defense Planning Guidance(DPG) were indeed startling.
The document argued that the core assumption guiding U.S. foreign policy in the 21st century should be the need to establish permanent U.S. dominance over virtually all of Eurasia.
It envisioned a world in which U.S. military intervention would become "a constant fixture" of the geo-political landscape. "While the U.S. cannot become the world's 'policeman' by assuming responsibility for righting every wrong, we will retain the preeminent responsibility for addressing selectively those wrongs which threaten not only our interests, but those of our allies or friends," wrote the authors, Paul Wolfowitz and I. Lewis Libby -- who at the time were two relatively obscure political appointees in the Pentagon's policy office.
The strategies put forward to achieve this goal included "deterring potential competitors from even aspiring to a larger regional or global role," and taking pre-emptive action against states suspected of developing weapons of mass destruction.
The draft, leaked apparently by a high-ranking source in the military, sparked an intense but fleeting uproar. At the insistence of then-National Security Adviser Brent Scowcroft and Secretary of State James Baker, the final DPG document was toned down beyond recognition.
But through the nineties, the two authors and their boss, then-Pentagon chief Dick Cheney, continued to wait for the right opportunity to fulfill their imperial dreams.
Their long wait came to an end on the morning of Sept. 11, 2001, when two hijacked commercial airliners slammed into the World Trade Center towers in Manhattan and a third into the Pentagon outside Washington.
And the timing could not have been more ideal. Dick Cheney had already become the most powerful vice president in U.S. history, while the draft's two authors, Wolfowitz and Libby, were now Deputy Defense Secretary and Cheney's chief of staff and national security adviser, respectively.
In the year since, these three men, along with Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and like-minded officials strategically located elsewhere in the administration, have engineered what former U.N. Ambassador Richard Holbrooke recently described as a "radical break with 55 years of bipartisan tradition" in U.S. foreign policy.
U.S. foreign policy after World War II was based on two broad strategies: a realist policy organized around containment and deterrence to U.S. power; and a more liberal, internationalist policy based on the construction of a set of multilateral institutions and alliances to promote open market-based economies and democratic values.
While Republican administrations leaned more towards the realist agenda and Democratic administrations toward the internationalist perspective, neither deviated very far from the core assumptions.
But now, "[f]or the first time since the dawn of the Cold War, a new grand strategy is taking shape in Washington," says Georgetown University professor G. John Ikenberry. In his article 'America's Imperial Ambition' published in the current edition of "Foreign Affairs," he argues that the Bush administration's foreign policy since Sept. 11 is driven by the desire for global dominance rather than the threat of terrorism.
"According to this new paradigm, America is to be less bound to its partners and to global rules and institutions while it steps forward to play a more unilateral and anticipatory role in attacking terrorist threats and confronting rogue states seeking WMD (weapons of mass destruction)," Ikenberry writes. "The United States will use its unrivaled military power to manage the global order."
Aside from a strong belief in U.S. military power, advocates of the new paradigm share a number of key attitudes that shape their foreign policy prescriptives. These include a contempt for multilateralism which necessarily denies the "exceptional" nature of the United States; a similar disdain and distrust for Europeans, especially the French; and a conviction that "fundamentalist" Islam poses a major threat to the United States and the West. They also consider China a long-term strategic threat that should be confronted sooner rather than later.
And these views have shaped the White House's policy decisions, including its strong support of Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and its attack on various multilateral institutions, such as the International Criminal Court (ICC), and key arms-control accords, like the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) treaty, not to mention its push for a war on Iraq and "regime change" in a number of Middle Eastern countries, including Saudi Arabia.
In other words, U.S. foreign policy today looks and sounds remarkably like the DPG draft leaked nearly ten years ago.
On this anniversary of Sept. 11, it is increasingly clear that Cheney and his proteges have used the tragedy to validate their dangerous delusions of grandeur. The so-called War on Terror was always just an expedient reason for the unilateral use of military power to achieve global dominance.
Pages about the DPG
A bit of research on Google revealed hundreds of pages about the DPG, including this from the Nordic News Network (Sweden)26 August 2000 - which gives excerpts and the original NYTimes references:
...there can be no doubt that world domination is the objective of the interests which dominate U.S. politics today. That was made very clear by the first systematic formulation of U.S. global strategy following the collapse of the Soviet Union. Entitled "Defense Planning Guidance", the high-level policy document includes the following elements:
Our first objective is to prevent the re-emergence of a new rival, either on the territory of the former Soviet Union or elsewhere, that poses a threat on the order of that posed formerly by the Soviet Union. This is 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. These regions include Western Europe, East Asia, the territory of the former Soviet Union, and Southwest Asia.
There are three additional aspects to this objective: First, the U.S. 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. Second, in the non-defense areas, 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. Finally, we must maintain the mechanisms for deterring potential competitors from even aspiring to a larger regional or global role. . . .
NATO continues to provide the indispensable foundation for a stable security environment in Europe. Therefore, it is of fundamental importance to preserve NATO as the primary instrument of Western defense and security, as well as the channel for U.S. influence and participation in European security affairs. While the United States supports the goal of European integration, we must seek to prevent the emergence of European-only security arrangements which would undermine NATO, particularly the alliance's integrated command structure.
. . . The most promising avenues for anchoring the east-central Europeans into the West and for stabilizing their democratic institutions is their participation in Western political and economic organizations. East-central European membership in the (European Community) at the earliest opportunity, and expanded NATO liaison. . . .
In the Middle East and Southwest Asia, our overall objective is to remain the predominant outside power in the region and preserve U.S. and Western access to the region's oil. . . .
Defense Planning Guidance was leaked to the New York Times, which noted: "The document is conspicuously devoid of references to collective action through the United Nations. . . What is most important, it says, is 'the sense that the world order is ultimately backed by the U.S.' and 'the United States should be postured to act independently when collective action cannot be orchestrated. . '."
Caught with its plan in the global cookie jar, the administration of George Bush attempted to pass off the document as a low-level draft of minor significance. But, in fact, it had been approved by numerous senior officials, including General Powell who at the time was serving as the president's chief military adviser, and Dick Cheney, then Secretary of Defense and current vice-presidential candidate.
More importantly, subsequent events have confirmed the validity of the document. With few exceptions, everything has been going according to plan.
See also New York Times:
8 March 1992, "U.S. Strategy Plan Calls for Insuring No Rivals Develop", including excerpts from Defense Planning Guidance
10 March 1992, "Lone Superpower Plan: Ammunition for Critics"
Copied from a post by Fred Cook, 28 Sep 2002, Post-Con-Pol Yahoo eList Group
