www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/EC20Ak07.html
They got their war against Afghanistan (planned before September 11). They're getting their war against Iraq (planned slightly after September 11). After Iraq, they plan to get their wars against Syria, Lebanon, Iran and Saudi Arabia. Last Sunday, one of them, Vice President Dick Cheney, said that President George W Bush would have to make "a very difficult decision" on Iraq. The decision had already been taken for him in the autumn of 2001. As far as their "showdown Iraq" is concerned, it's not about weapons of mass destruction, nor United Nations inspections, nor non-compliance, nor a virtual connection between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda, nor the liberation of the Iraqi people, nor a Middle East living in "democracy and liberty". The American corporate media are not inclined to spell it out, and the absolute majority of American public opinion is anesthetized non-stop by a barrage of technical, bureaucratic and totally peripheral aspects of the war against Iraq. For all the president's (sales)men, the whole game is about global preeminence, if not unilateral world domination - military, economic, political and cultural. This may be an early 21st century replay of the "white man's burden". Either way, enshrined in a goal of the Bush administration, it cannot but frighten practically the whole world, from Asia to Africa, from "old Europe" to the conservative establishment within the US itself. During the Clinton years, they were an obscure bunch - almost a sect. Then they were all elevated to power - again: most had worked for Ronald Reagan and Bush senior. Now they have pushed America - and the world - to war because they want it. An Asia Times Online investigation reveals this is no conspiracy theory: it's all about the implementation of a project. The lexicon of the Bush doctrine of unilateral world domination is laid out in detail by the Project for a New American Century (PNAC), founded in Washington in 1997. The ideological, political, economic and military fundamentals of American foreign policy - and uncontested world hegemony - for the 21st century are there for all to see. PNAC's credo is officially to muster "the resolve to shape a new century favorable to American principles and interests". PNAC states that the US must be sure of "deterring any potential competitors from even aspiring to a larger regional or global role" - without ever mentioning these competitors, the European Union, Russia or China, by name. The UN is predictably dismissed as "a forum for leftists, anti-Zionists and anti-imperialists". The PNAC mixes a peculiar brand of messianic internationalism with realpolitik founded over a stark analysis of American oil interests. Its key document, dated June 1997, reads like a manifesto. Horrified by the "debased" Bill Clinton, PNAC exponents lavishly praise "the essential elements of the Reagan administration's success: a military that is strong and ready to meet both present and future challenges; These exponents include Dick Cheney, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle, chairman of the Defense Policy Board, an advisory panel to the Pentagon made up of leading figures in national security and defense, Florida Governor Jeb Bush and Reagan-era White House adviser Elliott Abrahms. Already in 1997, the PNAC wanted to "increase defense spending significantly" to "challenge regimes hostile to our interests and values" and "to accept responsibility for America's unique role in preserving and extending an international order friendly to our security, our prosperity, and our principles". The deceptively bland language admitted "such a Reaganite policy of military strength and moral clarity may not be fashionable today. But it is necessary if the United States is to build on the successes of this past century and to ensure our security and our greatness in the next". The signatories of this 1997 document read like a who's who of Washington power today: among them, in addition to those mentioned above, Eliot Cohen, Steve Forbes, Francis Fukuyama, Frank Gaffney, William Bennett, Donald Kagan, Zalmay Khalilzad, Lewis Libby, Norman Podhoretz and Dan Quayle. The PNAC, now actively exercising power, is about to fulfill its dream of invading Iraq. In the PNAC's vision of Iraq, the only vector that matters is US strategic interest. Nobody really cares about Saddam Hussein's "brutal dictatorship", nor his extensive catalogue of human rights violations, nor "the suffering of the Iraqi people", nor his US-supplied weapons of mass destruction, nor his alleged connection to terrorism. Iraq counts only as the first strike in a high-tech replay of the domino theory: the next dominoes will be Syria, Iran and Saudi Arabia. And dismember Iraq altogether and annex it to Jordan as a vassal kingdom to the US: after all, Jordan's King Abdullah is a cousin of former Iraqi King Faisal, deposed in 1958. This would be one solution for the nagging question of who would have any legitimacy to be in power in Baghdad after Saddam. All PNAC members and most Pentagon civilians - but not the State Department - do: after all, they control NATO, not the EU. But Rumsfeld, the blunt midwesterner, former fighter pilot and former servant of presidents Gerald Ford and Ronald Reagan, prefers John Wayne to Bismarck: even Spanish Prime Minister Jose Maria Aznar, a staunch ally of Bush, complained out loud that diplomacy for Rumsfeld is an alien concept. If Rumsfeld barely manages to disguise his aversion for dovish Secretary of State Colin Powell's views, one imagines to what circle of hell he dispatches the pacifist couple of Jacques Chirac and Gerhard Schroeder. Strange, no journalist has stood up and ask Rumsfeld, in one of those cosy Pentagon spinning sessions, how was his 90-minute session with Saddam in Baghdad in December 20, 1983. The fuzzy photo of Rumsfeld shaking hands with Saddam, observed by Iraqi vice premier Tarik Aziz, is now a collector's item. Rumsfeld was sent by Reagan to mend relations between the US and Iraq only one month after Reagan had adopted a secret directive - still partly classified - to help Saddam fight Iran's Islamic Revolution that had begun in 1979. This close cooperation led to nothing else than Washington selling loads of military equipment and also chemical precursors, insecticides, aluminum tubes, missile components and anthrax to Saddam, who in turn used the lot to gas Iranian soldiers and then civilian Kurds in Halabja, northern Iraq, in 1988. The selling of these chemical weapons was organized by Rumsfeld. Washington was perfectly aware at the time that Saddam was using chemical weapons. After the Halabja massacre, the Pentagon engaged in a massive disinformation campaign, spinning that the massacre was caused by Iran. Cheney, as Pentagon chief from March 1989 onwards, continued to cooperate very closely with Saddam. The military aid - secretly organized by Rumsfeld - also enabled Saddam to invade Kuwait on August 2, 1990. Between 1991 and 1998, UN weapons inspectors conclusively established that the US - as well as British, German and French firms - had sold missile parts and chemical and bacteriological material to Iraq. So much for the moral high ground defended by America and Britain in the Iraqi weapons of mass destruction controversy. September 2002's National Security Strategy (NSS) document simply delighted the members of the PNAC. No wonder: it reproduced almost verbatim a September 2000 report by the PNAC, which in turn was based on the now famous 1992 draft Defense Policy Guidance (DPG), written under the supervision of Wolfowitz for then secretary of defense Cheney. Already in 1992, the three key DPG objectives were to prevent any "hostile power' from dominating regions whose resources would allow it to become a great power; That's the thrust of the NSS document, which calls for a unipolar world in which Washington's military power is unrivalled. In this context, the invasion and occupation of Iraq is just the first installment in an extended practical demonstration of what will happen to "rogue" states alleged to have or not have weapons of mass destruc...
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