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Project of New American Century

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  • 20-05-2006 4:58pm
    #1
    Squaddy
    Closed Accounts Posts: 232 ✭✭


    After the Cold War, created the prospect of a unipolar world - set up by a group called neoconservatives or neocons. Charles Krauthammer published a piece entitled “Universal Domination” in it he argued that America should work for “a qualitatively new outcome” other words a unipolar world.

    A year later he said the U.S., as the “unchallenged superpower” should act “unashamedly laying down the rules of world order and being prepared to enforce them”

    In 1992 Dick Cheney, the most important neocon, the last year of his tenure as secretary of defence had two of his assistants Paul Wolfowitz and Lewis “Scooter” Libby write a draft of the Pentagons “Defence Planning Guidance” which stated that Americas “First objective is to prevent the re-emergence of a new rival”

    Andrew Bacevich who is a conservative but not a neoconservative has called this draft “a blueprint for permanent American global hegemony” An article in Harper’s calls it an early version of Cheeneys “Plan to rule the world.”

    During the 90s the unipolar dream kept growing. In 1996 Robert Keegan said the U.S. should use its military strength “to maintain a world order which both supports and rests upon American hegemony”

    In 1997 William Kristol, the son of neocon Irving Kristol founded a unipolarist ‘think tank’ called Project of the New American Century or PNAC. Its members included Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfield, Paul Wolfowitz, Lewis Libby, Jeb Bush and many more neocons who would become central members of the Bush administration in 2001.

    In September 2000, PNAC published a document entitled Rebuilding America’s Defences. Reaffirming “the basic tenets” of the Cheney - Wolfowitz draft of 1992. This document said that “Americas grand strategy should aim to preserve and extend its present advantageous position” and thereby “to preserve and enhance the American Peace”

    According to these neocons to preserve and enhance the Pax Americana is basically these five things:-

    1st. Control of the worlds oil. As Robert Dreyfuss, a critic of the neocons, says “who controls oil controls the world” For the neocons this meant bringing about regime change in several oil rich countries especially Iraq. Neocons such as Cheney and Rumsfield had wanted the first President Bush to take out Sadam in 1990. They continued to advocate this policy throughout the 90s. With PNAC even writing a letter to President Clinton in 1998 urging him to use military force to “remove Sadam regime from power.”

    After the Bush - Cheney administration took office, attacking Iraq was the main item on its agenda but the only thing was “finding a way to do it” - Paul O’Neill

    2nd. Transformation of the military. At the centre of this RMA or “revolution in military affairs” is the military use of space. Although the term “missile defence” implies that this use of space is to be purely defensive, Lawrence Kaplan stated otherwise saying “Missile defence isn’t really meant to protect American. it’s a tool for global domination”

    Implementing this transformation will be very expensive which brings us to the 3rd requirement. Because most Americans assumed that since we no longer had to defend the world against global Communism America could drastically reduce military spending thereby having a “peace dividend” to spend on health, education and the enviroment.

    4th. The modification of the doctrine of preemptive attack. Traditionally, a country has had the right to launch a preemptive attack against another country if an attack from that country was imminent, too imminent to take the matter to the UN Security Council. But neocons wanted the U.S to act to preclude threats that might arise in the more or less distant future.

    5th. These 4 developments would require a 5th thing - an event that would make the American people ready to accept these imperialistic policies. This point had been made in The Grand Chessboard, a 1997 book by Zbigniew Brzeinski, who was Jimmy Carters national security advisor. Brzeinski is not a neocon but he shares their concern with American primacy.

    Portraying Central Asia with its vast oil reserves as the key power, Brzeinski argued that America must get control of this region. However, Brzeinski counselled, Americans, with their democratic instincts, are reluctant to authorize the military spending and human sacrifices necessary for “imperial mobilization” and this reluctance “limit’s the use of Americas power especially its capacity for military intimidation.”

    But this inpediment could be overcome, he added, if there were “a truly massive and widely perceived direct external threat” For Example the American people were willing to enter WW II after “the shock effect of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.”

    The same idea was suggested in PNACs document of 2000, Rebuilding America’s Defences. Referring to the goal of transforming the military, it said that “process of transformation is likely to be a long one, absent some catastrophic and catalysing event … like a new Pearl Harbor.”


    When the attacks of 9/11 occurred, they were treated like a new Pearl Harbor. It was reported that President Bush wrote in his diary on that night: “The Pearl Harbor of the 21st Century took place today.”

    Many commentators from Robert Kagan to Henry Kissinger to a writer for Time Magazine, said that America should respond to the of 9/11 in the same way it had responded to the attack on Pearl Harbor. Rumsfeld said that 9/11 created “the kind of opportunities that World War II offered, to refashion the world.” President Bush and Condoleezza Rice also spoke of 9/11 as creating opportunities.

    And it did, in fact, create opportunities to fulfill what the neocons had considered the other necessary conditions for bringing about a Pax Americana. With regard to oil, the Bush administration had, during the summer of 2001, developed a plan to attack Afghanistan to replace the Taliban with a puppet regime, thereby allowing UNOCAL to build its proposed pipeline from the Caspian Sea and the US military to build bases in the region.

    The official story of 9/11, according to which it was carried out by members of al-Qaeda under the direction of Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan, provided the needed pretext for this operation. In 2004, Rumsfeld told the 9/11 Commission that prior to 9/11, the president could not have convinced Congress that the United States needed to “invade Afghanistan and overthrow the Taliban.”

    9/11 also provided a necessary condition for the attack on Iraq. It did not provide a sufficient condition. The administration still had to wage a propaganda offensive to convince the public that Saddam was involved in 9/11, was connected to al-Qaeda, and illegally possessed weapons of mass destruction. But 9/11 was a necessary condition. As neocon Kenneth Adelman has said: "At the beginning of the administration people were talking about Iraq but it wasn't doable. . . . That changed with September 11.“Historian Stephen Sniegoski, explaining why 9/11 made the attack on Iraq possible, says:

    “The 9/11 attacks made the American people angry and fearful. Ordinary Americans wanted to strike back at the terrorist enemy, even though they weren't exactly sure who that enemy was. . . . Moreover, they were fearful of more attacks and were susceptible to the administration's propaganda that the United States had to strike Iraq before Iraq somehow struck the United States.”

    Sniegoski's view is supported by Nicholas Lemann of the New Yorker. Lemann says that he was told by a senior official of the Bush administration that, in Lemann's paraphrase,

    the reason September 11th appears to have been “a transformative moment” is not so much that it revealed the existence of a threat of which officials had previously been unaware as that it drastically reduced the American public's usual resistance to American military involvement overseas.

    The new Pearl Harbor also opened the way for the revolution in military affairs. Prior to 9/11, Bacevich reports, “military transformation appeared to be dead in the water.” But the “war on terror” after 9/11 “created an opening for RMA advocates to make their case.”

    9/11 also allowed for great increases in military spending, including spending for space weapons. On the evening of 9/11 itself, Rumsfeld held a news briefing at the Pentagon. Senator Carl Levin, the chair of the Senate Armed Services Committee, was asked:

    “Senator Levin, you and other Democrats in Congress have voiced fear that you simply don't have enough money for the large increase in defence that the Pentagon is seeking, especially for missile defence. . . . Does this sort of thing convince you that an emergency exists in this country to increase defence spending?”

    The new Pearl Harbor also paved the way for the new doctrine of preemptive warfare. “The events of 9/11,” observes Bacevich, “provided the tailor-made opportunity to break free of the fetters restricting the exercise of American power.” Bush alluded to this new doctrine at West Point the following June. It was then fully articulated in the administration's 2002 version of the National Security Strategy. The president's covering letter said that America will “act against . . . emerging threats before they are fully formed.” The document itself said:

    Given the goals of rogue states and terrorists, the United States can no longer rely on a reactive posture as we have in the past. . . . We cannot let our enemies strike first. . . . The United States will, if necessary, act preemptively.

    Congress immediately appropriated an additional $40 billion for the Pentagon and much more later.


    So do you think they are achieving their aims?


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