America’s Bid For Global Dominance
by John Pilger
Dissident
Voice
December 16,
2002
The threat posed
by US terrorism to the security of nations and individuals was outlined in
prophetic detail in a document written more than two years ago and disclosed
only recently. What was needed for America to dominate much of humanity and the
world's resources, it said, was "some catastrophic and catalysing event -
like a new Pearl Harbor". The attacks of 11 September 2001 provided the
"new Pearl Harbor", described as "the opportunity of ages".
The extremists who have since exploited 11 September come from the era of
Ronald Reagan, when far-right groups and "think-tanks" were
established to avenge the American "defeat" in Vietnam. In the 1990s,
there was an added agenda: to justify the denial of a "peace dividend"
following the cold war. The Project for the New American Century was formed,
along with the American Enterprise Institute, the Hudson Institute and others
that have since merged the ambitions of the Reagan administration with those of
the current Bush regime.
One of George W
Bush's "thinkers" is Richard Perle. I interviewed Perle when he was
advising Reagan; and when he spoke about "total war", I mistakenly
dismissed him as mad. He recently used the term again in describing America's "war
on terror". "No stages," he said. "This is total war. We
are fighting a variety of enemies. There are lots of them out there. All this
talk about first we are going to do Afghanistan, then we will do Iraq... this
is entirely the wrong way to go about it. If we just let our vision of the
world go forth, and we embrace it entirely and we don't try to piece together
clever diplomacy, but just wage a total war... our children will sing great
songs about us years from now."
Perle is one of the
founders of the Project for the New American Century, the PNAC. Other founders
include Dick Cheney, now vice-president, Donald Rumsfeld, defence secretary,
Paul Wolfowitz, deputy defence secretary, I Lewis Libby, Cheney's chief of
staff, William J Bennett, Reagan's education secretary, and Zalmay Khalilzad,
Bush's ambassador to Afghanistan. These are the modern chartists of American
terrorism. The PNAC's seminal report, Rebuilding America's Defences: strategy,
forces and resources for a new century, was a blueprint of American aims in all
but name. Two years ago it recommended an increase in arms-spending by $48bn so
that Washington could "fight and win multiple, simultaneous major theatre
wars". This has happened. It said the United States should develop
"bunker-buster" nuclear weapons and make "star wars" a
national priority. This is happening. It said that, in the event of Bush taking
power, Iraq should be a target. And so it is.
As for Iraq's
alleged "weapons of mass destruction", these were dismissed, in so
many words, as a convenient excuse, which it is. "While the unresolved
conflict with Iraq provides the immediate justification," it says,
"the need for a substantial American force presence in the Gulf transcends
the issue of the regime of Saddam Hussein." How has this grand strategy
been implemented? A series of articles in the Washington Post, co-authored by
Bob Woodward of Watergate fame and based on long interviews with senior members
of the Bush administration, reveals how 11 September was manipulated.
On the morning
of 12 September 2001, without any evidence of who the hijackers were, Rumsfeld
demanded that the US attack Iraq. According to Woodward, Rumsfeld told a
cabinet meeting that Iraq should be "a principal target of the first round
in the war against terrorism". Iraq was temporarily spared only because
Colin Powell, the secretary of state, persuaded Bush that "public opinion
has to be prepared before a move against Iraq is possible". Afghanistan
was chosen as the softer option. If Jonathan Steele's estimate in the Guardian
is correct, some 20,000 people in Afghanistan paid the price of this debate
with their lives.
Time and again,
11 September is described as an "opportunity". In last April's New
Yorker, the investigative reporter Nicholas Lemann wrote that Bush's most
senior adviser, Condoleezza Rice, told him she had called together senior
members of the National Security Council and asked them "to think about
'how do you capitalise on these opportunities'", which she compared with
those of "1945 to 1947": the start of the cold war. Since 11
September, America has established bases at the gateways to all the major
sources of fossil fuels, especially central Asia. The Unocal oil company is to
build a pipeline across Afghanistan. Bush has scrapped the Kyoto Protocol on
greenhouse gas emissions, the war crimes provisions of the International
Criminal Court and the anti-ballistic missile treaty. He has said he will use
nuclear weapons against non-nuclear states "if necessary". Under
cover of propaganda about Iraq's alleged weapons of mass destruction, the Bush
regime is developing new weapons of mass destruction that undermine
international treaties on biological and chemical warfare.
In the Los
Angeles Times, the military analyst William Arkin describes a secret army set
up by Donald Rumsfeld, similar to those run by Richard Nixon and Henry
Kissinger and which Congress outlawed. This "super-intelligence support
activity" will bring together the "CIA and military covert action,
information warfare, and deception". According to a classified document
prepared for Rumsfeld, the new organisation, known by its Orwellian moniker as
the Proactive Pre-emptive Operations Group, or P2OG, will provoke terrorist
attacks which would then require "counter-attack" by the United
States on countries "harbouring the terrorists".
In other words,
innocent people will be killed by the United States. This is reminiscent of
Operation Northwoods, the plan put to President Kennedy by his military chiefs
for a phoney terrorist campaign - complete with bombings, hijackings, plane
crashes and dead Americans - as justification for an invasion of Cuba. Kennedy
rejected it. He was assassinated a few months later. Now Rumsfeld has
resurrected Northwoods, but with resources undreamt of in 1963 and with no
global rival to invite caution. You have to keep reminding yourself this is not
fantasy: that truly dangerous men, such as Perle and Rumsfeld and Cheney, have
power. The thread running through their ruminations is the importance of the
media: "the prioritised task of bringing on board journalists of repute to
accept our position".
"Our
position" is code for lying. Certainly, as a journalist, I have never
known official lying to be more pervasive than today. We may laugh at the
vacuities in Tony Blair's "Iraq dossier" and Jack Straw's inept lie
that Iraq has developed a nuclear bomb (which his minions rushed to
"explain"). But the more insidious lies, justifying an unprovoked
attack on Iraq and linking it to would-be terrorists who are said to lurk in
every Tube station, are routinely channelled as news. They are not news; they
are black propaganda.
This corruption
makes journalists and broadcasters mere ventriloquists' dummies. An attack on a
nation of 22 million suffering people is discussed by liberal commentators as
if it were a subject at an academic seminar, at which pieces can be pushed
around a map, as the old imperialists used to do.
The issue for
these humanitarians is not primarily the brutality of modern imperial domination,
but how "bad" Saddam Hussein is. There is no admission that their
decision to join the war party further seals the fate of perhaps thousands of
innocent Iraqis condemned to wait on America's international death row. Their
doublethink will not work. You cannot support murderous piracy in the name of
humanitarianism. Moreover, the extremes of American fundamentalism that we now
face have been staring at us for too long for those of good heart and sense not
to recognise them.
With thanks to
Norm Dixon and Chris Floyd
John Pilger is one of the
world’s most renowned investigative journalists and documentary filmmaker. His
latest book is The New Rulers of the World (Verso, 2002). Visit John Pilger’s
website at: http://www.johnpilger.com