Friday, September 20, 2002

Read it and weep

Chris Floyd has this to say about the the blueprint for American military dominance, as revealed in the recently exposed PNAC report, "Rebuilding America's Defences: Strategies, Forces And Resources For A New Century":

...Anyone still "puzzled" over the Bush Regime's behavior need only look to these documents for enlightenment. They have long been available to the media -- which accepted Bush's transparent campaign lies about a "more humble foreign policy" at face value -- but have only now started attracting wider notice, in the New Yorker magazine this spring, and this week in the Glasgow Sunday Herald.

The documents explain America's relentless march across Afghanistan, Central Asia and soon into the Middle East. They explain the Bush Regime's otherwise unfathomable rejection of international law, its fanatical devotion to so-called missile defense, its gargantuan increases in military spending -- even its antediluvian energy policy, which mandates the continued primacy of oil and gas in the world economy. (They can't conquer the sun or monopolize the wind, so there's no profit, no leverage for personal gain and geopolitical power in pursuing viable alternatives to oil.) The Sept. 11 attacks gave the Regime a pretext for greatly accelerating this published program of global dominance, but they would have pursued it in any case.

So there will be war: either soon, after the November mid-term elections, or -- in the unlikely event that Iraq's offer of inspections is accepted -- then later, after some "provocation" or "obstruction," no doubt in good time before the 2004 presidential vote. The purse-lipped rhetoric about "liberation" and "moral clarity" is just so much desert sand being thrown in our eyes. Backstage, the Bush Regime is playing Mafia-style hardball, warning reluctant allies to get on board now or else miss out on their cut of the loot when America -- not a "democratic Iraq" -- divvies up Saddam's oil fields: a shakedown detailed this week by the Economist, among many others.

The Dominators dream of empire. Not only will it extend their temporal power, they believe it will also give them immortality. One of their chief gurus, Reaganite firebreather Michael Ledeen, says that if the Dominators reject "clever diplomacy" and "just wage total war" to subjugate the Middle East, "our children will sing great songs about us years from now." This madness, this bin Laden-like megalomania, is now driving the hijacked American republic -- and the world -- to murderous upheaval.

It's all there in the text, set down in black and white.