A 46-page document that has been circulating at the highest levels of the Pentagon for weeks, and which Defense Secretary Dick Cheney expects to release later this month, states that part of the American mission will be ‘convincing potential competitors that they need not aspire to a greater role or pursue a more aggressive posture to protect their legitimate interests’.
The classified document makes the case for a world dominated by one superpower whose position can be perpetuated by constructive behavior and sufficient military might to deter any nation or group of nations from challenging American primacy. The New York Times article Patrick E Tyler 8th March 1992, ‘US Strategy Plan Calls for Insuring No Rivals Develop a One-Superpower World’
Our most fundamental goal is to deter or defeat attack from whatever source ... The second goal is to strengthen and extend the system of defense arrangements that binds democratic and like-minded nations together in common defense against aggression, build habits of cooperation, avoid the renationalization of security policies, and provide security at lower costs and with lower risks for all. Our preference for a collective response to preclude threats or, if necessary, to deal with them is a key feature of our regional defense strategy. The third goal is to preclude any hostile power from dominating a region critical to our interests, and also thereby to strengthen the barriers against the re-emergence of a global threat to the interests of the US and our allies. Paul Wolfowitz (co-author Scooter Libby), Defense Planning Guidance 1994-9, 16th April redraft
One of the primary tasks we face today in shaping the future is carrying long standing alliances into the new era, and turning old enmities into new cooperative relationships. If we and other leading democracies continue to build a democratic security community, a much safer world is likely to emerge. If we act separately, many other problems could result. ibid.
Certain situations like the crisis leading to the Gulf War are likely to engender ad hoc coalitions. We should plan to maximize the value of such coalitions. This may include specialized roles for our forces as well as developing cooperative practices with others. ibid.
While the United States cannot become the world’s policeman and assume responsibility for solving every international security problem, neither can we allow our critical interests to depend solely on international mechanisms that can be blocked by countries whose interests may be very different than our own. Where our allies’ interests are directly affected, we must expect them to take an appropriate share of the responsibility, and in some cases play the leading role; but we maintain the capabilities for addressing selectively those security problems that threaten our own interests. ibid.
We discussed the need to prepare for a full range of asymmetric threats, including terrorism, cyber-attacks, advanced conventional weapons, cruise missiles, ballistic missiles, and certainly weapons of mass destruction. Donald Rumsfeld
Pearl Harbor was a failure of imagination. The Unknown Known, Rumsfeld, director Errol Morris, Sky Atlantic 2014
The United States government should envision a goal along these lines: new regimes in Afghanistan and another key state (or two) that supports terrorism. ibid. memo
There are two sides to the coin: one is, Belief in the inevitability of conflict can become one of its main causes ... If you wish for peace, prepare for war. ibid. Rumsfeld’s rules
A passive role would be terribly dangerous. But who do we want to lead – to provide leadership in the world – somebody else? ibid. Rumsfeld at conference
This document asserts as the guiding policy of the United States the right to use military force against any country it believes to be, or believes at some point may become a threat to American interests. No other country in modern history has asserted such a sweeping claim to world domination. David North, re National Security Strategy of the United States of America September 2002
It is a story that begins as the Cold War ends. A story about a group of self-identified radical conservatives on the right-wing extreme of the Republican Party. A group of intellectuals and policy-makers who saw the fall of the Soviet Union and communism not as an opportunity to scale back America’s Cold War military machine, but as an opportunity to build up its size and scale. To use military force more aggressively and unilaterally. To construct a new unchallenged American Empire. Hijacking Catastrophe, 2004
In all its previous incarnations and long before 9/11 and the current War on Terror, the Wolfowitz doctrine had identified regime change in Iraq as a crucial first step toward global domination by force. In a widely circulated letter to President Clinton in 1998 the members for the Project for the New American Century challenged the President to act forcefully and militarily to remove Saddam Hussein from power. Two years later George W Bush would hand-pick many of these Neo-Conservatives for key foreign policy posts in the Pentagon and the State Department. Once installed in government positions, as recent interviews with a number of former members of the Bush administration have revealed, the group maintained its long-standing focus on Iraq. A focus that intensified after the attacks of September 11. ibid.
At its core the document revived the Wolfowitz doctrine. It called on the United States to increase the military budget by up to a hundred billion dollars, to deny other nations the use of outer space and to adopt a more aggressive and unilateral foreign policy that would allow the United States to act offensively and pre-emptively in the world. ibid.
It is the war that defined a presidency and a plan to respond that became a war about a war. Frontline: Bush’s War I, PBS 2008
Rumsfeld’s deputy, Paul Wolfowitz, on a conference call with the vice president suggested a retaliatory attack on Iraq. ibid.
The Neo-Cons had been given enough to mount a campaign. ibid.
Rumsfeld would now be in charge. ibid.
At the vice-president’s office they decided to write the speech Powell would deliver. ibid.
9/11: On the phone to the Pentagon, Cheney talked about the shoot-down order with his oldest political ally, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. Frontline: The Dark Side, PBS 2006
The vice-president would become the chief architect of the War on Terror. There would be new laws enhancing executive power. Robust action at home and abroad. And above all – secrecy. ibid.
After the Ford administration, Rumsfeld made his fortune in private industry; Cheney spent ten years in Congress where he was immersed in security matters. ibid.
There is a drive certainly from Neo-Con political classes in America to try and find a pretext for attacking Iran. Annie Machon, interview 30th April 2010
The greatest propaganda coup of the American Right has been to convince its citizens that we are in the grip of a liberal conspiracy. Shane Smith
The new Bush team had a very different approach to money-laundering from its predecessor. Clinton’s global AML strategy was ridiculed by the Neo-Cons as a dastardly anti-competitive European plot. Misha Glenny, McMafia
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.