“What are we going to do today, Brain?” asks Pinky, the goofy cartoon sidekick of the menacing — though ineffectual — would-be world-dictator, Brain. “Why, what we always do, Pinky. Plan to take over the world.”
The same words must be spoken everyday in the offices of The Project for the New American Century, and in the Pentagon and White House offices of the right-wing think tank’s sponsors.
At least, that’s what a document prepared for Bush insiders, written before the president took power in January, 2001, suggests. [1]
Prepared in September, 2000, “Rebuilding America’s Defense: Strategies, Forces and Resources for a New Century,” builds “upon the defense strategy outlined by the Cheney Defense Department in the waning days of the Bush Administration.” That strategy “provided a blueprint for maintaining U.S pre-eminence, precluding the rise of a great power rival, and shaping the international security order in line with American principles and interests.”
US pre-eminence is another way of saying what the Brain says more clearly: the US taking over the world.
And precluding the rise of a great power rival, means weakening, by any means necessary, any country that may be able to pursue its own course, free from subordination to Washington.
Uncovered by the Sunday Herald [2], the document–which the Herald reveals was prepared for key members of the Bush administration, including now Vice-President Dick Cheney and his chief of staff Lewis Libby, Donald Rumsfeld, now Secretary of Defense, and his deputy Paul Wolfowitz, and George W. Bush’s brother, Jeb Bush–lays out a plan to “preserve and extend (America’s) position of global leadership by maintaining the pre-eminence of U.S. military forces.”
The blueprint was prepared to promote American “global leadership,” a scholarly sounding weasel phrase meaning “the US — and more particularly, its elite — dictating the political and economic terms the world, and its people, must live by.”
Those terms, not surprisingly, are in the first, designed to be advantageous to the U.S., a point the document makes unapologetically. Whatever advantages accrue to others are entirely negative: they are the advantages of submitting: not being bombed or subject to crippling economic sanctions. Do as we say, and nobody gets hurt, could well be the pithiest way to describe US foreign policy.
Like others in the US foreign policy establishment who see the collapse of the Soviet Union as having provided the US a unique opportunity to secure complete control of the globe, the project speaks of “grand strategies” backed up by U.S. military “pre-eminence” and of “a foreign policy that boldly and purposefully promotes American principles abroad,” (whether people abroad want them or not.)
Those principles almost certainly include the “free-market” principles rich American investors (no less those in Bush’s cabinet) rely on to enhance their wealth, almost invariably at the expense of such out-of-fashion ideas as economic security for all, public health care and education, and protecting the environment.
The language, though scholarly, hardly disguises the bullying intent of the blueprint: As the world’s only superpower, and possessed of unparalleled military might, the United States is in a an unprecedented position to consolidate its power over those parts of the world it controls, while making over those parts of the world it doesn’t control, in line with its own political and economic interests. And challenges to its pre-eminence are to be beaten back in no uncertain — and bloody — terms.
To do that, the blueprint’s authors say the US military must be large enough to “fight and win multiple, simultaneous theatre wars” while performing “‘constabulary’ duties associated with shaping the security environment in critical regions,” and preserving “nuclear strategic superiority.”
This is New York Times columnist’s, “The hidden hand of the market will never work without a hidden fist — McDonald’s cannot flourish without McDonnell-Douglas, the designer of the F-15. And the hidden fist that keeps the world safe for Silicon Valley’s technologies is called the United States Army, Air Force, Navy and Marine Corps.” [3]
Having increased military spending significantly, as recommended by the report, the US now spends more on its military than the next eight largest countries.
On Iraq, the blueprint refers to Saddam Hussein’s regime as a justification for the larger goal of establishing a permanent US presence in the Persian Gulf.
“The United States has for decades sought to play a more permanent role in Gulf regional security. While the unresolved conflict with Iraq provides the immediate justification, the need for a substantial American force presence in the Gulf transcends the issue of the regime of Saddam Hussein.”
Notice the word “transcend,” as in “even if Saddam weren’t there, we’d still find a reason to establish a permanent presence in the Gulf region.”
The Cold War, it can be argued, was a continuation of W.W.II. Two powers emerged from the war victorious over the Nazis, and proceeded to do what the Nazis had been doing — carve up the world.
With one of the superpowers having since collapsed, the sole remaining superpower is free to extend its sphere of influence to the remainder of the world, to do what the Nazis tried, but failed, to do on a more limited scale.
Call it securing and extending America’s pre-eminence to establish a new American century, as the Bush administration’s think tank lackeys do, or call it what it is: the sound of jackboots marching around the world.
Notes:
[1] “Rebuilding America’s Defenses: Strategy, Forces and Resources For a New Century,” September 2000. A Report of the Project for the New American Century. http://www.newamericancentury.org/RebuildingAmericasDefenses.pdf
[2] Neil Mackay, Bush planned Iraq ‘regime change’ before becoming President, Sunday Herald, September 15, 2002
[3] Thomas L. Friedman, “A Manifesto for the Fast World,” New York Times Magazine, March 28, 1999.
Mr. Steve Gowans is a writer and political activist who lives in Ottawa, Canada.
