BY NORM DIXON
US President
George Bush has cynically exploited the 9/11 terror attacks to launch a
blatant drive to finally realise the long-held dream of the United States
capitalist ruling class: an American Century (as the goal was dubbed
around the time of the second world war) of unchallenged global US military,
political and economic domination.
While most commentary has focussed on the aggressive military aspects of Washington's post-9/11 War on Terror - such as its assertion of the right to preemptive attack on terrorists, tyrants or rogue states - it should never be forgotten that US military might, and the political power that flows from it, is a means to an end: to strengthen and promote US business interests across the globe.
Vice president Dick Cheney, defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld and a tightly organised, highly disciplined cabal of ideologically driven figures in the US elite, many of them veterans of the Reagan and Bush senior administrations, call the shots in the Bush junior administration.
While Bill Clinton was president, these so-called hawks organised themselves through a network of right-wing ruling-class think tanks and journals, with overlapping memberships and interlocking leaderships. They formulated a grand strategy for US global domination that, in its essentials, is the program of the present Bush administration.
These outfits included the Project for the New American Century (PNAC), the American Enterprise Institute, the Hudson Institute and the Center for Security Policy. The Weekly Standard, the editorial pages of the Wall Street Journal (as well as dozens of op-ed columns provided by the PNAC and allied cadre) aggressively argued for their views.
The PNAC, established in 1997 to promote American global leadership, included among the 25 signatories of its founding statement of principles people who are now key members of the Bush administration, including: Cheney; Rumsfeld; Paul Wolfowitz (now deputy defence secretary); I. Lewis Libby (now Cheney's chief of staff); Elliot Abrams (now a senior staffer in the National Security Council); William Bennett (now Bush's education secretary); and Zalmay Khalilzad (now the White House's envoy to Afghanistan).
Via yet more interlocking think tanks, such as the Jewish Institute for National Security and the Washington Institute of Near East Policy, the new hawks argued for unstinting hostility towards regimes in the Middle East over which Washington did not have full control - namely Iraq, Iran, Syria and Libya (some went even further and advocated regime change in Saudi Arabia because the unstintingly pro-US monarchy there was deemed too independent to be allowed to control such a huge proportion of the world's oil supplies).
In September 2000, the PNAC's imperial vision was fleshed out with the release of a report, Rebuilding America's Defences: Strategy, Forces and Resources for a New Century. The project's participants included Wolfowitz, Libby and Weekly Standard editor William Kristol.
The report's introduction noted that the US is the world's only superpower, combining preeminent military power, global technological leadership and the world's largest economy85 At present the US faces no global rival. America's grand strategy should aim to preserve and extend this advantageous position as far into the future as possible.
The report's authors admitted that they had built upon the 1992 draft of the Pentagon's Defence Planning Guidance (DPG), which was prepared by none other than Wolfowitz and Libby on the orders of Cheney, then US defence secretary in the Bush senior administration.
This document stated bluntly that the US must continue to discourage 85 advanced industrial nations from challenging our leadership or 85 even aspiring to a larger regional or global role 85 [To achieve this, the US] must retain the preeminent responsibility for addressing 85 those wrongs which threaten not only our interests, but those of our allies or friends, or which seriously unsettle international relations.
This was a admission that the massive build-up of US military might in Europe, Asia and the Middle East after 1945 was not simply directed at containing the Soviet Union, crushing Third World revolutions and controlling Middle Eastern oil - as vital to US interests as they were. It was also aimed at enmeshing its capitalist rivals - Britain, France, Germany and Japan - within US-dominated military alliances designed to prevent them developing independent armed forces.
The PNAC report recommended that the US boost war spending to a minimum of 3.5-3.8% of GDP.
The report also urged Washington to develop the capability to fight and win multiple, simultaneous major theatre wars and at the same time perform the 'constabulary' duties associated with shaping the security environment in critical regions. It recommended that the US maintain nuclear strategic superiority by developing smaller bunker-buster nuclear weapons, resuming nuclear testing and developing the star wars global missile defence system.
Rebuilding America's Defences also frankly revealed that Iraq would be a target if its authors gained power, suggesting that the Bush administration's recent hysteria over weapons of mass destruction is merely a convenient excuse: The US 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.
Clearly, the Cheney-Rumsfeld cabal had a long-standing agenda for the expansion of US global domination when they came to power behind front-man Bush junior in January 2001. But the agenda lacked the existence of a serious enough threat to convince the US people to abandon their desire for a post-Cold War peace dividend and their opposition to the deaths of US soldiers in overseas wars.
The PNAC's 2000 report recognised this when it stated: the process of transformation is likely to be a long one absent some catastrophic and catalysing event - like a new Pearl Harbor.
Remarkably, they got just that with the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. The Bush gang immediately recognised the opportunity with which it was presented.
A series of articles written by the Washington Post's Bob Woodward and Dan Balz, which were based on extensive interviews with senior members of the administration and published in late January, revealed how 9/11 was manipulated in order to implement the hawks' grand strategy.
Without any evidence as to who perpetrated the mass murders, on the afternoon of the attacks Bush ordered Rumsfeld to prepare plans for an attack on Afghanistan (it was later revealed that the plans had already been drawn up by the Clinton administration).
On the morning of September 12, 2001, Rumsfeld was already demanding that the US attack Iraq. According to Woodward, in a meeting of the National Security Council (NSC) held that afternoon, Rumsfeld again argued that Iraq should be a principal target of the first round in the war on terrorism.
US Secretary of State Colin Powell and the top military officers argued that the first target be Afghanistan and that public opinion had to be prepared before a move against Iraq was possible. Bush sided with Powell. Cheney argued that the target should be quickly expanded from the Taliban and al Qaeda to states that sponsor terrorism.
A September 14 cabinet meeting again discussed how to make use of 9/11. Like Bush, Powell saw the attacks as an opportunity to reshape relationships throughout the world, Woodward and Balz reported.
An article in the April 2002 issue of the New Yorker by reporter Nicholas Lemann confirmed that the Bush gang saw the slaughter of 9/11 as a political opportunity.
Lemann wrote that Bush's national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, told him that she called together senior staff of the NSC and asked them to think about 'how do you capitalise on these opportunities' to fundamentally change American doctrine, and shape the world, in the wake of September 11. 'I really think this period is analogous to 1945 to 1947 85 in that the events so clearly demonstrated that there is a big global threat85 That has started shifting the tectonic plates in international politics. And it's important to try to seize on that and position American interests and institutions and all that before they harden again.
Another top official was even more honest. Lemann reported: Inside government, the reason September 11 appears to have been 'a transformative moment', as one senior official I had lunch with put it, 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, at least for a while.
Since September 11, the hawks have fast-tracked the implementation of their agenda in case this window of opportunity closes.
They have won a massive increase in military spending of US$48 billion, to $379.3 billion (which incidentally is almost exactly the PNAC's magic figure of 3.8% of GDP), in 2002-2003. Adding non-Pentagon military spending, mostly by the energy department for the nuclear weapons program, total military spending will be $396.1 billion. A further $38 billion is to be spent on homeland defence - mainly for the plethora of US police agencies. Washington has projected that the war budget will steadily increase to more than $451 billion by 2007, a 30% increase.
Washington has signalled - with its repudiation of the Kyoto Protocol on greenhouse gas emissions, the war crimes provisions of the International Criminal Court and the anti-ballistic missile treaty - that US military, economic and political power will not be subject to any form of international constraint.
It has been revealed that the US has plans to use nuclear weapons against non-nuclear states in the name of eliminating the threat of weapons of mass destruction. US special forces have been authorised to kill or capture terrorists anywhere in the world, whenever the opportunity arises, without having to obtain permission from the relevant government.
As a result of its war to overthrow the Taliban, Washington has secured permanent military bases and stationed tens of thousands of troops for the first time in the increasingly strategic Central Asian region. From these bases, the US can more easily contain Russia and China, control the emerging oil and gas resources of the Caspian Sea region, strengthen further its hold over the Persian Gulf and increase its military stranglehold on most of the world's vital energy resources.
Using the cover of the war on terrorism, Washington has increased or resumed military funding for notoriously repressive regimes - including Yemen, Georgia, Indonesia, Pakistan, the Philippines, Colombia and the dictatorial Central Asian republics - as well as sending thousands of troops and military advisers to help them crush anti-government movements.
If any proof was needed that corporate globalisation and the US war drive are two sides of the same coin, you need look no further than Bush's National Security Strategy (NSS) document which was released on September 20.
It was a succinct summary of both the 1992 DPG and the 2000 PNAC documents. It rejected policies of containment and deterrence of adversaries in favour of aggressive military intervention, anticipatory self-defence and proactive counterproliferation.
What was new was the explicit statement that the US will use its unparalleled military strength and great economic and political influence - this moment of opportunity - to extend the benefits of freedom across the globe. We will actively work to bring the hope of democracy, development, free markets and free trade to every corner of the world, the document declared.
It went on: The United States will stand behind any nation determined to build a better future by seeking the rewards of liberty for its people. Free trade and free markets have proven their ability to lift whole societies out of poverty. Later in the same document, it admitted that a world where some live in comfort and plenty, while half the human race lives on less than $2 a day is neither just nor stable.
The document further declared: So the US will work with individual nations, entire regions and the entire global trading community to build a world that trades in freedom and therefore grow in prosperity. The US will deliver greater development assistance to nations that govern justly, invest in their people and encourage economic freedom.
The implicit threat is that any Third World government that chooses not to accept Washington's definition of liberty and refuses to follow neo-liberal directives from the US and its proxies - the International Monetary Fund (IMF), World Bank and World Trade Organisation (WTO) - will receive no aid or be tagged a rogue state.
Just days before the Brazilian people were to elect left-winger Lula da Silva as their president on October 27, the influential Republican chairperson of the US House of Representatives international relations committee, Henry Hyde, wrote to Bush to warn that a left-wing government in Brazil could join forces with the radical Venezuelan government and the revolutionary government of Cuba to form an axis of evil in the Americas.
Hyde claimed that Brazil may decide to develop nuclear weapons, that Cuba was a sponsor of terrorism and that Venezuela supplies oil to Cuba and supports terrorist organisations attacking nearby fragile democracies including the [Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia] in Colombia and radical anti-democratic groups seeking to destabilise Bolivia and Ecuador. Washington backed an attempted coup in Venezuela earlier this year.
Ominously, the NSS document declares that free markets and free trade are key priorities of our national security strategy and placed special emphasis on the role of the WTO to entrench the power of market principles.
But contrary to Bush's lies, the economic policies imposed on the Third World by the IMF, World Bank and WTO benefit only the First World countries which control these institutions, especially the US.
Inequality between the First and Third Worlds is growing, not decreasing. The average per capita income of the richest countries was 11 times that of the poorest countries in 1870, 38 times in 1965 and 58 times in 1985.
According to the 1997 UN Human Development Report, the combined wealth of the 225 richest people in the world was more than $1.7 trillion, which is equal to the annual income of some 2.5 billion people, or 47% of the world's population. The wealth of just one man, Bill Gates, is enough to achieve and maintain universal access to basic education and health care, safe water and sanitation for the entire world.
The WTO was set up in 1995 as the world body to police trade liberalisation - the removal of barriers to imports and foreign investment, as well as measures to protect domestic industries and jobs.
The WTO can rule that environmental or health regulations are barriers to trade. Countries that do not participate in the WTO are denied access to markets. Punitive economic sanctions can be imposed on countries that do not comply with agreements.
However, the mutual opening of markets always hurts the weakest economies. The historical subjugation of Third World economies to the corporate elite of the rich Western countries has left the former with lower labour productivity rates and outdated technology, problems that cannot be overcome without a major restructuring of the world economy based on putting social needs ahead of corporate profits.
From Green Left Weekly, November 13, 2002.
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