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THE NEOCON REVOLUTION
Posted by: joan.Russow on http://PEJ.org Sunday, January 30, 2005 - 02:00 PM
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THE NEOCON REVOLUTION
F.H. Knelman, Ph.D.
The first emergence of a distinct radical new ideological group, the neoCons, first appeared during the Reagan administration. Some individual early prototypes appeared on the political/policy scene earlier. Among this latter group was Alfred Wohlstetter, an early member of the Rand Corporation?s strategy reports, whose first report on nuclear strategy was a classified paper - Rand Report R-244-S (K. Husain, ?NeoCons: The Men Behind the Curtain?, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, Nov/Dec, 2003, pp. 62-71).
THE NEOCON REVOLUTION
F.H. Knelman, Ph.D.
The first emergence of a distinct radical new ideological group, the neoCons, first appeared during the Reagan administration. Some individual early prototypes appeared on the political/policy scene earlier. Among this latter group was Alfred Wohlstetter, an early member of the Rand Corporation?s strategy reports, whose first report on nuclear strategy was a classified paper - Rand Report R-244-S (K. Husain, ?NeoCons: The Men Behind the Curtain?, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, Nov/Dec, 2003, pp. 62-71). Later, while a professor at the University of Chicago, Wohlstetter engaged two young graduate students, Paul Wolfowitz, currently Assistant Secretary of Defense and Richard Perle, the perennial hard-line neoCon. Both Wohlstetter and Wolfowitz argued that the U.S. must extend its security umbrella to the middle East. Wolfowitz was also a member of the notorious Team B, established by then CIA Director, George Bush Sr., in 1976. The major message of the Wohlstetter-Wolfowitz team was to argue that the U.S. move away from deterrence to a policy of world domination, the centrepiece of a 1990 report by Wolfowitz to the then Secretary of Defense, Dick Cheney. ?A decade earlier Team B had found a place in the Reagan administration, Reagan?s ?Evil Empire? rhetoric underscored and began the undertaking of moving completely from deterrence to nuclear warfighting dominance, leading to the largest defence budget increase in U.S. history up to that time. Reagan?s neoCon advisers argued for a preemptive action which became the centrepiece of George Bush Jr.,?s policy. Iraq became the inevitable target of their policies, incorporating the policy of the geopolitics ?of oil. Also a natural consequence of seeking world domination was to trash the nuclear arms control regime and to discount international law and the UN, i.e. unilateralism.
Key neoCons in the Reagan administration were the hawkish Secretary of Defense, Caspar Weinberger, the perennial neoCon, Richard Perle, and a mixture of the Old and New Right. In support were a number of lobbies whose members were pure neoCons. The Committee on the Present Danger (CPD) was typical. ?Its message was clearly enunciated by two key members, Colin Gray and Keith Payne, in an article, ?Victory is Possible?, i.e. ?The United States should plan to defeat the Soviet Union and to do so at a cost that would not prohibit U.S. recovery?, (see F.H. Knelman, ?America, God and the Bomb: The Legacy of Ronald Reagan?) (Vancouver, New Star Books), 1987. The result was a complete break with deterrence policy in favour of defeating the Soviet Union through a counterforce first strike nuclear attack. The ?acceptable? cost was estimated at twenty million U.S. deaths. To reduce this cost, a ?Star Wars? development was proposed, later sanitized as the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI). The above policies are being operationalized by the current Bush administration. Reagan sent the complete neoCon, Donald Rumsfeld, as a special emissary to Iraq, bringing with him a huge basket of military gifts to help Iraq defeat Iran, a true irony of history.
Together with Wohlstetter, the evil wizard who fathered the neoCon revolution was Lee Atwater. To his critics he was a symbol of the dark side of U.S. politics (Thomas B. Edsall, Washington Post, March 30, 1991, p.A-1). Atwater had been the key adviser to George Bush Sr., along with his associate, Karl Rove, the master of dirty tricks, who is the current president?s major adviser. Atwater was the key parent of Pax America. This lineage continued with Rumsfeld?s key adviser, Thomas Barnett. Richard Perle, the Prince of Darkness, whose influence began in the Reagan presidency, is a member of this clan of evil wizards. All they needed was a compliant president and they found the perfect one in George W. Bush. I believe that certain moral judgements should be made with great caution. Nevertheless the above men, the precursor advisers in favour of Pax Americana were evil in the full meaning of that word. They were not unlike the advisers to Hitler and their advice to Bush was sinister. The message, ?Do anything necessary to fulfill Pax America? was planned, promoted and processed. And the current crop of advisers and members of the Bush administration - Wolfowitz, Libby, Feith et al are the servants of the nightmares which they serve with conviction and, in many ways, control. We believe they are so blinded by power that they will voluntarily persist in the trap of Iraq. To hold elections under the current conditions is the fulfillment of failure. The irony is that the Sunnis are unlikely to vote, thus the Shiite majority is sure to win, once again creating an Islamic fundamentalist regime which the U.S. had opposed earlier in Iran, when it supported Iraq. To have a national election under such adverse conditions is the mark of a madman. We now have hard evidence that Bush, Rumsfeld, Cheney and even Powell, based their invasion of Iraq on a library of lies. How can any fair person not conclude that the war in Iraq ?is an international crime and these are the criminals who planned and continue to wage it. Unfortunately there is no court to bring them to justice. The court of history will have to perform this function.
The major neoCon goal is to establish a world dominated by Pax Americana, the first global domination of our planet. ?An early version of Pax Americana was contained in the publication of the group Policy for ?New American Century (PNAC). Virtually every current member of the neoCons in the Bush administration were former members of PNAC. They included Paul Wolfowitz, John Bolton, Eliot Cohen, Stephen Cambone, Dov Zakheim and Lewis Libby. They were also all academics. In 2000 they published what was to become the policy blueprint of the Bush Administration, i.e. Rebuilding America?s Defenses. The New American Century is the realization of Pax Americana. Their master was Donald Rumsfeld, one of the chief architects of U.S. policies of preemption, unilateralism and domination. They have now embraced the radical new policy of ?net war? and exploiting the planet?s high ground, i.e. space. This has become the primary agenda of the Bush administration. It was in the above document that the authors stated that the transformation in U.S. policy they sought ?was likely to be a long one....? and ?absent some catastrophic and catalytic event? would not be feasible while Condoleezza Rice, following the 9/11 event stated ?this is the Pearl Harbor we have been waiting for?. One could not invent a more inappropriate person to represent a country on the U.N. Security Council, which is why George Bush named her as such. What began by a group of neoCon advisers to government and members of associations dedicated to establishing Pax Americana has now become the government itself and it is prepared to bring global domination to a successful end.
Pax Americana has moved relentlessly from its conceptual stage to the operational plans and policies of its fulfillment. The components of Pax Americana are (1) to achieve control of the world?s major oil deposits; (2) an aspect of this is to stabilize the Middle East and support Israel, to control the oil and gas reserves of Eastern Europe, to make certain of Canadian supply and to upset the government of Venezuela in order to recapture control of its oil (Iraq was invaded for its oil and to help ?stabilize? the Middle East); (3) to slowly surround, suffocate and isolate Russia, whom it considers to be a potential ?re-emergent peer? as well as to plan to fight and win a nuclear war with Russia. U.S. activities in Azerbeijan and the Ukraine are an important part of isolating Russia and accessing the rich oil and gas deposits of the Caspian Sea region; (4) to take control of those countries known as the ?gap? who are currently resisting globalization, the goal being to ?manage the global distribution of resources, people, energy and money?. This is the plan of Thomas Barnett, author of the book ?The Pentagon?s New Map?, in what he calls the ?Grand March of History?, (see Janet M. Eaton, jmeaton@ns.sympatico.ca.). It should be noted that Barnett is Rumsfeld?s top strategist. Barnett calls for the complete end to multilateralism and the total embrace of preemption. Key countries in the ?gap? are Nigeria and Venezuela, with their huge oil fields, but also Senegal, Ghana, Mali and Uganda as well as Columbia and the Republic of Georgia.
The strategic containment of Russia described above involves expanding ?missile defense systems into Eastern Europe, while oil-rich Iran will be encircled with missiles based in Azerbeijan, Turkmenistan, Iraq and Afghanistan. In order to assist in this global venture the U.S. plans to cover the entire Earth with secret satellite surveillance. This will be posted on the internal military ?net? ?(a new ?internet in the sky?), leading to the capacity to fight a war anywhere on the planet, i.e. ?net war?.
But a tragic flaw may be brewing, and that is Iraq. The neoCons have conveniently forgotten the lessons of Viet Nam. Drunk with power and over-confidence, they may yet be facing an ultimate loss which will be politically wounding to the entire Bush administration. This is Rumsfeld?s nightmare and possibly Blair?s as well. There is nothing more blinding than absolute convictions which are not based on reality. As for the outcome of the Iraqi elections, the Americans won, but we knew that even before the elections were held.
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