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U.S. Plans to Dominate the World
(Jonathan Freedland, The Guardian, February 26, 2003)
With barely a peep of congressional opposition to a military attack against Saddam, and most Democrats reduced to silent compliance, the Washington village has taken it as read, both that war will happen, and that it is justified. Their debate is focusing instead on a different question: what next? . . . If, however, the American victors insist on a much more robust level of US control - restructuring Iraq entirely, studding it with countless military bases - then we could start drawing rather different conclusions as to the true motive of this campaign. We might agree with those who detect in the Iraq adventure the opening move of a much grander American design: the establishing of US hegemony for the next 100 years. . . . This is not just twitchy, anti-war conspiracy talk. An outfit exists on 17th Street in Washington, DC, called the Project for the New American Century, explicitly committed to US mastery of the globe for the coming age. Its acolytes speak of "full spectrum dominance", meaning American invincibility in every field of warfare - land, sea, air and space - and a world in which no two nations' relationship with each other will be more important than their relationship with the US. There will be no place on earth, or the heavens for that matter, where Washington's writ does not run supreme. To that end, a ring of US military bases should surround China, with liberation of the People's Republic considered the ultimate prize. As one enthusiast puts it concisely: "After Baghdad, Beijing." . . . If this sounds like the harmless delusions of an eccentric fringe, think again. The founder members of the project form a rollcall of today's Bush inner circle. Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, Jeb Bush, Richard Perle - they're all there. So too is Zalmay Khalilzad, now the White House's "special envoy and ambassador-at-large for free Iraqis". . . . In other words, this is one debate we cannot afford to sit out. As US commentator Sandra Mackay wrote this month: "Washington's hawks understand that the real risks ... are not in war, but in the peace that follows." . . . Victory may be rapid and easy - but that's when the real trouble could start.

posted by LoZo 11:47 AM