PNAC's Imperial Manual

Observe that the author of the following review, Thomas Donnelly, is also the primary author of the infamous Rebuilding America's Defenses, and that Max Boot, the author of the book under review, is an officially acknowledged supporter of the current Bush administration's aggressive belligerence. The review is hosted by Foreign Affairs Magazine a publication of the oligarchic and malignant Council on Foreign Relations.

Years ago, when we first heard rumblings of "Neocon" imperialism, we mistakenly dismissed these as mere partisan hyperbolae. We have since been forced to conclude that such dire warnings had much basis in fact. This is not to say that we embrace the officially sanctioned "Liberal" opposition. That party is merely a different tentacle of the same malevolent chameleon octopus.

---

The Past as Prologue: An Imperial Manual

Thomas Donnelly
From Foreign Affairs, July/August 2002

The Savage Wars of Peace: Small Wars and the Rise of American Power. Max Boot Basic Books, 2002, 448 pp. $30.00.

Summary: Max Boot's history of America's small wars shows that the republic actually has a long, underappreciated imperial past. It offers lessons for the new Pax Americana and a call not to retreat from policing the imperial frontier.

Thomas Donnelly is Deputy Executive Director of the Project for the New American Century.

The fact of American empire is hardly debated these days. Even those who fear and oppose it (in this country, the libertarian right and the remnants of the new left; abroad, a variety of voices from Paris to Baghdad to Beijing) define international politics almost entirely in relation to U.S. power -- and especially U.S. military power. The "unipolar moment" has become a unipolar decade and, with a little effort and a little wisdom, could last much longer. Even Yale historian Paul Kennedy, who in the mid-1980s predicted U.S. "imperial overstretch," has become a believer. Stunned by the initial success of the war in Afghanistan, he wrote in February,

Nothing has ever existed like this disparity of power; nothing. The Pax Britannica was run on the cheap. Britain's army was much smaller than European armies and even the Royal Navy was equal only to the next two navies -- right now all the other navies in the world combined could not dent American maritime supremacy. Napoleon's France and Philip II's Spain had powerful foes and were part of a multipolar system. Charlemagne's Empire was merely western European in its stretch. The Roman Empire stretched further afield, but there was another great empire in Persia and a larger one in China. There is no comparison.

To be sure, it is still inflammatory to speak openly of empire -- hence the prevalence of euphemisms such as hegemony, preeminence, primacy, sole superpower, or, a la the French, hyperpuissance. But many of the nation's founders would not be so shocked: Alexander Hamilton, writing the first paragraph of the first Federalist Paper, described America as "an empire in many respects the most interesting in the world." Thomas Jefferson's term was "empire of liberty."

Since September 11, President George W. Bush, too, has learned that it is hard to be a humble hegemon. During the 2000 election campaign, Bush's advisers spoke contemptuously of the Clinton administration's promiscuous "engagement" in "nation building" and other "international social work," and they derided Secretary of State Madeleine Albright's claim that the United States was "the indispensable nation." But now that he is fighting a war on terrorism, the president asserts that "no nation is exempt" from the "true and unchanging" American principles of liberty and justice. He sees adherence to these principles as a "non-negotiable demand" that forms the "greater objective" of the war. The Bush Doctrine is thus an expression of the president's decision to preserve and extend Pax Americana throughout the Middle East and beyond.

But a doctrine does not a strategy make. Since the end of the Cold War, U.S. foreign policy has been driven by short-term tactics and politics (both international and domestic). Even in the war on terrorism, the Bush administration has been reluctant to accept any link between one problem and another. Afghanistan, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Iraq, radical Islamism -- all have been dealt with discretely rather than as part of a larger regional approach.

[... continued ...]

Miss America, Dick Cheney and the New Pearl Harbor

Taken in isolation this may not seem to amount to much, but given the bigger picture is seems likely to have been no mere coincidence that the mention of Dick Cheney and Pearl Harbor was made at 08:50:30 shortly before the program cut to NYC where WTC 1 had been hit at 08:46:30.

See: PNAC's Rebuilding America's Defenses "Further, the process of transformation, even if it brings revolutionary change, is likely to be a long one, absent some catastrophic and catalyzing event – like a new Pearl Harbor."

Lewis Paul Bremer III on Washington DC NBC4 TV 09/11/01

Google removed this three times, and blocked it once

For reasons yet to be explained, Google has repeatedly removed this video from their server. In the first week that it was up, it had 1,474 views before it was removed. It caught fire recently and received about 5000 hits in a matter of a few days before it was taken down again. The evident pattern is that it is not removed as long as it is getting little attention.

This is a mind-boggling interview with Lewis Paul Bremer III (who ended up as the pro-council of Iraq.)

On 09/11/01 Bremer was the Chairman and CEO of Marsh Political Risk Practice which had offices in the WTC as did its parent company Marsh USA. They had a total of 1,700 employees assigned to the WTC. Bremer, himself, had an office in the South Tower. Nonetheless, this "counter-terrorism expert" makes no mention of any of this only three hours after the first plane flew directly into seven of the eight floors of WTC 1 occupied by Marsh USA. He is here on television prognosticating about who will turn out to be the culprits, with calm detachment. What is wrong with this picture?

The opinions of Emad Salem and Andreas Strassmeir would be of interest in this matter.

Full Transcript

Lewis Paul Bremer: Nat'l Commission on Terrorism

Gentzler: We want to turn now to a guest who is
joining us in the studio. It's Paul Bremer. I want to make sure
I'm getting your name right because I'm just meeting you. You're
a terrorism expert? Bremer: Counter-terrorism, I
hope. Gentzler:And can talk to us a little bit about
who could...I mean there are a limited number of groups who could
be responsible for something of this magnitude. Right?

Bremer: Yes, this is a very well planned, very well
coordinated attack, which suggests it's very well organized
centrally. And there are only three or four candidates in the
world really who could have conducted this attack.

Vance:Bin Laden comes to mind right away, Mr. Bremer.

Bremer: Indeed, he certainly does. Bin Laden was
involved in the first attack on the World Trade Center, which had
as its intentions doing exactly what happened here, which was to
collapse both towers. He certainly has to be a prime suspect.
But there are others in the Middle East. There are at least two
states, Iran and Iraq which should least remain on the list
of.

Gentzler:What kind of coordination? How could something
like this be put together.

Bremer:First of all, you've got to find some people
who are willing to die. And then, of course, they have to find
ways around what we thought was pretty good security at our
airports. We haven't had a hijacking in a long time. Let alone
four. So there had to be good coordination. There has to have
been coordination in the whole planning of the attack. The
people, if they were not Americans, they needed visas to get into
the United States. They needed false identities to by Airline
tickets. They needed cars to get to the Airport. There's a whole
lot of stuff that had to happen here.

Gentzler:With as many resources as our government, and
our allies' governments around the world devote to studying
terrorism, and knowing what's going on, and what they're planning,
you have to wonder how something of this magnitude, how this could
take place without any warning or any hint that it was coming.

Bremer:Well, first of all, the intelligence against
terrorists is the hardest intelligence to gather. Basically, you
have to have a spy in the terrorist group who's willing to talk to
you, for whatever reason. It's the hardest intelligence there is
to... The National Commission on Terrorism which I chaired last
year, made as our key recommendation much more effort to try to get
terrorist spies, informing on their colleagues to us.

Every time there is a major terrorist attack, it is
automatically, of course, an intelligence failure. That's by
definition. But I'm sympathetic to the problem about how you get
good intelligence on these people. It's not easy. There is an
intelligence failure here. There is a massive security failure,
where we have four airplanes being hijacked on the same morning.
Two from Dulles Airport it appears. So there's a lot of lessons
that have to be learned. First we have to find out who did
it.

Vance:Mr. Bremer, I want to speak to that for a second.
When the Oklahoma City incident occurred, the immediate response
from a lot of people was that it came from some Arab terrorist
group. Is there any reasons why we aught to be cautious about that
kind of an assumption on this particular incident, on these
incidents?

Bremer:Well, of course. What you have to work with at
this stage, since we don't have any hard intelligence, apparently,
we don't have any forensic evidence, is motivations and
capabilities. And so when I list four potential groups I'm working
mostly from motivations and proven capabilities in the past.
[That] doesn't mean you can exclude that some other group
could have come out of nowhere and done this. But, at least as a
working hypothesis in the first chaotic hours here after this
attack, you have to start somewhere. And you have to start with
what you know about the past and which groups have motives.

Vance:One of the things that the President said today
from Florida, early on, was that the United States will respond to
this, and he left it at that. Is it to be assumed that the first
thing we have to figure out is to identify precisely who it is
we're going to respond against?

Bremer:Of course. Basically we has sort of a four
stage operation. First we've got to hope and help we can save as
many people ... as possible. Stabilize the situation at the
Pentagon and in New York. Secondly we need to get to work in
trying to identify the perpetrators. And then, thirdly, we come to
the question about retaliation. And fourthly, which goes along,
all along, at the same time is what are the lessons we learned?
What did we learn about the intelligence failure? What did we
learn about the security failure? And who do we move forward in
the future on these areas.

Vance:I don't recall anything like this. Pearl Harbor
happened a month before I was born, and I hear my parents talk
about it all the time as a seminal event in their lives all the
time. I am not aware of anything like this in the United States
before. Americans are now, I think it's fair to say, really
scared. Should we be?

Gentzler:This is a day that will change our lives,
isn't it?

Bremer:It is a day that will change our lives. It's
a day that the war that the terrorists declared on the United
States, and after all they did declare a way on us, has been
brought home to the United States in a much more dramatic way than
we've seen before. So it will change our lives.

I do think it's important, and I'm sure the President and
his colleagues when they start talking about this, it's important
to hit some ballance. The American way of life is not threatened
by these people, unless we threaten it ourselves. If we start
throwing away the democratic freedoms and the civil liberties that
are at the heart of our society, that's what their after. And
that's what we can't allow to have happen. And we've got to go
about our business. People have got to move around.

I was diverted on a plane this morning. I was trying to get
to New York, and wound up in Baltimore. I in a way was sort of at
least relieved to see business as usual going on between people.
We have to go on with our lives. It's not to say we don't take it
seriously. We take it very seriously. But it's not something
where we can all jump in a foxhole somewhere and hope the world
doesn't come and bother us. We have to find a ballanced response.
One that makes it absolutely clear, as the President said this
morning, that we're not going to tolerate this act of war. This
will have consequences for the people who did it. Very, I hope
very severe consequences. The most sever military response we can
come up with. But we also have to remember that we've got a way
of life to protect, and that this is not an existential threat to
the United States.

Gentzler:Paul Bremer, thank you.

Vance: We appreciate it, Mr. Bremer, thank you very
much.

Gentzler:We should make it clear that there has been
no claim of responsibility ... Bremer:I
understand. Gentzler:...at this point to, uh, for
any of these incidents.

The 'Clean Break' Plan: A Conspiracy Of Theories

YouTube:"This video has been removed due to terms of use violation"

An audio recording of the presentation is available on the IRmep Audio page. The audio file is 08/29/06 - "The Clean Break Plan: A Conspiracy of Theories?" Grant Smith

Three Documents Defining Current Foreign Policy

PNAC's Rebuilding America's Defenses(PDF)

Strategy Forces and Resources for a New Century

This is the infamous document produced in 2000 by the Project for the New American Century Which gave us the term A new Pearl Harbor. It lays out a geopolitical strategy whereby the defense apparatus of the United States of America is to be commandeered for use in a campaign of global imperialism.

A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm

Here's a taste:

Following is a report prepared by The Institute for Advanced Strategic and Political Studies’ "Study Group on a New Israeli Strategy Toward 2000." The main substantive ideas in this paper emerge from a discussion in which prominent opinion makers, including Richard Perle, James Colbert, Charles Fairbanks, Jr., Douglas Feith, Robert Loewenberg, David Wurmser, and Meyrav Wurmser participated. The report, entitled "A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm," is the framework for a series of follow-up reports on strategy.

Benjamin Netanyahu’s government comes in with a new set of ideas. While there are those who will counsel continuity, Israel has the opportunity to make a clean break; it can forge a peace process and strategy based on an entirely new intellectual foundation, one that restores strategic initiative and provides the nation the room to engage every possible energy on rebuilding Zionism, the starting point of which must be economic reform. To secure the nation’s streets and borders in the immediate future, Israel can:

• 
  Work closely with Turkey and Jordan to contain, destabilize, and roll-back some of its most dangerous threats. This implies clean break from the slogan, "comprehensive peace" to a traditional concept of strategy based on balance of power.
  


• 
  Change the nature of its relations with the Palestinians, including upholding the right of hot pursuit for self defense into all Palestinian areas and nurturing alternatives to Arafat’s exclusive grip on Palestinian society.
  


• 
  Forge a new basis for relations with the United States—stressing self-reliance, maturity, strategic cooperation on areas of mutual concern, and furthering values inherent to the West. This can only be done if Israel takes serious steps to terminate aid, which prevents economic reform.
  


• 
  This report is written with key passages of a possible speech marked TEXT, that highlight the clean break which the new government has an opportunity to make. The body of the report is the commentary explaining the purpose and laying out the strategic context of the passages.
  

2002 United States National Security Policy(PDF)

This is the document which advocated a shift in US military philosophy from defensive military strategy to pre-emptive aggressive warfare.