What follows is as factual as we can make it. We regret to report certain associations between past and present practices of governance. If the shoe fits, we must wear it, at least for the time it will take to replace winner-take-all politics with statesmanship.
See also: Neocons; Letter to Bush.
Project for the New American Century, NAC
The Project for the New American Century is a non-profit educational organization dedicated to a few fundamental propositions: that American leadership is good both for America and for the world; that such leadership requires military strength, diplomatic energy and commitment to moral principle; and that too few political leaders today are making the case for global leadership.
The Project for the New American Century intends, through issue briefs, research papers, advocacy journalism, conferences, and seminars, to explain what American world leadership entails. It will also strive to rally support for a vigorous and principled policy of American international involvement and to stimulate useful public debate on foreign and defense policy and America's role in the world.
Statement of Principles (From NAC Website)
Our aim is to remind Americans of these lessons and to draw their consequences for today. Here are four consequences:
- we need to increase defense spending significantly if we are to carry out our global responsibilities today and modernize our armed forces for the future;
- we need to strengthen our ties to democratic allies and to challenge regimes hostile to our interests and values;
- we need to promote the cause of political and economic freedom abroad;
- we need to accept responsibility for America's unique role in preserving and extending an international order friendly to our security, our prosperity, and our principles.
Such a Reaganite policy of military strength and moral clarity may not be fashionable today. But it is necessary if the United States is to build on the successes of this past century and to ensure our security and our greatness in the next.
Signatories on the letter to Clinton suggesting the above as national policy follow.
Elliott Abrams - Assistant Secretary of State, Reagan. In 1991, Abrams was indicted by the Iran-Contra special prosecutor for giving false testimony before Congress in 1987 about his role in illicitly raising money for the Nicaraguan Contras. He pleaded guilty to two lesser offenses of withholding information to Congress in order to avoid a trial and a possible jail term. He was pardoned by President George H. W. Bush along with a number of other Iran-Contra defendants on Christmas night 1992.
Gary Bauer - "Gary Bauer campaigns as a hard-right moralist, and has credentials to back it up from his years working in Reagan's White House... Unfortunately for him, his record isn't quite as squeaky clean as his speeches."
William J. Bennett - Secretary of Education under Ronald Reagan and Director of National Drug Control Policy under George Herbert Walker Bush.
Jeb Bush - Governor of Florida, brother of President, son of a former President. Bush was elected as Florida's Republican Governor in November 1998 and was reelected November 2002 (term expires January 2007)
Dick Cheney - Neocon; Vice President. A member of the Council on Foreign Relations. Cheney was CEO of Halliburton Company, which greatly benefits from contracts with the U.S. Government, especially in the war with Iraq. Cheney has ties to the Carlyle Group, is a former Senior Fellow with the American Enterprise Institute, served on the Advisory Board of the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs (JINSA),
Eliot A. Cohen - Neocon; Cohen is a professor and director at the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS) at Johns Hopkins University. He is believed to be a member of the Council on Foreign Relations."
Midge Decter - Neocon; "Author of the soon-to-be-published book "Rumsfeld: A Personal Portrait." See also: Maureen Dowd: "There are many disturbing passages in this soon-to-be-published book. Ms. Decter is doyenne of the neocon movement, wife of the neocon patriarch Norman Podhoretz; mother of John Podhoretz, the neocon Iraqi war cheerleader and new ''West Wing'' adviser. After Reagan's victory, Decter and Rumsfeld co-chaired the international offshoot of the committee, called the Coalition for the Free World."
Paula Dobriansky - Neocon; Under Secretary of State for Global Affairs. Earlier appointments include Associate Director for Policy and Programs at the United States Information Agency (1990-1993), Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Human Rights and Humanitarian Affairs (1987-1990); Deputy Head of the U.S. Delegation to the 1990 Copenhagen Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe (CSCE); Advisor to the U.S. Delegation to the 1985 UN Decade for Women Conference in Nairobi, Kenya; and Director of European and Soviet Affairs at the National Security Council (1983-1984), the White House."
Steve Forbes - Son of wealthy publisher Malcolm Forbes. After graduating from Princeton in 1970, Steve Forbes joined the family business. Eventually, he become President and CEO of Forbes, Inc. and President and Editor-in-Chief of Forbes Magazine. Forbes entered the GOP presidential primaries, with his family fortune giving him instant political credibility. In 1996, he lost the nomination to Bob Dole and withdrew from the race in February 2000.
Aaron Friedberg - Professor, Princeton University since 1987, appointed professor of politics and international affairs in 1999. "In a typical evaluation of East Asia's strategic future the foreign-policy expert Aaron Friedberg states darkly in the journal International Security. In the long run, it is Asia [rather than Europe] that seems far more likely to be the cockpit of great power conflict. The half millennium during which Europe was the world's primary generator of war (as well as of wealth and knowledge) is coming to a close. But, for better and for worse, Europe's past could be Asia's future. [Ed: This disregards, or shows ignorance of, the Chinese society that has never been expansionist in the European sense. Rather than overrun Mongolia, China built the Great Wall.]
Francis Fukuyama - Francis Fukuyama is the Omer L. and Nancy Hirst Professor of Public Policy at the Institute of Public Policy at George Mason University and director of the Institute's International Transactions Program. He is also a consultant to the RAND Corporation in Washington, DC. Recently broke ranks with the Neocons.
Frank Gaffney - Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Policy and Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense under Reagan.
Fred C. Ikle - Undersecretary of Defense for Policy under Reagan. Director for the U.S. Arms Control and Disarmament Agency under Ford.
Donald Kagan - Hillhouse Professor of History and Classics at Yale.
Zalmay Khalilzad - National Security Council Director in charge of everything from the Persian Gulf States to Southwest Asia.
I. Lewis Libby - Assistant to the President and Chief of Staff to Vice President Dick Cheney.
Norman Podhoretz - A Neocon mentored by Irving Kristol. Spouse, Midge Decter. Editor of Commentary, the influential monthly publication of the "American Jewish Committee."
Dan Quayle - Vice President under Bush I.
Peter W. Rodman - Assistant Secretary for International Security Affairs in the Department of Defense
Stephen P. Rosen - Beton Michael Kaneb Professor of National Security and Military Affairs at Harvard University.
Henry S. Rowen - Senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and a "professor of public policy and management emeritus at the university's Graduate School of Business and a member Stanford University's Asia/Pacific Research Center ... Rowen is an expert on international security, economic development, Asian economics and politics, as well as U.S. institutions and economic performance.
Donald Rumsfeld - Neocon; Secretary of Defense. Held a variety of positions under Ford and Nixon. He served on a number of boards, including service as non-executive Chairman of Gilead Sciences, Inc. Previously, he served as Chairman and CEO of General Instrument Corporation from 1990 to 1993. From 1977 to 1985, he served as CEO, President and then Chairman of G.D. Searle & Co., a worldwide pharmaceutical company."
Vin Weber - Neocon. U.S. Representative from Minnesota (80-92)
George Weigel - Senior Fellow, John M. Olin Chair in Religion and American Democracy at the Ethics and Public Policy Center (EPPC). A "Roman Catholic theologian and one of Americas leading commentators on issues of religion and public life", Weigel is considered to be a conservative Roman Catholic social ethicist." His areas of expertise include Catholic social teaching, religion and democracy, and just-war tradition." Served as advisor for the U.S. Information Agency (USIA)
Paul Wolfowitz - Neocon; Undersecretary of Defense. He is the principal author of the "Wolfowitz doctrine", also known as the Bush doctrine, veteran of both the Ronald Reagan and George Herbert Walker Bush Administrations. At the beginning of the Reagan Administration, he served as Director of Policy Planning for the Department of State and then as Assistant Secretary of State for East Asian and Pacific Affairs. In 1986, he was appointed U.S. Ambassador to the Republic of Indonesia. He was "Reagan's Man in Indonesia." Under President George Herbert Walker Bush, Wolfowitz served as Undersecretary of Defense for Policy. Is Dean and Professor of International Relations at The Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies in Washington. Wolfowitz has ties to Northrop Grumman.
The above is heady stuff and not to be taken lightly. The foregoing summarizes much of what scares our European friends and allies. The following statement can be variously interpreted:
"We need to accept responsibility for America's unique role in preserving and extending an international order friendly to our security, our prosperity, and our principles."
But if an American economic empire, tailored for American Plutocracy, is not a direct result, then we do not know how to read or think. It is right out of the Neocon playbook. This statement is consistent with Paul O'Neill's firsthand observation that Bush operates a propaganda machine. Shades of Hitler! See Mein Kampf, vol. 1 ch 6 and vol. 2 ch 11.
O'Neill's view is that of an insider, from an American citizen, a participant in history. The rest of the world sees the same things and when they put themselves into the picture, what comes out is EMPIRE pure and simple.
Arundhati Roy employs a rather different term than Plutocracy. He prefers the term New Imperialism for it is more global and not limited to the Neocons for support or inspiration, even though they are its shepherd just now and it fits their manifesto to a "Tee." Roy's term seems more appropriate, for more than the American electorate is involved--of course.
In fact, many, including editors at The Nation, accept the fact that America is now an empire. It dominates the world both militarily and economically. Substantial excerpts from the 9 Feb. 2004 Article by Arundhati Roy in The Nation follow:
"...The new missionaries want order at the cost of justice. Discipline at the cost of integrity. And ascendancy at any price. Occasionally some of us are invited to "debate" the issue on "neutral" platforms provided by the corporate media. Debating imperialism is a bit like debating the pros and cons of rape. What can we say? That we really miss it?"
"In any case, New Imperialism is already upon us. It's a remodeled, streamlined version of what we once knew. For the first time in history, a single empire with an arsenal of weapons that could obliterate the world in an afternoon has complete, unipolar, economic and military hegemony. It uses different weapons to break open our markets. There isn't a country on God's earth that is not caught in the cross-hairs of the American cruise missile and the IMF checkbook.... Poor countries that are geopolitically of strategic values to Empire, or have a "market" of any size, or infrastructure that can be privatized, or, God forbid, natural resources of value--oil, gold, diamonds, cobalt, coal--must do as they are told or become military targets. Those with the greatest reserves of natural wealth are the most at risk. Unless they surrender their resources willingly to the corporate machine, civil unrest will be fomented or war will be waged."
"In this new age of empire, when nothing is as it appears to be, executives of concerned companies are allowed to influence foreign policy decisions. The Center for Public Integrity in Washington found that at least nine of thirty members of the Bush Administration's Defense Policy Board were connected to companies that were awarded military contracts for $76 billion between 2001 and 2002."
"George Schultz former Secretary of State,... is also on the board of directors of the Bechtel Group. ...In April 2003, Bechtel signed a $680 million contract for reconstruction [of Iraq]."
"...as long as our "markets" are open, as long as corporations like Enron, Bechtel, Halliburton, and Arthur Anderson are given a free hand to take over our infrastructure and take away our jobs, our "democratically elected" leaders can fearlessly blur the lines between democracy, majoritarianism and fascism."
"A government's victims are not only those it kills and imprisons. Those who are displaced and dispossessed and sentenced to a lifetime of starvation and deprivation must count among them." [America supports a Middle Eastern country with this kind of blood on its hands. But this link is really about the New Empire and about India getting in line to dance the American tune.] Millions of people [in India] have been displaced by development projects. In the past 55 years, big dams alone have displaced between 33 million and 55 million in India. They have no recourse to justice. In the past two years there have been a series of incidents in which police have opened fire on peaceful protesters, most of them Adivasi and Dalit.,,,Those who have been fired upon are immediately called militants."
"We all know the sordid story of Enron in India. ...The government signed a power purchase agreement that gave Enron profits that amounted to 60 percent of India's entire rural development budget. A single American company was guaranteed a profit equivalent to funds for infrastructural development for about 500 million people!"
"Unlike the old days, ...[the] new imperialism can be conducted by email. The vulgar, hands-on racism of Old Imperialism is outdated. The cornerstone of New Imperialism is New Racism."
"As part of the project of New Racism we also have New Genocide. ...facilitated by economic sanctions. New Genocide means creating conditions that lead to mass death without actually going out and killing people. Denis Halliday, who was UN humanitarian coordinator in Iraq between 1997 and 1998 [Clinton's watch], ... used the term genocide to describe the sanctions in Iraq. In Iraq, the sanctions outdid Saddam Hussein's best efforts by claiming more than a half million children's lives." [Just think about this for a minute; there must be a better way; in this case, closer monitoring by UN could have prevented most of this tragedy. Ed.]
In the new era, apartheid as formal policy is antiquated and unnecessary. International instruments of trade and finance oversee a complex system of multilateral trade laws and financial agreements that keep the poor in their bantustans anyway. Its whole purpose is to institutionalize inequity.
For all these reasons, the derailing of trade agreements at Cancn was crucial for us. Though our governments try to take the credit, we know that it was the result of years of struggle by many millions of people in many, many countries. What Cancn taught us is that in order to inflict real damage and force radical change, it is vital for local resistance movements to make international alliances. From Cancn we learned the importance of globalizing resistance.
No individual nation can stand up to the project of corporate globalization on its own. Time and again we have seen that when it comes to the neoliberal project, the heroes of our times are suddenly diminished. Extraordinary, charismatic men, giants in the opposition, when they seize power and become heads of state, are rendered powerless on the global stage. I'm thinking here of President Lula of Brazil. Lula was the hero of the World Social Forum last year. This year he's busy implementing IMF guidelines, reducing pension benefits and purging radicals from the Workers' Party. I'm thinking also of the former president of South Africa, Nelson Mandela. Within two years of taking office in 1994, his government genuflected with hardly a caveat to the Market God. It instituted a massive program of privatization and structural adjustment that has left millions of people homeless, jobless and without water and electricity.
It was wonderful that on February 15 last year, in a spectacular display of public morality, 10 million people on five continents marched against the war on Iraq. It was wonderful, but it was not enough. February 15 was a weekend. Nobody had to so much as miss a day of work. Holiday protests don't stop wars. George Bush knows that. The confidence with which he disregarded overwhelming public opinion should be a lesson to us all. Bush believes that Iraq can be occupied and colonized as Afghanistan has been, as Tibet has been, as Chechnya is being, as East Timor once was and Palestine still is. He thinks that all he has to do is hunker down and wait until a crisis-driven media, having picked this crisis to the bone, drops it and moves on. Soon the carcass will slip off the bestseller charts, and all of us outraged folks will lose interest. Or so he hopes.
This movement of ours needs a major, global victory. It's not good enough to be right. Sometimes, if only in order to test our resolve, it's important to win something. In order to win something, we need to agree on something. That something does not need to be an overarching preordained ideology into which we force-fit our delightfully factious, argumentative selves. It does not need to be an unquestioning allegiance to one or another form of resistance to the exclusion of everything else. It could be a minimum agenda.
If all of us are indeed against imperialism and against the project of neoliberalism, then let's turn our gaze on Iraq. Iraq is the inevitable culmination of both. Plenty of antiwar activists have retreated in confusion since the capture of Saddam Hussein. "Isn't the world better off without Saddam Hussein?" they ask timidly.
Let's look this thing in the eye once and for all. To applaud the US Army's capture of Saddam Hussein, and therefore in retrospect justify its invasion and occupation of Iraq, is like deifying Jack the Ripper for disemboweling the Boston Strangler. And that after a quarter-century partnership in which the Ripping and Strangling was a joint enterprise. It's an in-house quarrel. They're business partners who fell out over a dirty deal. Jack's the CEO.
So if we are against imperialism, shall we agree that we are against the US occupation and that we believe the United States must withdraw from Iraq and pay reparations to the Iraqi people for the damage that the war has inflicted?
How do we begin to mount our resistance? Let's start with something really small. The issue is not about supporting the resistance in Iraq against the occupation or discussing who exactly constitutes the resistance. (Are they old killer Baathists, are they Islamic fundamentalists?)
We have to become the global resistance to the occupation.
Our resistance has to begin with a refusal to accept the legitimacy of the US occupation of Iraq. It means acting to make it materially impossible for Empire to achieve its aims. It means soldiers should refuse to fight, reservists should refuse to serve, workers should refuse to load ships and aircraft with weapons. It certainly means that in countries like India and Pakistan we must block the US government's plans to have Indian and Pakistani soldiers sent to Iraq to clean up after them.
I suggest we choose by some means two of the major corporations that are profiting from the destruction of Iraq. We could then list every project they are involved in. We could locate their offices in every city and every country across the world. We could go after them. We could shut them down. It's a question of bringing our collective wisdom and experience of past struggles to bear on a single target. It's a question of the desire to win.
The Project for the New American Century seeks to perpetuate inequity and establish American hegemony at any price, even if it's apocalyptic. The World Social Forum demands justice and survival.
For these reasons, we must consider ourselves at war.
"In any case, New Imperialism is already upon us. It's a remodeled, streamlined version of what we once knew. For the first time in history, a single empire with an arsenal of weapons that could obliterate the world in an afternoon has complete, unipolar, economic and military hegemony. It uses different weapons to break open our markets. There isn't a country on God's earth that is not caught in the cross-hairs of the American cruise missile and the IMF checkbook.... Poor countries that are geopolitically of strategic values to Empire, or have a "market" of any size, or infrastructure that can be privatized, or, God forbid, natural resources of value--oil, gold, diamonds, cobalt, coal--must do as they are told or become military targets. Those with the greatest reserves of natural wealth are the most at risk. Unless they surrender their resources willingly to the corporate machine, civil unrest will be fomented or war will be waged."
"In this new age of empire, when nothing is as it appears to be, executives of concerned companies are allowed to influence foreign policy decisions. The Center for Public Integrity in Washington found that at least nine of thirty members of the Bush Administration's Defense Policy Board were connected to companies that were awarded military contracts for $76 billion between 2001 and 2002."
"George Schultz former Secretary of State,... is also on the board of directors of the Bechtel Group. ...In April 2003, Bechtel signed a $680 million contract for reconstruction [of Iraq]."
"...as long as our "markets" are open, as long as corporations like Enron, Bechtel, Halliburton, and Arthur Anderson are given a free hand to take over our infrastructure and take away our jobs, our "democratically elected" leaders can fearlessly blur the lines between democracy, majoritarianism and fascism."
"A government's victims are not only those it kills and imprisons. Those who are displaced and dispossessed and sentenced to a lifetime of starvation and deprivation must count among them." [America supports a Middle Eastern country with this kind of blood on its hands. But this link is really about the New Empire and about India getting in line to dance the American tune.] Millions of people [in India] have been displaced by development projects. In the past 55 years, big dams alone have displaced between 33 million and 55 million in India. They have no recourse to justice. In the past two years there have been a series of incidents in which police have opened fire on peaceful protesters, most of them Adivasi and Dalit.,,,Those who have been fired upon are immediately called militants."
"We all know the sordid story of Enron in India. ...The government signed a power purchase agreement that gave Enron profits that amounted to 60 percent of India's entire rural development budget. A single American company was guaranteed a profit equivalent to funds for infrastructural development for about 500 million people!"
"Unlike the old days, ...[the] new imperialism can be conducted by email. The vulgar, hands-on racism of Old Imperialism is outdated. The cornerstone of New Imperialism is New Racism."
"As part of the project of New Racism we also have New Genocide. ...facilitated by economic sanctions. New Genocide means creating conditions that lead to mass death without actually going out and killing people. Denis Halliday, who was UN humanitarian coordinator in Iraq between 1997 and 1998 [Clinton's watch], ... used the term genocide to describe the sanctions in Iraq. In Iraq, the sanctions outdid Saddam Hussein's best efforts by claiming more than a half million children's lives." [Just think about this for a minute; there must be a better way; in this case, closer monitoring by UN could have prevented most of this tragedy. Ed.]
In the new era, apartheid as formal policy is antiquated and unnecessary. International instruments of trade and finance oversee a complex system of multilateral trade laws and financial agreements that keep the poor in their bantustans anyway. Its whole purpose is to institutionalize inequity.
- Why else would it be that the US taxes a garment made by a Bangladeshi manufacturer twenty times more than a garment made in Britain?
- Why else would it be that countries that grow cocoa beans, like the Ivory Coast and Ghana, are taxed out of the market if they try to turn it into chocolate?
- Why else would it be that countries that grow 90 percent of the world's cocoa beans produce only 5 percent of the world's chocolate?
- Why else would it be that rich countries that spend over a billion dollars a day on subsidies to farmers demand that poor countries like India withdraw all agricultural subsidies, including subsidized electricity?
- Why else would it be that after having been plundered by colonizing regimes for more than half a century, former colonies are steeped in debt to those same regimes and repay them some $382 billion a year?
For all these reasons, the derailing of trade agreements at Cancn was crucial for us. Though our governments try to take the credit, we know that it was the result of years of struggle by many millions of people in many, many countries. What Cancn taught us is that in order to inflict real damage and force radical change, it is vital for local resistance movements to make international alliances. From Cancn we learned the importance of globalizing resistance.
No individual nation can stand up to the project of corporate globalization on its own. Time and again we have seen that when it comes to the neoliberal project, the heroes of our times are suddenly diminished. Extraordinary, charismatic men, giants in the opposition, when they seize power and become heads of state, are rendered powerless on the global stage. I'm thinking here of President Lula of Brazil. Lula was the hero of the World Social Forum last year. This year he's busy implementing IMF guidelines, reducing pension benefits and purging radicals from the Workers' Party. I'm thinking also of the former president of South Africa, Nelson Mandela. Within two years of taking office in 1994, his government genuflected with hardly a caveat to the Market God. It instituted a massive program of privatization and structural adjustment that has left millions of people homeless, jobless and without water and electricity.
It was wonderful that on February 15 last year, in a spectacular display of public morality, 10 million people on five continents marched against the war on Iraq. It was wonderful, but it was not enough. February 15 was a weekend. Nobody had to so much as miss a day of work. Holiday protests don't stop wars. George Bush knows that. The confidence with which he disregarded overwhelming public opinion should be a lesson to us all. Bush believes that Iraq can be occupied and colonized as Afghanistan has been, as Tibet has been, as Chechnya is being, as East Timor once was and Palestine still is. He thinks that all he has to do is hunker down and wait until a crisis-driven media, having picked this crisis to the bone, drops it and moves on. Soon the carcass will slip off the bestseller charts, and all of us outraged folks will lose interest. Or so he hopes.
This movement of ours needs a major, global victory. It's not good enough to be right. Sometimes, if only in order to test our resolve, it's important to win something. In order to win something, we need to agree on something. That something does not need to be an overarching preordained ideology into which we force-fit our delightfully factious, argumentative selves. It does not need to be an unquestioning allegiance to one or another form of resistance to the exclusion of everything else. It could be a minimum agenda.
If all of us are indeed against imperialism and against the project of neoliberalism, then let's turn our gaze on Iraq. Iraq is the inevitable culmination of both. Plenty of antiwar activists have retreated in confusion since the capture of Saddam Hussein. "Isn't the world better off without Saddam Hussein?" they ask timidly.
Let's look this thing in the eye once and for all. To applaud the US Army's capture of Saddam Hussein, and therefore in retrospect justify its invasion and occupation of Iraq, is like deifying Jack the Ripper for disemboweling the Boston Strangler. And that after a quarter-century partnership in which the Ripping and Strangling was a joint enterprise. It's an in-house quarrel. They're business partners who fell out over a dirty deal. Jack's the CEO.
So if we are against imperialism, shall we agree that we are against the US occupation and that we believe the United States must withdraw from Iraq and pay reparations to the Iraqi people for the damage that the war has inflicted?
How do we begin to mount our resistance? Let's start with something really small. The issue is not about supporting the resistance in Iraq against the occupation or discussing who exactly constitutes the resistance. (Are they old killer Baathists, are they Islamic fundamentalists?)
We have to become the global resistance to the occupation.
Our resistance has to begin with a refusal to accept the legitimacy of the US occupation of Iraq. It means acting to make it materially impossible for Empire to achieve its aims. It means soldiers should refuse to fight, reservists should refuse to serve, workers should refuse to load ships and aircraft with weapons. It certainly means that in countries like India and Pakistan we must block the US government's plans to have Indian and Pakistani soldiers sent to Iraq to clean up after them.
I suggest we choose by some means two of the major corporations that are profiting from the destruction of Iraq. We could then list every project they are involved in. We could locate their offices in every city and every country across the world. We could go after them. We could shut them down. It's a question of bringing our collective wisdom and experience of past struggles to bear on a single target. It's a question of the desire to win.
The Project for the New American Century seeks to perpetuate inequity and establish American hegemony at any price, even if it's apocalyptic. The World Social Forum demands justice and survival.
For these reasons, we must consider ourselves at war.
This is not an Islamic mullah spouting off. Roy is a thoughtful and insightful journalist. He represents the developing world and the poor people in it. The world needs more like him.
We have identified monotheism as one feature in the equations of terror. The evidence related here strongly suggests that the New Imperialism is equally important in a different way, economics instead of religion. Both provide motivation to the terrorist whether from the ramparts of from within. Authoritarianism underlies both.
Imperial America may have just happened, but we think not. The Neocons bear substantial responsibility. No one reading this record could doubt its basic reality. The Neocon's rise in influence can be traced back to the period after WWII, to Strauss who provided the philosophical foundations for the movement. It has been gathering steam ever since. Many Neocons take that as meaning they are inevitable. That is not true, since now that they have been unmasked to a degree, voters can see for themselves that the Neocons do not speak for them. Why did it take so long for the unmasking to take place? The answer to that lies in a the new policy of politics Roy alluded to when he said: "...when nothing is as it appears to be...." Of course Roy was speaking of the propaganda smoke screens that are now ever so much more sophisticated, widely played, and dangerous than was Hitler's. Of course the Neocons will protest this. Bush makes it self-evident with his empty promises, not to mention his distortions of the WMD issue to further his plutocratic dreams of world dominance.
That is the secular side. But the Bush team has a strong religious flavor as well. We quote from Warrior's World:
"Many Fundamentalist Evangelicals believe there will be catastrophic events on earth, some occurring already, including the turmoil in the Middle East, culminating in the Battle of Armageddon in which Christ will triumph and begin ruling the earth. At this point, they believe, nonbelievers will be destroyed, good Christians saved and any remaining Jews converted to Christianity."
"Says Ed McAteer, a founder of the Moral Majority and known as the godfather of the Christian Right, 'I believe that we are seeing prophecy unfold so rapidly and dramatically and wonderfully, and, without exaggeration, [it] makes me breathless.'"
"Says Ed McAteer, a founder of the Moral Majority and known as the godfather of the Christian Right, 'I believe that we are seeing prophecy unfold so rapidly and dramatically and wonderfully, and, without exaggeration, [it] makes me breathless.'"
Reality is often hard to come by. Starting from scratch on 12 Sept 2001, we have been pursuing many avenues towards clarifying terrorism, for with understanding comes control.
On this website at least, we have come full circle. We look at the Middle East, then in a mirror and see much the same landscape of human avarice, conceit and frailty that we do on the "other side."
Still, the two sides are different, dramatically so. One singular difference lies in their ethical systems. Thanks to the Reformation, Judeo-Christian secular governance became the byword, while Islam has yet to experience even a semblance of a reformation.
Secular governance, as faulty as it may be, nevertheless discovers ways to improve the human condition that eventually translates into life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness for all citizens--modernization in other words. Modernization puts humankind in control of nature, not just the other animal species. Modernization is limited only by the physical laws of this universe, and these are still being defined and utilized.
Humankind is not yet ready for peace; it still has vulnerabilities born of evolution in the jungle; humanity seems unable, generally, to see beneath its own outer skin for the fundamental causes of conflict. Are the genes that led to our speciation and survival now clashing with the very concept of civilization? The answer is yes, of course. Those genes surely came into functional being long before Homo sapiens did. They are also not compatible naturally with our thinking, logical selves. Emotions and better-judgment are ever at odds in modern societies.
But nature is not all. Nurture [read that social and physical environment] is equally important. If nature were everything, Honolulu would be as violent as Washington DC while Norway and Sweden would be in perpetual war. Since these (and many other examples) are not the case, we find hope that peace is possible without changing our genetic makeup, which humankind now has the power to do.
Peace can come to societies that want it and work for it. It is all a matter of priority.
The Neocons are opting for riches and dominance via a new Empire America. This policy only leads to continued Alienation and Humiliation that fuel terrorism.
Instead, we must remove the basic inequities that only serve to motivate terrorism.
So we read again from the NAC play book.
The Project for the New American Century is a conservative non-profit educational organization dedicated to a few fundamental propositions: that American leadership is good both for America and for the world; that such leadership requires military strength, diplomatic energy and commitment to moral principle; and that too few political leaders today are making the case for global leadership. See Wikipedia for more.
- There may be some case for global leadership, but unless it specifically addresses the fundamental inequities that serve to motivate and stimulate terror through the Authoritarian Personality, there will be no abatement in the violence.
Further, "a few fundamental propositions" need more than mere statement; they need proof of efficacy. So far, Afghanistan and Iraq, look more like anti-proof.
Finally, if what "is good for America is good for the world," then should we not share and share alike, with all nations of the world? There is a built-in contradiction between words and actions here.
Posted by RoadToPeace on Monday, August 08, 2005.
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