Part Three
excerpted from the book
Full Spectrum Dominance
Totalitarian Democracy in the
New World Order
by F. William Engdahl
Third Millennium Press, 2009,
paperback
p155
For the Pentagon and the US policy establishment, regardless of
political party, the Cold War with Russia had never really ended.
It merely continued in disguised form. This had been the case
with Presidents G.H.W. Bush, William Clinton, and George W. Bush.
Pentagon strategists had no fear of a nuclear strike on the territory
of the United States from Iran. The US Navy and Air Force bomber
fleet stood in full preparation to bomb Iran, even with nuclear
weapons, 'back to the stone age' over mere suspicions that Iran
was trying to develop independent nuclear weapon technology. States
like Iran had no capability to attack America - much less render
it defenseless - without risking its own nuclear annihilation
many times over. Iran was well aware of this, one could be sure.
'Missile defense' projects emerged in
the 1980's when Ronald Reagan proposed developing systems of satellites
in space, as well as radar bases listening stations, and interceptor
missiles around the globe, all designed to monitor and shoot down
nuclear missiles before they hit their intended targets.
It was dubbed 'Star Wars' by its critics.
... The Star Wars target of the Pentagon
was not Iran or even North Korea. It was the only other nuclear
power on the face of the earth standing the way of total US military
domination of the planet - Russia.
p160
New York Times - in an article about space weapons - post-September
11, 2001
War planners have conceived scores of
new and exciting weapons.
p165
Rebuilding America's Defenses, the September 2000 report of the
Project for the New American Century {PNAC), the strategic blueprint
for defense and foreign policy after George W. Bush entered the
White House in January 2001. The PNAC strategy paper declared:
The United States must develop and deploy
global missile defenses to defend the American homeland and American
allies, and to provide a secure basis for US power projection
around the world.
p166
The US rush to deploy a missile defense shield was clearly not
aimed at North Korea or Middle East terror attacks. It was aimed
at Russia. It was aimed also at the far smaller nuclear capacities
of China.
p166
Keir Lieber and Daryl Press 'The Use of Nuclear Primacy' Foreign
Affairs magazine, March/April 2006
The current and future US nuclear force
... seems designed to carry out a pre-emptive disarming strike
against Russia or China.
... Today, for the first time in almost
50 years, the United States stands on the verge of attaining nuclear
primacy. It will probably soon be possible for the United States
to destroy the long-range nuclear arsenals of Russia or China
with a first strike. This dramatic shift in the nuclear balance
of power stems from a series of improvements in the United States'
nuclear systems, the precipitous decline of Russia's arsenal,
and the glacial pace of modernization of China's nuclear forces.
Unless Washington's policies change or Moscow and Beijing take
steps to increase the size and readiness of their forces, Russia
and China - and the rest of the world will live in the shadow
of US nuclear primacy for many years to come.
... [T]he sort of missile defenses that
the United States might plausibly deploy would be valuable primarily
in an offensive context, not a defensive one-as an adjunct to
a US First Strike capability, not as a stand-alone shield. If
the United States launched a nuclear attack against Russia (or
China), the targeted country would be left with only a tiny surviving
arsenal-if any at all. At that point, even a relatively modest
or inefficient missile defense system might well be enough to
protect against any retaliatory strikes...
p184
Foreign Policy in Focus, 1999
As a result of a rash of military-industry
mergers encouraged and subsidized by the Clinton Administration,
the Big Three weapons makers - Lockheed Martin Corporation, Boeing
Corporation, and Raytheon Corporation - now receive among themselves
over $30 billion per year in Pentagon contracts. This represents
more than one out of every four dollars that the Defense Department
doles out for everything from rifles to rockets.
p185
Ian Mount, David H. Freedman, and Matthew Maier in Business 2.0
magazine, March 2003 about the 'New Military-Industrial Complex'
When it comes to military spending, the
tradition of the iron triangle - Congress, the Pentagon, and defense
industries - joining to push costly weaponry is nothing new.
p199
Washington Post, March 1992, reporting on a leaked document titled
''Defense Planning Guidance (DPG)'
In a classified blueprint intended to
help 'set the nation's direction for the next century,' the Defense
Department calls for concerted efforts to preserve American global
military supremacy and to thwart the emergence of a rival superpower
in Europe, Asia or the former Soviet Union... [T]he document argues
not only for preserving but expanding the most demanding American
commitments and for resisting efforts by key allies to provide
their own security.
In particular, the document raises the
prospects of 'a unilateral US defense guarantee' to Eastern Europe,
'preferably in cooperation with other NATO states,' and contemplates
use of American military power to pre-empt or punish use of nuclear,
biological or chemical weapons, 'even in conflicts that otherwise
do not directly engage US interests'
The memo was drafted under supervision
of Paul Wolfowitz, Undersecretary for Policy. The central strategy
of the Pentagon framework is to 'establish and protect a new order'
that accounts 'sufficiently for the interests of the advanced
industrial nations to discourage them from challenging our leadership,'
while at the same time maintaining a military dominance capable
of 'deterring potential competitors from even aspiring to a larger
regional or global role.
p202
George W. Bush's 'National Security Strategy' document, September
2002
While the United States will constantly
strive to enlist the support of the international community, we
will not hesitate to act alone, if necessary, to exercise our
right of self-defense by acting pre-emptively against such terrorists,
to prevent them from doing harm against our people and our country.
p203
'The Military-Industrial Think Tank Complex', William Hartung
and Michelle Ciarrocca, Multinational Monitor, Jan-Feb 2003
The pre-emption doctrine is actually
misnamed. Pre-emption suggests striking first against a nation
that is poised to attack. The Bush doctrine is much more open-ended,
implying that a U.S. attack is justified if a nation or organization
might pose a threat at some unknown future date.
p204
'Rebuilding America's Defenses, Project for A New American Century
(PNAC)
The United States cannot simply declare
a 'strategic pause' while experimenting with new technologies
and operational concepts. Nor can it choose to pursue a transformation
strategy that would decouple American and allied interests. A
transformation strategy that solely pursued capabilities for projecting
force from the United States, for example, and sacrificed forward
basing and presence, would be at odds with larger American policy
goals and would trouble American allies. 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.
p205
[The hijacking of the Italian cruise ship 'Achille Lauro' in 1985]
was ordered by Mossad, the Israeli secret services and carried
by their agents inside Palestinian organizations. The details
of the preparations were related by an insider of the Israeli
secret services, An Ben-Menashe, former special intelligence advisor
to Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir, in his book, "Profits
of War." According to Ben-Menashe, the attack on the Achille
Lauro was "an Israeli 'black' propaganda operation to show
what a deadly, cut-throat bunch the Palestinians were.""
He said Mossad paid millions of dollars, via agents posing as
"Sicilian dons," to a man named Abu'l Abbas to follow
orders "to make an attack and do something cruel.
[Ari Ben-Manashe, 'Profits of War: Inside
the Secret U.S.-Israeli Arms Network', 1992]
[Abu'l] Abbas then gathered a team to
attack the cruise ship. The team was told to make it bad, to show
the world what lay in store for other unsuspecting citizens if
Palestinian demands were not met. The group picked on an elderly
American Jewish man, Leon Klinghoffer, in a wheelchair, killed
him, and threw his body overboard. They made their point. But
for Israel it was the best kind of anti-Palestinian propaganda.
p205
A growing number of critical citizens [after 9-11] began to question
the accusations against an elusive Osama bin Laden as mastermind
of 19 Arabic-speaking terrorists. The idea that they could commandeer,
with only primitive boxcutters, four sophisticated Boeing commercial
jets and redirect three of them, successfully, as apparently poorly-trained
amateur pilots in air maneuvers which seasoned pilots claimed
were near impossible, was creating growing disbelief among ordinary
Americans in the official US Government version of the events.
What became clearer in the months after
9-11 was that the attack was clearly used immediately by the Bush
Administration, at the very least, as the pretext to launch a
war on Islam under the name of a 'War on Terror,' the 'Clash of
Civilizations,' which Harvard Professor Samuel Huntington outlined
in the early 1990's.
Many senior international intelligence
experts began to put forward the possibility that the attacks
of September 11, 2001 had been a "False Flag" operation.
Eckehardt Werthebach, former president
of Germany's domestic intelligence service, BundesVerfassungsschutz,
told the press just after 9/11 that, "the deathly precision
and the magnitude of planning behind the attacks would have needed
years of planning."
Such a sophisticated operation, Werthebach
said, would require the "fixed frame" of a state intelligence
organization, something not found in a "loose group"
of terrorists like the one allegedly led by Mohammed Atta while
he studied in Hamburg.
Many people would have been involved in
the planning of such an operation and Werthebach pointed to the
absence of leaks as further indication that the attacks were "state
organized actions."
Andreas von Billow served on a German
Parliamentary Commission which oversaw the three branches of the
German secret service while a member of the Bundestag or German
parliament from 1969 to 1994. Von Bülow told American Free
Press he believed that the Israeli intelligence service, Mossad,
and the CIA were behind the 9/11 terror attacks. '
He believed the planners used corrupt
"guns for hire" such as Abu Nidal, the Palestinian terrorist
who von Bülow called "an instrument of Mossad,"
high-ranking Stasi (former East German secret service) operatives,
or Libyan agents who organize terror attacks using dedicated people,
for example Palestinian and Arab "freedom fighters."
Both Werthebach and von Billow said the
lack of an open and official investigation, like Congressional
hearings, into the events of September 11 was incomprehensible.
p208
Horst Ehmke was German Minister of Justice under Prime Minister
Willy Brandt in the 1970s - about 9-11
Terrorists could not have carried out
such an with four hijacked planes without the support of a secret
service.
p208
General Leonid Ivashov, one of the most senior of Russian military
figures, in a speech delivered in an international conference
in Brussels in early 2006
If we analyze what happened on September
11, 2001, in the United States, we can arrive at the following
conclusions: 1. The organizers of those attacks were the political
and business circles interested in destabilizing the world order
and who had the means necessary to finance the operation.
... Unlike traditional wars, whose conception
is determined by generals and politicians, the oligarchs and politicians
submitted to the former were the ones who did it this time.
... Only secret services and their current
chiefs - or those retired but still having influence inside the
state organizations - have the ability to plan, organize and conduct
an operation of such magnitude.
... Osama bin Laden and "Al Qaeda"
cannot be the organizers nor the performers of the September 11
attacks. They do not have the necessary organization, resources
or leaders. Thus, a team of professionals had to be created and
the Arab kamikazes are just extras to mask the operation.
The September 11 operation modified the
course of events in the world in the direction chosen by transnational
mafias and international oligarchs; that is, those who hope to
control the planet's natural resources, the world information
network and the financial flows. This operation also favored the
US economic and political elite that also seeks world dominance.
p210
Stanley Hilton a Washington attorney, the former Chief of Staff
of Senator Bob Dole, represented
families of victims of September 11. In a September 10, 2004 radio
interview on the Alex Jones Radio Show,
[W]e are suing Bush, Condoleezza Rice,
Cheney, Rumsfeld, (FBI chief) Mueller for complicity in personally
not only allowing 9/11 to happen, but in ordering it... this is
now without any doubt a government operation and that it amounts
to the biggest act of treason and mass murder in American history.
p210
The Bush Administration vehemently refused to name a truly independent
commission of inquiry into 9/11 and had allowed most of the vital
evidence, including ? especially the steel pillars of the World
Trade Center towers, to be immediately shipped overseas for scrap.
p211
Whoever ultimately was responsible for the September 11, 2001
attacks, the undeniable result was a military hysteria and defense
mobilization not seen in the United States since the Pearl Harbor
attack in December 1941 that brought the United States into World
War II against Germany, Japan and Italy.
p211
The bombing attack by Japan at Pearl Harbor, as 1946 classified
US Congressional Hearings established, was known well in advance
by President Roosevelt and a handful of top US military officials,
days before the US fleet was bombed. It could have been avoided,
and thousands of American lives saved. Roosevelt cold-bloodedly
decided to "let it happen" to bring the United States
into a war that he and his top planners had calculated they would
win.
p212
As early as November 26 [1941], two weeks before the attack, Roosevelt
had been urgently and personally alerted to an imminent attack
on Pearl Harbor by British Prime Minister Winston Churchill. Roosevelt
responded by stripping the fleet at Pearl Harbor of air defenses,
to insure Japanese success. Churchill's November 26 message to
Roosevelt was the only document in their correspondence which
has to this day never been made public on grounds of "national
security."
The devastating attack on Pearl Harbor
gave Roosevelt the cause to wage the war he so urgently sought.
It was a war to create a new American Empire.
p217
Zbigniew Brzezinski
Potentially the most dangerous scenario
would be a grand coalition of China, Russia and perhaps Iran,
an 'anti-hegemonic' coalition united not by ideology but by complementary
grievances... Averting this contingency... will require a display
of US geostrategic skill on the western, eastern and southern
perimeters of Eurasia simultaneously.
p218
When the combined military budgets of the United States and all
its NATO allies as well as key Pacific allies Japan, South Korea
and Australia were totaled, the US-dominated alliance spent annually
$1.1 trillion on their combined militaries, representing 72 percent
of the world's total military spending.
p225
President George W. Bush signed the Order creating AFRICOM, the
new US military command dedicated to Africa,
... The African Continent contains what
most geologists believe to be the planet's most abundant mineral
riches. With China, Russia, India and other potential US 'rivals'
beginning to develop ties to various African nations and their
raw materials, the Washington response was clear-military.
The Democratic Republic of Congo had been
renamed from the Republic of Zaire in 1997 when the forces of
Laurent Désiré Kabila (father of President Joseph
Kabila) had brought Mobutu's thirty two year reign-of-terror to
an end. Locals continued to call the country Congo-Kinshasa.
The Kivu region of the Congo was the geological
repository of some of the world's greatest strategic minerals.
The eastern border straddling Rwanda and Uganda runs on the eastern
edge of the Great African Rift Valley, believed by geologists
to be one of the richest repositories of minerals on the face
of the earth. The Great Rift was the largest rupture on the earth's
land surface, extending more than 4,000 miles from Lebanon to
the Mozambique Channel in the southern part of the Continent,
containing perhaps the most fertile volcanic soil and greatest
mineral concentration on the planet. Quite literally for whoever
controlled it, this region was a goldmine.
The Democratic Republic of Congo contained
more than half the world's cobalt. It held one-third of its diamonds,
and, extremely significantly, fully three-quarters of the world
resources of columbite-tantalite or "coltan" - a primary
component of computer microchips and printed modern boards, essential
for mobile telephones, laptops and other modern electronic devices.
p227
According to the International Rescue Committee, more than 5,400,000
Congolese civilians had died over the course of an ongoing war
in the Congo since 1996, making the wars in the DR Congo the deadliest
conflict in the world since World War ll. Curiously enough, unlike
the case of Darfur, no Washington outcry of genocide was heard
over this staggering number of deaths in the Republic of the Congo-orders
of magnitude larger than those cited as proof of genocide in Darfur.
p229
Joseph Kabila, the Democratic Republic of Congo's first democratically
elected President, had been negotiating a major $9 billion trade
agreement between the DRC and China, something that Washington
was clearly not happy about In April 2008 Kabila had given an
interview to a Belgian newspaper, Le Soir, where he declared that
China was now Congo's most important trade and development partner,
promising that its influence would expand further at the expense
of Europe.
... Not long after Kabila's interview
in Le Soir, Nkunda launched his new offensive. Nkunda was a long-standing
henchman of Rwanda's President Kagame who had been trained at
Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. All signs pointed to a heavy, if covert,
USA role in the Congo killings by Nkunda's men. Nkunda himself
was a former Congolese Army officer, a teacher and Seventh Day
Adventist pastor. But, thanks to his training at Fort Leavenworth,
he became best known for killing.
p230
The Congo News Agency charged that it was not to protect his native
Tutsi brothers that [Laurent] Nkunda was fighting, but instead:
[Laurent Nkunda's] true motives ... are
to occupy the mineral-rich North Kivu province [of DRC], pillage
its resources, and act as a proxy army in eastern Congo for the
Tutsi-led Rwandan government in Kigali. Kagame wants a foothold
in eastern Congo so his country can continue to benefit from the
pillaging and exporting of minerals such as Columbite-Tantalite
(Coltan). Many experts on the region agree today that resources
are the true reason why Laurent Nkunda continues to create chaos
in the region with the help of Paul Kagame.
p230
A French court in 2006 ruled that [Paul] Kagame had organized
the shooting down of the plane carrying Hutu President of Rwanda,
Juvénal Habyarimana, in April 1994, the event that set
off the indiscriminate, rampaging slaughter of hundreds of thousands
of people, both Hutu and Tutsi, across the region.
The end result of the Rwandan genocide,
in which perhaps as many as a million Africans perished, was that
US and UK backed Paul Kagame-a ruthless military strongman trained
at the US Army Command and General Staff College at Fort Leavenworth
Kansas-was firmly in control as the US-backed dictator of Rwanda.
The Clinton Administration had done nothing to intervene to halt
the killing. On the contrary, the US had actively blocked UN Security
Council action. At the time, according to a later declassified
Pentagon memo, the Pentagon had predicted a "massive bloodbath"
and announced that it would not intervene "until peace is
restored".
p231
Since the end of the 1994 genocide, [Rwandan president Paul] Kagame
had covertly backed the repeated military incursions by General
[Laurent] Nkunda into the mineral-rich Kivu region [of DRC]. on
the pretext it was to defend a small Tutsi minority. Kagame repeatedly
rejected attempts to repatriate those Tutsi refugees back to Rwanda,
however, obviously fearing he might lose the pretext for his occupation
of the mineral rich region of Kivu.
p231
According to Canadian researcher [Michel] Chossudovsky, the 1994
[Rwandan] massacre of civilians between Tutsi and Hutu was "an
undeclared war between France and America".
By supporting the build up of Ugandan
and Rwandan forces and by directly intervening in the Congolese
civil war, Washington also bears a direct responsibility for the
ethnic massacres committed in the Eastern Congo including several
hundred thousand people who died in refugee camps.
Major General Paul Kagame was an instrument
of Washington. The loss of African lives did not matter. The civil
war in Rwanda and the ethnic massacres were an integral part of
US foreign policy, carefully staged in accordance with precise
strategic and economic objectives.
p232
The U.S. Pentagon, working covertly through the USAID under the
Department of State, had been diverting millions of dollars of
USAID funds earmarked for 'gorilla conservation' in the Virunga
National Park in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo and using
it instead to explore the vast oil and mineral riches located
in the same area.
... When skeptics investigated, they found
that USAID money officially paid to the Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund
International and Conservation lnternational, were being misused.
... The USAID was apparently covering
up for the diversion of US taxpayer dollars from gorilla conservation
to minerals exploration and providing arms to various organizations
in Congo's Kivu.
... There was reason to believe that the
USAID funds were being merely laundered via the conservation NGOs
to create a massive arms buildup in the region.
p232
Uganda and Rwanda were two of the Pentagon's premier military
partners in Africa in recent years. In 2007 some 150 US Special
Forces were added to the Pentagon's Uganda arsenal, while American
and British military advisers had been training Uganda's UPDF
troops." AFRICOM would presumably upgrade those operations
to counter Chinese presence in the Democratic Republic of Congo,
using a variety of techniques such as diverting USAID gorilla
conservation funds to arms purchases.
p234
If France had been the covert target of US 'surrogate warfare'
in central Africa in the early 1990's, by 2008 it was clearly
China that had become a real and growing threat to US control
of Central Africa's vast mineral riches. China's rapid industrialization
had made secure supplies of every mineral commodity imaginable
a national state priority for China.
Speaking to the International Peace Operations
Association in Washington, D.C. on Oct. 27, 2008 General Kip Ward,
Commander of AFRICOM, defined the command's mission:
[I]n concert with other US government
agencies and international partners, [to conduct] sustained security
engagements through military-to-military programs, military-sponsored
activities, and other military operations as directed to promote
a stable and secure African environment in support of US foreign
policy.
General Ward was speaking to a gathering
of the vast private mercenary military industry that had blossomed
under the Bush Administration, including notably DynCorp and Blackwater.
... AFRICOM was clearly organized to combine
all such resources from hard military power to mercenaries to
food aid and so-called 'soft power' to keep Africa's resource-rich
countries under its sway and out of the control of rivals such
as China.
AFRICOM's "military operations as
directed to promote a stable and secure African environment in
support of US foreign policy" were clearly aimed at blocking
China's growing economic presence on the continent.
p236
I. Peter Pham, a leading Washington insider who was an advisor
to the US State and Defense Departments, stated that one of the
objectives of the new AFRICOM was:
... protecting access to hydrocarbons
and other strategic resources which Africa has in abundance, ...
a task which includes ensuring against the vulnerability of those
natural riches and ensuring that no other interested third parties,
such as China, India, Japan, or Russia, obtain monopolies or preferential
treatment.
In testimony before the US Congress supporting
creation of AFRICOM in 2007, Pham, who was closely associated
with the neoconservative Foundation for Defense of Democracies,
stated:
This [natural wealth makes Africa an
inviting target for the attentions of the People's Republic of
China, whose dynamic economy, averaging 9 percent growth per annum
over the last two decades, has an almost insatiable thirst for
oil as well as a need for other natural resources to sustain it.
China is currently importing approximately 2.6 million barrels
of crude per day, about half of its consumption; more than 765,000
of those barrels-roughly a third of its imports-come from African
sources, especially Sudan, Angola, and Congo (Brazzaville). Is
it any wonder, then, that... perhaps no other foreign region rivals
Africa as the object of Beijing's sustained strategic interest
in recent years. Last year the Chinese regime published the first-ever
official white paper elaborating the bases of its policy toward
Africa.
This year, ahead of his twelve-day, eight-nation
tour of Africa-the third such journey since he took office in
2003 - Chinese President Hu Jintao announced a three-year, $3
billion program in preferential loans and expanded aid for Africa.
These funds come on top of the $3 billion in loans and $2 billion
in export credits that Hu announced in October 2006 at the opening
of the historic Beijing summit of the Forum on China-Africa Cooperation
(FOCAC) which brought nearly fifty African heads of state and
ministers to the Chinese capital.
Intentionally or not, many analysts expect
that Africa - especially the states along its oil-rich western
coastline - will increasingly becoming a theatre for strategic
competition between the United States and its only real near-peer
competitor on the global stage, China, as both countries seek
to expand their influence and secure access to resources.
That was the framework for the events
of late October 2008 when Nkunda's well-armed troops surrounded
Goma in North Kivu and demanded that Congo President Joseph Kabila
negotiate with him.
General Nkunda demanded, among other things,
that President Kabila cancel a $9 billion joint Congo-China venture
in which China would obtain rights to the vast copper and cobalt
resources of the region in exchange for providing $6 billion worth
of infrastructure: road construction; two hydroelectric dams;
hospitals; schools; and railway links to southern Africa, to Katanga,
and to the Congo Atlantic port at Matadi. The remaining $3 billion
was to be invested by China in developing new mining areas.
This was, up to that point, the biggest
single contract by China in Africa. In exchange for the infrastructure
and mining development, China would get a share of Congo's precious
natural resources for its industries 10 million tons of copper
and 400,000 tons of cobalt for use in manufacturing batteries,
propeller blades, magnets and chemicals. It was a barter deal-what
the Chinese called 'win-win'-not aid with strings attached, like
Western powers had given DR Congo over the years.
p241
Zbigniew Brzezinski, a foreign policy adviser to candidate Obama
during his campaign, had stated as far back as 1997 that for the
United States, control of Central Eurasia-the region encompassing
Afghanistan and Pakistan and their neighbors in the states of
the former Soviet Union-was a prime goal of post-Cold War US military
and foreign policy. He stated, "whoever either controls or
dominates access to the region is the one most likely to win the
geopolitical and economic prize."
The war on terror is being used as a
pretext and excuse for building up the US and NATO military and
organizational machine in the region [Afghanistan and Central
Asia] and maintaining its open-ended presence there.
p242
{George W.] Bush had used the events of 9/11 to ram through a
paralyzed Congress several pieces of legislation, particularly
the Patriot Act and the Homeland Security Act, which had all but
destroyed Constitutional checks and balances, as well as the Bill
of Rights.
The US Pentagon ordered 20,000 uniformed
troops deployed inside the United States by 2011. They would be
trained to "help state and local officials respond to a nuclear
terrorist attack or other domestic catastrophe," according
to Pentagon officials.
This dramatic shift in the Defense Department's
role in homeland security was backed with troop commitments and
funded by Congress. It was a direct violation of the Posse Comitatus
Act, a law dating from the post-Civil War era which explicitly
limits the role of the Pentagon to defense of the United States
from foreign attack, and forbids the use of combat troops for
domestic law enforcement situations. The initial redeployment
to the US in October 2008-at a time when the US military was already
severely over-extended in Iraq and now Afghanistan-raised the
spectre of police state control over expected domestic protests
as the economic crisis worsened.
... According to the Federal Government's
official Federal Register, new rules would allow certain civilians
to call American soldiers into action within the US in order to
prevent "environmental damage" or respond to "special
events" and "other domestic activities." It was
an alarmingly broad and intentionally vague mandate whose true
justification was not made clear to the public.
p245
In November 2008 the US Army Strategic Studies Institute issued
a document, "Known Unknowns: Unconventional 'Strategic Shocks'
in Defense Strategy Development." The document, which received
almost no notice, explicitly referred to possible domestic economic
and social 'shocks' as being "both the least understood and
the most dangerous." It warned, "it would be prudent
to add catastrophic dislocation inside the United States or home-grown
domestic civil disorder and or violence to this category."
It then went on to state, "shock would result" if widespread
civil disobedience were to occur inside the United States, "to
such an extent that they forced the Department of Defense to radically
re-role (sic) for domestic security, population control."
p245
For both Washington and for the rest of the world, the situation
had reached a stage of strategic choice whose consequences could
spell the end of the American Century from the rot of its own
internal policy since the Vietnam War. An end to the obsessive
military agenda of the warfare state would not be an easy process,
but a necessary one for the survival not only of the world, but
also of the United States as a functioning democracy.
Full
Spectrum Dominance
Home Page