'Maintaining Imperial Order'
By Anna Pha
Guardian
03 July, 2003
Empires have come and gone in world history - the Roman empire, the Mongols, the British and Ottoman empires. The objective of the leaders of Nazi Germany was world domination but they were resisted and they failed. The British empire disintegrated after WW2. Now, a new and even more powerful and dangerous nation has launched its crusade for a New World Order - a new world-wide American empire. They have become so arrogant that they do not hide their objectives and the ways by which they intend to enforce their domination. This article, the first of three, brings you what their spokespersons have said.
"The United States has no rival. We are militarily dominant around the world. Our military spending exceeds that of the next six or seven powers combined, and we have a monopoly on many advanced and not so advanced military technologies. We, and only we, form and lead military coalitions into war. We use our military dominance to intervene in the internal affairs of other countries, because the local inhabitants are killing each other, or harbouring enemies of the United States, or developing nuclear and biological weapons." (S R Rosen, "The Future of War and the American Military", Harvard Magazine, May-June 2002)
"A political unit that has overwhelming superiority in military power, and uses that power to influence the internal behaviour of other states, is called an empire. Because the United States does not seek to control territory or govern the overseas citizens of the empire, we are an indirect empire, to be sure, but an empire nonetheless. If this is correct, our goal is not combating a rival, but maintaining our imperial position, and maintaining imperial order." (Emphasis added)
"[I]mperial strategy focuses on preventing the emergence of powerful, hostile challengers to the empire: by war if necessary, but by imperial assimilation if possible", writes Rosen.
You may say that this is just extremist language but its author is part of a circle of very powerful and dangerous people and organisations who are in control of the Bush administration's foreign policy.
In September 2000, prior to Bush's appointment to the US presidency and one year before the September 11 attack on the World Trade Centre, the Project for a New American Century (PNAC) (one of the many US think tanks) published a statement called Rebuilding America's Defense: Strategy, Forces and Resources for a New Century.
The report identifies core tasks for the US military to achieve. These include:
"MAINTAIN NUCLEAR STRATEGIC SUPERIORITY.
"DEVELOP AND DEPLOY GLOBAL MISSILE DEFENCES to defend America and American allies and to provide a secure basis for US power projection around the world.
"CONTROL THE NEW 'INTERNATIONAL COMMONS' OF SPACE AND 'CYBERSPACE', and pave the way for the creation of a new military service - US Space Forces - with the mission of space control.
"EXPLOIT THE 'REVOLUTION IN MILITARY AFFAIRS' to ensure long-term superiority of US conventional forces..
"INCREASE DEFENCE SPENDING gradually to a minimum level of 3.5 to 3.8 percent of gross domestic product, adding $15 billion to $20 billion to total defence spending annually." (PNAC) (Upper case from the original text)
Michael Ledeen is a member of another of the "think tanks" - the American Enterprise Institute (AEI). He published an article "We'll Win this War" in the AEI's The American Enterprise magazine in December 2001.
"We must wage revolutionary war against all the terrorist regimes, and gradually replace them with governments that turn to their own people's freely expressed desires as the basis of their political legitimacy", he writes.
"If we act like the revolutionary (!) force we truly are, we can once again reshape the world, as we repeatedly did throughout the last century. But if we settle for token victories and limited accomplishments, we will permit our enemies to reorganize, and attack us with even greater venom in the future." (Emphasis added)
Shock and Awe warfare Shock and Awe is the method of warfare to achieve these goals. It has just been tested in Iraq. It is explained by Rosen:
"The maximum amount of force can and should be used as quickly as possible for psychological impact - to demonstrate that the empire cannot be challenged with impunity. [W]e are in the business of bringing down hostile governments and creating governments favourable to us.
"Conventional international wars end and troops are brought back home. Imperial wars end, but imperial garrisons must be left in place for decades to ensure order and stability. This is, in fact, what we are beginning to see, first in the Balkans and now in Central Asia..
This type of warfare is explained in the strategy document, Shock and Awe: Achieving Rapid Dominance, which was published by the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs (JINSA) in 1996. It says:
"The military posture and capability of the United States of America are, today, dominant. Simply put, there is no external adversary in the world that can successfully challenge the extraordinary power of the American military in either regional conflict or in 'conventional' war as we know it once the United States makes the commitment to take whatever action may be needed." (Emphasis added)
Rapid Domination "The aim of Rapid Dominance is to affect the will, perception, and understanding of the adversary to fit or respond to our strategic policy ends through imposing a regime of Shock and Awe.
"Clearly, the traditional military aim of destroying, defeating, or neutralizing the adversary's military capability is a fundamental and necessary component of Rapid Dominance. Our intent, however, is to field a range of capabilities to induce sufficient Shock and Awe to render the adversary impotent. This means that physical and psychological effects must be obtained.
"`Dominance' means the ability to affect and dominate an adversary's will both physically and psychologically. Physical dominance includes the ability to destroy, disarm, disrupt, neutralize, and to render impotent. (Emphasis added)
"Psychological dominance means the ability to destroy, defeat, and neuter the will of an adversary to resist; or convince the adversary to accept our terms and aims short of using force. The target is the adversary's will, perception, and understanding..
" deception, confusion, misinformation, and disinformation, perhaps in massive amounts, must be employed." (Emphasis added)
"Theoretically, the magnitude of Shock and Awe Rapid Dominance seeks to impose (in extreme cases) is the non-nuclear equivalent of the impact that the atomic weapons dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki had on the Japanese.
"The impact of those weapons was sufficient to transform both the mindset of the average Japanese citizen and the outlook of the leadership through this condition of Shock and Awe. The Japanese simply could not comprehend the destructive power carried by a single airplane. This incomprehension produced a state of awe..
"It will imply more than the direct application of force. It will mean the ability to control the environment and to master all levels of an opponent's activities to affect will, perception, and understanding.
"This could include means of communication, transportation, food production, water supply, and other aspects of infrastructure as well as the denial of military responses. Deception, misinformation, and disinformation are key components in this assault on the will and understanding of the opponent."
The JINSA document continues: "The first priority of a doctrine of Rapid Dominance should be to deter, alter, or affect the will and therefore those actions that are either unacceptable to U.S. national security interests or endanger the democratic community of states and access to free markets.
"Should deterrence fail, the application of Rapid Dominance in these circumstances should create sufficient Shock and Awe to the immediate threat forces and leadership as well as provide a clear message for other potential threat partners. The doctrine of Rapid Dominance has applications in a variety of areas such as countering WMD, terrorism, and perhaps other tasks.
"...in addition to improving our force capabilities, the US must develop an intelligence repository far more extensive than during the Cold War, covering virtually all the important regions and organizational structures throughout the world." (JINSA)
Space control Space control is also necessary in the eyes of the imperial war hawks. As long ago as 1976, the Joint Strategy Review by the National Defense Panel said, "Unrestricted use of space has become a major strategic interest of the United States." (as quoted in Rebuilding America's Defenses)
"Building an effective, robust, layered, global system of missile defenses is a prerequisite for maintaining American preeminence." (PNAC)
"The Clinton Administration's adherence to the 1972 ABM Treaty frustrated development of useful ballistic missile defenses", says the PNAC strategy document.
"No system of missile defenses can be fully effective without placing sensors and weapons in space ... US armed forces are uniquely dependent upon space." (PNAC)
"The US Space Command foresees that in the coming decades, . an adversary might also share the same commercial satellite services for communications, imagery, and navigation.The space 'playing field' is levelling rapidly, so US forces will be increasingly vulnerable." (PNAC) (Italics are quote from US Space Command.)
"For US armed forces to continue to assert military preeminence, control of space - defined by Space Command as 'the ability to assure access to space, freedom of operations within the space medium, and an ability to deny others the use of space' - must be an essential element of our military strategy." (Emphasis added)
"As Space Command also recognizes, the United States must also have the capability to deny America's adversaries the use of commercial space platforms for military purposes in times of crises."
"But, over the longer term, maintaining control of space will inevitably require the application of force both in space and from space, including but not limited to anti-missile defenses and defensive systems capable of protecting US and allied satellites; space control cannot be sustained in any other fashion, with conventional land, sea or airforce, or by electronic warfare." (Emphasis added) (PNAC)
Nuclear weapons "Shutting the country down would entail both the physical destruction of appropriate infrastructure and the shutdown and control of the flow of all vital information and associated commerce so rapidly as to achieve a level of national shock akin to the effect that dropping nuclear weapons on Hiroshima and Nagasaki had on the Japanese. Simultaneously, Iraq's armed forces would be paralysed with the neutralization or destruction of its capabilities. Deception, disinformation, and misinformation would be applied massively." (JINSA)
This does not rule out the use, development or testing of nuclear weapons. Rebuilding America's Defences (PNAC) is quite categoric on this question. The maintenance of a moratorium on nuclear tests is "an untenable situation" it says.
"...there may be a need to develop a new family of nuclear weapons designed to address new sets of military requirements, such as would be required in targeting the very deep underground, hardened bunkers that are being built by many of our potential adversaries." (Emphasis added)
"US nuclear superiority is nothing to be ashamed of; rather, it will be an essential element in preserving American leadership in a more complex and chaotic world." (Emphasis added) (PNAC)
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AEI: the American Enterprise Institute.
JINSA, Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs, Shock and Awe: Achieving Rapid Dominance, (JINSA) 1996.
Ledeen, M, We'll Win this War, The American Enterprise magazine, December 2001.
PNAC: Project for a New American Century (PNAC), Rebuilding America's Defense: Strategy, Forces and Resources for a New Century, September 2000.
Rosen, SP, The Future of War and the American Military, Harvard Magazine, May-June 2002.
All documents quoted available from each organisation's website.