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Opinion

The new American century?

By Douglas Lummis

Have you heard about the Project for the New American Century (PNAC)? This neoconservative think tank was established in 1997 "to promote American global leadership." The idea is that with the demise of the Soviet Union, no country or alliance of countries in the world can rival America's power. America's strategy should be to keep things that way by maintaining "a globally preeminent military capacity both today and in the future." In this way, an "American peace" can be established over the world.

By using the expression "American peace," the PNAC members show that their model is the Pax Romana of ancient times. But the Rome that enforced its "peace" on other countries was an empire. Is PNAC proposing that America become a world empire?

If so, that would matter a great deal, for, among the founding members of PNAC are Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, Elliot Abrams and Jeb Bush. In short, when George W. Bush became president, that amounted to a PNAC takeover of the White House.

In September, 2000, during the presidential election campaigns, PNAC published a report entitled "Rebuilding America's Defenses." Read this report and you will understand what has been going on in the world since the Bush administration came into office.

In general, the report says that U.S. military expenditure must be greatly increased, that its weapons must be modernized, and that more and stronger military bases must be established overseas, on what the report calls "the new American frontier."

Thus, as Mr. Scott T. Hards correctly pointed out on these pages (May 2), the invasion of Iraq was not about weapons of mass destruction (it seems there weren't any), or about the security of the United States (probably the war increased the danger of terrorist attacks), or links between Iraq and the al-Qaeda (none has been shown to exist). But the PNAC report shows that the invasion was not about former Iraqi President Saddam Hussein either:

"While the unresolved conflict with Iraq provides the immediate justification, the need for a substantial American force presence in the Gulf transcends the issue of the regime of Saddam Hussein."

In building a world empire, however, one runs into this

difficulty: Present international law does not permit such a thing. Thus in its recent wars, the United States should be understood not as simply violating international law, but as reshaping it. In the last year and a half, the U.S. government has given itself three new rights:

They are (1) the right to make pre-emptive attacks on sovereign states; (2) the right to change the regimes of sovereign states; and (3) the right to send police and/or CIA agents into foreign territory, arrest foreign nationals and imprison them on U.S. territory.

Note that neither the United Nations nor any other country has any of these rights. Taken together, they amount to the right to assert political control over foreign lands. In political terminology, the accurate name for such control is empire.


Shukan ST: May 23, 2003

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