After 9/11, Secretary Rice said, “This changes everything.”  What she meant was that the Project for the New American Century, the plan for  the Neo-con domination of the world, which had been waiting quietly behind the scenes, could now be put into action under the guise of defending America from its new terrorist enemy. This Project, or rationale for forcefully pursuing world Neo-con goals without regard for international law, the United Nations or the niceties of treaties and diplomacy, was justified by our victories in W.W.II and the Cold War. According to an early Rice article, the U.S. had earned the right to world domination; it was only realistic for us to grab whatever we wanted by force.

Since 9/11 we have been fighting a land wars against people we designate as terrorists in foreign lands. These wars have been total failures: democracy has not taken hold in these nations and has not spread in the region. When the new Iraqi government leased its oil fields for development by international corporations, American companies received a small fraction of the contracts.  Further, our disruption of the balance of power in the Middle East, in combination with rising food prices, led to the unpredictable and uncontrollable Arab Spring with Islamic fundamentalists dominating the rebellions.

Now, even as we prepare to withdraw from Afghanistan, our war preparations are expanding in Asia and Africa. Learning from our failures, our new approach to world domination, revealed in David Vine’s The Military’s New Lily-Pad Strategy, The Nation, July 16, 2012, is to avoid costly land wars by establishing bases everywhere staffed with small, high tech forces ready to do whatever is necessary.

At the same time, we are developing high tech means of dominating the world through far greater information and precision weapons in space. The full description of these new technologies is to be found in Space warfare and the future of U.S. global power, by Prof. Alfred W. McCory, U Wisconsin-Madison. This is an Aljazeera opinion, available at http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2012/11/201211912435170883.html “As with the Philippine Insurrection and the Vietnam War, the occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan have served as the catalyst for a new information regime, fusing aerospace, cyberspace, biometrics and robotics into an apparatus of potentially unprecedented power.”

The forces for peace in the United States have been opposing the wars, the  waste, the ballooning military budgets and influence  - far beyond what President Eisenhower predicted - with limited results. The core of the problem is the imperial mindset of the Neo-cons, which has taken root in the Defense Department, its very prosperous suppliers and Congressional vassals.

We will not substantially reduce our military budget or relinquish our nuclear weapons as long as the hidden goal of our nation is world domination. We will continue to neglect the needs of our society and discount our national future as long as we are pursuing this illusion of world military domination.

The decline of the United States in the last decade is an indictment of these imperial goals. The beneficiaries of of our imperial policy are the international corporations, many of which avoid taxes in the U.S. As a result of our military influence, they get increased access to labor, materials and markets abroad with less regulation and environmental restrictions. In the meantime, our huge military budgets have further indebted our nation and caused budgetary cuts in programs urgently needed for the future development of our nation in the era of climate change and devastation.

To my knowledge, there has never been a national debate on the desirability of U.S. world domination, or an opportunity for our people to vote on the issue. In spite of Chalmers Johnson’s The Sorrows of Empire and Dismantling the Empire, Joseph Gerson’s Empire and the Bomb and others, the peace movement has ignored this root cause of our ongoing violence and continuous war preparations. It has failed to inform the American people of the World Domination hallucination that has corrupted our military and seduced its suppliers and their Congressional vassals.

The defense of our nation remains the honorable and necessary activity that it has always been. The misdirection of that defense responsibility into an aggressive, war-fighting policy, with the intent of world domination, at any cost, is a distortion of our national character and a betrayal of our trust in the armed forces. It is urgent that the distinction between necessary national defense and the false dream of world domination be brought to the public, before our nation collapses in exhaustion. America must rid itself of this sick, irrational fantasy and return to the more modest and far healthier occupation of building a free and viable future for our nation.

Peter G Cohen, artist-writer, is a veteran of W.W.II, a political activist and the author of the website www.nukefreeworld.com. Peter Lives is Santa Barbara and may be contacted at <Den här e-postadressen skyddas mot spambots. Du måste tillåta JavaScript för att se den.>

©2012 Peter G Cohen

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