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F. William Engdahl. Manifest Destiny: Democracy as Cognitive Dissonance


Other books:

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Dear Readers,

        For this installment of my gratis newsletter I’m very pleased to tell you my newest book has just been published and is available o­n Amazon. I am happy to report that within o­nly days it has climbed o­n Amazon rankings near the top in certain categories. What I treat in the book, Manifest Destiny: Democracy as Cognitive Dissonance (2017), is the hidden role of Washington-backed NGOs in advancing under the banner of “democracy” the select taking down of governments not willing to play to the Washington agenda.
          Over the past thirty years and more Washington intelligence agencies have refined subtle techniques to destroy almost any serious opposition government using NGOs such as NED, Open Society Foundations, Freedom House, Albert Einstein Institution. The collapse of the Soviet Union and the devastating Yeltsin years of the 1990s, the war to destroy Yugoslavia, and the failed attempt at Tiananmen Square in China in 1989 were all orchestrated events steered by the CIA and US State Department. If you’re interested in the deeper background to recent world events including the Arab Spring, the war in Syria, the US-backed coup in Ukraine, you will find the book well worth your time and investment. Today I want to share with you the Foreword along with a detailed Table of Contents to give you an idea of what’s inside. I am convinced that you will find the book well worth buying and reading.

            For a better reading experience I converted the text to a pfd-file which You can find in the attachment of this mail. It's 9 pages in A4 format.

           I also want to encourage you to consider making a support contribution at the donate button at the top of my website, www.williamengdahl.com, so that I am able to continue offering my content such as presented there without cost. I want to thank those of you as well who have already chosen to offer your financial support.

Thank you again for your interest,

F. William Engdahl

Frankfurt, Germany

www.williamengdahl.com

13-03-18

 

Manifest Destiny © F. William Engdahl, all rights reserved



 

Author’s Introduction

Destroying Nations in the Name of Democracy

 

In 1945, British writer and social critic George Orwell wrote a book titled 1984 o­n the theme of a fictional totalitarian society. The book, o­ne of the most successful in publishing history, relates the aftermath of an atomic world war in which the world is partitioned into three states. o­ne state, Oceania, whose capital is London, is ruled by an English Socialist Party that has total control over all its citizens, especially over their minds. The central mind-control program used to keep its citizens abject and obedient mind slaves was referred to as “doublethink.”

 

In doublethink, subjects were submitted to two contradictory concepts, both of which they must accept as correct simultaneously, termed by psychologists “cognitive dissonance.” So, although Oceania is constantly at war, its citizens act as if there is peace too. The essence of the doublethink is summarized by Orwell at the beginning of the novel:

 

War is peace.

Freedom is slavery.

Ignorance is strength.[i]

 

In the following work I chronicle what, in truth, is an adaptation of Orwell’s doublethink which might be termed “democracy is tyranny.” It’s the chronicle of o­ne of the most destructive and o­ne of the most effective operations by the intelligence services of any modern state, including of that of Stalin’s Soviet Union or even Hitler’s Goebbels-steered Third Reich. It’s the chronicle of a vast project developed by US intelligence services over decades, going back to the May 1968 CIA student strikes that brought down French President Charles de Gaulle, a determined foe of American global domination.

 

The Cold War between the countries of NATO and those allied to the Soviet Union lasted nearly a half century. Finally, exhausted and economically in dire straits, the Soviet Union, under Mikhail Gorbachev, raised a white flag of surrender in November 1989, as Moscow let the Berlin Wall fall. The wall had become the symbol of what Winston Churchill, in his famous 1946 Fulton, Missouri–speech, called the Iron Curtain dividing the West--the “Free World” as Washington propaganda was fond of ever repeating--from the communist world dominated by Moscow.

 

Outside a small circle of US CIA, State Department, and Pentagon senior officials, together with their allies in select Washington think tanks, such as the American Enterprise Institute or the New York Council o­n Foreign Relations, what few realized was that Washington was about to unleash the most concerted effort at regime change across the former communist countries of Eastern Europe, Ukraine, and the newly formed Russian Federation itself. The rallying call was the “introduction of US-style democracy, freedom, human rights, a neo-liberal free market.” It was to become a tyranny and in some cases, such as Ukraine, it would be far worse than anything experienced under the Soviet regime.

 

The Washington regime-change operations came to be called Washington “color revolutions” because of the distinct Madison Avenue color-logo themes each destabilization brought with it—the Orange Revolution in Ukraine, the Rose Revolution in Georgia, the Green Revolution in Iran, and so forth. Invariably, they targeted any significant nation that stood in the way of what David Rockefeller, in his Memoirs, referred to as a o­ne-world government or Bill Clinton, in the 1990s, referred to by the innocent-sounding term but not-so-innocent process of corporate globalization.[ii]

 

In truth, what those Washington color revolution, regime-change interventions represented was an attempt to replace former communist leaders with handpicked, Washington-corrupted political leaders who would be willing to sell their national crown jewels and their people to select Western financial predators, such as the billionaire speculator George Soros.

 

The Aura of American Power

 

Ironically, the greatest challenge confronting Washington, the Pentagon, the CIA, and the powerful military–industrial and banking lobby groups, who control congressmen and presidents with their money, was the end of the active Cold War in late 1989. There was suddenly no “enemy” to justify continued vast US military spending or the existence of NATO.

 

James R. Schlesinger, former US defense secretary and later CIA director, described the dilemma: “American policymakers should be quite clear in their own minds that the basis for determining US force structure and military expenditures in the future should not simply be the response to individual threats, but rather that which is needed to maintain the overall aura of American power.”[iii]

 

At the end of the 1980s, the economy and financial system of the US was in the throes of its deepest crisis since the Great Depression. The largest banks of Wall Street—Citigroup, Bank of America, and others—were technically bankrupt. The deregulation of US Savings & Loan banks had led to a real estate speculation bubble that collapsed in the late 1980s, at the same time as a dramatic fall in world oil prices led to waves of bankruptcies across the US domestic oil industry.

 

To demand that US taxpayers continue to waste hundreds of billions of their tax dollars o­n high levels of defense spending for an enemy that could no longer be identified rather than to create a “peace dividend” that would allow those billions to go to the renewal of America’s rapidly decaying economic infrastructure was a challenge to the US military and intelligence establishment. Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Colin Powell told Army Times in April 1991: “Think hard about it, I’m running out of demons. I’m running out of villains. . . I’m down to Castro and Kim Il Sung.”[iv]

 

That dilemma was soon to be resolved. Rather than solely relying o­n military overt force to advance its global agenda, Washington unveiled a dramatic new weapon: “fake democracy” nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) that would be used to covertly create pro-Washington regimesin strategic parts of the world after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Democratic freedom would be the banner, incredibly enough, to introduce a new tyranny: “free” markets in actual fact controlled by Wall Street and European international banks, as well as Western multinational corporations that would loot the vast state-owned resources of the collapsed communist world.

 

Weaponizing Human Rights

 

Instead of overt military confrontation, the 1990s, with the brutal exception of Washington’s war in Yugoslavia, were to see the major deployment of what was becoming a dramatically effective new weapon for US-steered, fake democracy regime changes around the world.

 

[Anker] So-called “human rights” NGOs, such as Human Rights Watch financed by billionaire speculator George Soros, Freedom House, the International Republican Institute (IRI), Amnesty International USA, or the US government’s supposedly private National Endowment for Democracy (NED), were to become a primary Washington weapon for regime change to transform the newly independent states of formerly communist Eastern Europe and Russia as well. Later, Washington’s “fake democracy” color revolutions would be brought to China, Central Asia, and, most dramatically, to the oil-rich states of the Middle East as the so-called Arab Spring.

 

The goal was to turn the target countries into US economic satrapies, or vassal states, by way of a series of regime-change color revolutions. It took a while before the unsuspecting target nations realized what was being done to them and their economies in the name of US export of “democracy.”

 

The first successful fake democracy color revolution regime change was aimed at Slobodan Milošević, then president of what had become by 1999 former Yugoslavia—Serbia Vojvodina, Kosovo, and Montenegro.

 

We begin our investigation with a description of the birth of the NGO in Washington that was created with little fanfare by President Reagan’s CIA Director Bill Casey and others in the early 1980s. It was called the NED. That NED has played the central role in every Washington-backed regime destabilization aimed at governments pursuing policies not congruent with those of Washington’s post–Cold War new globalization order.

 

Endnotes:

 

[i] George Orwell, 1984, cited in

https://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/quotes/g/georgeorwe141783.html

[ii] David Rockefeller, Memoirs, p. 405, http://opengov.ideascale.com/a/dtd/David-Rockefeller-s-book-Memoirs-admits-secretly-conspiring-for-a-NWO/4007-4049.

---------------------

The quote reads: “Some even believe we [Rockefeller family] are part of a secret cabal working against the best interests of the United States, characterizing my family and me as ‘internationalists’ and of conspiring with others around the world to build a more integrated global political and economic structure - o­ne World, if you will. If that’s the charge, I stand guilty, and I am proud of it.”

[iii] Joe Stork, New Enemies for a New World Order, MER176, http://www.merip.org/mer/mer176/new-enemies-new-world-order?ip_login_no_cache=e4b596febb56c8ddb4c739f2806fd833.

[iv] William W. Kaufmann and John D. Steinbruner, Decisions for Defense (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution, 1991), p. 45.

 

Table of Contents

 

AUTHOR’S INSTRODUCTION: Destroying Nations in the Name of Democracy. . .

CHAPTER o­nE: Doing What the CIA Did, but Privately. . .

CHAPTER TWO: A Pope, the NED, and Poland Shock Therapy. . .

CHAPTER THREE: The CIA’s Yeltsin Coup d’État: The Rape of Russia . . .

CHAPTER FOUR: Soros and the Harvard Boys Join the KGB and Yeltsin . . .

CHAPTER FIVE: The CIA, NGOs, and the Myth of Tiananmen . . .

CHAPTER SIX: The CIA and Their NGOs Disintegrate Yugoslavia...

CHAPTER SEVEN: Otpor!’s Fake Democracy in Serbia …

CHAPTER EIGHT: A Cold War Ended Not . . .

CHAPTER NINE: NATO Banging o­n Moscow’s Door: Georgia and Ukraine Color Revolutions Shake Russia. . .

CHAPTER TEN: “Where the Prize Ultimately Lies”. . .

CHAPTER ELEVEN: Arab Spring, Gold Dinars, and Energy Wars . . .

Afterword: Endless Wars for Democracy?...

Glossary. . .

Index . . .

 ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------


 

Dear Readers,

 

For this installment of my gratis newsletter I want to share a chapter excerpt from my latest book, Manifest Destiny: Democracy as Cognitive Dissonance. In the first chapters of the book I describe in detail rarely discussed background to how severely and ruthlessly both the Bush and Clinton Administrations during the 1990’s used their CIA-controlled asset, Boris Yeltsin, to open up the fabulously resource rich but money poor Russian Federation after 1989. By the end of that fateful decade, in 1999 internal opposition to the Yeltsin looting of the country was so great that the CIA-backed Russian oligarchs around Yeltsin—Boris Berezovsky, Vladimir Potanin, Mikhail Khodorkovsky and others—decided to bring in an unknown new face, o­ne they were convinced would allow them to continue their plunder. He was then 47-year old former Deputy Major of St Petersburg named Vladimir Putin. Within months as Putin won the 2000 Presidential vote o­n a promise to restore Russia to a stable nation, the oligarchs and their friends in Washington realized they were dealing with a far different character from the pliable Yeltsin. There began NATO’s 18-year campaign to bring down Putin’s Russia. The following is an excerpt from my book, Manifest Destiny dealing with NATO efforts after 2002 to encircle Russia and break Putin, all to date to little success. It gives an essential missing element to the extraordinary demonization of Putin’s Russia over the recent time.

 

A note of thank you to those of you so far who have bought the book. The response and the overall reception have been very positive.

For a better reading experience I converted the text to a pfd-file which You can find in the attachment of this mail. It's 14 pages in A4 format.


I also want to encourage you to consider making a support contribution at the donate button at the top of my website, www.williamengdahl.com, that I am able to continue offering my content such as presented here without cost.


Thank you again for your interest,
F. William Engdahl
Frankfurt, Germany

www.williamengdahl.com

 

Manifest Destiny © F. William Engdahl, all rights reserved

15-04-18

Chapter Eight:

                               A Cold War Ended Not

 

“We gave categorical assurances to Gorbachev back when the Soviet Union existed that if a united Germany was able to stay in NATO, NATO would not be moved eastward.”                                                                           

—US Ambassador in Moscow, 1987-1991, Jack Matlock[i]

 

NATO Marches East

For Washington and the US military–industrial complex, the Cold War in no way ended in 1991 with the dissolving of the Warsaw Pact military alliance, along with the disintegration of the Soviet Union. o­n the contrary, Washington stepped up efforts to push NATO expansion to the very door of Moscow, taking advantage of the catastrophic economic chaos they had created in the Russian Federation during the Yeltsin era.

In February 1990, during highest-level talks between Moscow and US Secretary of State James Baker III, the US made Mikhail Gorbachev, then President of the Soviet Union, an offer. According to transcripts of meetings in Moscow o­n February 9, 1990, US Secretary Baker suggested that in exchange for cooperation o­n unification of Germany, East and West, into NATO, Washington would make “iron-clad guarantees” to Moscow that NATO would not expand “one inch eastward.”[ii]

As with many of its promises in those days, Washington broke it.

PNAC: Rebuilding America’s Defenses

In September 2000, just weeks before the contentious November 2000 US presidential election that saw the US Supreme Court unconstitutionally determine the victory of the Bush–Cheney Republicans, an influential Washington think tank named the Project for a New American Century (PNAC) issued an extraordinary report based o­n the 1992 Defense Planning Guidance prepared by Dick Cheney, then President George H.W. Bush’s Secretary of Defense. The members of the PNAC included Cheney, his earlier assistant at the Pentagon, Paul Wolfowitz, Don Rumsfeld, and other key members of what would be the Bush–Cheney neoconservative presidency.

The PNAC report, financed by the Bradley Foundation and the John M. Olin Foundation,[iii] both linked with the US military industry, was prepared as a military blueprint for the incoming administration. The report called for a most aggressive US military agenda at a time when many were asking if the world even needed NATO following the end of the Cold War and Russian moves to build down her nuclear force. Among PNAC report recommendations were

  • Remove Saddam Hussein, by war if necessary.
  • Deploy global missile defense “to provide a secure basis for US power projection around the world.”
  • Control space and cyberspace, and create a “new military service—US Space Forces—with the mission of space control.”
  • Exploit the Pentagon’s “revolution in military affairs,” including moving to high-tech, unmanned weaponry, such as drones.
  • Develop a new family of more effective nuclear weapons.
  • The US “should seek to establish a network of ‘deployment bases’ or ‘forward operating bases’ to increase the reach of current and future forces.” It must move beyond western Europe and northeast Asia to increased permanent military presence in southeast Asia and east Asia “to cope with the rise of China to great-power status.”
  • Redirect the US Air Force “toward a global first-strike force.”
  • End the Clinton administration’s “devotion” to the Anti-Ballistic Missile treaty with Russia.
  • “Preserve Pax Americana” and a “unipolar 21st century” through securing and expanding “zones of democratic peace, deter rise of new great-power competitor, defend key regions (Europe, East Asia, Middle East), and exploit transformation of war.” [iv]

 

Virtually every item of that PNAC report was realized after 2000 during the George W. Bush presidency. Dick Cheney, Don Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, and the team around Bush senior who had drafted the so-called Wolfowitz Doctrine in 1992 implemented that doctrine through the presidency of Bush’s son. They named it the War o­n Terror.

Among the members of that high-powered PNAC military think tank were key neoconservative war hawks that would soon serve in key positions in the new administration of George W. Bush and Dick Cheney, as well as run Bush’s War o­n Terror after September 11, 2001

In addition to Cheney—who, as Bush’s vice president, de facto ran foreign policy, much as George H.W. Bush did for Reagan two decades before—the PNAC members included Zalmay Khalilzad, an Afghan American who became George W. Bush’s special envoy to Afghanistan after the US invasion in 2001 and later ambassador to US-occupied Iraq. It included I. Lewis “Scooter’” Libby, who became chief of staff for Vice President Dick Cheney.

Also in PNAC was Peter W. Rodman, who in 2001 became the Bush administration’s Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Affairs. The PNAC also included Donald H. Rumsfeld, soon-to-be secretary of defense for the Bush–Cheney presidency. The PNAC members signing the September 2000 report included Paul D. Wolfowitz as well, as Rumsfeld’s undersecretary of defense. Wolfowitz had authored the controversial 1992 Pentagon Defense Planning Guidance, dubbed the Wolfowitz Doctrine, that called for US “preemptive” wars against any potential challenger to America’s “sole superpower hegemony.”[v]

 

NATO’s Fake Democracy Promotion

Among the more interesting little-noticed members of the 2000 PNAC was Vin Weber. Weber, a former Minnesota congressman, was a registered lobbyist for Lockheed Martin, then the world’s largest defense conglomerate. At the same time, Weber was also chairman of the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), the US government–financed, “fake democracy” nongovernmental organization (NGO) that was installing chosen pro-NATO regimes, o­ne after the other, in former Communist Eastern Europe.[vi]

Vin Weber, the person responsible for the NGO that ostensibly brought democracy into former Communist states, was, at the same time, a select member of the PNAC, which drafted the precise military foreign policy of not o­nly the George W. Bush–Cheney administration but also the Obama–Biden administrations. The same Vin Weber was a paid lobbyist for the world’s largest military–industrial conglomerate, Lockheed-Martin. Little wonder that the “democracy” operations of the NED paralleled the eastern expansion of NATO and its military agenda.

That eastern expansion of NATO was a campaign politically led in Washington by Bruce P. Jackson, from 1993 to 2002, a vice president for strategy and planning at Lockheed Martin Corporation, the same company that Vin Weber, NED “democracy promoter” was a paid lobbyist for. Further, Weber and Jackson both sat o­n the board of the PNAC, the think tank devising the military strategy of the Bush–Cheney presidency. Bruce Jackson also founded something he named the US Committee o­n NATO in 1996 to promote the expansion of the North Atlantic alliance eastward. Its motto was “Strengthen America, Secure Europe, Defend Values, Expand NATO.”[vii]

As Lockheed-Martin Vice President Bruce Jackson was busy in the 1990s creating o­ne after another well-funded newspaper front group to promote the NATO and US military–industrial complex agenda for arms buildup. He did that despite the fact that in the 1990s, the former states of the Soviet Union, especially the Russian Federation, were in economic ruin and in no way a threat to NATO.

A cofounder with Lockheed-Martin’s Bruce Jackson of these lobbyist newspaper organizations from the US Committee o­n NATO was someone named Julie Finley. In 2003, as NATO’s eastward expansion was going forward with dramatic speed, Finley and Jackson together created a successor to the no-longer-needed US Committee o­n NATO, calling itself the Project for Transitional Democracies, where Jackson was president and Finley chairman of the board. At the same time Finley sat o­n the Project for Transitional Democracies board, she was a board member and treasurer of Vin Weber’s NED.[viii] It was a tight-knit circle promoting NATO side by side with Washington’s NGO-led fake democracy in former Communist Eastern Europe.

 

NATO Moves East

By 1999, Washington was ready to begin its provocative expansion of NATO eastward, violating those solemn assurances given the Soviet leader Gorbachev in 1990. After almost a decade of Yeltsin’s looting of Russia’s economy, as well as his nonpayment of pensions and other social benefits, the Russian Federation could do little to stop NATO other than protest feebly.

To call the policy reaction of the Yeltsin government to the US-led expansion of NATO to former communist countries of Eastern Europe “confused” would be to put it mildly. In the 1990s, Moscow had shown clear willingness to cooperate with Washington in mutual nuclear arms reduction.

On January 3, 1993, just days before leaving the presidency to incoming President Bill Clinton, US President George H. W. Bush went to Moscow, where he and Boris Yeltsin signed the Treaty o­n Further Reduction and Limitation of Strategic Offensive Arms, popularly called START II. A skeptical Russian Duma refused to ratify Start II. That same year, Washington proposed a Partnership for Peace (PfP) as a loose diplomatic dialogue initiative and invited Russia to join, which Russia did.

After Washington money and support of the US-tied Russian oligarchs had secured Yeltsin’s reelection in 1996, Washington brazenly escalated its moves to formally expand NATO, secure in the conviction the corrupt Yeltsin would not react. In 1999, Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic joined the NATO organization over the feeble protests of the Yeltsin regime.

For reasons of their financial dependency o­n US and Western banks and financiers, the circle around Yeltsin tended to favor Washington o­n most issues. However, the NATO issue was extremely unpopular among the vast majority of Russians, who, rightly, saw no reason a decade after the end of the Soviet Union for NATO to exist at all, let alone move eastward in the direction of Russia’s borders.

Yeltsin himself, at different times, made contradictory statements o­n the NATO expansion. At o­ne point, he called the NATO expansion “a strategic mistake.” Later, he tried to minimize the danger for Russian security noting, falsely, “the negative consequences of NATO’s enlargement will be reduced to the minimum through the NATO-Russia deal.”[ix]

For Washington and the US military–industrial complex, it was a huge strategic victory. The eastward expansion of NATO allowed the US to dominate and effectively sabotage the EU’s attempts to create an independent-from-NATO EU defense pillar, partly by locking the former communist states of Eastern Europe into long-term US military equipment purchases as part of NATO, in effect making them US client states.

 

US Missile “Defense”

NATO’s expansion into the countries of the former communist Warsaw Pact in Eastern Europe was by no means the o­nly Washington move that raised alarm bells in Moscow. In December 2000, just weeks after the admission of Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic into NATO and just days before Donald Rumsfeld became Secretary of Defense, the Pentagon released a Strategy Report for Europe and NATO. The report contained a section o­n “Theater Missile Defense.” As an official US Defense Department policy paper, it was worth careful study. It stated:

 

Theater Missile Defense: As part of broader efforts to enhance the security of the United States, Allied and coalition forces against ballistic missile strikes and to complement our counter-proliferation strategy, the United States is pursuing opportunities for TMD (Theater Missile Defense) cooperation with NATO Partners. The objectives of United States cooperative efforts are to provide effective missile defense for coalition forces...against short to medium range missiles. In its Strategic Concept, NATO reaffirmed the risk posed by the proliferation of NBC (Nuclear, Biological, Chemical) weapons and ballistic missiles, and the Alliance reached general agreement o­n the framework for addressing these threats. As part of NATO’s DCI, Allies agreed to develop Alliance forces that can respond with active and passive defenses from NBC attack. Allies further agreed that TMD is necessary for NATO’s deployed forces.[x]

 

Two years earlier Rumsfeld, a former Secretary of Defense and NATO Ambassador, had headed a presidential commission to look into the desirability of reinvigorating the moribund US missile defense effort that had been largely set aside after the collapse of the Soviet nuclear threat. The Rumsfeld Commission vigorously advocated a revived US missile defense program.

Missile defense projects first emerged in the 1980s, when President Ronald Reagan proposed developing systems of satellites in space, as well as radar bases as listening stations, and interceptor missiles around the globe, all designed to monitor and shoot down hostile nuclear missiles before they hit their intended targets.

The Reagan program was dubbed “Star Wars” by its critics as science-fiction fantasy, but the Pentagon had officially spent more than $130 billion o­n developing the system after 1983. President George W. Bush, beginning in 2002, increased that amount significantly to $11 billion a year. That was double the amount allocated during the Clinton years. And another $53 billion for the following five years was budgeted, not even counting the untold billions which were being diverted to missile defense under secret and unaudited Pentagon “black box” budgets.

With even a primitive missile defense shield, the US could theoretically attack Russian missile silos and submarine fleets with far less fear of effective retaliation; the few remaining Russian nuclear missiles would be unable to launch a sufficiently destructive response. That, at least, was the idea behind US missile defense. It was not defensive in any way, rather extraordinarily offensive.

 

Upturning MAD

During the Cold War, the ability of both sides—the Warsaw Pact and NATO—to mutually annihilate o­ne another had led to a nuclear stalemate dubbed by military strategists as MAD—mutually assured destruction. It was scary but, in a bizarre sense, more stable than what would come later with a unilateral US pursuit of nuclear primacy. MAD was based o­n the prospect of mutual nuclear annihilation with no decisive advantage for either side; it led to a world in which nuclear war had been “unthinkable.”

Now, after 2000 and the collapse of the threat from the Soviet Union and Warsaw Pact, the US was pursuing the possibility of nuclear war as thinkable. That was really and truly “mad,” as in insane. The first nation with a nuclear missile “defense” (NMD) shield would de facto have “first strike ability.” Quite correctly, Lt. Colonel Bowman, who had himself been director of the US Air Force Missile Defense Program during the Reagan era, called missile defense “the missing link to a First Strike.”[xi]

For the time being, at the beginning of the Bush–Cheney administration, little was discussed about Rumsfeld’s December 2000 defense policy document proposing a new US ballistic missile defense effort. Moscow watched nervously.

 However, in o­ne of its first official moves, in December 2001, just three months after the September 11 World Trade Center and Pentagon attacks, the Bush–Cheney administration announced its decision to unilaterally withdraw from the US-Russian Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty.

On June 13, 2002, as the original treaty was up for renewal, the Bush–Cheney administration let it expire to the alarm of Moscow, who rightly asked what Washington now planned. Washington was now free to aggressively pursue missile defense. In his official statement announcing the US withdrawal from the ABM Treaty, President George W. Bush lied and claimed it was necessary after the September 11, 2001, terror attacks. Back then, anything and everything was justified as part of the Washington War o­n Terror.[xii]

That ABM Treaty had been signed by Washington and the Soviet Union in 1972 to slow the nuclear arms race. The ABM Treaty barred both powers from deploying national defenses against long-range ballistic missiles and from building the foundation for such a defense. Washington was preparing to launch an incredibly aggressive missile defense shield aimed directly at Russia. The ABM Treaty had to go.

The withdrawal from the ABM Treaty was a critical step if Washington seriously planned to implement a working global network of “missile defense” capability as the key to US nuclear primacy. Moscow protested that, contrary to assurances from Washington that it was aimed at Iran, North Korea, or “rogue terrorists,” the o­nly serious target with remaining nuclear long-range missile delivery capability was the Russian Federation. It was to be several more years before it became clear how aggressive Washington’s missile defense deployments would be.

 

 

By 2002, Washington was ready to bring NATO to the borders of Russia in Ukraine and Georgia.

 

Then, in November 2002, half a year after US revocation of the US–Russia ABM Treaty, Washington and NATO invited Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Slovakia, and Slovenia to begin formal NATO membership talks, which were culminated in June 2004 at the Istanbul NATO Summit. More than a few people inside the Kremlin, by then under the presidency of Vladimir Putin, were becoming alarmed at possible Washington motives.

 

Rumsfeld’s CONPLAN 8022

In that same month, June 2004, US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld approved a “top secret” order for US Armed Forces to implement something called CONPLAN 8022, “which provides the president a prompt, global strike capability.”[xiii]

The term “CONPLAN” was Pentagon shorthand for contingency plan. What “contingencies” were Pentagon planners preparing for? A preemptive conventional strike against tiny North Korea or even Iran? Or a full-force preemptive nuclear assault o­n the last formidable nuclear power not under the thumb of US full-spectrum dominance—Russia?

The two words “global strike” were notable. It was Pentagon-speak for a specific preemptive US military attack that, for the first time since the earliest Cold War days, included a nuclear option. This was directly counter to the traditional US military notion of nuclear weapons being used o­nly in defense to deter attack.[xiv]

CONPLAN 8022 was unlike traditional Pentagon war plans that had been essentially defensive.Like the aggressive preemptive 2002 Bush Doctrine, CONPLAN 8022 was purely offensive. It could be triggered by the mere “perception” of an imminent threat and be carried out by presidential order without consulting Congress or obtaining its constitutionally required authorization for war. The constitutional “checks and balances” which the US founding fathers had taken such care to embed into the Constitution were gone. The president, o­n his own, could detonate nuclear war preemptively.

Lt. Gen. Bruce Carlson, commander of the 8th Air Force, boasted to the press that his fleet of B-2 and B-52 bombers were ready to carry out such missions: “We’re now at the point where we are essentially o­n alert. We have the capacity to plan and execute global strikes.” He added the disturbing remark that his bombers, including nuclear, could execute an attack “in half a day or less.”[xv]

“Global Strike” was the new military term of art to describe a specific preemptive attack. Washington Post military specialist William Arkin remarked, “When military officials refer to global strike, they stress its conventional elements. Surprisingly, however, global strike also includes a nuclear option, which runs counter to traditional US notions about the defensive role of nuclear weapons.”[xvi] Most Americans were blissfully ignorant of what their mad politicians and military were playing with.

The Russian air defense was clearly aware of CONPLAN 8022 and hardly delighted. Again, recovering from the economic devastation of the Yeltsin decade of the 1990s, there was little that Russia under the first term of President Vladimir Putin could do other than hope for the best. In 2003 to 2004, Russia was in no way able to match Washington in a new arms race.

Then Washington made a provocation atop all else that Moscow could not digest. For the first time since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, Washington moved to install pro-Washington and pro-NATO vassal regimes in the Republic of Georgia and in Ukraine, two former parts of the Soviet Union before 1991 and two states directly at the borders of the Russian Federation.

To create such a coup o­n Moscow’s doorstep, Washington deployed the full resources of its fake democracy apparatus so successful in former Yugoslavia in ousting Slobodan Milošević. This time, Washington and their PR consultants decided to combine the logos of a clenched fist together with a color theme. In Georgia, the chosen color was rose, and in the Ukraine, it was orange—the Rose Revolution and the Orange Revolution, as the Western mainstream media called the US regime-change fake-democracy operations. Moscow called both color revolutions a catastrophe for future Russian security.

 

Endnotes:

[i] Richard C. Cook, “Militarization and The Moon-Mars Program: Another Wrong Turn in Space?,” Global Research, January 22, 2007. www.globalresearch.ca.

[ii] Joshua R. Itzkowitz Shifrinson, Russia’s got a point: The US broke a NATO promise, Los Angeles Times, May 30, 2016, http://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-shifrinson-russia-us-nato-deal—20160530-snap-story.html. Washington officials later denied any such assurance was given to Moscow. However, former Ambassador to the Soviet Union Jack Matlock noted in 1995: “We gave categorical assurances to Gorbachev back when the Soviet Union existed that if a united Germany was able to stay in NATO, NATO would not be moved eastward.” Quoted in Philip Zelikow, “NATO Expansion Wasn’t Ruled Out,” New York Times, August 10, 1995, http://www.nytimes.com/1995/08/10/opinion/10iht-edzel.t.html.

[iii] Center for Media and Democracy, Project for the New American Century, Source Watch, http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Project_for_the_New_American_Century.

[iv] Ibid.

[v] Anatol Lieven, The Spectre of Wolfowitz, American Review, http://americanreviewmag.com/opinions/The-spectre-of-Wolfowitz.

[vi] Ibid.

[vii] Right Web, Finley, Julie, February 8, 2016, http://rightweb.irc-online.org/profile/finley_julie/

[viii] Ibid.

[ix] O.N. Mehrotra, Senior Fellow, NATO Eastward Expansion and Russian Security, Institute for Defence Studies and Analyses (IDSA), https://www.idsa-india.org/an-nov8-8.html

[x] United States Department of Defense, Strategy Report for Europe and NATO Excerpt o­n

Ballistic Missile Defenses, December 1, 2000. Washington, D.C.

[xi] Robert Bowman, Lt. Colonel, US Air Force (Ret.), Statement made during a telephone interview with the author, March 15, 2009.

[xii] Wade Boese, US Withdraws From ABM Treaty; Global Response Muted, Arms Control Association, July/August 2002, https://www.armscontrol.org/act/2002_07-08/abmjul_aug02.

[xiii] Hans M Kristensen, Global Strike: A Chronology of the Pentagon’s New Offensive Strike Plan, Federation of American Scientists, Washington, D.C., March 2006, accessed in http://www.fas.org/ssp/docs/GlobalStrikeReport.pdf.

[xiv] William Arkin, Not Just A Last Resort?, May 15, 2005, Washington Post,

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/05/14/AR2005051400071_3.html.

[xv] Ibid.

[xvi] Ibid.

 

 



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