{"id":3550,"date":"2009-10-12T21:57:39","date_gmt":"2009-10-13T01:57:39","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/?p=3550"},"modified":"2009-10-13T07:36:43","modified_gmt":"2009-10-13T11:36:43","slug":"american-dominance-au-cheney","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/2009\/10\/12\/american-dominance-au-cheney\/","title":{"rendered":"AMERICAN DOMINANCE au Cheney…"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
After Liz Cheney made her incredible comment yesterday, the term she that just rolled off her lips, American dominance<\/font><\/strong>, has been percolating around in my mind. She said it like it was something in one of our founding documents, or engraved on some Washington monument – like we all knew what she was talking about. She said it like it was the word Freedom<\/font><\/strong>, or maybe Liberty<\/font><\/strong>. I ran across this old article that summarized things pretty well: <\/div>\n
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Dark Passage: PNAC’s Blueprint for Empire<\/a><\/strong>
(Original version published Sept. 20, 2002 in the Moscow Times. This is the expanded version from the book, Empire Burlesque.)<\/em><\/sup>
March 27, 2005<\/div>\n

The Unipolar Moment:<\/strong> Not surprisingly, the roots of PNAC go back to the first Bush Administration. In 1992, then-Defense Secretary Dick Cheney<\/strong> asked two of his top aides, Paul Wolfowitz<\/strong> [now assistant secretary of Defense] and Lewis Libby<\/strong> [now Cheney’s chief of staff)] to draw up a "Defense Guidance Plan" to shape American strategy in the post-Cold War world. They produced an aggressive, ambitious document calling for the unilateral use of American military might to "discourage advanced industrial nations from challenging our leadership or even aspiring to a larger regional or global role." Military intervention would be "a constant fixture" of what Wolfowitz and Libby called a "new order" which the United States – not the United Nations – would "establish and protect."<\/p>\n

The goal was to seize the opportunity offered by the collapse of the Soviet Union – which left the United States without a serious international rival – and extend this "unipolar moment" of American dominance for decades to come; indeed, into a "New American Century."<\/p>\n

The report was leaked in the midst of the 1992 presidential campaign, sparking controversy over its "imperial ambitions," and was publicly disowned by President George H.W. Bush. After the Bush team was defeated by Bill Clinton, a lame-duck Cheney finally issued a watered-down version of the paper as official policy. The Clinton Administration then scrapped it upon taking office.<\/p>\n

But the unipolar vision of American dominance<\/font><\/strong> was not forgotten. During the 1990s, it was refined and expanded in a number of conservative think tanks – the American Enterprise Institute [AEI] the Hudson Institute, the Center for Security Policy and others – whose memberships often overlapped. And now that they were out of office, the advocates of dominance could speak more freely.<\/p>\n

One former member of Cheney’s Defense Department team, Zalmay Khalilzad<\/strong> [now Bush’s special emissary to Afghanistan], wrote openly that the U.S. must "be willing to use force" to express its "global leadership" and preclude the rise of potential rivals. Others, such as former Reagan official and AEI stalwart Richard Perle [now head of the Pentagon’s Defense Policy Board] and Douglas Feith [now assistant secretary of Defense], worked with Israel’s Likud Party, drawing up plans calling for American-led "regime change" efforts in Iraq, Syria, Iran and Saudi Arabia.<\/p>\n

Finally, in 1997, Project for the New American Century was formed as a focal point for disseminating the dominance ideal. It was a "big tent" of Great Power adherents: Beltway players like Cheney<\/strong>, Rumsfeld<\/strong>, Wolfowitz<\/strong>, former Vice President Dan Quayle<\/strong>, and former Reagan education secretary turned public scold, William Bennett; Christian "social conservatives" like Gary Bauer<\/strong>; and the so-called "neoconservatives" [often former Democrats whose staunch anti-communism had led them to the Reagan Right], including Elliot Abrams<\/strong>, who’d been convicted of lying to Congress in the Iran-Contra scandal but was pardoned by George Bush Sr. [and now serves on the White House director of Middle East policy]. Other notable figures joining PNAC included the Afghan-born Khalilzad<\/strong>, publisher and presidential candidate Steve Forbes<\/strong>, and Jeb Bush<\/strong>, younger brother of the president-to-be.<\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n
American dominance<\/font><\/strong> was an idea, one that apparently originated with Dick Cheney himself. He assigned Paul Wolfowitz and Scooter Libby to write it up. Read this part again:<\/div>\n