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F. William Engdahl
INTRODUCTION
Less than two decades ago have passed since than the collapse of the
Soviet Union and the end of a decades-long polarized world of two opposing
military superpowers. In late 1989 Communist East Germany, the German
Democratic Republic as it was known, began to break the barriers of Soviet
control and by November of that year the much-hated Berlin Wall was being
pulled down stone-by-stone. People danced on the wall in celebration of what
they believed would be a new freedom, a paradise of the 'American Way of Life'.
The collapse of the Soviet Union was inevitable by the end of the
1980's.The economy had been literally bled to the bone in order to feed an
endless arms race with its arch rival and Cold War opponent, the United States.
By late 1989 the Soviet leadership was pragmatic enough to scrap the last
vestiges of Marxist ideology and raise the white flag of surrender. 'Free
market capitalism' had won over 'state-run socialism.'
The collapse of the Soviet Union brought jubilation everywhere, with the
exception of the White House where, initially, President George H. W. Bush
reacted with panic. Perhaps he was unsure how the United States would continue
to justify its huge arms spending and its massive intelligence apparatus -
ranging from the CIA to the NSA to the Defense Intelligence Agency and beyond -
without a Soviet foe. George H. W. Bush was a product and a sharper of the Cold
War National Security State. His world was one of 'enemy image', espionage, and
secrecy, where people often sidestepped the Us Constitution when 'national
security’ was involved. In its own peculiar way it was a state within the
state, a world every bit as centrally run and controlled as the Soviet Union
had been, only with private multinational defense and energy conglomerates and
their organizations of coordination in place of the Soviet Politburo. Its
military contracts linked every part of the economy of the United States to the
future of that permanent war machine.
For those segments of the US establishment whose power had grown
exponentially through the expansion of the post World War II national security
state, the end of the Cold War meant the loss of their reason for existing.
As the sole hegemonic power remaining after the collapse of the Soviet
Union, the United States was faced with two possible ways of dealing with the
new Russian geopolitical reality.
It could have cautiously but clearly signaled the opening of a new era
of political and economic cooperation with its shattered and economically
devastated former Cold War foe.
The West, led by the United States, might have encouraged mutual
de-escalation of the Cold War nuclear balance of terror and the conversion of
industry - West as well as East - into civilian enterprises to rebuild civilian
infrastracture and repair of impoverished cities.
The United States had the option of gradually dismantling NATO just as
Russia had dissolved the Warsaw Pact, and furthering a climate of mutual
economic cooperation that could turn Eurasia into one of the world's most prosperous
and thriving economic zones.
Yet Washington chose another path to deal with the end of the Cold War.
The path could be understood only from the inner logic of its global agenda - a
geopolitical agenda. The sole remaining Superpower chose stealth, deception,
lies and wars to attempt to control the Eurasian Heartland - its only potential
rival as an economic region - by military force.
Kept secret from most Americans, by George H. W. Bush, and by his friend
and de facto protégé, Democratic President Bill Clinton, was the reality that
for the faction that controlled the Pentagon - the military defense industry,
its many sub-contractors, and the giant oil and oil services companies such as
Halliburton - the Cold War never ended.
The 'new' Cold War assumed various disguises and deceptive tactics until
September 11, 2001. Those events empowered an American President to declare
permanent war against an enemy who was everywhere and nowhere, who allegedly
threatened the American way of life justifying laws that destroyed that way of
life in the name of the new worldwide War on Terror. To put it crassly, Osama
bin Laden was the answer to a Pentagon prayer in September 2001.
What few were aware of, largely because their responsable national media
refused to tell them, was that since the fall of the Berlin Wall in November
1989, the Pentagon had been pursuing, step-by-careful-step, a military strategy
for domination of the entire planet, a goal no earlier great power had ever
achieved, thought may had tried. It was called by the Pentagon, "Full
Spectrum Dominance" and as its name implied, its agenda was to control
everything everywhere including the high seas, land, air, space and even outer
space and cyberspace.
That agenda had been pursued over decades on a much lower scale with
CIA-backed coups in strategic countries such as Iran, Guatemala, Brazil,
Vietnam, Ghana, the Belgian Congo. Now the end of a counter-vailing Superpower,
the Soviet Union, meant the goal could be pursued effectively unopposed.
As far back as 1939 a small elite circle of specialists has been
convened under highest secrecy by a private foreign policy organization, the
new York Council on Foreign Relations. With generous funding from the
Rockefeller Foundation, the group set out to map the details of a post war
world. In their view, a new world war was imminent and out of its ashes only
one country would emerge victorious - The United States.
What was the real agenda of the relentless Pentagon wars? Was it, as
some suggested, a strategy to control major oil reserves in an era of future
scarcity? Or was there a far different, more grandiose, agenda behind the US
strategy since the end of the Cold War?
The litmus test as to whether the aggressive military agenda of the two
Bush administrations was an extreme aberration of core American foreign
military policy, or on the contrary, at the very heart of its long-term agenda,
was the Presidency of Barack Obama.
The initial indications were not optimistic for those hoping for the
much-touted change. As President, Obama selected a long-time Bush family
intimate, former CIA Director and Bush Secretary of Defense, Robert GAtes, to
run the Pentagon. He choose senior career military people as head of the National Security Council
and Director of National Intelligence, and his first act as President was to
announce an increase troop commitment to Afghanistan.
F. William Engdahl
– Abril, 2009
Next:
CHAPTER ONE
A War in Georgia – Putin Drops a Bomb
Guns of August An One of Those Funny
Numbers
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