‘This
is garbage from right-wing
think-tanks stuffed with
chicken-hawks — men who have
never seen the horror of war
but are in love with the idea
of war.
— Tom Dalyell, British Labour
Member of Parliament

[Scottish
Sunday
Herald]

Bush planned Iraq ‘regime change’ before becoming President

By Neil Mackay

A SECRET blueprint for
US global domination reveals that
President Bush and his cabinet were planning a premeditated attack on Iraq to secure ‘regime change’ even before he took power in January 2001.

The blueprint, uncovered by the
Sunday Herald, for the creation of a ‘global Pax Americana’ was drawn up for
Dick Cheney (now vice- president),
Donald Rumsfeld (defence secretary), Paul Wolfowitz
(Rumsfeld’s deputy), George W
Bush’s younger brother Jeb and
Lewis Libby (Cheney’s chief of staff).

The document, entitled Rebuilding
America’s Defences: Strategies, Forces And
Resources For A New Century, was written in September 2000 by the neo-conservative think-tank Project for the New American
Century (PNAC).

The plan shows Bush’s cabinet intended to take military control of the Gulf region whether or not Saddam
Hussein was in power. It says: ‘The
United States has for decades sought to play a more permanent role in Gulf regional security. 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.’

The PNAC document supports a ‘blueprint for maintaining global US pre-eminence, precluding the rise of a great power rival, and shaping the international security order in line with American principles and interests’.

This ‘American grand strategy’ must be advanced for ‘as far into the future as possible’, the report says. It also calls for the US to ‘fight and decisively win multiple, simultaneous major theatre wars’ as a ‘core mission’.

The report describes American armed forces abroad as ‘the cavalry on the new
American frontier’. The PNAC blueprint supports an earlier document written by
Wolfowitz and Libby that said the US must
‘discourage advanced industrial nations from challenging our leadership or even aspiring to a larger regional or global role’.

The PNAC report also:

  • refers to key allies such as the UK
    as ‘the most effective and efficient
    means of exercising American global
    leadership’;
  • describes peace-keeping missions as
    ‘demanding American political
    leadership rather than that of the
    United Nations’;
  • reveals worries in the
    administration that Europe could rival
    the USA;
  • says ‘even should Saddam pass from
    the scene’ bases in Saudi Arabia and
    Kuwait will remain permanently —
    despite domestic opposition in the Gulf
    regimes to

    the stationing of US troops
    — as ‘Iran may well prove as large a
    threat to US interests as Iraq
    has’;

  • spotlights China for ‘regime
    change’ saying ‘it is time to increase
    the presence of American forces in
    southeast Asia’.

    This, it says, may
    lead to ‘American and allied power
    providing the spur to the process of
    democratisation in China’;

  • calls for the creation of ‘ US Space
    Forces’, to dominate space, and the
    total control of cyberspace to prevent
    ‘enemies’ using the internet against
    the US;
  • hints that, despite threatening war
    against Iraq for developing weapons of
    mass destruction, the US may consider
    developing biological weapons — which
    the nation has banned — in decades to
    come.

    It says: ‘New methods of attack
    — electronic, ‘non-lethal’, biological
    — will be more widely available …
    combat likely will take place in new
    dimensions, in space, cyberspace, and
    perhaps the world of microbes …
    advanced forms of biological warfare
    that can ‘target’ specific genotypes
    may transform biological warfare from
    the realm of terror to a politically
    useful tool’;

  • and pinpoints North Korea, Libya,
    Syria and Iran as dangerous regimes and
    says their existence justifies

    the
    creation of a ‘world-wide
    command-and-control system’.

Tam Dalyell, the Labour MP, father of the House of Commons and one of the leading rebel voices against war with
Iraq, said:

‘This is garbage from
right-wing think-tanks stuffed with
chicken-hawks — men who have never
seen the horror of war but are in love
with the idea of war. Men like Cheney,
who were draft-dodgers in the Vietnam
war.

‘This is a blueprint for US world domination — a new world order of their making. These are the thought processes of fantasist Americans who want to control the world. I am appalled that a British Labour Prime
Minister should have got into bed with a crew which has this moral standing”.