Bush planned Iraq 'regime change' before becoming President By Neil Mackay
http://www.sundayherald.com/news/internationalnews/display.var.1032487.0.
bush_planned_iraq_regime_change_before_becoming_president.php
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: l refers to
key allies such as the UK as 'the most effective and efficient means of exercising American global
leadership'; l describes peace-keeping missions as 'demanding American political leadership rather than that
of the United Nations'; l reveals worries in the administration that Europe could rival the USA; l 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'; l 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'; l 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;
l 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'; l 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.' |