The Pax Americana and Total War

"This is total war. We are fighting a variety of enemies. There are lots of them out there . . . If we just let our vision of the world go forth, and we embrace it entirely, and we don't try to piece together clever diplomacy but just wage a total war, our children will sing great songs about us years from now." Richard Pearle

From The Colder War

by John Pilger
29 January 2002
Daily Mirror

Last week, the US government announced that it was building the biggest-ever war machine. Military spending will rise to $379billion, of which $50billion will pay for its "war on terrorism".

There will be special funding for new, refined weapons of mass slaughter and for "military operations" -- invasions of other countries.

Of all the extraordinary news since September 11, this is the most alarming. It is time to break our silence.

That is to say, it is time for other governments to break their silence, especially the Blair government, whose complicity in the American rampage in Afghanistan has not denied its understanding of the Bush administration's true plans and ambitions.

The recent statements of British Ministers about the "vindication" of the "outstanding success" in Afghanistan would be comical if the price of their "success" had not been paid with the lives of more than 5,000 innocent Afghani civilians and the failure to catch Osama bin Laden and anyone else of importance in the al-Qaeda network.

The Pentagon's release of deliberately provocative pictures of prisoners at Camp X-Ray on Cuba was meant to conceal this failure from the American public, who are being conditioned, along with the rest of us, to accept a permanent war footing similar to the paranoia that sustained and prolonged the Cold War.

The threat of "terrorism", some of it real, most of it invented, is the new Red Scare.

The parallels are striking.

In America in the 1950s, the Red Scare was used to justify the growth of war industries, the suspension of democratic rights and the silencing of dissenters.

That is happening now.

Above all, the American industrial-complex has a new enemy with which to justify its gargantuan appetite for public resources -- the new military budget is enough to end all primary causes of poverty in the world.

Donald Rumsfeld, the Defence Secretary, says he has told the Pentagon to "think the unthinkable".

Vice President Dick Cheney, the voice of Bush, has said the US is considering military or other action against "40 to 50 countries" and warns that the new war may last 50 years or more.

A Bush adviser, Richard Perle, explained. "(There will be) no stages," he said.

"This is total war. We are fighting a variety of enemies. There are lots of them out there . . . If we just let our vision of the world go forth, and we embrace it entirely, and we don't try to piece together clever diplomacy but just wage a total war, our children will sing great songs about us years from now."

Sectret Document Leaked to New York Times

U.S. Strategy Plan Calls for Insuring No Rivals Develop
A One-Superpower World
By Patrick E. Tyler
Special to The New York Times

The Project for the New American Century Publishes a report titled:
Rebuilding America's Defenses: Strategy, Forces and Resources For a New Century,"