I went through the Pentagon a week after 9/11. One of the Generals…calls me after I’d seen Rumsfeld. He said, “Sir, come in here.” He said, “Sir, we’re going to invade Iraq.” I said, “We’re going to invade Iraq!?! Why?” And he said, “Because,” he says, “I don’t know why. Really,” he said, “It doesn’t make a whole lot of sense, but,” he said, “I guess they don’t know what to do about the problem of terrorism, and if the only tool you have is a hammer, then every problem has to look like a nail.”
He said, “We don’t know what to do about terrorists, but we can take down governments. So, I guess they’re looking for a government to take down. Meanwhile we started bombing in Afghanistan.
So well, I came back to see the same General in early November [2001]. I said, “Are we still going to invade Iraq?” He said, “Yes, Sir,” he said, “but it’s worse than that.” I said, “How do you mean?” He held up this piece of paper. He said, “I just got this memo today or yesterday from the office of the Secretary of Defense upstairs. It’s a, it’s a five-year plan. We’re going to take down seven countries in five years. We’re going to start with Iraq, then Syria, Lebanon, then Libya, Somalia, Sudan, we’re going to come back and get Iran in five years.[emphasis added] I said, “Is that classified, that paper?” He said, “Yes Sir.” I said, “Well, don’t show it to me, because I want to be able to talk about it.”
That was retired-General Wesley Clark giving a speech at the University of Alabama in October 2006. The full transcript can be found here, which includes a Q&A and it makes for enlightening reading.
In other words, we’ve got an out of control militarized leadership who’ve been looking for countries to invade ever since the collapse of the USSR and the end of the fake Cold War. As Sheldon Drobny writes in “The Dark Side of the Domino Theory:”
The idea of a monolithic enemy came from NSC-68 issued in 1950. Paul Nitze was the author of this NSC statement that was the by-product of a George Kennan’s “Long Telegram” from Moscow in 1946, and the subsequent 1947 article “The Sources of Soviet Conduct” that argued that the Soviet regime was inherently expansionist and that its influence had to be “contained” in areas of vital strategic importance to the United States.
Shortly after NSC-68 became official U.S. policy, Kennan began to criticize the policies that he had seemingly helped launch. By mid-1948, he was convinced that the situation in Western Europe had improved to the point where negotiations could be initiated with Moscow. The suggestion did not resonate within the Truman administration, and Kennan’s influence was increasingly marginalized–particularly after Dean Acheson was appointed Secretary of State in 1949. As U.S. Cold War strategy assumed a more aggressive and militaristic tone, Kennan bemoaned what he called a misinterpretation of his thinking.
The CIA intelligence at the time confirmed that the Soviet Union even under Stalin was not in favor of expanding communism with the exception of its Eastern European satellite states to protect itself from another German invasion. The Truman Administration either ignored or skewed the intelligence that confirmed the Soviet position regarding world-wide expansion was a myth to help scare the American people enough to accept a buildup of the military industrial complex.
In our American History classes we were taught that there had been worries after WWII the U.S. would de-militarize as it had done after WWI and this was thought to be a weakness due to the threat of Communism, which we were scared into thinking was just on the other side of our front doors.
This rationale was proffered for the Korean and the Vietnam wars that followed in the decades immediately after. But, even in the 40s, our own intelligence determined that there was not much need for such a build up.
And there was definitely no excuse for a large military after the Soviets caved so, whoops, along come the Muslims!
For our current leaders, the thinking here is strictly military. Spend, build weapons, find someone to use the weapons on, find reasons to use the weapons on them, use the weapons on them, spend more, build more weapons, etc.
No thought of diplomacy and negotiation. And there have been plenty of times where that could’ve been done instead of a military option (just look at recent reports of Iran offering to talk with Cheney in 2003).
As Drobny says:
The regime change we need to build a peaceful Middle East is the rejection of the current leadership and military dominance that has plagued our nation for nearly 60 years. We in the U.S. have to get our own house in order to reject the insane military confrontation that has been evangelized by the Pentagon and their corporate sponsors. That will be the true test for leadership for the current Congress and the Presidential campaign of 2008.
Regime change begins at home. Are we Sparta or Athens? Let the next 12 months be a time of radical change in direction.
“Of all the enemies to public liberty, war is perhaps the most to be dreaded because it comprises and develops the germ of every other.”
~James Madison
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