From Balance of Terror to Unilateral Terror

From Balance of Terror to Unilateral Terror on the Grand Chessboard!

Zahir Ebrahim

April 26, 2008.

© Project HumanbeingsfirstTM. Permission granted to use freely as per copyright notice.


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Douglas J. Feith, Undersecretary of Defense for Policy, in his Hearing before the Senate Armed Services Committee on February 14, 2002 in the aftermath of 911, explaining the rationale for the Department of Defence 2002 Nuclear Posture Review, summarized the overarching reasons for “new thinking” by the United States as the unchallenged sole superpower in the following words:

'A half a century ago, in the midst of the Cold War, Prime Minister Winston Churchill noted in the House of Commons the “sublime irony” that in the nuclear age, “safety will be the sturdy child of terror and survival the twin brother of annihilation.” The Cold War is long over and new approaches to defense are overdue. As President Bush has stated, “We are no longer divided into armed camps, locked in a careful balance of terror.…Our times call for new thinking.” '

In essence, and as has been empirically evident over the past seven years, what Douglas Feith was arguing before Congress in the euphemistically disguised verbiage of “new thinking”, was that the “careful balance of terror” must now be replaced by unfettered and uninhibited unilateral terror! As his intellectual mentor Zbigniew Brzezinski had previously argued during the Clinton era in 1997, the goals for American primacy and its geostrategic imperatives had to be to “perpetuate America's own dominant position for at least a generation and preferably longer” such that “no Eurasian challenger emerges, capable of dominating Eurasia and thus also challenging America”.

It was the first time in the history of civilization that America had become “the first, only, and last truly global superpower”. It was deemed a terrible waste of hegemonic bank balance to not capitalize on it while there was still time to do so, before others eventually caught up to America's lead in about a generation and forced another Détente.

The Project for the New American Century (PNAC), that had seeded the majority of Bush Administration officials beginning in 2000 – from Vice President to Secretary of Defence to a majority of Under Secretaries – too had argued in its report on Rebuilding America's Defences that seeking “full spectrum dominance” to maintain “America's preeminence” and “American Peace” in the world by forcing other nations to accept “America's unique role in preserving and extending an international order friendly to our security, our prosperity, and our principles”, was a natural American prerogative as per the Brzezinski truism “Hegemony is as old as mankind”.

The only impediment to the realization of this “new thinking”, and the enormous increase in the expenditure needed to support it, as explained by Zbigniew Brzezinski, was the darn “populist democracy”. Fighting in far-away lands is quite “uncongenial to democratic instincts” as the “economic self-denial (that is defense spending), and the human sacrifice (casualties even among professional soldiers) required in the effort” makes “democracy ... inimical to imperial mobilization.”

Therefore, a commensurate lifetime of “War on Terrorism” was architected against a well formulated never-ending enemy – the “islamofascists” – in a Machiavellianly seeded doctrine of the “Clash of Civilizations”. Bernard Lewis had constructed that bit of magic in Foreign Affairs magazine in 1990. In the aftermath of 9/11/2001, it became the self-fulfilling policy calculus of the overtly exuded foreign policy of the United States, and was continually replenished by more priceless doctrinal state-craft from the mighty pen of Bernard Lewis, like Crisis of Islam – Holy War and Unholy Terror!

In order to get the ball rolling ab initio, to both seed the “military transformation” necessary to capitalize on America being “the first, only, and last truly global superpower”, and to embark on the “American peace” mission that called for “new thinking” of forcing other nations to accept “America's unique role in preserving and extending an international order friendly to our security”, the “populist democracy” needed a shockingly “catastrophic and catalyzing event – like a new Pearl Harbor”.

Well, 911 was that “new Pearl Harbor”!

Whether 19 “islamofascist” jihadis on their flying carpets controlled by a mind-melding yoda master sitting on his bare rump in a cave in the Hindu-Kush mountains did it, or whether it was an expertly orchestrated precision controlled demolition, is a moot point. For it was an 'operation canned goods' all the way on the proverbial screen of Plato's Myth of the Cave!

But that in itself wasn't enough for the Prisoners of the Cave. Because 911 could have just as easily been dealt with as a great crime, and not cause célèbre for massive invasion of other nations. The crime scene could have been secured and a forensic analysis of the evidence performed to understand how did three tall towers miraculously collapse within the span of a few hours in a single day into exactly their own footprints at almost free-fall speed. Zbigniew Brzezinski had astutely observed of this “populist democracy”, that:

“as America becomes an increasingly multicultural society, it may find it more difficult to fashion a consensus on foreign policy issues, except in the circumstance of a truly massive and widely perceived direct external threat. .... More generally, cultural change in America may also be uncongenial to the sustained exercise abroad of genuinely imperial power. That exercise requires a high degree of doctrinal motivation, intellectual commitment, and patriotic gratification.”

Yes indeed, along with 911, the secret sauce to the recipe, so to speak, was, and still continues to be, “doctrinal motivation, intellectual commitment, and patriotic gratification”!

The United States public had to be so dexterously primed with the multi-faceted mantras crafted of the “sudden threat or challenge to the public's sense of domestic well-being”, that today, its successes can be measured all the way to several Nobel Prizes in Profound Political Machinations (PPM – if such an accolade for hegemonic conquest was to be split off from the Nobel Peace Prize).

The latest evidence for such a prize accumulating to the Bush Administration in spades is in the public survey by Gallup Poll released on March 31, 2008, which states: “Iran topped the list, with 25 percent naming it when asked which country is the greatest U.S. enemy,”. And most Americans, the vast majority, and certainly most of the 25 percent in the above survey, have likely never met an Iranian person, or anyone from any of the exotic regions from where the ubiquitous boogiemen are being fashioned!

As already forensically dismantled in Project Humanbeingsfirst's report: 'Bin Laden': Key enabler of “imperial mobilization” ( http://tinyurl.com/5akqf4), its conclusions unfortunately bear repeating again and again as in these times of Orwellian state-craft, even blatantly obvious truths need to be rehearsed explicitly for the gullible “populist democracy” brain washed into “United We Stand”:

This criminal priming of the “populist democracy” now naturally enables “the first, only, and last truly global superpower” to be fully “autocratic abroad” in its unlimited “capacity for military intimidation”. Please note how Brzezinski concludes the aspirations of the truly global superpower:

“Geostrategic success in that cause would represent a fitting legacy of America's role as the first, only, and last truly global superpower.”

And it is precisely in that overarching “Geostrategic ... cause”, that Iran and Pakistan are today imminently staged on the nuclear chopping block to seed the “Geostrategic success”, while some American city is made expendable to create the new “catalyzing event” for “imperial mobilization” that “will make Sept. 11 pale by comparison”.

All conveniently enabled by the continued Orwellian use of the fiction of 'Bin Laden' and its various surrogates including 'Al Qaeeda'. If these stick-wielding cave-dwelling antediluvians possess such awesome powers as to bring down a superpower to its knees, forcing it to spend 3.1 trillion dollars next year a majority of it on defense, and its peoples to lose all their democratic freedoms and civil liberties, then they are surely more powerful than the USSR! Or at least, a wonderful 'Ali Baba' bedtime story. I used to invent such tales while putting my kids to bed when they were younger, and in my stories, the 'Ali Baba' was a Herculean Mr. Good-deeds and Mother Teresa rolled into one – flying off to far away places on his magic carpet with his band of 40 (along with his wife and children who were, only co-incidentally, named after my own), and with his awesome powers of Superman, solving all the problems of the world. But I think the 'empire's' rendition of 'Ali Baba' is more effective for “imperial mobilization”.

And as the 'wheat' was forensically 'separated from the chaff' in Project Humanbeingsfirst's other report titled: The attack of 'Al-Qaeeda' and Pakistani 'loose nukes' ( http://tinyurl.com/47bj9u), this “imperial mobilization” was discovered to already have been defined as the “supreme international crime” at the Nuremberg Military Tribunals by the United States' own Chief Prosecutor Justice Robert Jackson. A crime so stupendous and monumental “differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole”, that the Nazi war machine was held responsible for “all the evil that follows” in the aftermath of the first primal aggression! The Nazis had invaded Poland on the heels of their own Operation Canned Goods too, in the pretext of 'self-defense' against 'terrorists'!

And that, as they say, is all there is to this “new thinking”. It isn't exactly clear why the Americans and the world appear so confused about something so blatantly obvious.

Indeed, this unilateral terror ideology for “full spectrum dominance” was even aptly summed up by Vladimir Putin, President of Russia, in these laconic but penetrating words in 2007:

“what is a unipolar world? However one might embellish this term, at the end of the day it refers to one type of situation, namely one centre of authority, one centre of force, one centre of decision-making. It is world in which there is one master, one sovereign. And at the end of the day this is pernicious not only for all those within this system, but also for the sovereign itself because it destroys itself from within.”

Yes sir, give me the “sublime irony” of being “locked in a careful balance of terror” any day!

And that, is also the only rational way out from crossing the nuclear Rubicon!

Unless Russia and China get their act together, unless Pakistan wakes up from its suicidal slumber, and they unite to safeguard the Asian portion of Eurasia in a mutual defense treaty ALA NATO, nuclear holocaust awaits the 'lesser' humanity. Perhaps this is how population reduction is ultimately planned amidst food shortages as per some secret clauses that haven't yet been declassified in NSSM 200 and NSDM 314 (or in some other undisclosed National Security Strategy calculus derivatives).

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The author, an ordinary researcher and writer on contemporary geopolitics, a minor justice activist, grew up in Pakistan, studied EECS at MIT, engineered for a while in high-tech Silicon Valley (patents here), and retired early to pursue other responsible interests. His maiden 2003 book was rejected by six publishers and can be read on the web at  http://PrisonersoftheCave.org. He may be reached at  http://Humanbeingsfirst.org.

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From Balance of Terror to Unilateral Terror on the Grand Chessboard!

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