The Will to Power and Its Tragic Consequences for America and the World

Author: by Christopher Schaefer, Ph.D.
Issue: Special Issue - America
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Daily we are faced with grim images of road-side bombings, planned assassinations of Iraqi politicians and the killing of innocent civilians by overwhelming American firepower. How did we get into this mess, and what consequences can we draw from the disturbing pictures we see daily? This brief essay is an effort to look behind events and to chronicle the road to what Richard Falk has called the “Global Domination Project” of the present Administration.(1)

I maintain that the occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan and indeed the U.S. “war on terror” is the result of a radical long term effort on the part of political and military elites to extend American power abroad, to remake the international political order, while at the same time shaping the domestic political debate according to a neo-conservative agenda. This assertion is of course not new since observers as different as Paul Krugman and Benjamin Barber have come to similar conclusions.(2) I argue that there is a direct line of thinking and action linking the foreign policy goals of the first Bush Administration with the election of 2000, the tragic events of September 11th , and the invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq under George W. Bush. Furthermore, the costs of increased military expenditures, growing governmental deficits due to massive tax cuts, and the desire to alter Social Security and other entitlement programs constitute the domestic portion of the neo-conservative Republican agenda to remake the present political order. The groups actively supporting this shift in international and domestic politics include the Republican right, neo-conservative think tanks and groups such as the American Enterprise Institute and the Project for a New American Century, Christian Evangelicals connected to the Council for National Policy and other leaders of the Christian right. The Republicans and Democratic parties have both played into this radical takeover of U.S. politics. Meanwhile, the mainstream press, in particular the liberal press, such as the NY Times and the Washington Post, have been relatively passive observers of a process which to my mind represents the worst elements of the American shadow; aggressive self serving chauvinism dressed up in idealistic, moralistic and religious language. It is time to wake up to the dangers our Republic faces; politically, economically and spiritually for the “war on terror” will increase terrorism, risk bankrupting our nation, and will undermine the cause of democracy at home and abroad.

The Pattern of Events

The largely self willed and guided collapse and transformation of the Soviet Empire fundamentally changed the nature of international politics. From 1945 until 1989-90, the world was seen to be primarily bi-polar, witnessing a struggle for the hearts and minds of humanity between two ideologies: capitalism and communism, and between two Superpowers, the United States and the Soviet Union . A growing conventional and nuclear arms race led to a global struggle in which armed conflict occurred frequently, usually fought by proxy states, in developing areas. This ended in 1989-90 with the United States being perceived as the victor due to its superior economic and military power. The shift was so dramatic and unanticipated that many commentators thought that a time of peace was at hand, and even more that the triumph of liberal, democratic capitalist societies heralded the end of history, since the dialectic of competing ideologies had ended.(3)

Of course, nothing was further from the truth, and regional conflicts in Asia, Africa, Latin America, and the Middle East soon awoke the hopeful public to the continuing reality of “wars of liberation” and “terrorism” in its many forms.

The first Bush administration (1988-92) with Richard Cheney as Secretary of Defense and Colin Powell as head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, found itself in the enviable position of being able to project military power without risking opposition from other nuclear states. The implications of this situation were first tested by the United States during the first Iraq War, ‘Desert Storm,' in which the United States and an international military coalition defeated Saddam Hussein's large conventional army after its invasion of Kuwait .

The opportunity for the global projection of American power provided by the demise of the Soviet Union led to the articulation of new defense department planning guidelines during the first Bush Administration. These guidelines, known as Defense Planning Guidance for the 1994-1999 Fiscal Years (revised draft) Office of the Secretary of Defense 1992, and Defense Strategy for the 1990's (Office of the Secretary of Defense, 1993) were written for the Secretary of Defense, Richard Cheney, by Paul Wolfowitz, then undersecretary of defense for policy and Colin Powell, previously national security advisor for Ronald Reagan and now head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff for Bush. The documents depict a world dominated by the United States , which would project its economic and military power to maintain its super power status at all costs. The U.S. would “prevent the emergence of a new rival,” would use pre-emptive force, if necessary, and would rely more on ad hoc assemblies of allies as opposed to formal alliance structures, because it was essential that America be in position “to act independently when collective action cannot be orchestrated.”(4)

The final toned-down version of Defense Planning Guidance was released as Defense Strategy for the 1990's, just as the new Clinton Administration took office. It was then to disappear from sight, but not from the minds of Cheney, Wolfowitz and Powell who helped to see it restated by the Project for a New American Century in the late 1990's and then reformulated as Defense Planning Guidance for the 2004-09 Fiscal Years in 2002 by the second Bush administration. What had begun as an aggressive “forward leaning” foreign policy under George Bush, reemerged in the second Bush Administration altered and fueled by the shocking events of 9/11.

The Clinton years, in which U.S. foreign policy shifted from global domination to globalism, were followed by the election of 2000, in which George W. Bush lost the popular vote by over 500,000 votes. In looking at this election, it is important to note a number of anomalies. These included that the election was decided by the Supreme Court which blocked a re-count along strictly partisan lines which most observers predicted would have led to a substantial Gore victory because of faulty ballots and voting machines. Secondly, 50,000 African American voters had been disenfranchised by the Administration of Governor Jeb Bush, G.W. Bush's brother, and thirdly quite remarkably, the U.S. Senate with Al Gore in the Chair as Vice President, insisted on ratifying the vote of the Electoral College, despite numerous signed Congressional petitions from African American Congressmen and women from Florida and elsewhere, alleging voting fraud and corruption.

The election result not only assured the victory of GW Bush, but also of the defense and foreign policy priorities formulated by Paul Wolfowitz and Colin Powell on behalf of George Bush, and his Secretary of Defense, Richard Cheney, as the architects of these policies moved into positions of power in the new Administration.

The shocking events of 9/11 allowed the second Bush Administration to proceed with the aggressive defense and foreign policies previously articulated by the first Bush administration. It fulfilled a hope of the Project for a New American Century, of which Cheney, Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz were signatories, that the overthrow of Saddam Hussein's regime and the stationing of US troops in Central Asia would be possible if “a new Pearl Harbor ” were to take place. Indeed the many unanswered questions about 9/11 have led many observers to wonder whether elements of the Administration and the military allowed 9/11 to happen as a justification for previously planned military adventures.(5)

The U.S. military declared war on the Taliban on October 7, 2001 largely using the troops of the Northern Alliance . After many months of preparation, including the unsubstantiated linking of Saddam Hussein's regime to Al Quaeda and 9/11, and the false claim of Iraq possessing weapons of mass destruction, President Bush declared war on Iraq in April of 2003, without the support of the U.N. or of the international community. The wars in both Afghanistan and in Iraq are going badly, at a growing cost of military and civilian lives, and a growing governmental deficit.