Monday, April 16, 2018

"Seven Nations in Five Years"


As the coalition of the willing launches missiles against Syria, led by the US, I am reminded strongly of a famous whistle-blower's talk about the neoconservative plan to transform the Middle East through regime change.

Former four-star US general Wesley Clark's 2007 memoir, A Time to Lead: For Duty, Honor and Country (Palgrave Macmillan) describes a long-term Defense Department policy for aggressive regime change in the Middle East.

You can see a clip from an interview with Clark here:


Salon has a good review that traces the origins of the aggressive regime change policy to neoconservatives, especially Paul Wolfowitz:
Joe Conason (10.12.2007).“Seven countries in five years”: Wesley Clark’s new memoir casts more light on the Bush administration’s secret strategies for regime change in Iran and elsewhere. Salon, https://www.salon.com/2007/10/12/wesley_clark/

While the Bush White House promotes the possibility of armed conflict with Iran, a tantalizing passage in Wesley Clark's new memoir suggests that another war is part of a long-planned Department of Defense strategy that anticipated "regime change" by force in no fewer than seven Mideast states....

In May 1991, according to Clark, he dropped in for a conversation with Wolfowitz, then the third-ranking civilian in the Pentagon, to congratulate him on the success of the Gulf War. "We screwed up and left Saddam Hussein in power. The president [then George H.W. Bush] believes he'll be overthrown by his own people, but I rather doubt it," he quotes Wolfowitz lamenting. 
"But we did learn one thing that's very important. With the end of the Cold War, we can now use our military with impunity. The Soviets won't come in to block us. And we've got five, maybe 10, years to clean up these old Soviet surrogate regimes like Iraq and Syria before the next superpower emerges to challenge us ... We could have a little more time, but no one really knows."

The push for total regime change in the middle east by neoconservative hawks has been unrelenting for almost 20 years. 

Now its happening full scale. Much of the Middle East is in turmoil with families suffering devastating losses.

How can destroying another nation be a national strategy in the context of 21st century liberal democracy?

There is a very strong contradiction between our ideals and our national policies that Americans need to examine more carefully.

The drive for war is, of course, a drive for annihilation as the world's national states hoard chemical and nuclear weapons, bio-weapons, cyber-security weapons, etc that could kill us all if deployed.

How can a logic of annihilation drive our most powerful organizational actors, nation states?


No comments:

Post a Comment

Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.