Rex Regnant Sed Non Gubernat

The Ideology of American Empire
by Claes G. Ryn

Claes G. Ryn is professor of politics at the Catholic University of America and
chairman of the
National Humanities Institute. He is editor of Humanitas and
author of numerous books,
including Unity Through Diversity: On Cultivating
Humanity’s Higher Ground (Beijing
University, 2000) and Will, Imagination and
Reason: Babbitt, Croce and the Problem of Reality
(2nd ed., Transaction,
1997). This article is adapted from a chapter in his America the
Virtuous:
The Crisis of Democracy and the Quest for Empire (forthcoming,
Transaction 2003).

The president of the United States has committed his country to goals
that will require world hegemony, not to say supremacy. In numerous
speeches and statements since September 2001, President Bush has
vowed to wage an exhaustive, final war on terror and to advance the cause of
a better world. ‘‘Our responsibility to history is clear: to answer these attacks
and rid the world of evil.’’1 In the president’s opinion, the United States
represents universal principles. He summarizes them in the word ‘‘freedom.’’
As mankind’s beacon of political right, the United States must, he believes,
remove obstacles to freedom around the world. Accomplishing this task is
associated in the president’s mind with using American military might. Even
before 9/11/01, in June 2001, he informed the Congress that the ‘‘Department
of Defense has become the most powerful force for freedom the world has
ever seen.’’2 Since 9/11, the U.S. government has relentlessly mobilized and
deployed that force far and wide, with effects that remain to be seen.
What had happened? In his 2000 presidential campaign, President
Bush had repeatedly called for a more ‘‘humble’’ U.S. foreign policy and
expressed strong reservations about America’s undertaking nation building
and following a generally interventionist foreign policy. A cynic might
suggest that, having won the presidency partly by appealing to Americans’
weariness of international over-extension, President Bush had now seized an
opportunity greatly to extend his power. A less cynical observer would note
that the 9/11 attacks outraged the president. They aroused nationalistic
feelings in him and shifted his focus to world affairs. Since then he has also
gained a new sense of the military and other power at his command.

Yet it is not likely that George W. Bush would have changed his
stated approach to foreign policy so drastically had he not been affected by a
way of thinking about America’s role in the world that has acquired strong
influence in recent decades, not least in the American foreign policy
establishment inside and outside of government. A large number of American
political intellectuals, including many writers on American foreign policy,
have been promoting what may be called an ideology of empire. Many of
them are in universities; some are leading media commentators. Today some
of the most articulate and strong-willed have the president’s ear.
When the 9/11 terrorists struck, the time had long been ripe for
systematically implementing an ideology of empire, but in his election
campaign George W. Bush had seemed an obstacle to such a course. He
advocated a more restrictive use of American power. If he had done so out of
genuine conviction, 9/11 brought a profound change of heart. The already
available ideology of empire helped remove any inhibitions the president
might have had about an activist foreign policy and helped shape his reaction
to the attack. It can be debated to what extent his advisors and speechwriters,
who were to varying degrees attracted to the ideology, along with numerous
media commentators of the same orientation, were able to channel the
president’s anger. In any case, President Bush moved to embrace the idea of
armed world hegemony. The attack on America could have elicited a much
different reaction, such as a surgical and limited response; it became instead
the occasion and justification for something grandiose.
In spite of its great influence, the ideology of empire is unfamiliar to
most Americans, except in segments that appear disparate but are in fact
closely connected. Drawing these connections is essential to assessing the
import and ramifications of the evolving Bush Doctrine.
Though heavily slanted in the direction of international affairs, the
ideology of American empire constitutes an entire world view. It includes
perspectives on human nature, society, and politics, and it sets forth distinctive
conceptions of its central ideas, notably what it calls ‘‘democracy,’’ ‘‘freedom,’’
‘‘equality,’’ and ‘‘capitalism.’’ It regards America as founded on universal
principles and assigns to the United States the role of supervising the remaking
of the world. Its adherents have the intense dogmatic commitment of true
believers and are highly prone to moralistic rhetoric. They demand, among
other things, ‘‘moral clarity’’ in dealing with regimes that stand in the way of
America’s universal purpose. They see themselves as champions of ‘‘virtue.’’ In some form, this ideology has been present for a long time.
There are similarities between the advocates of the ideology of
American empire and the ideologues who inspired and led the French
Revolution of 1789. The Jacobins, too, claimed to represent universal
principles, which they summed up in the slogan ‘‘liberte´, e´galite´, et fraternite´.’’
The dominant Jacobins also wanted greater economic freedom. They thought
of themselves as fighting on the side of good against evil and called themselves ‘‘the virtuous.’’ They wanted a world much different from the one they had
inherited. The result was protracted war and turbulence in Europe and
elsewhere. Those who embody the Jacobin spirit today in America have
explicitly global ambitions. It is crucial to understand what they believe, for
potentially they have the military might of the United States at their complete
disposal.
The philosopher who most influenced the old Jacobins was Jean-
Jacques Rousseau (1712–78), who asserted in The Social Contract (1762) that
‘‘man was born free, but he is everywhere in chains.’’3 The Jacobins set out to
liberate man. The notion that America’s military might is the greatest force for
freedom in human history recalls Rousseau’s famous statement that those
who are not on the side of political right may have to be ‘‘forced to be free.’’
The new Jacobins have taken full advantage of the nation’s outrage
over 9/11 to advance their already fully formed drive for empire. They have
helped rekindle America’s long-standing propensity for global involvement.
Knowingly or unknowingly, President Bush has become the new Jacobins’
leading spokesman, and he is receiving their very strong support. Reflexes
developed by American politicians and commentators during the Cold War
have boosted the imperialistic impulse. Many cold warriors, now lacking the
old enemy of communism, see in the goal of a better world for mankind
another justification for continued extensive use of American power. President
Bush’s moralistic interventionism gains additional support and credibility from
a number of antecedents in modern American politics. Woodrow Wilson
comes immediately to mind. But the current ideology of empire goes well
beyond an earlier, more tentative and hesitant pursuit of world hegemony,
and it has acquired great power at a new, formative juncture in history.
The most conspicuous and salient feature of the neo-Jacobin
approach to international affairs is its universalistic and monopolistic claims.
The University of Chicago’s Allan Bloom (1930–92) argued in his best-selling
The Closing of the American Mind that what he called ‘‘the American project’’
was not just for Americans. ‘‘When we Americans speak seriously about
politics, we mean that our principles of freedom and equality and the rights
based on them are rational and everywhere applicable.’’ World War II was for
Bloom not simply a struggle to defeat a dangerous enemy. It was ‘‘really an
educational project undertaken to force those who did not accept these
principles to do so.’’4 If America is the instrument of universal right, the cause
of all humanity, it is only proper that it should be diligent and insistent in
imposing its will.
The new Jacobins typically use ‘‘democracy’’ as an umbrella term for
the kind of political regime that they would like to see installed all over the world. In their view, only democracy, as they define it, answers to a universal
moral imperative and is legitimate. Bringing democracy to countries that do
not yet have it ought to be the defining purpose of U.S. foreign policy. One
may call this part of neo-Jacobin ideology ‘‘democratism.’’ It has been
espoused by many academics, Duke University political scientist James David Barber prominent among them. ‘‘The United States should stand up and lead
the world democracy movement,’’ he wrote in 1990. ‘‘We have made
democracy work here; now we ought to make it work everywhere we can,
with whatever tough and expensive action that takes.’’5
Numerous American intellectual activists, journalists, and columnists,
many of them taught by professors like Bloom and Barber, sound the same
theme. It has become so common in the major media, newspapers, and
intellectual magazines and has been so often echoed by politicians that, to
some, it seems to express a self-evident truth.
Not all who speak about an American global mission to spread
democracy are neo-Jacobins in the strict sense of the term. Some use neo-
Jacobin rhetoric not out of ideological conviction, but because such language
is in the air and appears somehow expected, or because war is thought to
require it. Many combine Jacobin ideas with other elements of thought and
imagination: rarely, if ever, is an individual all of a piece. Contradictory ideas
often compete within one and the same person. The purpose here is not to
classify particular persons but to elucidate an ideological pattern, showing
how certain ideas form a coherent, if ethically and philosophically
questionable, ideology.

New Nationalism

Two writers with considerable media visibility, William Kristol and
David Brooks, who label themselves conservatives, have led complaints that
the long-standing prejudice among American conservatives against a larger
federal government is paranoid and foolish. Big government is needed,
Kristol and Brooks contend, because the United States is based on ‘‘universal
principles.’’ Its specialmoral status gives it a great mission in the world. In order
to pursue its global task, the American government must be muscular and
‘‘energetic,’’ especiallywith regard to military power. Kristol and Brooks call for
a ‘‘national-greatness conservatism,’’ which would include ‘‘a neo-Reaganite
foreign policy of national strength and moral assertiveness abroad.’’6
Similarly, foreign policy expert Robert Kagan writes of his fellow
Americans: ‘‘As good children of the Enlightenment, Americans believe in
human perfectibility. But Americans . . . also believe . . . that global security and a liberal order depend on the United States—that ‘indispensable
nation’—wielding its power.’’7
International adventurism has often served to distract nations from
pressing domestic difficulties, but in America today, expansionism is often
fueled also by intense moral-ideological passion. Since the principles for
which America stands are portrayed as ultimately supranational (for Bloom
they are actually opposed to traditional national identity), ‘‘nationalism’’ may
not be quite the right term for this new missionary zeal. The new Jacobins
believe that as America spearheads the cause of universal principles, it should
progressively shed its own historical distinctiveness except insofar as that
distinctiveness is directly related to those principles. Though countries
confronted by this power are likely to see it as little more than a manifestation
of nationalistic ambition and arrogance, it is nationalistic only in a special
sense. Like revolutionary France, neo-Jacobin America casts itself as a savior
nation. Ideological and national zeal become indistinguishable. ‘‘Our
nationalism,’’ write Kristol and Brooks about America’s world mission, ‘‘is
that of an exceptional nation founded on a universal principle, on what
Lincoln called ‘an abstract truth, applicable to all men and all times.’ ’’8
This view of America’s role can hardly be called patriotic in the old
sense of that word. Neo-Jacobinism is not characterized by devotion to
America’s concrete historical identity with its origins in Greek, Roman,
Christian, European, and English civilization. Neo-Jacobins are attached in the
end to ahistorical, supranational principles that they believe should supplant
the traditions of particular societies. The new Jacobins see themselves as on the
side of right and fighting evil and are not prone to respecting or looking for
common ground with countries that do not share their democratic preferences.
Traditionally, the patriot’s pride of country has been understood to
encompass moral self-restraint and a sense of his own country’s flaws. By
contrast, neo-Jacobinism is perhaps best described as a kind of ideological
nationalism. Its proponents are not precisely uncritical of today’s American
democracy; Bloom complained that American democracy was too relativistic
and insufficiently faithful to the principles of its own founding. But it should
be noted that he regarded those principles as ‘‘rational and everywhere
applicable’’ and thus as monopolistic. Greater dedication to ‘‘American
principles’’ would by definition increase, not reduce, the wish to dictate terms
to others.

New Universalism

Having been nurtured for many years in pockets of the academy,
American neo-Jacobinism started to acquire journalistic and political critical mass in the 1980s. It was well-represented in the national security and foreign
policy councils of the Reagan and Bush Sr. administrations. As Soviet communism
was crumbling, it seemed to people of this orientation increasingly
realistic to expect an era in which the United States would be able to dominate
the world on behalf of universal principles. Missionary zeal and the desire to
use American power began to flood the media, the government, and the public
policy debate. Columnist and TV commentator Ben Wattenberg offered a
particularly good example of this frame of mind when he wrote in 1988 that
the prospects for exporting American values were highly propitious. ‘‘Never
has the culture of one nation been so far-flung and potent.’’ Wattenberg
pointed out that ‘‘there is, at last, a global language, American.’’9
After the Cold War, American culture could only spread, he
continued, with global sales of American TV shows, movies, and music.
‘‘Important newsstands around the world now sell three American daily
newspapers. There is now a near-global television news station: Cable News
Network.’’ Not mentioned by Wattenberg was that the content being
transmitted to the world might be of dubious value and a poor reflection
on America and democracy. What intrigued him was the potential to expand
American influence by exporting America’s culture.
Behind the argument that the United States and its values are models
for all peoples lurked the will to power, which was sometimes barely able to
keep up ideological appearances. Again by way of example, Wattenberg
desired nothing less than world dominance: ‘‘It’s pretty clear what the global
community needs: probably a top cop, but surely a powerful global
organizer. Somebody’s got to do it. We’re the only ones who can.’’ He called
‘‘visionary’’ the idea of ‘‘spreading democratic and American values around
the world.’’ As if not to appear immodest, he wrote: ‘‘Our goal in the global
game is not to conquer the world, only to influence it so that it is hospitable
to our values.’’10 Later he urged, ‘‘Remember this about American Purpose: A
unipolar world is fine, if America is the uni.’’11
In the major media, one of the early and most persistent advocates
of an assertive American foreign policy was the columnist and TV commentator
Charles Krauthammer. In 1991, for example, he urged ‘‘a robust
interventionism.’’ ‘‘We are living in a unipolar world,’’ he wrote. ‘‘We Americans
should like it—and exploit it.’’ ‘‘Where our cause is just and interests are
threatened, we should act—even if . . . we must act unilaterally.’’12 This point
of view would eventually become a commonplace.
The idea of spreading democracy sometimes took on a religious
ardor. In a Christmas column published in 1988, Michael Novak said about the Judeo-Christian tradition that it ‘‘instructs the human race to make constant
progress. . . . It insists that societies must continually be reshaped, until each
meets the measure the Creator has in mind for a just, truthful, free, and creative
civilization.’’ All over the world people were ‘‘crying out against abuses of their
God-given rights to self-determination.’’ The spread of democracy was for
Novak a great religious development that he compared to God’s Incarnation.
The ‘‘citizens of the world . . . demand the birth of democracy in history, in
physical institutions: as physical as the birth at Bethlehem.’’13 The enthusiasm
of the Christmas season may have inclined Novak to overstatement, but he was
clearly eager to have his readers associate democracy with divine intent.
This mode of thinking is in marked contrast to the old Christian
tradition. Christianity has always stressed the imperfect, sinful nature of man
and warned against placing too much faith in manmade political institutions
and measures. Augustine (354–430) is only one of the earliest and least
sanguine of many Christian thinkers over the centuries who would have
rejected out of hand the idea that mankind is destined for great progress and
political perfection, to say nothing about the possibility of salvation through
politics. Although Christianity has stressed that rulers must serve the common
good and behave in a humane manner, it has been reluctant to endorse any
particular form of government as suited to all peoples and all historical
circumstances. Here Christianity agreed with the Aristotelian view.

The New Democratism

Democratism has long had more than a foothold in American
government. A look back in modern history is appropriate. President
Woodrow Wilson, with his belief in America’s special role and his missionary
zeal, gave it a strong push. Harvard professor Irving Babbitt (1865–1933),
perhaps America’s most incisive and prescient student of modern Western and
American culture, commented in the early years of the twentieth century on the
imperialistic trend in U.S. foreign policy. Babbitt, the founder of what has been
called the New Humanism or American Humanism, was formally a professor of
French and comparative literature, but he was also a highly perceptive as well
as prophetic observer of social and political developments. He noted that the
United States was setting itself up as the great guardian and beneficiary of
mankind. ‘‘We are rapidly becoming a nation of humanitarian crusaders,’’
Babbitt wrote in 1924. Leaders like Wilson viewed America as abjuring selfish
motives and as being, therefore, above all other nations. Babbitt commented:

We are willing to admit that all other nations are self-seeking, but as for
ourselves, we
hold that we act only on the most disinterested motives. We
have not as yet set up,
like revolutionary France, as the Christ of Nations,
but during the late war we liked
to look on ourselves as at least the Sir
Galahad of Nations. If the American thus regards himself as an idealist at the
same time that the foreigner looks on him
as a dollar-chaser, the explanation
may be due partly to the fact that the American
judges himself by the way he
feels, whereas the foreigner judges him by what he
does.14

By the time of President Wilson the idea had long been common in
America that in old Europe conceited and callous elites oppressed the
common man. There and elsewhere things needed to be set right. Thomas
Jefferson had been a pioneer for this outlook. But from the time of George
Washington’s warning of the danger of entangling alliances, a desire for heavy
American involvement abroad had for the most part been held in check. By
the time of Theodore Roosevelt’s presidency, it was clear that the wish for
American prominence and activism in international affairs had thrown off
earlier restraints. Woodrow Wilson reinforced the interventionist impulse,
not, of course, to advance selfish American national motives but, as he said,
to ‘‘serve mankind.’’ Because America has a special moral status, Wilson
proclaimed, it is called to do good in the world. In 1914, even before the
outbreak of the European war, Wilson stated in a Fourth of July address that
America’s role was to serve ‘‘the rights of humanity.’’ The flag of the United
States, he declared, is ‘‘the flag, not only of America, but of humanity.’’15
Babbitt pointed out that those who would not go along with Wilson’s
‘‘humanitarian crusading’’ were warned that they would ‘‘break the heart of
the world.’’ Babbitt retorted: ‘‘If the tough old world had ever had a heart
in the Wilsonian sense, it would have been broken long ago.’’ He added
that Wilson’s rhetoric, which was at the same time abstract and sentimental,
revealed ‘‘a temper at the opposite pole from that of the genuine statesman.’’
Wilson’s humanitarian idealism made him ‘‘inflexible and uncompromising.’’16

The Post–Cold War Imperative

The notion that America had a mandate to help rid the world, not least
Europe, of the bad old ways of traditional societies with their undemocratic
political arrangements has remained a strong influence on American foreign
policy. In World War II, FDR’s sense of American mission may have been as
strong as Wilson’s.
14 Irving Babbitt, Democracy and Leadership (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1979 [1924]),
pp. 337, 295. It is a national misfortune that Americans have paid less attention to one of their
truly great thinkers than to a number of lesser European lights who impress by their denser,
more technical, less essayistic philosophical style.
15 Woodrow Wilson, Thanksgiving Proclamation, Nov. 7, 1917, The Papers of Woodrow
Wilson, Arthur S. Link, et al. (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1966–93), pp. 44, 525;
and Address at Independence Hall, Philadelphia, Papers, pp. 30, 254. For an in-depth study of
Woodrow Wilson and his notion of America as servant of mankind, see Richard M. Gamble,
‘‘Savior Nation: Woodrow Wilson and the Gospel of Service,’’ Humanitas, Vol. XIV, No. 1 (2001).
16 Babbitt, Democracy, p. 314.

For a long time during the Cold War, most policy makers and
commentators saw that war as a defensive struggle to protect freedom or liberty
against totalitarian tyranny. But some of the most dedicated cold warriors were
also democratists. They had a vision for remaking the world that differed in
substance from that of the Soviet Union and other communist regimes but that
was equally universalistic. With the disintegration and collapse of the Soviet
Union, these cold warriors did not argue for substantially reducing the
American military or the United States’ involvement in international affairs. On
the contrary, they believed that America should continue to play a large and,
in some respects, expanded role in the world; that, as the only remaining
superpower, America had a historic opportunity to advance the cause of
democracy and human rights. This language had long been gaining currency in
the centers of public debate and political power, and soon government officials
and politicians in both of the major parties spoke routinely of the need to
promote democracy. Many did so in just the manner here associated with neo-
Jacobinism. It seemed to them that the American ideology had not only
survived the challenge from the other universalist ideology, but had prevailed
in a contest that validated the American ideal as applicable in all societies.
The first President Bush thought of himself as a competent pragmatist,
but, as is often the case with persons who lack philosophically grounded
convictions of their own, he was susceptible to adopting the language and
ideas of intellectually more focused and ideological individuals. The rhetoric
in his administration about a New World Order often had a distinctly
democratist ring, in considerable part probably because of the ideological
leanings of speechwriters. In 1991 James Baker, President Bush’s secretary of
state, echoed a neo-Jacobin refrain when he declared that U.S. foreign policy
should serve not specifically American interests but ‘‘enlightenment ideals
of universal applicability.’’ Whether such formulations originated with Mr.
Baker or his speechwriters, the Secretary clearly liked the sound of them. He
advocated a ‘‘Euro-Atlantic community that extends east from Vancouver to
Vladivostok.’’ This ‘‘community,’’ he said, ‘‘can only be achieved on a
democratic basis.’’ The enormous size and political and cultural diversity of
the region he described did not give him pause or make him question the
United States’ willingness or ability to take charge of such a daunting cause.
No, the United States should promote ‘‘common . . . universal values’’ in
those parts of the world, he said, and ‘‘indeed, elsewhere on the globe.’’17
American power was there to be used. It seemed appropriate in cases such as
these to talk of virtually unlimited political ambition.
The surge of globalist political-ideological aspirations was even
more blatantly and pointedly expressed by the Bush Sr. administration in a
draft Pentagon planning document that was leaked to the New York Times.
It had been produced under the supervision of then Undersecretary of
Defense Paul Wolfowitz. The draft plan dealt with the United States’ military
needs in the post–Cold War era, setting forth the goal of a world in which the
United States would be the sole and uncontested superpower. The draft plan
assigned to the United States ‘‘the pre-eminent responsibility’’ for dealing with
‘‘those wrongs which threaten not only our interests, but those of our allies
or friends, or which could seriously unsettle international relations.’’ The
goal of American world dominance was presented as serving the spread of
democracy and open economic systems. American military power was to be so
overwhelming that it would not even occur to the United States’ competitors to
challenge its will.18 This vision of the future might have seemed the expression
of an inordinate, open-ended desire for power and control, uninhibited by
the fact that the world is, after all, rather large. But significantly, many
commentators considered the vision entirely plausible. The Wall Street Journal
praised the draft plan in a lead editorial favoring ‘‘Pax Americana.’’19
Bill Clinton made clear in his 1992 presidential campaign that he
would pursue a foreign policy similar to, if not more expansive than, the
Bush administration’s. In 1993 his Secretary of State-designate Warren
Christopher addressed a group of neoconservative Democrats, including
Penn Kimball, Joshua Muravchik, Peter Rosenblatt, Albert Shanker, and Max
Kampelman, to assure them that he would fully back the president’s
commitments to making promotion of democracy a central tenet of U.S.
foreign policy.20 Christopher’s successor, Madeleine Albright, was even more
comfortable with this stance. Democratist ideology was by now clearly
dominant in top policy-making circles in Washington and elsewhere. It both
generated and sanctioned an assertive, expansive use of American power.
When running for president, George W. Bush appeared to have
substantial qualms about this broad use of American might. He questioned
the desire to impose solutions to problems in all regional and local trouble
spots around the world, seeming to recognize that such efforts betrayed
arrogance and an undue will to power that other countries might resent. His
adoption of a wholly different, far more assertive tone after the 9/11 attacks
was surely induced in large part by war-like conditions. Although the change
was probably motivated more by pragmatic than by ideological considerations,
President Bush’s rhetoric began to take on a neo-Jacobin coloring, as
when he spoke of the ‘‘axis of evil,’’ a phrase coined by neoconservative
speechwriter David Frum.
In subsequent speeches, the president has often come to resemble
Woodrow Wilson in assigning to the United States, the exceptional country, an exceptional mission in the world. He has asserted that an attack upon the
United States was an attack upon freedom: ‘‘A lot of young people say, well,
why America? Why would anybody want to come after us? Why would
anybody want to fight a war with this nation? And the answer is because we
love freedom. That’s why. And they hate freedom.’’21 Identifying America with
the universal cause of freedom, Bush has even adopted Wilsonian imagery.
Echoing Wilson in 1917, he said that the American flag stands ‘‘not only for our
power, but for freedom.’’22 Although the president used the term ‘‘freedom’’
rather than ‘‘democracy,’’ which is the one favored by the new Jacobins, he
seemed to agree with the notion that any enemy or critic of the United States is
an opponent of universal principle. ‘‘They have attacked America,’’ he said
three days after 9/11, ‘‘because we are freedom’s home and defender.’’23
Proponents of American empire had moved with great speed to head
off any reluctance on the part of a devastated and disoriented American
public to deal quickly and comprehensively with terrorism around the globe.
Already on the morning after the attacks, when it was still not clear who was
responsible, the Washington Post carried an article by Robert Kagan calling
for sweeping countermeasures. The U.S. Congress should, Kagan insisted,
declare war immediately on the terrorists and any nation that might have
assisted them. The situation required that America act with ‘‘moral clarity and
courage as our grandfathers did [responding to the attack on Pearl Harbor].
Not by asking what we have done to bring on the wrath of inhuman
murderers. Not by figuring out ways to reason with, or try to appease those
who have spilled our blood.’’24 On the same day William Bennett, Jack Kemp
and Jeane Kirkpatrick issued a statement calling for war against the ‘‘entire’’
Islamic terrorist network.25

If the president thought that American actions might have contributed
to the hostility to the United States in the world, he did not, and in the
circumstances perhaps could not, say so publicly. What he did say and has said
repeatedly is that the United States must be diligent, active, and forceful—
preemptive even—in dealing with present or potential threats of terrorism.
Paradoxically, given his earlier calls for American humility, he has presided
over a massive push for greater American involvement in the world and for a
21 Remarks of President to United Brotherhood of Carpenters and Joiners of America 2002
Legislative Conference, June 19, 2002, www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2002/06; Peter
Slevin, ‘‘The Word at the White House: Bush Formulates His Brand of Foreign Policy,’’ vastly more intrusive role for government in the daily lives of U.S. citizens. In fairness to a politician who is not also an intellectual and a historian, war has its
own logic, and it may be premature to draw definitive conclusions about the
president’s statements and actions in the wake of 9/11, which was an act of
war. But the fact is that President Bush’s assertive approach and universalistic
rhetoric has been seized on by American democratists who have been
preparing the ground for a war and for a wider pursuit of empire. Charles
Krauthammer praised the president for applying ‘‘the fundamental principle of
American foreign policy—the promotion of democracy.’’26 Political activist and
writer Midge Decter pointed out that after 9/11 America could do something to
clean up the world. She urged her countrymen ‘‘to hang onto what is most
important to remember: that our country, the strongest on earth, has been
pressed by circumstance—I would say, has been granted the opportunity—to
rid the world of some goodly measure of its cruelty and pestilence.’’27
In mid-September 2002, President Bush sent to the U.S. Congress the
president’s annual statement on strategy, the National Security Strategy,
which gave clear evidence that he was abandoning his earlier calls for a more
‘‘humble’’ U.S. foreign policy. Though the report was framed as a strategy for
combating terrorism, the stated objectives supererogated any need to
respond to acute external or internal threats. The report defined what
amounted to a new and highly ambitious role for America in the world.
Released the day after the president asked the Congress to authorize the use
of preemptive military force against Iraq, it provided justifications for
American intervention against potential security threats, while also formulating
a new and much broader international agenda. The report in effect set forth
a doctrine of American armed hegemony. The president justified this
ascendancy as serving both America’s security needs and its efforts to
promote freedom, democracy, and free trade. The Washington Post said that
the Strategy gave the United States ‘‘a nearly messianic role.’’ It meant not only
acceptance but also extension of the old Wolfowitz draft plan. Indeed,
Wolfowitz is now Deputy Secretary of Defense and a highly vocal and
assertive proponent of American activism around the world. According to the
report, America’s strength and influence in the world is ‘‘unprecedented’’ and
‘‘unequaled.’’ The United States, ‘‘sustained by faith in the principles of
liberty and the value of a free society,’’ also has ‘‘unparalleled responsibilities,
obligations, and opportunities’’ beyond its borders. The report calls for
possessing such overwhelming military power as to discourage any other
power from challenging American hegemony or developing weapons of mass
destruction. It overturns the old doctrines of deterrence and containment.
Committing the United States to a much expanded understanding of security,
it argues that the United States must reserve the right to act preemptively and unilaterally against potentially threatening states or organizations. But the
president approved an even wider goal. The Strategy commits the United
States to making the world ‘‘not just safer but better.’’ In explaining the report,
a senior administration official said that besides leading the world in the
war against terrorists and ‘‘aggressive regimes seeking weapons of mass
destruction,’’ the United States should preserve the peace, ‘‘extend the benefits
of liberty and prosperity through the spread of American values,’’ and
promote ‘‘good governance.’’ In familiar-sounding words, the report describes
America’s strategy as a ‘‘distinctly American internationalism that reflects the
union of our values and our national interests.’’28

A New Kind of War

The foreign policy of George W. Bush’s immediate two predecessors,
Bush Sr. and Bill Clinton, had a strong Wilsonian tilt. But neither president
followed any sustained, consistent strategy. By contrast, the Bush Doctrine as
set forth in the National Security Strategy and other places commits the
United States to a bold, comprehensive, and elaborate foreign policy.
The publicly and formally stated U.S. goal, in sum, is to establish global
supremacy. The United States would set itself up as the arbiter of good and
evil in the world and, if necessary, enforce its judgments unilaterally.
Reservations expressed in Europe and elsewhere about American
unilateralism and global aspirations have been scorned and dismissed by
proponents of empire as a failure to recognize the need to combat evil in the
world. Kenneth Adelman, a former deputy ambassador to the UN and a
highly placed advisor on defense to the U.S. government, couched his
advocacy of imperial designs in terms of fighting terrorism. ‘‘I don’t think
Europeans should cooperate with the United States as a favor to the United
States. They should be very grateful to the United States and cooperate
because we have a common enemy—terrorism. In my mind, it’s a decisive
moment in the conflict between civilization and barbarism.’’29
Since America is at war it is, in a way, not surprising that some of its
leaders should be portraying America as being on the side of good and those
not eager to follow America’s lead as aiding and abetting evil. Stark rhetoric has
been used before to get Americans to support or sustain war, but the war aims
spoken of today are derived from a consciously universalistic and imperialistic
ideology. Therein lies an important difference, and a great danger.
The belief in American moral superiority knows no party lines. In an
article critical of the George W. Bush administration’s way of preparing for war against Iraq, Richard C. Holbrooke, ambassador to the UN under
President Clinton, expressed a view ubiquitous in the American foreign policy
establishment: ‘‘Over the past 60 years, the United States has consistently
combined its military superiority with moral and political leadership.’’30 The
word ‘‘consistently’’ is telling. The notion that, unlike other nations, America is
above moral suspicion, provides the best possible justification for the desire to
exercise American power.
It seems to the proponents of the ideology of American empire that,
surely, America the virtuous is entitled to dominate the world. Some of them
have worked long and hard to make this point of view dominant in American
foreign policy. President Bush was merely echoing what others had been
saying when he stated: ‘‘There is a value system that cannot be compromised,
and that is the values we praise. And if the values are good enough for our
people, they ought to be good enough for others.’’31
Many members of the so-called Christian right share the view that
America has a special mission, but give this notion a triumphalist religious
cast beyond the moralism typical of neo-Jacobin ideology. They believe that
the United States, as led by a man of God, has a virtually messianic role to
play, especially in the Middle East, where God’s chosen people, Israel, must
be supported by the United States against their enemies. Breaking sharply
with the mainstream of traditional Christianity, which has made a distinction
between the things of God and the things of Caesar, this form of religion
identifies a particular political power, America, with God’s will. George W.
Bush’s rhetoric has sometimes suggested that he is drawn to such thinking.
‘‘Evangelical’’ Christianity of this kind may rest on rather simplistic theological,
biblical, and historical assumptions and arguably have virtually no influence
over America’s dominant national culture, but it provides considerable political
support for neo-Jacobinism, which does have such influence. In its practical
effects on United States foreign policy, this religious triumphalism puts a
religious gloss on neo-Jacobinism. It does not Christianize U.S. foreign policy,
but makes it less humble and more belligerent.
Both in domestic and international affairs the new Jacobins are strongly
prejudiced against the traditions of old, historically evolved nations and
groups. These only retard the emergence of a new order based on what they
consider universal principles. In their view, the distinctive traits of different
societies and cultures should yield to the homogeneity of virtuous democracy.
The new Jacobins are trying to clear away obstacles to the triumph of
their ideology and of their own will to power. They exhibit a revolutionary
mindset that will inexorably lead to disaster. Alongside what President Bush called ‘‘history’s unmarked graves of discarded lies’’32 lie the graves of the
self-righteous, the people whose moralism concealed, even from themselves,
their importunate will to power. As Ronald Reagan preached, the idealistic
utopians and the well meaning are responsible for some of the world’s worst
evils. Self-righteousness blinds one to one’s own sins.
Even if the opinions examined in this article are assessed in the
most generous and charitable spirit, their element of political-ideological
imperialism is hard to miss. A philosophically and historically inclined
observer is reminded of the terrible and large-scale suffering that has been
inflicted on mankind by power-seeking sanctioned or inspired by one or
another kind of Jacobin moral and intellectual conceit. Communism, one of
the most radical and pernicious manifestations of the Jacobin spirit, has
disintegrated, at least as a major political force. But another panacea for the
world is taking its place. The neo-Jacobin vision for how to redeem humanity
may be less obviously utopian than that of communism. It may strike some as
admirably idealistic, as did communism. But the spirit of the two movements
is similar, and utopian thinking is utopian thinking, fairly innocuous perhaps
if restricted to isolated dreamers and theoreticians but dangerous to the
extent that it inspires action in the real world. The concern voiced here is that
neo-Jacobinism has come to permeate American public debate and is finally
within reach of controlling the military might of the United States.
Prudence, realism, compromise, and self-restraint are indispensable
qualities in politics. They have been reflected in traditional American
institutions, in great decisions made by American statesmen, and sometimes
in American public opinion. They have constituted the first line of defense
against all manner of foreign and domestic threats, including surges of passion
and eruptions of extremism. Given the atrocities of 9/11 and the need for a firm
American response, the prominence of crusaders in the Bush administration is
perhaps not surprising. But it is also a sign that needed old American virtues are
weakening or disappearing. The continued ascendancy of neo-Jacobinism
would have disastrous consequences. By acting under its influence
America’s leaders may be setting in motion fateful developments
that they and their successors will not be able to control. 

It comes as no surprise two “of America’s top scholars,” having released an article criticizing the hijacking of American foreign policy by AIPAC, the neocons, and the tiny outlaw state of Israel, are unable to get a hearing in the corporate media.

John Mearsheimer of the University of Chicago and Stephen Walt of Harvard’s Kenney School “say that [AIPAC] is so strong that they doubt their article would be accepted in any U.S.-based publication,” reports United Press International.

“They claim that the Israel lobby has distorted American policy and operates against American interests, that it has organized the funneling of more than $140 billion dollars to Israel and ‘has a stranglehold’ on the U.S. Congress, and its ability to raise large campaign funds gives its vast influence over Republican and Democratic administrations, while its role in Washington think tanks on the Middle East dominates the policy debate.”

Mearsheimer and Walt come close to stating what many of us have known for some time—a clique of Straussian neocons, wedded to radical Likudites in Israel, and share

“close ties to pro-Israel groups like JINSA (Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs) or WINEP (Washington Institute for Near Eastern Policy),”

exploited nine eleven to

“adopt the general goal of ousting Saddam”

and push forward “preventive war,” that is to say invasions of sovereign Muslim and Arab nations, a plan long in the tooth and at the heart of Likudite Zionism.

Unfortunately, the authors do not arrive at the natural conclusion—not only did the neocons exploit nine eleven, they orchestrated it from within the Pentagon, as a previous cabal of Pentagon insiders, including the Joint Chiefs, attempted to create an earlier nine eleven by way of Operation Northwoods.

Fortunately for the American and Cuban people, that earlier plan was eighty-sixed by Robert McNamara and John F. Kennedy. No such luck with nine eleven.

Mearsheimer and Walt name names—Elliot Abrams, John Bolton, Douglas Feith, William Kristol, Bernard Lewis, Donald Rumsfeld, Richard Perle and Paul Wolfowitz, key members of the inner circle of the neocon clique.

It is interesting a name not normally associated with the neocons is mentioned—Bernard Lewis.

It was the elderly “Arabist” Lewis who urged “Lebanonization” in the Arab and Muslim Middle East.

“In 1992, in the aftermath of the Persian Gulf War, Lewis celebrated in the pages of the New York Council on Foreign Relations’ Foreign Affairs that the era of the nation-state in the Middle East had come to an inglorious end, and the entire region should expect to go through a prolonged period of ‘Lebanonization’—i.e., degeneration into fratricidal, parochialist violence and chaos,”

write Scott Thompson and Jeffrey Steinberg.

“Lebanonization” is a reference to the implementation of the Sykes-Picot Agreement by the French under the League of Nations in the 1920s, dividing Lebanon into five provinces based along ethnic and religious lines.

Of course, this artificial construct eventually resulted in a bloody civil war between Lebanese Christians and Muslims, exacerbated by the Israeli lebensraum policy of ethnically cleansing Palestinians (this conflict resulted in the death of over a 100,000 people and created 900,000 refugees), and was intensified and prolonged by an Israeli invasion and political and military participation by the United States.

Lewis concluded his Foreign Affairs article by predicting the “Lebanonization” of the entire region with the notable exception of Israel:

“Most of the states of the Middle East … are of recent and artificial construction and are vulnerable to such a process.

If the central power is sufficiently weakened, there is no real civil society to hold the polity together, no real sense of common national identity or overriding allegiance to the nation-state.

The state then disintegrates—as happened in Lebanon—into a chaos of squabbling, feuding, fighting sects, tribes, regions and parties,”

a process well underway at this moment in Iraq.

“For the past several decades, and especially since the Six-Day War in 1967, the centerpiece of US Middle Eastern policy has been its relationship with Israel,”

Mearsheimer and Walt continue.

“The combination of unwavering support for Israel and the related effort to
spread ‘democracy’ throughout the region has inflamed Arab and Islamic opinion
and jeopardized not only U.S. security but that of much of the rest of the
world. This situation has no equal in American political history. Why has the
U.S. been willing to set aside its own security and that of many of its allies
in order to advance the interests of another state?”

It is a situation, the authors conclude, created by the influence of AIPAC, an organization representing the Jabotinsky-Likudite faction in Israel. According to Thompson and Steinberg, Bernard Lewis’ son, Michael, is “the director of the American-Israeli Public Affairs Committee’s super-secret ‘opposition research section.’

This is one of the most important wellsprings of propaganda and disinformation, presently saturating the U.S. Congress and American media with war-cries for precisely the Clash of Civilizations Bernard Lewis has been promoting for decades.”

Defecting AIPAC staffer Gregory Slabodkin told the Washington Report in 1992 that AIPAC’s secret

“opposition research section” concentrates on “releasing derogatory (and generally false or misleading) information about American ‘enemies of Israel’ to their rivals in the media and academia.”

Israel

“works ruthlessly to suppress questioning of its role, to blacken its critics and to crush serious debate about the wisdom of supporting Israel in U.S. public life,”

the UPI summarizes the not destined for prime-time conclusions of Mearsheimer and Walt.

“Not surprisingly, the Jewish establishment organizations are lining up behind Aipac and not too subtly rolling out the traditional big guns by suggesting that the accusations themselves might be motivated by anti-Semitism,”

writes Michael Lerner.

“Aipac and a variety of closely linked Jewish organizations regularly use the anti-Semitism card to attack anyone who dares criticize the occupation of the West Bank.

Increasingly dominated by Jewish neo-cons and their worldview, the Jewish establishment has moved far to the right in the past two decades, spurred in part by Aipac’s powerful impact.”

As we know, the neocon “worldview” is one of endless conflict and misery abroad and subversion of American ideals at home.

The Straussian neocons—and it is important to stress the Straussian aspect with its Machiavellian philosophy and fascist ideology taking cues from the authoritarian idealism of a Nazi jurist, Carl Schmitt—are decidedly behind schedule on implementing the next phase of their master plan, gleaned in part from Oded Yinon’s “A Strategy for Israel in the 1980s”, of attacking and balkanizing Iran.

Once again, Bush reminds us of the tight relationship between Israel’s territorial aspirations and its connection to the military prowess (now in obvious decline) of the United States.

“The threat from Iran is, of course, their stated objective to destroy our strong ally Israel.

That’s a threat, a serious threat. It’s a threat to world peace,”

said our Caesar.

“I made it clear, and I’ll make it clear again, that we will use military might to protect our ally Israel.”

In fact, this is the only approach, as long ago sketched out by the Straussian neocons and their Jabotinksyite overlords, and diplomacy is but a shell game introduced to make the neocons appear reasonable, when in fact they are neo-Jacobin radicals.

Bush’s neocons, in control of the Pentagon, plan to eventually attack Iran, certainly not this month as initially speculated, but some time down the road, maybe this summer, maybe next year, but eventually, as the Straussian neocons, the anti-American AIPAC, and the reprehensible Israeli Jabotinskyite racists have long planned, even if it results in the ultimate destruction of America.

Rep. Waxman writes: "If the President signed the Reconciliation Act knowing its constitutional infirmity, he would in effect be placing himself above the Constitution."

The text of the letter follows:

March 15, 2006

The Honorable Andrew Card

Chief of Staff

The
White House

1600 Pennsylvania Avenue,

NWWashington, DC
20500

Dear Mr. Card:

On February 8, 2006, President Bush signed
into law a version of the Deficit Reduction Omnibus Reconciliation Act of 2005
that was different in substance from the version that passed the U.S. House of
Representatives.

Legal scholars have advised me that the substantive
differences between the versions - which involve $2 billion in federal spending
- mean that this bill did not meet the fundamental constitutional requirement
that both Houses of Congress must pass any legislation signed into law by the
President.

I am writing to learn what the President and his staff knew
about this constitutional defect at the time the President signed the
legislation.

Detailed background about the legislation and its
constitutional defects are contained in a letter I sent last month to House
Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, which I have enclosed with this letter.[1]

In summary, the House-passed version of the legislation required the
Medicare program to lease "durable medical equipment," such as wheelchairs, for
seniors and other beneficiaries for up to 36 months, while the version of the
legislation signed by the President limited the duration of these leases to just
13 months.

As the Congressional Budget Office reported, this seemingly
small change from 36 months to 13 months has a disproportionately large
budgetary impact, cutting Medicare outlays by $2 billion over the next five
years.[2]

I understand that a call was made to the White House before the
legislation was signed by the President advising the White House of the
differences between the bills and seeking advice about how to proceed.

My understanding is that the call was made either by the Speaker of the
House to the President or by the senior staff of the Speaker to the senior staff
of the President.

I would like to know whether my understanding is
correct.

If it is, the implications are
serious.

The Presentment Clause of the U.S. Constitution
states that before a bill can become law, it must be passed by both Houses of
Congress[3]

When the President took the oath of office, he swore to
"preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States," which
includes the Presentment Clause.

If the
President signed the Reconciliation Act knowing its constitutional infirmity, he
would in effect be placing himself above the
Constitution.

I do not raise
this issue lightly.

Given the gravity of the matter and
the unusual circumstances surrounding the Reconciliation Act, Congress and the
public need a straightforward explanation of what the President and his staff
knew on February 8, when the legislation was signed into law.

Sincerely,

Henry A. Waxman

Ranking Minority Member

Enclosure

• [1] See Letter from Rep. Henry A. Waxman to Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi (Feb. 14, 2006).
• [2] See Letter from CBO Acting Director Donald Marron to Rep. John M. Spratt, Jr. (Feb. 13, 2006).
• [3] U.S. Constitution, Article I, § 7.
• © Copyright 2006 YubaNet.com

US and Israeli governments plan a military attack against Iran, possibly using nuclear bombs [1] [2] [3] [4] [5], possibly this month (March 2006) for reasons including:

stopping the planned opening of an international oil-petrochemical-gas stock exchange for oil trade in euros [1] [2] [3] [4] [5];
control of Khuzestan province [1] [2] [3] where most Iranian oil lies, on the border with Iraq (US war plan OPLAN 1002-04); to distract attention from USA domestic political problems; and for Christian fundamentalist reasons - Bush says he was just following God's orders when he ordered the attacks on Afghanistan and Iraq.

The official excuse for the attack is the possible nuclear weapons program in Iran: ex-CIA agents Paul Pillar and Ellen Laipson as well as retired United Nations weapons inspector Hans Blix state that if Iran were really trying to build atom bombs, then the most effective way to stop this would be a guarantee from the US and Israel not to attack Iran.

Key facts:

• Iran has not (yet) violated the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), though the National Intelligence Community in the USA estimates that Iran could build nuclear bombs in about 10 years' time, and it seems that nuclear proliferator (US ally) Pakistan gave some help to Iran to do this [1] [2] [3] [4] [5]
• USA, France and the UK grossly violate Article VI of the NPT, which requires disarmament
• Germany violates Articles I and II of the NPT by nuclear sharing
• Israel has about 75-200 nuclear bombs and has neither signed nor ratified the NPT, but it is a member of the IAEA - the agency making inspections for the NPT
• in June 2005, the USA blackmailed IAEA chief El Baradei to either "get tough" on Iran or lose his job
  

info: iranbodycount wikipedia Iranian blogs Workers' Left Unity Iran

action: campaigniran defendiran stopwaroniran medialens.org StopWar.org.uk Global Days of Action 18-20 March

Three years after the US attack on Iraq, controlled by the dictator Saddam Hussein 53 years after the US+UK coup d'etat in Iran against the democratically elected prime minister Mossadegh and 18 years after the shooting down by the USS Vincennes of Iran Air Flight 655, killing the 290 people on board ( 274 passengers, 16 crew), the USA and Israeli regimes plan a military attack against the theocratic democracy in Iran.

According to various analysts, [1] [2] [3], the attack may use "mini-nukes" (small nuclear bombs), in order to destroy deep underground facilities. Because of the official reason for the attack (the possible Iranian program to build nuclear bombs), the US/Israeli attack on Iran is expected to be a single, fast, massive simultaneous attack on nuclear energy (civilian or suspected military) and military facilities in sixteen different towns in Iran [1] [2] including e.g. Bushehr (165,000 inhabitants), Arak (511,000), the mountain town of Natanz (40,000), Isfahan (2,000,000) and Tehran (12,000,000) - for a total population in the listed towns (including Tehran metropolitan area) of 23 million.

Even though it's realistic that some sectors of the Iranian government may be hoping to build nuclear bombs in violation of the Iranian head of state's fatwa (religous order) banning the production, stockpiling and use of nuclear weapons, there are several reasons why this alleged bomb-building program is not a credible reason for the planned attack:

• practical: Iranian engineers and scientists would have great difficulty building nuclear warheads, since Iran has been party to the NPT since 1970. It is credible that there has been some transfer of technical knowledge from Pakistan and P.R.China to Iran. However, in November 2004, Iranian authorities voluntarily accepted to follow an Additional Safeguard Agreement, under which during the last few years, the IAEA has carried out frequent and intrusive inspections of Iranian facilities. According to the Iranian authorities, 1200 person-days of inspections were carried out from November 2003 to November 2005, while the total number of person-days of inspections carried out by the IAEA each year is about 10,000 for 140 states;
• motivational: the threat of attack by the USA/Israel is a strong motivating factor for Iranian politicians and voters to build atom bombs. Ex-CIA agents Paul Pillar and Ellen Laipson and the previous IAEA chief Hans Blix have said that if Iran were really trying to build nuclear weapons, then the most effective way of stopping this would be for USA and Israel to provide guarantees that they will not attack Iran - which the USA seems to have done for North Korea;
• ineffectiveness: Many analysts e.g. at the Centre for Nonproliferation Studies say that since the most likely effect of the attacks would be to increase motivation to build nuclear bombs without destroying the existing uranium supplies (underground) nor being able to totally destroy the technological knowledge among Iranians, the attack would only delay a nuclear bomb building program by a few years.

A more credible reason for the attack is control of Khuzestan province[1] [2] [3] where most Iranian oil lies, on the border with Iraq. British troops and US marinesstudying ethnic tensions have already been accused of carrying out provocations in Khuzestan and studying ethnic tensions there in order to more efficiently provoke local conflict and "justify" military intervention. Iranian authorities have claimed that a letter calling for Arabs from Khuzestan to be moved to another part of Iran was a fake intended to provoke ethnic conflict (which it did), and that recent bombings in Khuzestan were provoked by British agents, and that two recent military plane crashes occurred due to radio-jamming. The British Ahwazi Friendship Society, which states that it does not support separatism and opposes any invasion of Iran by foreign forces and condemns all forms of terrorism and has no links to any armed group, disagrees with at least some of these claims. The US war plan for invading Khuzestan apparently has a codename OPLAN 1002-04.

According to William Clark, Elias Akleh, Krassimir Petrov and Chris Cook, a more realistic reason for the planned attack is the opening (originally planned for 20 March 2006) of an International Oil Bourse (or Iran Petroleum Exchange) on the island of Kish, at which oil trading in euros (the so-called petro-euro) will become possible. At present, international oil trade happens in US dollars. European, Chinese, Japanese, West Asian and other companies and institutions wishing to buy or sell oil are presently forced to trade using large quantities of dollars, and in practice to keep large reserves in dollars.

After the opening, initially announced for 20 March 2006 though probably greatly delayed, of the Iranian oil exchange, which is expected to use euros, it would become possible to buy oil directly in euros. The risk for the USA would be loss of control over a large part of the world economy due to selling of the dollar, possibly leading to either an economic depression or hyperinflation in the USA. In late 2000, Saddam Hussein changed oil related transactions from the dollar to the euro. Also, he changed $US 10 billion in the Iraqi reserve fund at the United Nations to euros. These are considered to be important factors in the US decision to invade Iraq. On 23 March 2006, the Federal Reserve (central bank in the USA) will stop publishing the "M3" statistic, which (more or less) represents the amount of US cash dollars circulating around the world.

Other likely factors in the threat to attack Iran are Christian fundamentalist reasons, both for retaining support from the Christian fundamentalist electorate in the US - and for what seems to be Bush's personal belief that God has as much (if not more) right to make US foreign policy decisions as the US electorate: Bush says he was just following God's orders when he ordered the attacks on Afghanistan and Iraq.

The mainstream media propaganda is focussed on the possible Iranian program for developing nuclear weapons, even though:

• there is not (yet) any evidence that Iran has violated the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty1200 person-days of intrusive inspections from Nov 2003 to Nov 2005, though the National Intelligence Community in the USA (CIA, etc.) estimates that Iran could build nuclear bombs in about 10 years' time, and organisations more pro-war than the CIA claim shorter delays
• USA, France and the UK grossly violate Article VI of the NPT, which requires disarmament
• Germany violates Articles I and II of the NPT by nuclear sharing
• Israel has about 75-200 nuclear bombs and has neither signed nor ratified the NPT, but it is a member of the IAEA - the agency making inspections for the NPT.
• On 4 November 2004, at the 59th General Assembly of the United Nations 147 countries (including Iran) voted in favour of creating a committee for the negotiation of a treaty against producing fissile material which could be used for producing nuclear weapons; 2 countries abstained (UK, Israel); only one country voted against (USA); (see also other related votes);
• the world's largest democracy, India, struggled for many decades in favour of nuclear disarmament and did not ratify the NPT. However, in 1998, India became an overt nuclear weapons state (Pokhran II). During the next few days (first week of March 2006), Bush will visit India in recognition of India's status as a nuclear weapons state (but will also be "welcomed" by activists for his status as a mass murderer and war criminal).

Mainstream media attention has also focussed on comments by the recently elected president of Iran, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Ahmadinejad spoke against the existence of Israel as a state and expressed doubts about the Holocaust, leading to strong media and parliamentary criticism in Europe. Ahmadinejad made statements relating to the "wiping out" of the state of Israel in a similar way, according to him, that the USSR, the regime of Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlawi and Saddam Hussein's regimes were "wiped out". The accuracy of the translation of his words from Farsi to English remains disputed. The article http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mahmoud_Ahmadinejad_and_Israel discusses this in more detail. See also the explanation on 20 Feb 2006 by Iranian foreign minister Manouchehr Mottaki.

Ahmadinejad's election and somewhat weakened power as president demonstrate the complex balance of political forces in post-1979 Iran:

• the 2005 presidential election was the first which had to go to a second round of voting (runoff)
• four of Ahmadinejad's proposed ministers were rejected by parliament - the first time that a cabinet was rejected
• the appointment of Khatami to the State Expediency Council's Strategic Research Center in October was criticised and perceived as a weakening of Ahmadinejad's power

more info: iranbodycount wikipedia Iranian blogs Workers' Left Unity Iran

Do something! Stop the attacks before they start! campaigniran defendiran stopwaroniran medialens.org StopWar.org.uk Global Days of Action 18-20 March

The date was February 22, 1943.

Hans Scholl and his sister Sophie, along with their best friend, Christoph Probst, were scheduled to be executed by Nazi officials that afternoon.

The prison guards were so impressed with the calm and bravery of the prisoners in the face of impending death that they violated regulations by permitting them to meet together one last time.

Hans, a medical student at the University of Munich, was 24. Sophie, a student, was 21.

Christoph, a medical student, was 22.

This is the story of The White Rose.

It is a lesson in dissent.

It is a tale of courage – of principle – of honor.

It is detailed in three books: The White Rose (1970) by Inge Scholl, A Noble Treason (1979) by Richard Hanser, and An Honourable Defeat (1994) by Anton Gill.

Hans and Sophie Scholl were German teenagers in the 1930s.

Like other young Germans, they enthusiastically joined the Hitler Youth.

They believed that Adolf Hitler was leading Germany and the German people back to greatness.

Their parents were not so enthusiastic.

Their father – Robert Scholl – told his children that Hitler and the Nazis were leading Germany down a road of destruction.

Later – in 1942 – he would serve time in a Nazi prison for telling his secretary: "The war! It is already lost.

This Hitler is God's scourge on mankind, and if the war doesn't end soon the Russians will be sitting in Berlin."

Gradually, Hans and Sophie began realizing that their father was right.

They concluded that, in the name of freedom and the greater good of the German nation, Hitler and the Nazis were enslaving and destroying the German people.

They also knew that open dissent was impossible in Nazi Germany, especially after the start of World War II. Most Germans took the traditional position – that once war breaks out, it is the duty of the citizen to support the troops by supporting the government.

But Hans and Sophie Scholl believed differently.

They believed that it was the duty of a citizen, even in times of war, to stand up against an evil regime, especially when it is sending hundreds of thousands of its citizens to their deaths.

The Scholl siblings began sharing their feelings with a few of their friends – Christoph Probst, Alexander Schmorell, Willi Graf – as well as with Kurt Huber, their psychology and philosophy professor.

One day in 1942, copies of a leaflet entitled "The White Rose" suddenly appeared at the University of Munich.

The leaflet contained an anonymous essay that said that the Nazi system had slowly imprisoned the German people and was now destroying them.

The Nazi regime had turned evil.

It was time, the essay said, for Germans to rise up and resist the tyranny of their own government. At the bottom of the essay, the following request appeared: "Please make as many copies of this leaflet as you can and distribute them."

The leaflet caused a tremendous stir among the student body. It was the first time that internal dissent against the Nazi regime had surfaced in Germany.

The essay had been secretly written and distributed by Hans Scholl and his friends.

Another leaflet appeared soon afterward.

And then another.

And another.

Ultimately, there were six leaflets published and distributed by Hans and Sophie Scholl and their friends – four under the title "The White Rose" and two under the title "Leaflets of the Resistance."

Their publication took place periodically between 1942 and 1943 – interrupted for a few months when Hans and his friends were temporarily sent to the Eastern Front to fight against the Russians.

The members of The White Rose, of course, had to act cautiously.

The Nazi regime maintained an iron grip over German society. Internal dissent was quickly and efficiently smashed by the Gestapo.

Hans and Sophie Scholl and their friends knew what would happen to them if they were caught.

People began receiving copies of the leaflets in the mail.

Students at the University of Hamburg began copying and distributing them.

Copies began turning up in different parts of Germany and Austria.
Moreover, as Hanser points out, the members of The White Rose did not limit themselves to leaflets.

Graffiti began appearing in large letters on streets and buildings all over Munich: "Down with Hitler! . . . Hitler the Mass Murderer!" and "freiheit!
. . . freiheit! . . . Freedom! . . . Freedom!"

The Gestapo was driven into a frenzy.

It knew that the authors were having to procure large quantities of paper, envelopes, and postage.

It knew that they were using a duplicating machine.

But despite the Gestapo's best efforts, it was unable to catch the perpetrators.

One day – February 18, 1943 – Hans' and Sophie's luck ran out.

They were caught leaving pamphlets at the University of Munich and were arrested.

A search disclosed evidence of Christoph Probst's participation, and he too was soon arrested.

The three of them were indicted for treason.

On February 22 – four days after their arrest – their trial began.

The presiding judge, Roland Freisler, chief justice of the People's Court of the Greater German Reich, had been sent from Berlin.

Hanser writes:

"He conducted the trial as if the future of the Reich were indeed at stake.

He roared denunciations of the accused as if he were not the judge but the prosecutor.

He behaved alternately like an actor ranting through an overwritten role in an implausible melodrama and a Grand Inquisitor calling down eternal damnation on the heads of the three irredeemable heretics before him. . . .

No witnesses were called, since the defendants had admitted everything.

The proceedings consisted almost entirely of Roland Freisler's denunciation and abuse, punctuated from time to time by half-hearted offerings from the court-appointed defense attorneys, one of whom summed up his case with the observation, "I can only say fiat justitia. Let justice be done.

" By which he meant: Let the accused get what they deserve.

Freisler and the other accusers could not understand what had happened to these German youths.

After all, they all came from nice German families.

They all had attended German schools.

They had been members of the Hitler Youth.

How could they have turned out to be traitors?

What had so twisted and warped their minds?

Sophie Scholl shocked everyone in the courtroom when she remarked to Freisler: "Somebody, after all, had to make a start.

What we wrote and said is also believed by many others.

They just don't dare to express themselves as we did.

" Later in the proceedings, she said to him: "You know the war is lost.

Why don't you have the courage to face it?"

In the middle of the trial, Robert and Magdalene Scholl tried to enter the courtroom.

Magdalene said to the guard: "But I'm the mother of two of the accused."

The guard responded: "You should have brought them up better."

Robert Scholl forced his way into the courtroom and told the court that he was there to defend his children.

He was seized and forcibly escorted outside.

The entire courtroom heard him shout: "One day there will be another kind of justice! One day they will go down in history!"

Roland Freisler pronounced his judgment on the three defendants: Guilty of treason.

Their sentence: Death.

They were escorted back to Stadelheim prison, where the guards permitted Hans and Sophie to have one last visit with their parents.

Hans met with them first, and then Sophie. Hansen writes:

"His eyes were clear and steady and he showed no sign of dejection or despair.

He thanked his parents again for the love and warmth they had given him and he asked them to convey his affection and regard to a number of friends, whom he named.

Here, for a moment, tears threatened, and he turned away to spare his parents the pain of seeing them.

Facing them again, his shoulders were back and he smiled. . . .

"Then a woman prison guard brought in Sophie. . . .

Her mother tentatively offered her some candy, which Hans had declined. "Gladly," said Sophie, taking it.

"After all, I haven't had any lunch!"

She, too, looked somehow smaller, as if drawn together, but her face was clear and her smile was fresh and unforced, with something in it that her parents read as triumph.

"Sophie, Sophie," her mother murmured, as if to herself.

"To think you'll never be coming through the door again!"

Sophie's smile was gentle.

"Ah, Mother," she said.

"Those few little years. . . ."

Sophie Scholl looked at her parents and was strong in her pride and certainty.

"We took everything upon ourselves," she said.

"What we did will cause waves."

Her mother spoke again: "Sophie," she said softly, "Remember Jesus."

"Yes," replied Sophie earnestly, almost commandingly, "but you, too."

She left them, her parents, Robert and Magdalene Scholl, with her face still lit by the smile they loved so well and would never see again.

She was perfectly composed as she was led away.

Robert Mohr [a Gestapo official], who had come out to the prison on business of his own, saw her in her cell immediately afterwards, and she was crying.

It was the first time Robert Mohr had seen her in tears, and she apologized.

"I have just said good-bye to my parents," she said. "You understand . . ."

She had not cried before her parents.

For them she had smiled."

No relatives visited Christoph Probst.

His wife, who had just had their third child, was in the hospital.

Neither she nor any members of his family even knew that he was on trial or that he had been sentenced to death.

While his faith in God had always been deep and unwavering, he had never committed to a certain faith.

On the eve of his death, a Catholic priest admitted him into the church in articulo mortis – at the point of death. "Now," he said, "my death will be easy and joyful."

That afternoon, the prison guards permitted Hans, Sophie, and Christoph to have one last visit together.

Sophie was then led to the guillotine.

One observer described her as she walked to her death: "Without turning a hair, without flinching."

Christoph Probst was next.

Hans Scholl was last; just before he was beheaded, Hans cried out:

"Long live freedom!"

Unfortunately, they were not the last to die.

The Gestapo's investigation was relentless.

Later tried and executed were Alex Schmorell (age 25), Willi Graf (age 25), and Kurt Huber (age 49).

Students at the University of Hamburg were either executed or sent to concentration camps.

Today, every German knows the story of The White Rose.

A square at the University of Munich is named after Hans and Sophie Scholl.

And there are streets, squares, and schools all over Germany named for the members of The White Rose.

The German movie The White Rose is now found in video stores in Germany and the United States.

Richard Hansen sums up the story of The White Rose:

"In the vogue words of the time, the Scholls and their friends represented the "other" Germany, the land of poets and thinkers, in contrast to the Germany that was reverting to barbarism and trying to take the world with it.

What they were and what they did would have been "other" in any society at any time.

What they did transcended the easy division of good-German/bad-German and lifted them above the nationalism of time-bound events.

Their actions made them enduring symbols of the struggle, universal and timeless, for the freedom of the human spirit wherever and whenever it is threatened. " 

Replete with esoteric symbols, conspiracy research certainly warrants semiotic examination.

Although fraught with historical flaws and theological distortions, The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown acknowledges the value of semiotics in studying the conspiratorial world.

In fact, the novel’s central character is a semiotician specializing in symbology. Evidently, Brown recognized the potential of semiotics in analyzing the coded messages of cabals occupying history’s darker corners.

September 11th is one such corner that is worth semiotic analysis.

Numerous researchers like Michael Ruppert and Dennis Cuddy have done an excellent job compiling the evidence of government complicity in 9-11.

Recapitulating their arguments is not the purpose of this article. However, it is this researcher’s contention that there is a supranational power elite positioned above the political machinations of national governments.

It was this supranational elite that created Bin Laden and, through strategically placed surrogates, de-activated portions of American’s national security apparatus that could have prevented 9-11.

Commenting on this supranational elite, Professor Keller explains: "Like a secret society, those at the top rarely reveal the inner workings of their worlds" (3).

Semiotics could provide the Rosetta Stone to deciphering the esoteric language of the elite, particularly the subtle messages that they embedded within the events of 9-11.

This article shall semiotically dismantle the early media reports that NBC broadcasted on September 11, 2001.

It is this author’s contention that these early reports, working intertextually with sci-fi films of previous years, helped the power elite to impose a politically expedient narrative paradigm upon 9-11.

A Primer on Semiotics

Finding its proximate origins during the sixties, semiotics is a relatively young field of study.

Its simplest definition is the study of signs.

However, semiotics probes slightly deeper, examining the application of signs in the daily social interchanges of humanity.

Moreover, signs are not merely images, like the proverbial STOP sign.

They are also spoken and written words.

These last two categories of signs have long been the providence of linguistics, a subsidiary of the larger field of semiotics.

All of these signs are used to communicate messages, which semioticians refer to as "texts." A text can inhabit any medium of communication.

Whether verbal or nonverbal, a text always has meaning.

Before proceeding any further, a list of basic terms used in semiotics might be helpful to the reader.

Throughout the course of this examination, these terms will continue to re-surface.

Hopefully, they will not become too confusing.

Signs

There are three categories:

• Iconic
• These signs normally resemble something else.
• They are approximations, facsimiles.
• Examples: statues, pictures.
• Indexical
• Like the index in the back of a book, these signs refer the percipient to something else.
• They are used to establish causal or physical relationships.
• Examples: Smoke is commonly an indexical sign for fire.
• A shadow is normally an indexical sign for a physical body in front of some light source.
• Symbols
• These signs express some convention and hold a shared meaning for those interpolated into the culture.
• These signs must be learned.
• Examples: Words, numbers, flags.

Intertextual reference

This type of reference creates a correlation between more than one text, thus augmenting a sign’s meaning.

Denotation

A sign’s literal meaning.

Connotation

A sign’s implied meaning.

It should be understood that this is just the basic terminology of semiotics.

However, it will work for the purposes of this examination.


The Narrative Paradigm: "Good" Americans vs. "Evil" Arabs

Few are not acquainted with the scene in Independence Day during which the White House is destroyed by a powerful energy beam from a hovering alien ship.

In his semiotic analysis of this famous clip, Professor Elliot Gaines discerns "the narrative qualities that embody the paradigmatic character of the situation and images" surrounding 9-11(Gaines 123).

This researcher would contend that such synchronicities were consciously engineered by the entertainment industrial complex.

Intrinsic to the narrative characteristics of Independence Day was a paradigmatic template that the elite successfully imposed upon September 11th.

Promulgated vigorously by Establishment media organs, Independence Day was instrumental in creating a cultural milieu that would be hospitable to future media manipulations. By the time of the WTC attacks, the collective subconscious of America was fertile with memes (contagious ideas) planted by Independence Day.

This memetic fertility is most effectively illustrated by the comments of MSNBC reporter Ron Insana.

Insana witnessed the disintegration of the World Trade Center firsthand (Gaines 125).

In an interview with Matt Lauer, Katie Couric, and Tom Brokaw, Insana vividly recounted his experience:

“[A]s we were going across the street, we were not terribly far from the World Trade Center building, the south tower.

As we were cutting across a, a quarantine zone actually, the building began disintegrating.

And we heard it and looked up and started to see elements of the building come down and we ran, and honestly it was like a scene out of Independence Day.

Everything began to rain down.

It was pitch black around us as the wind was ripping through the corridors of lower Manhattan.” (Qutd. in Gaines 125)

Gaines identifies the Independence Day reference as semiotically significant (125).

Given his distinction as a journalist before a global audience, Insana is thoroughly cognizant of the fact that his "intertextual reference to the film will be understood as a commonly known cultural text" (125).

At this point, the previously dormant seeds of virulent thought implanted by Independence Day have been activated.

Insana’s invocation of this "commonly known text" has triggered the release of ideational spores within humanity’s collective consciousness.

Gaines reveals the semiotic effect of Insana’s intertextual reference upon the percipient’s mind:

“The violence in Independence Day, coded as fiction, constructs a narrative binary opposition that clearly identifies good against evil.

The available images representing the events of September 11th, using inferences drawn from Independence Day’s sign/object relations, construct a narrative paradigm based upon the same themes, but coded as reality.” (126)

Indeed, Insana’s intertextual reference helped establish the paradigm of "good against evil" upon which the "War on Terrorism" would be premised.

Suddenly, Arabs became analogous to the "alien invaders" of Independence Day. Simultaneously, the United States became analogous to the beleaguered "home world."

Semiotically, Insana’s intertextual reference prompted America’s collective subconscious to reconceptualize the relational dynamic between the West and the Arab world. "Good" humans against "evil" aliens, a narrative paradigm coded as fiction in Independence Day, suddenly recoded itself in the guise of reality.

However, according to the elite’s narrative paradigm for September 11th, being neither "good" nor "human" is part of the Arab’s role.

The Semiotics of Sci-fi Predictive Programming

It is not this researcher’s contention that Insana consciously designed his intertextual reference to achieve such an end.

However, it is this researcher’s contention that Insana’s intertextual reference is product of a larger semiotic deception.

This larger semiotic deception is part of a program for cultural subversion known as "sci-fi predictive programming," a term coined by researcher Michael Hoffman.

Elaborating on this concept, Hoffman states:

"Predictive programming works by means of the propagation of the illusion of an infallibly accurate vision of how the world is going to look in the future" (205).

Innocuous though the genre may seem, science fiction literature has had a history of presenting narrative paradigms that are oddly consistent with the plans of the elite.

In Dope, Inc., associates of political dissident Lyndon LaRouche claim that the famous literary works of H.G. Wells and his apprentices, George Orwell and Aldous Huxley, were really "‘mass appeal’ organizing documents on behalf of one-world order" (538).

Such would seem to be the case with Gene Roddenberry’s Star Trek, which presents a socialist totalitarian world government under the appellation of the Federation.

Moreover, Roddenberry espoused a core precept of the ruling class religion:

"As nearly as I can concentrate on the question today, I believe I am God; certainly you are, I think we intelligent beings on this planet are all a piece of God, are becoming God" (Alexander 568).

This statement echoes the occult doctrine of "becoming," a belief promoted within the Masonic Lodge and disseminated on the popular level as Darwinism.

According to this doctrine, man is gradually evolving towards apotheosis.

In 2001: A Space Odyssey, Stanley Kubrick and Arthur C. Clarke presented a semiotic signpost for the next step in this chimerical evolutionary ascent.

Michael Hoffman explains:

"2001, A Space Odyssey, directed by Stanley Kubrick and based on the writing of Arthur C. Clarke, is, with hindsight, a pompous, pretentious exercise.

But when it debuted it sent shivers up the collective spine.

It has a hallowed place in the Cryptosphere because it helped fashion what the Videodrome embodies today.

At the heart of the film is the worship of the Darwinian hypothesis of evolution and the positioning of a mysterious monolith as the evolutionary battery or "sentinel" that transforms the ape into the space man (hence the "odyssey").

Clarke and Kubrick’s movie, 2001, opens with a scene of the "Dawn of Man," supposedly intended to take the viewer back to the origins of humanity on earth.

This lengthy sequence is vintage Darwinism, portraying our genesis as bestial and featuring man-like apes as our ancestors.

In the film, the evolution of these hominids is raised to the next rung on the evolutionary ladder by the sudden appearance of a mysterious monolith.

Commensurate with the new presence of this enigmatic "sentinel," our alleged simian progenitors learn to acquire a primitive form of technology; for the first time they use a bone as a weapon.

This bone is then tossed into the air by one of the ape-men. Kubrick photographs the bone in slow motion and by means of special effects, he shows it becoming an orbiting spacecraft, thus traversing "millions of years in evolutionary time."

The next evolutionary level occurs in "2(00)1" (21, i.e. the 21st century).

In the year 2001, the cosmic sentinel that is the monolith reappears again, triggering an alert that man is on to the next stage of his "glorious evolution." (Hoffman 11-12)

The monolith or "sentinel" semiotically gesticulates towards the next epoch of man’s "glorious evolution."

Like the tabula rasa of human consciousness, the barren canvas of the monolith awaits the next brushstrokes of unseen painters.

A new portrait of man is scheduled to be painted and the "glorious evolution" of humanity continues.

"Coincidently," this semiotic signpost reappeared before the public eye in the actual year 2001.

Michael Hoffman recounts the moment of this reappearance:

“In keeping with the script, in the first dark hours of New Year’s 2001, a "mystery monolith appeared on a grassy knoll in Magnuson Park in Seattle, Washington."

The image of this monolith was that of an almost exact replica of the one featured in 2001: A Space Odyssey.

Neither the media nor the police would say how the monolith got on the "grassy knoll" or who was responsible.

The 2001 monolith stood for a few days while the Seattle parks department debated its fate. Then it disappeared.”. (Hoffman 14)

That same year, the World Trade Center attacks took place and the Bush Administration began to erect a garrison state under the auspices of "national security."

The chronically recapitulated theme of exchanging freedom for security is one of the most prevalent symptoms of this transformational period.

However, semiotic intimations of this emergent garrison state may be discernible in the 1997 film Starship Troopers.

Based on the sci-fi novel by Robert Heinlein, the film presents a socialist totalitarian world government that owes its very existence to a threat from "beyond."

Synopsizing the theme of the film, literary critic Geoffrey Whitehall makes an interesting observation:

“Against, yet within, its clichéd ontological galaxy, Starship Troopers mobilizes the beyond to critique this dominant us/them narrative.

It seeks to reveal how identity/difference, a relation of fear, founds a political galaxy… fear is the order word of a security discourse.

Historically, a discourse of fear bridged what it meant to be human in the world under Christendom (seeking salvation) and the emergence of modernity (seeking security) as the dominant trope of political life in the sovereign state.

The church relied on a discourse of fear to 'establish its authority, discipline its followers and ward off its enemies,' in effect creating a Christian world politics.

Under modern world politics, similarly, the sovereign state relies on the creation of an external threat to author its foreign policy [emphasis - ADDED] and establish the lofty category of citizenship as the only form of modern human qualification.” (182)

It is interesting that, the very same year of Starship Troopers’ release, former national security advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski published The Grand Chessboard.

In this overtly imperialistic tract, Brzezinski delineated the geostrategy by which America would attain global primacy.

According to Brzezinski, this period of American hegemony would represent little more than a transitional period preceding her amalgamation into a one-world government.

In one of the most damning portions of the text, Brzezinski reveals the catalyst for America’s imperialist mobilization:

“Moreover, as America becomes an increasingly multi-cultural 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.” [emphasis - ADDED] (Brzezinski 211)

A "truly massive and widely perceived direct external threat" did appear.

His name was Osama bin Laden.

Starship Troopers was premised upon the same thesis that would underpin American foreign policy four years later… consensus facilitated by an external threat.

Like Insana’s Independence Day analogy, the thematic similarities between Brzezinski’s Grand Chessboard and Heinlein’s Starship Troopers reiterate the semiotic notion of intertextuality.

The various texts comprising human discourse are not read in a cultural vacuum. On the level of consumption, "any one text is necessarily read in relationship to others and . . . a range of textual knowledges is brought to bear upon it" (Fiske 108).

Likewise, "a range of textual knowledges" was brought to bear upon September 11th.

Like Independence Day, Heinlein’s Starship Troopers constituted part of this body of "textual knowledges."

The centrality of an external threat to the formulation of foreign policy, which thematically underpinned Brzezinski’s geostrategy, was semiotically communicated to the public through Starship Troopers.

In the elite’s narrative paradigm for September 11th, the necessity of the external threat was illustrated by the nationalistic fervor that followed the WTC attacks.

Suddenly, the appellation of "patriot," which was previously a stigma assigned to tax protesters and members of militias, regained its place in the cultural lexicon of reverential labels.

The removal of the pejorative connotations previously imposed upon the "patriot" facilitated the semiotic deception that was to follow with the introduction of the Patriot Act.

Connotatively, the very title of the Patriot Act suggested that those who opposed it constituted "unpatriotic" elements.

Thus, acquiescence meant patriotism.

This inference echoes the mantra presented in Starship Troopers: "Service guarantees citizenship."

In the post-911 cultural milieu where the term "patriot" was as elastic as the term "terrorist," independent reasoning was subverted by a burgeoning epidemic of cognitive dissonance.

Starship Troopers also reiterated the narrative paradigm of "good" humans against "evil" aliens, a belief integral to the imperial mobilization of Brzezinski’s geostrategy.

The forces of "good," embodied by America, were mobilized against the forces of "evil," embodied by the Arab world.

In keeping with the narrative paradigm of the elite, the media continued its standard practice of typecasting.

Like the extraterrestrial "bugs" of Starship Troopers, Arabs were cast as hostile aliens.

Meanwhile, Americans maintained their roles as humans.
Again, it is not this researcher’s contention that Ron Insana was a conscious agent of this semiotic deception.

Yet, as a part of the Establishment media, Insana acted as the perfect transmission belt for memes emanating from the ruling class itself.

As the old adage goes, "No one knows who invented water, but you can bet it wasn’t the fish."

Immersed within the sea of Establishment-controlled media, Insana could not identify the larger semiotic manipulation in which he unwittingly played an integral role.

Science fiction has been called "the literature of ideas." Insana’s intertextual reference suggests that he had contracted an ideational contagion through exposure to sci-fi films like Independence Day and Starship Troopers.

Assembling the Picture

Ferdinand de Saussure observed that "normally we do not express ourselves by using single linguistic signs, but groups of signs, organized in complexes which themselves are signs" (Saussure 1974, 128; Saussure 1983, 127).

Indeed, isolated signs say very little, if anything at all. Communication and cogent thought are contingent upon the coalescence of signs.

Such coalescence constitutes the complex social interchange called discourse.

Likewise, the semiotic significance of a particular scene becomes evident only once the percipient has correlated all the constituent signs comprising it.

This is syntagmatic analysis, the study of a text’s structure and correlating signs.

Because they are narratives, films largely depend upon sequential configurations that produce the illusion of causal relationships.

Likewise, the narrative paradigm that the power elite wished to impose upon September 11th was sequenced to create a false causal connection between the WTC attacks and the Arab world.

During the interview with Insana, Couric abruptly announced an "upsetting wire that just came across the wire from the West Bank" (qutd. in Gaines 126).

Couric proceeded to paint a disturbing portrait of militant Muslims celebrating the destruction of the Twin Towers:

“Thousands of Palestinians celebrated Tuesday’s terror attacks in the United States chanting ‘God is great’ and distributing candy to passers by even as their leader, Yasir Arafat said he was horrified. The U.S. government has become increasingly unpopular in the West Bank and Gaza Strip in the past year of Israeli-Palestinian fighting.” (Qutd. in Gaines 126).

As the report continued, Couric read the same "upsetting wire" again, this time as a voice-over narrative to video footage of Palestinian demonstrators (Gaines 126).

The footage was accompanied by a title card claiming that the event had occurred "EARLIER THIS MORNING" (Gaines 126).

This researcher contends that the juxtaposition of this image with Insana’s intertextual reference was intentional.

It was designed to reinforce the paradigmatic template of "good" Americans against "evil" Arabs.

Within the mind of the percipient, causal connections were already being made.

"Behold, the face of the enemy," the subconscious declared. The syntagmatic structure of the NBC report was designed to achieve precisely this effect.

Upon closer examination, the semiotic deception grows even more sinister.

Gaines elaborates on the unfolding sham:

“NBC later acknowledged that it had committed a breach of ethics by using archive footage with an unverified wire report.

Only through convention do we assume the indexical nature of an image grounded by the text of news.

The image was not actually acquired September 11th as an authentic Palestinian celebration of the attack against the US.

The image was selected from an archive as a global sign to imply Islamic extremism as the enemy.” (126)

Was this an accident or a consciously engineered psychocognitive assault?

Given the distinct possibility of a conspiracy to orchestrate 9-11, one cannot help but wonder if the NBC report was designed to distract attention.

Gaines states: "The stereotypical images of Arab, mid-eastern-looking people celebrating on a street could be falsely anchored to a specific people from a designated time and place" (127).

With the eyes of the world firmly fixed upon Islamic extremism as the enemy, the true of criminals remained hidden behind a semiotic veil.

Conclusion

Citing Richard L. Lanigan, Gaines asserts: "Fiction and nonfiction are both mediated popular texts-the convergence of human experience expressed through technology" (127).

That the chief means of deception is technological in nature is intentional.

The word "technology" is derived from the Greek word techne, which means "craft." Moreover, the term "craft" is also associated with witchcraft or Wicca.

From the term Wicca, one derives the word wicker (Hoffman 63).

Examining this word a little closer, researcher Michael Hoffman explains: "The word wicker has many denotations and connotations, one of which is ‘to bend,’ as in the ‘bending’ of reality" (63).

This is especially interesting when considering the words of Mark Pesce, co-inventor of Virtual Reality Modeling Language.

Pesce writes: "The enduring archetype of techne within the pre-Modern era is magic, of an environment that conforms entirely to the will of being" (Pesce).

Through the magic of electronic media, the post-September 11th environment seemed to conform entirely to the will of the elite.

The Druid magicians of antiquity used to carry wands, which were made out of "holly wood." Does this sound familiar?

The famous Hollywood sign is but an enormous semiotic marker for an industry that specializes in illusion. Independence Day could be considered just one more of its spells.

Given the public compliance to the illusion of the so-called "War on Terror," it would seem that the spell is working.

Through the alchemical sorcery of electronic media, America’s consciousness remains immersed within the semiotic mirage of the post-911 culture.

Works Cited

• Alexander, David. Star Trek Creator. New York: Dutton Signet, 1994.
• Brzezinski, Zbigniew. The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy and Geostrategic Objectives. New York: Basic Books, 1997.
• Fiske, John. Television Culture. London: Routledge, 1987.
• Hoffman, Michael. Secret Societies and Psychological Warfare. Coeur d’Alene, Idaho: Independent History & Research, 2001.
• Gaines, Elliot. "The Semiotics of Media Images From Independence Day and September 11th 2001." The American Journal of Semiotics 17 (2001): 117-131.
• Keller, Suzanne. Beyond The Ruling Class: Strategic Elites In Modern Society. New York: Random House, 1963.
• LaRouche, Lyndon. Dope, Inc. Washington, D.C.: Executive Intelligence, Inc., 1992.
• Pesce, Mark, "Ontos and Techne," Computer-Medicated Magazine, April 1997.
• Saussure, Ferdinand de. Course in General Linguistics. 1916. Trans. Wade Baskin. London: Fontana/Collins, 1974.
• ---. Course in General Linguistics. 1916. Trans. Roy Harris. London: Duckworth, 1983.
• Whitehall, Geoffrey. "The Problem of the ‘World and Beyond’: Encountering ‘the Other’ in Science Fiction." To Seek Out New Worlds: Science Fiction and World Politics, Jutta Weldes, ed. NY: Palgrave, 2003, 169-193.

About the Author

Phillip D. Collins acted as the editor for The Hidden Face of Terrorism.

He has an Associate of Arts and Science. Currently, he is studying for a bachelor’s degree in Communications at Wright State University.

During the course of his seven-year college career, Phillip has studied philosophy, religion, and classic literature.

He co-authored the book, The Ascendancy of the Scientific Dictatorship: An Examination of Epistemic Autocracy, From the 19th to the 21st Century, is available online here.