Sins Of Statecraft: The War On Terror Exposed

The reasons for the use of the long-standing instruments of fear and militarism in the cause of navigating the contours and undulations of the Cold War are revealed in the context of the post-Cold War “war on terror,” which employs the same rhetoric and means of manipulation. Such revelations are not limited to identical methods, but spring forth from statements voiced by the manipulators themselves. A recent example (among many) came from the wife of Norman Podhoretz, Midge Decter, founder of the Committee for the Free World, and cofounder of a plethora of single-minded think tanks ranging from the second incarnation of the Committee on the Present Danger (CPD), Hudson Institute, Heritage Foundation, Coalition for a Democratic Majority, to the Project for the New American Century (PNAC). In a 2004 Los Angeles interview, Decter stated, “We’re not in the Middle East to bring sweetness and light to the world. We’re there to get something we and our friends in Europe depend on. Namely, oil.”[i] Statements like these surface after years, even decades, of manipulations that use very different and far more publicly palatable rhetoric to arrive at the tipping point when pretexts “to get” what manipulators want are achieved and exploited. Regarding methods, again reflecting undulations in tensions between presidents and individuals acting in groups to influence policy - groups whose objectives invariably have little or nothing to do with democracy and the welfare of the American people - a clear pattern of self-serving interests emerges from the comparison of the ascendancy of 32 CPD members to posts in the pro-Cold War Reagan administration with the ascendancy of a roughly similar number of PNAC members to posts in the pro-“war on terror” Bush administration. Though the precise reasons have somewhat varied between the end of World War II and today, they have in common the convergent interests of such influential groups with likeminded groups outside the US, who together stood to gain from imperial ambitions pursued under the cloak of American projection of force as a response to the well-fashioned threats of “communist enslavement” and “international terrorism” respectively. http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article14262.htm

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