EN-- F. William Engdahl -- FULL SPECTRUM DOMINANCE -- INTRODUCTION

F. William Engdahl

INTRODUCTION

Less than two decades ago have passed since than the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of a decades-long polarized world of two opposing military superpowers. In late 1989 Communist East Germany, the German Democratic Republic as it was known, began to break the barriers of Soviet control and by November of that year the much-hated Berlin Wall was being pulled down stone-by-stone. People danced on the wall in celebration of what they believed would be a new freedom, a paradise of the 'American Way of Life'.

The collapse of the Soviet Union was inevitable by the end of the 1980's.The economy had been literally bled to the bone in order to feed an endless arms race with its arch rival and Cold War opponent, the United States. By late 1989 the Soviet leadership was pragmatic enough to scrap the last vestiges of Marxist ideology and raise the white flag of surrender. 'Free market capitalism' had won over 'state-run socialism.'

The collapse of the Soviet Union brought jubilation everywhere, with the exception of the White House where, initially, President George H. W. Bush reacted with panic. Perhaps he was unsure how the United States would continue to justify its huge arms spending and its massive intelligence apparatus - ranging from the CIA to the NSA to the Defense Intelligence Agency and beyond - without a Soviet foe. George H. W. Bush was a product and a sharper of the Cold War National Security State. His world was one of 'enemy image', espionage, and secrecy, where people often sidestepped the Us Constitution when 'national security’ was involved. In its own peculiar way it was a state within the state, a world every bit as centrally run and controlled as the Soviet Union had been, only with private multinational defense and energy conglomerates and their organizations of coordination in place of the Soviet Politburo. Its military contracts linked every part of the economy of the United States to the future of that permanent war machine.

For those segments of the US establishment whose power had grown exponentially through the expansion of the post World War II national security state, the end of the Cold War meant the loss of their reason for existing.

As the sole hegemonic power remaining after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the United States was faced with two possible ways of dealing with the new Russian geopolitical reality.

It could have cautiously but clearly signaled the opening of a new era of political and economic cooperation with its shattered and economically devastated former Cold War foe.

The West, led by the United States, might have encouraged mutual de-escalation of the Cold War nuclear balance of terror and the conversion of industry - West as well as East - into civilian enterprises to rebuild civilian infrastracture and repair of impoverished cities.

The United States had the option of gradually dismantling NATO just as Russia had dissolved the Warsaw Pact, and furthering a climate of mutual economic cooperation that could turn Eurasia into one of the world's most prosperous and thriving economic zones.

Yet Washington chose another path to deal with the end of the Cold War. The path could be understood only from the inner logic of its global agenda - a geopolitical agenda. The sole remaining Superpower chose stealth, deception, lies and wars to attempt to control the Eurasian Heartland - its only potential rival as an economic region - by military force.

Kept secret from most Americans, by George H. W. Bush, and by his friend and de facto protégé, Democratic President Bill Clinton, was the reality that for the faction that controlled the Pentagon - the military defense industry, its many sub-contractors, and the giant oil and oil services companies such as Halliburton - the Cold War never ended.

The 'new' Cold War assumed various disguises and deceptive tactics until September 11, 2001. Those events empowered an American President to declare permanent war against an enemy who was everywhere and nowhere, who allegedly threatened the American way of life justifying laws that destroyed that way of life in the name of the new worldwide War on Terror. To put it crassly, Osama bin Laden was the answer to a Pentagon prayer in September 2001.

What few were aware of, largely because their responsable national media refused to tell them, was that since the fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989, the Pentagon had been pursuing, step-by-careful-step, a military strategy for domination of the entire planet, a goal no earlier great power had ever achieved, thought may had tried. It was called by the Pentagon, "Full Spectrum Dominance" and as its name implied, its agenda was to control everything everywhere including the high seas, land, air, space and even outer space and cyberspace.

That agenda had been pursued over decades on a much lower scale with CIA-backed coups in strategic countries such as Iran, Guatemala, Brazil, Vietnam, Ghana, the Belgian Congo. Now the end of a counter-vailing Superpower, the Soviet Union, meant the goal could be pursued effectively unopposed.

As far back as 1939 a small elite circle of specialists has been convened under highest secrecy by a private foreign policy organization, the new York Council on Foreign Relations. With generous funding from the Rockefeller Foundation, the group set out to map the details of a post war world. In their view, a new world war was imminent and out of its ashes only one country would emerge victorious - The United States.

What was the real agenda of the relentless Pentagon wars? Was it, as some suggested, a strategy to control major oil reserves in an era of future scarcity? Or was there a far different, more grandiose, agenda behind the US strategy since the end of the Cold War?

The litmus test as to whether the aggressive military agenda of the two Bush administrations was an extreme aberration of core American foreign military policy, or on the contrary, at the very heart of its long-term agenda, was the Presidency of Barack Obama.

The initial indications were not optimistic for those hoping for the much-touted change. As President, Obama selected a long-time Bush family intimate, former CIA Director and Bush Secretary of Defense, Robert GAtes, to run the Pentagon. He choose senior career military  people as head of the National Security Council and Director of National Intelligence, and his first act as President was to announce an increase troop commitment to Afghanistan.

F. William Engdahl – Abril, 2009

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CHAPTER ONE

A War in Georgia – Putin Drops a Bomb

Guns of August An One of Those Funny Numbers

INVITATION TO THE INTERNATIONAL CONVENTION

FOR THE 70TH ANNIVERSARY OF NATO

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