@enhydra lutris
.
may be a bit daunting ..

just jump if that is where
the destination is

and killers.

be well and have a good one

@fire with fire
.
pan out so well for the neocon crowd
only hope they bet their farms on it so
they lose their asses in the process.

US total domination of the world !
who would want to go there ?

Life is too complicated already.

Dick Cheney's Song of America

Few writers are more ambitious than the writers of government poli­cy papers, and few policy papers are more ambitious than Dick Cheney’s masterwork. It has taken several forms over the last decade and is in fact the product of several ghostwrit­ers (notably Paul Wolfowitz and Colin Powell), but Cheney has been consistent in his dedication to the ideas in the documents that bear his name, and he has maintained a close association with the ideologues be­hind them. Let us, therefore, call Cheney the author, and this series of documents the Plan.

The Plan was published in unclas­sified form most recently under the title of Defense Strategy for the 1990s, as Cheney ended his term as secretary of defense under the elder George Bush in early 1993, but it is, like Leaves of Grass, a perpetually evolving work. It was the controver­sial Defense Planning Guidance draft of 1992 — from which Cheney, unconvincingly, tried to distance him­self — and it was the somewhat less aggressive revised draft of that same year. This June it was a presidential lecture in the form of a commence­ment address at West Point, and in July it was leaked to the press as yet another Defense Planning Guidance (this time under the pen name of Defense Secretary Donald Rums­feld). It will take its ultimate form, though, as America’s new national security strategy — and Cheney et al. will experience what few writers have even dared dream: their words will become our reality.

The Plan is for the United States to rule the world. The overt theme is unilateralism, but it is ultimately a story of domination. It calls for the United States to maintain its over­whelming military superiority and prevent new rivals from rising up to challenge it on the world stage. It calls for dominion over friends and enemies alike. It says not that the United States must be more power­ful, or most powerful, but that it must be absolutely powerful.

The Plan is disturbing in many ways, and ultimately unworkable. Yet it is being sold now as an answer to the “new realities” of the post–September 11 world, even as it was sold previously as the answer to the new realities of the post–Cold War world. For Cheney, the Plan has al­ways been the right answer, no mat­ter how different the questions.

/snip/

With the Soviet Union gone, the United States had a choice. It could capitalize on the euphoria of the moment by nurturing cooperative re­lations and developing multilateral structures to help guide the global re­alignment then taking place; or it could consolidate its power and pursue a strategy of unilateralism and global dominance. It chose the latter course.

In early 1992, as Powell and Cheney campaigned to win congressional sup­port for their augmented Base Force plan, a new logic entered into their appeals. The United States, Powell told members of the House Armed Services Committee, required “suffi­cient power” to “deter any challenger from ever dreaming of challenging us on the world stage.” To emphasize the point, he cast the United States in the role of street thug. “I want to be the bully on the block,” he said, implant­ing in the mind of potential opponents that “there is no future in trying to challenge the armed forces of the Unit­ed States.”

As Powell and Cheney were mak­ing this new argument in their con­gressional rounds, Wolfowitz was busy expanding the concept and working to have it incorporated into U.S. policy. During the early months of 1992, Wolfowitz supervised the preparation of an internal Pentagon policy statement used to guide mili­tary officials in the preparation of their forces, budgets, and strategies. The classified document, known as the Defense Planning Guidance, depicted a world dominated by the United States, which would main­tain its superpower status through a combination of positive guidance and overwhelming military might. The image was one of a heavily armed City on a Hill.

/skip/

The story, in short, was dominance by way of unilateral action and mili­tary superiority. While coalitions — such as the one formed during the Gulf War — held “considerable promise for promoting collective ac­tion,” the draft DPG stated, the Unit­ed States should expect future al­liances to be “ad hoc assemblies, often not lasting beyond the crisis being confronted, and in many cases carry­ing only general agreement over the objectives to be accomplished.” It was essential to create “the sense that the world order is ultimately backed by the U.S.” and essential that America position itself “to act independently when collective action cannot be or­chestrated” or in crisis situations re­quiring immediate action. “While the U.S. cannot become the world’s ‘po­liceman,’ ” the document said, “we will retain the preeminent responsibility for addressing selectively those wrongs which threaten not only our interests, but those of our allies or friends.” Among the interests the draft indi­cated the United States would defend in this manner were “access to vital raw materials, primarily Persian Gulf oil, proliferation of weapons of mass destruction and ballistic missiles, [and] threats to U.S. citizens from terrorism.”

/skip/

The DPG was leaked to the New York Times in March 1992. Critics on both the left and the right attacked it immediately. Then-presidential can­didate Pat Buchanan portrayed it as giving a “blank check” to America’s al­lies by suggesting the United States would “go to war to defend their in­terests.” Bill Clinton’s deputy campaign manager, George Stephanopoulos, characterized it as an attempt by Pentagon officials to “find an excuse for big defense budgets instead of down­sizing.” Delaware Senator Joseph Biden criticized the Plan’s vision of a “Pax Americana, a global security system where threats to stability are suppressed or destroyed by U.S. military power.” Even those who found the document’s stated goals commendable feared that its chauvinistic tone could alienate many allies. Cheney responded by at­tempting to distance himself from the Plan. The Pentagon’s spokesman dis­missed the leaked document as a “low-level draft” and claimed that Cheney had not seen it. Yet a fifteen-page sec­tion opened by proclaiming that it constituted “definitive guidance from the Secretary of Defense.”

The article goes on to relate how the Clinton Administration avoided the full monte of Cheney's dream, but the election of 2000 and September 11 sealed the deal, and we are a quarter of a century into the Full Spectrum Dominance Regime.

And most of us are blaming it on the Orange Fart Cloud.

@on the cusp
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"Dick Cheney left a stain upon our species that we will spend the rest of our lives trying to scrub out. All decent people want our world to move in the exact opposite direction he spent his entire blood-spattered career working to steer us toward. All decent people want to undo everything that Dick Cheney was."

ill of the dead Dick. Cheney, to be clear.
https://realleecamp.substack.com/p/lets-speak-ill-of-the-dead-dick-cheney