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This War Was in the Cards All Along

More evidence in Sunday's Times of  a couple of unsavory facts now coming frequently to light: that the US has had its war plan for "spreading democracy" to Iraq and various other places well in hand since day one of the Bush administration, and that all pretenses to the contrary (the weapons of mass destruction scare, the liberation of Iraqis, even the globalized "war on terror" itself) are pure opportunism. This is German Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer, answering a Der Spiegel reporter who wants to know why the Europeans did not keep closer track of the Bushies after 9/11:

I did that. Ever since September 18th or 19th, 2001, when Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz in Washington roughly outlined for me what he thought the answer to international terrorism had to be.... His view was that the US had to liberate a whole string of countries from their terrorist rulers, if necessary by force. Ultimately a new world order would come out of this... [More...]

Granted, this speaks to conversations between Fischer and Wolfowitz after September 11--one week after, to be exact, and one does not come up with a plan for "new world order" or a whole laundry list of countries targeted for regime change in a week's time. His view was that the US had to liberate a whole string of countries from their terrorist rulers... The word "terrorist" in that formulation is so patently a paste job; two weeks previously, Wolfowitz was no doubt still calling them "totalitarian."

Here, by the way, is an excerpt from a great piece about Wolfowitz's 1992 Defense Planning Guidance report, a document that has morphed a couple of times en route to becoming official US policy.

Posted by Steve Perry at March 31, 2003 8:07 AM

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