PART II
Both France and Germany - with the collusion of the Hussein government - had planned to create a cordone sanitaire around Iraq insofar as American and British influence in that country was concerned. Iraq would then accept the Euro as its "trading currency." After this was accomplished, the "Euro Sphere" could then be expanded to include Syria, Lebanon, Libya - and eventually even Saudi Arabia.
A VERY NECESSARY PART OF THIS PLAN INSOFAR AS THE EUROPEANS WERE CONCERNED INVOLVED INGRATIATING THEMSELVES TO THE ARABS BY POSITIONING THE EUROPEAN COMMUNITY ON THE SIDE OF THE PALESTINIANS AGAINST THE ISRAELIS IN THE CURRENT ISRAELI / PALESTINIAN CONFLICT - something the Europeans pressed all through the 1990s, even to the point of appearing ANTI-SEMITIC. Indeed, this is so much the case that it (i.e., anti-Semitism) appears by now to have escaped the control of the elites in Europe who first permitted it to surface under the rubric of "anti-Zionism," and has now taken on a life of its own.
The new anti-Semitism that has been unleashed in Europe denies the Holocaust, claims that Jews are Nazis, excludes Jewish responses to these charges by vilifying those Jews who respond, and has even resurrected the old shibboleth of "blood libel" - the claim that Jews kill children and drink their blood - AND ALL THIS THE EUROPEANS HAVE DONE TO INGRATIATE THEMSELVES TO THE MUSLIMS. Pretty sad!
CIRCUMVENTING AND NEUTRALIZING U.S. MILITARY POWER
SUCCESS IN THE "GAME" THE EUROPEANS WERE PLAYING AGAINST THE AMERICANS MEANT, OF COURSE, "NEUTRALIZING" OR OTHERWISE "INVALIDATING" U.S. MILITARY STRENGTH. Why? - because the fact is, as Robert Kagan, who publishes a monthly Washington Post column and writes foreign policy editorials with William Kristol for the Weekly Standard, explains,
"Europe's (military) weakness has ... produced a powerful European interest in inhabiting a world where (military) strength doesn't matter, where international law and international institutions predominate (for example, NATO, the United Nations, etc.), WHERE UNILATERAL ACTION BY THE POWERFUL (MEANING THE UNITED STATES) IS FORBIDDEN, where all nations regardless of their military strength have equal rights and are equally protected by commonly agreed-upon international rules of behavior. THUS, EUROPEANS HAVE A DEEP INTEREST IN DEVALUING AND EVENTUALLY ERADICATING THE BRUTAL LAWS OF AN ANARCHIC HOBBESIAN WORLD WHERE (MILITARY) POWER IS THE ULTIMATE DETERMINANT OF NATIONAL SECURITY AND SUCCESS."
[Of course, when the Europeans had the power, they were more than willing to use that power and "Lord it over" the rest of the world through their onerous and oppressive system of colonies; but now that they have none, they have suddenly "discovered" the "usefulness" of multilateral institutions. The naked duplicity of the Europeans here fairly boggles the mind - and it's an affectation that's easy enough for most Americans to see through.]
Commenting on the importance of the "game" they (i.e., the Europeans) had embarked upon in trying to build up a "Euro-Sphere" in opposition to the "Dollar-Sphere," and hoping against hope that the Americans wouldn't resort to military power in order to stop them, Gerhard Schroeder, the Chancellor of Germany, remarked:
"The war with Iraq will make it clear whether 'a multipolar world' can be preserved or whether the 'sole superpower' (i.e., the United States) will control international affairs in the future."
By this, Schroeder was saying that if the Americans resort to war, and bypass the Security Council to do so, the Europeans are finished; they will be consigned PERMANENTLY to secondary status in the American New World Order System - a situation analogous to the Greeks in the Roman Empire of Augustus Caesar.
AMERICAN MILITARY SUPERIORITY
VIS A VIS THE REST OF THE WORLD
Now one should bear clearly in mind in all of this, that there can be NO doubt as to American military superiority vis a vis Europe and the rest of the world - a superiority which is not only qualitative in nature, but quantitative as well. The reality is, the U.S. spends more on its military than all the rest of the nations on earth COMBINED, and it does so while expending less than 4.5 percent of its gross domestic product.
But it's the qualitative edge of the American military over and against the Europeans that lifts the American military head and shoulders over them, and that edge (really, a yawning gap) between itself and the Europeans (indeed, the whole of the rest of the world) is based upon a "REVOLUTION IN MILITARY AFFAIRS" that the U.S., AND THE U.S. ALONE, has participated in - a "revolution" made possible not only by new weapons of war, but by the development of a very specific kind of "information technology" which has allowed the U.S. to reorganize its armed forces into relatively small specialized units, supported by a variety of forms of air power employing precision guided munitions. This has transformed the American military into war-making machine of COLOSSAL power unmatched by any other military in the world. [Please see our article, "The Revolution in Military Affairs."]
A NEW KIND OF BLITZKRIEG
The American "REVOLUTION IN MILITARY AFFAIRS" was first tried out as a COHERENT SYSTEM OF WARFARE not in the 1991 Gulf War of Bush the Elder (as many suppose), but in Yugoslavia in 1999, and then again in Afghanistan in 2001. In both instances, IT PROVED TO BE SUCCESSFUL BEYOND THE WILDEST DREAMS OF ITS INNOVATORS - and it proved to be so not only because of the new star-wars kind of technology it employed, but because of the manner in which it united older methods of war-making with newer technologies in a way that no other nation on earth could manage.
For instance, in a key speech in January 2002 Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld compared the assault on Mazar-e-Sharif by U.S. Special Forces (together with the Northern Alliance) during the Afghan war to the Nazi Blitzkrieg in 1939-1941 as an example of how the U.S. is capable of making war on today's battlefields; Rumsfeld said:
"What was revolutionary and unprecedented about the Blitzkrieg was not the new capabilities the Germans employed, but rather the unprecedented and revolutionary way they mixed new and existing capabilities. In a similar way the battle for Mazar was a transformational battle ...
"Coalition forces took existing military capabilities from the most advanced laser-guided weapons to antique 40 year old B-52s - and also to the most rudimentary, a man on horseback. And they used them in unprecedented ways, with devastating effect on enemy positions, on enemy morale, and, this time, on the cause of evil in the world." |
