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June 17, 2005
Permanent War for Permanent War
Here's more evidence that the United States is on a permanent crusade to remake the world. William Pfaff, in a fine column called "Disconnected from Reality," tells us about
a new Bureau of Reconstruction and Stabilization in the State Department, charged with organizing the reconstruction of countries where the United States has deemed it necessary to intervene in order to make them into market democracies.
The Bureau currently has 25 countries under surveillance as possible candidates for U.S. Defense Department deconstruction and U.S. State Department reconstruction.
The bureau’s director is recruiting “rapid reaction forces” of official, non-governmental and corporate business specialists. He hopes to develop the capacity for three full-scale, simultaneous reconstruction operations in different countries.
He told a recent conference on this subject (according to Naomi Klein in The Nation magazine [April 16]) that some of these American corporations will be given “pre-completed” contracts for reconstruction work in countries currently unaware that they are candidates for destruction/reconstruction. Getting the paperwork done beforehand, he said, could “cut off 3 to 6 months in your response time.” Reconstruction is a profitable new market sector.
This occurs at the same time American military forces still are unable to pacify Iraq or Afghanistan, agricultural societies of less than 25 million people each, both largely in ruins. The billions Washington already has spent on reconstruction have yet to produce reliable electric power, clean water or a functioning sewer system in Baghdad itself.
The creation of an official capability for reconstructing 25 countries, at a time when anonymous senior army officers are quoted as saying that the United States could be defeated in Iraq, is the most egregious Washington example of a pathological disconnection from reality.
However it is a logical bureaucratic response to the announced administration intention to overturn tyrants and spread liberty throughout the world. It serves also as its reductio ad absurdum.
Here's the website for the office of the Coordinator for Reconstruction and Stabilization. If that website doesn't prove that our government wants to run the whole world, nothing does.
Posted by Mike Tennant at June 17, 2005 04:39 PM
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