FULL SPECTRUM DOMINANCE TOTALITARIAN DEMOCRACY IN THE NEW WORLD ORDER F. William Engdahl Copyright © 2009 F. William Engdahl All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without prior written permission of the publisher and author. Cover art by David Dees www.deesillustration.com Published by: edition.engdahl Wiesbaden ISBN: 978-3-9813263-0-7 Library of Congress Control Number: 2009927425 Printed in USA To Margot, whose support and incisive suggestions helped make this book a reality. Introduction Less than two decades have passed since 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 intelli- gence 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 shaper 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 v 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 So- viet 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 economi- cally 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 conver- sion of industry—West as well as East—into civilian enterprises to rebuild civilian infrastructure and repair 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 Presi- dent to declare permanent war against an enemy who was everywhere and nowhere, who allegedly threatened the American way of life, justify- ing 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. vi What few were aware of, largely because their responsible 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, though many 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 had been con- vened 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 postwar world. In their view, a new world war was imminent and out of its ashes only one country would emerge victorious—the United States. Their task, as some of the members later described, was to lay the foundations of a postwar American Empire — but without calling it that. It was a shrewd bit of deception that initially led much of the world to believe the American claims of support for ‘freedom and democracy’ around the world. By 2003 and the Bush Administration’s invasion of Iraq on the false and legally irrelevant assertion that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction, that deception was wearing thin. What was the real agenda of the relentless Pentagon wars? Was it, as some suggested, a strategy to control major world oil reserves in an era of future oil 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. vii 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 increased troop commitment to Afghanistan. The purpose of the present book is to place events of the past two decades and more into a larger historical or geopolitical context, to illuminate the dark corners of Pentagon strategy and actions and the extreme dangers to the future — not only of the United States but of the entire world — that their Full Spectrum Dominance represents. This is no ordinary book on military policy, rather it is a geopolitical analysis of a power establishment that over the course of the Cold War had spun out of control and now threatens not only the fundamental institutions of democracy, but even of life on the planet through the growing risk of nuclear war by miscalculation. — F. William Engdahl, April 2009 viii Contents CHAPTER ONE .......................................................................................... 1 A War in Georgia—Putin Drops a Bomb CHAPTER TWO ....................................................................................... 31 Controlling Russia Color Revolutions and Swarming Coups CHAPTER THREE ................................................................................... 73 Controlling China with Synthetic Democracy CHAPTER FOUR ..................................................................................... 89 Weaponizing Human Rights: Darfur to Myanmar to Tibet CHAPTER FIVE ..................................................................................... 127 The Empire of Bases— the Basis of Empire CHAPTER SIX ........................................................................................ 145 The Curious History Of Star Wars CHAPTER SEVEN .................................................................................. 159 Washington’s Nuclear Obsession CHAPTER EIGHT .................................................................................. 171 Dr. Strangelove Lives! CHAPTER NINE .................................................................................... 179 The Permanent War State Lobby CHAPTER TEN .....................................................................................