Unipolarism = Global Domination

Whatever you call it--unipolarism, Pax Americana, or a "Reaganite policy of military strength and moral clarity"--the neoconservative ideals of George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, Zalmay Khalilzad, and others bears some listening to. Not because you'll agree with them but because their version of American Empire just might not jive with yours. And, based on "a defense budget that would maintain American security and advance American interests in the new century," it's the ruling opinion right now. A whole lot of high-power Bushies agree with Ben Wattenberg who explains, "A unipolar world is a good thing, if America is the uni."

Gary Dorien writes for ElectronicIraq that 9-11, ostensibly the excuse for Bush's excited game of American policeman, wasn't really what set our current roster of pro-military, Reaganite hawks in motion. He writes:

In 1990, Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney commissioned a new strategic plan for the United States. Under Cheney's guidance, Paul Wolfowitz, Lewis Libby, and Eric Edelman outlined a policy of U.S. global domination that called for unilateral military action and the preemptive use of force; Colin Powell countered with a case for a moderately conservative realism that was backed by George Schultz and Brent Scowcroft. Though the unipolarists won several victories in the first Bush administration, the realists held the upper hand. Cheney's attempt to create a new strategy was derailed by the Persian Gulf war and the leaking of Wolfowitz's plan to the press, and the unipolarists despaired of Bush's lack of ideological vision. A few of them supported Bill Clinton in 1992, because Clinton campaigned that year as a democratic globalist.

But most of them stayed in the Republican party, and in 1997, a group of unipolarists led by Cheney, Wolfowitz, Libby, Stephen Cambone, Donald Kagan, and Donald Rumsfeld founded the Project for the New American Century, (PNAC). This group espoused an aggressive American policy of global domination, and it forged an alliance with George W. Bush, who carried a personal grudge against Saddam Hussein and who turned out to be a foreign policy nationalist and unilateralist. Two months before the presidential election of 2000, the PNAC issued a position paper that spelled out the particulars of a global empire strategy: repudiate the ABM treaty, build a global missile defense system, increase defense spending by $20 billion per year to 3.8 percent of gross domestic product, and reinvent the U.S. military to meet expanded obligations throughout the world. When Bush won the presidency, the unipolarists came with him: Cheney, Wolfowitz, Rumsfeld, Bolton, Cambone, Cohen, Cross, Feith, Libby, Perle, Pipes, and Woolsey.

Iraq is the first on the attack list not because the country is a real threat or strong enough for a good fight: it's a manageable first step through which the government can test the public's appetite for global imperialism.