The ‘Bush Doctrine’ and Weapons in Space
Published on Sunday, February 11, 2007.
By Prof. Rodrigue Tremblay
“The dangerous patriot: “The one who drifts into chauvinism and exhibits blind enthusiasm for military actions. He is a defender of militarism and its ideals of war and glory. Chauvinism is a proud and bellicose form of patriotism . . . which identifies numerous enemies who can only be dealt with through military power and which equates the national honor with military victory.” James A. Donovan, Colonel, US Marine Corps
“Where you have a concentration of power in a few hands, all too frequently men with the mentality of gangsters get control.” Lord Acton (1834-1902)
“If you want war, nourish a doctrine. Doctrines are the most frightful tyrants to which men ever are subject… ” William Graham Sumner
On September 20, 2002, George W. Bush, in conformity with the path that Cheney-Rumsfeld-Wolfowitz-Rice and Co. had traced for him, adopted a hegemonic foreign policy and issued the famous hubristic “Bush Doctrine”. His then Security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, and her assistant, Philip D. Zelikow, drafted much of the 2002 report titled “The National Security Strategy of the United States”, which has come to be known as the “Bush Doctrine” of pre-emptive wars and of American assertive military hegemony around the world.
Eight months before, in his January 29, 2002 first State of the Union Address, Bush, inspired by his neocon and theologian speech writers, had singled out three disparate countries as belonging to an “axis of evil” (Iran, Iraq, and North Korea), even though two of these countries had been at war at each other for years (Iraq and Iran) and the third (North Korea) had no visible political ties to the first two. Bush also expressed his intention that the United States control both the Earth and Outer Space, no matter what the other 191 countries of the world think and no matter what international law and international treaties call for.
On Earth, the neocon Bush-Cheney administration’s goal was to invest so much in military gear, and to take military actions if necessary, that no other country would ever challenge its status as the world’s sole military superpower.
The intention was to establish a military New American Empire for the 21st Century, along the lines of the British Empire in the 19th Century.
In Space, the administration asserted the “far out” claim that the United States has the right to control Outer Space and to deny access to space to any country not in sync with U.S. interests. Bush’s then Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, in the so-called report on “Counterspace Operations Doctrine” (2004), even stated that the U.S. should not refrain from using such tactics as “cover, concealment, and deception” and “satellite jamming” to control Outer Space. —The chairman of the U.S. joint chiefs of staff, General Peter Pace, said that (Donald) Rumsfeld must truly be ‘inspired by God!’ This hairy policy was revisited and signed into law by President George W. Bush, on October 18, 2006, thus initiating a new and dangerous Space arms race.
Read all of it here.
