Kent Southard at BushWatch nicely follows up last week’s nuke story and outs Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz as this decade’s Dr. Strangelove.
The nexus of the Bush war party seems to be Rumsfeld’s Deputy Sec. of Defense Paul Wolfowitz. Pat Buchanan in his book ‘A Republic, Not an Empire’ finds Wolfowitz, and a 46 page memorandum he wrote while in the Pentagon under the first Bush, at the center of Republican foreign policy. As his book’s title suggests, Buchanan’s apprehensions are based on the agenda explicitly laid out by Wolfowitz – that America should dominate the world, in every sense, that the planet shall serve as our empire; that we should militarily prevent any country or consortium of countries from controlling the resources that would allow them to escape their dependence and subservience: which is how we now find ourselves building a string of military bases in Central Asia, to control Caspian Sea oil reserves not for America’s use, but to control China and India who will.
And so we also find ourselves with ‘contingency plans’ for nuclear weapons, with apparent abandonment of our historic ‘no first strike’ policy – in case somebody didn’t get the message and needs to be slapped down. When Pat Buchanan says a conservative is too extreme for him, it should tell you something.