World domination plan falling into place for U.S. president

“Ah, but a man’s reach should exceed his grasp, Or what’s a heaven for?” Robert Browning.

After the attacks on the morning of September 11, 2001,  U.S. President Bush’s mentors didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. They were looking for a provocation that would justify implementation of their plan but this was beyond their wildest visions.

The first highjacked plane hit the north tower of the World Trade Center in New York at 8:45 a.m. Eastern Daylight Time.  The second tower was hit twenty minutes after that, and the third hit the Pentagon an hour later.

Soon after the initial attacks, President Bush took off in his jet from Sarasota, Florida.  He needed time to let it sink in.  High in the stratosphere, he struggled with mixed feelings of horror and guilt.  The president had been told of such attacks only a month earlier.  On August  6,  intelligence briefings had warned him of al Qaida plans and he had done nothing.

On the ground below, the twin towers collapsed into a hellish inferno, a fourth highjacked plane crashed into a field in Pennsylvania, the White House had been evacuated, and a nervous nation wondered where their president was.  What would he tell the people?

Three hours the president’ realized that this was no time for admissions of guilt.  He landed in Louisiana and hurried to an underground bunker air force base to tape a TV message.  On the little screen he looked pale and shaken as he said “Make no mistake, the United States will hunt down and punish those responsible for these cowardly acts.”

A few hours later the president was flown to another fortified location at the Strategic Air Command headquarters in Nebraska where he consulted his mentors.  What to do?  He didn’t need to think for long.  The plan had already been drafted years ago by the hawks in his father’s presidency, including vice president Dick Cheney.

The plan’s four installments were recently declassified under the title of Defense Strategy for the 1990’s, or the Plan for short.  “The Plan is for the United States to rule the world,” writes David Armstrong in his article, Dick Cheney’s Song of America (Harper’s Magazine, October, 2002).

When peace broke out in 1990 after the fall of the Soviet Empire there was a real threat to U.S. military.  Doves and peaceniks wanted a reduction in military spending.  Cheney saw this threat to his dream of military conquest of the world.  And he didn’t like the competition from his so-called friends.  A strong European Union and the rise of the Asian tigers threatened U.S. world commercial dominance.

Cheney’s plan called for continued military spending against unspecified threats – – he couldn’t suggest war against his allies.  To the question “what threat,” Cheney was unwilling to say.  The Plan’s audacious goal of world domination would have offended the sensibilities of the most Americans.

Its co-author, Colin Powell, called on the U.S. to be the “biggest bully on the block.”  It called for world supremacy through force;  invasion of Iraq to destabilize European oil interests; demonization of North Korea to destabilize Asia and counter efforts to reunite the Koreas, giving a reason for continued U.S. military occupation.

What Cheney needed some horrible event to galvanize public.  He needed “some catastrophic and catalyzing event-like a new Pearl Harbor,” as the president’s brother, Jeb Bush, had suggested.

The Plan grew more credible with each passing hour.  The president rehearsed the answers.  Could he convince Americans that an attack on Afghanistan was justifiable, despite evidence that al Qaida had left and spread around the globe?  Easy.  Could he sell the idea that, while they were in Afghanistan, they might as well invade Iraq and toss out Saddam Hussein and his fictional weapons of mass destruction?  No problem. Could he convince Americans that Iran and North Korea were the next targets because they were part of some unsubstantiated “axis of evil”, despite no logical connection between the countries?  He could.

Today, Bush’s Pearl Harbor had been delivered to him.  He had the right stuff to be the chief bully of the baddest army in the world.  When the president returned to Washington at 7 p.m. on September 11, he was ready to rumble.  World domination was within his reach.

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Bush as peacemaker biased by one-sided religious view

The popularity of religion may declining but not its power.  According to a survey done by Statistics Canada, Canadians increasingly say they have no religion.  The Yukon and B.C. lead the country in non-believers.

Billy Graham and G.W. Bush

But fear not. Our fallen province is about to be saved by American Baptists.  They have designated Vancouver a “strategic focus city.”  Professor John Stackhouse from Vancouver’s Regent College says that U.S. evangelicals see Vancouver as “shockingly pagan, with our low numbers of church attendance and high numbers declaring no religion (The Daily News, May 31, 2003).”

The idea of British Columbians being saved by Southern Baptists is mildly amusing.  What’s not funny is the influence that religious forces have over the world’s hyperpower. An unholy union of state and religion guides President Bush and the U.S. government.  Some of these religions are obscure.

I bet you’ve never heard of The Fellowship, for example.  That’s the way they want it.  The Fellowship is not like most religions that seek to convert the masses.  It’s more like an covert council.  Their goal is to sway the world’s decision makers, not to win converts.

“A Fellowship employee, went so far as to say that ‘there is no such thing as the Fellowship,’ even as she helped lead a group of 250 college students around Washington this month, part of a Fellowship-sponsored national leadership forum on faith and values,” writes Lisa Getter in The Los Angeles Times (Sep 27, 2002).

Even those who are influenced by The Fellowship don’t know exactly who they are.  The administration of U.S. government is so closely entwined with The Fellowship that they appear seamless.  Their annual big public event is the National Prayer Breakfast in Washington. It has been attended by a succession of ambassadors, foreign dignitaries for years.  Most attendees think the event is sponsored by Congress or even the president.

A Los Angeles Times review of the Fellowship’s archives kept at the Billy Graham Center reveals that The Fellowship has had extraordinary access and influence on foreign affairs for the last 50 years.

The Fellowship’s leader, Douglas Coe, 73, has befriended a succession of presidents and world leaders since arriving in Washington in 1959. Former U.S. President Bush Sr. once referred to Coe as “an ambassador of faith.”

Jeffrey Sharlet infiltrated The Fellowship at their boot camp for recruits in Arlington, Virginia.  They don’t like to call themselves The Fellowship.  They prefer “the Family.”   They don’t even like to call themselves Christians.  It’s “a term they deride as too narrow for the world they are building in Christ’s honor,” says Sharlet in the March issue of Harper’s magazine. Instead, they are “believers.”

The Family believes that the way to advance Christ’s will on earth is through intense personal bonds, or covenants, with world leaders.  While in Arlington, Sharlet met Douglas Coe as he was counseling a congressman from Kansas about commitment to the Family.  Coe summed up the influence of their minimalist religion, “That’s what you get with a covenant, Jesus plus nothing.”

It’s not just shadowy quasi-religions that influence the world’s most powerful nation.  U.S. President Bush’s foreign policy is affected by Evangelical Christians who make up 25 per cent of the U.S. population.

Many of Bush’s supporters are Christian Zionists – – they believe that the return of the Jews to Israel is part of God’s plan.  They include Evangelical groups headed by Pat Robertson, Oral Roberts, Billy Graham and Jerry Falwell.

Their biblical interpretation of God’s plan was popularized by a maverick Irish Anglican priest, John Nelson Darby (1800-1882).  He proposed history as a series of epochs in which mankind moved from catastrophe to catastrophe.  First there was the expulsion from Eden, then the flood, the crucifixion of Christ.  Now, with the return of the Jews to Israel, we are in an epoch which God will soon bring to a shuddering halt.

In the apocalyptic imaginations of Christian Zionists, Yasser Arafat and Saddam Hussein compete for the role of Antichrist.

President Bush hopes to bring peace between Israel and Palestine with his “road map.”  His credibility as peacemaker is stretched, not just by his inclination to make war, but by his religious bias. How can his plan succeed when he regards one side as God’s chosen people and the other as evil terrorists?