Full Spectrum Conspiracy?

Written by Joy-Ann Lomena Reid
Monday, 14 May 2007

Are George W. Bush and his administration pursuing international policies brought on by forces outside of their control (i.e., terrorism), or is Team Bush pursuing a preordained strategy of world domination that would have gotten underway whether or not 19 hijackers brought down the twin towers of the World Trade Center?

That is the question that is increasingly being asked by political outsiders like the U.S. Green Party, a handful of analysts like Foreign Policy In Focus' Michael T. Klare, and the usual cadre of lefty intellectuals like Gore Vidal, but not breathed at all by the president's supposed opponents in Congress, or the purportedly neutral policy minders in the American media.

The question is important, because if the administration is simply the vessel through which long-dreamed-of policies of remaking the world might finally be realized, that fact would subvert the very idea of American democracy.

A presidential administration is in many ways an era, and is almost always dubbed as much by historians. That implies that even as each new administration moves through the labyrinth of unplanned events, it carries with it the will of the voters at a moment in history. But if American presidencies move with neither events nor the will of the people, they are no better than ideological dictatorships -- the very kind of "secret governments" conspiracy theorists dream of. continued →