One Nation AND one Land.
From this viewpoint--the State's perspective,-- a people AND a land are juncked together--united under God.
Fom this inside perspective,
--inside the American Way of Life--
--that of the State of the Nation--
...the Democrats don't offer a world-view different from that of the Republicans.
At least, both share the idea that, along the collapse of the Soviet Union, the MAD doctrine of the Cold War gave way to the Full-Spectrum Dominance doctrine of the War on Terror. During the Cold War, an Order was produced in the face of potentially life-destroying antagonism by the shared doctrine of 'mutually assured destruction': any violence waged by anyone of the two superpowers would immediately escalate into a global nuclear cataclysm. With the fall of the Soviet Union, the bipolarization dissolved, leaving one sole super-power flying above an outside sea of chaos. From now on, the ultimate aim of the U.S.government is to prevent another superpower from ever arising again, in order to secure a UNI-POLAR world.
9/11 changed the way to justify that aim of 'domination', by posing the Terrorist as the post-Cold War Communist Enemy. Because the Terrorist threat can spring up anywhere, at any time, by any means, at any scale--the only way to neutralize it is to act on the FUTURE. To PRE-EMPT, power is defining itself as a FULL-SPECTRUM FORCE of potential catastrophes to happen in the future.
During the Cold War, an Order was produced in the face of potentially life-destroying antagonism by the shared doctrine of deterrence.
The Cold War Order was achieved on the chaotic foundation of a paradoxical structural antagonism between the US and the Soviet Union. This Order was conceptualized in a military doctrine called M.A.D., for 'mutually assured destruction': any violence waged by anyone of the two superpowers would immediately escalate into a global cataclysm through the use of both powers' nuclear arsenals.
The Soviet Union and the United States knew they couldn't fight each other directly without exposing their citizens to annihilation, for to launch a frontal attack against a nuclear-equipped opponent would be suicidal. This Third World War is commonly referred to as the 'Cold War' because the two "superpowers" killed almost none of each other's citizens. However, despite this global order reposing on the MAD principal, a lot of people did die in this Third World War, even more that in the Second one: they died in "Third World" countries.
With the fall of the Soviet Union, the bipolarization that supported the Cold War Order dissolved, leaving one sole super-power flying above an outside sea of chaos.
On Sept. 11, a tide came in; and as a result, the country was awash in fear. The organizing global structuring that stood between the US domestic order and the outside chaos had clearly collapse.
In fact, as it appears retroactively from the new 9/11 perspective, the global Order has began to collapse along the fall of the Soviet Union. Indeed: Before 9/11, and after the collapse of the Berlin Wall, a sole super-power was apparently reigning above the outside chaos, immune to the local wars around the globe, the states collapses and the rising fundamentalisms.
But when "war came home" on 9/11, that sense of impermeability ended. America was suddenly violently affected by the chaotic sea of the outside world. The domestic front appears since very vulnerable to others attacks to come.
The Day "Everything Changed"
The collapse of the World Trade Center revealed a process that had virtually began with the collapse of the Soviet Union. "Everything changed" that day, and the days that followed, only because something already under way--at least since 1991--became visible.
Around the events of 9/11, a radical reconfiguration of the World Politics took a visible form and became clearly perceptible. 9/11 has since became an icon: the post-Communist Enemy--real but indeterminate,
navigating somewhere on the chaotic flux--
was given a figure: that of the Islamo-Terrorist.
The Cold War antagonism with the Soviet Union had been organizing the globe in a way where the Enemy was identifiable: The Communist.
And the reasons for the confrontation could be expressed in clear terms, as a struggle between two political and economic systems, between two "ideologies": capitalism vs. communism. This dualism of diametric opposites gave an general impression of order and security.
After the Cold War ended and the US lost its evil shadow, it was hard to connect the sea of chaos, now flowing unstructured, to an identifiable Enemy.
For sure, the political Enemy of the U.S. was still out there somewhere, but it had no figure. Being only virtual, with no actual features, the Enemy was not identifiable. The enemy was actually nobody and virtually anybody: which is precisely the political definition of the Terrorist. The Generic Terrorist, not the Islamic one.
In the inter-war between the collapses of the Berlin Wall and of the Twin Towers, the Enemy was only the Generic Terrorist; it could not be described as ideological, and no distinct features other that to inspire fear, to terrorize.
All features other than to generate Fear were remaining, before 9/11, largely unqualified: the Enemy could carry any passport and be of any ethnicity.
The Generic Terrorist could be anyone, anywhere, attacking by any means, any time.
The 9/11 Event instantiated the determinate content of the Generic Terrorist.
The Terrorist since coincide to the archenemy of a coming Order to be produce by waging a New War.
On 9/11, from the viewpoint of the mass-media, the icon of the terrorist was fixed in the position of the Islamic fundamentalist.
With the Islamo-Terrorist as the Arch-Enemy, the fear and chaos surrounding the Terrorist
has become the organizing principle of American polices--both on the domestic and foreign level.
But the Islamo-Terrorist is not the Communist, it is not fighting an ideology,
a given political or economic system per se. No, the chosen enemy of the Islamic fundamentalist Terrorist is perceived to be the `American way of life.'
After the Cold War, from the US government practical viewpoint, the challenge was to find a way to manage the threat of Generic Terrorism.
In fact, the explicit aim of the Executive mentioned in Clinton-time government documents on foreign and military policy was `domination.'
What is striking about President Bill Clinton's foreign policy is that it actually increased U.S. military preponderance vis-à-vis the rest of the world. During the late 1990s, U.S. defense spending was higher than that of the next dozen nations combined. The overall goal, according to Clinton's joint chiefs of staff, was to create "a force that is dominant across the full spectrum of military operations-persuasive in peace, decisive in war, preeminent in any form of conflict."
BUSH'S FOREIGN POLICY
Melvyn P Leffler. Foreign Policy. Washington: Sep/Oct 2004., Iss. 144; pg. 22, 6 pgs
Indeed, the ultimate aim of the post-Cold War era we live in is still to prevent another superpower from ever arising again. And to preserve the unipolarity of the geopolitical situation, to secure American supremacy, the strategy is to manage the Terrorist threat. Everybody taking the time to read internal governement document of the Clinton-era would understand that the aim was global military hegemony.
Of course, the language in which the Government expresses this goal in internal documents is not the same language that is used publicly to justify the military actions.
In fact, there is a radical disjunction between the Executive functional discourse and the discourse of its legitimation.
9/11 only changed to way to justify the aim of global 'domination'.
Under the Clinton government, the military capabilities ensuring a unipolar global order had to take the Generic Terrorist as such as their object. And terrorist threat is a threat yet to come. A threat is a risk; it is somthing already in the present only in the form of a fear, of an apprehension of a danger. As Stephen Colbert would say, it has to do much more with feelings that with facts.
The threat is indeed the omnipresence of risk. And the only way to neutralize a risk is to act on the future. To revent.
That's how you do deal with a risk, i.e. a virtual cause of a present danger. Preventive defence is thus the military strategy answering to the terrorist threat.
According to this doctrine of prevention--or preemption--, the legitimate use of military force can be based on the perception of threat, on preventing risks from eventuating. Not on actual facts as such, but on what is felt to be a coming fact: perception.
And Preventive defence happens to recast State power as a device that can prevent catastroph from happening, catastrophe like 9/11 or Katrina.
To act on a risk in order to prevent its catastrophic actualization, State power has to be also able--like the risk--to spring up anywhere, at any time, by any means, at any scale. State power is hence defining itself as a FULL-SPECTRUM of risks, as a continuum of potential catastrophes to happen in the future.
Starting under Clinton, State military power is transforming itself to be as indefinite as a terrorist threat. It is defining military action as a potential continuum of actions that can spring anywhere, any time, in any form, depending on the risk.
Military force is becoming as amorphous as the terrorist threats it faces, but still capable of taking any shape on any scale at any time.
This new doctrine, calling for the radical rebuilding
of the US military machine actually being undertaken,
is labelled `full-spectrum force' by the US Executive.
The military machine is remade on the model of rapid-deployment force, along the Full-Spectrum dominance doctrine able to secure a Unipolar American World.
On the far end of the Spectrum of force is full-scale warfare, including massive invasion and the tactical use of nuclear weapons and biological and chemical weapons.
And the fact that the very weapons of mass destruction whose perceived possession by "hostile" regimes is considered a trigger for US military intervention makes it clear that the US no longer contemplates disarmament as a goal, but rather a monopoly on the means of mass destruction, as a way of ensuring the unipolarity of global power.
In the middle of the spectrum are many kinds of action that were, during the Cold War, considered policing and peace-keeping operations rather than military ones.
The transformation goes also in the other direction: the police become militarized and extend their equipment, tactics and sphere of intervention.
In the full-spectrum force, the lines separating between military force and civilian policing become totally blurred. As the distinction between war and civil peace erodes, the state of war becomes the normal situation. This full-spectrum war on a permanent basis
blurs the very distinction between war and peace. It's a continual state of full-spectrum war.
At the opposite end of the spectrum from full-scale invasion is continual readiness to strike; this is where military force shades into continual surveillance.
The function of surveillance, traditionally an extension of police power,
becomes the effective center of military force. All its other operations depend on it and grow out of it; surveillance accompanies every actual governmental violence, following the continuum of force as shadow with light.
The name given to this middle pole of the full spectrum is the Terrorist Surveillance Program.
This program refers to the fusion of military and civilian surveillance operations, domestically and abroad, toward the construction of one single centralized database, which includes commercial information gathering (credit cards, borrowing biographies, transportation tickets, credit reports, etc). Through Total Information Awareness, military apparatus extends its reach even to private economic activity on the U.S. domestic front.
This is the form under which the `War on Terrorism' comes home.
Preventive defense, full-spectrum force and continual surveillance, practiced by the world's sole superpower, represent a radical shift in global geopolitics.
Since the end of the Cold War, the nature of political power is undergoing a complete transformation; the nature of the state itself is changing, and will never be the same.