The New American Imperialism:
Some Historical Light
by Dr. Clifford A. Kiracofe, Jr.
Dr. Kiracofe is a former senior professional staff member of the U.S. Senate Committee on Foreign Relations. He presented this paper to EIR's Berlin seminar on June 28, 2005.
I thank our hosts for the invitation to speak again here in Berlin at this fine venue. I am delighted to be with you all and to see many friends from the last meeting in January. Today, I will try to cast some light on the "New American Imperialism" and to provide some historical context for the problem. In light of the present Iraq War debacle, and a possible follow-on war against Iran, my focus is on the origins and policy of the imperial faction in the United States.
President Abraham Lincoln warned against financial interests and business corporations being "enthroned." President Franklin Roosevelt warned against the influence of "American Tories." President Dwight Eisenhower warned against the rise of the "military-industrial complex." All three United States Presidents were warning against the power of entrenched financial and business interests to overturn the American republican form of government. Implicit was a warning against an imperial foreign policy such interests would pursue for private economic gain.[1] My remarks today relate to three main points. First, as current American imperial policy is modeled to a large extent on the 19th-Century British imperial practice, I shall comment on Lord Palmerston's strategy for the British Empire of the period.
Second, I shall comment on the assimilation in the United States of this antiquated and pernicious British imperial policy by contemporary proponents such as the influential Zbigniew Brzezinski, and the network of "neo-conservative" policy experts guiding the present Bush Administration. Third, I shall address the historical root of the problem in 16th- and 17th-Century England. Broadly speaking, at that time there was a struggle in England between a faction of corrupt business interests and courtiers, and a faction committed to virtue in government.[2] This factional conflict, sometimes referred to as that between the "court party" and the "country party," was transferred to the American colonies as a result of our settlement in early Virginia and New England, and, in effect, continues on our side of the Atlantic down to this day.[3] One can say the Bush foreign and domestic policy, including the current war in Iraq, is a case in point of the continued operations of the "court party" in America.
I. Palmerston and 19th-Century
British Imperial Strategy
British imperial policy in the 19th Century was greatly influenced by Lord Palmerston (Henry John Temple, 1784-1865), who created the concept of the "Great Game," the struggle between the British Empire and the Russian Empire, with the Middle East and Central Asia as the battlefield. This general concept was later updated by Halford Mackinder (1861-1947) who promoted the concept of the Eurasian "Heartland" being bordered by "Rimlands," and the control of the Heartland leading to the domination of the world.
With respect to the Middle East, Palmerston's basic concept was to use the Ottoman Turks against the Russians to the north, and to control the Arabs as represented by Egypt, for example. Noting Napoleon's utopian idea for the restoration of Jews to the Holy Land, Palmerston advocated the same approach, with some refinements. Palmerston sought to induce Ottoman cooperation by sweetening the arrangement with the prospects of the financial support that London-based Jewish banking circles, who held a philanthropic interest in a Jewish entity in the Middle East, could bring to the Porte, should the Porte allow some Jewish "settlements" in Palestine.[4] British strategy in Central Asia was to penetrate the region in order to enhance its strategic position with respect to India and Russia. In contrast, at the same time, American involvement in the Middle East was based on peaceful cultural cooperation in education and medicine, and in mutually beneficial commercial activity. Since our War of Independence, we had developed constructive relations with, for example, Morocco, Tunisia, Oman, the Ottoman Porte, Egypt, and Persia.
Palmerston's global strategy included North America. His design involved the destruction of the American Republic, the "Union" of our states under the Constitution, and its division into separate Northern and Southern confederations. In this scheme, the role of Texas was as a separate "buffer state," if necessary. Certain powerful circles in Texas, who later supported the Southern Confederacy, were only too willing to go along with this design. This disloyal element included the father of the notorious "Colonel" Edward Mandel House, President Woodrow Wilson's closest advisor on foreign affairs. House's father, an Englishman who had moved to Texas, was a cotton broker selling into the British market, with close links to certain Wall Street banking circles. The cotton and other commercial interests of East Texas were in league with the slave South and aligned with certain London financial circles and their Wall Street friends. This is a consistent pattern even today.
Palmerston's North American strategy was nothing new, of course, as British imperial circles had long sought to contain and dismember the American Colonies and, failing that owing to the American War of Independence, the Early Republic. For example, the so-called "Proclamation Line of 1763," at the conclusion of the Seven Years' War ("French and Indian War"), was an attempt to block American settlement west of the Appalachians, to box us in along the Atlantic coastline. Other early British geopolitical stratagems involved the concept of the Old Northwest (today's Michigan, Wisconsin, Illinois, Ohio, and Indiana) as a separate "buffer state," and the plot for the secession of several New England states. When these did not work, fomenting civil war between the northern and southern sections of the country was undertaken. Palmerston was joined in his treacherous American Civil War design by Lord John Russell (1792-1878) who, with a faction of the aristocratic British Tories and commercial Whigs, was a supporter of the secessionist slave South. Certain British interests abetted the American Civil War by covert financial assistance and support to extremists in the North and the South for several decades prior to the outbreak of the war.
Fortunately, at the time of our Civil War, decent leaders in England such as John Bright (1811-89), and English workingmen in general, opposed favoring the slave South and supported the Union. This helped to forestall outright diplomatic recognition of the Southern Confederacy by Britain.[5] I would add that Prince Albert (1819-61), Queen Victoria's Consort, was regarded as a friend of the Union, and many Americans were greatly saddened by his sudden death.
At the same time Palmerston and Russell, together with William Gladstone (1809-98) and other powerful players, supported the destruction of the American Union, Napoleon III of France connived along a similar geopolitical line. Favored by Palmerston, the French Emperor's design was to place the Austrian Maximilian on a throne in Mexico and then detach the American South, or a major portion of it, to align it with his puppet Mexican empire. Fortunately, the great Mexican patriot Benito Juárez foiled this plot by defeating the reactionary forces in Mexico that supported Maximilian.
We should note that by 1850, owing to the American System of political economy and industrialization in the North, the United States, was the number three industrial power in the world behind England and France. Destroying the American Union, and its northern manufacturing base, would destroy a powerful and growing commercial rival. The essence of British imperial strategy was outlined in a report to Parliament of 1854 as follows:
The laboring classes ... are often indebted for being employed at all to the immense losses which their employers voluntarily incur in bad times, in order to destroy foreign competition, and to gain and keep possession of foreign markets.... The large capitals of this country are the great instruments of warfare against the competing capital of foreign countries, and are the most essential instruments now remaining by which our manufacturing supremacy can be maintained; the other elements—cheap labor, abundance of raw materials, means of communications, and skilled labor—being rapidly in the process of being equalized.[6]
Naive and reckless Southern leaders did not foresee the development of alternate supplies of cotton in British-controlled India.[7] For decades, these decadent and disloyal Southern leaders supported so-called "Free Trade" in order to buy cheap goods from their British friends, rather than buy honest goods produced by their fellow countrymen receiving good wages under the American System of political economy in the industrialized North. I would point out that within this international context, the staunch friend of the American Union and President Lincoln was Russia. And I would say to our Russian friends with us here today that there are not a few Americans who are mindful of our historic friendship, which extends even back to the days in the late 17th Century, when Peter the Great allowed the importation of Virginia tobacco to Russia.
After the fall of Bismarck, who was also a friend of the United States, British imperial strategy altered. Rather than seeking the dismemberment of the United States, London now bent every effort toward a rapprochement. Why? The rising unified German state posed economic and potential military challenges to British imperial interests. London calculated that the United States could be manipulated as a useful counterweight in the British imperial game.
But a rapprochement with the United States was a tall order, given the lingering bitterness in the United States over British support for the South during the Civil War, among other factors. Sections of the American elite bought into a rapprochement, some owing to so-called "Anglophile" leanings based on the racial ideology of "Anglo-Saxonism" fashionable at the time, and some out of pragmatic strategic calculations.[8] Germany's fatal error, of course, was the resumption of unrestricted submarine warfare, as promoted by the military extremists and Pan-German circles, which inevitably led to the declaration of war by the United States Congress.[9]
II. Contemporary U.S. Imperialism
In the wake of World War I, the British adeptly continued their rapprochement strategy, principally by means of a behind-the-scenes entente between certain British and U.S. financial circles. The Harriman interests and the Lazard banking establishment typify this arrangement, which is the origin of the 20th-Century so-called "Anglo-American Establishment," combining financial, business, political, intelligence, and cultural elements.[10] One critical element of the institutionalization of this arrangement after World War I was the founding of the very influential Council on Foreign Relations in New York City, as an emanation of the Royal Institute of International Affairs, or "Chatham House," based in London.
It is appropriate to note in our setting here today in Berlin, that significant elements of this so-called "Anglo-American Establishment" supported the Fascism of Mussolini and Hitler.[11] In this regard, we should recall the words of Ambassador William E. Dodd, Franklin Roosevelt's ambassador to Germany. He referred to the American section of the transnational fascist oligarchy of the era as follows:
A clique of U.S. industrialists is hell-bent to bring a fascist state to supplant our democratic government and is working closely with the fascist regime in Germany and Italy. I have had plenty of opportunity in my post in Berlin to witness how close some of our American ruling families are to the Nazi regime. They extended aid to help Fascism occupy the seat of power, and they are helping to keep it there.
Just after World War II, Prof. William Langer of Harvard University called attention to the French and German circles of this same transnational clique of financiers and businessmen in an official history of United States policy toward France as follows:
Many of them long had extensive and intimate business relations with German interests and were still dreaming of a new system of "synarchy," which meant government of Europe on Fascist principles by an international brotherhood of financiers and industrialists.[12]
I would note that the very well-informed Professor Langer played an important role in wartime intelligence, and later served in a key advisory capacity at our Central Intelligence Agency. I would also note that the Soviet leadership apparently was informed on the synarchists in France as, for example, the mistress of one of its leading members, Anatole de Monzie, was an NKVD asset. I will comment briefly on the fascist and esoteric ideology of "synarchy" at the end of my remarks today. As the current war against Iraq demonstrates, it is an easy matter for the self-appointed, self-selected, and self-perpetuating American Establishment to push a few buttons and launch an unjustified and unnecessary war with immense implications and consequences. While United States Constitution guarantees a free press, this protection has been nullified by the concentration of print, radio, and television media by corporate interests in the service of the imperial faction.
As the Iraq War demonstrates, it is a simple matter to propagandize the American masses using Goebbels-like "Big Lie" methods.[13] Congress offers little resistance to imperial policy, owing to its own deep corruption, although this may change some as American public opinion increasingly rejects the war in Iraq, as the international financial crisis deepens, and as the latent Constitutional crisis in the United States sharpens and becomes more public.
Contemporary U.S. imperial strategic thinking has been influenced for almost half a century by two policy specialists: Henry Kissinger and Zbigniew Brzezinski. Rather than assimilate an authentic American perspective, they operate within a pernicious transnational mindset, while formulating strategy and foreign policy in the service of an international oligarchy.
One can account for the imperial strategy of the United States over the past quarter century by reading Brzezinski's revealing book entitled The Grand Chessboard, published in 1997.[14] The book lays out the core strategic concepts of recent U.S. policy which, in essence, is a remake of Palmerston and Mackinder, calling for the strategic encirclement of Russia and the domination of Central Asia.
For Brzezinski, the strategic containment, and even dismemberment of Russia, is the primary objective. We should recall that, as National Security Advisor to President Carter, Brzezinski was able to launch his new Great Game in July 1979, with assistance from his colleagues Bernard Lewis and Samuel Huntington, by having the inexperienced President sign off on covert aid to the Afghan resistance to the regime then in power. The world is currently suffering from the "blowback" of this policy, which led to the rise of the global international terrorism associated, in particular, with Osama bin Laden and his far-flung network of so-called "Afghan veterans."[15]
In his "Chessboard" book, Brzezinski lays out a "Rimland" strategy à la Mackinder that involves U.S. penetration and dominance in Central Asia, a policy of tension in the Caucasus, and the manipulation of the political evolution of Ukraine, Belarus, Moldova, and other post-Soviet-era states.
The post-Cold War strategy of the Clinton Administration followed the Brzezinski line, which was implemented by his former student Madeleine Albright.[16] In this regard, I would point out for special emphasis the Clinton Administration "pipeline geopolitics" involving Central Asia, the Caspian Sea, Afghanistan, and the Balkans.[17] Let us not forget that the Clinton Administration created the Taliban, with the assistance of Pakistan, a willing player seeking influence in Central Asia and "strategic depth" against India.
I would be remiss not to point out that, during this period, Brzezinski was a consultant to British Petroleum and the consortium involved in the Baku-Ceyhan pipeline project, designed to strategically skirt Russian and other routes. It is indeed more than symbolic that Brzezinski was in the service of the same global oil concern for which the United States overthrew the patriotic government of Muhammad Mossadegh of Iran.[18]
While Brzezinski was lining his pockets in the service of foreign oil interests, Richard Cheney was scheming away on oil geopolitics in Texas as chairman of Halliburton. So nothing major changed in U.S. global strategy when the inexperienced and unstable George W. Bush entered the White House.[19]
The Bush core foreign policy team composed of the neo-conservative network, and protected by Vice President Cheney, follows the main lines of Brzezinski's global strategy, which we can fairly say represents a certain elite consensus. Brzezinski's geopolitics is the dominant geopolitics of the American Establishment, in which the neo-conservative intellectuals are just one small but strident cog in the greater wheel.
Secretary of State Condi Rice herself is a former student of Madeleine Albright's father, Joseph Körbel, an opportunistic Czech diplomat once sympathetic to Stalin. We should not fail to take note of Ms. Rice's connections to the Chevron oil interests and to the Morgan banking interests. Her own rise to prominence and wealth is attributable to the apparent patronage of the influential George Shultz who, with Richard Cheney, organized the foreign policy advisory group to "educate" candidate George W. Bush. This group, nicknamed the "Vulcans," was led by Paul Wolfowitz, with Ms. Rice as the principal coordinator.[20] This group decided on the use of force against Iraq prior to the 2000 election.[21]
For successfully assisting the betrayal of their country into an unnecessary war, Wolfowitz was recently rewarded with a plum job as head of the World Bank, and Ms. Rice was rewarded with a considerable elevation in rank to Secretary of State. Such is Washington these days.
With respect to the Far East, Brzezinski has correctly argued for a pragmatic approach to China, and a reduction of tensions in the Pacific, but the neo-conservatives argue for the opposite. The neo-conservative network, however, closely linked to certain extremist Taiwanese circles, wishes to promote tension in the Pacific, with the ultimate goal of provoking a war with China. To that end, they appear to favor a nuclear strike against North Korea, in order, in the words of one influential neo-conservative acquaintance of mine, to "send a message to China."
With respect to the Iraq War, one might argue that the central reason for it is Vice President Cheney's obsession with the control of global hydrocarbon resources. Cheney and hence Bush, adopted Brzezinski's outlook with respect to the global geopolitics of energy. As the Bush and Cheney families have major financial interests in the energy sector, their policy is personally financially rewarding. And, as I said earlier, it is an elite consensus within the American Establishment.
We should not be surprised, therefore, to find Vice President Cheney's daughter stationed today as a political commissar in the Near East Bureau of our Department of State. Crass nepotism aside, Ms. Cheney, as a high-powered Washington lawyer involved in international business, stands to gain financially from her deep involvement in the imperial Bush Administration Middle East policy. The Bush family interest in the Carlyle Group, the largest private investor in the U.S. defense industry, and in other holdings, may well reap financial benefits from the current war economy over which George W. is the self-described "War President."
But to fully understand the Bush Middle East policy, and the degraded state of current American politics, one has to take into consideration that his political base is composed primarily of delusional Christian fundamentalists, of whom about 25 million are hardline "Christian Zionists." Karl Rove and Bush family political managers have very effectively manipulated and mobilized these millions of fundamentalists as shock troops at the polls.22 These deluded souls see themselves helping Israel by crushing the "Evil One in Babylon" (Saddam Hussein) and strategically checking "Magog" (Russia) prior to "Armageddon," which is seen to be coming soon.
The pro-Israel neo-conservative policy network adroitly linked to Christian fundamentalist leaders such as Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson back during the Carter Presidency, and has provided Zionist-oriented foreign policy guidance to the fundamentalists during the Carter, Reagan, George H.W. Bush, Clinton, and George W. Bush administrations. The close linkage between the Bush Administration and the Likud Party, and other extremists in Israel, is facilitated by the neo-conservatives and the fundamentalists.
Christian Zionism is a bizarre ideology, also called "premillennial dispensationalism," created back in the 1840s in England by several deranged and delusional cult leaders such as John Nelson Darby (1800-82) and Edward Irving (1792-1834). Their ideas spread to the United States from 1859-72, when Darby came to North America to preach his doctrines to gullible masses.[23] Christian Zionism in England was more than a little useful to the Palmerston crowd in whipping up support for its Middle East policy and Great Game against Russia.[24]
Simply put, neo-conservative Middle East policy is essentially a remake of Palmerston's, namely, an alignment of the United States, Turkey, and Israel to dominate the region. Today, of course, the reason for imperial domination is the hydrocarbon supply in the region. That hydrocarbon supply was a key strategic consideration in late-19th-Century and 20th-Century Britain goes without saying. This strategic concern resulted from the shift from coal- to oil-fired boilers in the British Navy. While the United States had plenty of hydrocarbon resources within its own territory in that era, the British Empire did not.
The neo-conservative influence over U.S. foreign and defense policy has been achieved through its penetration of both political parties, for example, the Lieberman faction in the Democratic Party and the McCain and Bush factions in the Republican Party.[25] The neo-conservatives have successfully made their ideology the dominant ideology in the Republican Party, although there are some signs of growing resistance now.[26]
III. Roots of Evil: A Corrupt Oligarchy Against Virtue
The factional struggle in the United States today, between a corrupt oligarchy favoring imperialism and those who support republican institutions has roots in 16th- and 17th-Century England. With the organization of the British colonies in North America beginning with Jamestown, Virginia in 1607, the factional struggle came to our shores, and has not ceased.
Although this is a highly complex and obscure topic, I will simply say today that this factional struggle was exemplified in the London Company which founded Virginia some 400 years ago and also influenced settlement in New England, notably Plymouth Colony. I would give particular emphasis to Plymouth in early New England, because that group of Pilgrims had spent a number of years in the Netherlands, mostly in Leiden, and had assimilated elements of Erasmian Continental Humanism. In religion, they were close to the French Huguenots and, hence, there are indications of the influence of the thought of such intellectuals as Jean Bodin, François Hotman, and Hubert Lanquet.
One can well say that the bitter dispute in this early day between the oligarchic commercial faction linked to the Crown around Sir Thomas Smith, and its opponents in the patriotic faction around Sir Edwin Sandys and his brother, represent the matter then as now.[27] Sandys, and his Parliamentary allies, fought against the Stuart tyranny which rested on a foundation, Venetian style, of moral degradation and commercial corruption organized around business and financial monopolies, not the least of which was the East India Company. Later, the Bank of England, a private monopoly for almost three centuries, would be added to this "system" of oligarchic or, more accurately, plutocratic rule.
The so-called "Anglo-American Establishment" organized in the wake of World War I, represents a continuity, or restoration, of this earlier oligarchic-plutocratic faction. Of course, it has always been represented to some degree in North America, whether in the colonial era or after American Independence. And this alien interest penetrated both political parties.
Is it any surprise, for example, that the London Rothschild agent August Belmont became the head of the Democratic Party in the United States during the 1860s, or that the Democratic Party espoused a British "Free-Trade" doctrine in the face of the successful American System policy of the Whig Party and then Lincoln and the Republican Party?[28]
Is it any surprise that the Republican Party succumbed to the influence of Wall Street and London, as its Progressives and moderates were sidelined by the Money Power prior to World War I, and have fought a rear-guard action ever since?[29]
Is it any surprise that the Wall Street faction of the Democratic Party, typified by John Nance Garner of Texas, himself linked to the pro-fascist Liberty League circles of Wall Street, bitterly opposed the Presidential nomination of Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1932, and then sought to undermine the New Deal even as Vice President? In this context, we must recall that President Roosevelt pointedly broadened his administration to include such well-known Progressive Republicans as Harold Ickes and Henry A. Wallace.[30]
Or, finally, is it any surprise that George W. Bush and his Wall Street-Texas-London faction plunged the United States, and indeed the world, into an unnecessary war against Iraq in the service of transnational oligarchic interests?
When we consider the facts about the Bush family and their historic linkages to the Harriman and Rockefeller interests, to the Wall Street and London Money Power, and to international Big Oil, we should not be surprised in the least.[31] Nor can one be surprised considering the longstanding Bush family connection to one of the most elite American imperial clubs, namely, the esoteric Skull and Bones Society of Yale University.[32]
In conclusion, as we assess the imperial policies of the transnational oligarchy of our day, in the United States and around the world, as expressed through such elite consensus-building organizations as the Bilderberg Group and the Trilateral Commission, curious 19th-Century ideologies should not be overlooked.
One key ideologist I would point to is the former French occult leader of the Martinist Order, Joseph-Alexandre Saint-Yves D'Alveydre (1842-1909), who was inspired by Napoleon's own occult advisor Fabre d'Olivet and the notorious Joseph de Maistre. It was Saint-Yves who, in the late 19th Century, created the concept of "Synarchy" as a fascist world order opposed to the Westphalian ideal of a system of sovereign states.[33]
Will the American Republican and Democratic parties liberate themselves from the pernicious influence of transnational oligarchic circles? Will the American public come to its senses and demand the abandonment of the current imperial strategy? Time will tell.
[1] For a trenchant analysis of modern imperialism see, J.A. Hobson, Imperialism (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1965). A useful study of Roman imperialism is William Stearns Davis, The Influence of Wealth in Imperial Rome (New York: Macmillan, 1910).
[2] For some useful context see, Blair Worden, The Sound of Virtue, Philip Sidney's Arcadia and Elizabethan Politics (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996).
[3] For background see, for example, Perez Zagoria, The Court and the Country, The Beginning of the English Revolution of the Mid-Seventeenth Century (New York: Atheneum, 1970).
[4] For general background see, James Parkes, The Emergence of the Jewish Problem 1878-1939 (London: Oxford University Press, 1946).
[5] See, George Macaulay Trevelyan, The Life of John Bright (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1913).
[6] Report of the Commissioner appointed to Examine into the State of the Population of the Mining Districts 1854, cited by Henry Charles Carey in his Principles of Social Science, 3 vols. (Philadelphia: Lippincott and Co., 1877), Vol. I, pp. 420-421.
[7] For background see, William E. Dodd, The Cotton Kingdom (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1919) and Frank L. Owsley, King Cotton Diplomacy: Foreign Relations of the Confederate States of America, 2nd rev. ed. (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1959).
Of special interest is Dodd's "The Social Philosophy of the Old South," American Journal of Sociology, 1918, pp. 735-746 (online at: http://www.dinsdoc.com/dodd-1.htm) where he points out that Southern slavery ideology was fortified by the spread of transplanted Hegelian philosophy in Southern educational institutions in the decades prior to the Civil War.
Today's neo-conservatives, following Leo Strauss and Alexandre Kojève, are attracted to this pro-slavery orientation of Hegel, which is an important philosophical element justifying their imperial concepts. On this point see, Shadia Drury, Alexandre Kojève, The Roots of Postmodern Politics (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1994), pp. 29-39.
[8] Bradford Perkins, The Great Rapprochement, England and the United States 1895-1914 (New York: Atheneum, 1968).
[9] For background see, James Brown Scott, A Survey of the International Relations between the United States and Germany 1914-1917 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1917).
[10] On the Harrimans see, George Kennan, E.H. Harriman, A Biography, 2 vols. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1922). Note: The American diplomat George Kennan was a distant relative of the author.
[11] For a useful overview see, Charles Higham, Trading with the Enemy, The Nazi-American Money Plot 1933-1949 (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1995). Considerable data is also provided in William C. McNeil, American Money and the Weimar Republic, Economics and Politics on the Eve of the Great Depression (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986).
[12] William L. Langer, Our Vichy Gamble (New York: Knopf, 1947), p. 168. Langer explains that synarchist circles formed around several international banking groups, including the French Banque Worms which was allied with the Lazard banking interests of London, New York, and Paris, as well as with the Royal Dutch Shell group. For a highly revealing study see, James Stewart Martin, All Honorable Men (Boston: Little Brown, 1950).
[13] The sensationalism of the "yellow journalism" of the Hearst press inciting Americans to go to war against Spain in 1898 was systematically developed after World War I by, among others, Henry Luce of the Time-Life empire. See, for example, W.A. Swanberg, Luce and His Empire (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1972).
[14] Zbigniew Brzezinski, The Grand Chessboard, American Primacy and Its Geostrategic Imperatives (New York: Basic Books, 1997).
[15] On the problem of blowback see, John K. Cooley, Unholy Wars, Afghanistan, America and International Terrorism (London: Pluto Press, 1999).
[16] See, Michael Dobbs, Madeleine Albright, A Twentieth Century Odyssey (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1999).
[17] See, for example, William Engdahl, A Century of War, Anglo-American Oil Politics and the New World Order (London: Pluto Press, 2004), and Paul Sperry, Crude Politics, How Bush's Oil Cronies Hijacked the War on Terrorism (Nashville: WND Books, 2003).
[18] For background on the U.S. coup against Mossadegh see, Stephen Kinzer, All The Shah's Men, An American Coup and the Roots of Middle East Terror (Hoboken: John C. Wiley and Sons, 2003).
[19] For an in-depth professional psychological assessment of Bush see, Justin A. Frank, M.D., Bush on the Couch (New York: Regan Books, 2004.) For operational aspects of the Bush Presidency see, John W. Dean, Worse than Watergate, The Secret Presidency of George W. Bush (New York: Little Brown, 2004) and Robert C. Byrd, Losing America, Confronting a Reckless and Arrogant Presidency (New York: Norton, 2004).
[20] For background see, James Mann, Rise of the Vulcans, the History of Bush's War Cabinet (New York: Viking, 2004).
[21] Paul O'Neill, former Secretary of the Treasury in the G.W. Bush Administration, reported that Iraq was the key topic of the first meeting of the principals of the National Security Council on Jan. 10, 2001. See, Ron Suskind, The Price of Loyalty, George W. Bush, the White House, and the Education of Paul O'Neill (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2004).
[22] On Rove see, for example, James Moore and Wayne Slater, Bush's Brain, How Karl Rove Made George W. Bush Presidential (Hoboken: John C. Wiley and Sons, 2003).
[23] The best analysis of Christian Zionism and Darbyite ideology is by Father Stephen Sizer, a British Anglican. See his publications and his website at http://www.christchurch-virginiawater.co.uk/articles/ czarticles.htm.
[24] See, for example, Geoffrey Wheatcroft, The Controversy of Zion (Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley, 1996), and Kathleen Christison, Perceptions of Palestine (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999).
[25] The best book on neo-conservative foreign policy is Stefan Halper and Jonathan Clarke, America Alone, The Neo-Conservatives and the Global Order (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004).
[26] For background see, Shadia B. Drury, Leo Strauss and the American Right (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1999).
[27] Some useful background is provided in B.E. Supple, Commercial Crisis and Change in England, 1600-1642 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1959).
[28]See, Irving Katz, August Belmont, A Political Biography (New York: Columbia University Press, 1968).[29] Insight into the Progressive Republican faction and the operations of Wall Street is provided in the memoirs of one of its leaders, Robert LaFollette. See, Belle Case LaFollette and Fola LaFollette, Robert M. LaFollette, 2 vols. (New York: Macmillan, 1953).
[30] For background see, Harold L. Ickes, The Secret Diary of Harold L. Ickes, The First Thousand Days 1933-1936 (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1953).
[31] For background see, Kevin Phillips, American Dynasty, Aristocracy, Fortune, and the Politics of Deceit in the House of Bush (New York: Viking, 2004), and Michael Lind, Made in Texas, George W. Bush and the Southern Takeover of American Politics (New York: New America Books, 2003).
[32] Antony C. Sutton, America's Secret Establishment, An Introduction to the Order of Skull and Bones (Trine Day, 2002 edition). This club, for example, has included the Harriman family, media magnate Henry Luce, Henry Stimson, and the Bundy brothers, all influential in American empire building. U.S. Sen. John Kerry is a member and this led to the unprecedented situation in 2004 of two members of the same imperial club vying for the Presidency.
[33] Saint-Yves d'Alveydre, Mission des Souverains (Helsinki: Les Editions Nord Sud, 1948). Brzezinski's Between Two Ages, America's Role in the Technotronic Era (New York: Viking, 1970) indicates the influence of a "synarchist" mode of thought.
For a revealing study see, William Y. Elliott, The Political Economy of American Foreign Policy (New York: Greenwood Press, 1968, reprint of the 1955 edition). Elliott, an apparent vector of synarchy, was a mentor of Brzezinski and a key academic asset of the Anglo-American Establishment. Elliott appears to have been influenced in the 1930s by the French synarchy and some of its members' writings on "economic humanism" which seem to parallel some British Fabian orientations. Elliott was also Kissinger's mentor.
On synarchy see, for example, Yann Moncomble, Du Viol des Foules—la Synarchie ou le Complot Permanent (Paris: Faits et Documents, 1983).
