X: Obama: A Looming World Tragedy 391secretary of state under Bush the Elder, stated explicitly that he had procured Syria as an ally for the
United States during the first Gulf War, and that he could do so again. Neocon press organs screamed
that Baker and Hamilton were “surrender monkeys,” but the handwriting was now on the wall. The
middle of the year saw the fall of the crypto-neocon Tony Blair, a creature of Rupert Murdoch and
the last of the major European leaders who had cooperated with Bush and the neocons to unleash
the Iraq war in the first place. The last serious attempt of the neocon faction to launch war with Iran
probably occurred at the end of August and the beginning of September 2007, when rogue forces
allied with Cheney in effect hijacked a B-52 intercontinental strategic bomber carrying six nuclear
armed cruise missiles, and flew it from North Dakota to Louisiana. One or more of these missiles
was probably destined to join in the Israeli attack on Syria which occurred on September 6. The
fact that this B-52 was not allowed to proceed, and that a consensus against letting it leaves the
United States rapidly emerged in the higher levels of the oligarchy, probably represented the last
gasp of the US - UK neocons as far as starting a wider war was concerned. Bush’s outbursts in
October and November about World War III were partly directed against Putin, and partly
expressed his frustration that no strategic attacks on Iran were likely. This overall impression was
solidified in December 2007 with the issuance of the National Intelligence Estimate on Iran, which
concluded that there was no longer any active Iranian program to build nuclear bombs.
In 2008, attention was already shifting to such classic Brzezinski gambits as Kosovo
independence and the emerging Polish missile crisis, along with the Tibet insurrection, threats to
attack Sudan, and a clear desire to use a humanitarian emergency in Burma as a pretext for a
humanitarian invasion and regime change using the story that the Burmese junta was not an
efficient distributor of relief supplies. During these same months, the US Supreme Court was
handing down the majority opinions striking down the Bush-Cheney military commissions plan for
alleged terrorist captives, and then asserting the right of habeas corpus for the prisoners being held
in the US exclave of Guantánamo Bay Cuba. Once again, the neocons howled in their impotence.
Then came the deal to de-list North Korea as a terrorist state, followed by increasing indications of
an imminent deal with Iran, even as the attacks on Pakistan escalated and that country teetered on
the brink of civil war and partition. The years had not been kind to the neocons: Scooter Libby had
been convicted, and only escaped prison through Bush’s highly controversial pardon. Lord Conrad
Black, arguably an even bigger neocon then Libby, was now actually serving a multi-year prison
sentence in a US federal penitentiary for embezzling money from his companies. Lord Black had
been one of the major funders of the American Enterprise Institute, where no less a personage than
Lynn Cheney, as well as Richard Perle and Michael Ledeen, had been employed. As for Ledeen,
his problems might only be beginning: a report from the Senate Intelligence Committee alleged that
Ledeen and his old Iran-Contra friend Ghorbanifar had conspired to manipulate US intelligence
during the run-up to the Iraq war. This report had no doubt received much personal attention from
the Committee Chairman, who was none other than Senator John D. Rockefeller IV, of the
Trilateral-Rockefeller faction which also included Brzezinski. These were some of the steps by
which the Trilaterals had ousted the neocons from their previous positions of power, had neutralized
Bush and Cheney, and had generally introduced a demagogic left turn in the entire posture of Anglo
American foreign policy, propaganda, and intelligence operations. Now, all they needed was a
figurehead to become the spokesman for this deceptive and cynical left turn — and this was
obviously the role assigned to Obama.
If the American people could imagine no conflict worse than the Iraq war, they were obviously
suffering from a severe poverty of imagination. Zbigniew Brzezinski’s imagination was richer than
that. He could and did imagine a drive to break up both Russia and China, reducing both to a