“…. the so-called ‘war on terrorism’ is being used largely as bogus cover for achieving wider US strategic geopolitical objectives….. 9/11 offered an extremely convenient pretext to put the PNAC plan into action. The evidence again is quite clear that plans for military action against Afghanistan and Iraq were in hand well before 9/11….. the PNAC blueprint of September 2000 states that the process of transforming the US into ‘tomorrow’s dominant force’ is likely to be a long one in the absence of ‘some catastrophic and catalyzing event – like a new Pearl Harbor’. The 9/11 attacks allowed the US to press the ‘go’ button for a strategy in accordance with the PNAC agenda which it would otherwise have been politically impossible to implement. The overriding motivation for this political smokescreen is that the US and the UK are beginning to run out of secure hydrocarbon energy supplies. By 2010 the Muslim world will control as much as 60% of the world’s oil production and, even more importantly, 95% of remaining global oil export capacity. As demand is increasing, so supply is decreasing, continually since the 1960s….. the ‘global war on terrorism’ has the hallmarks of a political myth propagated to pave the way for a wholly different agenda – the US goal of world hegemony, built around securing by force command over the oil supplies required to drive the whole project. Is collusion in this myth and junior participation in this project really a proper aspiration for British foreign policy? If there was ever need to justify a more objective British stance, driven by our own independent goals, this whole depressing saga surely provides all the evidence needed for a radical change of course.”
Michael Meacher MP, UK environment minister from May 1997 to June 2003
This war on terrorism is bogus
Guardian, 6 September 2003