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the ‘Axis of Evil.’ It singled out three regimes—North Korea, Iran and Iraq—as posing a special problem for the New American Century. Months before the world, courtesy of CNN, witnessed the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, or had even heard of Osama bin Laden, Cheney’s PNAC had targeted Saddam Hussein’s Iraq for special treatment, stating bluntly that U.S. policy should be to take direct military control of the Arabian Gulf. The report declared: The United States has for decades sought to play a more permanent role in Gulf regional security. While the unresolved conflict with Iraq provides the immediate justification, the need for a substantial American force presence in the Gulf transcends the issue of the regime of Saddam Hussein. That sentence, on the ‘need for a substantial American force presence in the Gulf,’ was later read and reread in many quarters around the world, in the months before the bombing of Baghdad. Iraq was simply a useful excuse for Cheney, Wolfowitz and others to justify ‘the need for a substantial American force presence in the Gulf …’ There was no talk of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, or of its ties to terrorists.2 FROM KABUL TO BAGHDAD: WAR ON TERROR OR WAR ON OIL? If the Bush administration had been unprepared for the shock of September 11, 2001, they certainly wasted no time in preparing their response, the war on terror. Terror was to replace communism as the new global image of ‘the enemy.’ The new terrorists could be anywhere and everywhere. Above all, as the war was defined in Washington, they were mostly to be found in the Islamic regions which also happened to control most of the world’s oil reserves. Old ‘cold warriors’ were galvanized again into action. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, now in his seventies, was in the center of global power politics as never before. According to the account of Washington Post editor Bob Woodward in his book Bush at War (for which he got access to sensitive National Security council documents), one day after the collapse of the World Trade towers, on September 12, 2001, Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz began to urge the president that Iraq should be ‘a principal target of the first round in the war
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