Safe Haven | Preservation of Capital |

An influential foreign-policy neoconservative with long-standing ties to top hawks in the administration of President George W. Bush has laid out what he calls "a checklist of the work the world will demand of this president and his subordinates in a second term."

The list, which begins with the destruction of Fallujah in Iraq and ends with the development of "appropriate strategies" for dealing with threats posed by China, Russia and "the emergence of a number of aggressively anti-American regimes in Latin America," also calls for "regime change" in Iran and North Korea.

"These items do not represent some sort of neocon 'imperialist' game plan," Gaffney stressed. "Rather, they constitute a checklist of the work the world will demand of this president and his subordinates in a second term."

November 05, 2004, 10:20 a.m.
Worldwide Value

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The important thing now, of course, is not simply to acknowledge past achievements, but to build upon them. This will require, among other things:

The reduction in detail of Fallujah and other safe havens utilized by freedom's enemies in Iraq a necessary precondition not only to holding elections there next year, but to the establishment of institutions essential to a functioning and stable democracy;

Regime change one way or another in Iran and North Korea, the only hope for preventing these remaining "Axis of Evil" states from fully realizing their terrorist and nuclear ambitions;

Providing the substantially increased resources needed to re-equip a transforming military and rebuild human-intelligence capabilities (minus, if at all possible, the sorts of intelligence "reforms" contemplated pre-election that would make matters worse on this and other scores) while we fight World War IV;

Providing, to the fullest extent possible, for the protection of our homeland including the adoption of sensible policies on securing our borders and contending with illegal aliens, and by deploying effective missile defenses at sea and in space, as well as ashore;

Keeping faith with Israel, whose destruction remains a priority for the same people who want to destroy us (and for the same reasons i.e., our shared, "moral values") especially in the face of Yasser Arafat's demise and the inevitable, post-election pressure to "solve" the Mideast problem by forcing the Israelis to abandon defensible boundaries;

Contending with the underlying dynamic that made France and Germany so problematic in the first term: namely, their willingness to make common cause with our enemies for profit, and their desire to employ a united Europe and its new constitution as well as other international institutions and mechanisms to thwart the expansion and application of American power where deemed necessary by Washington;

Adapting appropriate strategies for contending with China's increasingly fascistic trade and military policies, Vladimir Putin's accelerating authoritarianism at home and aggressiveness toward the former Soviet republics, the worldwide spread of Islamofascism, and the emergence of a number of aggressively anti-American regimes in Latin America.