Film suggests U.S. has plan to rule the world

Film suggests U.S. has plan to rule the world
Documentary takes look at neoconservatives.
Hijacking Catastrophe: 9/11, Fear and the Selling of American Empire • With: Julian Bond (narrator) and Noam Chomsky, Daniel Ellsberg, Lt. Col. (Ret.) Karen Kwiatkowski, Michael Franti, Norman Mailer, Scott Ritter and Medea Benjamin. • Location: Key Cinemas. • Running time: 68 minutes. • Rating: None.
By Anita Gates
The New York Times News Service
October 23, 2004
You won't see President Bush swinging any golf clubs in "Hijacking Catastrophe." You won't see his and his advisers' heads attached to the bodies of stars from "Bonanza." This is not Michael Moore's "Fahrenheit 9/11" revisited.
You will, however, see and hear Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney and other members of the administration say again and again, with various phrasings, "There is no doubt that Saddam Hussein has weapons of mass destruction." (That is an exact quotation from Cheney.)
Throngs of Democrats believe that Bush was determined to go to war with Saddam, come hell or high water. The pop-psychology reasoning goes that Bush the Younger is trying to prove himself to his father or to best him, at the expense of thousands of lives.
The writers and directors of this openly polemical but also sobering documentary -- Sut Jhally, a professor of communications at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst; and Jeremy Earp, a doctoral candidate there -- suggest that the reality is much bigger and even more disturbing.
They suggest that the real reason for the war with Iraq is a two-decade, three-administration, neoconservative master plan to -- well, let's let Norman Mailer say the words, as he does in the film. At the end of the Cold War, he proposes, the Republicans saw a "golden opportunity, now that Russia is out of the way, to take over the world." Or as the author Chalmers Johnson says on camera, without irony, they wanted to create "a new Rome, beyond good and evil."
You don't hear phrases like "take over the world" often these days without a James Bond movie review attached, but "Hijacking Catastrophe: 9/11, Fear and the Selling of American Empire" makes a convincing case with simple methods: talking heads, newspaper articles, an authoritative narrator (Julian Bond) and the occasional chart on military spending or the national debt.
The voices speaking out are not all wild-eyed liberals. In addition to predictable administration critics like Mailer, Noam Chomsky and Daniel Ellsberg, they include Scott Ritter, a former U.N. weapons inspector in Iraq; Stan Goff, a retired Army Special Forces master sergeant; and Lt. Col. Karen Kwiatkowski (Air Force, retired), a former staff officer at the Pentagon. Their arguments appear to support the filmmakers' most serious accusations.
Documents seem to do the same. A 2000 government report, "Rebuilding America's Defense," suggests that this global empire-building would be a long, tedious process unless some huge event, "like a new Pearl Harbor," speeds it up.
The filmmakers are definitely playing hardball. "Hijacking Catastrophe" begins with a quotation about the ease of making people do what a country's leaders want. "All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked," it begins. Then, after a deliberate pause, the screen reveals that this is something Hermann Goering said during the Nuremberg trials.