The "energy wars" have begun in earnest and will keep on going, from here onwards. These are the times that backward, politically unimportant weak little countries such as South Africa should shut up and keep their heads down if they want to remain untouched during the coming covert and overt conflicts.

We have to begin somewhere, so I'm choosing to start with two published "blueprints" that both lay out exactly what the United States would have to do, and is doing, in order to survive through the coming century. (And don't worry, there are lots of downloadable goodies to sweeten the medicine.)

You might want to grab Michel Chossudovsky: America's "War on Terrorism" -- a presentation to the Perdana Global Peace Forum (2005) in Malaysia (36-meg download) -- here.

Putting it simply, the two plans argue for never-ending global domination by the US -- which also requires taking firm military control of a sizeable quantity of the last remaining oil reserves on Earth and keeping control of them.

Download Sky TV's 'Conspiracies: Iraq' (27-meg download).

The first plan was, oddly enough, published in 1997 and comes from Zbigniew Brzezinski, a heavyweight player whose CV would stretch for a couple of paragraphs. (Just a few are: national security adviser to Carter, trustee and founder of the Trilateral Commission, co-chairperson of the Bush National Security Advisory Task Force.)

His book The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy and Its Geostrategic Imperatives pointed the way that the US had to go, complete with maps of the region which the US had to invade and control, in order to dominate the world and keep itself alive -- the Eurasian area of Iraq and Iran. Read Mein Kampf for the 21st Century? and A War in the Planning for Four Years.

Two quotes from his book are relevant to understanding what happened next. "The most immediate task is to make certain that no state or combination of states gains the capacity to expel the United States from Eurasia or even to diminish significantly its decisive arbitration role," (p198) and "Moreover, as America becomes an increasingly multi-cultural society, it may find it more difficult to fashion a consensus on foreign policy issues, except in the circumstance of a truly massive and widely perceived direct external threat" (p 211).

Keep that phrase of a "truly massive and widely perceived direct external threat" in mind, and let's go forward a few years.

The next plan, drawing on the above for inspiration, was created by a right-wing neo-conservative ("neocon") think tank in 2000. It was called the "Project for a New American Century" and among its members were Jeb Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz. Not surprisingly, here's their disarmingly quiet-looking webpage, Project for the New American Century.

And watch BBC Panorama's The War Party ("Panorama investigates the neo-conservatives, the small and unelected group of right-wingers, who critics claim have hijacked the White House") on stream or download.

In September 2000, this think tank created a report titled Rebuilding America's Defences (the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace describes it thus: "co-authored by, among others, six key defence and foreign policy officials now serving in the Bush administration. This report seems to have become a blueprint for Bush's foreign and defence policies.")

You can download this 850kb report in PDF form here. A back-up mirror is here.

To find some useful articles and info relating to the mass warfare and chaos that this think tank may well have unleashed upon the world, read Exposing the Project for a New American Century.

Now we need to back up a little, pause, and maybe work our way through the excellent three-part BBC TV series on the rise of the neocons -- and their opposites, the radical Islamic extremists. The point is also made in the documentary that "al-Qaeda" was not only created, trained and funded by the CIA, but it remains today mostly a useful tool for creating an "enemy" by Western intelligence services. Watch The Power of Nightmares 1: The Rise of the Politics of Fear, The Power of Nightmares 2 The Phantom Victory, and The Power of Nightmares 3 (if you only have time for one of these three episodes, go for the third episode).

It's a good wake-up call to realise that the name "al-Qaeda" (which means "the database") comes from the CIA's own descriptive term for their files on the fighters they were training and arming in Afghanistan during Soviet occupation. Don't believe me? Read Robin Cook in the United Kingdom Guardian. Nine paragraphs down.

Now read Gore Vidal's excellent article titled 'The Enemy Within'.

Back to the document the think tank came up with. It noted that this radical oil grab and global domination it felt the US had to do wouldn't happen fast enough, unless there was "some catastrophic and catalysing event -- like a new Pearl Harbour" to motivate the public into accepting this overt global war. A year later, 9/11 just "happened" to provide the perfect "new Pearl Harbour" justification.

Suddenly we have both 9/11 and the never-ending "massive and widely perceived direct external threat" of the "war on terror". The exact requirements needed.

To see 9/11 shown for what it really was, especially given the above context, watch 'Loose Change: Second Edition' and read a physics professor's quite alarming and careful paper on 'Why Indeed Did the WTC Towers Collapse'.

Here's an interesting deconstruction of how the media portrayed and behaved regarding Professor Steven Jones's study called 'A Physics Professor Speaks Out on 9/11: Reason, Publicity and Reaction'.

Read another scholarly paper, titled 'The Destruction of the World Trade Centre: Why the Official Account Cannot Be True'. The fake "war on terror" had begun.

As a matter of interest, to show where Saddam Hussein actually came from (given that

he was originally installed in power by the CIA), watch The Hidden Wars of Desert Storm: stream or download it (39 meg). There's also The Making of a Dictator.

Naturally, in order to start the mobilisation of the neocon plans, lies had to be told all round. You've heard of the "Downing Street Memo" (the notes taken as Bush and Blair plotted and worked out how best to sell a false "reason" for a non-existent war). Well, read it here. Also look over the info at its companion site After Downing Street.

Staying with the Blair poodle, watch BBC Panorama's Iraq, Tony and the Truth: stream or download it.

Let's pause to hear Harold Pinter, odd playwright and winner of the 2005 Nobel Prize for Literature, on Art, Truth and Politics.

History is being rewritten almost as fast as it happens. Remember Colin Powell talking to the United Nations ahead of the Iraq invasion, with supposed "proof"? How many of you know or heard the February 3 announcement by Powell's former chief of staff, during a PBS interview, that "I participated in a hoax on the American people, the international community, and the UN Security Council"? Don't believe me? Go to the PBS transcript page and search for the word "hoax" -- Iraq Pre-War Intelligence.

Meanwhile, to see where we are now, read 'On the Brink in Iraq'.

Where to next? From all the signs, we might be potentially mere weeks away from the next war, the next step in the neocons' plans. Here's John Pilger's take, 'The Next War: Crossing the Rubicon'.

Also read 'Iran's Euro-Denominated Oil Bourse to Open in March; US $ Crash Imminent'. Then read the enlightening 'Who Will Blow the Whistle Before We Hit Iran'.

Here's a programme by Channel Four satirists called Beneath Iraq and a Hard Place --download or stream -- and its sequel, BEYOND Iraq and a Hard Place (29 meg) -- stream or download it.

Although it deals primarily with the misuse of the Holocaust, there's some very interesting perspectives on modern history and current affairs from a philosophical point of view at Rearranging the 20th Century.

Until the next time, unless the nukes get me.