Looked at another way, despite what had just happened to the Pentagon and those towers in New York, on September 12, 2001, the globe’s “sole superpower” had remarkably few enemies. Small numbers of jihadis scattered mostly in the backlands of the planet and centered in an impoverished, decimated country -- Afghanistan -- with the most retro regime on Earth. There were, in addition, three rickety “rogue states” (North Korea, Iraq, and Iran) singled out for enemy status but incapable of harming the U.S., and that was that.
The world, as Dick Cheney & Co. took for granted, looked ready to be dominated by the only (angry) hyperpower left after centuries of imperial rivalry. The U.S. military, its technological capability unrivaled by any state or possible grouping of states, was to be let loose to bring the Greater Middle East to heel in a decisive way. Between that regular military and para-militarizing intelligence agencies, the planet was to be scoured of enemies, the “swamp drained” in up to 60 countries. The result would be a Pax Americana in the Middle East, and perhaps even globally, into the distant future. It was to be legendary. And no method -- not torture, abuse, kidnapping, the creation of “black sites,” detention without charges, assassination, the creation of secret law, or surveillance on a previously unimaginable scale -- was to be left out of the toolkit used to birth this new all-American planet. The “gloves” were to be taken off in a big way.