“The objective of these officials is to continue to carry out a longstanding plan that was developed in the 1990s by the leadership of the neoconservative movement which has controlled US foreign policy in the Middle East for decades. The plan has always been to eliminate independent nations in the region that refuse to be incorporated into the Washington Consensus that was developed at the end of the Cold War. The idea behind the Washington Consensus is that the United States should be the de facto world government that rules on a unipolar basis, and that nations that refuse to be incorporated into the American empire should be subjugated or destroyed,” Keith Preston, the chief editor and director of attackthesystem.com, told the Tasnim news agency in an interview.