When George Bush was running for President he promised the American people a more “humble” foreign policy if he won the election. Now as maximum leader Bush has declared “today Lubbock, tomorrow the world.” I suppose because Bush didn’t really win the election he feels under no obligation to keep his promises.
The scope of Bush’s ambition makes Augustus Caesar look modest. The Roman Legions just wanted to rule the known world. These days a lot more world is known. Our president is casting his greedy eyes even on China.
The current target for destruction and domination is Iraq. At first the Bushies tried to play the game with a nod to international law and traditional doctrines of “just war.” They sought to tie Saddam Hussein to September 11 and the Al Queda. But extensive investigation proved just the opposite. The secularist Iraqi government and the religious fascists of Islamic fundamentalism actually hate each other. And the universal finding on Iraq was “not guilty” of the Twin Towers massacre.
So the Bush gang came up with a rather novel concept. Since Iraq might someday do something bad to the United States, the U.S. has the right to militarily assault that nation and change it’s government. It resembles Hitler’s excuse for attacking Russia at a time when his country had signed a nonaggression pact promising never to do that terrible thing. Hitler claimed that since the Russians were Communists they would probably attack Germany someday soon. After the war was over, an international tribunal did not buy this excuse for aggression. In fact the court was so miffed that it sent quite a few Nazi leaders to the gallows and the Russian invasion was one of the reasons.
Perhaps it is to avoid these very same gallows that the Bush Doctrine arrogantly declares that no American will ever be tried in an international court. After all, Americans are the good guys.
For a while it looked like Congress might put up some road blocks on Bush’s superhighway to war. Some peace minded and libertarian Republicans criticized Bushist militarism. But the Democrats, chickenhearted after all these years, collapsed, figuring, I guess that if they let Bush steal the election they might as well give him the whole Constitution. Congress has become such a sham, we can expect a new Caligula to nominate his horse for the Senate.
The Bush doctine of anticipating bad behavior and punishing it before it occurs has invaded the legal system. Recently in Oregon a judge disappointed the prosecutor, the Portland Police Chief and the anti-terrorist commission because she refused to tack on lots of years to an Arab’s prison sentence just because the guy was sympathetic to a Palestinian Islamic group. The Police Chief stated that the fellow might become a terrorist someday.
And the FBI and its allies are starting to talk of banning protest demonstrations, even peaceful ones because “they might be a diversion for terrorist acts.” It’s getting like the sci-fi film “Minority Report,” where consumerist America has become a nation that arrests and punishes individual for crimes they have not yet committed.
Will Junior Bush actually get to rule the world? I was raised to believe that anyone who tried that move was a dangerous psycho who would fall flat on their hubris. (My people call it chutzpah.) And economists point out that the US is becoming such a deep-in-the-hole debtor nation to foreigners, that ultimately it will be them and not the American president who dictates policy. And then again there are the terrible terrorists (remember them) who have no nation to destroy and who can turn commercial airplanes into weapons of mass destruction. It would seem that the Bush Doctrine will only create a million more of these suicidal killers.
Even if Bush does get to rule the world, he won’t have much fun doing it.
