The "New American Century" seems to have been slightly shortened- to about nine months if you look at the Iraq war and its immediate aftermath.
The Cheney-RumsfeldPerle-Wolfowitz architects of the war, the infamous socalled "neoconservative cabal," envisioned a triumphal conquest and rapid transition to a stable Iraq, spearheading "the democratic transformation of the Middle
into a magnificent American-ruled oil lake.
Iraq instead has become the tar pond of the empire.
The ideological international agenda of the neocon faction (their domestic programs are nasty, but less coherent) has been to establish unchallenged U.S. supremacy through overwhelming power:
"We don't need to be loved, merely feared" is the guiding slogan.
What's now clear is that the Iraq catastrophe has strengthened the hand of forces who loathe the United States, but do not fear it.
That is the consensus of the 9/11 Commission Report and of all the books pouring out from former government insiders about the Bush administration's rush to war.
With Islamist insurgencies exploding and the growing threat of Iraq itself coming unglued, the Bush unilateral doctrine of "pre-emptive war" and serial "regime change" has been explosively discredited both among elites and in the general U.S. population.
Certainly the idea of building upon the victory in Iraq to frontally threaten Iran, as was envisioned by the neocons and their far-right Likudnik allies within the Israeli military, is utterly off the agenda.
Barring unforeseen contingencies like a new terrorist attack, the capture of Osama or a serious stock market crash, a very close U.S. presidential election is likely to turn on whether the Bush administration can create an appearance of partial Iraqi stabilization to begin lowering U.S. troop levels.
"Appearance" is what matters here; anything like real stability or reconstruction in Iraq of course is nowhere on the horizon.
In its undisguised form, then, the neoconservative agenda of unchallenged U.S. global supremacy - call it Manifest Destiny on Steroids - has been busted.
Paradoxically, with a different packaging and stamped with a Multilateral Seal of Good Housekeeping, this same agenda may have swept the field.
Astonishingly, Democratic candidate John Kerry - the great majority of whose voters loathe this war to the point where they want "Anybody But Bush" to take over - not only voted for the war authorization resolution in the U.S. Senate, but now, knowing that the whole case for the war was built on lies, says he was right to do so and would vote the same way again!
Kerry's rationale? The power to wage war is one that "the President should have" -the power to drag his own country and the people of the targeted nation into hell.
It's just that he, Kerry, would have "used that power more wisely" by reassembling the Gulf War I coalition, consulting with "our allies" and various other manoeuvres to prevent the United States from becoming "isolated."
What would Kerry have done? What will he do if elected? Who knows?
Depending on the day of the week, he is for the war and against it; for lowering U.S. troop levels in Iraq and for raising them ("if the commanders judge it necessary") and especially for getting troops from Arab and Muslim countries into Iraq to bear the peacekeeping burden, as it any such government in its right mind would do so...
Why do a candidate and a party that desperately depend on the antiwar vote promote themselves as the effective war party? There are two essential parts of the answer.
The first point is that the organized antiwar movement,
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Whoever wins the election in November, it will still be necesDESIS RISING ORMOY was correct to vote for the Congress resolution authorising Bush to go to war against Iraq.
In some respects Kerry is now more of an imperialist than Bush. Recently demonstrated by his opposition to the Bush administration's decision to withdraw US troops from Germany and South Korea.
On the central domestic issues the Nader/Camejo slate is against the Patriot Act, in sup-