Roadmaps to Nowhere

excerpted from the book

Rogue State

America at War with the World

by T. D. Allman

Nation Books, 2004, paper

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All wars, to one extent or another, are exercises in mass hallucination. Why, otherwise, would perfectly normal people gather together in large groups and walk into cannon fire? Crowds of people firing off guns, dropping bombs, and shooting off artillery shells (that is to say, armies) are very dangerous, but nowhere near as dangerous as an out-of-control political elite in the grip of a shared delusion.

World War I was a catastrophe of elitist decision-making; it remains history's bloodiest war. One of its astonishing features is that the folly of starting it was at least partially visible to those who unleashed it. People ranging from the German Emperor Wilhelm II to British Foreign Secretary Sir Edward Grey, sensed they were acting insanely. Yet swept along by the delusion that unleashing a general war in Europe was the unavoidable course of action, Europe's rulers chose self-destruction. Within five years the czar was dead, the kaiser in exile, and the

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As George W. Bush peevishly strode toward his defining moment beside the Euphrates, Tony Blair's United Kingdom followed along, wagging its tail all the way to Iraq. In the neocon schema of US hegemony, allies do not play a policymaking role; they serve a policy-implementation function. The Brits started calling their prime minister "America's poodle" when it became clear that, so far as Blair was concerned, his master's voice emanated from the White House.

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British prime ministers love toadying to American presidents, imagining it gives them "influence." This illusion goes back to Winston Churchill and his groveling "Former Naval Person" messages to Franklin D. Roosevelt. FDR and all subsequent presidents have let British prime ministers sleep over in the White House-and then gone on to do exactly whatever they please. Every British prime minister dreads being abandoned by the Americans. Every American president knows full well that the Brits will always tag along, even into the mouth of hell, and if they don't, who cares? In its capacity as dominant ally, there are no limits on the demands the United States is entitled to make. The "special relationship" involves no reciprocal privileges for the British, however.

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Unlike the United States, Britain has no written constitution. Its various spy organizations, including those in charge of domestic snooping, are less stringently regulated than the CIA and FBI. This allows British prime ministers to help out American presidents in ways that under US law could be construed as criminal offenses.

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Not until Tony Blair formed his own very "special relationship" with George W. Bush, however, was it clear how truly supine a British prime minister could be.

In the course of his ineffectual pandering to George W. Bush in the run-up to the Iraq war, Blair demeaned himself, lost the respect of his own people, and incurred the contempt of the rest of the world. Then, afterward, as the wicked web which he had woven tightened around him, the British prime minister shifted his fire away from Saddam Hussein. He started lashing out against the one remaining British institution which still commands universal respect now that the royal family's sexcapades have so diminished their stature in the eyes of the world. Blair attacked the BBC.

The tragic events in Iraq that followed the invasion had not ruffled Tony Blair's aura of utter certitude, but crisis gripped 10 Downing Street when the British Broadcasting Corporation reported in June 2003 that the Blair's allegations about Saddam Hussein's supposed weapons of mass destruction had been "sexed up." Prime Minister Blair and his director of spin, Alastair Campbell, professed themselves shocked-shocked!-that an organization of such repute had indulged in such a lewd lapse from propriety.

"Sexed up" was too genteel a euphemism for what actually had been done to the truth, but it was enough to set Blair and Campbell off on a ferocious vendetta. Before they were finished trying to settle scores with the truth-tellers, the BBC correspondent who broke the story, Andrew Gilligan, was hauled before a Foreign Affairs Select Committee and the BBC itself was excoriated in an official report. Blair, via the Hutton report, managed to make it seem that the BBC, not he and his government, had foisted a false impression on the British public.

Neither then nor later was there any doubt about the truthfulness of the BBC report, which was that the Blair government had recklessly spread unfounded (and, as it turned out, false) allegations concerning the military dangers posed by Saddam Hussein.

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Anyone seeking to understand why world events have unfolded as they have during the presidency of George W. Bush must consider the mystery of why Tony Blair-the leader of a significant nation possessing the material qualifications for sovereignty -chose, at the exact historical moment when Britain might have actually exerted some influence for good in the world, to act like a camp follower. Before he attached himself to Bush, Blair appeared to be an authentically independent leader with a role of his own to play in the world. Blair's toadying to the Americans disappointed many in Britain. It was an even greater disappointment to those Americans who imagined the prime minister would help contain George W. Bush's excesses. But Blair's behavior came as no surprise to the Europeans, especially, of course, to the French. From their perspective, Blair was simply doing what the English have been doing since the Hundred Years' War: keeping Europe divided.

A generation ago, Charles de Gaulle vetoed Britain's entry into the Common Market. England wasn't ready to be a part of Europe, he said; maybe it never would be. De Gaulle predicted that someday there would come into existence a united Europe stretching from "the Atlantic to the Urals." This was a conception that could, but did not necessarily, exclude Britain, and which definitely foresaw the collapse of Communism, and Russia's loss of its Caucasian and Central Asian dependencies. De Gaulle's doubts about England proved to be prescient.

Over the decades, the veneer of England has changed. You can drink Beaujolais nouveau in Birmingham, and find fresh ducks' breasts for sale in Hungersford. But if there had been any doubt about England-or at least its governing elite, including Tony Blair's "New Labor"-retaining a profoundly hostile attitude toward the possibility of becoming European, Blair's behavior proved that Perfidious England remains the inveterate enemy of a united Europe.

The mystery here is that Blair, by dividing Europe instead of working to keep it united, threw away a historic chance to exalt his own, and Britain's, role in the emerging power arrangements of the twenty-first century. George W. Bush's unilateralist foreign policy, especially his disdain for America's European allies, give the European Union-which is supposed to have a shared foreign policy-the chance to act like an emerging independent power. More than a chance, it was an opportunity. No previous challenge had united the people of Europe more than George W. Bush's scheme to invade Iraq. It wasn't just in France or Germany. In Britain itself there was overwhelming popular opposition to the Iraqi invasion.

The British are skeptical of the euro. They don't like the bureaucrats in Brussels, but by a two-to-one ratio they agreed with the Italians, the Spanish, the Germans, the French, and virtually all the Europeans who believed that this time, Europe must check American arrogance and impetuousness with a constructive policy of its own. Forging a united European alternative to Bush's Iraq war was a kind of Europeanism the majority of the British public could have supported.

This unanimity of public opinion gave European leaders the opportunity for the first time to provide an independent, friendly alternative to an American policy they and the people who had elected them did not support. What makes his rejection of those possibilities truly odd is that these very same circumstances also gave Tony Blair, who favors closer integration into European Union, including British adoption of the euro as its currency, a tremendous chance to further his own European objectives. In the process, he could have done more than simply advance his own agenda at the expense of the opposition Tories and "Euroskeptics." He could have raised British influence to new heights in both the United States and in Europe. Instead Blair wound up demeaning his and Britain's status on both sides of the Atlantic.

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Tony Blair himself seems unlikely ever to explain this failure of moral vision and political nerve. Yet one explanation for his behavior that fits the facts of the mystery is that when you scratch Tony Blair's telegenic "Cool Britannia" persona, all you really find underneath is that old English fear that the jungle begins at Calais. And if the Yanks won't save us from all those garlicky foreigners, who will? Blair has said as much a number of times while attempting to justify his policy of dependence on the United States to domestic audiences in the United Kingdom. The following is from his speech to his annual party conference in October 2003.

"Britain should be in there," Blair said, speaking of his support for the US invasion of Iraq, "not because we are America's poodle, but because dealing with it will make Britain safer." He continued: "It's not so much American unilateralism I fear. It's isolation. It's walking away when we need America there engaged."

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And when the courtier's dream of power is rebuked by reality? There always remains the option of denial. "On weapons of mass destruction, we know that the regime has them, and we know that, as the regime collapses, we will be led to them," Tony Blair insisted in April 2003, even as invading US and British forces failed to find any weapons of mass destruction. Even after the facts were verified, Blair continued telling interviewers, "We have already found two trailers, both of which we believe were used for the production of biological weapons."

After nine months of fruitless searching, Blair remained in denial. On December 16, 2003, Blair made the following statement in an interview with the Arabic service of the BBC: "INTERVIEWER: Forgive me to ask you, are you still confident that they may be found? PRIME MINISTER: I am confident that the Iraqi Survey Group, when it does its work, will find what has happened to those weapons, because that he had them, there is absolutely no doubt at all."

Beneath the absurdity, as always, lay the guile of the spin. Consider the following quote. It comes from Tony Blair's official website: "There is no doubt about the chemical program, the biological program, indeed the nuclear weapons program. All that is well documented by the United Nations. Now, our priority, having got rid of Saddam, is to rebuild the country. So the focus at the moment is on the humanitarian and the political reconstruction of the country. The threat from weapons of mass destruction, obviously with Saddam out, is not immediate any more."

In the end there is not really a contradiction. The Tony Blair with the clever, professional wife, who helped gentrify Islington in North London, who vacations in Tuscany and Aquitaine, who is at his best both classy and classless is exactly the self-same Tony Blair who, the moment George W. Bush decides he's going to invade Iraq, is also just another spineless Brit politician who snaps to attention whenever America snaps its fingers.

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Rumsfeld made his "old Europe" remark in Prague, showcase of the new Europe. A reporter asked him about "European opposition" to the Iraq invasion plan, and Rumsfeld seized the moment.

"You're thinking of Europe as Germany and France," Rumsfeld rejoined. "I don't. I think that's 'old Europe." He then laid out the administration's strategic vision for Europe: "If you look at the entire NATO Europe today, the center of gravity is shifting to the east. And there are a lot of new members. And if you just take the list of all the members of NATO and all of those who have been invited in recently-what is it, twenty-six, something like that?"

Continuing on in his signature stream-of-consciousness manner, Rumsfeld then made the comment that more than any other made the rupture between George W. Bush's America and Europe irreparable. "Germany has been a problem, and France has been a problem," Rumsfeld said. Then he added: "You look at vast numbers of other countries in Europe. They're not with - France and Germany; they're with the United States."

After Rumsfeld left, Cohn Powell rushed around Europe with his diplomatic mop and pail, but it was Rumsfeld, not the secretary of state, who had defined George W. Bush's Europe policy, which was to exploit Europe's divisions, not help heal them.

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There truly is an "old Europe" that, until Rumsfeld stuck his verbal wedge in there, had been coexisting, more or less amicably, with the new Europe that began to emerge after the fall of the Berlin wall. The old Europe had started, in the 1950s, as a bloc of nations that steadily dismantled the trade barriers dividing them. Free trade was only a first step toward fulfilling the dream of a united Europe extending far beyond the original Six (France, Germany, Italy, and the Benelux countries), as the founding members of the common market were called. By the time Rumsfeld made his comment, the grouping had renamed itself the European Union. It also had expanded to include fifteen countries stretching from Finland to Portugal, and from Ireland to Greece. Even at that size, it remained mostly a rich man's club. But by the time George W. Bush started taking his "for-us-or-against-us" approach to the world, the balance of power and also the way things are done in Europe, had started to shift.

Over the next few years, at least ten more nations will join the European Union. NATO also will greatly expand. The new members of both organizations will include such countries as Romania, Cyprus, Lithuania, and Malta. The days when "Europe" was a stroll down the Champs-Elysee, or a performance of Verdi at La Scala, or a scenic Rhine cruise, are gone. Poor people are pouring into rich countries. Polish farmers now want subsidies French farmers fear losing. The euro and the unified European market have made some things (computers, VCRs) cheaper, while making many other things more expensive than ever. Europe is becoming more like America in ways some Europeans, especially in "old Europe," are not sure they want. Meanwhile, many of the new members, especially those in Eastern Europe, are less interested in European unity than they are in using membership in the European Union (as well as NATO) to maximize their independence-an opportunity the George W. Bush administration would most adroitly exploit.

The motor and soul of "old Europe" (which is still very much in business) is the fusion of French and German interests. The two countries coordinate their domestic as well as foreign policies. On some occasions, when the chancellor of Germany cannot attend an important conference, the president of France speaks for both countries, or the other way around. Two nations that three times in less than 100 years drenched Europe in blood today live in peaceful symbiosis. This deep friendship between the two old enemies truly is a special relationship. Particularly in the United States, where it is scarcely noticed all, the French-German fusion is one of least appreciated as well as one of the most noble international accomplishments of the post-World War II era.

Acting as one gives France and Germany stupendous power within Europe. They will remain very important whatever form new Europe takes, but in the "old Europe" almost nothing could be done without French-German support. This was a European fact of life that small countries, and even large ones like Italy, Spain, and Britain, had no choice but to accept. But what about the new Europe? With so many new members piling on board, will the French and Germans still control the tiller, even when they want to pilot Europe on a different course from the United States?

Arrogance and self-importance are far from being alien traits in either France or Germany. The truth is, if you aren't French or German, or happy to let them take the lead on practically everything, this admirable French-German amity can be a pain in the neck. To put it another way, the European "Union" is still much more an expression of principle than it is a reality. Everything it does (especially when the French and Germans make it happen) is done over the opposition, and incurs the resentment of at least some of its members. At least one of those members Britain, whether under Blair or Thatcher-is almost always looking for an excuse to gum up the works. If it weren't for the traditional European commitment to policy-making by consensus, respect for opposing views, and civility in deliberation, wedge-issue politics might have torn Europe apart long ago.

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... George W. Bush, having sent his fellow Americans to their deaths, shirks their funerals. There are no photos of him next to a coffin with an American flag on it in the newspapers or on TV. An Internet search reveals how successfully the White House media management folks have been in visually detaching George W. Bush from the American deaths his war is producing. An image search elicits the following message: "Your search-'Bush coffin flag'-did not match any documents." The search "Bush flag" produces 502 hits, the majority showing him patriotically backed by immense American flags while he salutes or holds his hand over his heart.

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In the end George W. Bush's "coalition of the willing" was a motley assembly, which is the way the neocon radicals like it. The problem for them with organizations like the UN and NATO is not that allies sometimes oppose us. The problem is that allies are allies. The pundits' laments that the US-induced splits on the Security Council and within the European Union are "mistakes" which now need to be corrected miss the point. The success of the whole strategy behind "coalitions of the willing" depends on creating division. Only division can provide the United States with the utter freedom of action that is the real strategic goal of the George W. Bush foreign policy.

Go back and look again at Wolfowitz's list of "Countries Eligible to Compete for Contracts Funded With US Appropriated Funds for Iraq Reconstruction." You are looking at wedge-issue politics in the process of assuming geopolitical form. This unilateral detachment of US war-making from traditional alliances operates in two directions. The absence of many of America's traditional treaty allies from Wolfowitz's list means that the United States no longer has to waste its time reasoning with them. It is finally liberated from "constructive contribution" and is free to do exactly what it wants.

Replacing treaty alliances and collective security with "coalitions of the willing" provides other advantages, including the illusion, useful in the 2004 election year, that "coalition" forces are taking the causalities in Iraq, night after night. It also serves the deeper purpose of helping to prevent regional alternatives to US hegemony from emerging in reaction to American unilateralism. France, Germany, and Russia may have stood up to America, but notice on Wolfowitz's list how Spain, Italy, Ukraine, and, of course, Britain compensate for the loss of those countries' support. Thanks to Iraq, it will be a long time before Europe has a unified foreign policy of its own.

In this strange new world disorder, in which US freedom of action, and nothing else, is the great strategic goal for which wars are provoked and Americans are sent off to die, the relationship of allies to the United States comes to mirror the postindustrial relationship of American workers to the corporations which employ them.

Think of "old Europe" nations like France and Germany as experienced executives and unionized workers. Following the hostile takeover of America, Inc., after the 2000 elections, the new management doesn't want to pay the costs, and above all it is uninterested in maintaining the kind of social benefits necessary to keep France on the management team and Germany loyal and productive. It fact it wouldn't mind getting rid of them altogether.

Though the new board of directors still has a few distinguished holdovers from an earlier, more collegial era in executive management, it is dominated by asset-strippers and greenmailers, who have decided the time has come to show who's in charge now. It's time for some union-bashing or, in this case, some Euro-UN bashing. It works! France resigns and Germany takes early retirement. Now we can hire all those undocumented workers who never talk back, go on strike, or ask us to honor a contract (treaty).

In this new schema of neocon unilateralist US force projection, America's own cross-cultural fighting force-the multihued members of those racially, ethnically, and sexually integrated military units you see dying every night on TV-are like temp workers. In fact that is exactly what the National Guardsmen suffering most in Iraq are in relation to America's professional armed forces: temps you hire when you don't want to expose top-grade employees to industrial accidents.

Temps-National Guardsmen-don't have expensive pension rights. If they do manage to get home alive and uninjured from Iraq (or anywhere else George W. Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, and Wolfowitz decide to send them), you don't have to pay, promote, educate, or house them. You just dump them back onto the local labor market.

Getting rid of traditional allies serves a similar purpose. Since, in the end, all the United States really wants now is to prevent any other power from being able to block, or even disagree with whatever it decides to do, it no longer really wants traditional allies anymore. On a shifting basis, though, it does need "platforms" for projecting US power, and "local hires" to man them. It's also nice to hire troops from low-income countries to soak up the kind of casualties Americans don't like to take. This is precisely what Secretary Rumsfeld proposed doing with India and several other nations, but they proved to have too exalted an idea of their sovereignty to accept such a deal.

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In ... Gulf war [II] the great victor was media manipulation. Even when it was proven beyond a doubt that Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction had never existed, the fact that the war had been fought for a lie no longer seemed consequential.

"What difference does it make?" answered George W. Bush, in a Christmas interview after the capture of Saddam Hussein, when it was pointed out to him that no weapons of mass destruction had been found.

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George W. Bush seemed safely on the road to electoral oblivion before 9/11. Objectively, the security lapses that day still provide the greatest grounds for his transformation an from accidental president into an ex-president. But subjectively? The upwelling of patriotism and love for America and its institutions, including the presidency, gave George W. Bush a second chance. He used it, at home, to fight the reforms that might make America less vulnerable to future attack, and to accelerate his program of expanding government for the benefit of the rich. As a result his popularity again eroded, but the Iraq invasion once again revived his fortunes. When the folly of that adventure started to become apparent, Saddam came to the rescue.

The timing of Saddam's capture was not ideal for George W. Bush. It would have been better for it to have come closer to the 2004 presidential election-though Osama bin Laden is still out there, and thus potentially of great utility.

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Whatever the spin, the key to winning is going to be more and more money, stupendous amounts of money. Victory will also involve waving flags and creating division, but whatever it takes, this time he intends to win.

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"Allow the president to invade a neighboring nation whenever he deems it necessary," a junior Illinois congressman named Abraham Lincoln protested, "and you allow him to make war at pleasure. Study to see if you can fix any limit to his power."

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In his farewell address ... president ... Dwight Eisenhower ... reflected upon how much and how fast the United States had changed. He talked to his countrymen about how that change had created a new kind of danger. "Until the latest of our world conflicts," Eisenhower recalled, referring to the American participation in World War II, "the United States had no armaments industry. American makers of plowshares could, with time and as required, make swords as well." But World War II, the Korean War, and especially the Cold War had changed that. The United States, Eisenhower went on to note, now had "a permanent armaments industry of vast proportions. Added to this, three and a half million men and women are directly engaged in the defense establishment. We annually spend on military security more than the net income of all United States corporations," the outgoing president reminded his countrymen.

As Eisenhower now emphasized, for the first time in its history the United States had an economy-and therefore a society and a politics-in which war, notably the development and production of increasingly sophisticated weapons of mass destruction provided the livelihood for millions of people on a permanent basis. "This conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience," he said. "The total influence-economic, political, even spiritual- felt in every city, every state house, every office of the federal government."

Then Eisenhower sounded the warning that would give his 1961 farewell address, like Adams's July 4 speech in 1821, a permanent place in the American debate about the interrelationship of liberty and force. "In the councils of government," Eisenhower urged, "we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex! (One hundred forty years after Adams issued his warning, Eisenhower perceived that, thanks to the creation of a permanent American war machine, the dangers Adams foresaw were becoming reality. His warning about this was quite explicit.), The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist. We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes." Then Eisenhower, in his own fashion, reminded Americans that the price of liberty is eternal vigilance: "We should take nothing for granted. Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together."

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... America's liberties, Eisenhower's farewell speech made clear, were now threatened by a whole political as well as economic class of Americans who had never seen war, never served in a war, but who now prospered by insuring that even in peacetime, the United States spent more and more on "defense" whoever was President-whether or not any external threat to the country existed.

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Where most Americans perceive a triumph of liberty, others have always seen a much darker history beneath the endless rhetoric -a long, unfolding pageant of American usurpation in which the selfish use of power is robed in hypocrisy and outright lies. ... Writing a century later, [ HL] Mencken pointed out that Americans had acquired their country by "butchering innocent savages and swindling them out of their land," then built it up by the sweat of kidnapped Africans and indentured laborers. Wars of conquest had completed "the extension of the area of freedom" which genocide and slavery had begun. "The Mexican and Spanish Wars I pass over as perhaps too obscenely ungallant to be discussed at all," he wrote. Mencken went on to quote President Ulysses S. Grant's comment on the Mexican War: "It was the most unjust war ever waged by a stronger against a weaker nation."

As Lyndon Johnson's Vietnam war adviser, Walt Whitman Rostow would put it, in more temperate tones, there was "a double bar-sinister which cut across the fabric of American life"-the twin original sins of the "African slave trade" and the "decimation of the Indian." Throughout their history, Americans have preferred to ignore that history. Blinding themselves with the shining glory of their own supposed goodness has been one of the most effective ways of doing it.

Equating power with good, so long as it is American power, has had an additional benefit for Americans: Besides helping them to avoid any recognition of their own defects, it automatically makes those who resist us "evil." So just as by extending slavery Americans "extended the area of freedom," they also didn't kill Indians or steal land from Mexico. Instead, Americans conquered "the frontier." As for slavery, the nation did confront that dark circumstance straight on once. Before the Civil War was finished, more Americans had been killed than in any other war-more than in Vietnam, Korea, World War II, and World War I combined.

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Read some American history books, especially the books used to teach history in US schools, and you find they have been churned out by historical spin doctors. The result, inculcated into generation after generation of Americans, is an idea of America, and of how it came to be what it is, that is as fake as a Dick Cheney interview on PBS, as divorced from reality as a George W. Bush address to the United Nations.

This "brainwashing" about America's goodness and the resultant evil of all whom we decide are "against us" is all the more effective because it is self-inflicted. A 2003 poll, for instance, shows that 69 percent of Americans believe Saddam Hussein "was personally involved in the September ii terrorist attacks"-although not even George W. Bush has purported that. Even many Americans who oppose George W. Bush no doubt believe that the US invasion and occupation of Iraq has something to do with "freedom." These beliefs exist not only in defiance of reality, but independent of it.

A military historian would ignore all that. Looking back at what has happened since George W. Bush took office, he would explain events in terms of the global balance of power, or the lack of one. With the collapse of the Soviet Union, and the channeling of European and East Asian energies into nonmilitary pursuits, he would point out, no external counterweight to the exercise of US power remained. From this perspective, Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld have been able to act as they do because there is no one to stop them. Power, like all forms of energy, tends to extend itself until it either meets resistance or is exhausted.

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In the Western Hemisphere, the United States has been by far the greatest military power for more than 10 years; the history of Latin America reflects that chronic imbalance. Most Americans are vaguely aware of how Teddy Roosevelt "took" Panama; they are almost completely unaware that the history of military aggression by the United States in Latin America continues in our day. In recent decades alone, the United States has intervened-clandestinely or openly-in Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua, Panama, Cuba, Haiti, the Dominican Republic, Grenada, and Chile. It has done this in order "stop Communism" or to "build democracy"-but whether the president is a human rights advocate like Bill Clinton (Haiti) or a national security hard-liner like Nixon (Chile), US intervention has been unceasing.

Since World War II, the United States has extended its Latin American model of behavior to much of the rest of the world, especially the Third World. Within the United States, among Americans, the debate about such interventions is always a debate about right and wrong. Rightly or wrongly American power goes on filling power vacuums, whatever the moral circumstances-even when the Communist "threat" used to justify such intrusions disappears, and cartoon-character menaces like the "axis of evil" have to be created because real Hitlers aren't around anymore. America's approach to the world is perpetually skewed in a military direction because the United States spends twice as much per person on war as any other industrialized nation. As it struts the world stage, the US colossus, militarily speaking, is on steroids.

"We are at last beginning to understand the significance o the stockpiles," Senator J. William Fulbright remarked nearly forty years ago, during congressional hearings into the causes of the Vietnam war. He was referring to how the Cold War arms buildup, meant to deter a Soviet attack on Western Europe, helped propel the United States into fighting a war 10,000 miles away in Southeast Asia. The paradigm of this unintended causality was the B-52 bomber. A warplane designed to drop nuclear weapons on Soviet missile sites wound up raining conventional explosives down on thatched-hut villages in Laos. To the weapons, over the decades, has been added a stockpile of "defense intellectuals." Think of Cheney as a dirty bomb. Think of Wolfowitz as anthrax. Think of Rumsfeld, Perle, and the others as nasty little vials of smallpox. These weapons of mass destruction are never eliminated; they are just stored in their think tanks, consulting firms, and academic sinecures. Then someone like George W. Bush comes along, and throws the warehouse open.

What is the consequence of all this? Objectively speaking, the United States is the greatest threat to world peace, and has been for a long time, and not merely because it is the world's only superpower. Equally important, the United States is also far more disposed to use its power than any other powerful nation currently is. Though Americans are culturally and emotionally blind to the fact, the mere intrusion of US power is, in and of itself, destabilizing. Furthermore, there is no immediate likelihood of the worldwide imbalance of power being rectified any time soon.

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When a republic's most venerable institutions no longer operate as they were intended, it becomes possible for small cabals to usurp power, and, while keeping the forms, corrupt the function of those institutions for their own ends. Looking at things that way, the George W. Bush presidency has been both result and symptom of the decadence of America's constitutional mechanisms. The unremedied defects of the Electoral College, combined with the suborning of the Supreme Court by a partisan clique, allowed a Commander in Chief the American people had not chosen to be installed in the White House. By this light, the story of the George W. Bush presidency is the retelling of a tale well-known to Plutarch. We cannot know what catastrophes might have been averted had the Romans been more zealous in preserving the essence, and not just the appearances, of their republican institutions. We do know that in America-as in Rome in its decadence-once a group of quirky, adventurous extremists got their hands on the control levers of the world's greatest military power, bizarre things started to happen.

The Roman Senate endured in form long after its functions and powers had been usurped by the Caesars, a title which at the time was much closer in meaning to our own "Commander in Chief" than to "emperor." It is now unfortunately clear that in less than ten years, the United States has seen a kind of depravity creep into its own institutions. The impeachment power of the US Constitution was never intended to be used as tool of political warfare-as a device for defeating a president who could not be defeated at the polls. That, however, was what happened in 1998, when Bill Clinton was impeached.

The installation of George W. Bush was followed in Texas by an effort, undertaken at the behest of Republican leaders in the US Congress, to redistrict out of office members of Congress who could not be defeated at the polls. That was followed, in California, by the removal from office of a governor who had won election less than one year earlier, and his replacement, through plebiscite, by an amiable movie star. The debates in the US Senate prior to the Iraq invasion were particularly revealing of a growing systemic dysfunction in America. The oratorical prerogative of every senator was scrupulously respected. Many beautiful speeches were given, some of them with philosophical as well as literary merit. This formality having been observed, the Commander in Chief launched his invasion.

What do these events demonstrate besides the fact that control of the Republican Party has fallen into the hands of unscrupulous radicals with no respect for the principles of democracy? They demonstrate what Lord Acton observed more than a generation after John Quincy Adams, in his own way, had made the same point: "Power corrupts, and absolute power tends to corrupt absolutely." There is nothing surprising about this. At least there is nothing surprising about it unless you happen to believe, as the majority of Americans do, that they and their country are exempt from the corrosive forces of history. From the viewpoint of a classical historian, it would be odd if America's stupendous worldwide power had not led to a corruption of its own internal political institutions-especially in an age when it is so easy to use nonconstitutional mechanisms (notably the manipulation of video images and the distribution of tax breaks, the current equivalent of circuses and bread) to manipulate opinion and generate money for political spending.

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As the Iraq war and its aftermath have demonstrated, the is a worldwide imbalance of power. America's civil institutions are insufficient to check, or even balance, the power of an unelected president-and George Bush has proved himself to be unusually defective in moral as well as strategic vision. All of which proves that sometimes our own prophets are with honor.

Maybe what George W. Bush has proved, most of all, is that John Quincy Adams and Dwight David Eisenhower were right. Next time you have the chance, watch George W. Bush alight from Air Force One surrounded by his "security" men. Isn't what he emanates a "false and tarnished luster"? Certainly that is what people all over the rest of the world see in him. "Murky radiance of dominion and power" might as well be his middle name.

Is there anyone else who better personifies "the acquisition of unwarranted influence" than Dick Cheney? Combine the "tarnished luster" that George W. Bush epitomizes and the "unwarranted influence" of which Cheney is the paradigm with the American public's failure to heed Eisenhower's 1961 warnings, and you have almost a step-by-step description of what, forty years later, has happened to America and its government. What if we let the Dick Cheneys "in every city, every state house, every office of the federal government" usurp the decision processes of our democracy? What if we then let them install someone like George W. Bush in office? "The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist," Eisenhower warned.

"We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes," he added. But what if such a combination did endanger our democratic processes, and the American people still did nothing-not even when the democratic process in question was the choice of president of the United States? "Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together," Eisenhower declared. What if, instead of heeding this warning, Americans took everything for granted? What if they weren't "alert and knowledgeable"? What if the American citizenry didn't do a damn thing as "the huge industrial and military machinery" usurped "our peaceful methods and goals"? Neither security nor liberty could prosper-and, under George W. Bush, neither has.

p376
People will always argue about the nature of evil, but on two occasions in recent modern history, the world-including America-truly did confront it, first in the form of Hitler's Nazi Germany and then in Pol Pot's Cambodia. Hitler's "final solution" and Pol Pot's killing fields had something in common besides their horror. Even after the nature and the magnitude of the evil became known, the United States refused to help stop the killing. President Franklin D. Roosevelt, the "liberal" Democrat, refused to authorize air strikes to destroy Hitler's extermination camps. President Ronald Reagan, the "conservative" Republican, did FDR one better. He authorized clandestine support for Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge-the better to fight the Soviet Union's "Evil Empire."

p392
... what causes most people to hang back from saying "George W. Bush is evil" is simply that he happens to be the leader of the United States of America, not some Balkan or Arab country. That in itself is a very odd application of a double standard. Should we not bold the leaders of a highly civilized country like the United States of America to a higher standard than the leaders of countries like Serbia and Iraq? We certainly should not excuse their actions because we continue to hope that America, at its heart, is still good. Instead we should apply to our own leaders at least the same standards we use when judging the presidents of Serbia or Iraq. That was what Henry Thoreau was urging back in 1848, when he called protest a patriotic duty, and added: "What makes this duty the more urgent is the fact that ours is the invading army." The fact that Polk's attack on Mexico brought great benefits to the United States can never make it right. To paraphrase Talleyrand, the fact that George W. Bush's Iraq invasion "was more than a crime, it was a mistake," does not transform the moral significance of what he has done to the world or to America, either. To the contrary, the fact that George W. Bush has acted foolishly makes what he's done even worse.

George W. Bush is a lesson to be learned, but who among Americans will teach or learn? Countries lose their way sometimes, and that's what history will have to record: At the beginning of the twenty-first century, at a moment when it held the world's respect and all the world's possibilities were in its grasp, the United States heeded a small and petulant voice that scorned the advocates of reason and sneered at the voices of wisdom. Turning its back on the real challenges it faced, America abandoned its honorable responsibilities and marched stubbornly, haughtily, into the wilderness.

In the end, it remains inexplicable-the anger, the antagonism, the need to break things. Maybe it is George W. Bush's "Americanism" that, in the end, makes him so un-American. We were supposed to have moved beyond all that destructive behavior. We were supposed to have "progressed." That is the paradox of him, and the American complaisance that has allowed him to act. He has changed the world more than any L world leader since Gorbachev, but he has changed it for the worse, and that's not what Americans are supposed to do.

Rogue State

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