The Bush Doctrine and the First War
of American Democratic Imperialism

The Smoking Gun of Clear Intent

      Four years after the mission was accomplished in Iraq let's go back in time to the crucial moment on which the entire war in Iraq actually turned.  Forget about "slam dunks" and Curveballs, cherry picking intelligence and Valerie Plame for a moment and focus on the months before the war when the White House was being told for a fact that there were no weapons in Iraq and proceeded with the war anyway.
      Whatever else you may discern about their intentions before the war their behavior in these months can only be explained by the fact that they knew prior to the war that their claim of the presence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq was largely untrue.  It proves what many have just suspected, that this claim was always just a flimsy pretext, a pale cover for the war they wanted to fight, never its rationale.  
      It is in these few months that the smoking gun of their intent may be most clearly seen.

Plea Bargaining on Iraq

      In 2003 Iraq was a country much reduced even since we had decimated it in the 1991 Gulf War.  After the war, arms inspectors remained on the ground until late 1998 documenting every bit of evidence about the state of Iraq's arms and armament capability.  After 1998 when Saddam Hussein summarily dismissed these arms inspectors from his country, the eye of the international community on the ground went dim.
       But only the most rabid supporters of this war could have possibly proposed that in those five brief years Saddam would have been able to completely reconstitute his country's arms manufacturing capability to a level which made him more dangerous in 2003 than he had been in 1991.  Yet that is what we were told.  This, even though with daily flyovers over his divided country, constrained oil revenues, satellite imagery focused on every mole hill in Iraq and the full attention of the international community directed on every move he made, we could find absolutely no evidence of the arms production that was claimed.  
      To those who knew better, it seemed clear that the entire case for war was being manufactured in the febrile imaginations of our policy leaders.
       At least this is now what they seem anxious for us to believe. To this day they claim they were terrified of Saddam and incompetent in the analysis of our intelligence ("but so was everybody else," they are quick to add though, of course, everybody else wasn't in charge and didn't have access to the sources that they did) and this was why they led us into Iraq - not because they intentionally deceived us into war.  But this explanation rings hollow and the evidence suggests the contrary.  They may indeed be stupid people, and far be it from me to take away whatever faint solace they think this provides them, but I think we must grant them much more credit for creative disingenuity than they are willing to grant themselves.  
      In other words, in the only compliment this administration is likely ever to receive in connection to this war, I believe they are actually smarter than they would have us believe.
      Their eagerness to plead guilty to the lesser charge reminds you of a guilty man's plea bargain.  Normally no one would so readily admit to such a damning offense as total ignorance and incompetence at their life's work unless they were facing the accusation of a far more serious crime.  Their defense, that "we were not dishonest, only stupid and afraid, your Honor," is hardly reassuring, but the alacrity with which they accept this judgment is even more suspicious and suggests a conscious attempt to cover up an even deeper crime.  Otherwise, surely they would be much more vigorous in defending their intelligence and competence than they have been up to now.  
      The nation's problem with their record in office is that either one, the other or both of these possibilities must be true.  To the extent they weren't incompetent, they were dishonest, and vice versa.  There are no other available explanations for their actions. Again, neither of these eventualities is in the least acceptable.  Nobody has a right to be this wrong.  But to think that they were actually lying to us in order to do the wrong things on our behalf only makes their failure to succeed at them more egregious.
       After all, the Iraq war was engineered on the basis of Saddam's alleged unwillingness to be forthcoming about his weapon's production.  As it turns out he was telling the truth. To the extent he was not forthcoming it was not because he had something to hide but because he was defenseless and didn't want anyone to know how weak he really was.  
      It would be a long stretch from reality to call Saddam an honest man.  He was a brutal, petty, smalltime, subprime tribal leader in a world where bluster and dignity count for more than they do in the west.  Like all dictators he was the ultimate narcissist.  Where power and wisdom are small, egos sometimes are inflated in compensation.  To be sure, a shrewder administration might have been expected to realize this unless, that is (just our luck), they happened to be suffering from the exact same intellectual myopia as he was.  And try as you might to keep them apart, it's a powerful principle of nature that two like-minded fools are going to find one another even with their eyes closed in the dark.
      Because in this case, much to the nation's eternal discredit, we now know that Saddam was being at least as honest with the world as our leaders were being with us.

Snatching Military Defeat from Diplomatic Victory

      To give peace a chance, and blunt the administration's obvious ardor for war, the United Nations Security Council, allegedly too weak to act, actually gave the administration a huge win for our foreign policy.  In late 2002 it voted unanimously to send weapons inspectors back into Iraq to discover the truth.  Saddam, allegedly the greatest threat to the world since Hitler, meekly complied with this demand.  
       This completely boxed in Saddam.  If the inspectors, led by professional men like Hans Blix and Mohamed ElBaradei of such skill and unimpeachable integrity that everything they have ever said about Iraq has been proven true, found the weapons they would be destroyed.  If they didn't find the weapons we would be relieved of the massively costly responsibility of going to war against Iraq to destroy them ourselves.  In either case, if the case for war had ever really been about WMD's, this should have been the end of it.  This was a clear victory for the United States and the world and one that, not for the last time, the administration would cast aside in its single minded pursuit of defeat at all costs.  
      With the 15-0 vote in the Security Council, we thoroughly reinvigorated the containment policy against Iraq and alleviated ourselves of the necessity of a conflict. If the Bush administration, as they claimed, was only reluctantly seeking war out of necessity and as a last resort, this should have rendered the war unnecessary.  The arms inspectors would definitively discover once and for all who was telling the truth, George Bush or Saddam Hussein.  This heightened security in Iraq would have guarded our back (for those who were actually worried that Saddam was a real threat) and allowed us free reign to relentlessly prosecute the war against the real terrorists in Afghanistan.
      Unlike the tea leaves the CIA was reading, or smoking, this would be hard evidence, documented facts compiled by the only people in the world actually in a position to know for sure.  Either the inspectors would prove that Iraq had reconstituted its weapons programs on a large scale or they hadn't.  But too much success and certainty all at once was apparently too much for us to handle. 
      That the Bush administration refused to accept this bird in hand victory tells us much about their diplomatic incompetence and political dishonesty.  Even with all their mistaken analysis of intelligence and erroneous statements to the American people up to this point, if they had merely stopped then, with this salutary diplomatic victory they claimed they wanted firmly in hand, the US would not today be suffering one of the worst military defeats in our history.  But it was not to be.  Unfortunately for us, the entire UN inspection regime was an elaborate ruse, a puppet show designed to dupe the world and the American people from the outset.  It was a mere gauze of reasonableness to buy time for an irrational administration while it prepared to go to war regardless of what, if any, weapons were found in Iraq.  
      As proof of someone's real intent, sometimes you don't actually have see the smoke to know the gun has been fired.  On November 26, 2002, the very day before the weapons inspectors entered Iraq, a formal request was sent to the defense department to begin the deployment of 300,000 American troops to the Gulf.  
      The first lie our leaders told us about the war was the existence of weapons of mass destruction and mushroom shaped clouds over the United States unless we invaded Iraq.
      The second casualty of the case for war we can with certainty lay to rest is the claim that George Bush was reluctant to go to war.  Or that he was only going to war as a necessity or as a "last resort".  In fact he did nothing to delay this war, much to encourage it, hasten it and make it inevitable.  The only thing he ever did which spoke of reasonableness, fairness and diplomacy and an honest desire to find out the truth - the insertion of UN weapons inspectors into Iraq prior to the war - he abrogated before they had a chance to conclude their mission and prove that the war was completely unnecessary.

       Trouble with the inconveniently honest and capable arms inspectors began right away. Apparently not part of the scam they were distrusted by the Bush administration from the start.  Though they were diplomatic in saying that their work was not quite finished (probably to give the Bush administration time to craft a face saving out), they were warning us loud and clear in public hearings well before the war that further work was unlikely to reveal that such a weapons stockpile or manufacturing capability existed.  This was good news to the world, of course, but terrible news to George Bush.   News which would have been met by any competent and honest administration with relief and satisfaction was derided and condemned by this administration and its supporters as not living up to their own high standards of proof.  And we now know just how rigorous those standards were.
      Not only was George Bush being quite publicly apprised that there were no weapons in Iraq - to go along with all the other evidence contradictory to their case that continued to accumulate - but there were even offers on the table to double the number of inspectors to be sent there, just in case, to ensure quickness and thoroughness of discovery of the imaginary weaponry.  It would be illuminating to hear exactly what George Bush was hearing in private about the likelihood of finding weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, because the only people in the world actually in the best position to know, those on the ground in Iraq, were clearly signaling that there were none there to be found.

The Haste to War

      This is where the war turns from a fatal lack of judgment into a completely criminal act.  Like the malevolent driver who, instead of braking, actually speeds up to run down the pedestrian in the walkway, the administration escalated the progress to war in inverse ratio to the necessity of having to fight it.  If this were a court of law, if Iraq was not premeditated murder it was certainly reckless manslaughter.
      Because far from rejoicing that this threat against us that never existed was being carefully and legally removed, the sweaty minded proponents of the war were so anxious to commit us to a long, unnecessary and anti-American war they were panicky.  They weren't so much afraid of Saddam as they were afraid they might not get to fight their bloody and illegitimate war after all.  So after months of trying to undercut the arms inspectors' work, the administration hurried to war regardless of their findings, actually forcing the weapons inspectors to leave off their work prior to finishing it.  
      Forget about all the other prewar assessments.  No responsible administration that sincerely wished to avoid war and understood war's terrible costs would have possibly behaved this way.  To ignore the one group who was actually in a position to know, the 250 trained professional weapons inspectors from sixty countries, including many Americans, who were on the ground in Iraq, that had already completed over 700 site inspections before the war, should prove to anyone who is paying attention that the existence of these weapons was never germane to their reasoning.  The war was the goal of the reasoning, not the result of it.  The weapons inspections were just misdirection, sleight of hand by our government to deceive their own people.
      The disgraceful trace of the evidence is that we started the war not because of the proof of the weapons' existence but to avoid the final report which would prove once and for all they didn't exist.  Otherwise, their behavior is inexplicable.  Why rush to circumvent the inspection regime that was sure to prove their case that WMD's existed in Iraq unless they had never believed their own arguments or had learned by then that their charges against Iraq weren't true?   
      The weight of the evidence is that this administration hastened us into this war gratuitously, knowing full well that the argument for it was a lie and that with just the exercise of a little patience we would never have to fight it at all.  On the contrary, desperate to begin the bloodletting before the lack of proof should undercut the war's necessity, we rushed to attack as soon as we could.  For the first time in our history the United States preemptively invaded an unarmed country for no good reason other than to satisfy the inane theories, foolish fears and outsized egos of our president and his advisor's.  
       After all, if the President had really believed his own statements that such lethal weapons existed somewhere in Iraq, even if the inspectors couldn't find them, how irresponsible was it to send hundreds of thousands of American troops into harm's way in Iraq before we found out exactly where they were?  Especially when there were still inspectors on the ground with a mandate to locate them?  These inspectors were a godsend. What country in the world has ever invaded another when they had a chance to disarm that country of its most potent weaponry prior to the invasion? What if they had been hidden underground in the southern part of the country as our troops poured into Iraq?  What if they had unloaded them on their own people or their neighbors?  How many American lives could have been lost if weaponized dirty bombs had been set off behind our own lines?
      Even if you think that a war against Iraq would eventually need to be fought, if they really believed these incredibly lethal weapons existed, who can argue that we shouldn't have culled Iraq for every available piece of intelligence about their weapons capability while we had the opportunity?  Every way you look at it, no more than a few months harmless and admirable patience would have settled every one of these issues once and for all without the necessity of a war costing trillions of dollars, four years and tens of thousands of lives with nothing to show for our great exertions in return.  
      The truth is, that even if the administration's incessant propaganda of the need to fight this war had succeeded in convincing the American people to stand behind them, those who manufactured the war, even if they hadn't known previously, knew full well by the time the war began that the centerpiece of the case they had made to the American people to attack Iraq was untrue.
Unless George Bush can prove he was hearing something radically different in private than was being said in public in late 2002 and early 2003, he was lying to us when he continued to assure the American people there was "no doubt" that the existence of huge stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction were the reason that war had to be unleashed on March 9, months later.

Spiders Tangling in their own Webs

      Absent these weapons, the core of their entire argument for the necessity of the war falls apart.  When you consider the nature of the threat that Saddam, an aging, blowhard dictator, actually presented to the most powerful nation in the world, an all out preemptive war that has gone on for four years was surely a disproportionate response to it.  So even though they knew that the major part of their case, the prohibited production of weapons of mass destruction, was probably untrue before the preemptive war to eliminate them, when they proceeded with the ultimate penalty anyway, they shifted the ultimate guilt and all the costs for this war from Saddam to us. 
      Perhaps if they'd just contritely admitted they were wrong in Iraq we could engender some sympathy and respect for them.  But, unwilling to take responsibility for their own errors, its authors have advanced increasingly bizarre alternative rationalizations for the war to keep us mired there.  As they reach farther and farther afield for exoneration, this willingness to pile new irrationality on old errors only tends to reinforce our sense of their propensity to dishonesty in general, which is what led us into this war to begin with. This only proves their guilt more and makes them even less worthy of our trust, not more.  
      For instance, they have actually argued that Saddam may have intended to have weapons, would have liked to, would've if he could've, etc., as if imaginary assumed intention was somehow legal justification enough for a preemptive decimation of an entire country. 
      Some also argued that the war was not their fault because the preparations for war were by then too far advanced to be stopped, as if the fact that these preparations were so far advanced was not also completely their fault.  Apparently they doubt our memory as well as our intelligence, and think we will forget later who forced the issue of war ahead at the start.  Besides, when have honesty and justice ever been time sensitive?  Any endeavor based on an injustice or lie is like building a house on weak and shifting sands.  The longer it is persisted in the more unstable it becomes.  Wasn't it entirely predictable then that this war would go very badly for the United States?
      Other apologists say there was still reason to attack Iraq just on general principle, because of some other lack of compliance with UN resolutions.  Naturally, Iraq was probably guilty of something.  So are we.  But to be guilty of anything is not the same as being guilty of everything.  Proportionality and patience, where the proper punishment is calibrated to the crime and the accuracy of the evidence is carefully weighed, are virtues vital to justice.  To exclude these two vital components from the equation is to change the sum and operate outside and against the law, not in support of it.
      Finally, some say that it is perfectly understandable that an administration so mistrustful of the rest of the world would naturally choose to ignore the honest internationalists of the United Nations.  But how with such profound international xenophobes in charge of our government can we trust them to make any fundamental decisions regarding the future of our foreign policy?  Isn't this precisely the root of the problem which has led to all their mistakes?  Having people in charge of our foreign policy who haven't the capacity to understand it is like hiring schizophrenics to reform the medical treatment of schizophrenia.  This is not a defense of their actions, it is a further indictment of them.
      The best that may be said of the Bush administration's case for war is they didn't really care whether it was true or not. This is itself a damning indictment of their ethics and a shocking disavowal of their constitutional responsibility to the people of the United States. The far worse conclusion is that they knew with high probability that a casus belli did not exist prior to the war and yet willfully committed us to fighting it anyway for their own reasons. 

      The clear evidence is that this was not a war of defensive necessity or principle or high priority or national interest, at all, not even a war against al Qaeda, but a poorly planned and endless waterfall of lies to enable a war of clear imperialistic aggression and intent against an unarmed country half way around the world simply because our leaders were of a single mind they wanted to fight it.  The "defeat" which we will surely suffer in Iraq when this war has run its sorry course, will not be a product of its conclusion or even its incompetent prosecution, but of the internal illogic of its instigation.  
      By now, of course, not only has there never been evidence found in Iraq that could have possibly justified a war of this magnitude, difficulty and cost; but so desperate were they to fight it, from their actions it seems hard to imagine any evidence which might have arisen which would have deterred this administration from war.  Needless to say, this is precisely the opposite of what they were leading us to believe.  In their mad march to war, not only did they exaggerate evidence that wasn't there, they ignored real evidence that was and clearly lied to the American people on both sides of the argument as to why the war was necessary.  
   Worse, when they actually hurried its date ahead, to our own detriment and ability to gather world support behind us, they crippled our ability to succeed just in order to keep the American people from finding out that there was no compelling reason to fight the war in the first place.  As unbelievable as it seems then, this is not only a war in search of its own justification but is continuing as an ongoing cover-up of its own instigation.  
      This sounds insane but really isn't.  In their minds, the haste and hurry to start the war was necessary to cover up their own cynical manipulation of the pre-war intelligence.  As it became increasingly clear to them that the weapons inspectors were going to disprove the necessity of the war, their idea was that if they could just get the war started we would become invested in the lie, too, and have to support the war to support the troops or risk being called unpatriotic (by them, of course).  It just might have worked too, if the war had been quick and easy.  In that case they hoped that the euphoria of the war's easy victory would make people forget that there had never been any reason to fight the war to begin with.
      However, they are so impractical and incompetent that even though the military easily won the war, since the politicians lost the political argument of the war we have had to stay for four years in Iraq now vainly searching not for weapons or victory, but for their ruined credibility.  This is how mendacious leaders with the world's greatest military at their disposal have managed to "lose" (only in their own minds) a war against one of the weakest nations in the world.
      Compared to our own standards and the standards of the rest of the world, the war in Iraq was as illegal as it has been inhumane.  In the end this Bush administration would up doing to Iraq in 2003 what the first Bush administration fought the Gulf War in 1991 to punish Iraq for doing to Kuwait.  As to which people, we or the Iraqis, have been most thoroughly victimized by our own leaders in this war, it is sometimes hard to tell.
      This administration structured their support for this war around a trifecta of deceit.  As should be clear by now, every explanation for it, from the cause and necessity of the war, to the blind eagerness of this administration to promote it and the suspicious and unseemly haste in which they rushed us into it, have all proven to not only be wrong but completely contrary to the best interests of the United States.  At times they have been so astonishingly anti-democratic and unforthcoming in their behavior and their beliefs that it almost seems they would rather deceive us than tell us the truth.  Surely we must expect more than this from our leaders.
      As for the President, since everything he has said to the American people about this war has been so completely opposite the truth that we can only believe he - and even if he wasn't, he may as well have been - was lying to us.

Playing at War

      But why?  What kind of incomprehensible vanity must it take to intentionally mislead your own people into an unnecessary war that leads to such catastrophe?  
      Granted, from the very way in which this failure has been continued so irrationally long after it has proven disastrous, it is fair to surmise that somewhere very early on in the minds of its proponents this war became more about politics and cowardice in Washington than good foreign policy abroad.  
      But long before that, the source of the war seems to have sprung from a ganglia of myth, bad thinking and poor practices way too tangled and complicated to unravel here.  Among the proponents of the war some were fearful, some sought greed, some were eager for political advantage, some for privilege and power, some for avenging false national honor; some were just naïve, some delusional, some sheep, some idealistic, some just downright mean - all these were wrapped around an extraordinary confusion of illusions gathered together in a box of huge egos, wrapped with raw aggression and hopeless arrogance and all prettily tied up with a bow of sheer incompetence.  
      However you look at it, the inanity of all the slack minded rationales for this war is breathtaking in its array.   But even when all added together, for all the trillions of dollars in potential cost to the country, they still don't amount to a dime's worth of sense or ounce of profit for our country. 
      In fact, this is the same old trap that badly led nations with too much unchecked power often fall into.  It is an age old tale of a profound and careless abuse of public trust and massive misuse of power typically called imperialism.  
      Having defined the problem, the most important question we have to ask ourselves now is how all this bad thinking arose and why it has been allowed to go so long unchecked.

      Once the Cold War ended, the roster of the world's superpowers halved from a duality to a singularity and moved the US atop the heap as the world's only superpower.  This represented an extraordinary shift in our responsibility which has never been fully accounted for by many of our policymakers.  Suddenly we were supreme without the obvious checks and tension against us of any obvious threat and competition.  We had, as it were, climbed to the top of the greasy pole among the nations of the world, and were there alone. 
      Yet we never opened a systematic debate leading to a consensus as to what kind of world leader we ought to be. It was erroneously taken for granted that we already knew. Since the fall of the Soviet Union, therefore, in response to our new great responsibilities, we have responded in ad hoc fashion to events, from Somalia, Bosnia, Haiti and Iraq in the Gulf War, with mixed results.  But, by and large, prior to this Iraq war, even in Afghanistan, we stayed within recognizable parameters of established American policy. 
      Historically, America has always been the honest broker, the regulator, the hope, the vision, the peace maker, even when peace has temporarily entailed war to maintain. We have a long and hard won record as enemies of injustice, extremism and religious intolerance. The United States has always been a forward looking bulwark of anti-imperialist and anti-colonialist behavior in the world.  
      This is the pure essence of our democracy, the basis of our founding. In the record of the entire last century we were the hope of small nations against aggressive hegemonistic neighbors and ideologies that would punish and dominate them for their own profit and gratification.  This is exactly what World Wars I and II and the Cold War were all about, fights against hegemony and oppression, Nazism and Communism, extreme ideologies of both the left and right that would impose their totalitarianism by force on others.  
      In all of our history, prior to the Bush administration, we have never considered or used democracy as an aggressive "ideology" to be imposed on or dictated to others, but have relied on the example of our own great success to convince others of our free system of beliefs as the natural alternative to the self-limiting and oppressive totalitarianism practiced by others. 
      As we have hated injustice domestically we have consistently upheld the rule of law internationally by supporting the founding of democratically organized international organizations. As we love democratic rights and freedoms, open markets and free debates internally we have desired to see these flourish globally and have fought to secure the independence, openness, cooperation and autonomy of weak and small nations against the large and aggressive nations that denied them the ability to do this.  No one would suggest we have always been perfectly even ended and true even to our own ideals but by and large the influence of our natural impulse on the world while, to be sure, ensuring our own prosperity, has been far more beneficial and uplifting than malign.  
      Unfortunately some of the more small minded among us don't agree with or measure up to the heights of these ingrained ideals.  In their minds our new position as the world's only superpower only serves as a license for an arrogant moral laxity that means we needn't be as careful, or nuanced or controlled in our activities as we had previously been.  Instead of seeing our preeminence as a sign that our responsibilities to the world augment and multiply they imagine that a nation's responsibility to the world diminish with the increased accumulation of power.  Rather than become even more careful they think this power affords us the opportunity to be less careful of our actions in the world.  
      They have come to hate, above all, the very international organizations previous greater Americans helped to found in order to nurture and promote our own democratic ideals as the greatest guarantors of international justice and security in the world.  Since these organizations have come into being largely due to American influence, for some of this generation to seek to deny them now is a little like a miser denying his inheritance to his own children. 
      Despite the vast and undeniable success of these unselfish and farsighted policies and their inherent benefit to us as a buttress to our respect and superiority, a few of us have come to despise and reject them.  These are the ones who now style themselves neo-conservatives.  They have long nurtured their illusions in secret like an oppressive shadow on the native optimism of America.  At last, given an opening in the Bush administration, they have quickly moved to impose their harmful, shortsighted and self-destructive theories on the rest of us.  
      This was unforeseen, because unless illusions are brought out into the open, publicly branded as false and debated into resolution, they may develop into a policy vacuum which sucks the life out of good thinking.  So that when a power vacuum does occur, as in for instance Iraq, it often draws refuse from the bottom up and initially fills the cavity of power with evil intents and corruptions far sooner than the more difficult to explain, achieve and maintain, rule of law and order may arise to contain them.  A vacuum of ideas, as well, when pressured, quickly reverts to its lowest common denominator of fear, vengefulness and cruelty.  
      This has been the Bush administration's reaction to 9/11.  With no well established, recent American intellectual consensus or standard to cleave to or opposition to restrain them, and without the moral capacity and knowledge of the world to provide one for themselves, the weakest ideas have risen to the top.  This administration willfully used the trauma of 9/11 as an excuse to indulge their long standing predilection for imperialistic hegemony.  
      They have expanded the false concept that "since 9/11 the world has changed" as a pretext for attacking the rule of law, the necessity of international conventions and even basic and traditional American values.  Actually nothing of vital importance has changed since 9/11.  The world still revolves at the same pace and in the same direction; the same principles, rules and standards of law and ethics which have made us great still pertain.  
      Yet some in our current government have decided it's shrewd and necessary to adopt the tactics of our enemies whereas, in fact, that is the only conceivable way in which our enemies may ever truly win against us, by making us stoop to their level rather than making them rise to ours.  The American dream has always sought and thought ourselves to be better than this, but this current generation of American leadership has proven without a doubt that, if they can help it, we will be worse.
      Since 9/11 we have not changed, ethics have not changed, the world has not changed, but our leaders have tried to change us.  They speak of truth, justice and the American way while in practice they have actively sought to betray all three. 
      To this end, after 9/11 they immediately adopted a series of catch as catch can policies, based on settling old grudges, incredibly shallow appraisals of complex events, political expediencies, inhumane corner cutting and wildly flailing, fear mongering policies.  They have taken our unchallenged preeminence not as a sacred responsibility to use wisely and well but as a license to indulge their fantasies of knee jerk anti-internationalism which has culminated in the unrestrained use and naked abuse of power, in service to the theory that we can do exactly what we want and unilaterally impose our will on the rest of the world merely because no one else is big enough to stop us.  
      Knowing full well the rest of country doesn't share their dark vision of the world they have intentionally lied to us about their intentions.  This was the crux of their plan with Iraq.  It was meant to be the paradigm for other wars.  In Iraq they embarked us on a program to test theories that even a cursorily competent reading of history should have told them would fail and now are telling us that it will be a "severe defeat for America" if we fail to persist in trying to make all their delusions come to pass.   
      So they surrounded the war in Iraq with happy talk of democracy and altruistic intentions and flowers (that would be strewn at us when we arrived) meant to deceive the rest of us.  Meanwhile, they proceeded to commit us to the most blatantly imperialistic, dishonest and unjustifiable war in American history.  Once begun on such a meretricious and anti-democratic basis, even if this war had been fought with pure integrity and perfectly competently, it still could have only ever eventuated in a defeat for America.  
      Even as they have adopted the classic phraseology of American idealism to describe their policy they abase it in practice by placing it in corrupt servitude to embarrassingly cynical exercises in unjust and manufactured warfare, torture and renditions to torture, hit and miss aerial assassinations with little regard for innocent victims, bully diplomacy without means to back up our threats and a derisive evading of international law and conventions. In a blizzard of anti-constitutional signing statements they engage in secret arrests, secret trials and secret prisons and have sought to subvert our system of checks and balances.  They unilaterally deny representation, notification, proper counsel, due process and habeas corpus to prisoners who are deemed guilty in advance without proof or trial.  Without congressional or legal authorization they have engaged in unregulated wire tapping and assaults on the privacy of their own citizens.  They have abused rights at home and abroad and disguised it all with a relentless and unprecedented campaign of political disinformation and propaganda directed at their own people. 
      In all these ways, the small minded cabal in charge of our country today along with their supine supporters have slowly remade us into little better than our former enemies, manipulating nuances of laws more with an eye to evading truth than finding it, leavening sophistries of banal justifications into expediencies of self interest and torturous definitions.  They pretend to serve us while serving only themselves at our expense, while uttering hollow platitudes of democracy and spouting nonsensicalities of paternalism and freedom even as they preemptively attack and occupy an unarmed nation.   We have no say in this and are told we must indulge our political leaders' arrogant delusions of moral, religious, cultural and ethnic superiority which invariably are unreflected by the mirror of their actions.  
      Stop and reread this list and you'll see that the only thing that each item in this long and incomplete train of abuses has in common is that each and every one of them are things that we in this country have always prided ourselves in fighting against.

      With this war as centerpiece to their theories, this administration has betrayed the spirit of our forefathers.  The fact that this war was first dishonestly sold to the American people as a defensive war of necessity and then in the palimpsests of their ever shifting rationalizations for continuing it, has been hypocritically redefined as a war of democratic altruism and idealism only makes it more criminal, degrading what democracy itself is in the minds of the world. Merely to avoid having to admit their mistakes and pay for their own errors, they have hijacked our history and turned us into the enemy of our own honored past and betrayers of the true guiding spirit of America.  With this unethical war they have diminished the sacrifices of all those wars of our past.  
      If this war in Iraq was not treasonous to our own ideals why do you think this government had to subvert democratic ethics and procedures in order to lie and trick and hurry us into a war that if honestly explained and democratically debated would have been overtly repudiated by their own people?  Its intentional corruption of the American dream has been exposed by the very duplicity of its instigation. They knew that this war and all its attendant abuses was not an evocation of our traditional democratic values but a usurpation of them. Such practices derive not from the high ideals, optimism and stout principles that this nation was founded on but from the base desires, crude techniques, pessimism and fears that the worst of nations always descend to.  
      The fact that their half baked, shallow, comic book theories of democratic imperialism are so internally contradictory as to have no chance of succeeding in this day and age does not make them any less of a betrayal of the trust the nation has placed in their care.

      And now, even though our leaders fomented a war foreign to our traditions based on bogus grounds without conceivable benefit for the US and have waged it with unprecedented carelessness and incompetence for four years, they still refuse to entertain an end to it.  
      After tricking us into adventurous interventionism against an unarmed country based on false pretenses, jingoistic fears and juiced information, with no clear plan as to what we would do when we got there; we destroyed that nation's infrastructure (affecting oil production, safety, electricity, water, health and safety), then completely mishandled the occupation which has left Iraq a power vacuum that festers internally while continuing to destabilize the region externally.  meanwhile, the American taxpayers are being asked to pay to rebuild (quite unsuccessfully) the infrastructure we have just destroyed.  With our interminable occupation a magnet of continuous unrest, it has opened vast fissures in this society between factions of the population and has created a civil war which perpetuates permanent conflict while inviting foreign terrorists and neighboring governments to infiltrate and take sides in the war.  The only thing all the warring factions seem to be able to agree on is their dislike for us.  Still we are told that we must at all costs continue doing this at great cost to ourselves (and massive costs to the Iraqis) because our ill-advised and illegal invasion has been such a great force for good, calm, stability and democracy in the region!
       Of course, they and all the pundits and fomenters and war mongers who promoted and beat the drum for the agony that is Iraq, exaggerating, caviling and making excuses with every other breath, ought to be ashamed but haven't the wit. Their naiveté of the world is matched only by their total misunderstanding of the principles on which the true greatness of our country rests. Compared to the greatest leaders of our history they are vulgar, shallow, ill bred, ill-informed, prejudiced and inhumane.  They despise all sense of shared sacrifice, idealism, shun the hard work and cooperation that maintaining the equality of democracy demands, and have replaced our liberal traditions with deviousness, fearfulness, self-interest and greed.  Certainly they haven't the moral capaciousness or mental fiber to conceive the complexity of the world that faces us and lack the character of a moral center and ethical diligence to their behavior which would enable them to be successful in withstanding the eternal pull of the deep shadows of life in order to confront them with the equanimity and light of the brave.
      The attempts by what we have come to call the neo-conservatives to unseat our democratic traditions in order to institute a more cynically robust and imperialistic foreign policy, negligent of international convention and foreign to our own standards of law, to allow us to pursue our own whims as irresponsibly if we were alone on the planet, is not only alien to our all best revered traditions, it is irrational and self-destructive to all that is good in the world.  
      The Bush Doctrine, which might best be called Democratic Imperialism, is as wheezing, gaseous, inefficient, unwieldy, oppressive, cruel and anachronistic in the modern world and to our own beliefs as a steam robot.