THE FACE IN THE MIRROR

The smoke is dissipating, the face of war is clearly reflected in the mirror and it is misshapen and ugly. The President of the United States has described March 17th, 2002 as the “moment of truth for the world” and indeed it is. United States citizens have been advised to evacuate the Middle East. UN inspectors have been told to evacuate. The die is cast, the President has plunged into the Rubicon and the New World Order ushered in by the First Iraqi War is irreparably changed.

The stakes are higher than the fate of Saddam Hussein, the Iraqi regime or the people of Baghdad. The United States has issued its ultimatum, not to our enemies but to our friends. Its terms are simple and direct. It says to the United Nations, and especially to France, Germany and Russia, that the United States’ train is leaving the station, either get on board or get left behind.

Having declared the United Nations to be irrelevant to the issue of war or peace the Bush Administration has made the decision to insure that its description of the UN is accurate. The Administration’s goal for its New American Century is nothing less than imperial hegemony over the whole of the world. With an hubris born of imperial ambition the Administration in already letting contracts to favored United States firms to implement its plan to rebuild Iraq into an American colony without reference to international cooperation and participation.

The Bush Administration does not seek an Iraq at peace with its neighbors. It seeks a power center in the Middle East from which to project the power it believes it can dominate the economic engines of the world by controlling access to energy. The issue is not, and never has been as simple as oil, nor has it been the existence of weapons. It has not been an effort to democratize a tyrannical regime. This has not been and is not now a regional issue. The issue is whether the United States will emerge from this conflict with the power to dictate its will to the remainder of the world.

War is an amalgam of unintended consequences. The consequence of this war may well be the development of a countervailing Eurasian power bloc to balance American power. The framework of that counterbalancing alliance is already developing with the alliance of convenience between the French, the Germans and the Russian Confederation straddling the Old World from the Atlantic to the Pacific. That new alliance has the economic energy and military muscle to challenge anew the emerging American hegemony.

The New American Century promises not a century of Pax Americana but rather the initiation of a modern Cold War in which America can no longer rely upon the great oceans as a moat to protect it.