Fear and Loathing vs. Hope and Liberty

In a CommonDreams.org commentary, Vermont governor Howard Dean writes:

Our nation should be viewed as a moral and just power, a power that seeks to do good, one that has led by example and with a spirit of generosity, and one that works with the world community in advancing the ideals of human dignity and rule of law across the globe.

The people of this country must understand that this Administration has a far different concept of the role of America in the world. This concept involves imposing our will on sovereign nations. This concept involves dismantling the multilateral institutions that we have spent decades building. And this concept involves distorting the rule of law to suit their narrow purposes. When did we become a nation of fear and anxiety when we were once known the world around as a land of hope and liberty?

Dean may or may not be the right man to lead us out of this quagmire, but he is dead-on when he talks about the neoconservatives' concept of the new world order and America's place in it. A year before 9/11 - months before George W. Bush was "elected" (wink wink, nudge nudge) President - a group called Project for the New American Century, founded in 1997 by a group that included Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Lewis Libby, Paul Wolfowitz, and Jeb Bush, published a doctrine of world dominion, in which they described "a new manifest destiny" for the US: to be the ruling power in a new version of the Roman Empire (they even call it a Pax Americana). The group advocated invasion and occupation of Iraq by the next GOP administration, regardless of whether Saddam Hussein should still be in power by that time, for the purpose of controlling the world's oil supply. They want a permanent US military presence in the Middle East. Also in Southeastern Europe and Southeast Asia. They want to do whatever it takes to ensure that no other world power develops to challenge Americas status as king of the hill. They say a core mission for the US military should be "to fight and decisively win simultaneous major theater wars." (Not just to have the capacity to do so, mind you, but to go and do it.) They want to militarize space, creating a new "Space Force" branch of the armed services and putting weapons in orbit (and they see NASA and the shuttle program as the biggest threat to their success in that area). They want to develop "offensive" capacity to conduct "cyberattacks" (read: computer hacking to further the interests of the US). They want to resume nuclear weapons testing and revive chemical and biological weapons programs. Pure and simple, and without the slightest exaggeration, what they want is to rule the world.

The reasons they now give for the Iraq war--to remove a regime that supported terrorism, to bring a Western-style democracy to Iraq, to eliminate the ousted regime's purported weapons of mass destruction--are mere rationalizations; the group's real aims were published in their September 2000 manifesto, "Rebuilding America's Defenses: Strategy, Forces, and Resources for a New Century."

This goes far beyond questions of right and left to fundamental questions of right and wrong, freedom and bondage, democracy and totalitarianism. All patriotic Americans, whatever their political stripe, should read this document and decide for themselves whether or not they want to buy into this vision; whether it describes an America conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal, or one in which might makes right; and whether the dreams of world dominion promulgated by the radical right are worth the millions of dollars and thousands of lives already spent, let alone the billions of dollars and millions of lives at stake.