Note: This is the last of a five-part series
Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5

The Price of Imperial Overreach

After a mediocre start to his presidency, fate, or more likely a sinister master-plan, handed George Bush and his allies their chance to be untethered from any restraint and be able to go for the big prize they wanted all along but needed public support to do it. It was the gift of the 9/11 tragedy his administration ruthlessly exploited as a launching platform to pursue an imperial agenda of permanent war against enemies invented for the enterprise including former CIA asset against the Soviets in Afghanistan Osama bin Laden in the lead role.

With the help and complicity of round-the-clock daily corporate media fed invented terror threat warnings, color-coded on television for added impact, it scared the public enough and made the Congress willing enough to go along with the scheme the administration had in mind all along and had envisioned from the work of the right wing Project for the New American Century think tank (PNAC) document called Rebuilding America's Defenses: Strategies, Forces and Resources for a New Century. Conceived by future key Bush administration officials, it was a grand imperial plan for US global dominance to extend well into the future to be enforced with unchallengeable military power - a blueprint for the current "war on terror" now rebranded as a "long war" against "Islamic fascism" with goals spelled out in the May, 2000 Department of Defense (DOD) Joint Vision 2020 calling for "full spectrum (world) dominance" that was code language meaning total control over all land, sea, air, outer space and information with enough overwhelming power to defeat any potential challenger or adversary with no restraint on the use of any weapons, including nuclear ones.

This "Vision" was one of several imperial documents looking ahead that included the Nuclear Policy Review of 2001, the FY 2004 Air Force Space Command Strategic Master Plan, the Pentagon's 2006 Quadrennial Defense Review and the National Security Strategy of 2002, updated in 2006. Together they laid out a "grand imperial strategy" that included the notion of "preventive war" updated to a "long war" against "Islamofascists" that was set in motion by the trigger of the 9/11 tragedy to target those parts of the world of greatest strategic value like the oil-rich Greater Middle East including Central Asia and its Caspian Basin riches.

These plans were embellished on October 6, 2006 when George Bush quietly signed the National Space Policy superceding a September, 1996 version of the same directive. The plan lays out US space policy goals that include implementing an "innovative human and robotic exploration program" to extend the presence of humans in space. It calls on NASA to "execute a sustained and affordable human and robotic program of space exploration and develop, acquire, and use civil space systems to advance fundamental scientific knowledge of our Earth system, solar system, and universe." It supports the use of nuclear power systems and implies without so stating that includes nuclear weapons that will be deployed there to use when and if necessary. That's very much the message from the language that this policy is designed "to ensure space capabilities....to further US national security, homeland security, and foreign policy objectives (that include defending) our interests there....(and having The Director of National Intelligence) provide a robust foreign space intelligence collection and analysis capability....to support national and homeland security."

With all the pieces of its grand imperial scheme in place, the best-laid plans, nonetheless, don't always go as designed especially when they encompass more than can be digested and the forces against them are determined enough to resist and do it effectively. What began with world support for a global "war on terror" began to unravel in the wake of the Bush administration's notion of endless wars and its unilateral intent to invade and occupy Iraq in spite of growing opposition to it that was ridiculed, spurned and arrogantly defied. Even the world's only superpower should have known no nation, no matter how powerful, can challenge the rest of the world and get away with it without enough support, especially when the two adventures it undertook in Iraq and Afghanistan unravelled so fast and the economic and political costs incurred from them are so enormous and increasing they've made visible fissures in the hegemon's superstructure making it vulnerable.

The cost of Bush administration go-it-alone adventurism accelerated a decline of US imperial power that began, according to some astute observers, with its futile losing gambit in Vietnam. It's now repeating it and then some in the Greater Middle East and as a result lost its stature as a failed model of a once democratic state flaunting the rule of law and ignoring the values it claims to stand for while doing just the opposite in reckless pursuit of its own interests. It's now seen for what it is - an out-of-control rogue state threatening all others wanting no part of it and a growing number of them willing to challenge its supremacy in the process.

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This behavior fits the definition of what Noam Chomsky calls a "failed state" in his 2006 book titled Failed States while explaining the notion of what this means, in fact, is imprecise at best. It may be a nation unable to protect its citizens from violence or destruction but could also be one that flaunts the rule of international law and acts as an aggressor. The US uses this term for nations seen as potential threats to our security we feel justified intervening against in self-defense. Chomsky says if we evaluate our own agenda by that definition "we should have little difficulty in finding the characteristics of 'failed states' right at home."

Blame much of it on how noted historian and author Gabriel Kolko characterizes the Bush administration - "the worst set of incompetents ever to hold power in Washington. It 'shocked and awed'....itself." Winston Churchill called himself an optimist and once remarked that "the United States invariably does the right thing, after having exhausted every other alternative." Not a chance as long as George Bush is president and neocons are in charge. That's a hurdle even Churchill's optimism couldn't have cleared.

It shows how a once proud country lost its legitimacy and with it the power to face down a growing number of nations willing to confront its authority and get away with it, even small players that once wouldn't have dared. In the hemisphere, Cuba has been joined by Venezuela, Bolivia, Nicaragua on November 7 with the reelection of Sandinista FSLN leader and former US nemesis Daniel Ortega, and now in Ecuador on November 26 with the impressive election of populist candidate Rafeal Correa in the run-off presidential election against the Washington-backed billionaire oligarch.

Elsewhere in Asia, China and North Korea have defied US authority as has Russia in Eurasia and Iran and Syria in the Middle East. Resistance groups everywhere have now learned the lessons from Iraq, Afghanistan and Hezbollah in Lebanon. These groups have asymmetrical guerrilla-tactic power that when used effectively can hold their own against the most powerful nation on earth beating it at its own game by outlasting it or rendering its super-weapons useless against an opponent that can't be seen until its bombs go off and bullets start flying and often not even then. They've also inspired the courageous people of Mexico and their epicenter of resistance in Oaxaca taking to the streets in their courageous fight against electoral fraud and an end to decades of abuse and injustice and doing it with little more than their bodies and a redoubtable spirit that won't quit.

Add to this the growing unease and discontent of an aroused and angered public at home. It sent a powerful message of disgust and contempt for six failed years of imperial madness and corrupted right wing neocon Republican rule by drubbing its candidates in the mid-term elections. It wants change in Washington even though there's little chance to get it when the new leadership takes control of the Congress in January. Beyond the usual post-election continuation of campaign-style rhetoric, already it's clear the Democrat party mission is to move the ship of state forward with its agenda largely intact but with them in charge including in the White House if they can prevail in the 2008 election. It's the way things always work in the nation's Capitol where those holding power owe their allegiance to the interests of wealth and power that put them there, and, in the end, the people be damned and "let 'em eat cake" but the language is more subtle.

It won't work for the new congressional leadership any more than it did for the president who brought down the house of Bush ending the family dynasty's reign while turning the nation's imperial dreams into its death throes by his arrogance and ineptness. He'll now live in infamy as the man who accelerated the American empire's decline. His imperial madness buried it in the caves and rubble of Afghanistan and the burning sands of the Middle East financing it with an unrepayable mountain of Federal Reserve-created debt in an age of aberrant capitalism gone wild and transformed into a fiscal weapon of mass-destruction that may end up throttling the US and world economies. It's what out-of-control greed and delusions of grandeur always lead to - self-aggrandizing excess that eventually undermines the "irrationally exuberant" dreams of fools and despots that go well beyond the limits of reason or any hope for success.

If George Bush lasts another two years, it'll be thanks to the kindness of his dwindling number of hard core friends and strangers who still think they can pick something from the bones of his tenure before payment for his imperial overreach comes due. When it does, it'll be high, painful and inevitable just like it always is the way it was for that French queen of "let em eat cake" fame who along with her husband, King Louis XVI, lost their heads for their misdeeds. "King" George may keep his, but the family dynasty has been undone and defrocked by the sins of the unworthy scion ill-chosen to carry its reign forward to pass on to the next in line after him. It wasn't to be as the dominance of another powerful family passes into history, never to be trusted again with the seat of power in a nation accelerating in decline in the new century that was planned to be an American one but already is not six years into it.

Whereto from here with a disgraced head of state and unindicted war criminal already an artifact or relic of an era past, his power ebbing and marking time going through the motions despite the same bravado, smirk and all, that resonates less with each public appearance. It's intended to keep his weakened presidency from collapsing that may just take one more good shove to do it. Despite desperate efforts to save it, in the end who but the family will care if it does and who will ever again believe a serial liar once exposed and disgraced making him unwelcome in the halls of power that once embraced him. Success, as they say, has many parents and friends, but failure is an unwanted orphan, and it's showing up as some of the hard core faithful voice their displeasure openly and walk away.

It now remains for his final exit that can't come soon enough for most who want him out now and may act to force it if the Congress won't act as a majority of the public demands. Whatever happens from here, the king is dead (even with his head in place), and with it the power and influence of a family dynasty brought down by the poisoned chalice of its ill-chosen successor, unworthy and unable to wear the crown and pass it to the next in line. Henceforth, all will know what should have been clear all along. Behind every "Bush," there's a crime, and some of them are too great to hide, make up for or overcome. So it is with the lesson of George Bush, a very bad seed and a president only a mother can love. And even that's in doubt in a family that doesn't take defeat very well. Give them time, they'll acclimate.

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Stephen Lendman [send him email] lives in Chicago, and maintains a blog at http://sjlendman.blogspot.com