JAY BOOKMAN ajc.comThis war, should it come, is intended to mark the official emergence of the United States as a full-fledged global empire, seizing sole responsibility and authority as planetary policeman. It would be the culmination of a plan 10 years or more in the making, carried out by those who believe the United States must seize the opportunity for global domination, even if it means becoming the "American imperialists" that our enemies always claimed we were.
Once that is understood, other mysteries solve themselves. For example, why does the administration seem unconcerned about an exit strategy from Iraq once Saddam is toppled?
Because we won't be leaving. Having conquered Iraq, the United States will create permanent military bases in that country from which to dominate the Middle East, including neighboring Iran.
In an interview Friday, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld brushed aside that suggestion, noting that the United States does not covet other nations' territory. That may be true, but 57 years after World War II ended, we still have major bases in Germany and Japan. We will do the same in Iraq.
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To preserve the Pax Americana, the report says U.S. forces will be required to perform "constabulary duties" -- the United States acting as policeman of the world -- and says that such actions "demand American political leadership rather than that of the United Nations."
To meet those responsibilities, and to ensure that no country dares to challenge the United States, the report advocates a much larger military presence spread over more of the globe, in addition to the roughly 130 nations in which U.S. troops are already deployed.
More specifically, they argue that we need permanent military bases in the Middle East, in Southeast Europe, in Latin America and in Southeast Asia, where no such bases now exist. That helps to explain another of the mysteries of our post-Sept. 11 reaction, in which the Bush administration rushed to install U.S. troops in Georgia and the Philippines, as well as our eagerness to send military advisers to assist in the civil war in Colombia.
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The potential implications of a Pax Americana are immense.
One is the effect on our allies. Once we assert the unilateral right to act as the world's policeman, our allies will quickly recede into the background. Eventually, we will be forced to spend American wealth and American blood protecting the peace while other nations redirect their wealth to such things as health care for their citizenry.
Donald Kagan, a professor of classical Greek history at Yale and an influential advocate of a more aggressive foreign policy -- he served as co-chairman of the 2000 New Century project -- acknowledges that likelihood.
"If [our allies] want a free ride, and they probably will, we can't stop that," he says. But he also argues that the United States, given its unique position, has no choice but to act anyway.
"You saw the movie 'High Noon'? he asks. "We're Gary Cooper."
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Rumsfeld and Kagan believe that a successful war against Iraq will produce other benefits, such as serving an object lesson for nations such as Iran and Syria. Rumsfeld, as befits his sensitive position, puts it rather gently. If a regime change were to take place in Iraq, other nations pursuing weapons of mass destruction "would get the message that having them . . . is attracting attention that is not favorable and is not helpful," he says.
Kagan is more blunt.
"People worry a lot about how the Arab street is going to react," he notes. "Well, I see that the Arab street has gotten very, very quiet since we started blowing things up."
The cost of such a global commitment would be enormous. In 2000, we spent $281 billion on our military, which was more than the next 11 nations combined. By 2003, our expenditures will have risen to $378 billion. In other words, the increase in our defense budget from 1999-2003 will be more than the total amount spent annually by China, our next largest competitor.{the soft time is ending. it's like an anti-drug commercial gotten out of hand. the decay of the family the damage from the poison, only it doesn't stop, there's no therapy, no policeman stepping in, no intervention, just the mad violent rush of ever more frequent dosage, the fierce blindness and flat emotions, all semblance of parenthood disappearing into the day after day of constant high, and the house getting darker, the cupboards' dwindling contents, and the steadily rising fear from the youngest kids. the shock of seeing that so many have gotten now that the cameras can go everywhere, anywhere, glimpses into the squalor of lives you have no other contact with than the hidden wires bring. the crack pipes and the filth the violence the simple choices passed by in favor of another rock. and you can watch it from the relative safety of your place in the unsteady world. and your logical mind says of course anyone with any scrap of human decency and self-respect would stop now but they don't they just keep going on and on faster and faster more and more it's shrieking now it's eating everything around it, and there's a part of me that when I first read this piece about these dull men with their atomic bombs I wanted to believe it was all there was, that they could do this they could burn their way to a new throne and be like that, kings, emperors, fathers at last, sons no longer, dominating the world and there would be a kind of peace after that though the bones and blood of almost everything still living that I love here would be broken into the dust and ground beneath their wheels but even that was denied me, it won't be, it can't. the soft time is ending and it won't come again for any of us. they don't have what's needed. the strength. the wisdom. this is Columbine writ large. these are the outcasts come back on fire, long black dusters sweeping through the halls of the world with their guns and their bombs and their small dark hearts.}
