This article originally appeared in the Jamaica Observer.

Mr. Bush is on a roll. He’s so happy he’s thumbing his nose at the world. He’s got away with Abu Ghraib, with Fallujah and Haiti and everywhere the rent-a-crowd counter-revolutions just seem to go rolling along.

For a man who had traveled out of the United States only once (or was it twice) before he stood for the Presidency of the United States, Mr. Bush seems to know a lot about the world outside. It rather resembles Texas, only very slightly bigger.

Instead of signing death warrants Mr. Bush can now appoint Ambassadors and World Bank directors to destroy international institutions, carrying to the logical conclusion the remark by the prophet of the neoconservatives –  Richard Perle  – to the effect that the Iraq War meant the end of  the "evil system of international law."

These days, nobody seems to notice or at least, nobody of any consequence. We in the (misnamed) developing world will, however, feel some of the consequences.

Meanwhile the US media, supposedly dedicated to freedom of the press in aid of the free society, concerns itself not with the crimes of the grand and greedy, but with the peccadilloes of rap singers, baseball players and small time hoodlums. Their picture of America the Beautiful and Free is oddly disconcerting.

It is a little off-putting to watch the necrophiliac voyeurism of a Larry King as he probes the psychic guts of yet another victim of the American way. It is weirdly non-compelling to hear the daily recital of the elaborate fictions served up to discredit Michael Jackson or to learn that the rap singer L’il Kim faces 30 years in jail for lying about a shooting incident outside a radio station while somewhere else Ken Lay is explaining why he is not guilty of anything and the Congress refuses to investigate American  corruption in Iraq or the corruption of the Republican leader of the House of Representatives, Mr. Tom DeLay.

Mr. Bush’s appointment of John Bolton to be Ambassador to the United Nations – a job once held by Adlai Stevenson – seems weirdly appropriate, since Mr. Bolton is not only about as far right as Adolph Hitler but is a pathological liar to boot. Mr. Negroponte’s appointment as America’s security czar seems fitting too, in this age of American gulags around the world, and of people being rendered like fat pork – “teased” into confessing while their brains turn to jelly in some faraway, foreign torture chamber.

The nomination of Paul Wolfowitz to head the World Bank seems entirely sensible, even deserved, in this scenario where morality consists of denying post facto contraception to poor women  and in prolonging the torture of a brain-dead woman who has been in a vegetative state since 1990. This week, the Congress of the United States attempted to prolong the agony by issuing a subpoena for Terry Schiavo to appear before them to testify in her own defense. This Grand Guignol gambit was Congress’ way of trying to ensure that the plug was not pulled on a ghastly experiment in hypocrisy which has gone on for 15 years.

Of course, people do notice. Saturday was the anniversary of the start of the war in Iraq and all round the world, millions demonstrated their impotent rage and frustration at the senseless killing and destruction authorized by Bush, Cheney, Wolfowitz, Rumsfeld, Rice, Bolton and Negroponte.  Just over two weeks ago was the anniversary of the assisted coup in Haiti where democracy was aborted on “humanitarian” grounds. Haitians, as the acting Secretary General of the OAS, Mr. Einaudi has said, should have no business in running Haiti. Democracy works, in the horrific personages of La Tortue and his gang of CIA trained killers.

In a speech before the UN Human Rights Commission, Perez Roque, Foreign Minister of Cuba was scathing:

You may remember it was the new UN Ambassador,  Mr. John Bolton, then an Undersecretary of State, who two years ago invented a monstrous lie against Cuba to the effect that biological and chemical weapons were being manufactured there. In his new post at the UN he will no doubt have the opportunity to spew his poisoned rhetoric  directly at Cuba and Venezuela and all those other picayune powers who do not wish to accept US domination.

The UNCHR has long been used to pillory Cuba and other states which the US wishes to demonize. So Mr. Roque chose his platform with care, it seems, and used the occasion to denounce the international double standards which allow rich and powerful states to abuse international law and human rights with impunity. Mr. Roque was harsh on the European Union. A year ago the EU had shown much tender concern for the fate of several dozen people who the Cubans considered treacherous paid agents of the United States. Mr. Roque denounced the EU for its recent use of a procedural ploy to sabotage “a draft resolution that proposed to investigate the massive, flagrant and systematic human rights violations still  committed today against over 500 prisoners at the naval base that  the United States keeps, against the will of the Cuban people, in  Guantanamo Bay."

To the casual visitor from Mars it must seem a little odd that the US and the EU, both such doughty “champions” of human rights don’t seem to be enthusiastic about investigating the documented abuses up to and including murder, which have happened just 90 miles north of Oracabessa.

Mr. Roque was disturbed by another development:

Since that is obviously not going to happen Mr. Roque spoke on behalf of the civilized world when he said that the enjoyment of human rights today depends on whether you live in a developed country or not, and on the social class to which you belong. “There will be no real enjoyment of human rights for all as long as we fail to achieve social justice in the relations among countries and within countries themselves.”

With Mr. Negroponte minding the chicken coop, Mr. Bolton riding herd on the fictional  United Nations and Mr. Wolfowitz flexing his intellectual muscle at the World Bank it is clear that for the next four years – at least – Mr. Roque’s prognosis will hold true:

The invasion and destruction of the Iraqi state was first mooted by President Bush as a case for “regime change.” Saddam Hussein was a bad guy and needed to be removed for the good of humanity.  That impolitic justification was urgently replaced by something apparently more rational and likely to be accepted by the world: Bush, backed by Britain’s Tony Blair said Saddam possessed weapons of mass destruction and was likely to use them against his neighbors and perhaps, even against the United States. Nightmares of mushroom clouds in American cities began to be peddled by Bush and Condoleezza Rice, his National Security adviser.

In the United States, though nowhere else, a majority of the population had been convinced by the Administration’s rhetoric that Saddam was behind the atrocities of 9/11.

World opinion quickly assessed the real reason as the United States lust for control of the world’s energy resources. I myself carried a sign saying “No Blood for Oil” in one of the thousands of popular demonstrations in which millions of people around the world protested against the coming invasion.

The protests were a waste of time. Messrs Bush, Cheney, Wolfowitz, Rumsfeld and Co. were not to be stopped. On the night of March 18, 2003, the United States launched an attack meant to murder Saddam Hussein and to intimidate his people into submission by frightfulness – “shock and awe” as it was called. This was followed by a barbaric reduction to rubble of the Iraqi state and its cities. The 8,000 year old record of civilization in Babylon and other places did not escape American vandalism. Museums and government ministries were looted and the whole apparatus of government destroyed in an apparent effort to remove from the Iraqi people, the very idea of autonomy and independence.

No weapons of mass destruction have ever been found, But no sweat – “Mission accomplished!”

Bush, Rumsfeld, Bremer and the Halliburton company rule

Two years later the American “cakewalk” has turned into a pathway to hell for the Iraqi people more than 100,000 of whom have so far perished in the American campaign to purify their country. Despite the American effort to impose its own “democratic solution” on the country, the result has been the substitution of a fundamentalist Islamic government for the secular regime of Saddam Hussein.

When Mr. Bush began his crusade against Islamic fundamentalism/”terrorism” he had been warned that his intervention could have the opposite effect to that hoped for. That prognosis has turned out to be accurate. To control Iraq and the Middle East the Americans will need to remain in Iraq for the foreseeable future. Meanwhile, the Halliburton company extracts its private tribute in unaccounted and unaccountable billions and American oil companies wait to be let loose to exploit Iraq’s massive oil reserves in the service of American democracy.

There is just one fly in the ointment. A resistance movement which 18 months ago numbered less than five thousand members, today counts anywhere between 25,000 and 50,000 fighters, determined to frustrate Mr. Bush’s  grand design.

It seems that while they may have been shocked by Mr. Bush’s display of power, they were clearly not awed.

John Maxwell of the University of the West Indies (UWI) is the veteran Jamaican journalist who in 1999 single-handedly thwarted the Jamaican government's efforts to build houses at Hope, the nation's oldest and best known botanical gardens. His campaigning earned him first prize in the 2000 Sandals Resort's annual Environmental Journalism Competition, the region's richest journalism prize. He is also the author of How to Make Our Own News: A Primer for Environmentalists and Journalists (Jamaica, 2000). Mr. Maxwell can be reached at [email protected].