On the day that the Iraq invasion began, BC was certain that the U.S. Pirate class led by Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld were on a fool’s errand, a delusional mission that would turn the world’s people definitively against the United States, and lead to defeat. That defeat is now accepted as a matter of fact by a majority of Americans – although it is by no means clear that most Americans understand the reasons they have been beaten.

Written as the first bombs fell in Baghdad, this article was prescient in its prediction of how the conflict ultimately would unfold. Here it is, as composed on March 19, 2003, and published on March 20 – The Editors.

We are all assembled, the world's people, awaiting the Pirates' lunge at history. The Bush men have made sure we pay rapt attention to their Big Bang, their epochal Event, after which the nature of things will have changed unalterably to their advantage – they think. The Bush men are certain of our collective response, convinced that once we have witnessed The Mother of All War Shows, humanity will react according to plan, and submit.

Bush was already savoring the New American Century just days ago, when he summoned his underlings from Britain and Spain to the Azores to make yet another final pronouncement. "We concluded that tomorrow is a moment of truth for the world," Bush said.

Spoken like a King. Or The Man Who Would Be King.

Rudyard Kipling's tale of an English colonial soldier drunk on his imagined power over the natives is eerily appropriate. The projected fruits of Shock and Awe – the power to pillage the world with impunity – utterly bedazzled and blinded the perpetrators of the staged holocaust, even before the Event itself had unfolded. In the days between the final U.S. ultimatum and the invasion, American political and corporate media players were visibly shaken by the clear and unanimous world revulsion at U.S. imperiousness.

"Are we going back to The White Man's Burden?" Arab League UN Ambassador Yahya Mahmassani shot at CNN's startled Wolf Blitzer. "Is this the 21st Century?"

Yes, it is, and George Bush and his armies cannot wrench away the provenance of Time to lift again the Burden that even Kipling knew the White Man was not fit to bear.

No one can predict the specific ways in which nations and movements will resist Bush's aggression against civilization. What is certain is that the Pirates have succeeded in arraying important sectors of every other nation on the planet in opposition to Washington's hegemony. Bush has made the name that is our patrimony – "America" – a curse on the lips of much of the world.

If Shock and Awe is essentially a horrific psychological warfare exercise – and it is – the assault on humanity's collective sensibilities has already had disastrous, unintended effects.

Although they are incapable of realizing it, the Bush men have revealed themselves to the world - the audience for Shock and Awe - as grotesquely ugly, brutish, irredeemably repugnant human beings whose touch must be avoided under all circumstances. Every plan and project of individuals and nations will be shaped by having witnessed a racist America raining fire on a weaker people - and reveling in the crime.

Bush's plan for world domination was doomed before the burning, blasting, thundering, screaming display. The Pirates have accelerated the processes of their own ruin.

As we wrote in the March 6 issue of BC.

That was the plan. However, as the world watched the U.S. morph into its predatory essence month by month, a collective, global withdrawal from America became apparent. Clyde V. Prestowitz Jr., president of the Economic Strategy Institute and author of the forthcoming book Rogue Nation, describes the phenomenon.

War is the great and terrible engine of history. Bush and his Pirates hope to employ that engine to harness Time and cheat the laws of political economy, to leapfrog over the contradictions of their parasitical existence into a new epoch of their own imagining.

Instead, they have lunged into the abyss, from which no one will extricate them, for they will be hated much more than feared.

In attempting to break humanity's will to resist, the Bush pirates have reached too far.