Bush Pirates Shipwrecked in Iraq

George Bush presided at a wake this week. White American Manifest Destiny is dead, rotting ignominiously somewhere in Iraq. Neither Bush nor the corpse knows it yet, but the stench is pervasive and unmistakable.

The zombie still has lots of thrashing around to do – some death-force to expend – but cold cadaverous hands cannot grip the globe with terror much longer. Incantations will not resurrect him.

“We’re changing the world.” Bush offered variations on the mantra five times during his session with the servile corporate press, April 13. Bush and his Pirates have been vowing to remake the world since at least 1992, when Bush Sr. Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney and Under-Secretary Paul Wolfowitz drew up a strategy to “establish and protect a new order” that would deter “potential competitors from even aspiring to a larger regional or global role.” During the eight years of the Clinton presidency the expanding cabal refined their Plan for global U.S. hegemony, formalizing their conspiracy through the Project for the New American Century, in 1997. The Plan to “change the world” by enslaving it became the defining foreign policy doctrine of the United States the minute George Bush walked into the White House, in 2000. The Bush men were consumed by the prospect of world conquest, compared to which al Qaida seemed less than a fly, a mere gnat, unworthy of diligent monitoring.

The Plan has come utterly undone in Iraq, in full view of a wired planet. Yet George Bush behaves as if nationalistic bombast will forestall the inevitable exit. Incapable of perceiving Iraqis as human beings, Bush conjures demons. “They seek to intimidate America into panic and retreat, and to set free nations against each other,” said the President. But when a force cannot stay, it must retreat. The U.S. cannot remain in Iraq.

The magnitude of what has transpired since the U.S. invasion is not yet fully understood, even by much of the Left. The Bush men have already been defeated. What is unfolding is a terminal debacle, a crack in history. Bush made it so, and perversely confirmed the epochal nature of events when he told reporters, Tuesday, “Now is the time, and Iraq is the place.”

Imperial overreach

Corporate media fog and flatulence, and the fixating horror of televised war cannot obscure the fundamental fact: The Pirates have failed, having bet everything on a swift takeover of Iraq and its transformation into a corporate “model” for the entire region, a springboard for further conquest and corporate colonization. The Plan envisioned that:

The Plan assumed the Shock and Awe of “The Mother of All War Shows” (the title of our pre-war, January 30, 2003 Cover Story) would cow the entire planet, making the world “malleable, ready for reshaping in the not-yet-defined New Order.”

What New Order? Even the “Coalition of the Bribed” is crumbling.

On August 28 of last year, just four months after the fall of Baghdad, it was clear to that “The Pirates Have Already Lost Iraq.”

The French daily, Liberation summed up the view from Paris:

The Sunni guerilla war continues, some of the Shi’ia are in rebellion, the Provisional Iraqi Authority is powerless, the country’s reconstruction compromised by the lack of security, and GIs coming home in sinister body bags are ever more numerous. They are no longer even pretending to try to win “the hearts and minds” of a populace that Bush was supposed to want to liberate, and they have allowed themselves to be dragged into a true guerilla war….

The leftist French newspaper, in fact, understates the case, as if the personality of George Bush is at issue, rather than the future of world order. Iraq was the lynchpin in the Bush Pirate’s lunge for global hegemony, a “crusade” which was to begin with the overthrow of the straw man, Saddam Hussein, and culminate in a glorious, U.S.-imposed “New Order.” Despite the abject failure of The Plan, the Pirates see no option but to “stay the course” – a guarantee of even more colossal defeats. Bush told the White House press (inverting the meaning of the word “free”), “A free Iraq will change the world.” It is precisely because the Bush men have staked the entire global imperial enterprise on Iraq that we must ask, “Will a U.S.-free Iraq change the world?” The answer is yes – profoundly so.

Lost control

Reality is composed of things in motion. The Pirates understand this, in a degenerate fashion. They sprang at the “opportunity” (September 11, but any excuse would have sufficed) to set in motion a world conquest, at the time and place of their choosing: Iraq. The Plan failed, but other forces have now been set in motion, forces beyond the control of the initiator of the aggression. “It’ll change the world,” Bush insisted for the fourth time on Tuesday, reading the direction of events, backwards. Pirates should be careful what they wish for.

The projected June 30 transition to Iraqi “sovereignty” is nonsense, signifying nothing worthy of the term (see Jonathan Schell, “Phantom Sovereign”). The date serves mainly to illuminate the stupendous U.S. failure to create a politically significant comprador class willing to wear the American leash.

The Nation’s Naomi Klein encapsulates the Americans’ supremely arrogant and racist ”transition” scheme: