Sound familiar? No wonder. It was the very imperial program for eternal American dominance and endless war against the planet’s rogue states that George W. Bush’s administration would officially adopt. By then, Wolfowitz was the number two man at the Pentagon; Libby, the Vice President’s good right hand; and Khalilzad was the new, post-invasion U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan.

In a post-9/11 atmosphere of belligerent fear, their program went mainstream. Having been attacked not by a rogue state but by a squad of 19 terrorists pledging allegiance to a stateless terrorist organization, we were “at war” with evil itself. By 2002, the administration had conducted a “successful” war in Afghanistan; the Taliban had been crushed; Osama bin Laden was MIA; and the neocons were riding high. The rest of us found ourselves in a Global War on Terror, or the Long War, or World War III, or even World War IV or whatever our rulers chose to call it that week. (As we would learn in Iraq, counting was not one of their skills.)

Dazzled beyond any reasonable imperial sense by the power to dominate that they believed American military superiority gave them, top Bush administration officials essentially proclaimed the U.S. an empire by fiat, a superduperpower the likes of which the world had never seen. In their infamous 2002 National Security Strategy of the United States of America (essentially the 1992 Defense Planning Guidance document recycled), they swore that we would remain so forever and feed the Pentagon so much money that it would be bulked up into the distant future to suppress any potential superpower or bloc of powers that might emerge.

They insisted that we would go our own way, strike whomever we pleased, torture anyone we wished, and jail without recourse anyone we cared to sweep up or kidnap anywhere on Earth. The rest of the world could either approve or be damned, but it would be full speed ahead for us. Their acolytes in right-wing think tanks and lobbying outfits around Washington, along with Washington’s assembled punditry (and some liberal tag-alongs) declared the world on the verge of a Pax Americana and this nation the globe’s New Rome.

In the meantime, domestically, Karl Rove and his pals were working to ensure that the Republican Party would be dominant against all challengers for a generation or more. This was to be a domestic version of “full spectrum dominance.” The two — the global Pax Americana and the Party’s Pax Republicana seemed joined at the hip back then, each reinforcing the unilateral, don’t-tread-on-me, I’ll-do-anything-I-wish dominance of the other. It was Rovian Abramoffism at home and Cheney-izing Wolfowitzism abroad.

How deeply they misunderstood the nature of power in our world, and how thoroughly they miscalculated the limited nature of the power of the New Rome! If you want to take the measure of how far we’ve come since then, consider the spectacle of this last election season. Take Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist. Like the President, deep into this September he was still excoriating the Democrats not just for their positions on the Iraq War, but for their “surrender” policies in the war on terror. As he put it in a PBS interview with Jim Lehrer on September 14th:

“I’d say, ‘Wake up, Harry Reid. Wake up, Harry Reid…’ I think that [the president] has got it right, that we’re not going to do what Harry Reid wants to do, and that is surrender, to wave a white flag, to cut and run at a time when we’re being threatened… as we all saw just three or four weeks ago, in a plot from Britain that was going to send 10 airplanes over here.”

He then characterized the Democratic Party as a group “who basically belittle in many ways this war on terror, who do want to wave this white flag and surrender.”

By late October, however, according to Washington Post reporters Peter Slevin and Michael Powell, Frist had fully grasped that the global and domestic programs of dominance no longer were working together. So he offered the following succinct advice — a flip-flop of the first order — to congressional candidates: “The challenge is to get Americans to focus on pocketbook issues, and not on the Iraq and terror issue.”

Just another “milestone” on the path to… well, that’s the question, isn’t it?

Oil Wars

After September 11, 2001, the President and his advisors were determined to run an invasion of, and war against, Iraq that would be the anti-Vietnam conflict of all time. From the draft to the body count, they were going to reverse all our Vietnam “mistakes.” Above all, they were going to win quickly and decisively. The result? In no time at all, they had brought us deep into the Iraqi “big muddy” (as the Vietnam-era phrase went). Now, looming in the distance — think of it as the dark at the end of this particular horror-fest of a tunnel — is the worst Vietnam nightmare of all: defeat. Just check Juan Cole’s Informed Comment website, for his “Top Ten Ways We Know We Have Lost in Iraq,” if you don’t believe me.

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