This could be the most dangerous period of Bush's reign. The carefully layered walls of Bush's bubble are disintegrating as the outer layers of purchased politicos are beginning to peel away, revealing the core ideologues of the cabal. Long gone are wistful architects of the new, bloody American imperialism like Wolfowitz and Perle. As they receded, loyalists like Rice, Hadley, Gordon England, etc. advanced up the chain they forged with their military industrial alliances into catbird seats, lording over our defense budgets, plotting out their imperious ambitions with no fear in their fiefdom.
Stepping out from behind the curtain into the positions of power are faces of past bloody mis-adventures like Negroponte, and engineers of the new American fascism, like Gen. Hayden, whose tenure is marked by the admission of the treasonous act of spying on Americans he shared with the president who directed him there.
This bunch's retreat from their privileged bunkers at the end of Bush's term will be marred by more than misplaced furniture and missing typewriter keys. They are neck-deep in two occupations (both with active, violent resistance), complete with over a thousand prisoners, most held without charges, and many subject to torture which continues even in the wake of the revelations at Abu Ghraib; they are actively engaged in another similar face down of another sovereign nation, Iran, threatening them with preemptive war without any evidence of any threat, direct or otherwise; and our nation is being held hostage to outrageous prices for gas and oil, fueled in a great part by the very militarism that Bush's father promised in the first Gulf war would secure the flow of oil in the Persian Gulf.
Cheney did his best to lurch our nation back into the Cold War Thursday when he criticized Russia and President Vladimir V. Putin at a conference in Lithuania. He accused Russia of using their oil reserves as "tools of intimidation or blackmail."
Cheney went from there to Kazakhstan to buddy up with the oppressive state (two presidential candidates murdered in the past 6 months), score their oil, and possibly persuade them to bypass the Russians with their pipeline to directly supply the West, possibly coming out in Turkey.
Russian press immediately accused Cheney of trying to start a new Cold war. That's what Kommersant, a major newspaper there called it: "The beginning of a second Cold War." That would mesh with the Bush regime's ambition to use their militarism to catapult the U.S. into an era of paranoiac appropriations of our tax dollars into their military industry protection racket. Stir up a nemesis and force the nation to spend their great-grandchildren's future on weaponry and mobilizations of our fractured forces defending against the certain reprisals and recriminations.
All of this is fostered, nurtured, and perpetuated by a State Dept. more concerned with proliferating war than in promoting the institution of peace. We started out with the agency headed by the general who prosecuted the first bloody, neo-con aggression against sovereign Iraq, now we will presumably have a general running the CIA. At the U.N. Bush has installed a man who has publicly asserted that the institution 'doesn't exist'.
John Bolton, leading foreign policy adviser and diplomat of the U.S. regime which doles out nuclear favors and permissions according to how low countries bow to them, while punishing those who dare to criticize them, is actively trying to intimidate the international community into approving a security council resolution under Chapter VII of the U.N. Charter, which is militarily enforceable, to make all IAEA resolutions mandatory.
Instead of continuing with the dismantling of our nuclear arsenal, the Bush regime set out from the beginning of their reign to awaken the nation's slumbering nuclear program in their ambition to build more radioactive bombs with new justifications for their use. They want to build nuclear bunker-busters; the type of weapon that, coincidently, they have called for to disrupt the weapon's labs they have conjured up in Iran beyond any supporting evidence. In all, no nemesis, no new nukes.
The danger from this retreating U.S. regime is not just in the new money they seek for new nukes, or for ground-based lasers to shoot down 'enemy' satellites. It's not just from the money they want for new construction of permanent military bases in Iraq, or for new prison construction at Gitmo and Afghanistan. The danger's not restricted to assertions by the Executive branch that they have the authority to ignore or re-interpret any law because of a congressional authorization to catch the perpetrators of the 9-11 attacks.
The real danger is in the mindlessly callous manner the Bush regime has set the bulk of the world against our nation by acting on their manufactured mandate to conquer. Their aggressive and violent expansionism has provoked lesser equipped nations to unconventional defenses in support of basic expressions of liberty and self-determination, which the Bushites false authority disregards as mere threats to their consolidation of power.
Across the globe there was, at least, a tacit understanding about our nation's military forces, which were to be guileless in their unassailable defenses, that there was some internal moral compass that would stifle our leader's tendencies toward repression and domination with the checks and balances of our democracy. But, the institutions of our government have been invaded by a cabal of industry executives whose ambitions to rape our Treasury for their own greed have been unabated by the representatives we elect to account for our tax dollars. Their only relevant authority outside of their squabbling is the allocation of our hard-earned contributions to government, which they pass around among their industry benefactors as if they hadn't already broken the bank with over 40% of our national debt foreign-owned.
The legacy of the Bush regime will be a loaded Supreme Court, a kudzu of surveillance and muckraking against Americans, indenture to price inflation by wizened energy producing nations antagonized by his arrogant assumption of U.S. ownership of their resources by virtue of our need, and, of course, a manipulated foreign policy which exploits the resources of the defenseless around the world for the benefit of a minority of industry leeches.
The continuing danger of this regressive regime is in trumped-up, bloody invasions of sovereign nations to rob them of their oil and resources. And, it's in the shackling of countless generations of Americans to a corporate agenda of U.S. world domination, supported by the perpetual sacrifice of the lives and blood of generations of our sons and daughters in continuous world war. Regaining control of Congress from the republican enablers will be the first step in coaxing the tentacles of their fascism from their grip on the institutions of our democracy.
Then, our Democratic leaders will have to act . . . to reclaim the ground.
