Barack Obama has now declared -- on Fox News, no less -- that George W. Bush's escalation of the flagrant war crime in Iraq has "succeeded beyond our wildest dreams." He also proclaimed his "absolute" belief in the "War on Terror," and pledged, once again, "never to take a military option off the table" (not even the nuclear option) against the "major threat" of Iran.

In short, he continued his relentless campaign to purge himself of any of that weak-sister "anti-war" taint that got attached to him in the early days of his campaign -- which was, of course, responsible for his phenomenal rise in the first place. He rode that wave to national prominence -- trading on the desperate hopes of millions of Americans that the ungodly criminal nightmare in Iraq might finally end -- but it was obvious long ago that he was never going to dance with the ones that brung him. Once it was clear that he might really make it all the way to the top of the greasy pole, he began a dogged campaign to prove to our ruling elite that he would be a "safe pair of hands" for the imperial enterprise.

We've seen this in, among other things, the shameful FISA vote, the bellicose threats to launch incursions into Pakistan (a policy which the Bush Administration is already implementing, with the usual deadly results for civilians), the ritual and repeated assertions of his willingness to attack Iran, and the foolhardy promise to shepherd Georgia's entry into NATO -- a mirror-image of Dick Cheney's stance, and a policy guaranteed to ratchet up tensions with Russia and quite possibly spark not only a new Cold War but a hot war of horrendous proportions if Georgia pulls its future NATO treaty partners into another conflict with Moscow.

But it is Obama's surrender on the Iraq War front -- or rather, the anti-Iraq War front -- that is most striking, and most disheartening. On the very night that John McCain was putting the "success" of the surge at the center of his campaign, Obama was openly, cravenly laying down one of his chief weapons at the feet of Bill O'Reilly. Obama's cheerleading for the surge -- "beyond our wildest dreams!" -- surpassed anything that McCain himself has claimed for the escalation.

Obama also emphasized the obscene and morally depraved position that has become the Democrat's standard line on Iraq: that the lazy, no-good Iraqis "still haven't taken responsibility" for running "their own country." The arrogance and inhumanity of this position is staggering, almost indescribable. The United States of America invaded Iraq, destroyed its society, slaughtered its citizens, drove millions from their homes, occupied the country and made itself the ultimate master and arbiter of the conquered land -- but still the Iraqis are condemned for "not taking responsibility for their own country."

Not a single Iraqi attacked America. Not one. America's action has killed more than a million Iraqis. But it is the Iraqis who are now "responsible."

Not only has Obama validated McCain's position on the surge, but his and the Democrats' stance on the Iraqis' "responsibility" also completely buys into the Bush Faction's lie that the "government" of Iraq -- installed at the point of foreign guns, with a "constitution" based upon the arbitrary directives of an occupying power -- is somehow legitimate. This stance too validates the "success" of the entire war: "Hey, they've got a legitimate government there now, so they need to take responsibility for their own country."

This bears repeating: the Democrats' position on Iraq fully accepts -- and even celebrates -- the Bush Administration's fundamental claims for the war. The war has established a legitimate, democratic government in Iraq, Bush and the Democrats both say. The "surge" has succeeded "beyond our wildest dreams" in "securing" Iraq, Bush and the Democrats both say. When "conditions on the ground" are right, America should withdraw its "combat troops" from Iraq, leaving behind an unspecified number of troops for training Iraqi security forces, conducting counterterrorism operations and providing security for other American personnel and reconstruction projects, Bush and the Democrats both say.

Where then is the actual difference -- the evidence for genuine "change" -- between these two positions? While the Democrats will occasionally assert that instigating the war was a "mistake" -- because we should have been fighting more wars elsewhere -- they steadfastly refuse to denounce it as an illegitimate and criminal action. And, as we have seen, they agree almost entirely with Bush on the results that the war has produced. The rhetoric is different, of course, and each side denounces the other in the usual partisan bickering -- but the fundamental agreement is undeniable.

And now Obama has made it explicit: a success "beyond our wildest dreams."

II.

But let's put the disturbing implications of Obama's stance aside for a moment, and deal with the facts of his statement. Is the surge really a "success"?

Well, yes, it is. The "surge" -- which in addition to an influx of troops included the ruthless ethnic cleansing of Baghdad, the walled ghettoization of vast swathes of the city, and the arming and funding of violent sectarian militias across the land -- certainly succeeded in extending the duration of the murder, suffering and chaos engendered by America's armed and belligerent presence in Iraq.

So it is indeed a great "success" ... in the same way that, say, Albert Speer's miraculous efforts to keep the Nazi war machine going from 1943 to 1945 -- resulting in the deaths of millions of people, including the worst ravages of the Holocaust -- was a "success."

This is what Obama is celebrating when he lauds the "wild" success of the "surge": the extension and entrenchment of war he ostensibly opposes.

But is the surge a "success" on its own public terms, in the way that it is portrayed almost universally now in the media: a bold campaign that has brought peace and security to Iraq? Of course not. As Juan Cole points out below, the "surge" (and several other major factors unrelated to the U.S troop escalation, not least of which is Iran's intervention to tamp down Shiite insurgency and bolster the allies it shares with Bush in the Baghdad government) merely reduced the amount of violence in Iraq from that of an unspeakable hell on earth to the level of some of the very worst sectarian conflicts of the last century. As Cole noted a few days ago (see original for links):

AP reports that Baghdad is still very dangerous despite lowered death tolls from political violence:

"Small scale bombings and shootings persist in the capital - each a reminder that the war is not over and that Baghdad remains a place where no trip is routine and residents are still guided by precautions. Most won't drive at night. Many try to avoid heavily clogged streets, remembering that suicide bombers and other attackers intent on killing large numbers of civilians favor traffic jams or congested areas . . . [in August] at least 360 civilians were killed and more than 470 wounded in violence throughout the country, according to an Associated Press count."

That would be 4,320 civilians killed in political violence every year if the level stayed that low. (I take it this number excludes killed 'insurgents' and Iraqi security forces, so that actual number of war-related deaths would be much higher annually.)

It is estimated that 75,000 persons have died in the civil war in Sri Lanka since 1982, or 2800 a year.

Iraq is higher, just with regard to civilian casualties.

The Kashmir conflict is estimated to have killed 70,000 persons since 1988, or about 3500 a year.

Iraq is higher.

In the Lebanon Civil War of 1975-1990, it is estimated that at least 100,000 persons were killed, 75,000 civilians and 25,000 military.

If we extrapolated out Iraq's August death rate for civilians over 15 years, that would be 64,000 or not far from the toll in Lebanon's war.

Let me repeat: The level of violence at this moment in Iraq is similar to what prevailed on average during one of the 20th century's worst ethnic civil wars! It is still higher than the casualty rates in Sri Lanka and Kashmir, two of the worst ongoing conflicts in the world.

Only in an Orwellian society could our press declare the relative decline in monthly death tolls in Iraq to constitute "calm" in an absolute sense.

And that is if the August levels are taken as the baseline and if the numbers continue to be that low. If we averaged deaths during the previous 12 months, the baseline would be much higher.

The current Iraq Civil War is one of the world's most deadly continuing conflicts, worse than Sri Lanka and Kashmir and on a par with the 15-year long Lebanon Civil War!

This is the "success" that exceeds all dreams, according to the Democratic candidate for President of the United States -- the voice, you'll recall, of hope and change.

Military Correspondent

There has always been a bizarre synchronicity in the 9/11 affair. You may think that I mean to comment on the coincidence that our national emergency condition was begun with an attack some seven years ago on 9/11 -- the very national date code that already said "Emergency!" to the American people. But I was thinking more about the coincidence that 9/11/01 followed the strange announcement of 9/11/90 by the first President Bush that the first Middle Eastern War would create a "New World Order." The attack of 9/11/01 came eleven years later to the day.

I wouldn't be at all surprised if there weren't another strained coincidence with another 9/11 event on this week's seventh anniversary, such as a hurricane like IKE striking a US Gulf Coast target. It would be another little numeric/numerological reminder that our pre-9/11 home sweet home of America has become a post-9/11 homeland sweet homeland, Amerika, and that the only sure guarantee against a hostile world is an absolute government.

This kind of thinking is either medieval or postmodern, depending on your reason for believing that the unlikely coincidences will continue to come. If you believe, as do a solid chunk of the American people, that God's hand is made manifest when such improbabilities occur, then you are as much a child of faith as Saint Francis. If, on the other hand, you believe that these "signs" are false miracles set in place by occult powers who have captured our country in a dark conspiracy, then you are as cynical as Socrates.

I suppose it all begins with what you think of the weather -- especially of IKE, which is tentatively scheduled for a US landfall this Thursday, on the seventh anniversary of 9/11. I offer more food for thought than digested answers. IKE will speak for himself, although there are those who suggest that he has already said plenty in his name itself:

"I" the first letter, can be used to represent its occult value of "9" -- the ninth letter;
"K" its second letter, can be used to represent its occult value of "11".
So, some would have it that IKE has already been "written" as a "9/11" event.

I am hardly the first to observe that the super-storms of the post-9/11 era have been effective weapons against the American people. Indeed, in this area of growing interest, I merely echo a direct Bush quote. After touring the devastation from Katrina in New Orleans, he put the matter succinctly:

"It's as if the entire Gulf Coast were obliterated by the worst kind of weapon you can imagine." ~~~ George W. Bush, Sept. 3, 2005

Years earlier, Clinton's Secretary of Defense, William Cohen, admitted the weaponization of primordial Earth forces at a 1997 counter-terrorism conference:

"Others are engaging even in an eco-type of terrorism whereby they can alter the climate, set off earthquakes, volcanoes remotely through the use of electromagnetic waves. So there are plenty of ingenious minds out there that are at work finding ways in which they can wreak terror upon other nations. It's real, and that's the reason why we have to intensify our efforts, and that's why this is so important."

Good Morning Middle America, your King of Simple News is on the air.

I had a big weekend as I officially turned 62 yesterday and will begin drawing Social Security. I once worried that our government had squandered the Social Security money away, but events over the week-end involving a couple of kids named Fannie and Freddie have now proven that there is actually no end to the government coffers.

Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were losing billions from their childish lending practices and were finding it more and more difficult to have their allowances raised by the private sector. These famous kids were behaving so badly that stock in Fannie fell from $68.50 to $3.53, and Freddie, not to outdone, went from $65.85 down to $2.26. Freddie and Fannie became unwanted step children of the financial community and were put up for adoption.

Luckily for these orphans, they were "too big to fail," and were quickly adopted on Sunday by a bachelor going only by the name of "Uncle Sam."

This adoption is a wonderful and charitable event and has created a global stock rally as folks around the world have determined that not only will Uncle Sam protect poor orphans, but also the foreign bond holders who have been feeding these kids. That's right, Fannie and Freddie were getting foreign aide.

To take it directly from the horse's mouth, Jacky Choi, a Hong Kong-based fund manager at Value Partners Ltd., which manages about US $5 billion in assets in Asia, said "The bailout comes as a relief to the many Asian governments and institutions with the mortgage giants' debt on their books."

So ya see, the stock market is not nearly as risky as you may have imagined if it involves America's lenders such as Japan and China who certainly can't be left holding the proverbial bag. Otherwise they may not loan us anymore money and we would have default on the deed to Yellowstone Park. The risk and the debt have to be shared and we are certainly a sharing lot here in the good ol' U.S. of A.

How many of you are familiar with the old, "The Band" song, "Take a load off Fanny?" Alright everyone, all of you tax payers out there, in the key of 'C', sing along with me now. "Take a load of Fannie, take a load for free, take a load off Fannie and Freddie, and and, and, put the load right on me." Good, excellent singing today.

The really good news is that our very own federal government has now become America's number one lender. Oh joy. Finally we will be borrowing from someone with a proven track record of incurring unlimited debt that can be enjoyed by generations to come.

All of our worries are over...well, except for the former Big-3. Chrysler, Ford and G.M. are hoping to get a $50 Billion loan from that same Uncle Sam character so that they can get busy making better cars that get higher gas mileage. Now there is a concept worth consideration...about 20 years ago.

The Freddie and Fannie deal is probably the most under-reported event of this year. This is a moronic monumental move to salvage the un-retrievable mess that government wrote, produced, directed and starred in. This is a remake of the old hit film, "Gone With the Wind."

For anyone who hasn't already done so, please click on "the book" button at the top of the page. Read the free chapter "Smoke and Mirrors." As you read that chapter, consider that I wrote that portion of my book when housing was an absolutely white hot investment with no end in sight.

If you enjoy that chapter, you'll love the rest of the book. I discount the book to my blog readers. Send me an e-mail with your mailing address and I'll send you a signed book including first class postage for $12.50.

What a sorry lot we humans are, particularly those of us immersed in the "American Way of Life." Killing is indeed our business. And business has never been better.

According to the World Resources Institute, 4 species go extinct every hour "due to tropical deforestation alone."

More than half the tropical rainforests are gone and at the rate we're going, we will have reduced chopped, hacked, sawed, dozed, and burned our way to the virtual eradication of the "lungs of the planet" by the year 2030.

Kids, get ready to start suffocating because we're NOT giving up our meat habit! Patrick Henry was prepared to die for liberty, but we have a nobler agenda: Give us more grazing land or give us death!

Reflecting the spiritually perverse beings we are here in America (don't be fooled by our carefully polished veneer of civility and humanity-we're the most savage murderers of all) is the fact that we are considering replacing our "commander-in-chief," (the most heinous war criminal since Hitler) with a senile war-mongering septuagenarian and his recently anointed reactionary sidekick who never met a non-human animal she wouldn't slaughter or an ecosystem she wouldn't decimate in the name of "hunting," "free enterprise," or "resource acquisition."

Or we may occupy the impending vacancy in the White House with a pseudo-progressive who has sworn his allegiance to the genocidal "state" of Israel and to corporate America whilst surrounding himself with a depraved and ruthless entourage, most of whom sold their souls to Wall Street and the military industrial complex years ago.

McCain at the helm? Obama on the throne? Who cares? Either way we party on here in America, oblivious to the devastation and suffering our obscene existence is causing. Our factory farms will continue torturing and slaughtering billions of animals each year to satiate our meat addiction, McDonald's will keep our arteries clogged and our ascent to obesity intact, Big Pharma will inundate us with soothing and sedating "happy pills" to ensure our guilt-free participation in the murder of the planet, Big Oil will gleefully continue meeting our gluttonous demand for its "black gold," and the corporate media will keep our wretched and vile hologram intact by constantly re-enforcing rabid nationalism, ahistorical thinking, consumerism, narcissism, alienation, rugged individualism, "free" markets, the virtues of wealth, and the "superiority" of the American Way.

While numerous complex entities and dynamics enable the power elite to maintain their strangle-hold on wealth and power, military might remains their principal means of dominating, extorting, exploiting, stealing, and annihilating with impunity. While we outspend the rest of the world (that's all other countries combined, mind you) maintaining and expanding the war machine we revere with religious fervor, it is not money alone that gives our lords and masters the capacity to keep the world safe for capitalism and corporate plunder.

Our dirty little secret here in the US is that we built and buttressed our crumbling empire by unleashing a force so potent and so capable of rendering life on Earth extinct that it makes capitalism's "slow motion" ecocide look like candy-striping. In 1945 we became the first and only country to harness the power of nuclear fission and utilize it as a weapon of mass destruction. Our cold-blooded murder of hundreds of thousands of Japanese civilians cemented our position as global hegemon.

When the uber-capitalist ruling elite of the US saw a socioeconomic system that was a potential threat to their supremacy, they successfully convinced most of their wage slaves that they were well off under a system of the rich, by the rich and for the rich and that the "communist threat" in Russia must be extinguished. What was their solution? They forced the Russians (who were moving with amazing rapidity to industrialize an agrarian economy which was dwarfed by that of the US) into a pissing contest over who could manufacture the largest arsenal of nuclear weapons.

Their strategy was of course successful. The Soviet Union eventually collapsed. Country-clubbing white men with snow on the roof-top and fog on the brain maintained their "right" to clench their billion dollar net worth statements in one decrepit claw and the deeds and titles of their myriad precious possessions in the other. And the rest of us could breathe easy knowing that the "American Way of Life" was no longer in jeopardy. But at what cost to the Earth and the rest of its inhabitants?

Nuclear non-proliferation is a joke. Treaties, vows, resolutions, good intentions, and promises involving crossing hearts, hoping to die and sticking needles into eyes have resulted in even more nukes brandished by more nations. Meanwhile, we US Americans continue dictating who gets "nuclear privileges" AND we still possess more WMD's than any other nation. When is another country going to invade us, depose the evil junta in DC, and hold a public lynching like our puppets did in Iraq?

Thankfully sanity (or perhaps just sheer luck) has prevailed and we have been the only nation brutal and stupid enough to employ nuclear weapons. And we have put our nuclear knowledge to constructive use by harnessing the power of the atom to create electricity. Yet when Prometheus brought us the "fire of the Twentieth Century" and told us we could use it for peaceful purposes, he failed to warn us that if this "fire" gets out of control we're all cooked.

Nuclear power only produces 20% of the electricity consumed in the US, but accounts for a number of staggering problems we simply keep sweeping under the rug for future generations to solve. Forget logic or consideration for our children or for Mother Earth, though. John McCain, Greenpeace founder Patrick Moore, and a host of other whores to the nuclear power industry hail nuclear energy as a "green" alternative to fossil fuels and clamor for more.

Yes, let's build more nuclear power plants. After all, given our culture of militarism and death, why not erect as many temples honoring Thanatos as is humanly possible?

Let's take a closer look at the technology many are ready to embrace as the "remedy for Climate Change."

Nuclear power is touted as a cheap alternative to coal (and other ways of producing energy). While it is a less expensive means of actually generating electricity once a reactor is online (the operating cost is about half that of a coal-fired plant), there are tremendous fiscal costs associated with building a nuclear facility, removing and storing radioactive waste, and decommissioning a plant once it is retired. (One hasn't been closed yet but the estimated cost to do so is around $300 million).

And just who's underwriting these outrageous costs? We the taxpayers! On May 12, 2008, the Wall Street Journal wrote, "For electricity generation, the EIA concludes that solar energy is subsidized to the tune of $24.34 per megawatt hour, wind $23.37 and 'clean coal' $29.81. By contrast, normal coal receives 44 cents, natural gas a mere quarter, hydroelectric about 67 cents and nuclear power $1.59."

More importantly, the threat nuclear energy poses to the environment is so high that calling it "green" is an absurdity one would think had sprung from the mind of Lewis Carroll.

Since nuclear plants rely on large bodies of water to cool reactors (and avoid a melt-down) and discharge about 70% of the heat they generate (as waste), they are vulnerable to droughts and cause significant thermal pollution in the bodies of water that cool them.

Nuclear power production begins to contaminate the environment with radioactivity before the fuel even arrives at the plant. It takes a ton of uranium ore to produce 3 kilograms of uranium oxide. While the tailings that are left behind emit small levels of radiation, they do release radon gas and radioactive dust at a rate 10,000 times faster than the unmined ore. This nuclear contamination stays in the environment for 100,000 years and over time reaches such high levels that a Los Alamos Laboratory report concluded that we need to, "to zone the land in uranium mining and milling districts to forbid human habitation."

Nuclear power facilities produce a steady stream of low-level radioactive waste, including gas, solid and liquid. Gaseous and liquid wastes are "cleaned and diluted," but are eventually released into the environment. Solid wastes are transported to one of three low-level radiation disposal sites in the US where they continue accumulating and emitting radiation into the environment. Sounds Earth-friendly, doesn't it?

About once a year 33% of a reactor's fuel rods are replaced, producing anywhere from 12 to 30 tons of high level nuclear waste. The frightening part is that we've been using this "green" technology for 40 years now and still haven't figured out a safe and permanent means of disposing of its extremely dangerous and lethal by-products. Temporary pools or dry cask storage (large steel cylinders that require constant monitoring) onsite at nuclear facilities house most of the spent reactor fuel, which will remain a dire threat to the environment for tens of thousands of years. Nuclear power plants are running out of storage capacity and the "permanent storage solution" at Yucca Mountain, projected to be operational in 2017, is little more than a tentative and distant speck on the horizon. Perhaps we could erect dry casks on some of the sprawling estates that McCain has forgotten he owned....

How remote is the possibility of a nuclear melt-down resulting in a disaster? Let's ask the thousands of heavily irradiated victims of Chernobyl and those living in the vicinity of the "near miss" at Three Mile Island.

Lest we forget, nuclear reactors are "dual-use" by virtue of the fact that plutonium is one of their by-products and plutonium can be used to produce nuclear weapons. Small wonder our ruling class trembles with fear (hence their belligerence, bullying and macho posturing) at the prospect of Iran (a nation which refuses to genuflect to the American/Israeli Empire) developing nuclear reactors to generate power.

And someone please explain what it is that's so "green" about a source of electricity that produces waste that people (whom our malevolent and brutal foreign policy has pissed off-there are millions and millions of them) could use to make a "dirty bomb" and then deploy it against us. Granted the potential efficacy of a dirty bomb is subject to debate, but who wants to find out? We already have 104 repositories for bomb-making materials scattered across the United States. Let's push to add more!

While many anti-nuclear activists focus their efforts on opposing the issuance of licenses to build new nuclear power plants, another approach may prove to be more effective and is in play at this moment. Members of IPSEC, a group of over 70 community groups, have devoted themselves to shutting down the nuclear power plant known as the Indian Point Energy Center. Grassroots and non-profit, the objective of IPSEC groups like Riverkeeper is to replace nukes with a truly safe form of sustainable energy and to preserve the integrity of the environment. If IPSEC is successful in setting a precedent by catalyzing the shuttering of Indian Point, a domino effect could ensue and spell the beginning of the end for the menace of nuclear power.

For a litany of reasons, IPSEC is wholly justified in its appeals to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to deny Entergy Corporation's bid to renew Indian Point's license for another 20 years. In fact, if sanity and moral considerations amounted to more than a pair of sickly midgets making desperate and ridiculous attempts to halt the stampeding herd of narcissistic consumers and greedy corporations that are the embodiments of monopoly capitalism, there wouldn't even be a debate.

Indian Point is situated about 25 miles from New York City, a rather populous area, eh? (93 million people live within a 500 mile radius of this nuclear facility, most of whom would be impacted by a major accident or meltdown at Indian Point).

Indian Point's two reactors that continue to function were built in 1974 and 1976, which means that they are old, hence prone to cracks, leaks, fissures, wear, deterioration, and the like. It also means that they were built to less stringent safety specifications than newer reactors.

At one time Indian Point had three functional reactors. In an October 2001 article (entitled America's Terrorist Nuclear Threat to Itself) long-time anti-nuclear activist Harvey Wasserman wrote, "Indeed, Indian Point Unit One was shut because activists warned that its lack of an emergency core cooling system made it an unacceptable risk. The government ultimately agreed."

In 2006 the NRC fined Entergy Corporation, the owners and operators of Indian Point, $130,000 for problems associated with its system designed to warn nearby residents to evacuate in the event of a nuclear crisis.

Until they finally began moving them to dry casks in January of this year, Indian Point had 1500 tons of spent fuel rods stored in temporary pools. These pools have been leaking tritium and strontium-90 (both highly toxic substances) into the groundwater and the Hudson River since 2005 and are demonstrably vulnerable to sabotage or attack. And as Wasserman elucidates in the previously cited article, these pools (not to mention the reactor cores) are horrific accidents waiting to happen:

"Without continuous monitoring and guaranteed water flow, the thousands of tons of radioactive rods in the cores and the thousands more stored in those fragile pools would rapidly melt into super-hot radioactive balls of lava that would burn into the ground and the water table and, ultimately, the Hudson."

Indian Point Energy Center manifests nearly all that is inane and insane about humans shattering atomic nuclei and hubristically believing we can play with the fires of hell without getting burned.....

Yet there's at least a "little" Eichmann in all of us as we faithfully participate in our ecocidal "American Way of Life." So what do we care about a little radiation here or a few meltdowns there? Remember, "Killing is [our] business.....and business is good!" Just ask a member of that species that will be extinct in about 15 minutes....

For those of you refusing to bow at the altar of Thanatos, click on the links below to find out what you can do to help IPSEC shut down Indian Point:

Paris - There is much current talk about a new cold war, or a new configuration of nations, a new power balance (or imbalance). There is something in this; it's a consequence of the crisis produced by Georgia's foolhardy and tragic attack on South Ossetia and upon the Russian soldiers stationed there. This upset standard thinking about the U.S. and about Putin's Russia

(Parenthetically, there is no longer dispute as to Mikheil Saakashvili's responsibility for launching the attack, presumably in the mistaken belief that Georgia's pending NATO candidature would either deter Russian retaliation, or force the United States and NATO to support his adventure. He was wrong on both counts. See the devastating report by C.J. Chivers and Thom Shanker in the September 3 New York Times.)

What is being ignored in discussion of new power balances and revived cold war is the reason why international relations have fundamentally changed since the collapse of the Soviet Union.

The cold war was ideological struggle. It obviously involved power confrontations, the Warsaw Pact versus NATO, the presumed Soviet military threat to Western Europe, the Korean war - and of course the nuclear threat.

But what was behind it was Marxist-Leninist, and later Maoist, ideology. These were doctrinally expansionist. They said that capitalism was in its final stages, the class war between workers and industrial-capitalism and imperialism approaching its culminating crisis, and Communism on the march towards inevitable victory.

You can question to what extent leaders in Moscow and Beijing really believed this. They had to act as if they believed it. Millions of Communists in the West and an unknowable number in the U.S.S.R. and China really did believe it. The ideology was the only source of legitimacy and power for the Soviet and Chinese Communist parties and governments.

They had to seem ever on the march, expanding - or seeming to expand - because they had to make people believe that they were revolutionary regimes which sooner or later, by the scientifically determined dialectical progression of history, were guaranteed to produce victory, a New Dawn, the Great Day, The Victory of the East, and millenarian rule by workers and peasants, and the "progressive intellectuals" allied with them. The United States and its allies were in the struggle for classical geopolitical and strategic reasons. They had interests to defend. They were defending the new democratic postwar order in Western Europe. Harry Truman, Dean Acheson, Clement Attlee, Ernest Bevin, George Kennan, and the leading American and Allied diplomatic figures of the time, were not ideologues. They were all in the classical sense of the term, conservatives, defending the democratic order.

It is true that during the period when John Foster Dulles was American secretary of state, the United States itself caught a bad case of the ideological fevers. Dulles was a prominent churchman, a Presbyterian Elder, as well as an international lawyer, and as John Lukacs writes in his history of the Cold War, brought "the distressingly puritanical and at times even pharisaic inclination to see in the world struggle a national personification of good versus evil." The fever unfortunately became a chronic condition, with as yet no cure.

Thus today the situation is the reverse of 1948-1950. Russia is not an ideological power. It has no doctrine to sell. Its preoccupations are prosperity and power. Vladimir Putin has no wish to subvert and rule the United States or Europe. He just doesn't want NATO's candidates biting his ankles. He wants level-headed governments on his borders who don't make trouble for Russia. But that is perfectly, if regrettably, normal.

The United States has been invading troublesome Caribbean and Central American neighbors since the mid-19th century. It was what the U.S. Marine Corps did for a living - Cuba, Haiti, the Dominican Republic. Ronald Reagan absurdly invaded Granada, officially to save American students from dangerous Cuban airport laborers. The senior George Bush invaded Panama to seize President Manuel Noriega, a former employee of the CIA. It has never been explained what those two invasions were really about. There were (widely publicized) clandestine operations in Nicaragua and El Salvador. All this has been taken for granted as the Monroe Doctrine at work.

China is no longer an ideological power. Chinese Communism has been intellectually dead for two decades. The Party is kept going with all its congresses and assemblies because that furnishes the only justification China's leaders have for why they are in power. China's actual politics function through Party co-option, favoritism and power struggle. This one day will probably end in a major crisis, as I have said before in this space.

China is not an expanding power. It wants Taiwan, various "lost" islands in the China Seas; it demands recognition that Tibet is Chinese. But all this is traditional. It certainly is not promoting Communism abroad.

Today the world's only expansionist ideological power is the United States, aggressively pushing everywhere, persuading, promoting, and even invading countries for "democracy." It wants to make everyone democratic "like us," which in the end means to do as we want them to do. The ideology is meant to be generous, but it is a generosity devoted to the control of energy resources, raw materials, trade, and finance.

Dear Polizeirichter Harrington,

Congratulations, you have just been awarded the "Vidkun Quisling Award!" Your name will now live throughout history with such past award winners as Marcus Junius Brutus, Judas Iscariot, Benedict Arnold, George Stephanopoulos, Ralph Nader, Vidkun Quisling and last year's winner Volksjudge Anthony (Fat Tony) Kennedy.

Without your lock-step calling for the repeal of the Constitution, your support of our two coup d'etats, your willingness to commit acts of treason for the Junta by ending the 1st and fourth amendments to that damned piece of paper, Iraq and these many other profitable oil wars to come would have been impossible! With the help of our mutual friends, the other "Junta Whores" you have made it possible for all of us to goose-step off to a brave new bank account!

Along with this award you will be given the Iron Cross 2nd class with copper clusters presented by our glorious Fuhrer, Herr Bush at a gala celebration at "der Wolf's Lair," formally "Rancho de Bimbo," on 10-31-2008. We salute you Herr Harrington, Sieg Heil!

Signed,
Vice Fuhrer Cheney