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February 24, 2007
The Bush administration continually talks in terms of ending tyranny and replacing it with democracy in the world of nations. Vice President, Dick Cheney, who is currently visiting Australia, is talking in terms of the war on terrorism and the unprecedented struggle between civilization and barbarism.
The US actions to achieve this goal of advancing civilization include internationally illegal, unilateralist, and preemptive attacks on other countries, accompanied by arbitrary imprisonments and the practice of torture. The US defends its pursuit of regime change and advancing civilization by making the claim that the United States possesses an exceptional status among nations that confers upon it special international responsibilities, and exceptional privileges in meeting those responsibilities.
Garland
Few other nations accept this manifest destiny claim, as they see it as a national myth of divine election and mission. Even the British realize they were fighting for the United States, not Britain, in Iraq.They are leaving a local civil war in Basra, and their departure looks like retreat.
William Pfaff in Manifest Destiny: A New Direction for America in the New York of Books says that instead of the stability promised by the proponents of American military and political deployment in the form of Pax Americana we have:
The doomed and destructive war of choice in Iraq, continuing and mounting disorder in Afghanistan following another such war, war between Israel and Hezbollah in Lebanon, between Israel and Hamas in Gaza, as well as between Hamas and Fatah, accompanied by continuing crisis in Palestine, with rumbles of new American wars of choice with Iran or Syria, and the emergence of a nuclear North Korea —all demonstrate deep international instability.
American international hegemony is considered a threat in the Middle East, where it's interventionism is seen in terms of a war against Islamic "nationalism" and as creating an creating an "arc of instability" stretching from Iraq to Pakistan and Afghanistan.
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Do you think John Howard will ever back up all of his Iraq rhetoric with some new sets of testicles?