Column: World domination

With a full-scale war already underway and 24-hour news coverage captivating millions of Americans, it's easy for the ins and outs of the fighting to monopolize our consciousness and blur the big picture. It is frightening to watch Baghdad burn on live TV or to look at the heart-wrenching photos of Iraqi children in the newspaper.

But what scares me even more is what will happen after the bombs stop falling on Baghdad. I'm scared that Operation "Iraqi Freedom" is the beginning of something much bigger - namely, a series of military operations against other "threats" to American interests.

This is very likely, as long as there is a Bush in the White House backed by a team of arrogant, power-hungry war mongers along the lines of Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz.

And believe me, my fears are not unfounded. On the contrary, the belligerent rhetoric emanating from the Bush administration points to future conflicts with Iran, North Korea and Syria, among others. The utter contempt toward the United Nations, along with Bush's flawed doctrine of pre-emtive war, only increases future conflicts.

Above all, the clearest indicator of the direction of American foreign policy is an understanding of the chilling ideology behind our government's foreign policy. The Bush administration envisions a global community wholly shaped by the United States. The National Security Strategy, issued by the White House last fall, states, "The U.S. national security strategy will be based on a distinctly American internationalism that reflects the union of our values and our national interests." Aside from its ethnocentricity, this policy is unnerving in that it ostensibly provides justification for making war on any nation that is a current or even potential threat to broadly defined U.S. interests (most definitely including access to oil).

The administration's foreign policy decisions perfectly illustrate this worldview. The president has shown total disregard for the opinions of other countries, rejecting the Kyoto accords, the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty and the International Criminal Court.

Most recently, he coasted through the diplomatic motions for Iraq, attempting to buy legitimacy from an ad hoc coalition of nations hoping to leech billions in aid from our bloated treasury and afraid of being this war's Yemen. (In Gulf War I, Yemen and Cuba were the only Security Council members to vote against the war. Yemen subsequently lost its $30 million per year aid package for a decade, and Cuba continued to receive squat.)

For a striking articulation of the Bush administration's vision of American foreign affairs, one need only look to the Project for the New American Century, a non-profit organization established to promote American global leadership. PNAC was founded in 1997 by, among others, Cheney, Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz. A report issued by PNAC in 2000 argued that in order for America to remain the world's only unchallenged superpower, we must permanently deploy large military forces around the globe, from Europe to the Persian Gulf to East Asia. Such forces would be both a deterrent and response to any potential challenge to the U.S.-dominated world order. A new, friendly regime in Iraq would provide our military with a perfect place to base our Persian Gulf police squad.