The Chicken Hawk Factor

"There's more combat experience on the 7th floor of the State Department than in the entire Office of the Secretary of Defense," quipped the high-ranking State Department official to a room filled with senior military officers last month. The statement "generated riotous applause," according to an eyewitness quoted in the Nelson Report, a private newsletter subscribed to by foreign-policy heavyweights and embassies in Washington. [read more]

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Bush is Intent on Painting Allies and Enemies in the Middle East as Evil
by Robert Fisk

Just as Americans are recovering from the harrowing television re-runs of the 11 September attacks, their President is going to launch the biggest reshaping of the Middle East since the British and French parceled out the Arab lands after the 1914-18 war. When he addresses the United Nations on Thursday, George Bush will be threatening not only Iraq – which had absolutely nothing to do with the crimes against humanity in New York and Washington – but Syria, Iran and, by extension, Saudi Arabia and Egypt. [read more]

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Cheney's Warped Perspective on the Need to Attack Iraq
by Scott Ritter

Contrary to the myth propagated by Cheney, there were no "smoking gun" revelations made by Hussein Kamal regarding hidden Iraqi weapons of mass destruction. Throughout his interview with UNSCOM, a UN special commission, Hussein Kamal reiterated his main point--that nothing was left. "All chemical weapons were destroyed," he said. "I ordered destruction of all chemical weapons. All weapons--biological, chemical, missile, nuclear--were destroyed. There is not a single missile left ... they [Iraq] had kept blueprints and molds for production, but all the missiles were destroyed." [read more]

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Iraq War Hawks Have Plans to Reshape Entire Mideast

As the Bush administration debates going to war against Iraq, its most hawkish members are pushing a sweeping vision for the Middle East that sees the overthrow of President Saddam Hussein of Iraq as merely a first step in the region's transformation. [read more]

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The End of Empire
by William Greider

The imperial ambitions of the Bush Administration, post-9/11, are founded on quicksand and are eventually sure to founder, but for fundamental reasons not currently under discussion. Bush's open-ended claims for US power--including the unilateral right to invade and occupy "failed states" to execute "regime change"--offend international law and are prerogatives associated only with empire. But Bush's greater vulnerability is about money. You can't sustain an empire from a debtor's weakening position--sooner or later the creditors pull the plug. That humiliating lesson was learned by Great Britain early in the last century, and the United States faces a similar reckoning ahead. [read more]

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All of this reminds me of little poem I read in high school.

Ozymandias

I met a traveler from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read,
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed,
And on the pedestal these words appear:
"My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings:
Look upon my works, ye Mighty, and despair!"
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.

Percy Bysshe Shelley
1792-1822