Bush`s Hegemonic Fantasy

Finding itself in Republican sights
and with no Democratic power center to offer protection,
National Public Radio is turning into an upscale version
of Fox “News”. Nevertheless, information still
gets out if the listener is sufficiently attentive.

On July 5, NPR`s

All Things Considered interviewed two warmongers
for their views on the North Korean missile test. One
was Ashton Carter, a Clinton administration Assistant
Secretary of Defense, now at the

Kennedy School of Government at Harvard. The other
was Ambassador Christopher Hill, an
Assistant Secretary of State in the Bush regime.

The Clinton DOD assistant secretary
is coauthor of a recent article advocating an unilateral
US military attack on North Korea. [If
Necessary, Strike and Destroy, By Ashton B.
Carter and William J. Perry, Washington Post,
June 22, 2006] His first pitch on NPR was that the whole
region, not just the US, is threatened by North Korea
and that everyone should gang up on North Korea to make
them behave. The NPR interviewer asked Carter to
reconcile his multilateralism with his own
recommendation for the US to unilaterally attack North
Korea. Carter replied that North Korea`s missile was
developed to attack us, so we had to protect ourselves.

When the NPR interviewer asked
Carter why deterrence would fail with North Korea when
deterrence succeeded in the case of the more powerful
Soviet Union, Carter agreed that North Korea was not
sufficiently insane to launch an attack on the US.

So, if the US is not in danger of
being attacked by North Korea, why does Carter want to
attack North Korea?

The answer is, well, you see, if we
permit North Korea to develop any weapon with which they
might be able to stand up to us on some issue critical
to North Korea, well, they might not do as we want them
to do. Carter could not conceive of a world in which any
country existed that might be able to behave differently
than the US dictates.

Ambassador Hill agreed, but he came
at it in a different way. Hill`s view is that it is
China`s, Japan`s, and South Korea`s responsibility to
make North Korea behave as the US wants it to behave.
Both Hill and Carter agreed that no country, with the
exception of Israel, has a right to any interests of its
own unless it is an interest that coincides with US
interests. No other interest is legitimate.

Listening to the pair of hegemonic
maniacs, I realized that the US is the new Rome—there is
no legitimate power but us. Any other power is a
potential threat to our interests and must be eliminated
before it gets any independent ideas. The US, however,
is far more dangerous than Rome. Rome saw its world as
the Mediterranean and, for a while, Northern Europe, but
the US thinks the whole world is its oyster. The Bush
regime is busy trying to marginalize Russia, and

neocons are preparing war plans to attack China
before that country can achieve military parity with the
US.

Gentle reader, consider what it
means when our government believes other countries have
no right to their own interests unless they coincide
with US interests.

It means that we are the tyrant
country. We cannot be the tyrant country without being
perceived as the tyrant country. Consequently, the rest
of the world unites against us.

How is the US, which has spent
three years proving that it cannot successfully occupy
Iraq, a small country of only 25 million people, going
to control India, China, Russia, Europe, Africa and
South America?

It`s not going to happen.

What it does mean is that the US
government in its hubris and delusion is going to
continue starting wars and attacking other countries
until a coalition of greater forces smashes us. Even
among our European allies we are already perceived as
the greatest threat to world peace and stability.

Our power is not what it once was.
We are weak in manufacturing and dependent on China for
advanced technology products. We are dependent on China
to finance our wars, our budget and trade deficits. How
long will China accommodate us when China reads about
Bush`s plans to prevent China from achieving military
parity?

The Bush regime thinks that it can
have every country under its thumb. Neocons are fond of
proclaiming that it is a unipolar world in which the US
is supreme.

This is a fantasy, and it is
rapidly becoming a nightmare.

COPYRIGHT

CREATORS SYNDICATE, INC.

Paul Craig Roberts
[email
him] was Assistant
Secretary of the Treasury in the Reagan Administration.
He is the author of

Supply-Side Revolution : An Insider`s Account of
Policymaking in Washington;
 Alienation
and the Soviet Economy and

Meltdown: Inside the Soviet Economy,
and is the co-author with Lawrence M. Stratton of


The Tyranny of Good Intentions : How Prosecutors and
Bureaucrats Are Trampling the Constitution in the Name
of Justice. Click

here for Peter
Brimelow`s Forbes Magazine interview with Roberts
about the recent epidemic of prosecutorial misconduct.