George Bush's Crusading Scorecard (2001-2007) (TOM ENGELHARDT)

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The Church of Our Man of Global Domination

So think of this as Bush's crusading scorecard for the years 2001-2007 -- this record of barbarism with its guarantee of a "whirlwind of blowback," as Pepe Escobar of the Asia Times puts it, and the unmistakable look of a war against Islam.

In truth, the most obvious factor linking all of the above together, however, the real thing they have in common, is not, in the normal sense, religious at all. If there is a religious war going on, waged by men (and a few women) of faith, then that faith is neither Christianity, nor Judaism, nor is the war against Islam per se. It comes instead from the fundamentalist Church of Our Man of Global Domination and at its heart is the monotheistic religion of Force. If the arc of instability were inhabited by recalcitrant, angry, sometimes armed, and sometimes destructive Buddhists, sitting on vast energy reserves, this war would look like a war against the Buddha himself.

The essential doctrine of faith that ties all the disparate foreign-policy acts of this administration together is the belief that to every global problem, to every difficult situation, there is but a single striking and uniform response -- not the application of democracy, but the application of force.

In its pursuit of force as a faith, the Bush administration has managed to lower the bar on all applications of force by any state (just as it has raised the value of a nuclear arsenal and so, despite its threats of war, lowered the bar on the proliferation of those weapons). This is but a small part of the price a regime of force must pay when force is such an inadequate instrument in our world. The single most striking aspect of Bush foreign policy is that, over and over, it is revealed to be a quiver with but a single arrow in it. If things are going well, you reach back, take that arrow of force, or the threat of it, and notch it into your bow. If things are going badly, you do the same. For an administration so focused on the domination of planetary resources, its officials have, in fact, proven themselves remarkably resourceless.

The sort of eternal global military domination imagined in the National Security Strategy document they issued with great fanfare in 2002 is, of course, long gone. The sort of domination in Iraq and other lands in the arc of instability of which the neocons dreamed so fervently is no longer at issue either.

The religion of Force has proven itself a remarkably weak reed in our complex and difficult world, but that doesn't matter to them. Like many cultists, deeply imbued with their own way of looking at life, our President, our Vice President, and their dwindling band of compatriots can still imagine no other solutions than force, whatever the presenting problems. Not only can't they think outside the box, but the box itself is narrowing around this Presidency and Vice Presidency -- and believe me, given their crusading record, that's dangerous indeed.

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