World war or world peace is the blunt choice that will face either Barack Obama or John McCain when one of them is elected president of the United States on Tuesday, November 4, 2008.
For a major eruption of violence to be averted, the new president must deal positively with the reappearance of Russia on the world stage, the emergence of China as an economic force, and the aspirations of all the nations on earth for a decent and secure way of life.
Making matters much more dangerous are the ongoing financial crisis, along with what appears to be the start of a worldwide economic recession of as yet undetermined depth and duration.
It is Europe, not the U.S., from which proposals are emerging for a transformative approach to the most compelling issues. But will it be enough?
THE DISASTROUS PRESIDENCY OF GEORGE W. BUSH
In December 2000, at the time the U.S. Supreme Court was intervening in the disputed vote count in Florida to name Republican George W. Bush president over Democrat Al Gore, the stock market began to crash. The "dot.com" bubble, based largely on foreign investment in internet companies and technology stocks, deflated. By the time Bush was inaugurated in January 2001, signs of a recession were appearing.
This did not prevent the Bush administration from initiating a $450 billion tax cut for the upper income brackets that Congress approved in March 2001. A similar cut was subsequently enacted in May 2003.
On September 11, 2001, the World Trade Center's Twin Towers in New York City were attacked by airplanes flying into them, followed that morning by an air attack on the Pentagon in Washington, D.C.
Terrorists from Al Qaeda, an organization of Islamic extremists associated with the Afghan mujaheddin, and a Saudi figure, Osama bin Laden, alleged to be their leader, were blamed. The wealthy bin Laden family had close ties to the U.S. and the Bush family.
Within a few weeks, the Bush administration pulled a battle plan from the shelves of the Pentagon and invaded Afghanistan. The object was to wrest control of that nation from the Taliban, supposedly Al Qaeda collaborators. A new U.S. Asian land war had begun.
In March 2003, the Bush administration added to the Afghan action the second invasion of Iraq in the past thirteen years, following the "Shock and Awe" aerial attack. The assaults on Afghanistan and Iraq, with torture of prisoners, use of depleted uranium weapons, and killing of civilians, was methodical and brutal.
Americans who had opposed the Vietnam War in the 1960s and 70s were appalled at how history was repeating itself. The public was subjected to a relentless barrage of pro-war propaganda by square-jawed military talking heads
Behind the scenes were the international financial and oil interests who stood to benefit from the removal of Iraqi president Saddam Hussein as an independent actor in the Middle East. Financiers like David Rockefeller, who had founded the Trilateral Commission and was one of the "internationalist" leaders of what had come to be called the "New World Order," tended to remain in the shadows, but their presence was palpable.
Rockefeller had reportedly expressed his world view in a statement at a 1991 meeting of the Bilderberg Group:
"The supra-national sovereignty of an intellectual elite and world bankers is surely preferable to the national auto-determination practiced in past centuries."
With respect to most of the U.S. military actions after World War II, especially the ones after Ronald Reagan was elected president in 1980, an argument could be made that the internationalists were using the U.S. military as their personal global police force.
Even so, the Neocons—"new conservatives"—who had rushed to the forefront after September 11, 2001, working chiefly through Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and Vice-President Richard Cheney, seemed to be a more radical element than the officials who had been in charge during the Clinton years, when the U.S. and NATO went to war against Serbia. Many of the Neocons were Jewish, with strong ties to Israel.
In 1997 the Neocons had created the Project for a New American Century, which advocated a new invasion of Iraq, and published a statement that positive change might result from a "catalyzing event—a new Pearl Harbor." Later this was interpreted as possibly having foreshadowed the 9/11 attacks.
President George W. Bush justified the Iraq invasion by claiming that the regime of Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction. Later this claim proved to be a lie.
To many the attack was a simple act of aggression. Kofi Annan, Secretary General of the U.N. said of the invasion on September 16, 2004, "I have indicated it was not in conformity with the U.N. charter. From our point of view, from the charter point of view, it was illegal." The U.S. paid no attention to Annan's misgivings.
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