We have been searching high and low for those Weapons of Mass Destruction that we claimed that Hans Blix couldn’t find. We haven’t found a trace of one. Not one clue, not one. We told the world that we knew that the Iraqi despot had them. had hid them from the UN inspectors and would use them when our army penetrated the “Red Line” around Baghdad. There has been no such attack of chemical and biological weapons and the only use of radiological weapons has been our own use of depleted uranium tank killer rounds. Does it make a difference?

We told the world that we were going to Iraq to liberate the people from a brutally oppressive regime. We predicted that we would be greeted with enthusiasm, cheers and dancing in the streets. It did not happen. Instead of being joined by a roused population in our sweep to depose Saddam we were met with resistance. We have yet to reduce Basra. We don’t control either An Nasiriya or An Najif. We simply bypassed the urban resistance in our politically mandated race to Baghdad. We are seen as invaders not as liberators. Does it make a difference?

Regime Change, Disarmament, and Liberation of the Iraqi People were all announced as our rationale for going to war. Those were the public rationale but they were never the reasons for this second American war of the New American Century. None of them are of any import. All are consigned to the margins. None of them make any difference at all.

Saddam Hussein was never the objective of this war any more than Usama Bin Laden has been the objective of the war in Afghanistan. The objective of these wars, as well as the other wars of imperial ambition to come, has always been to enforce American economic hegemony in the New American Century. In the first part of the 19th Century American policy was driven by the idea that it was the Manifest Destiny of the United States to rule the continent from ocean to ocean. In this first part of the 21st Century what is emerging is the rationale that it is the Manifest Destiny of the United States to rule the planet from pole to pole. That is what the unfinished campaign in Afghanistan was about. That is what the present campaign in Iraq is about. That is what the coming campaigns of the modern Hundred Years War of the New American Century will be about.

We will not see peace in the span of my lifetime, nor in lifetimes of my children nor of my grandchildren. Peace will only come when either the Manifest Destiny of the New American Century is realized and the inevitable decline and fall of the American Empire follows.