NOT WITH A BANG

March 1, 2003 - Yesterday, February 28, 2003, was one of those days that mark a sea change in the tides of history. There are many such days we remember. They usually mark events that burst rudely into our consciousness. April 12, 1861 marks the day that Beauregard opened fire on Fort Sumter to commence the four years of fratricide that film romanticizes in Gods and Generals. December 7th, 1941 that marks the perfidious attack on Pearl Harbor and lives in infamy. November 22, 1963 that marked the end of Camelot on a Dallas Street. And, the most recent, September 11, 2001, of which we are reminded daily. Those are the kinds of days on which we annually remember just where we were and what we were doing when we heard the news.

February 28, 2003 was not such a day. There was no dramatic event that exploded and focused our common attention. No shots were fired to commence a conflict. No buildings fell nor leaders died. But none the less it marked an end of an era and a beginning of a new age in America’s history. It was an event marked by words, words as deadly as bullets but it did not come in a stirring speech calling a nation to march and sacrifice. It is symbolic of our age that the words came from a spokesman, not a leader, and were spoken almost off hand. The New York Times recorded the words.

“Ari Fleischer, the White House spokesman, said today that President Bush was hopeful that war could be averted, but that to escape military action, Iraq must disarm and Mr. Hussein must be deposed.

“That combination of events, he said, looked highly unlikely.

“Pressed on the point, Mr. Fleischer said both would be necessary conditions because disarmament was the United Nations' goal and changing Iraq's government was the president's.”

Those words marked the end of an era in human history that began on one of those other Watershed dates, December 7th, 1941. It was an era in which the United States built a military strength unequalled in the world but restrained in its application by a unwavering dedication to international consensus and consultation. It is ominously significant that Fleisher did not speak of America’s goals but rather a personal goal to Mr. Bush. With these words The United States abandoned that dedication and transmogrified the American Presidency into an American Caesar with an imperial vision of imposing his will on a reluctant world.

It marked an end to the Atlantic alliance annealed in the fires of World War, quenched in the Cold War and extended to the East with the fall of the Berlin Wall. It marked the beginning of a new alliance of Old Europe with Russian Eurasia to counter-balance America’s newly declared arrogance of power in which one man, upon assuming his office, presumes the authority to dictate to the nations of the world. It came, not with a bang, but with a spokesman’s whimper.