Bush One trumpeted a "New World Order" after the Berlin Wall came down, but was unable to provide specifics.
Bush Two declared, "I'M THE NEW SHERIFF IN TOWN" in Baghdad, trying to "finish" daddy's hesitance to "spread democracy," and failed to make it stick.
So..?
Now that we're in it, I desperately hope that America can impose a political process that will balance thousand-year-old Iraqi-enmities into a stable, democratic framework of commonly-accepted rules of dispute: I hope that they can come up with a "21st Century Constitution" that will unite grievously divided religious, ethnic, and family "communities of interest" in a common bond for survival as an Important Trade-Route Nation -- a conundrum that has not been solved since the days that the Kurdish Moslem, Saladin, routed the European Crusaders from their land by uniting those self-same, diverse and divided tribes into a common force against Christian Invasion.
I fear that the G.W. Bush administration has not read and understood enough of HISTORY -- both ancient and recent -- to grasp the fact that, the greater the oppression and depredation of a dictator, the more "centrifugal" the forces of the various interested and cohesive communities that dictator welded together by his oppression IS; and if you loose the grip of an oppressive Police State, you're going to have to deal with long-suppressed ambitions, from the ground, up.
There's over a thousand years' outrage that's going to be played out, in Iraq, in the next few months.
G.W.'s -- "Shrub's" -- father knew that instinctively if not by personal curiosity and study, and George H. W.'s advisors CERTAINLY knew that, out of long experience with the Cold War and the nagging "Nationalist Rebellions" and "Worker's Revolts" that they'd had to help their clients in far-flung States, suppress. Brent Scowcroft wrote a just-as-splashy New York Times editorial warning AGAINST going to war against Saddam's Iraq BEFORE the War as Ambassador Wilson's post-Invasion piece was disruptive to the Bush II rationale.
G.W. caught the hubris of a first-born trust-fund baby, and swaggered on in, anyway.
[It worked for generations of British Empire first-born sons, after all...]
OK. We're all there with him, now. G.W.'s proved incompetent to deal with the situation. What are we going to do, to pull all our asses out of his situation?
Well, now, just as desperately as I wished our so-called "Opposition" party had taken off their old Cold War blinders and seen the Bush-Cheney fraud for what it was in 2002, now I desperately hope that someone/anyone will come up with a Post-Cold War vision of the projection of Superpower Status in the World, and pose an alternate vision.
George H. W. Bush (Senior) kept saying, "We're in a New World Order," back in 1991, but never thought long enough or with enough depth, to come up with an understandable formulation for what that "New Order" actually was; he wasn't a "deep thinker, " either, Bush Senior.
Now is the time for a Deep Thinker to come up with a sentence or two that pretty much sums up what this "New World Order" is, and let's hope that the formula doesn't include "We're the new Sheriff in town..." swagger.
That's what I think.
What about you?