Iraq Is A Fuse, But The Fuse Has A Bomb

Sept 20 - Two documents issued by the George W. "43" Bush White House as draft U.S. policies, echo the fabled King Canute's wild, and useless ranting against the wind and the waves. The first, as reported from Agence France-Presse, is, de facto, a piece of fantasy proffered as a proposed draft U.S. Declaration of War against Iraq. The second, is a meandering, incoherent potpourri of White House Presidential utterances, pasted together, after the style of Braque, an incoherent utterance described by the New York Times, as the draft of a document bearing the pretentious, and wildly misleading title of The National Security Strategy of the United States.

Our nation's government is not presently burdened by the weighty work of intellectual giants.

Admittedly, for all the rags and tatters of its ruined and collapsing economy, the now virtually bankrupt U.S. Government still has the kill-power to ruin any Middle East targets on which it is currently foolish enough to be willing to spend between $2-3 trillions, at about $2-3 billions per day, and up, of the budget the U.S. does not have, during the remainder of the George W. Bush's present term as President. In other words, the U.S. presently has the power, like Bablyon's Belshazzar before his fall, to destroy, even perhaps obliterate the fuse, but it could not conquer the bomb of perpetual warfare, and the probable doom of these United States which the burning of that fuse would set off.

I am committed to be helpful in getting the President out of the worsening mess into which he is sinking. I intend to become, at last, that next President of the U.S.A. whose arrival is long overdue, and, therefore, I am dedicated to making the incumbent President's term as successful as might be possible, including pulling him out of the "Herbert Hoover" pot into which his economic policy is presently sliding him. The President must recognize his personal limitations, and rely on a new set of advisors who should replace many of those presently installed, especially that collection of "Freddie Kreuger-style" draft-dodgers in Napoleon-Bonaparte poses, who are presently controlling the U.S.'s military misadventures. For his part, our truculent President must drop those "Belshazzar of Babylon" poses -- "You know how Ah gits when Ah don't git mah way" which he has tended to affect, increasingly, during recent television appearances.

If President Bush is to emerge successfully from his term as President, he must bring himself to accept two leading points of my remedies for the rapidly worsening situation our nation faces. First, he must adopt an economic recovery program in the same spirit with which Franklin Roosevelt brought the U.S.A. out of the terrible Coolidge Depression of 1929-1933, to emerge as the only world power at the time of President Roosevelt's untimely death. Second, he must make himself familiar with and support a U.S. global policy of victory through peace, a policy typified by the combined measures of a New Bretton Woods world monetary-financial system, and the Eurasian Land-Bridge development, now in progress from Pusan to Rotterdam, as the chief economic driver for a general, long-term recovery of the planet as a whole.

Contrary to that pack of ex-Trotskyist draft-dodgers and the like, such as the late Albert Wohlstetter and his RAND kindergarten, which have crafted the current Bush Administration policies, neither Belshazzar nor Shelleys' allegorical Ozymandias triumphed in the end. As the martyred Israeli Prime Minister Yitshak Rabin understood, killing is not the road to our nation's peaceful security. In Christian tradition, as expressed by Cardinal Mazarin's contributions to that Peace of Westphalia which rescued Europe from the 1511-1648 European dark age of religious warfare, war is justified only when is employed as an unavoidable pathway to the preconditions for peace. As Cardinal Nicholas of Cusa and Moses Mendelssohn taught modern civilization, the road to peace and security is one of ecumenical peace based on the notion of the common principle of man and woman made in the likeness of the Creator of the universe, a principle which makes all human life sacred, and intrinsically redeemable in nature. Killing as a means of obtaining and maintaining power has always meant condition of perpetual warfare, like that which repeatedly ruined ancient Mesopotamia, Rome, and modern Spain.

This past week, a dear friend, Cardinal Francois Xavier Nguyen van Thuan died. He was precious to many of us, Christian and others alike, a person deeply committed to the work of Justice and Peace for all peoples, a gentle and courageous man, who among his works, leaves us those simply profound set of spiritual exercises which he first presented in the presence of John Paul II. Reflection on this beautiful soul and his work, is an appropriate inspiration for what I would wish both the President's true friends and others to hear from me, as follows, on this awesome occasion.

Peace as a Strategy

Durable peace is based only upon the modern principle of the perfectly sovereign nation-state republic. Or, as then-Secretary of State John Quincy Adams defined the U.S. long-term policy for the Americas: a community of principle among perfectly sovereign republics. A durable peace requires that the relations among sovereign states, and the internal affairs of those states be based on those three controlling principles of all U.S. constitutional law, as set forth in the Preamble of our own Federal Constitution: absolute sovereignty, the promotion of the general welfare, and the commitment to the betterment of all our posterity.

Since national cultures each have a peculiar basis, in language and other ways, without the perfect sovereignty of the nation, the citizen has no efficient means for participating in the shaping of his or her destiny. Thus, we must be separate, if our societies are to be just ones. However, like sovereign individuals of which a just nation is composed, the relations among sovereign nations must be ordered by the efficient practice of that universal principle known in Plato's and the Apostle Paul's Greek as agape, and translated into modern English as "the general welfare," or "the common good."

These are rightly to be recognized as universal principles, principles we have brought into use out of the torment inhering in those pre-modern societies in which a relatively few held the majority in the relative condition of human cattle, even as slaves. Only with the birth of the modern sovereign nation-state, during Europe's Fifteenth-Century Renaissance, did sovereign states governed by the general-welfare principle begin to elevate humanity as a whole toward truly human status, thus liberating both the powerful and the poor from the characteristic brutishness of all forms of individual life under ancient empires and feudal order, alike. It is by creating the conditions under which those faculties of the human will typified by discovery of universal physical principles express the essential difference between man and beast, that relations within and among nations achieve a truly human expression.

There is grave injustice, variously expressed, throughout most of this planet, injustices which include the cruelties of unremedied awful poverty and disease. We, as persons made in the likeness of the Creator, possess the instrument applying creative reason to our labor, to free this planet from the menacing physical deprivation which most of humanity presently endures.

The use of large-scale water-development and energy programs for the Middle East, is such a work of reason, and therefore of peace. The Eurasian Land-Bridge program, presently in initial phases of implementation, is such an effort. Similar programs of infrastructure-development for Africa, and a restoration of the currently vanishing, looted sovereignty of the states of Central and South America, are similar strategic works of peace.

Let the peoples of the world once again admire our republic for what we shall have, once again, caused ourselves to become, and we shall have the means and power to achieve and maintain peaceful cooperation throughout virtually all of this planet. Let the future love us for the care we have shown, and we shall have security and peace. Otherwise, we would now reap the whirlwind of bloody hatred.

Let us sweep those burps of doomed Belshazzar, the aforesaid Iraq-policy draft and the purported draft of a "The National Security Strategy of the United States," off the table, and, instead of these, get down to some seriously constructive , much deeded problem-solving work, the work of building peace.

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