We will then enter a new Dark Age -- the Age of Predation and Proliferation. For when the unconstitutionally appointed junta leader Bush sends his soldiers storming across the border into Iraq, the United States -- whose principles and ideals, however imperfectly realized, once represented humanity's brightest hopes of liberty and democracy -- will be teaching the world a new lesson: Attack your perceived (or manufactured) enemies even when they haven't injured or threatened you. Destroy them, seize their lands and drain their resources for your own profit. Attack without provocation, without mercy, with your entire arsenal of weapons of mass destruction "on the table" -- including the chemical weapons Donald Rumsfeld has received presidential permission to employ on Iraqi soldiers and civilians, and his vast stockpile of radioactive "depleted uranium" munitions, plus the 9,500-kilogram MOAB "superbomb" and the planned "shock and awe" barrage of cruise missiles on Baghdad, both of which will "rival nuclear weapons" in their indiscriminate destructive power, according to Pentagon warplanners.

That's the first lesson: Become a predator, or a predator's lackey -- or become prey. To avoid the latter fate, nations will follow the second lesson Bush is teaching: Develop your own weapons of mass destruction, as fast and as massively as you can. Emulate the Bush junta's maniacal proliferation of weapons systems, its abrogation of international arms treaties, its gutting of public services and civil rights in order to feed the bottomless greed of a warmongering elite. Emulate the Bush junta's crude nationalism, playing on the worst instincts of your people, the fearful, belligerent, monkey-brained tribalism that lurks in us all. Emulate the Bush junta's religious extremism, lending divine sanction to every act of thievery, hypocrisy, deceit and murder you commit. Emulate the Bush junta's paranoid suppression and manipulation of information, its obsessive monitoring of citizen thought and behavior, its demonization of sinister "Others" threatening the populace from without -- and within.

Use all these methods to bully, frighten and confuse your people into giving you the money and power to build ever-greater arsenals of death. Then use these arsenals "preemptively" on your enemies -- before they, having learned the same lessons, do it to you. This is the Bush Way; these are the "principles" now being advanced by the captured and corrupted American government.

Indeed, this is the "Project for a New American Century" -- the plan laid out years ago by Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney and their think-tank minions, and now unfolding before our eyes almost exactly according to their published blueprint, which eerily foretold the conquest of Iraq, the large-scale militarization of American society and the expansion of America's global domination. They recognized, of course, that the insular American people would balk at such wild dreams of world empire -- unless, of course, the nation was struck by what the Cheney-Rumsfeld group called, with blood-chilling candor, "some catastrophic and catalyzing event -- like a new Pearl Harbor."