George Bush presided at a wake this week. White American Manifest Destiny is dead, rotting ignominiously somewhere in Iraq. Neither Bush nor the corpse knows it yet, but the stench is pervasive and unmistakable.

The zombie still has lots of thrashing around to do – some death-force to expend – but cold cadaverous hands cannot grip the globe with terror much longer. Incantations will not resurrect him.

“We're changing the world.” Bush offered variations on the mantra five times during his session with the servile corporate press, April 13. Bush and his Pirates have been vowing to remake the world since at least 1992, when Bush Sr. Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney and Under-Secretary Paul Wolfowitz drew up a strategy to “establish and protect a new order" that would deter “potential competitors from even aspiring to a larger regional or global role." During the eight years of the Clinton presidency the expanding cabal refined their Plan for global U.S. hegemony, formalizing their conspiracy through the Project for the New American Century, in 1997. The Plan to “change the world” by enslaving it became the defining foreign policy doctrine of the United States the minute George Bush walked into the White House, in 2000. The Bush men were consumed by the prospect of world conquest, compared to which al Qaida seemed less than a fly, a mere gnat, unworthy of diligent monitoring.

The Plan has come utterly undone in Iraq, in full view of a wired planet. Yet George Bush behaves as if nationalistic bombast will forestall the inevitable exit.  Incapable of perceiving Iraqis as human beings, Bush conjures demons. “They seek to intimidate America into panic and retreat, and to set free nations against each other,” said the President. But when a force cannot stay, it must retreat.  The U.S. cannot remain in Iraq.

The magnitude of what has transpired since the U.S. invasion is not yet fully understood, even by much of the Left. The Bush men have already been defeated. What is unfolding is a terminal debacle, a crack in history. Bush made it so, and perversely confirmed the epochal nature of events when he told reporters, Tuesday, “Now is the time, and Iraq is the place.”

Imperial overreach

Corporate media fog and flatulence, and the fixating horror of televised war cannot obscure the fundamental fact: The Pirates have failed, having bet everything on a swift takeover of Iraq and its transformation into a corporate “model” for the entire region, a springboard for further conquest and corporate colonization. The Plan envisioned that:

The Plan assumed the Shock and Awe of “The Mother of All War Shows” (the title of our pre-war, January 30, 2003 Cover Story) would cow the entire planet, making the world “malleable, ready for reshaping in the not-yet-defined New Order.”

What New Order? Even the “Coalition of the Bribed” is crumbling.

On August 28 of last year, just four months after the fall of Baghdad, it was clear to that “The Pirates Have Already Lost Iraq.”

That was eight months ago. U.S. reserve units have since been effectively “drafted” – and still there are not enough troops to meet the “force protection” requirements of the casualty-averse U.S. military. There never will be. It is too late for a formal draft, which in any event would destroy the domestic social base of the Pirate enterprise. Mercenaries, who do not rate “force protection” and whose deaths don’t show up on “American” casualty lists, comprise the second largest “coalition” cohort. Their growing presence is another admission of U.S. failure.

The French daily, Liberation summed up the view from Paris:

The leftist French newspaper, in fact, understates the case, as if the personality of George Bush is at issue, rather than the future of world order. Iraq was the lynchpin in the Bush Pirate’s lunge for global hegemony, a “crusade” which was to begin with the overthrow of the straw man, Saddam Hussein, and culminate in a glorious, U.S.-imposed “New Order.”   Despite the abject failure of The Plan, the Pirates see no option but to “stay the course” - a guarantee of even more colossal defeats. Bush told the White House press (inverting the meaning of the word “free”), “A free Iraq will change the world.” It is precisely because the Bush men have staked the entire global imperial enterprise on Iraq that we must ask, “Will a U.S.-free Iraq change the world?” The answer is yes – profoundly so.

Lost control

Reality is composed of things in motion. The Pirates understand this, in a degenerate fashion. They sprang at the “opportunity” (September 11, but any excuse would have sufficed) to set in motion a world conquest, at the time and place of their choosing: Iraq. The Plan failed, but other forces have now been set in motion, forces beyond the control of the initiator of the aggression. “It'll change the world,” Bush insisted for the fourth time on Tuesday, reading the direction of events, backwards. Pirates should be careful what they wish for.

The projected June 30 transition to Iraqi “sovereignty” is nonsense, signifying nothing worthy of the term (see Jonathan Schell, “Phantom Sovereign”). The date serves mainly to illuminate the stupendous U.S. failure to create a politically significant comprador class willing to wear the American leash.

The Nation’s Naomi Klein encapsulates the Americans' supremely arrogant and racist ”transition” scheme:

U.S. corporate media pretend there is “power” for the Iraqis somewhere in that formula – but that doesn’t matter anymore, as events have overtaken and made irrelevant the Bush men’s Potemkin transition structures. None of the Pirates have any idea to whom they will be handing over the chimera of sovereignty; the United Nations special envoy has called for the dismissal of the entire, hand-picked Governing Council on June 30 in favor of a “technocrat” body; and a number of council members have already resigned or signaled their intention to do so.

The U.S. has irreversibly lost control of events in Iraq. No amount of collective punishment of cities, Phoenix-type assassination programs, or reshuffling of the dwindling number of puppets, can change that. Iraqis – Arab Iraqis, certainly – are experiencing a national renewal, forged in opposition to the United States. The Washington Post noted the sea change, on Tuesday, in an article titled, “Fallujah Gains Mythic Air.”

Killing Sadr will not improve the U.S. position – indeed, there is no scenario rooted in Iraqi realities that can extricate the Bush men from their failure and its global ramifications.

The UN cannot save the Project for a New American Century’s plan from ruin – even if the Iraqis acquiesced to UN supervision, which is problematic given the world body’s collaboration with U.S. persecution of Iraq since 1991. In any event, the United Nations was (and remains) on the Bush men’s liquidation list, as an impediment to American global rule. Any success for the UN represents a defeat for the Pirates.

Former National Security Advisor Zbignew Brezinski speaks of “generalized hatred” against the U.S. in the Arab world. Such hatreds can only increase with Bush’s total capitulation, the day after his “Change the World” speech, to Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s West Bank annexation plan. Yet the administration’s favorite think-tankers persist in putting forward fantasies of an “Arab solution” to the American quandary in Iraq. They are hallucinating – cognitively damaged minds. Arabs will not save The Plan; no one can.

Brits recoil at U.S. behavior

At the beginning of this commentary we said White American Manifest Destiny is dead, having gasped its last deep breath in Iraq. More than a defeat for the Bush cabal, the Iraqi fiasco has exposed America’s glaring unfitness to play a leading role in a modernizing world. Its armed forces, in particular, drawn from a population that has been reared in a continental bubble of ignorance and white supremacist delusion, are incapable of treating non-whites as people.

The blooming of Iraqi national solidarity is in part a result of American racism and, at times, barbarism. Among the soldiers are men who revel in ripping Korans, who used sniper rifles to murder women and children in Fallujah, and whose commanders have refused from the beginning of the occupation to even record the deaths of the Iraqi civilians whom they purport to protect.

Even the British, who former UN Ambassador Andrew Young once said “invented racism,” are appalled and alarmed at American behavior in Iraq – conduct that threatens the lives of British soldiers in charge of the southern part of the country. The UK Telegraph reported the comments of a “senior Army officer.”

American racial warfare was horrifically successful against Native Americans, Mexicans, Filipinos and many other victims of Manifest Destiny – but was defeated, at terrible cost, by the Vietnamese. The Iraqis are thwarting them again. The American worldview, stunted and deformed by racism, does not prepare the nation to interact with non-white populations without reverting to type.  Thus, the American military is a blunt instrument with limited uses. Only its machines make the US a military superpower. The human resources of the United States, civilian and military, are patently unfit to rule the globe. This elemental fact will become more obvious with every deployment – even to Americans.

The U.S. can punish darker nations and peoples, but it cannot exercise lasting authority over them. Unless it learns to coexist with others on the planet, it will be shunned and eclipsed.

The Bush Plan for global conquest was doomed from the start, based as it was on peculiarly American delusions that are organic to the nation’s hyper-racist history. John Kerry doesn’t have a plan for Iraq. Good.