[Originally published August 25, 2008]

By Sherwood Ross



“I believe in the universality of freedom,” George Bush told an audience at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington, “and I believe that this country, this grand country of ours, has an obligation to help people realize the blessings of freedom.”



This belief, you might even call it a “faith,” reflects the “calling” some American presidents have long had to improve, if not remake, the rest of the world in their own image as if they were gods. George W. Bush is only the latest occupant of the White House to display this arrogance.



The late Ronald Reagan also said Americans—whom he really believed were superior to other folks—-had an “obligation” to rescue foreigners and took it upon himself to fund the Contras to overthrow Nicaragua’s elected leftist regime. He didn’t bother going through Congress. It was quite a radical departure for a self-styled “conservative.” Richard Nixon also held this conceit, and had the CIA overthrow the elected leftist government in Chile. Even the amiable Dwight Eisenhower personally signed an order okaying a CIA overthrow of Iran’s elected government in 1953 because they nationalized their own oil resources. In none of these cases were the American people ever told by their government of those doings, much less asked.

Another expression of this master race philosophy in action occurred when President Bush trashed key international treaties (the Anti-Ballistic Missile and Germ Warfare covenants, for examples) so it is apparent he has set himself above international law. He’s too hoity-toity to sign any treaty to slow global warming. Bush’s belief that Americans are superior is not much more than a warmed-over version of Hitler’s Master Race theory. Bush may appear to be very sober, compared to the spellbinding Hitler Americans rightly identified as nuts, but the end product of his view Americans are chosen to dash around the world making wars is the same. Bush’s illegal invasion of Iraq has already killed approximately 1-million people and now he has even threatened Iran with atomic attack, a repudiation of President Reagan’s pledge that America would never start a nuclear war.

Millions of Americans, like Bush, hate the idea of any international authority that might limit American power. This may explain why every time the phrase “United Nations” is uttered at a Republican Party convention, the audience erupts with jeers and catcalls. They don’t want Americans to rank as equal citizens of the world. Indeed, America supremacists of the Project For A New American Century(PNAC) in 2000 “called for nothing less than the creation of a worldwide imperial American empire, with forces based all around the globe,” according to “The Book on Bush”(Viking) by Eric Alterman and Mark Green. Ten PNAC members urged a unilateral U.S. invasion of Iraq, stating, “American policy cannot continue to be crippled by a misguided insistence on unanimity in the Security Council.” Back in the Thirties German and Japanese militarists flouted the League of Nations, too. See where it got them.

Being superior to everyone else has its privileges. Bush is running what John Dean called the most secret government in history yet believes he has the right to eavesdrop on everybody else’s private conversations. As William Blum points out in “Rogue State”(Common Courage Press), in 2003 the U.S. even “listened in on UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan, the UN weapons inspectors in Iraq, and all the members of the UN Security Council during a period when they were deliberating what action to take in Iraq.” Now Congress wants the American people to trust the government not to eavesdrop on them. Sure!

And just so the Pentagon can keep tabs on what you write on your computer, the U.S. National Security Agency(NSA) helped to install a secret program in Microsoft software that, without user knowledge, can read your private jottings and E-mails, according to a 1999 French Defense Ministry report, Blum said. This brought no objections from Microsoft’s biggest client: the Pentagon.

The CIA’s policy of “extraordinary rendition,” first authorized by President Clinton, not George Bush, enables the American Master Race to fly anywhere in the world and arrest any person with no court order and remove the individual to another country for imprisonment, interrogation, torture, and/or summary execution. And President Bush has allowed the CIA to hold some of those men as “ghosts” without informing the Red Cross. Yet what country is it that flies thousands of POW/MIA flags in protest of holding ghost prisoners?

That other nationalities are mere ants in Neocon America’s world was the implicit message of the Army’s “School of the Americas”(SOA). According to a New York Times editorial, the Pentagon recommended to Latin army officers “interrogation techniques like torture, execution, blackmail and arresting the relatives of those being questioned.”

“For decades SOA grads have been involved in the chain of command of virtually every major human rights atrocity in Latin America,” Blum writes, including a coup attempt in 2002 against Hugo Chavez in Venezuela. This may account for why Chavez told the United Nations Bush was the “devil” — and got ridiculed by U.S. media for not being polite. I’m no fan of Chavez but what do you call a man who tries to overthrow governments by force and violence? What do you call governments that think torturing human beings is okay? Isn’t that what’s supposed to be done in Hell?

U.S. presidents also believe they have a unilateral right to poison inferior peoples’ countries with radioactive wastes. Hence, President Bush Sr. could shoot off more than 630,000 pounds of radioactive ammunition during the first Gulf War in Kuwait, Iraq, and Saudi Arabia, according to “Home Front”(Clarity Press) author Rick Anderson. Such depleted uranium shells were also fired “extensively” in Iraq in 2003. No matter some Iraqi women since have given birth to deformed infants, as have the wives of some GIs who fought in Iraq.

Most distressing of all is the heartlessness of the White House. Bush not only inflicts massive casualties on foreign civilians but denies medical care to tens of thousands of his own veterans seeking medical relief from “Gulf War Syndrome.” These luckless GIs dispatched to cram “the blessings of freedom” down foreign throats are discovering for themselves the New American Century Gang have little regard for human life, and this includes the lives of those who enlisted to fight their wars. Meanwhile, let oil-rich Iran and Venezuela watch out—lest Bush give them the good old master erase.

(Sherwood Ross is an American who writes on political and military topics. His articles have appeared in many national magazines. He worked as a reporter for the Chicago Daily News, served as an executive in the civil rights movement, and contributed regular columns for major wire services. Reach him at [email protected])