How Bush Rules: Chronicles of a Radical Regime [Hardcover]

MAD BAD AND DANGEROUS TO KNOW.

JOURNALISM likes to think of itself as the first draft of history - and that is exactly what Sidney Blumenthal's book is: a collection of newspaper and online articles published since the autumn of 2003. Almost all of these pieces are the standard newspaper-column size of a thousand words - one-bite snaps which match the spirit of the google age, but which seldom allow the author to formally enjoy the thematic coherence and cumulative narrative impetus of a unitary thesis.

Still, How Bush Rules is a terrifying window into the domestic and foreign-policy worlds of America under the leadership of the world's best-known draft-dodger and best-loved rhetoritician (and who got to be president of the republic with the support of just 24% of those entitled to vote for him in his 2004 re-election).

The book highlights the immensely deep ideological cleavages of modern-day American political culture: and it highlights too the often-rotten core of the political system that the stricken giant of the American Empire is pleased to call democracy.

Readers on this side of the Atlantic are already familiar with much of Blumenthal's material (though it is surprising how little of it gets into our newspapers): the use of torture and kidnap as instruments of state policy, the secret GULag and the secret dirty-war across the globe, and the suborning of the American Constitution (in whose founding mythologies Blumenthal is still a believer) in the cause of a military-capitalist junta as corrupt at times as any of those which the United States has traditionally maintained in the banana republics to its south.

Nor does the conduct in recent years of the American news media - which usually likes to think of itself as a robust and essential pillar of the Constitution - escape Blumenthal's critical eye. Central to this has been the image-management of the September 11 2001 attacks on that epicentral symbol of America's imperialist domination of the globe: the World Trade Centre.

Though Blumenthal does not say so, the 9/11 attacks served for Bush the same purpose as the Reichstag Fire and Enabling Act served for Hitler - `Bush's strategy remains organised around control of the image of 9/11. Maintaining support for Bush's foreign policy demands relentless domestic polarisation - including defining critics as giving aid and comfort to the enemy'.

Blumenthal does not overlook the United States' self-styled Christian Right - in comparison to which, Osama Bin Laden and his objectively anti-imperialist struggle might seem to some as shining citadels of courage and reason. It was a (uniformed) Lieutenant General William Boykin, after all, who told a church congregation - complete with Power Point visuals - that the enemy in the so-called `war on terror' was none other than Satan and that the Bush presidency was divinely ordained.

Blumenthal is enlightening too - albeit at something of a tangent - on the critical dimension of class-power in the American economy. The tax-cut (and personal and corporate taxation is a deliberate, redistributive instrument of social equity), `became Bush's chief instrument of social policy ..... Enron was the biggest financial supporter of Bush's political career'. Thus the day after Hurricane Katrina blasted New Orleans, `the Census Bureau released figures showing that the number of poor had increased for the fourth year in a row to 12.7% of the population'.

And a week after that hurricane, Condoleezza Rice found herself in Alabama, in a church pulpit, no less; or, rather, a black church pulpit (for Christian America doesn't really do faith across the sacred boundaries of colour). `The Lord Jesus Christ is going to come on time', the Good Doctor assured the assembled multitude, before adding - with a masterly command of historical pace and sensibility - `if we just wait'.

But Blumenthal is at his strongest with regard to foreign affairs, and especially long-term empire-building ambitions in the Middle East. According to this game-plan, once democratic order had been established in Iraq, the country was to have become, `a base for the projection of US influence throughout the Middle East. Instantly, Iraq would become a beacon of democracy. Awestruck, the Palestinians would forswear terrorist groups like Hamas. From the Iraqi bastion, the United States would topple the regimes of Syria and Iran, by military force if need be'.

This strategic ambition had earlier been given theoretical underpinning by the Project for the New American Century (which, inter alia, proposed the imperial militarisation of space). In September 2000 the promoters of the project issued a statement calling for a `process of transformation' in US foreign policy, which would, however, be unlikely without, `some catastrophic and catalyzing event - like a new Pearl Harbour'. Exactly one year later, the World Trade Centre collapsed: and Bush had his excuse for the long-planned attack on Iraq - courtesy of this `new Pearl Harbour'.

And still the fiasco in Iraq continues to deepen, and the Imperium dreams of taking-out the ancient, and supremely wily, onetime empire of Persia - and dragging the region, and the world, to the very brink of catastrophic war.

But how might it pay for it? The occupation of Iraq is costing the US £1 billion a week, according to Blumenthal - or maybe double that, in the view of some experts. No less an authority than Zbigniew Brezinski has said that to `win' in Iraq would take half a million troops, $500 billion, a military draft - and even then, ten years of savage asymmetric conflict. Already, the occupation of Iraq is effectively being financed, at second-hand, by the banking systems of China and East Asia. Strategically, then, the United States' position worsens by the month - and any attack on Iran can only worsen that position.

But what precisely happens when things - as they certainly will - fall apart in the blood-dimmed Middle East? What happens when the centre of the Imperium can no longer hold, and the Republicans face defeat in this coming autumn of 2008? What about a coup, as some Americans actually speculate - to `protect' public order, naturally, and to `defend' the Constitution and the `vision' of the Founding Fathers?

That seems very hard to believe (but so did Pearl Harbour and 9/11, of course). Were it to happen, however, then we can be sure - given the proximity of the presidential elections this autumn - that its architects are already hard at work on the planning stage.

www.iain-fraser-grigor.co.uk