On September 11, 1990, eleven years to the day prior to the attack on the Twin Towers in New York and the Pentagon in Washington, former U.S. president George Bush senior delivered a speech to Congress to sanction operation Desert Storm. The president related that point in time to the end of the Cold War saying, "A new world order can emerge: A new era -- freer from the threat of terrorism." But, as it turned out, his war on Iraq and the U.S. military bases overshadowing the Arab world were to increase terrorism rather than the reverse.

According to Bush, the new world order was to provide "an era in which the nations of the world, East and West, North and South, can prosper and live in harmony. Today that new world is struggling to be born. A world quite different from the one we have known. A world where the rule of law supplants the rule of the jungle."

Well, it certainly has become a different world, and it seems the rules are being made up by the U.S. as it develops. The size of the Iraqi invasion force was grossly exaggerated, there was no build up on the Saudi border, information about what provoked the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait was kept secret, and the U.S. pressure on certain members of the Arab League to prevent it from resolving the Kuwait crisis in a way which Iraq was prepared to abide by aren't consistent with the rule of law and neither are they anything new.

Leaving the dictator Saddam Hussein in charge, suspending the situation to justify the permanent military penetration of the region, then later compromising the weapons inspections by sending in spies, which caused the mission to fail just short of completely disarming Iraq of weapons of mass destruction, served the same purpose of extending the state of war. Clearly the new world order was to come about through disorder and then reorder.

Passing on from the allusion hope, Bush's speech went on to the hard reality, that a combined Iraq and Kuwait would have the potential to become a Middle East power with the capacity "to intimidate and coerce its neighbors, who control the lion's share of the world's remaining oil reserves. We cannot permit a resource so vital to be dominated by one so ruthless."

Well, what better way to prevent anyone from doing this than to do it oneself seems to be what's developing.

The threat of Saddam Hussein to U.S. foreign interests was described as potential not real.Thus a precedent has been set for the new world order that the pre-emptive strike only requires a potential threat. It is more likely and immediate that the greater threat was that Saddam had created an opportunity for the Arab world to address its own regional problems without interference from abroad, which is how it should have been, as this would be a serious block to U.S. foreign policy regarding the oil resources and the restructuring of that part of the world. But the obvious readiness of the U.S. to act indicates prior planning before this possibility had arrived.

The fractiousness of Arab leaders has been a significant aid to the U.S., a disaster in relation to the suffering Palestinians and Iraqis, and the Bush crusade is still in its early stages. Bush senior ultimately turned the spin in the inevitable direction of U.S. foreign policy by saying, "Recent events (the invasion of Kuwait) have surely proven that there is no substitute for American leadership."

If we now turn to the latest National Security Strategy of current U.S. President George W. Bush, released last September, we find the nature, purpose, and means of this American leadership which will determine the new world order. He started in a similar way, reflecting on the same past, saying, "The great struggles of the 20th century between liberty and totalitarianism ended with a decisive victory for the forces of freedom -- and a single sustainable model for national success: freedom, democracy, and free enterprise." The model of the new world is the U.S., and one would hope that its victory doesn't mean the winner takes all.

It claims that the U.S. doesn't use its unparalleled military strength and great economic and political influence to press for unilateral advantage, but instead tries to create a balance of power that favors human freedom. In short, the strategy is to build a safer world by recreating the globe in its image.

If that image is symbolized by freedom, democracy, and free enterprise, then the U.S. needs to reverse its current trend away from these.

The central obstruction in this strategy paper is supposedly international terrorism, while in fact it is its greatest catalyst for causing change in line with this strategy. It claims poverty is not an issue regarding why people become terrorists, but rather it is that countries lacking the freedom, democracy, and prosperity produced by free markets are the most prone to terrorist networking and drug cartels. The strategists' clear answer is that not only must these terrorist groups be eliminated, but the nation must be restructured. Afghanistan would be the classic example. Naturally, there was no reference to the CIA and the cultivation of opium poppies in Afghanistan.

According to the strategy, the greatest danger to the U.S. is radicalism and technology (weapons of mass destruction), and so the U.S. must be prepared to defeat their enemies' plans. This clearly justifies the preemptive strike, invasion, and restructuring of any perceived enemy nation because, as Bush junior stated, "In the new world we have entered, the only path to safety is the path of action."

The summary of the introduction is: "The aim of this strategy is to help make the world not just safer but better." However, the world is becoming more unsafe and it is not being made better by the policies of the IMF, the WTO, and the like, which the strategy looks to. Today when they hold meetings they have to find secluded places easily defended by armies of heavily equipped police to control protestors who come from all over the world.