It’s easy to see how the Bush administration would reshape the world - including their country - if only given the chance. How? You need only to take a look at the new Iraqi constitution, which the U.S. administration pretty much wrote for them.
Thomas L. Knapp has a good overview on his site. Somewhat frightening, but still to be expected, is the blind devotion to country and society it seems to require: parameters like harmful to the interest of society, freedom of speech only as long as you don’t upset the status quo, the lack of the freedom to act as you please in private, secret courts, retroactive laws and many others. All unfortunately in line with the parameters Leonard Peikoff delineates on his 1983 book The Ominous Parallels, pointing them out as the manure that helps feed the roots of authoritarian ideology.
It’s this sort of mentality, Peikoff insists, that allowed the rise of Nazi Germany in the first place - all this blind obedience and devotion to country and government a perfect breeding ground for automatons that, while maybe otherwise decent human beings, wouldn’t hesitate to commit genocide if their appointed leader asked for it. I’m sure it’s the same sort of mentality that shapes terrorists and convinces people that blowing themselves up in a crowded plaza is a decent and acceptable political act.
U.S. arrogance doesn’t allow them to see how this can easily be turned against them, how they’re sowing the exact same seeds they used in Afghanistan in the early 1990s. Twenty years from now, a new administration will once again be invading Iraq, fighting the latest warlord who took advantage of the absolute adoration the constitution has instilled in the new generations.
Or maybe they do. Best case scenario they have a lap dog, worst case scenario they have another war. Not only is war profitable, but every new terrorist attack lends itself to diminished freedoms.
They win. Everybody else loses.