The Bush administration unveiled its Doctrine in September 2002 when it released a paper titled "The National Security Strategy." The paper left no doubt about the Bush administration's future foreign policy plans. No country -- period -- would rival its military power, the paper stated. Like ideologically charged documents, the Doctrine is quite blunt in its meaning and simple in its application In pursuit of the War on Terrorism, once the US has identified a country as its enemy, it reserves the right to attack that country first before it can do any harm to the U.S.

The Doctrine of Pre-emption flatly contradicts Article 51 of the UN Charter, which permits the use of force only in self-defense and only if an armed attack occurs against a member of the United Nations.This is of little concern, however, to the sole superpower. Deputy Under-Secretary of State Paul Wolfowitz, one of the key players in the Bush administration and member of his select inner circle, has warned the world that a pre-emptive strike that aims at "prevention, not merely punishment, awaits those who oppose America's will and jeopardise its sense of security."

The idea of acting unilaterally to protect its national interest is not a new concept in American history. We can recall the formulation of the Monroe Doctrine in 1823, in which President Monroe reserved the right of the U.S. to intervene anywhere in the Western Hemisphere to protect its interests. Indeed, after advent of the Cold War, the U.S. intervened many times in the affairs of Latin American countries. Guatemala, Panama, Chile, and Nicaragua are some of the countries that come to mind. And interventionism US style has not been confined to Latin America. The Philippines, Iran and Vietnam, among several other countries, have seen the arrival of U.S. troops since the turn of the twentieth century.

The Bush administration, moreover, did not devise the Doctrine of Pre Emption out of the blue. In 1989, Dick Cheney, Paul Wolfowitz and Colin Powell released the so called "Defense Planning Guidance Report", which argued that the U.S. should strive for military dominance of the world, a move that should encompass both friend and foe. Interestingly, the word "preemptive" is used in the report. Cheney, Powell and Wolfowitz were no longer in power when Bill Clinton became president in 1992, but the neo conservative click to which they belong were busy launching the Project for the New American Century. The project published a report titled "Rebuilding America's Defence(www.newamericancentury.org)," which called once again for U.S. global military dominance, as well as U.S. control of the global economic markets.

When Bush, Jr. won (I use that word loosely here) the 2000 elections, Cheney and the gang were back in power. Then with the War on Terrorism one year old and in full swing, Bush launched his "National Security Strategy." Meanwhile, an agenda for war with Iraq had been building steam in Washington long before George Bush, Jr. appeared on the scene and Osama Bin Laden had become a household name in the U.S. In a letter dated January 26, 1998, which was delivered to President Bill Clinton shortly before his State of the Union address, a group of leading conservatives, including many who now shape U.S. policy, stated that the current policy towards Iraq was not succeeding and urged Clinton to use the State of Union Message to chart a "new strategy that would secure the interests of the U.S. and our friends and allies around the world" and that "aims, above all, at the removal of Saddam Hussein from power." Among the 18 signers were, you guessed it: Donald Rumsfeld, the current Secretary of Defence; Paul Wolfowitz, his deputy; and Richard Armitage, the deputy to Secretary of State Colin Powell.

The Doctrine was put into ideological motion after 9-11 devastating attack on U.S. soil. The Doctrine became the rationale for the invasion of Afghanistan and the ouster of the Taliban after the Mullahs failed to give up Osama Bin Laden and for the attack on Iraq. In the first instance, the U.S. had wide international support, and in the second, it flaunted international law and made a weak case for the U.S. invasion and occupation. The US had the power -- or so it thought -- to ignore international law.

It also had no qualms about ignoring or shaping the evidence (the lack of it, to be more accurate) in building a bogus case that Saddam possessed WMD, making him an imminent threat. The Iraq and WMD story became downright bizarre and it would be really comical, if the stakes weren't so high. There we have British Prime Minister Tony Blair, still insisting the evidence that Niger was selling Iraq uranium is solid, but he can't reveal it, even to his US ally, less he jeopardize the security of the intelligence sources that supplied it.

George, Jr., meanwhile, apologized for using the Niger-Iraq-uranium connection claim in his State of the Union speech. Niger tried to defend itself by pointing out that it was one of the first countries to supply soldiers for the US's 1991 Gulf War. Saddam is our enemy, said Niger's president, so why would we supply Iraq with materials that he could us to cause havoc on the world? Then a U.S. emissary reportedly visited Niger, the world's second poorest country, and gave its government a blunt message:

keep your mouth shut, or else.

Earlier the Bush administration had sent another emissary named Joe Wilson to Niger to find the truth. The messenger returned to Washington, reporting that Iraq was not trying to buy uranium from Niger. The messenger wasn't shot, but his report was ignored. Moreover, Bush still asserted in his last State of Union message that there was an Iraq-Niger connection. Wilson then went public, exposing the fraud Someone attempted to get back at the messenger by outing his wife as a CIA agent, an act that is illegal under US law and punishable with a sentence of up to ten years. This story dominates the news right now, but there is another one that shows what the Bush administration has been willing to do in pursuit of its ideological agenda. Iraq did release a report to the UN on the subject of WMD in the winter of 2002. The U.S. charged that the report was incomplete, but it has since been revealed that the U.S itself removed about 8,000 pages of that 11,800 page report. How could that happen? The U.S. convinced Colombia, the chair of the UN Security Council, to look away while the report was altered and returned, according to the Berlin newspaper Die Tageszetung, which broke the story on December 2002. In the frenzy leading up to the war with Iraq, the mainstream U.S. media --the stenographers for power -- carried a whisper of this explosive story and whether its details were true. The report is believed to provide embarrassing information of how the U.S, supplied Iraq with WMD in the 1980s when Iraq was Uncle Sam's ally.

Where are the missing pages and what do they contain, not where are WMD, are the questions U.S. media should now be raising. The Bush administration's obstinate attempt to fit the facts into a doctrine that is central to its imperial efforts to shape a New World Order has kept it in hot water. The US, though, can get away with it because it is now an imperial power, the most dominant one since the apex of the Roman Empire. There is no other way to describe a power that patrols the world with five regional military commands and dominates the global economy as it does.

In pursuit of its War on Terrorism, the U.S. has sent troops to the former

Soviet republics, as well as Afghanistan, Pakistan and even the Philippines. This does not include the countries where the U.S. has a military presence for other reasons, such as Korea and Colombia. And now with troops in Iraq, the US has a military presence that extends across Central Asia and the Middle East.

Iran and Syria are now the only countries in the region with no US military presence. In the past, these countries have resisted US influence in the region, but now they are virtually surrounded by that influence. In its imperial design to dominate the world militarily, the Bush administration planned to use a Saddam-free Iraq as a beachhead that could help spread democracy and free enterprise through much of the Muslim world and transform it into Uncle Sam's image.

But given the stakes involved in pursuing such a strategic objective, it is remarkable how little planning the U.S. did to assess the consequences of a Saddam-free Iraq. Incredibly, it has now been revealed that the Bush administration did not even bother to prepare and circulate internally among administration officials an intelligence assessment laying out various scenarios that could take place in post-war Iraq. Yet, there was serious concern within the U.S. government, especially at the CIA and the State Department's Bureau of Near Eastern and South Asian Affairs, that post-war Iraq would be ungovernable.

According to a report in the Nation, a leading U.S. liberal political magazine, in the period leading up to war, "there was something akin to panic at the Norfolk, Virginia-based U.S. Joint Forces Command, which was responsible for supporting the Pentagon's Iraq Task Force." The Nation quoted one former U.S. official in close contact with the command, as saying, "They were scared shitless. They were making it up as they went along. They didn't know the names of the Iraqi tribes, much less how they relate to each other. They didn't have the expertise, and they didn't have enough time to assemble the expertise."

Well, as we have seen, the script for Iraq has not gone according to plan. Five months after Bush declared victory, the Coalition Force is still having problems restoring the most basic necessities -- water, electricity and especially law and order -- millions of Iraqis still remain unemployed and unpaid. Meanwhile, thousands of US and British troops face an indefinite stay in Iraq amid increasing attacks. All reports indicate that resentment over the US troop presence in Iraq is building by the day as the coalition forces are unable to maintain services and security.

It doesn't seem like the situation will improve. A monograph that the Strategic Studies Institute of the Army College in the U.S. recently published lays out in comprehensive detail all the obstacles facing coalition forces in post- Saddam Iraq. The report points out that coalition forces will have to prevent Sunnis from fighting Shiites, secular Iraqis from fighting religious ones, returned Iraqi exiles from fighting non exiles, Kurds from fighting Turks and preventing them from establishing an independent state, tribes within all these group from fighting one another.

Further, the Coalition will have to keep an eye on Turkey so it doesn't try to move into northern Iraq to protect its interests, Iran from invading in the East and the members of the defeated Iraqi army -- which may be the only national institution that can keep the country from being ripped apart-- from dissolving. All of this is mere prelude to building a democratic state. So here we are -- two years after 9-11 and five months after the end of Iraq War -- and we see no sign that the Bush administration knows what it's doing or that it has learned from its mistakes. The neo-con click wants the international community to bail it out its growing quagmire in Iraq, but says, "Let's don't dwell on our past differences. There is no need to discuss how that quagmire began in the first place." Americans like me, who are eager for our country to rejoin the international community, wonder what further problems will arise for the world as the Bush administration recklessly pursues its ideological agenda. Ironically, the Cold War is history, but the world in many ways has become a more dangerous, place, thanks to George Bush Jr. and the tight junta that shapes his foreign policy.

Ron Chepesiuk is a Fulbright Scholar and Visiting Professor of Journalism at Chitttagong University.