"Mission Accomplished"

Yesterday was the fifth anniversary of George Bush's flight onto the Abraham Lincoln aircraft carrier with the famous and famously stupid "Mission Accomplished" banner.

"Major combat operations in Iraq have ended," Bush said at the time. "The battle of Iraq is one victory in a war on terror that began on Sept. 11, 2001, and still goes on."

But what has the Bush administration accomplished?

More than I'd like to admit. They've kept fighting the war in Iraq despite the opposition of Congress, public opinion, and their own generals. In this sense, the Bush administration is a renegade government but they succeeded in intimidating the Democratic leadership into continuing the war.

The Bush administration has also succeeded in turning the United States into a rogue super-power. With the Bush doctrine, the United States reserves the right to invade any country that might emerge as a competitor. McCain advisers like Robert Kagan are following the logic of the Bush doctrine when they call for treating Russia and China with the same relentless animosity that we now reserve for Iran and North Korea.

Given that the Bush administration refuses to negotiate as a matter of principle and demands that every other country either give us what we want or face retaliation, it wouldn't be going to far to claim that the United States has become a force for instability throughout the world.

Much of the "rogue" status of North Korea and Saddam Hussein's Iraq is connected with their reflexive belligerence, indulgence in torture, and general refusal to follow international standards of behavior.

The same is the case with the United States under the Bush administration. President Bush, Dick Cheney, and other figures in the Bush administration have been so eager to exchange insult for insult with bin Laden, Ahmadinejad, and Kim that American pronouncements now have the same homoerotic feel as the put-downs and threats issues by professional wrestlers.

Much worse, the Bush administration has constructed a vast international network for illegally confining and torturing hundreds or thousands of innocent Afghans and Iraqis who have been taken up by the War on Terror dragnet. Whether it is exploring new vistas or sensory deprivation, developing tactics for tormenting Muslim prisoners, or elaborating a web or international institutions for torturing prisoners and hiding responsibility, the Bush administration has made a point of flouting international law and disdaining moral standards that the U. S. itself was active in creating.

If such practices continue into the next administration (and there's a good chance they will), the Bush administration will have succeeded in making the U. S. into a war criminal state.

The United States needs to turn away from the path defined by the Bush administration. But the first step in changing direction is acknowledging how successful the Bush administration has been in turning the United States into a rogue superpower and war criminal state.