There is a bleak wondrousness to this American world of ours. The Bush administration, after all, loathes fundamentalists — those dangerous fanatics in strange lands with bizarre medieval belief systems, who wish us such ill and are more than ready to go to some twisted paradise to prove their fervor — except, of course, for the fundamentalists here who believe that they’ll soon enough be snatched away and enraptured, while the Middle East and then the world is turned into something like a giant car bomb. Our President proclaims the spread of freedom and won’t let American officials sit down alone with their “axis of evil” counterparts in Iran and North Korea to negotiate nuclear dangers — as if such contact might literally pollute them — and yet consorting with Saudi autocrats, Pakistan’s military ruler Musharraf, or the dictators of various Central Asian ‘stans and their associates is unremarked upon. (Note, by the way, that one result of Bush administration military-to-military tsunami aid in Indonesia has been the official revival of relations between the Pentagon and the well-bloodied Indonesian military.)

The Bush administration calls — quite rightly — for the ending of the Syrian military “occupation” of Lebanon and the withdrawal of Syria’s remaining 15,000 troops in that country — an occupation, I learned only yesterday from Juan Cole (in the single best backgrounder on the Lebanese situation I’ve seen), that was green-lighted by Henry Kissinger himself back in 1976 — and yet it sticks grimly with its occupation (…oops, liberation) of Iraq and considers the idea of withdrawing our 130,000 occupation troops there, no matter in what phased or timed fashion, cut-and-run heresy. (Why only the other day, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Gen. Richard Myers was saying that insurgencies around the world tend to last… hint, hint… 7-12 years. That would, of course, involve Syrian-style staying power.) And we naturally welcome liberty, except when it comes to any of the prisoners we hold under unbelievable conditions and without rights or limit in offshore prisons around the world and even in the United States.

Just Tuesday, in our topsy-turvy world, District Court Judge Henry F. Floyd, appointed to the federal bench in South Carolina by George Bush in 2003, ruled, according to R. Jeffrey Smith of the Washington Post, that the government must charge or free the imprisoned alleged terrorist Jose Padilla because it

“lacks statutory and constitutional authority to indefinitely imprison without criminal charges a U.S. citizen who was designated an ‘enemy combatant’… Using a phrase often levied by conservatives to denigrate liberal judges, Floyd… accused the administration of engaging in ‘judicial activism’… Floyd said the government presented no law supporting this contention and that just because Bush and his appointees say Padilla’s detention was consistent with U.S. laws and the president’s war powers, that did not make it so. ‘Moreover, such a statement is deeply troubling. If such a position were ever adopted by the courts, it would totally eviscerate the limits placed on Presidential authority to protect the citizenry’s individual liberties.’”

Indeed.

What a world when we must rely on right-wing judges appointed by our present President for the protection of our most basic civil liberties! What a world when it’s clear to such a judge that a government claim of “blanket authority under the Constitution to detain Americans on U.S. soil who are suspected of taking or planning actions against the country” is, in fact, nothing of the sort!

There was a time when I believed that, of the two famed dystopian novels of the previous century, Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World and George Orwell’s 1984, Huxley’s was the one that best caught the most frightening tendencies in our American world. But I may be changing my mind. After all, we’re now ruled by radicals who have proclaimed, in the name of freedom, that our fate is eternal war — a.k.a. World War IV, a.k.a. the Global War on Terror — and Americans have indeed grown relatively comfortable with a world in which “peace [ours] is war [against them]” — or, as William Rivers Pitt writes in a thoughtful essay on American empire at the Truthout.org website, “Now, permanent war and rule by fear are accepted without question.”

Pitt, like the declinist scholar Immanuel Wallerstein and Kirkpatrick Sale (in a recent essay, Imperial Entropy, at the Counterpunch.com website), believes us an empire in decline, cracking open at the seams, even threatening to collapse. Minimally, there is something remarkable in the fact that our imperial forces, in only their second sortie to war under new management, found themselves stopped in their tracks. Not quite the shock-and-awe vision of Roman legions marching across the known world. There can be little question, as Sidney Blumenthal indicated recently (and I wrote the other day), that the Europeans see us as a dangerous but weakening power and that the recent Bush trip to Europe is evidence of a new policy of “containment” — the beginnings of a global attempt (European, Russian, Chinese) to contain the Bush administration.

Though Orwell imagined a world in which phrases like “war is peace” were statements of horror and of linguistic degradation, it might be worth asking whether a version of Orwellian language might not also hold some element of hope within it. For instance, what if, as the Bush administration seems to be demonstrating at the moment, “strength is weakness”? What if being armed to the teeth, in the end, turns out to be a brutal form of imperial disarmament? This is, in a way, one question Jonathan Schell asks as he considers our President’s whirlwind tour of Europe in his latest “Letter from Ground Zero” for the Nation magazine.

[This article first appeared on Tomdispatch.com, a weblog of the Nation Institute, which offers a steady flow of alternate sources, news, and opinion from Tom Engelhardt, long time editor in publishing and author of The End of Victory Culture and The Last Days of Publishing.]

---