�The smell of the dead pours into the street through the air-conditioning ducts. Hot, sweet, overwhelming. Inside the Baghdad morgue, there are so many corpses that the fridges are overflowing. The dead are on the floor. Dozens of them. Outside, in the 46C (114F) heat, Qadum Ganawi tells me how his brother Hassan was murdered . . ." British journalist Robert Fisk reporting from Baghdad

"It's really difficult to exactly delineate who our enemies are, but they number in millions. They're Arab and Muslim . . . Our enemy is the majority of the people who live in what we think of as the large Arab nations, plus certain other groups. Our enemy is concentrated in Egypt, Libya, Jordan, Iraq, Saudi Arabia and Syria, plus the Palestinians are part of it."�Ralph Peters, a former lieutenant-colonel responsible for "future warfare" at the Office of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and deputy chief of staff for intelligence before he retired . . ." Quoted by Pepe Escobar, Asia Times.com

What is the status of occupied Iraq 20 months after the U.S. invasion? Considering the magnitude and intensity of the uprising that turned the optimistic invasion into a protracted war, the answer is but one: Dick Cheney, Paul Wolfowitz, and George Bush have massively miscalculated. They looked at the coveted conquest of Iraq through the rusted eye of the Zionist needle.

The disorientation of the United States as it moves inside the Iraqi maze is a two-sided reality. On one side, it provides a glimpse of the splendid failure of Bush-Cheney to pacify the �prize� despite fire, steel, and genocide. On the other, it points to the equally splendid failure of hyper-imperialism as a supremacist ideology to revive colonialism through bogus wars of �preemption.�

However, regardless of how the Nazi-like occupation of Iraq would continue or end, the U.S., seen in a future historical perspective, will forever bear the burden of mayhem it deliberately inflicted on Iraq, and the blood it spilled to pillage a land it may not succeed to conquer after all. Moreover, contrary to the expectations of U.S. Zionists, the occupation of Iraq neither produced anything tangible for Israel, nor made the prospects of Israel ruling over the Middle East more plausible than before the war, or ended the struggle of the Palestinian people for liberation from their Zionist captors.

More than anything else, while the war did not advance the project for building an Israeli-American Empire, the occupation degraded U.S. perceived military omnipotence despite awesome technology, and paved the way for the inevitable demise of hyper-imperialism.

The immediate result of Bush-Cheney�s war is palpable. Instead of shocking and awing the world with its war machine, the U.S. shocked and awed itself for failing to force the Iraqis into submission, and the world to come to its rescue despite showy U.N. resolutions and regional conferences. As the budding collapse of Iraq�s conquest is in progress, a significant byproduct of failure, the U.S. is now facing many world governments (excluding the pathologically decadent, corrupt, and servile Arab regimes) that are no longer inhibited from challenging its imperialist hegemony.

In short, the war on Iraq produced two related outcomes. On one hand and aside from the immense human toll, reconstituting colonialism in the 21st century is impossible. On the other, the fierceness and extent of the anti-occupation revolt turned Cheney�s prewar prediction that Iraq will greet its invaders/occupiers as �liberators� and shower them with roses and rice turned into the most disastrous prediction in history.

Emphatically, the failure of hyper-imperialism is multiform and goes beyond the political or military inability to subjugate Iraq. For instance, world disobedience to the U.S. diktat is an outcome that Cheney did not include in his prewar calculations. The pillar of failure however is this: once U.S. rationales to invade Iraq tumbled down like 10 million tons of bricks, the true imperialist intent of the United States came out naked: recycled colonialism backed by violent ideologies of empire.

In sum, the enormous U.S. Iraqi debacle denotes a much more complex situation: (1) the failure of Kristol and Cheney�s belief that America�s military power can restart colonialism unopposed; (2) the conversion of the U.S. to a police state through the mechanisms of democracy; and (3) the revival of Nazism but with an American identity. Moreover, as the U.S. is failing in Iraq, so is Zionism in the United States. You can feel this failure by touching the pulse of American Zionists as they analyze America�s �wars of civilizations.�

As a presumptuous Zionist, Thomas Friedman, sings praise for the upcoming farcial Iraqi election and calls it, �fair� and �balanced,� another Zionist, Steve Weissman (an author who once warned the world against the �Islamic bomb,� but failed to mention the threat posed by the Jewish bomb,) writes:

The Neo-Cons sold their pitch first to Don Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney, and then to President George W. Bush, who is proving now in Iraq how self-defeating preemption can be. It has turned off nearly half of American voters, scared away most of our traditional allies, and caused large majorities in Western Europe to see the United States as a greater threat to world peace than Osama bin Laden.� [Italics added]

While Friedman tries to disguise the Zionist failure in Iraq with an �American engineered election,� Weissman shrewdly insinuated that the neocons are just individuals who sold their cause to gullible men residing in the White House. Naturally, with this approach, Weissman discarded the role of Zionist think tanks, advisory boards to the government, and collaborating media, who, effectively, are the decision makers of U.S. foreign policy.

To skip discussing the arrangement of power in Washington, Weissman treated the neocons as an external party with influence, while deeming Rumsfeld and Cheney as an insider party that had nothing to do with the neocons, yet was persuaded by them. But Cheney and Rumsfeld are neocons and were among the founders of the Zionist �Project for the New American Century.�

Why did Weissman opt for such an obvious gimmick? First, although he appeared critical of the notion of �preemption,� he was keen to salvage the Iraqi enterprise by placing an unqualified blame on individuals called �neocons.� Second, he did not specify that the neocons are members of a new political coalition that binds Christian Zionists and Jewish Zionists, be they Republican or Democrat. Weissman had a purpose. By shifting the blame away from Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld, Weissman clearly tried to find a way to rehabilitate the neoconservative ideology that continues to be represented in the person of Cheney, Rumsfeld, and others.

But Cheney is more than a force inside the neocon camp. As a framer of hyper-imperialist issues and an �expert� on the ideological reinterpretations of Middle Eastern and world events, he is �The Man� inside the Bush administration. Unlike Bush who lacks the elementary intellectual requirements to perform the job of a professional imperialist, Cheney is the embodiment of imperialism. To investigate how Cheney frames the events I just mentioned I must introduce the subtexts on imperialist colonialism.

Transmitted by cultural and indoctrinating mechanisms, colonialism, as a racist expression of imperialist ideologies, is like a deep-seated addiction that can never be rehabilitated. In fact, all powers that practiced colonialism still crave it despite progress. We can see this clearly when some major European former colonial powers, notwithstanding �passionate� objections, did not rise against the American Iraqi colonialist expedition or try to punish the United States. Can we explain that?

Aside from double standards, it is the covenant for colonialist solidarity. Take France for example. While, officially, an opponent of the war on Iraq, France was actually for the war but only if the U.S. were to include it as a partner rather than a vassal. In essence, France had only opposed U.S. imperial unilateralism, but not its underlying colonialist drive and long-term objectives.

The point of this: justifications for American and European colonialism had not changed throughout time. Having this in mind, the ongoing American experiment in Iraq is the culmination of an entrenched western colonialist tradition. This time is different however; instead of traditional western colonialism with a Christian matrix, we have Zionist colonialism with mixed Christian and Jewish matrixes. It follows that when Dick Cheney and George Bush talk about the war against Iraq as a response to 9/11, or �liberating� Iraq from dictatorship, they are not deviating from established historical patterns of colonialist imperialism.

For instance, during World War One, when Gen. Stanley Maud entered Baghdad on March 19, 1917 as a British conqueror, he proclaimed the conquest of Iraq from the Ottomans, who were ruling it, in terms that Bush copied on March 19, 2003�my belief is that the date, March 19, is not a coincidence. Maud, whose statue once adorned the gates of the British Embassy in Baghdad until the anti-colonialist revolution of July 14, 1958, where the populace toppled it and dragged it through the streets of Baghdad, proclaimed:

Our military operations have as their object the defeat of the enemy, and the driving of him from these territories. In order to complete this task, I am charged with absolute and supreme control of all regions in which British troops operate; but our armies do not come into your cities and lands as conquerors or enemies, but as liberators. Since the days of Halaka your city and your lands have been subject to the tyranny of strangers, your palaces have fallen into ruins, your gardens have sunk in desolation, and your forefathers and yourselves have groaned in bondage. Your sons have been carried off to wars not of your seeking, your wealth has been stripped from you by unjust men and squandered in distant places. [Italics added]

Compare Maud�s British colonialist proclamation with that of Bush when he announced his war on Iraq:

�My fellow citizens, at this hour, American and coalition forces are in the early stages of military operations to disarm Iraq, to free its people and to defend the world from grave danger. . . . The people you liberate will witness the honorable and decent spirit of the American military . . . We come to Iraq with respect for its citizens, for their great civilization and for the religious faiths they practice . . . We have no ambition in Iraq, except to remove a threat and restore control of that country to its own people.� [Italics added]

Let us see that in sequence: Maud, a British imperialist, justified the conquest of Iraq by forwarding established and experimented lines of British colonialism; Bush, an American hyper-imperialist, justified the second attempt at conquest of the same in less than 100 years by advancing the new lines of American colonialism.

What remains to be seen, is how does Bush�s deputy, Dick Cheney see the conquest?

The 9/11 Rationale and Iraq�s Conquest

Because the purpose of Iraq�s occupation is achieving the combined objective of colonialism, imperialism, crusading Christian theology, and Zionism, the U.S. road to it was punctuated by numerous contradictory rationales that, as they never contained any reference to conquest, were filled with arcane references to our �goodness� and their �evilness.� By comparison, while Britain, France, or Italy never hid their lust for colonial possessions, the United States follows extremely tortuous routes to colonialism that could never disguise, however, its ultimate objective: empire building. The denial of imperialism and/or colonialism often pushes U.S. politicians and thinkers to hide behind futile idealistic dissertations that never reflected the ultimate intention: Imperium.

How did Cheney rationalize the imperialist takeover of Iraq? Cheney, holding his twisted ideological shovel, depicted a picture that had no equal:

Our mission in Iraq is a great undertaking and part of a larger mission that the United States accepted now more than two years ago. September 11, 2001, changed everything for this country. We came to recognize our vulnerability to the threats of the new era. We saw the harm that 19 evil men could do, armed with more than airline tickets and box cutters and driven by a philosophy of hatred. We lost some 3,000 innocent lives that morning, in scarcely two hours� time. [Italics added]

To be sure, Cheney announced three programs: (1) a triple-pronged paradigm comprising daring U.S. objectives� (2) a justificatory platform for their enactment; and (3) an example supporting the decision for empire:

• U.S. imperialistic objectives: with a series of repetitive linguistic tics (Cheney�s trademark) such as �our mission,� its synonym: �a great undertaking,� and again, �a larger mission,� Cheney designed the future path of Zionist hyper-imperialism in Iraq [mission], in the Middle East [great undertaking], and in the world [larger mission].
• Hyper-imperialism justificatory platform for universal empire: the U.S. �vulnerability for the threats of the new era.�
• Supporting argument: the U.S. �saw the harm that 19 evil men could do, armed with more than airline tickets and box cutters and driven by a philosophy of hatred. We lost some 3,000 innocent lives that morning, in scarcely two hours� time.�

By critically understanding Cheney�s reference to the invasion of Iraq as a loop in a longer chain, we can immediately identify the principal ruse that led to it: U.N. resolutions. With his �mission,� Cheney directly admitted that U.N.�s Iraq resolutions were only a convenient pretext. In fact, the invasion and protracted occupation of Iraq had an original strategic purpose.

To what mission was Cheney alluding?

From studying U.S. involvement in the Middle East, this mission cannot be but imposing a new model of conquest on Iraq and on the region, that is, refracturing the Middle East and turning established states that once were one land into new protectorates, colonies, and semi-colonies. The so-called Islamic threat in this case is nothing but the irrelevant, ideological superstructure that underpins the project of conquest.

Nevertheless, are Cheney�s �mission,� �great undertaking,� and �larger mission� a sudden idea created by the event of 9/11? Or did 9/11 provide the right atmosphere to reprise the interrupted yet long historical process for building an American Universal Empire, the dream of U.S. imperialists and biblical Zealots and visionaries? And how does Zionism enter into this formula?

It is academic to state that since the end of World War II, U.S. imperialists have been prospecting the takeover of Iraq and the Middle East. There were four fundamental reasons that nourished that ambition: (1) oil, (2) confrontation with the Soviet Union, 3) Israel, and (4) as a stage in the building of a universal empire. Expressions such as �our legitimate interests in the Gulf� or �our national interests in the region,� reinforced and made successive American generations think of the Middle East as a doormat for the United States whose sole function is supplying cheap oil to American consumers.

As we shall see in the upcoming parts, the idea that the U.S. must physically control the sources of Arab oil had existed long before well-defined ideological manifestos of U.S. Zionism became known. Consequently, the �Clean Break� of Richard Perle, the �Project for the New American Century� of Cheney, Kristol, et al, and the �National Security Strategy of the United States� of Condoleezza Rice were the most notorious.

Invariably, to control the oil resources of the Middle East, U.S. imperialists have always presupposed implementing direct military presence in the region. Three recent regional events facilitated that objective. First, the Iraq-Iran war as coordinated between the U.S., Iraq, Saudi Arabia, and Kuwait. Second, the invasion of Kuwait by Iraq as coordinated between Iraq and the United States. Third, the opportunity offered by 9/11 to cement that presence by the takeover of Iraq.

After this introduction, the question is how did Dick Cheney use his triple-pronged paradigm to implement hyper-imperialist colonialism starting with Iraq?�

Next: Part 25: Dick Cheney, the inferior art of bulldozing reality