government is better. We don't have to wrest justice from the kings. We only have to summon it
from within ourselves. We must act on what we know. [fn 1]After the inauguration ceremonies at the Capitol were completed, George and Barbara
Bush descended Pennsylvania Avenue towards the White House in a triumphant
progress, getting out of their limousine every block or two to walk among the crowds and
savour the ovations. George Bush, imperial administrator and bureaucrat, had now
reached the apex of his career, the last station of the cursus honorum: the chief
magistracy. Bush now assumed leadership of a Washington bureaucracy that was
increasingly focussed on itself and its own aspirations, convinced of its own omnipotence
and infallibility, of its own manifest destiny to dominate the world. It was a heady
moment, full of the stuff of megalomaniac delusion.
Imperial Washington was now aware of the increasing symtoms of collapse in the Soviet
Empire. The feared adversary of four decades of the cold war was collapsing. Germany
and Japan were formidable economic powers, but they were led by a generation of
politicians who had been well schooled in the necessity of following Anglo-Saxon orders.
France had abandoned her traditional Gaullist policy of independence and sovereignty,
and had returned to the suivisme of the old Fourth Republic under Bush's freemasonic
confrere Francois Mitterrand. Opposition to Washington's imperial designs might still
come from leading states of the developing sector, from India, Brazil, Iraq and Malasia,
but the imperial administrators, puffed up with their xenophobic contempt for the former
colonials, were confident that these states could ne easily defeated, and that the third
world would meekly succumb to the installation of Anglo-American puppet regimes in
the way that the Philippines and so many Latin American countries had during the 1980's.
Bush could also survey the home front with self-congratulatory complacency. He had
won a Congressional election in his designer district in Houston, but in 1964 and 1970
majorities at the polls had proven mockingly elusive. Now, for just the second time in his
life, he had solved the problem of winning a contested election, and this time it had been
the big one. Bush had at one stroke fulfilled his greatest ambition and solved his most
persistent problem, that of getting himself elected to public office. He had dealt
successfully with the thorny issue of governance in the domestic sphere, foiling the jinx
that had dogged all sitting vice presidents seeking to move up after Martin Van Buren's
success in 1836.
Bush assembled a team of his fellow Malthusian bureaucrats and administrators from
among those officials who had staffed Republican administrations going back to 1969,
the year that Nixon chose Kissinger for the National Security Council. Persons like
Scowcroft, Baker, Carla Hills, and Bush himself had, with few exceptions, been in or
around the federal government and especially the executive branch for most of two
decades, with only the brief hiatus of Jimmy Carter to let them fill their pockets in private
sector influence peddling. Bush's cabinet and staff was convinced it boasted the most
powerful battery of resumes, the the most consummate experience, the most impeccable
credentials, of any management team in the history of the world. All the great issues of
policy had been solved under Nixon, Ford, and Reagan; the geopolitical situation was
being brought under control; all that remained was to consolidate and perfect the total