In 1983, vice-president Bush expressed his admiration for Ceausescu’s political and economic progress and “respect for human rights.” Two years later Reagan’s ambassador resigned because of Washington’s objections to his concern for human rights. Shortly after, secretary of state Schultz praised Romania as among the “good Communists,” rewarding Ceausescu with a visit and economic favors. So matters continued until the tyrant was overthrown—by Romanians, as in the case of other killers and torturers in the Reagan-Bush entourage.

As soon as its favorite “good Communist” was eliminated, Washington announced that a “terrible burden” had been lifted from Romania, while at the same time lifting its ban on loans to Saddam Hussein in order to achieve the “goal of increasing US exports and put us in a better position to deal with Iraq regarding its human rights record,” the state department explained with a straight face. 9

As always, the US leadership can confidently take credit for the overthrow of the tyrants it supported until the very end. Saddam Hussein has joined “the pantheon of failed brutal dictators” whom the US has deposed, Donald rumsfeld proudly announced, including Ceausescu in the pantheon. On the same day as rumsfeld’s declaration, Paul Wolfowitz explained that his love of democracy was honed “during his formative years in the Reagan administration, when he was the state department’s chief Asian hand,” praising the monstrous Suharto and supporting the brutal and corrupt Marcos, whose fall, he now claims, shows that democracy “needs the prodding of the US”10—which backed Marcos until he could no longer be sustained in the face of the popular opposition joined even by the business classes and the army. The other examples are equally convincing.

As the rogues’ gallery of past friends fades into oblivion, new favorites take their place. Among them the Central Asian dictators—Uzbekistan’s Islam Karimov, Turkmenistan’s Saparmurat Niyazov, and others—who were becoming even more brutal and repressive as they were welcomed as participants in the redeclared ‘war on terror,” also reinforcing the US position in a region of considerable material wealth and strategic significance. Or, in another corner of the world rich in coveted oil, there is Teodoro Obiang of Equatorial Guinea, who ranks high in the competition among bloody tyrants and was duly received with full honors by president Bush in September 2002, shortly before he was reelected to a seven-year term with 97 percent of the vote.

An enthusiastic welcome has also been extended to Algeria, which had already been singled out for praise by Clinton’s state department for its achievements in combating terror—meaning, its horrendous record of state terrorist atrocities. Bush carried support for terror and torture to new extremes, offering military aid and other assistance to the Algerian government. Washington “has much to learn from Algeria on ways to fight terrorism,” we learn from William Burns, US assistant secretary of state for the Middle East. “Mr. Burns is right,” Robert Fisk comments. “America has much to learn from the Algerians,” including the barbaric techniques of torture that Fisk and a few other journalists have been exposing for years and that are now confirmed by Algerian army defectors in London and Paris. “Up to 200,000 Algerians have been slaughtered in the eleven years since the military cancelled that country’s first democratic elections because an Islamist party won,” Lisa Marlowe writes. “If Algeria is the US model for countering Islamic fundamentalism, heaven help us all.” 11 The sample above illustrates the consistency of the foreign policy record of the current incumbents. The domestic record displays a similar consistency.

The Reagan years saw a continuation of the relatively poor economic performance of the 1970s. Growth overwhelmingly benefited the very rich, unlike the “golden age” of the fifties and sixties, when it was evenly spread across the population. During the Reagan-Bush years real wages stagnated or declined along with benefits; working hours increased; and employers were given free rein to ignore protection for labor organizing. The policies were, naturally, unpopular. As the Bush I administration reached its final days, Reagan was ranked alongside Nixon as the least popular living ex-president. 12

After eight years, more reactionary sectors of the Reagan-Bush I administrations regained political power in the contested 2000 election. They recognized that the 9-11 atrocities provided them with an opportunity to pursue long-standing goals with even greater intensity, closely following the script of their earlier tenure in office.

It is not easy, under such conditions, to maintain political power. Only one good method is known: inspire fear. That tactic was employed throughout the Reagan-Bush years, as the leadership conjured up one devil after another to frighten the populace into obedience.

The threats to Americans during the first war on terror were immense. By November, 1981, Libyan hit men were roaming the streets of Washington to assassinate the president, who courageously faced down the scoundrel Qaddafi. From the first moment, the administration recognized Libya to be a defenseless punching bag, and therefore set up confrontations in which many Libyans could be killed, hoping for a Libyan response that could be exploited to induce fear.

Before Americans could breathe a sigh of relief over the president’s lucky escape from the Libyan hit men, Qaddafi was on the march again, this time invading Sudan across 600 miles of desert, with the air forces of the US and its allies standing by helplessly. Qaddafi also allegedly concocted a plot to overthrow the government of Sudan so subtle that Sudanese and Egyptian intelligence knew nothing about it, as discovered by the few US reporters who took the trouble to investigate. The subsequent US show of force enabled secretary of state Schultz to announce that Qaddafi “is back in his box where he belongs” because Reagan acted “quickly and decisively,” demonstrating “the strength of the cowboy” that so entranced worshipful intellectuals (Paul Johnson in this case). The episode was quickly relegated to oblivion once its purposes had been served. 13

Just as the early Libyan threats subsided, another even more dangerous one appeared: an air base in Grenada that the Russians could use to bomb us. Fortunately, our leader came to the rescue in the nick of time. After turning down offers for peaceful settlement on US terms, Washington landed 6,000 elite forces, who were able to overcome the resistance of a few dozen lightly armed, middle-aged Cuban construction workers, and we were at last “standing tall,” the gallant cowboy in the White House proclaimed. 14

But the threats were not over. Soon Nicaraguans were looming on the horizon, only two days’ driving time from Harlingen, Texas, waving their copies of Mein Kampf. Fortunately, the commander in chief, recalling churchills’s stand against the Nazis, refused to surrender and was able to fend off the threatening hordes, even though they were being supplied by Qaddafi in his campaign to “expel America from the world.” 15

As the White House sought to mobilize congressional support for an intensified attack on Nicaragua in 1986, the Libyan threat was conjured up again with deadly provocations in the Gulf of Sidra, followed by the bombing of Libya on prime-time TV, killing dozens, on no credible pretext. The official stance was that Article 51 of the UN Charter accords us the right to use violence “in self-defense against future attack.” That was perhaps the first explicit formulation of the doctrine of ‘preventive war,’ and the end of any hopes of a world of order and law, if taken at all seriously. And it was. New York Times legal analyst Anthony Lewis praised the Reagan administration for relying “on a legal argument that violence against the perpetrators of violence is justified as an act of self-defense.” Imagine the consequences if others were powerful enough to adopt the Reagan-Lewis doctrine. 16

So matters continued through the decade. The European tourist industry went into periodic decline, as Americans were too frightened to travel to European cities because they might be attacked by crazed Arabs or other demons. Grave threats were concocted at home as well. Crime in the US is not very different from other industrial countries. Fear of crime, however, is much higher. The same is true of drugs: a problem in other societies, an imminent danger to our very existence in the US. It is easy for political leaders to use the media to whip up fear of these and other menaces. Campaigns are mounted periodically, when required by domestic political needs. Bush I’s racist Willie Horton escapade in the 1988 election campaign is a famous example.

The September 1989 redeclaration of the “drug war” was another striking illustration. In the face of substantial evidence to the contrary, the administration dramatically proclaimed that Hispanic narcotraffickers were a menace to our society. Officials could be confident that the tactic would succeed, as explained by journalist and editor Hodding Carter, former assistant secretary of state in the Carter administration. It’s a “lead-pipe cinch,” he wrote, that “the mass media in America have an overwhelming tendency to jump up and down and bark in concert whenever the White House—any White House—snaps its fingers.” The campaign was a grand success. Fear of drugs instantly shot to the lead of public concerns. The stage was set for escalating the campaign to remove superfluous people from city streets to the new prisons that were rapidly being built; and to go on to Operation Just Cause, the glorious invasion of Panama on grounds of Noriega’s involvement with drug trafficking, among other reasons. At the same time, the Bush administration was threatening Thailand with severe sanctions if it placed barriers on import of a far more lethal US-produced substance, tobacco. But all this passed in silence.

In the case of Panama, too, there was a knockdown legal argument for invasion. UN ambassador Thomas Pickering instructed the security council that Article 51 of the UN Charter “provides for the use of armed force to defend a country, to defend our interests and our people,” and to prevent “its territory from being used to smuggle drugs into the US”—in this case, by reinstating the white elite of bankers and businessmen, many of whom were themselves suspected of narcotrafficking and money laundering and who soon lived up to their reputation, US government agencies reported. 17

Throughout, the legal arguments keep to a principle enunciated by the distinguished Israeli statesman Abba Eban: in “determining the legal basis” for some intended action, “one might look backward from the action one wished to take to find a legal justification.” 18

The script has been followed fairly closely as much the same elements gained a hold on political power in the 2000 election. In 1981 they had combined a vast increase in military spending with tax cuts, calculating “that growing hysteria over the ensuing deficit would create powerful pressures to cut federal social spending, and thus, perhaps, enable the administration to accomplish its goal of rolling back the New Deal.” Bush II followed the pattern with tax cuts overwhelmingly benefiting the very rich, and ‘the biggest surge in federal spending in twenty years,” 19 largely military, hence indirectly high-tech industry.

Government deficits require “fiscal discipline,” which translates into cutbacks for services for the general population. The administration’s own economists estimate the bills that the government will be unable to pay at $44 trillion. Their study was to be included in the annual budget report published in February 2003 but was removed, perhaps because it forecast that closing the gap would require a huge tax increase and bush was trying to ram through another tax reduction, again benefiting mainly the rich. “President Bush is working overtime to deepen our fiscal trap,” economists Laurence Kotlikoff and Jeffrey Sachs observe, reporting the enormous anticipated fiscal gap. Among the results, they contend, will be “massive cuts in future Social Security and Medicare benefits.” White House spokesperson Ari Fleischer agreed with the $44 trillion estimate and implicitly conceded the accuracy of the analysis as well: “there is no question that Social Security and Medicare are going to present future generations with a crushing debt burden unless policymakers work seriously to reform those programs”—which does not mean funding them by progressive taxation. The problem is deepened by the serious financial crisis of states and cities. 20

The editors of the staid Financial Times are only “stating the obvious,” economist Paul Krugman comments, when they write that “more extreme republicans” with their hands on the controls seem to want a fiscal train wreck that “offers the tantalizing prospect of forcing cuts on social programs through the back door.” Slated for demolition, Krugman contends, are Medicaid, Medicare, and Social Security, but the same may be true for the whole range of programs of the past century that were developed to protect the population from the ravages of private power. 21

Eliminating social programs has goals that go well beyond concentration of wealth and power. Social Security, public schools, and other such deviations from the “right way” that US military power is to impose on the world, as frankly declared, are based on evil doctrines, among them the pernicious belief that we should care, as a community, whether the disabled widow on the other side of town can make it through the day, or the child next door should have a chance for a decent future. These evil doctrines derive from the principle of sympathy that was taken to be the core of human nature by Adam Smith and David Hume, a principle that must be driven from the mind. Privatization has other benefits. If working people depend on the stock market for their pensions, health care, and other means of survival, they have a stake in undermining their own interests: opposing wage increases, health and safety regulations, and other measures that might cut into profits that flow to the benefactors on whom they must rely, in a manner reminiscent of feudalism.