One thing I don't admire about President Johnson is that when faced with the same scenario in Vietnam he chose to neither option.

The harsh title of this essay is not based on the belief that U.S. leaders are the most vicious ever, although they are amply arrogant, ruthless and even vicious, rendered more hypocritical by the veneer of self-righteousness and Godly service. Rather it rests, first, on the facts that they have far more destructive power than any predecessors, have already used it and threaten to escalate their violence, and are not only subject to inadequate constraints but operate in a political culture that is volatile, manipulable, and contains threatening irrational elements. The rise of U.S. destructive power, far beyond anything related to national "defense," and far beyond the capabilities of any potential rivals, was clearly purposeful and designed to serve both the transnational business and financial interests of the U.S. elite and the
contractor-Pentagon-politician vested interest in militarization - the military industrial complex (MIC).

U.S. military and economic power have allowed it to engage in three wars of aggression in violation of the UN Charter in the last decade without any serious opposition by the UN or "international community" (i.e., governments capable of any effective opposition to hegemonic power).
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In the case of its attack on Iraq the United States even received from the UN ex post facto recognition of its occupation and pacification rights - which helps explain the August 19, 2003 bombing of the UN offices in Baghdad - and the UN is busily engaged in providing the United States and Israel with some kind of quasi-legal sanction for the next phase of the U.S.'s serial aggressions.

Global publics have disapproved of these aggressions, and protests have grown in breadth and size, but thus far they have not been able to stop the onslaughts. Democracy is not working well across the globe as elite rulers have regularly ignored public antiwar sentiment as expressed in elections as well as polls, and where they have not, as in France and Turkey in 2003, those rulers have been vilified in the United States and have struggled to compensate for their democratic excesses. In the United States itself, not only has the ruling elite been able to ignore poll majorities favoring an exit from Iraq, the 2006 election victory of the Democrats, widely seen to have been a reflection of the public's interest in withdrawal, has not prevented a further Bush escalation of the war, with only nominal Democratic Party resistance. In another mark of democratic failure, the Democrats agreed to remove a funding bill requirement that Bush seek congressional approval before launching an attack on Iran.
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The world needs leadership in resolving these real problems, and what it has been getting from the United States are policies that waste resources, stoke conflict, kill and destroy, and literally fight against a constructive dealing with the threatening environmental disasters. The "end times" folks that have close links to the Bush administration may be getting their Armageddon without any divine aid, merely by Bush-U.S. policy as usual.