The Pre-Emptive Prophet

"Something has gone extremely wrong with American politics."

After you think, "duh," thank Saul Landau, who has put his veteran political instincts to work once again in The Pre-Emptive Empire: A Guide to Bush's Kingdom (Pluto Press, London, 2003), a brisk scouring of the ideological circus that is the Bush Administration.

An Emmy award-winning filmmaker and longtime analyst with the Institute of Policy Studies, Landau has authored dozens of gutsy, incisive commentaries on the state of international politics and is currently a professor of communications at Cal Poly in Pomona. After three decades of watching the world scene Landau isn't afraid to point out that our emperor-in-chief wears no clothes.

Gathered into a bracing bouquet of essays (many of the chapters are expanded from articles written for Progreso Weekly and Pacifica Network News) Landau's book offers a full-throttle crash course in just how we got into this mess. His probe is aimed both at the politically savvy and at those Americans whose grasp of foreign affairs and world politics is skimmed from cable news sound bites and government propaganda.

The book, which has a Foreword by George McGovern, tracks the Bush administration's imperial aggression in order to make the world free for democracy (whether it likes it or not). Bush-league imperialism quotes the New Testament early and often, before bludgeoning its detractors with Wild West clichés. It's a simple case of us against them, and of doing unto them (the pre-emptive part of Landau's title) before they do unto us.

Landau cites chilling instances of what our failure to question authority has cost. His overview of 9/11 and its costly harvest of government disinformation is illustrative. At no point did the Bush administration ask why the World Trade Centers were attacked.

"Shouldn't people in power have asked that question and debated it before rushing madly around the world with troops, missiles and extreme belligerence?" Landau wonders. Instead came the barrage of TV hyperbole, spin doctoring and the granting of "billions of dollars to the President to use as he wished."

In a section entitled, "The Empire Strikes Back," Landau details a historically accurate fable of just how the interests of national security have been used to pad federal payrolls, abbreviate civil rights and escalate our tax debt into a war perceived by former allies as ruthless and unjust. Landau knows that the Orwellian atmosphere of waging war to preserve peace is the perfect smokescreen for the Bush administration's mission of world domination.

"Our infrastructure, such as the Department of Homeland Anxiety, keeps people feeling misled and isolated," the author joked in a recent interview. Landau has watched the US agenda of world domination bloom, after the Cold War, into a landscape of official lies. "If left unquestioned, big lies turn into axioms and then into destructive policy -- cold war or hot war," he writes.

What would it take to stop this empire? "Well," Landau sighs, "the press could start doing its job. Someone said recently that if you embed reporters with the military what you get is presstitutes." Drum roll.

Seriously though, Landau mocks the press as "privatized Ministries of Propaganda," and deplores the "brevity of explanation and paucity of facts," fed to the American public by the mainstream media."

The book originated partly because "people just weren't quite grasping the breadth of all this," Landau told me. "I mean, who would declare a war without an exit strategy?" The result is what Landau calls "an abstract war" -- a war that can neither be won nor lost. Despite the fact that Iraq posed no documented threat to the US, Landau notes, W approved the daily pounding by hi-tech ordinance, while government spinmeisters tinkered with historic facts to make Saddam look more "evil."