Free American Way of War by Tom Engelhardt

from being aimed solely at the protection of U.S. space capabilities, such weapons are instead intended for offensive, first-strike missions.”
    Ever since H. G. Wells wrote The War of the Worlds in 1898, we humans have been imagining scenarios in which implacable aliens with superweapons arrive from space to devastate our planet. But what if it turns out that the implacable aliens are actually us—and that, as in the sixteenth century, someday in the not-too-distant future U.S. “ships” will “burst from space” upon the “coasts” of our planet with devastation imprinted in their programs. These are, of course, the dreams of modern Mongols.

Wonders of the Imperial World
    Of the seven wonders of the ancient Mediterranean world, including the Hanging Gardens of Babylon and the Colossus of Rhodes, four were destroyed by earthquakes, two by fire. Only the Great Pyramid of Giza today remains.
    We no longer know who built those fabled monuments to the grandiosity of kings, pharaohs, and gods. Nowadays, at least, it’s easier to identify the various wonders of our world with their architects. Maya Lin, for instance, spun the moving black marble Vietnam Memorial from her remarkable brain for the U.S. veterans of that war. Frank Gehry dreamt up his visionary titanium-covered museum in Bilbao, Spain, for the Guggenheim. The architectural firm of BDY (Berger Devine Yaeger, Inc.), previously responsible for the Sprint Corporation’s world headquarters in Overland Park, Kansas, the Visitation Church in Kansas City, Missouri, and Harrah’s Hotel and Casino in North Kansas City, Missouri, turns out to have designed the biggest wonder of all—an embassy large enough to embody Washington’s vision of an American-reordered Middle East. We’re talking, of course, about the U.S. embassy, the largest on the planet, being constructed on a 104-acre stretch of land in the heart of Baghdad’s embattled Green Zone. As Patrick Lenahan, then Senior Architect and Project Manager at BDY, put it (according to the firm’s website): “We understand how to involve the client most effectively as we direct our resources to make our client’s vision a reality.”
    And what a vision it was. What a reality it’s turned out to be.
    Who can forget the grandiose architecture of pre-Bush administration Baghdad: Saddam Hussein’s mighty vision of kitsch Orientalism melting into terror, based on which, in those last years of his rule, he reconstructed parts of the Iraqi capital? He ensured that what was soon to become the Green Zone would be dotted with overheated, Disneyesque, Arabian Nights palaces by the score, filled with every luxury imaginable in a country whose population was growing increasingly desperate under the weight of United Nations sanctions. Who can forget those vast, sculpted hands, “The Hands of Victory,” supposedly modeled on Saddam Hussein’s own, holding twelve-story-high giant crossed swords (over piles
of Iranian helmets) on a vast Baghdad parade ground? Meant to commemorate a triumph over Iran that the despot never actually achieved, they still sit there, partially dismantled and a monument to folly.
    It is worth remembering that, when the American commanders whose troops had just taken Baghdad wanted their victory photo snapped, they memorably seated themselves, grinning happily, behind a marble table in one of those captured palaces; that American soldiers and newly arrived officials marveled at the former tyrant’s exotic symbols of power; that they swam in Saddam’s pools, fed rare antelopes from his son Uday’s private zoo to its lions (and elsewhere shot his herd of gazelles and ate them); and, when in need of someplace to set up an American embassy, the newly arrived occupation officials chose—are you surprised? —one of his former dream palaces. They found nothing strange in the symbolism of this (though it was carefully noted by Iraqis), even as they swore they were bringing liberation and democracy to