The year 2003 was the most significant milestone in contemporary world history. The United States, under the presidency of George W. Bush, assumed a unilateral approach to world diplomacy which led to the misadventurous Middle East attack on Iraq in March 2003.

This, above all other factors, marked the downfall of the American Empire, not because of the ensuing military quagmire that culminated in the loss of a limited number of American forces; nor of the loss of thousands of Iraqis; nor of the terrorist war of attrition that followed against American citizens and interests both domestically and abroad. However, the loss of prestige in the world community inevitably led to America's decline and the rise of the European Community (EU) along with its Far Eastern counterpart, the People's Republic of China. The ensuing rise of terroristic attacks against Americans and American interests also played pivotal roles in the decline.

What was the principal source of America's fall?

The selection of US president G.W. Bush in December 2000 was the beginning of the end for the republic -- as Bush's father secretly contacted Justices of the US Supreme Court to lobby on behalf of his son; and the Florida ballot counting turned into fiasco, tainted by conflicts of interest and under-the-table dealings of political operatives and his brother's state officials who declined recusing themselves from key positions of vote tabulations.

G.W. Bush, inaugurated January 20, 2001, assumed the office much differently than his predecessors of 1824 and 1876 who also took office under cloud of losing the nation's popular vote while winning the electoral college -- though contested through the legal system. While presidents of these close elections in the 1800s ascended the office with contrite attitudes and acted promptly to mend the nation's divisions by selecting members of their respective cabinets balanced between both major political parties, G.W. Bush opted instead to pack his cabinet with hard-line conservatives of the militant persuasion, intent on pushing agendas counter to the public interest, such as the PROJECT FOR A NEW AMERICAN CENTURY written 1997-2000, and other partisan programs of such a contentious nature that national unity was irreparably damaged.

Upon his ascent, G.W. Bush issued executive orders to American intelligence agencies to cease investigating the terrorist activities of Osama bin Laden, native of Saudi Arabia and resident of Afghanistan where his terrorist training camps were based. Asked why Mr. Bush cut off investigations, staff members explained the order was due to Mr. Bush's business relationships with the Bin Laden family of Saudi Arabia and the USA in 1976, 1982, and 1986, and whose brother, Salem bin Laden, had been Mr. Bush's principal investor in Arbusto Energy, Inc., of Midland, Texas. Arbusto (meaning "Bush" or "Shrub") was a failed venture, but the Bin Laden money was never recovered but remained in Bush's account after four out of the five firms failed.

Thus, the United States was flying blind throughout the period of terrorist cell buildup of 2001 which led to September 11, the day that changed American history forever. While members of the Republican Party attributed the intelligence gap to the Clinton years and personal scandals, history records that Mr. Bush's retreat from investigating Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda in February 2001 because of former business interests dating back to 1977 led to surprise attack. In addition, Bush's unconditional support for Israel's Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, the construction of illegal Jewish settlements on Palestinian lands, and the hard-line militant approach toward Arab interests, further invigorated terrorists already planted as "sleeper cells" in the US and Europe. The Israeli-Palestinian Conflict was of prime interest to Muslims globally. They viewed an imbalanced American policy as "anti-Muslim," and thus were inflamed to action at George Bush's ascendancy.

America Takes A Fall

Assuming a unilateral, pre-emptive policy of foreign relations, Mr. Bush ordered air strikes on Baghdad, March 19, 2003, thus ending all hope for resolving issues through negotiated settlement or through protracted containment that had worked successfully for twelve years prior. Negotiations were anathema to Bush, as he concurred with more militant solutions many times publicly. Representing weakness to hard-line militants of his party, "negotiations" in their view were exclusively conducted by weak-kneed, spineless "liberal" leaders such as the former President Jimmy Carter, a Nobel Peace Prize winner in 2002 who had negotiated and assisted in resolving dozens of world conflicts since leaving office 1981.

The United Nations was also targeted by Mr. Bush, along with his contempt for other world bodies established to maintain order around the globe. Thus, he unilaterally withdrew from the successful 1972 AntiBallistic Missile Treaty (ABM), the World Court, International War Crimes Tribunal, and the Kyoto Protocol -- vacating the support of conventional diplomatic norms and outside acceptable international guidelines. Mr. Bush was thus remembered throughout the world as a dictatorial maverick -- the Europeans naming him the "Texas gun-happy cowboy." The world view of the United States was at its lowest ebb.

The attack on Iraq, though conducted by the world's superpower, was poorly planned and ill-conceived. Mr. Bush, in a show of arrogant belligerency, had repeatedly provided Mr. Saddam Hussein with advanced warning in almost every speech beginning fifteen months prior to invasion. As a result, Mr. Hussein was well prepared to take a portion of the world with him in defeat. Biological and chemical agents provided by George Bush the father and manufactured by weapons labs in the US and Europe in the 1980s, were at Saddam's disposal. Therefore, Hussein ordered vials of the deadly elements to be dispersed at strategic locations throughout the nation of Iraq and via "sleeper cells" in the United States, to be released at the onset of hostility, no directive necessary from the head of state. Saddam timed the release of the lethal agents to coincide with the full arrival of US troops within the city of Baghdad, thereby inflicting the most casualties.

The deadly agents immediately caused the deaths of 1,000,000 Iraqis, 20,000 British soldiers, 200,000 Americans in Iraq, and 500,000 Americans in the USA. Promptly Mr. George Bush declared martial law and placed the US on total war footing. But the damage was done. Stock markets around the world fell to their lowest levels since 1929 as panic captivated the entire world.

Upon release of chemical agents in the US, President George Bush ordered the nuclear attack on Baghdad, leading to the death of 5,000,000, the destruction of energy supplies for a decade, and resulting in chaos unparalleled in world history.

The overthrow of the military regime in Pakistan, which in part resulted from Mr. Bush's actions in Iraq and the subsequent incitement of Muslim militants all around the globe, resulted in the Pakistani-Indian Nuclear War, killing 2,000,000 at its onset. The domino effect of Mr. Bush's folly was felt around the world. Israel's annexation of the West Bank, Gaza and Golan Heights inflamed its Arab neighbors to action -- also effects of Mr. Bush's arrogant errors.

European and Asian powers had warned President George W. Bush repeatedly of such potential risk to world security, but to no avail. The world was swept into economic depression, and recovery from exposure to biological and chemical weapons of mass destruction lasted a full generation. America was forced to pay the price for George Bush's arrogant unilateralism, as Germany and China soon captured the stage as the world's leaders. The policies of unilateralism and pre-emptiveness were banned by a new United Nations established in Berlin. The US no longer was a "super power" and lowered its standing to less than an industrialized state, forced to concentrate all its resources on recovering from chemical and biological weapons exposure, the deaths of hundreds of thousands, and a generation of children born with defects.