Americans and concerned citizens everywhere in the world need a paradigm change in their Weltanschauung in order to start thinking "out of the box" about how we govern ourselves in our chaotic world.
At the end of World War II, World Federalists in the United States and Europe -- aware of the disastrous effect on humanity often split by power-hungry leaders into warring ultra-nationalist camps -- called for a federal system for governing the world: a world where the people -- the source of legitimate authority -- could distribute their powers to govern between governments of their countries and a government for the Earth.
The campaign for such a federal, well-governed world suffered from attacks by reactionary nationalists like Senator Joe McCarthy, at one extreme, and followers of totalitarian Josef Stalin, at the other, and for four long decades the Cold War prevented meaningful preparations for a World Federation. Coincidentally, the gentleman most responsible for the collapse of the Soviet Union, its last President, Mikhail Gorbachev (remember glasnost = openness and perestroika = reform), was an incipient World Federalist, as he declared on a visit to the U.S. in 1992:
"On today's agenda is not just a union of democratic states, but also a democratically organized world community. An awareness of the need for some kind of global government is gaining ground, one in which all members of the world community would take part."
However, instead of listening and taking up the challenge to work for a well-governed world in which all the people have a stake, a powerful coalition was rising within the United States and striving for a world completely dominated by the U.S. (ueber Alles). The coalition, reflecting President Eisenhower's warning of the danger of the military-industrial complex's growing political control over the U.S., includes businessmen, especially in the petroleum industry. They are aware that the world's production of petroleum has peaked, leading to a contest over control of steadily diminishing resources. (Could they be called "war profiteers"?) There are also certain military officers who aspire to be commanders of American forces that would overwhelm "the enemy."
And, now in the 21st Century, there are still the Messianics. Temporarily supporting the Jewish fundamentalists, who were the first to believe in the coming of a Messiah, are the millions of Christian fundamentalists -- the millenarians, the Armageddonists. They believe that their Messiah in the form of Jesus will launch a holy war that will destroy the forces of evil and secure the Holy Land to the Jews of the Bible, who then have the choice of becoming born-again Christians or being thrown into
bottomless perdition, along with all the other non-believers.
Ironically, in reaction to this latter-day Crusader mindset, followers of another kind of Messiah, the Mahdi, have no difficulty in finding Islamist and Arab recruits against the Americans and Israelis.
Then there are the neo-liberal neo-conservatives, with their plans to "democratize the Middle East" by military might starting with oil-rich Iraq, enabling Israel to become the regional hegemon. With roots earlier in the 20th Century, in 1997 many of them coalesced into the Project for the New American Century.
The U.S. election of 2000 propelled the neo-cons into dominating the American war machine. Nevertheless, they could not launch the "endless war," which would assure them endless power (might such persons be considered warmongers?), unless a docile American public could be aroused by "a new Pearl Harbor." Their prayers were met on September 11th, 2001, within hours of which plans to conquer Iraq -- allegedly as a step in the direction of democratizing Southwest Asia -- were set in motion. Since the professional intelligence services could not be depended upon to come up with weapons of mass destruction (W.M.D.) as a casus belli, and because they found no connection between the secular dictator, Saddam Hussein, and the al Qaeda Islamists under Osama bin Laden, the neo-cons created an Office of Special Plans to help provide their rationale for the war.
As it turned out, invading and overrunning Iraq with their “Shock and Awe” strategy was something that a technically advanced war machine appeared good at. However, pacifying a country whose people had revolted against foreign occupiers in the past and whose army had faded away was something else again.
With their idee fixe that Iraq was overrun with W.M.D., the planners of the war sent some 1600 skilled soldiers at a cost of a billion dollars on a wild good chase for W.M.D., which chief inspectors David Kay and Charles Duelfer then reported did not exist. In contrast, were hundreds of sites around Iraq containing explosives and other "conventional" weapons, which U.N. teams had sealed. Scott Ritter, on a U.N. authorized inspection, had discovered such sites possessing instructions on making I.E.D.s (improvised explosive devises). Thus when American troops invaded Iraq in March 2003 with inadequate strength to secure them, these sites were looted, giving Iraqi dissidents an ample supply of arms for an insurgency.
Aside from the grievous human toll on both sides, what has been the financial cost to the American people? Ever since the Sixties the United States has slowly been losing its position as the world's dominant economic power. Three indicators may exemplify its deteriorating condition.
l First, by launching a costly war and simultaneously reducing means for paying for it by awarding millionaires (and billionaires) tax breaks, the current U.S. Administration has piled up a series of record national deficits.
l Secondly, in November 2004 the U.S. Congress approved raising the accumulated national debt to some $8,180,000,000,000.00. This is equivalent to over $110,000 per family of four! (How many grandchildren will it take to pay off this sum -- which under present circumstances could continue to mount?)
l Thirdly, the United States has changed from being the country with the largest positive current account in international trade and finance to one with the worst -- with a deficit of over $500,000,000,000.00 in 2003.

A falloutof the adverse economic situation is the devaluation of the U.S. Dollar. Shortly after it was issued, the Euro came to be valued at less than the dollar. By 2002, the two currencies were virtually on par. Two years later, the dollar is worth only three-quarters of a Euro. And to my chagrin, in October, it cost me two dollars to buy a British pound!

Meanwhile, by buying U.S. Treasury bonds, the governments of China and Japan (with huge favorable balances of trade with the U.S.) have been propping up the dollar. As the value of their holdings decline, and as inflation takes off in the United States, interest rates will be pressured to rise, in an effort to forestall countries' dumping their dollars, which in turn might well lead to a depression.

Nero fiddled while Rome burned. Where are today's world statesmen and stateswomen -- today's version of America's Founding Fathers and pioneers of the European Union -- to call for ending endless wars, whether on "Communism" or on "Terrorism"? Isn't it long past time that we not only realize the need for a well-governed world, a democratic world federation (D.W.F.), but also strive to achieve it? -- By John O. Sutter