Tony Blair describes the insurgents as terrorists. There is clearly a body of foreign nationals which has entered Iraq since the invasion and which is committing terrorist atrocities. But the heart of the insurgency is widespread Iraqi resistance to a brutal and savage military occupation. Cutting off somebody’s head is a barbaric act. But so is the dropping of cluster bombs on totally innocent people and tearing them apart.

Thousands upon thousands of civilians have been killed in Iraq and many thousands more mutilated for life. We don’t see the corpses or the mutilated children on television.

The U.S. invasion of Iraq was not only totally unjustified, illegal, and illegitimate, it was a criminal act of immense proportions and one which will have profound consequences throughout the world.

But the invasion was also quite consistent with declared American foreign policy. American foreign policy now aims at FULL-SPECTRUM DOMINANCE—that is the U.S. administration’s term, not mine. Full-spectrum dominance means control of air, sea, land, and space. It also of course means control of the world’s resources.

The United States has over 700 military installations in 132 countries, including this one. It already has a vast military base at Baghdad airport. These bases are not there by accident or for “humanitarian reasons.” They are there to keep a stranglehold on the world, and they will do it by any means at their disposal.

The disclosures of torture in Iraq should come as no surprise to anybody. The Americans have been exporting torture for years. They have been teaching torture techniques to military representatives of various dictatorships at Fort Benning in Georgia for a very long time. Fort Benning was called the School of Americas but was actually known as the “school of torture.” They practice it themselves at home, in the vast gulag of prisons across the United States, where over two million people are held in custody, the majority black. Restraint chairs, where convicts are strapped and left naked in their own urine and excrement for days, the use of gas and stun guns, the random brutality, the systematic rape and abuse of young men and women—all of these things and more an affront to human dignity—are common practice. So torture in Iraq, at Bagram in Afghanistan, and at Guantanamo Bay are simply par for the course. That is the nature of the beast.

But the United States is not finding things so easy, and the less easy they find things the more dangerous they become. There is a growing resistance worldwide to this arrogant, brutal, complacent, destructive force, a force which holds the concept of international law and the United Nations in contempt and whose only vocabulary is bombs and death.