Target-rich environment.

• Position: Comment - George W. Bush and Donald Rumsfeld dispatch of U.S. troops around the world

Close your eyes, spin the globe, and point: You're bound to land on a spot where George W. Bush and Donald Rumsfeld have dispatched U.S. troops. From Afghanistan to Tajikistan to Uzbekistan to Kyrgyzstan to Georgia to the Philippines to Indonesia to Yemen and the Gulf of Aden and over to Somalia and the Sudan, the empire lurches eastward, securing a Central Asian outpost and shoring up Middle Eastern flanks. The war on terror is also providing cover for the United States to intrude on civil wars elsewhere around the world, from Colombia to Spain, no matter how distant these conflicts are from September 11. Where to next, Sri Lanka?

President Bush is free to go wherever he wants, so long as he pronounces the name Al Qaeda. There is no check on him: not by Congress, not by the United Nations, not by NATO, and not by any other nation or coalition in the world. Free he is to roam, and roam he does.

Defense Secretary Rumsfeld has been the chief strategist of this power projection. It's what he likes to call "leaning forward." But the United States is leaning so far forward it might fall on its face.

The assumption in Washington these days seems to be that for every problem, there is a military solution. It's said that a carpenter sees every object as a nail. This Defense Secretary sees every country as either a target or a landing strip.

The dispatching of troops to the four corners of the Earth gives the lie to a particularly fatuous bit of rightwing theorizing that was popular in the '90s: that the United States is a benign empire, one that rules not by might but by the supposedly gentle forces of commerce and culture.

But Disney and Nike and Archer Daniels Midland can only go so far. Now it's Marine time.

The U.S. armed forces often act as the advance team for U.S. corporations. And the Bush expeditions are doing that, too. In Colombia, for instance, the United States is spending $98 million in military aid to protect Occidental Petroleum's pipeline. And in Central Asia, U.S. forces may once again make the region free for U.S. oil exploitation and transshipment.

But there is more than just a crude materialist game being played here.

Bush, Rumsfeld, and Dick Cheney may be former corporate executives, but they are also ideologues, set on restoring what they perceive to be America's fallen place in the world. That's why they insist on throwing our weaponry around and dispatching troops hither and yon.

Their brazen rearticulation of U.S. first-strike policy--that Washington feels unencumbered about using U.S. nuclear weapons first and even against nations that don't have such weapons--was part of their public flexing exercise.

Somehow, Bush believes that everywhere the U.S...