Target-rich environment. (Comment).

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. troops land, they will be greeted as conquering heroes by the locals. He is in for a continual surprise. Just as he will be surprised when terrorism doesn't end at gunpoint.

On March 11, Bush elaborated on what he called "the second stage of the war on terror." Speaking paternalistically, he said: "America encourages and expects governments everywhere to help remove the terrorist parasites that threaten their own countries and the peace of the world. If governments need training or resources to meet this commitment, America will help."

In the Philippines, the Bush Administration, looking for an easy victory, has sent 660 soldiers, including 160 members of the Special Forces, to help the Filipino army take on a gang of bandits called Abu Sayyaf, who number fewer than 1,000--and, by some accounts, fewer than 100.

This deployment of excessive force has already restirred resentment in the Philippines, where the United States has a century-long record of bloody interventions. Rather than vanquishing terrorism, the U.S. presence may act as a recruiting call.

"There is growing concern among local officials, religious leaders, and residents here that the Abu Sayyaf will drag the U.S. military into a prolonged conflict and win new support by recasting its members as righteous Muslim warriors resisting foreign Christian trespassers," Philip D. Pan reported in The Washington Post on February 7.

Walden Bello, writing in the March 18 Nation, notes that some Filipinos are exulting in the fact that a U.S. helicopter crashed in Philippine waters on February 22, killing ten Americans.

"Even if the Special Forces and their proteges do damage the Abu Sayyaf, the unchanged conditions of ethnoreligious discrimination, inequality, and poverty will continue to breed extremist responses," Bello writes. "Only an aggressive program of social and economic reform will break the cycle of injustice and terrorism."

But that's too complicated for Bush, too ungratifying.

In Yemen, Bush is sending as many as 100 troops to fight what are described as pockets of Al Qaeda forces. Here, too, the U.S. soldiers may not be showered with bouquets. "Most in this poor country with limited political freedoms distrust U.S. motives," reported Larry Kaplow of Cox News Service. "Yemenis frequently say what they need most from America are new schools and hospitals."

Those won't be forthcoming.

The Bush Administration suffers from a military strain of elephantiasis. The swollen Pentagon is impairing its judgment.

Bush's war on terror has given a green light to repressive governments. After September 11, Prime Minister Ariel Sharon of Israel was quick to condemn Yasser Arafat as a terrorist and liken him to Osama bin Laden. It took Washington six months to summon the courage to criticize Sharon for escalating the violence against Palestinians.

Russia was quick to label the rebels in Chechnya as terrorists, and Bush dutifully toned down his criticism. China picked up the lingo, saying it was fighting terrorists in Taiwan, Tibet, and Xinjiang, a Muslim region "where China is engaged in a campaign of arrests and summary executions," noted Reed Brody, advocacy director of Human Rights Watch.

Uzbekistan is engaging in a "vicious crackdown on dissidents and Muslims who practice their faith outside state controls," Brody also wrote in an op-ed commentary for the Progressive Media Project. "If the Uzbek government doesn't clean up its act, the United States could be seen as aligning itself with a government that tortures nonviolent Muslims to death in the name of fighting terrorism. Such practices, like Russia's attacks on civilians in Chechnya, make it harder for the United States to argue that the war on terrorism is not a war on Islam."

In Indonesia, the world's most populist Muslim nation, the Bush Administration is eager to restore military ties and is discussing sending in military advisers. That may be why Washington didn't say boo when Indonesian troops assassinated the head of the Aceh Liberation Movement in January. (ExxonMobil, incidentally, has a massive oil investment in Aceh that the rebels have been disrupting. See Stephanie Brancaforte's "A Martyr for Aceh," April 2001.)

In Colombia, where Al Qaeda has not stepped foot, President Andres Pastrana got with the program and condemned the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (or FARC, as it's known) as a terrorist organization. FARC, to its everlasting discredit, has acted the part. And Bush is now responding the only way he knows how: with a proposal for more military aid, on top of the $1 billion already going to Bogota, but this time without the fig leaf of fighting the drug war.

"This is precisely the wrong approach to take," says Cecilia Zarate-Laun, co-founder of the Colombia Support Network, based in Madison, Wisconsin. "Peace can be achieved only when all sectors of Colombian society are incorporated in negotiations that address fundamental changes, such as social investments and land distribution."

Even Algeria has sought to capitalize on Bush's war by asking for military aid from Washington, including night-vision goggles, the better to see terrorists with. The Algerian government has a particularly unseemly record in suppressing Islamic rebels there. But the United States is not in much of a position or mood to object.

Shortly after September 11, Egypt scolded the United States for blaming Cairo for the way it treated its terrorists. "Maybe Western countries should begin to think of Egypt's own fight against terror as their new model," said Egypt's Prime Minister Atef Abeid. And guess what? They have.

In its annual human rights report issued in early March, the State Department "toned down past criticism of Egypt's military tribunals in the wake of the Bush Administration's own announcement that it might use such tribunals to try suspected terrorists," Todd S. Purdum noted in The New York Times. "One section, included in the 2000 report and deleted in the 2001 report, said, `The military courts do not ensure civilian defendants due process before an independent tribunal.'"

The Bush Administration's indifference to such abuses came in for heavy criticism in Human Rights Watch's World Report 2002. "Unless the rules of international human rights and humanitarian law clearly govern all anti-terror actions, the battle against particular terrorists is likely to end up reaffirming the warped instrumentalism of terrorism," the report noted. "Unfortunately, the coalitions conduct so far has not been auspicious." The leaders of the coalition have "substituted expedience for the firm commitment to human rights that alone can defeat the rationale of terrorism," it added.

The report leaves little doubt that it is directing its criticism at Washington. "If the battle against terrorism is to be understood as a fight for human rights, the most ardent combatants have often been the least willing to be bound by its principles," the report states. "Washington stands out because its resistance to enforceable human rights standards has been most fundamental."

Bush's strategy risks offending friend and erstwhile foe alike, a strategy that in the long run may make the United States not more secure but less so. Already, many in Europe have become reacquainted with American hubris. It has been a signal accomplishment of the Bush Administration to dissipate in a mere matter of months the goodwill toward the United States that flowed after September 11. And the deployment of U.S. troops to one Islamic nation after another will not be lost on the more than one billion Muslims around the world, especially if the United States proceeds to all-out war against Iraq.

Equally serious is the damage this imperial overreach may inflict on U.S. relations with Russia and China.

Russia was not delighted when Bush announced in late February that he was sending 200 military specialists to Georgia to train and equip the forces of that former Soviet republic to attack a handful of suspected Al Qaeda members. Foreign Minister Igor Ivanov said it "could further aggravate the situation in the area." And Newsweek reported that Putin's lieutenants retaliated by having "a gas concern closely linked to the Kremlin" announce that it was suspending "fuel supplies to the Georgian capital, Tbilisi."

While some U.S. soldiers are arriving on Russia's doorstep, others are arriving on Chinas. Bush's February visit to Beijing was hardly a lovefest, in no small part because of this. "One of the byproducts of the war in Afghanistan has been the beginnings of a new American military presence in Central Asia, an area of strategic concern to China since the third century B.C.," noted Maurice Meisner, a China scholar at the University of Wisconsin in Madison. "Particularly worrisome are potential bases in the now independent states that were once part of the Soviet Union."

This presence on Chinas western border reinforces Beijing's fear of encirclement, according to Meisner. "For half a century, China has feared being surrounded by American military bases," he wrote in a commentary for the Progressive Media Project. "This is not simply a case of paranoia. Almost 100,000 American soldiers and airmen remain more or less permanently stationed on bases in South Korea and Japan, forming an arc around eastern and southern China."

An alienated China or Russia would prove to be a much more ominous adversary than Al Qaeda, and if Bush doesn't watch out, he may succeed in pushing those countries into that category. That hardly would make the United States more secure, as the Bush nuclear strategy still contemplates nuclear war against China and even Russia. And they have nuclear missiles that can hit the United States today, not in some distant future, like Bush's "axis of evil" nations.

But neither strategic nor moral concerns seem uppermost in Bush's mind. What is uppermost, is the flexing of American military power. For Bush, almost nothing else matters.