March 14, 2006
 
COMMENTARY: Novus Ordo Seclorum Not Bush's New World Order
 
By Cicero
Special to Huntington News Network
 
The Latin phrase Novus Ordo Seclorum, meaning "New Order of the Ages", which appears on the reverse of the Great Seal of the United States and on the dollar bill, is taken from the fourth eclogue of Virgil – from the line, "Magnus ab integro seclorum nascitur ordo," referring to a prophecy regarding the fate of the Roman Empire.
 
Here is the question: Is President George W. Bush's New World Order also a prophecy on the fate of the United States? We see ample evidence that suggests this administration is marching down the same path as traveled by the Roman Empire, with all its ambition to impose its ideals, culture and form of government on others. And similar to what happened to the Romans, this would almost inevitably lead to revulsion by other nations and eventually the downfall of this great nation. If we never want to learn, are we prepared for the day when we are domed to meet Rome's fate?
 
It is now obvious to most U.S. citizens and clearly the rest of the world that the U.S. invasion of Iraq was an ill-fated venture based on incorrect assumptions and possibly personal ideals and objectives of the Triumvirate of Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld. Yes, no one could disagree that Saddam Hussein was a great despot who was persecuting his own people and posing a potential regional threat, but so to a potentially larger extent is the ruler of North Korea, so why Iraq? Could the answer be oil and hatred because Hussein had tried to destroy Bush's father, instead of an easily accepted but perverted sense that we have the only viable answer, our form of democracy?
 
The arrogance of the Triumvirate is no longer a secret, but the problem remains that we have only ourselves to blame for electing Bush and Cheney, who then hired Rumsfeld to manage the Legions. While we cannot rewrite the past, we should nevertheless still manage to learn a costly lesson from it and take some serious efforts to solve the existing problems posed by a potential civil war in Iraq.
 
We have to realize that almost as many Iraqis have died due to the war as were killed by Hussein during his horrible tenure, and that the families of the dead do not differentiate how their loved ones were killed – only that they were killed. In fact, our actions in Iraq have caused an increase in the breadth and strength of the radical fundamentalists who are all our enemies. Please, our enemy is not the Iraqis, the Sunni or Shia sects or followers of the Muslim religion, but only those criminals who use it as a guise to gain power, basically the anarchists of the twenty-first century. Instead of focusing our efforts on dealing with the real criminals, we have been using terms like "War,"
 
"Crusade," and others that we would never really use on criminals but only on enemy nations. Words are powerful things which can cause even friends to become alienated and repelled. It is indeed time that his nation starts rethinking our approach to coping with the anarchists and not continues to serve as their publicist.
 
Throughout history, many despots as leaders of different nations have attempted at instigating a New Order: Napoleon, Hitler, Mussolini, Lenin, and the list goes on. I wish people would laugh when any politicians talk about setting up a new world order, as we should know better now than believe that whatever order they are trying to bring us could be anything more than disorder, death and ruined economies.
 
All these politicians think they know all the factors that govern our world or nation, well we should yell to them that they can never know all, not even a micro portion of the millions of factors that govern this complex world in which we live in. Small things can destroy big nations, societies, economies, and individuals, if you just remember that a micro virus can kill an individual as swift as a bullet, and so can the slightest of their ill-advised actions be devastating to us all.
 
Vietnam, Iraq, and other mislaid actions by our government in the last decades have resulted in untold hardships and deaths without providing a modicum of safety or benefits to anyone except contractors, suppliers, lobbyists and their assorted friends.
 
Such misplaced actions following misguided decisions by our leaders always start out with high sounding themes but looking beneath the rhetoric one can not find any real substances that could provide a decent justification for any of them. The U.S. Congress is supposed to serve as a balance to the Executive, but unfortunately we do not see this happening in these cases. Instead they bend like the wind and whip right back into their leisurely lifestyle in Washington with their friends - the lobbyists.
 
Seeing how the Bush Administration is step-by-step turning this nation into a controlled society so they can build their New World Order, I'm frightened at the thought that George Orwell's classic on dictatorships "1984" might be George Bush's bedtime reading as a young man at Yale, hoping against hope that. President Bush would read more of the history of the world and contemplate how his actions may be leading us down a difficult path with the same outcome as that befell and destroy Rome.
 
At least, we can take comfort in the thought that in three years we will have a chance to scrutinize those seeking to become our next President and Vice President and try and pick some real leaders who share our belief in the basic principles that established this nation. But before we do that, let us all ask ourselves the question that Marcus Tullius Cicero once asked: "What is the end, the final and ultimate aim, which gives the standard for all principles of right living and of good conduct?"
 
Editor's Note: In the 1952 movie "Five Fingers," James Mason played the valet of the British ambassador to neutral Turkey during World War II. He was a German spy who went by the code name "Cicero." His intelligence information – including the date of D-Day – was excellent, but fortunately for the Allies, the Germans didn't believe him, thinking him a double agent. The film was based on real events. The alternate title of the movie is "Operation Cicero." The Roman political figure, orator and philosopher Cicero was a champion of the traditional institutions of the Roman Republic and the enemy of autocracy, including the politics of Julius Caesar and Pompey.