Future Tense: The Coming World Order.

• Author: Harding, Bruce
• Position: Book review

FUTURE TENSE: The Coming World Order

Author: Gwynne Dyer Published by: Scribe, Melbourne, 2006, 250pp, $27.95.

Gwynne Dyer is a Canadian-born, London-based columnist and author of the acclaimed book Ignorant Armies: Sliding into War in Iraq. Dyer's writings are widely syndicated and his commentaries on current geo-politics are framed with impressive, no-nonsense clarity. His argument in Future Tense develops around a core thesis of sound logic and informed moral outrage which is focused on the sustained attack by the 'Bushites' on the post-Second World War international security system and on the United Nations in particular (an argument bolstered by the recent appointment of a vociferous UN critic, John Bolton, as US Ambassador to that body).

Dyer has held academic positions at the Royal Military Academy at Sandhurst and at Oxford. He left academia to become a documentary film-maker and journalist and made an award-winning television series and linked book entitled War. Dyer lucidly explains the rationale for the post-Second World War multilateralist global diplomatic order in which the United Nations featured so centrally. He is passionately concerned about the direct attack on the international legal order by the acolytes of 'Cheneyland' (as Washington insiders label the cabal under Vice President Dick Cheney that unleashed the hounds of war). In a recent Time article (27 February 2006) Nancy Gibbs and Mike Allen argue that Bushland is by instinct more reformist, more political, more female and, in places, deeply devout. Cheneyland is more Establishment, more male, more button-down, more secretive, and in the first term it pursued 'a bareknuckled foreign policy ... which drove Colin Powell's State Department berserk'. Some commentators suggest that a softening has been occurring of late and that Cheney's influence, with his cabal of messianic extremists (which drives the thesis of Future Tense), is waning in the second-term Bush administration.

Dyer's principal argument is that the Iraq incursion debate is not about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction or terrorism but about derailing or sustaining a global community of strategic stability. 'The United States needs to lose the war in Iraq as soon as possible, writes Dyer, for 'What is at stake now is the way we run the world for the next generation or more'. In this searing broad-brush ethicopolitical polemic against pre-emptive war, Dyer argues that the 'Bushies' are moving the global...