This is a sad time to be an American.

What Has Become of American Values and Idealism? All Swept Away in This Thoroughly Un-American War Until now. George Bush has cast off the restraint which held back America's 42 previous presidents - including his father. Now he is seeking, as an unashamed objective, to get into the empire business, aiming to rule a post-Saddam Iraq directly through an American governor-general, the retired soldier Jay Garner. As the Guardian reported yesterday, Washington's plan for Baghdad consists of 23 ministries - each one to be headed by an American. This is a form of foreign rule so direct we have not seen its like since the last days of the British empire. It represents a break with everything America has long believed in.

This is not to pretend that there is a single American ideal, still less a single US foreign policy, maintained unbroken since 1776. There are, instead, competing traditions, each able to trace its lineage to the founding of the republic. But what's striking is that George Bush's war on Iraq is at odds with every single one of them. Perhaps best known is Thomas Jefferson's call for an America which would not only refuse to rule over other nations, it would avoid meddling in their affairs altogether. He wanted no "entangling alliances". If America wished to export its brand of liberty, it should do it not through force but by the simple power of its own example. John Quincy Adams (before Bush, the only son of a president to become president), put it best when he declared that America "goes not abroad in search of monsters to destroy". Could there be a better description of Washington's pre-emptive pursuit of Saddam Hussein?