The Persian Gulf war in '91 was the first major war fought on television. The current Iraqi war will be the first major war fought on the internet.

I'll get into what that means in a moment. But first i'd like to point out what bothers me most about the world situation: the fact that the US is so powerful that it can mobilize this war in the face of opposition from the UN and a host of UN member countries — and there's not a damn thing anyone can do to stop it.

Uncle Sam is playing world supercop. That's not necessarily a bad thing... Having a single dominant superpower does help keep the world stable. We are much better off with the US as the one superpower than we probably realize. Imagine a world with no superpowers, or one with an America wholly concerned with domestic affairs — it would be a world stumbling in chaos, with little wars continually breaking out between nations, ever teetering on the brink of nuclear apocalypse.

That said, the current situation isn't a lot better. For the US is a lumbering giant in foreign affairs — a bully in trade, an ugly American in diplomacy. This has become apparent in the brewing controversy over Turkey's plan of sending troops into northern Iraq — not to fight the Iraqis, but to contain the Kurdish people. The war against Iraq seems poised to ignite another, completely separate conflict, something the US obviously hadn't planned for.

The US may think it can act like a supercop, but it can't. Policing the world is like trying to control the weather. It's a chaotic system, where tiny actions can have huge, unimaginable repercussions.

The world situation would be a lot more stable if another power existed that could effectively "police the police" — stand up to the US when it oversteps its limits. But who would that be? The European Union? Its "union" is a joke: you can see how they're split over the war, with France and Germany against it and the UK, Spain and Italy siding with the US. Russia? Its hands are full just dealing with the former Soviet nations. China? Economically it may soon be a match for the US, but it has absolutely no credibility when it comes to handling world affairs.

So it seems there's no power that exists to oppose the US with any force. Or is there?

That's where the internet comes in. Hundreds of thousands of voices, expressing either dissent or reservation to the US position, could have an enormous impact. That is, if the US government listened to it. And that simply isn't happening. It's not a single voice, and it's not in one agreement. But it's a global network of influence and counter-influence, and for that reason it's always worth gauging the zeitgeist of the internet.

That is what Bush has not done. Well, what do you expect? He's a tv president. He's a master at playing the traditional media. That would have worked in '91, when the Gulf war actually turned CNN correspondents into stars. But it's a new millennium, and the world's leaders, opinion-makers, and influencers are online. This is where it's at. And the fact that Bush has blithely ignored the internet will cost him. Maybe not today... but eventually. Perhaps when Kurdistan has become a second Palestine.