In his speech Monday night, President Bush warned Iraqi generals that if they used chemical or biological weapons against U.S. troops, they would be tried as international war criminals, much as former Yugoslavian leader Slobodan Milosevic is now being tried by an international court for attempted genocide in Bosnia and Kosovo.

      The president's warning was appropriate and necessary, made all the more powerful by its citation of international law. Yet the very next day, the president dispatched a top State Department envoy to Europe to demand that all Americans be given total immunity from prosecution on war-crime charges by international criminal courts.

      One law for everybody else; no law for Americans. It is an act of empire.

      To most Americans, the notion that their nation might be seeking empire is insulting, perhaps even ridiculous. I understand and share that feeling, as does Donald Kagan of Yale University. When I wrote a recent article charging that Kagan and his neoconservative colleagues are advocating what amounts to a new American empire, he responded with a piece of his own denying the allegation.

      "I think it would be a very bad idea and entirely inconsistent with the kind of nation the United States is and should continue to be," Kagan wrote.

      "All comparisons between America's current place in the world and anything legitimately called an empire in the past reveal ignorance and confusion about any reasonable meaning of the concept empire, especially the comparison with the Roman Empire, which Bookman makes."

      Kagan, however, is arguing with himself. This is the same Donald Kagan who, in an interview with George Will, said, "I think you have to go all the way back, nearly 2,000 years, to the Roman Empire, to find a single power so pre-eminent compared to all others."

      And it was Kagan and his colleagues, not I, who adopted and embraced the term "Pax Americana," with its deliberate and provocative echo of "Pax Romana," the Roman peace.

      Furthermore, Kagan's most recent book, "While America Sleeps," is a 435-page, explicit, detailed comparison between the position of the British Empire in the 1920s with the position of the United States today.

      Clearly, though, blatant talk of empire won't wash in this country. So those who wish to advocate empire would need some less obvious term for what they hope to accomplish. The Orwellian term of art embraced by many neoconservatives is "benevolent global hegemony."

      The term first appears in a 1996 article in Foreign Affairs magazine. The piece, co-written by Bill Kristol and Kagan's son, Robert, warned that "conservatives will not be able to govern America over the long term if they fail to offer a more elevated vision of America's international role. What should that role be? Benevolent global hegemony."

      "The aspiration to benevolent hegemony might strike some as either hubristic or morally suspect," they acknowledge. "But a hegemon is nothing more or less than a leader with preponderant influence and authority over all others in its domain."

      Hmmm. "Preponderant influence and authority over all others in its domain," with that domain being the entire world.

      But not empire.

      Kagan, Kristol and others have continued to press that point. The term is also used in Present Dangers, a book published in 2000, edited by Kristol and Robert Kagan to which Donald Kagan contributed. In that book, they advocate military intervention, "even when we cannot prove that a narrowly construed 'vital interest' . . . is at stake," and argue that with its dominance, the United States can "set about making trouble for hostile and potentially hostile nations."

      Other contributors included Paul Wolfowitz and Richard Perle, now chief architects of our policy toward Iraq.

      Within foreign policy circles, such talk was soon recognized for what it is. Walter McDougall, a conservative foreign policy analyst and professor at the University of Pennsylvania, wrote a withering critique of the concept in 1997.

      "Benevolent hegemony' is a contradiction in terms," McDougall warned. "Such a self-conscious, self-righteous bid for global hegemony is bound to drive foreign rivals into open hostility to the U.S. and make our allies resentful and nervous."

      "If you go abroad in search of monsters, you will inevitably find them even if you have to create them," McDougall wrote. "You will then fight them, whether or not you need to, and you will either come home defeated, or else so bloodied that the American people will lose their tolerance for engagement altogether, or else so victorious and full of yourself that the rest of the world will hate you and fear that you'll name them the next monster."

      Five years later, McDougall's warning seems about to come true.

      Jay Bookman's column appears Thursdays.