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Landau - Reflections: 60 Years of Empire
Via NY Transfer News Collective * All the News that Doesn't Fit
Progreso Weekly - Jan 10, 2008
http://progreso-weekly.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=289&Itemid=1
Reflections: 60 Years of Empire
By Saul Landau
Look at 2008 symbolically! Some 60 years ago, the United States emerged
as the world power. Henry Luce formally announced the arrival of The
American Century even before the country entered World War II. Luce
thought the United States should become the worlds missionary,
spreading Christian values and democracy. U.S. history had woven
together a people with noble purpose, Luce argued, and had the most
exciting flag of all the world and of all history, blowing toward the
triumphal purpose of freedom.
Luce, owner of the publi****ng empire (Time, Life and Fortune), waxed
eloquent, calling on all Americans each to his own measure of
capacity, and each in the widest horizon of his vision, to create the
first great American Century. (February, 1941 "Life;" see also Philip S
Golubs October, 2007 essay in "Le Monde Diplomatique.")
It happened. After World War II, Luces dream conditions became
reality. The United States possessed more than 50% of the worlds
manufacturing capacity. The powers of Europe and Asia lay in ruins. But
politicians and media eschewed the word empire to describe the nation
that used its dollar as world currency base, set up vast military
alliances (NATO, CENTO and SEATO) and, by the early 1950s, had
established military bases in scores of other countries and begun to
stockpile nuclear weapons.
U.S. leaders used the Soviet threat -- the wicked commies would
overrun all other countries -- to justify such an extension of might.
As they checked Soviet desires of expansion, U.S. cor****ations and
banks moved quickly into much of the non-Soviet world. (The media did
not make public the fact that Soviet railroad gauges did not coincide
with those in their East European colonies, thus making the supply of a
potential invasion nearly impossible.)
Wa****ngton invented a Marshall Plan and other popular schemes to help
rebuild a thriving capitalism in (and a junior partner****p) with
Western Europe. Such behavior did frighten a defensive Soviet Premier
Stalin who, in the immediate post-war period, refused sup****t to
comrades in Greece and Iran, apparently in response to threats by
President Truman.
The Cold War posited a good West against an evil East. Stalins
behavior helped meet that stereotype, but the Soviets never built a
rival economy. Indeed, they possessed no cor****ations or banks to loot
Eastern Europe. Without them, the Soviets had few means with which to
transfer wealth from their supposed colonies.
No matter. Facts did not intrude on the political axioms developed by
the Cold Warriors. The United States became the protector of the free
world. Then, around 1990, the Soviets imploded. But the institutions
designed to protect the West from the threat of that wickedness not
only remained but grew. NATO, for example, expanded. Indeed, in 2002,
Wa****ngton even sponsored a NATO-Russia council. The number of U.S.
bases abroad grew to some 800.
At home, politicians rhetoric denied the existence of empire as the
very context of U.S. life, even as the military consumed giant hunks of
the budget (some $700 billion), at a time when no nation even remotely
threatened U.S. security militarily.
Leading presidential aspirants and Congressional leaders continue to
ignore this issue lest the public get a glimpse of the empire without a
wardrobe. They enable the ****d miscreants of power -- Bush, Cheney and
the neo cons -- to continue to bleed the treasury through a capricious
war and occupation.
In the 2008 election over whom shall run the empire, Republicans and
Democrats ignore the lingering toxicity of U.S. defeat in Vietnam.
Patriotism still entails chanting slogans (sup****t our troops) and
rejecting the syndrome that followed the Vietnam War -- dont fight
anyone who can fight back. The Republicans still want to revive the
U.S. reputation as a winner. (The last time the U.S. actually won a
war -- where the enemy fought back -- was 1945.)
The Iraq invasion and subsequent occupation has proven beyond unpopular
with the public. Upper national security bureaucrats have begun to
express their deep unease about the predicament. In 2006, retired
generals, senior intelligence, diplomatic and security officials also
made public attacks on the Bush policy, led by General William Odom and
Colonel Larry Wilkerson, Colin Powells former chief of staff. Odom,
who headed the NSA under Reagan, called the invasion of Iraq the
greatest strategic disaster in United States history. (Associated
Press - Oct. 5 2005)
Wilkerson labeled it a blunder of historic pro****tions. (Wa****ngton
Post - Jan. 19 2006) Former Carter National Security Council boss
Zbigniew Brzezinski described Iraq as a historic, strategic and moral
calamity. (Senate Foreign Relations Committee - February 1, 2007)
These establishment attacks stress Bush mismanagement, arrogance and
incompetence -- as well as his straying from the traditional alliance
system -- for losing U.S. hegemony in the Middle East and Gulf. The
critics of Bushs policy fear that Iraq may have seriously weakened the
U.S. military, the entity that stands as central enforcer of empire.
Brzezinski told Congress that Bushs Iraq and Afghanistan wars had
undermined Americas global legitimacy.
After the United States left Vietnam with its proverbial tail between
its legs, revolutions won power in Nicaragua and Grenada -- traditional
backyard areas. Similarly, the travails of the U.S. military have gone
hand in glove with left gains in Latin America. Voters in Venezuela,
Bolivia, Ecuador, Argentina, and even Guatemala and Paraguay indicated
not only their disgust with U.S. economic policies, but showed their
lack of respect for U.S. power as well.
In 1959, only Cuba dared act disobediently; other nations knew the
price of such rebellion: invasion or CIA destabilization. Similarly,
Bushs 2002 Axis of Evil threat did not work on North Korea or Iran.
Bush had to negotiate with a regime he had declared off limits.
Moreover, China, which now holds the power of being a major U.S.
creditor, has also emerged as a big time Asian player.
Sixty years ago Wa****ngton made plans to install a primitive defense
system in Western Europe. Bush wants to extend that system to Poland
and other newly freed countries. But some of the old allies take
exception. Indeed, ass-kissing regimes like Saudi Arabia even dare to
object to some U.S. policies. In the once-monopolized sphere of the UN
and other world financial institutions, Wa****ngton cannot dictate terms
so easily.
The world has watched George W. Bush lead the United States from a
bright dream toward an incipient nightmare. Under his rule, the dollar
has dropped in value. His Homeland Security goons have mistreated
potential tourists hoping to use the cheap dollar to get bargains. A
young Icelandic woman trying to enter the United States -- once
symbolized by the Statue of Liberty -- was imprisoned for more than 24
hours, treated inhospitably, and rudely de****ted. HS claimed she had
overstayed a visa by three days more than a decade earlier.
This kind of story mixes with re****ts and images of U.S. behavior in
Iraq -- the Abu Ghraib torture photos circulated widely -- around the
world. For the U.S. power elite, George W. Bush and his neo con
partners have made the world deeply unsettling.
U.S. leaders have assumed for sixty years that they had replaced their
British cousins as the worlds elite, that as movers and shakers of the
new dominant power they had a mandate from God or history to maintain
stability, to make the rules for the economy.
My late professor, William Appleman Williams, lectured about how U.S.
leaders suffered from visions of omnipotence. Because they had
overwhelming economic and military power they believed they would
forever prevail. But they did not in Korea in 1953; nor in Vietnam in
1975. In 2008, a daily drain saps the Treasury as U.S. military forces
in Afghanistan and Iraq fail -- expensively -- to overcome adverse
conditions that no military could hope to achieve.
Soviet collapse in 1990 led to the rise of the neo cons, demanding that
Wa****ngton become the new Rome. By starting with the conquest of Iraq,
they would spread the U.S. order throughout the Middle East. It has not
worked and democracy is not what the United States wants to bring.
Presidential aspirants of both parties ignore this fact. None address
the issue of what role a weakened United States should play in the
emerging world of the 21st Century when the U.S. economy no longer
provides the pillar of economic stability; when its technologically
omnipotent military failed to defeat less-equipped foes. As global
warming intensifies and UN rules, created by the United States for
other nations to follow, have lost prestige, what should Wa****ngton do?
Republicans -- save for Libertarian Ron Paul -- want more military.
They have become a sick joke. But Hillary? Barack? John? Is it
premature to ask them after only 60 years of the American Century? Or,
in lieu of U.S. political imagination and courage, will the answers
come from abroad?
[Saul Landau is an Institute for Policy Studies Fellow. ]
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