Letters to the Editor
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Published Letters: 1429 Editor's Choice: 20
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Some people call it 'empire'
[Read the article: Reply to Dan Drezner]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]The way Bush does it, it could more properly be described as 'armed robbery'.
Bushites fully expected to have their hand-picked Chalabi government in place by now and the international cartels in control of the oil. They were counting on an Iraq that would be easily pacified, what with all those years of sanctions and Saddam.
The usual goal of US-style imperialism is economic political domination for the benefit of trans-national corporations, and since Vietnam has often attempted to accomplish this through coercive diplomatic and trade tactics rather than through overt military domination. But not the Bushites. The Bush administration has taken the unusual step of outright military conquest to get what they want. That is armed robbery, and that is naked military imperialism.
Throughout most of its history the US may have been more expansionist than imperialist, although Native Americans could argue for military imperialism, and they'd be heard about this if more of them had survived. Remember 'Manifest Destiny', and also remember that the Civil War was fought partly about whether the western territories would become free or slave states. It took a hundred years to integrate the contiguous 48 states and 'tame the West'.
When the frontier was closed in the last century expansionism sought additional territories elsewhere and became more imperialist. America's conduct towards the Philippines was clearly imperial militarism. So it has always been part of the national identity, and it has usually been violent. Atrocities and other grave injustices have been committed along the way, which is just what you'd expect from an empire. Although America does not see normally see itself that way, it's in the history taught at every school in the country.
It's an issue now because military imperialism has become overt, and stated as policy.
Preventive War 'The Supreme Crime'
SEPTEMBER 2002 was marked by three events of considerable importance, closely related. The United States, the most powerful state in history, announced a new national security strategy asserting that it will maintain global hegemony permanently.
The new "imperial grand strategy", as it was termed at once by John Ikenberry writing in the leading establishment journal, presents the US as "a revisionist state seeking to parlay its momentary advantages into a world order in which it runs the show", a unipolar world in which "no state or coalition could ever challenge it as global leader, protector, and enforcer".
These policies are fraught with danger even for the US itself, Ikenberry warned, joining many others in the foreign policy elite.
The grand strategy authorises the US to carry out preventive war: preventive, not pre-emptive. Whatever the justifications for pre-emptive war might be, they do not hold for preventive war, particularly as that concept is interpreted by its current enthusiasts: the use of military force to eliminate an invented or imagined threat, so that even the term "preventive" is too charitable.
Preventive war is, very simply, the supreme crime that was condemned at Nuremberg.
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article4416.htm
In promulgating such a policy, the neoconservative Bush administration is effectively denying the sovereignty of every other nation on the planet. It has, in effect, announced its intention to rule the world as an empire of the US.
Keep in mind that Empire is antithetical to democracy: the methods are different and the goals are different. Since an empire cannot be a democracy, the US isn't a democracy. It's been increasingly run by corporatists since before Eisenhower gave his last speech on the dangers of the military-industrial complex. Corporatists let us vote for their candidates just to keep up pretenses. You can't say we weren't warned.
Lastly, do consider that empires have emperors, and not presidents, and that Bush does, after all, prefer dictatorship.
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@ Paul Dirks
[Read the article: Why is the Democratic Congress so unpopular?]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Bush is the most fiscally irresponsible big spending government bloating SOB we've seen in years.
An understatement. Bush is far worse than Reagan, who was second worse. It should tell you something that the fiscally irresponsible presidents at least since Eisenhower have all been Republicans.
Bush is so grossly irresponsible that a lot of people have wondered if he is intentionally trying to bankrupt the government in order to allow hyper-wealthy international cartels to foreclose on the country:
http://www.rense.com/1.imagesH/CHARTA.gif
It gets worse the more you look at it, so you have to wonder just how bad it's going to be when the bottom finally falls out.
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Corporatism and conservatism
[Read the article: Why is the Democratic Congress so unpopular?]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Have corrupted the Democrats. Not nearly so much as the Republicans, but enough to seriously weaken the more progressive members, some of whom struggle more or less heroically. Between the Blue Dogs and the Pubs and some others they just don't have the votes to do much and don't want to embarrass themselves by trying and failing.
Pubs as a whole are simply intransigent. The Republican party still has Bush, and in congress they also have the very substantial power of enforced ideological stupidity, and use it to continue to undermine the country by blocking reforms and protecting Bush.
"Bush's appeal is, after all, to the stupid. They, too, are inflexible - they also know that maintaining one's stupidity can become a kind of strength, provided you never change your mind."
- Norman Mailer, New York Review of Books