Imperial Overreach is Accelerating the Global Decline of America

Monday April 17, 2006

The following article is by Martin Jacques, a senior visiting research fellow at the Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore.

A broad and energetic promotion of democracy in other countries that will not enjoy our long-term and guiding presence may equate not to peace and stability but to revolution ... There is no evidence that we or anyone can guide from afar revolutions we have set in motion. We can more easily destabilize friends and others and give life to chaos and to avowed enemies than ensure outcomes in service of our interests and security. It is clear that the U.S. occupation of Iraq has been a disaster from almost every angle one can think of, most of all for the Iraqi people, not least for American foreign policy. The unpicking of the imperial logic that led to it has already commenced. And thus the U.S. still has to reap the whirlwind for its imperial overreach.

In becoming so catastrophically engaged in the Middle East, making the region its overwhelming global priority, it downgraded the importance of everywhere else, taking its eye off the ball in a crucial region such as east Asia, which in the long run will be far more important to the US's strategic interests than the Middle East. As such, the Iraqi adventure represented a major misreading of global trends and how they are likely to impact on the US.

America is well advanced into an unformed era in which new and unfamiliar opponents are gathering forces. In a world where the ratios of strength narrow, the consequences of miscalculation, are becoming more weakening.

The promotion of the non sense idea of the war against terror as the central priority of US policy had little to do with the actual threat posed by al-Qaida, which was always hugely exaggerated by the Bush administration, as events over the last four and a half years have shown. Al-Qaida never posed a threat to the US. Making it the central thrust of US foreign policy, in other words, had nothing to do with the al-Qaida threat and everything to do with the Bush administration seeking to mobilize US public opinion behind a neoconservative Imperial foreign policy. There followed the nonexistent  link with Saddam, which provided in large measure the justification for the invasion of Iraq that has been the hallmark of Bush foreign policy since 9/11.

The world is in the midst of a monumental process of change that, within the next 10 years or so, could leave the US as only the second largest economy in the world after China and commanding, with the rise of China and India, a steadily contracting share of global output. It will no longer be able to boss the world around in the fashion of the neoconservative dream. If the US is already under financial pressure from its twin deficits and the ballooning costs of Iraq, then imagine the difficulties it will find itself in within two decades in a very different kind of world.

Britain's Imperial rule has vanished in a few short years, undermined by unforeseen catastrophic events and by new threats that eventually overwhelmed the palisades of the past. The life of pre-eminence, as with all life on this planet, has a mortal end.

The overwhelming preoccupation of the Bush administration (and Blair for that matter) with Iraq, the Middle East and Islam, speaks of a failure to understand the deeper forces that are reshaping the world and with realizing and exploiting the US's temporary status as a global superpower. Such a narrow-minded view can only hasten the decline of the US as a global Empire power, a process that has already started.

The Bush administration stands guilty of an extraordinary act of imperial overreach which has left the US more internationally isolated than ever before, seriously stretched financially, and guilty of neglect in East Asia and elsewhere.

Iraq was supposed to signal the US's new global might: but in fact, it has well proved to be a portent of its decline. And that decline could be far more precipitous than anyone has previously imagined. Once the bubble of US power has been pricked, in a global context already oriented in other directions, it could collapse rather more quickly than has been imagined.

Monday April 3, 2006

The following article is by Mark Weisbrot Co-Director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research in Washington, D.C.

Since September 11, 2001, the phrases "American empire" and "America as an imperial power" are being heard a lot more. But in contrast to the 1960s and 1970s, when such terms were waved by an angry domestic anti-war movement or by developing nations in U.N. debates, the concept they represent has now at least partially entered the mainstream.

The post-9/11 attacks rationale in Washington is that America has the so – called terrorist enemies and rogue states that will do it serious harm if it doesn't police the world to stop them.

Michael Ingatieff at Harvard's Kennedy Center writes "Being an imperial power is more than being the most powerful nation. It means enforcing such order as there is in the world and doing so in the American interest."

But what most analysts have missed, whether or not they support the idea of an American empire, is that the U.S. simply can't afford the role of global cop.

The Real problem is that: The U.S. is entering this new age of empire with a gross federal debt that is the highest in more than 50 years as a percentage of gross domestic products. For fiscal 2005, which begin in October, the U.S. gross federal debt is projected to be 8.1 trillion dollars, or 67.5% of GDP. By the time 100,000 U.S. troops were in Vietnam in 1965, it was 46.9% and falling.

The annual federal budget deficit is, therefore, 639 billion dollars. This is 5.6% of GDP, a near-record level for the post-World War II era.

Sometime within a decade, and most likely in the next couple of years, foreign investors will see that a steep decline of the dollar is unavoidable and will begin to unload them and U.S. Treasury securities. As with any bubble, it will be better if this one bursts sooner rather than later, when it would be even bigger. But adjustment and pain will still occur, including higher interest rates and consequently slower growth.

Slower growth will also mean larger federal budget deficits. And one event that will certainly slow growth and increase federal government borrowing well beyond current projections is the bursting of the housing bubble. Housing prices have seen an unprecedented run-up since 1995 of more than 35 percentage points above the rate of inflation. That has created more than 3 trillion dollars in paper wealth that –- just like the illusory wealth of the stock-market bubble – is programmed to disappear. This, too, is almost certain to happen in the next few years.

The combination of unsustainable public debt and foreign debt is a deadly and explosive mix by itself. Rising real interest rates and a looming housing bubble bursting make it all the more dangerous. Financial markets will exert the necessary discipline if the U.S. politicians refuse to do so, but either way the U.S. can't afford even the 486 billion dollars a year that it's currently spending annually on the military and homeland security.

And even these spending levels are a lot less than would be necessary to maintain America's power in the world. Over the next decade or so, the Chinese economy will actually surpass the U.S. in size. America has 100,000 troops in East Asia. If the U.S. were to try to maintain its current dominance of the region – something that will probably prove impossible – it would boost the U.S. military spending even further.

The bottom line is that the American empire just isn't affordable. Within a decade or so, the U.S. will be forced to be much less preemptive and outward-looking and to engage in scaled-back foreign policy.

In the meantime, the segment of American society that would like to see advances in health care, education, poverty alleviation, or any other positive economic or social goals will get bad news. The foreseeable future is a lot different from most of the post-World War II era, during which the U.S. Empire added such programs as Medicare and Medicaid while spending literally trillions of dollars on cold and hot wars.

This time, little or no federal money will be available for the U.S. leaders Imperial ambitions until U.S. foreign policy changes. The most likely scenario is that most areas of nonmilitary discretionary spending will be squeezed relentlessly before anything gives in the realm of the U.S. illusive Empire.

The post-9/11 age of American empire will close by the constraints of public financing, and the limits of foreign borrowing. What remains to be determined is how much the U.S. will pay, as well as bills for and how many enemies it will make throughout the world, before coming to grips with reality.

Monday February 27, 2006

The following article is by Jonathan Schell a writer for TomDispatch.com.

Monday March 13, 2006

The following article is by Daniel Schwartz a Professor of Sociology and Anthropology, at the University of New Mexico.

Any logical meaning for modern warfare is a deceit. The costs and consequences of violence with the current technology of weapons systems should make war obsolete. It is an exercise in necrophilia for the earth and all life forms. The war in Iraq points to the progress of destruction for the U.S. Empire. Seymour Melman of Columbia University has written extensively on the evolution of military state capitalism and the permanent war economy which underlies some rationale for the empire pursuing war. Militarists like war because wars remind people they need militarists, military leaders and a war machine. Only with war and waste can the continuity of the military industrial machine be rationalized. The permanent war economy becomes justified by war even as the damage and death caused by war makes it insensible.

What specifically makes the damage and death of war insensible?

These are:

First, Collateral Damage: which is the unintended and intended wholesale killing and wounding of civilians. Generally thought to be unintended, the dirty fact of intentional killing and wounding occurs because imperfect weapons are made by imperfect human beings. Weapons of mass destruction malfunction on a normal basis either through design and/or human error and military planners know this. The number of non combatant Iraqis killed and maimed is genocidal.

Second Public Health Damage: which directs deaths and injuries attributed to the physical and emotional wounds of soldiers both during war and for the survivors. This includes the long term physical and emotional damage incurred by the civilian population. A war zone is full of toxic and poisonous liquids, solids and gases. Depleted uranium is only one of the toxic chemicals that blanket all life in the war zone. A synergistic effect magnifies all toxic materials that are breathed in or ingested through water or food. Physical and emotional wounds interact and intensify long term disabilities, pain and suffering. And third Environmental damage which includes the long term negative effects on the integrity of the ecosystem. A toxic war zone immediately diminishes and destroys the conditions for animal and plant wellbeing. The soil and air become contaminated along with rubble and bomb craters. This promotes pathogens and disease among all living things.

The message of non-violence, conflict resolution and statesmanship are made invisible and contribute to historical forgetfulness.

Damage to democracy by secrecy surveillance and media manipulation of truth, as well as the revocation of American ideals.  One would think that the above conditions would make modern warfare irrational and meaningless, but that clearly is not the case!

The war in Iraq is not about resources, ideology or economic control. War makes the world safe for war for a number of self serving reasons which include the following: 1) justifies the existence and continuation of the entire military-industrial complex, 2) justifies the continued need for research, development and upgrading weapons, 3) justifies university partnerships with military-industrial complex, 4) justifies need to replace weapon systems, 5) justifies need to spend money on military and security apparatus, 6) justifies restricting the social contract, democracy and civil rights, 7) justifies militarizing civilian society and strong militaristic civilian leaders.

The evolution of technological society and the progress of destruction lead to the pacification of human experience. This is greatly accomplished by mass media brainwashing and the omission of history. The current Administration promotes a militaristic consciousness which stresses peace through strength and the nobility of war. The President invokes the divine right of kings in his appeals for support and never shows a generosity of spirit nor does he want anyone to show a generosity of spirit! The nation is supposed to follow his “strong” leadership and believe that things are as they should be and there is no alternative. The cheerleading media generally echo this. Fascism may come to America in the name of protecting Democracy from its enemies. A culture out of balance makes nature out of balance and compromises the entire planet.

A movement is in place to begin the great reversal and great refusal towards American leaders who are delusional. There should be non cooperation with “business as usual.” Decommissioning, disarmament, conversion, and restoration should be the order of the day. The U.S. political system needs an infusion of non-violent conflict resolution and statesmanship. Nurturing the spirit of life will lead to the demise of necrophilia and renewal of a world in balance. And I suspect nature will have the final word in reality.

Monday February 20, 2006

The following article is by Kevin Zeese, who has been a candidate for U.S. Senate in Maryland.

Retired General William Odom, who served as a national security adviser to President Ronald Reagan, described the Iraq War as a notable mistake that the United States should end.  Most of General Odom's presentation dealt with his new book The Unintentional Empire published by Yale University Press. This academic book focuses on the role of the United States as an empire. General Odom sees mainly good coming out of the U.S. Empire and evidenced this by highlighting how western countries want to be part of the empire, share in the wealth and the liberal democracy America has developed. He describes the U.S. empire as an ideological empire, not a territorial one. And, unlike other empires in history, it is a moneymaking not a money-losing empire. He sees other institutions, like the WTO, IMF and World Bank as part of the system and notes that they were created by the U.S.

Finally, he sees the role of the U.S. military as projecting American power and influence as well as keeping peace among its allies. 'The military umbrella', according to Odom, 'is critical to supporting the empire.' 

An example of the positive role the U.S. empire plays is the re-unification of Germany. This was opposed by most of Europe but quiet behind-the-scene discussions by the United States resulted in the re-unification being accepted. This was good for Europe and the world, but likely would not have occurred without U.S. influence.

According to Odom, “The biggest threat to the U.S. empire is incompetent U.S. leadership.” This brought the discussion to Iraq, which General Odom has described as a major foreign policy blunder.

He was asked -- if President Bush sought your advice on Iraq what would you say in a letter to him. Odom responded that he would tell the President “he is losing in Iraq” and that he “has made the most strategic foreign policy disaster in the U.S. history.” 

General Odom was asked by an Iraq veteran who had just returned as to how he knew the war was lost when the U.S. has only been there for three years. Odom described the problems in Iraq as beyond the U.S. ability to control. The multiple ethnic groups in Iraq, the divisions in Arab culture and their lack of history with a limited state makes “Iraq one of the hardest places on earth to put in place a liberal democracy.” Odom sees spreading democracy, especially liberal democracy, as very difficult and even impossible. When asked how the U.S. can bring its president to heel? Odom responded with a question “how do you impeach the president?” He went on to express concern about the weakening constitutional balance in the United States.

Odom came to oppose the Vietnam War, not from the left but from the right and he is doing so on Iraq as well. He saw Vietnam as uniting American enemies and failing to contain China. He sees the same thing occurring in Iraq. The consequences of the Iran’s Revolution has undermined American influence in the Middle East and the world. It has made the Iraq war counterproductive to U.S. interests.

Odom noted that the United States is “running out of Army” and that people underestimate how difficult the Iraq War is on the Army. Indeed, he said: “if the U.S. took a referendum among U.S. troops 80 percent would favor leaving. America might be winning tactically, but it is losing strategically.” He predicted a dramatic draw down by next Christmas with some type of political cover invoked to accomplish it.

Regarding U.S. influence, Odom sees U.S. influence in the region diminishing. Further, according to Odom “it is important that the U.S. does not become the catalyst for upheavals, America should stop them from spreading and not be their cause.” The way to regain American influence would be 'resolving the Israel-Palestinian conflict.'

As to the idea that the Iraq War is a war for oil, Odom described oil as a “red herring. However, Odom did see a need to break U.S. addiction to oil. He realized the political leadership may not be able to accomplish this achievement.

On the larger issue of American Empire, and the lessons from Iraq, Odom urges that “the United States should act like a Republic. America should use its power like a teacher on a playground if possible, not like one of the kids.”

Monday February 13, 2006

The following article is by Tristam a News-Journal editorial Writer for the Daytona Beach News-Journal.

William Gladstone, the on-again, off-again British prime minister for most of the second half of the 19th century, famously liked to walk the streets at night, counseling prostitutes to a more wholesome life. He did so when he was young. He did so when he was old, and through his four terms as prime minister from 1868 through 1894. Those were the years when Britain thought itself Queen Victoria's and the nonsense God's gift to the world when imperialism found cover behind the infomercial known as the white man's burden.

The link between William Gladstone's streetwalking and Britain's globe-trotting is one of those striking historic parallels between a man's ideals personifying a civilization's presumptions. The link isn't just symbolic. It betrays the rot at the heart of Western assumptions about right and wrong, about who the savages are your majesty.

When the Soviet Union fell, it looked as if America's job as world's sheriff was done. Finally, the West's trillions could be invested in something more constructive than missiles and fear mongers' dividends. Sure enough, Pentagon budgets quit sprawling under Bill Clinton.

Conservatives panicked. Peace isn't good for certain trades such as imperial power and aimless leadership. Until the latter days of 2001, President Bush's skeletal talents for peacetime democracy were creaking out of the closet and down the ravine of opinion polls. Osama bin Laden to the rescue. His one-hit wonder on the Twin Towers and the Pentagon did wonders for a presidency looking for salvation. And the most imperial presidency in the U.S. nation's history was off on its wolves' hunt, with democracy for a battle flag.

While President Bush has been preaching a war for the claimed democracy before every military audience that will have him, democracy has never been so much in retreat by democracies' own doing. The same old Mideast despots we call American friends in the Middle East are aborting democratic moves the moment people make them. But that's to be expected in a region where despotism is second nature. What was less expected is the retreat of the claimed democracy in the West. American leaders, defend domestic spying, torture, the suspension of constitutional protections for whoever the president chooses.

The transformation of America into an emerging police state is encouraging other democracies to follow. The European Union is readying to do what the National Security Agency has been doing for years. Britain is readying to track every car and truck's movement on every road. Italy, Britain and France have all expanded government's power to imprison people without charge for lengthy periods. Under Prime Minister John Howard, Australia enacted into law a draconian alien and sedition act that exceeds America's Patriot Act.  

Is this Bush's march for democracy for American citizens?! Or an Imperial ambition.

Monday January 16, 2006

The following remarks are expressed by Fran Shor, Professor of history and sociology at Wayne State University.

Just imagine the following scenario in 1775:  King George announced that the elections in the American colonies, held with his full blessing and support, had once more demonstrated the wisdom of Great Britain's occupation of North America Kin George said: "The elections offer proof that the colonists will not be swayed by the terrorists in their midst whose continued attacks on our brave soldiers are signs of desperation. We will remain in the colonies until we achieve victory."

The King brushed aside voices from Parliament demanding a timetable for withdrawal of British troops. And said: "Our critics, while sincere, are terribly misguided. To give in before our mission is accomplished and victory secured would only give aid and comfort to the terrorists and undermine British credibility in the world."

In speaking from his royal throne, King George also insisted that the American colonist army, under the leadership of General Benedict Arnold, was rapidly improving. With both British and Hessian advisors, the colonist army was even venturing into the dangerous western provinces. While the King would not say when all the British troops would be removed, it was assumed that key strategic outposts on the North American continent would remain under British control far into the future.

Although there are still American colonists agitated by the persistence of taxes and tariffs, especially those which favor the controversial East Indian Tea Company, the special laws inserted into the American colonist constitution by British counsels will protect British investments in the colonies, regardless of what happens in the future. Nonetheless, continued insurgent voices could still be heard, among them Thomas Paine, who has denounced King George as a "royal brute."

Moreover, the fiery rebel, Thomas Paine, has attempted to stir up the colonists with his vitriolic declamations, including his incendiary declaration that it is the right of people in certain circumstances to "alter or abolish their government!" Of course, these are the opinions of those who fear the enlightened policies promoted by King George and the British Empire.

What are American people to make of present "King" George, W. Bush who claims that, as sovereign, he can authorize preemptive wars, spying on American citizens without court orders, incarcerating American citizens as "enemy combatants" without any constitutional protections, and torturing whoever he wants. All of this is, of course, within the law as he and his lackeys define it. As one of the White House insiders said: "We are an Empire. We make our own reality."

So, American people are left with the most outrages counterfactuals being issued daily by a regime so committed to empire and its spoils that they will destroy any vestige of constitutional rights of American citizens and international laws. Isn't it time to dethrone the U.S. King and his brutal regime?

Is The U.S. an Empire?

Monday  January 2, 2006

The following article is by Linda Colley, Professor of history at Princeton University and the Author of ' Captives: Britain, Empire and the World’.

The war in Iraq has had at least one redeeming feature. Along with events in Afghanistan, it has revived serious debate into some of the most important and long-standing issues in history and politics. for instance,  if one types the four words "Iraq", "Afghanistan", "America" and "empire" into the Google search machine, he or she get around 3.5 million hits. Is the U.S. an empire? If so, what sort of empire? Is imperialism good or bad, or sometimes both? And, of course: why has it proved so hard for America, the most formidable military and economic power the world has seen effect its will?

Neocon politicians and intellectuals who are willing to admit to the existence of a U.S. empire, often argue that American interventionism is better and purer than old-style, Old World imperialisms, because to a unique degree it strives to make the world a better place. Yet such American idealism represents one of the ways in which present-day foreign policy closely mirrors imperial ventures in the past.

George Bush's desire to implant U.S.-style democracy in the Middle East, along with apparently greater  freedoms, women's rights and the rule of law - by force of arms if necessary - is profoundly reminiscent of past British imperial practices, which may be one reason why Tony Blair and the new Tory leader have supported the project so enthusiastically. In the 19th and early 20th centuries, British imperialists too frequently sought to deploy their power to export representative government, the rule of law and the abolition of slavery.

The week elections keep open the prospect that Iraq might also ultimately be regarded as a success. But there is an obvious difficulty involved in this kind of imperialism. It is hard to convince people that you mean them well if you are looking at them down the barrel of a gun. Instead of exporting what they perceived to be rational, modern, humane government to their colonies, the British often found themselves propping up deeply unattractive and client rulers because this was the cheapest way of maintaining control. It remains to be seen how far, and how durably, the U.S. will achieve anything better in Iraq.

The gulf between imperial ideals and empire on the ground has customarily proved disillusioning not only for colonial peoples but also for some in the occupying power. In the past, anti-imperialists in Britain, such as Richard Cobden or George Orwell, regularly argued that overseas adventurism was detracting from the nation's decency and liberty. British anti-imperialists also argued, exactly like the author and journalist Chalmers Johnson is doing now in the U.S., that heavy expenditure on an overseas presence and military action abroad undermined the economic wellbeing of ordinary working people at home. 

Adam Smith, who distrusted empire, argued that only when "all the different quarters of the world" were able to inspire "mutual fear" would nations finally begin to respect the integrity of each other's borders. In the past, the imperialism of the West, like that of the rest, was often difficult - for the doers as well as for their victims; but western states were none the less usually able to dispatch forces overseas against non-western peoples without any fear of being attacked themselves. That kind of immunity is probably now a thing of the past.

Empire, Inequality, Race and Oil

Monday  December 26, 2005

The following article is by Paul Street, the Author of: Empire and Inequality: America and the World Since 9/11 Racial Apartheid in the Global Metropolis.

The historic events unfolding in New Orleans are very much about what the United States of America has become. They are the predictable outcome of steep societal disparities and related perverse political and policy priorities that reflect the interrelated and petroleum-soaked imperatives of “American” Empire and Inequality.

The residents of these so-called First World slums languish at the bottom of a militantly hierarchical socioeconomic regime where the top 1 percent owns more than 40 percent of the U.S. wealth and the top 10 percent owns two-thirds of the U.S. wealth.

 “America” is structured around an atomistic, petroleum-addicted transport technology.

 “American” government starves public transportation but maintains an exorbitantly expensive, taxpayer-financed public infrastructure of and for the automobile, trucking, and gasoline industries.

Global warming, significantly driven by human carbon emissions by modern petro-capitalism generated by cars, trucks, and planes, is part of why hurricanes are becoming more frequent and intense. As richer whites fled New Orleans in gas-guzzlings, leaving behind the city’s blacker and trapped poor, they contributed to future disastrous meteorological occurrences.

Speaking of petroleum, “America” has been starving basic civil and social infrastructure while spending hundreds of billions of dollars on the immoral, bloody, and monumentally illegal occupation of Iraq. Countless “Americans” are noticing the absurdity of a federal government that can’t promptly rescue citizens in one of its own cities at the same time that state invests in a costly, deficit-feeding, and failed imperial operation half-way across the world. 

That incidentally racist overseas operation has complex and shifting aims and origins, but it has always been very much about Iraq’s possession of vast petroleum reserves and the economic and related geo-strategic significance of Middle Eastern oil. Reflecting Uncle Sam’s bipartisan determination to control Persian Gulf oil and to maintain imperial credibility, hundreds of thousands of US troops and vast federal resources are tied up in the dangerous violation of the oil-rich Arab world.

Meanwhile, Uncle Sam spends untold billions on the opulent maintenance of a global empire of more than 700 military bases located in nearly every nation on the planet.  Those bases are disproportionately built in proximity to global oil resources, reflecting what called the conversion of the US military into “a global oil protection service.” 

They are part of an imperial “defense” budget that equals the rest of the world’s total military expenditure. This “defense” budget (mainly dedicated to what the Pentagon calls “forward global force projection”) amounts to more than 600 billion dollars when properly calculated.

Truth be told, the US has been sinking in a toxic stew of Empire and Inequality for quite some time. Thus the “American” people need to complete their many unfinished revolutions.

Even Remote Imperial Powers Can Fall

Monday  December 12, 2005

The following article is by John Chuckman, a Historian and American Writer.

Many otherwise well-educated Americans know remarkably little about the actual circumstances of their country's birth. Assumptions about that early period, frequently offered as counterexamples to the current dangerous American government, too often contain little more than boyish daydreams of nobler times. America's central legend about its founding goes something like this: An extraordinary group of men, dressed in frock coats and wearing powdered wigs, closeted together after a long and heroic war against tyranny, worked unselfishly to give the United States a perfect modern system of government. Since they were men concerned with rights and abuses and the tyranny of absolute monarchy, they gave Americans a set of basic rights that is the envy of the world.

Some Americans, blissfully unaware of European history and the long-term development of democratic and enlightened government in all advanced societies add that the events of those early days were almost a set of miracles, providing the world with a new concept of government. These notions manage to get thoroughly muddled with Puritan religious ones that have been around since America's colonial days, producing a story with strong overtones of a biblical legend. Belief in the sudden, unprecedented appearance of a new form of government reminds one of the sun being halted in the sky or the virgin birth. The documents associated with these events, from the Declaration of Independence to the Constitution, are regarded with much the same awe as books of the Bible, even though, as is the case certainly for the Declaration of Independence, there is a good deal of silly, outdated nonsense.

This set of myths and attitudes has been called America's Civic Religion, and it is an appropriate name. It follows that the thoughts and actions of someone like George Bush--a narrow politician, a man of few ideas and less learning--can only suffer by comparison. One sometimes sees letters in The New York Times from people with lengthy titles, people you might think should know better, making what are silly comparisons of real people to myths. Clearly, even the most robust flesh-and-blood politician would suffer from such comparisons. But contemporary America is not a case of a saint who's fallen into sin. The historical fact is that America was born out of some pretty unpleasant circumstances, and better understanding of this fact would provide Americans with perspective in the way they understand the world, especially concerning the arrogant habit of expecting everyone to see how clearly America "has got it right." and to instantly copy the pattern. America, in fact, did not "have it right" at the beginning, and it has taken more than two centuries to make a great many corrections, with many still to be made.

America was founded by a small group of privileged men who were mainly interested in maintaining their privileges and indeed in expanding them at the expense of a foreign-born aristocracy. The first truly important cause for American independence was Britain's victory in the French and Indian War more generally called the Seven Year's War.

Britain did win the war, but at considerable cost. The colonies' first reaction to British victory was joy and celebration. It was later that a series of what can only be regarded as reasonable tax measures to have the colonists help pay the costs of the war aroused such great antipathy in the colonies. The view was simply this: The war was over, the benefits to the colonists could not be re-claimed by Britain, so the colonists felt no obligation to help pay beyond what they had contributed during the war. Hatred of taxes--unavoidably associated with the crippling good and sound government--has remained to this day a feature of the American cultural landscape.

The Empire Against the Clock

Monday  December 5, 2005

The following article is by Toni Solo an Activist based in Central America.

The objectives of empire change very little from one century to another. Control of and access to energy and mining resources are only one strong motive driving imperial policy in Latin America. Control over food and water security is also a vital factor in imperial executive calculations. To veil the obvious injustice of the imperial system, co-option of local media is vital so as to manage the very terms in which political, economic and social issues are discussed.

Earlier empires eradicated whole languages and cultures from subject countries' public life. Racism has always been an essential imperial tool and continues in both subtle and overt forms across Latin America. The Venezuelan opposition's racist characterization of President Hugo Chavez is a contemporary glaring example. The Mexican ruling elite's attitudes to the indigenous Zapatistas are another. Racist repression of indigenous peoples continues throughout Latin America from Chile to Mexico, but seldom makes the international media.

Over the last twenty years, co-option of so-called "civil society" has become an equally important element of cultural and intellectual control. "Civil society" sometimes seems to refer principally to "non-governmental" organizations many of whom finance themselves acting as agents, consultants or sub-contractors to foreign governments or to international institutions, like the World Bank, controlled by imperial appointees.

The US government and its corporate allies have long worked to convince people in Latin America that organizing their own countries' agriculture to satisfy domestic consumption is uneconomic, Consumers are supposed to be best served by cheap food imports from the US. Urbanization is assumed to constitute inevitable progress. In this way, the US and its agri-business corporate allies increase their control of the agricultural economies of entire countries. For example, Mexico, once largely self-sufficient in rice, now imports over 80% of its yearly consumption from the US. Other sectors of Mexican agriculture will follow suit over the next few years as the North American Free Trade Agreement comes into full effect.

The US government and international financial institutions themselves intervened to impose "free market" solutions tailor-made to meet US government regional policy priorities. Now, at the end of nearly twenty years of those "free market" policies, many countries are unable to guarantee food security for their people from domestic agricultural production, just the way the imperial managers like it.

The defeated 2002 American coup attempt in Venezuela and Haiti's show the US and its allies are as ready as ever to use covert dirty tricks and complete aggression to get what they want in Latin America and the Middle East. The applicability of the Latin American and the Middle Eastern peoples' awakening drive towards integration and independence may well depend on persistent anti-imperial resistance in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Monday  November 28, 2005

The following article is by Mark Rudd, who nowadays teaches math at a community college in New Mexico.

Unlike World War II, Vietnam was an imperial war, a war of occupation whose purpose was the repression of a national liberation movement. Who benefits and who loses from an American empire? What are the moral and economic and spiritual costs to Americans? Is a system of international law possible as an alternative to endless use of American military power? Viewed against a grim future that Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld and Rice are offering Americans and the rest of the world, these questions begin to seem more practical than idealistic.  

What's hard to understand, given the revelations about the rush to war, the use of torture and the loss of more than 2,000 killed soldiers, is why the antiwar movement isn't further along than it is. Given that President Bush is now talking about Iraq as only one battle in an unlimited struggle against an enemy, a struggle comparable to the gigantic, 40-year Cold War against communism, shouldn't a massive critique of the global war on terrorism already be underway?

Yet the movement has remained small and politically isolated since the original outpouring of opposition in the spring of 2003, during the run-up to the war. In part, it was the victim of its own early success, the spontaneous demonstrations involving millions of people in the streets here and around the world trying to stop the war before it began. When this initial outburst failed, many became demoralized and hopeless.

Then, in 2004, most of the suppressed antiwar energy flowed into Americans campaign. The movement caught a second wind with the energizing presence of Cindy Sheehan mother of an American soldiers who killed Iraq war, but it remains small compared with the outpouring against the Vietnam War.

Probably it's because there's no draft now. Clearly, the fact that middle-class boys across the U.S. were receiving draft cards and lottery numbers went a long way toward helping stimulate resistance to the Vietnam War. Nor is there a countercultural movement today that questions authority like the one that emerged in the 1960s and 1970s.

American people need to take on the larger war. As the next battle heats up, the movement will have to ask the American people to look honestly at who they are in the world. The antiwar movement will have to engage in the most difficult dialogue of American citizens lives with their neighbors.

Throughout American history, popular movements have made vast transformations in the social and political geography of the U.S. 

Americans have to remind the story of how an antiwar movement involving millions of people accomplished something unique in American history and almost unique in the history of empires. American people helped stop a war of aggression by their own decision.

America's Empire of Bases

Monday  November 21, 2005

The following remarks are made by Chalmers Johnson, an American Writer and the U.S. political critic.

As distinct from other peoples, most Americans do not recognize -- or do not want to recognize -- that the United States dominates the world through its military power. Due to government secrecy, American citizens are often ignorant of the fact that the U.S. garrisons encircle the planet. This vast network of American bases on every continent actually constitutes a new form of empire -- an empire of bases with its own geography not likely to be taught in any high school geography class. The U.S. military deploys well over half a million soldiers, spies, technicians, teachers, dependents, and civilian contractors in other nations. To dominate the oceans and seas of the world, U.S. is creating some thirteen naval task forces built around aircraft carriers. The U.S. operates numerous secret bases outside it's territory to monitor what the people of the world, including it's own citizens, are saying, faxing, or e-mailing to one another.

It's not easy to assess the size or exact value of the U.S. our empire of bases. Official records on these subjects are misleading. According to the Defense Department's annual "Base Structure Report" for fiscal year 2003, which itemizes foreign and domestic U.S. military real estate, the Pentagon currently owns or rents about 700 overseas bases in about 130 countries and has another 6,000 bases in the United States and its territories.

These numbers, although staggeringly large, do not begin to cover all the actual bases the U.S. occupy globally. The 2003 Base Status Report fails to mention, any garrisons in Kosovo, in Afghanistan, Iraq, Israel, Kuwait, Kyrgyzstan, Qatar, Uzbekistan and Japan.

The Pentagon similarly fails to note all of the 5-billion dollars -worth of military and espionage installations in Britain, which have long been conveniently disguised as Royal Air Force bases. If there were an honest count, the actual size of American military empire would probably top 1,000 different bases in other people's countries, but no one -- possibly not even the Pentagon -- knows the exact number for sure, although it has been distinctly on the rise in recent years.

Of all the insensitive, metaphors the U.S. has allowed into American vocabulary,  "footprint" to describe the military impact of  American empire. Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Richard Myers and senior members of the Senate's Military Construction Subcommittee are apparently incapable of completing a sentence without using it. Establishing a more impressive footprint has now become part of the new justification for a major enlargement of American empire in the wake of the U.S. conquest of Iraq. The man in charge of this project is Andy Hoehn, deputy assistant secretary of defense for strategy. He and his colleagues are supposed to draw up plans to implement President Bush's preventive war strategy against the so - called "rogue states," "bad guys," and "evil-doers." They have identified something they call the "arc of instability," which is said to run from Colombia through North Africa and then sweeps across the Middle East to the Philippines and Indonesia. This is, of course, more or less identical with what used to be called the Third World -- and perhaps no less crucially it covers the world's key oil reserves.

Once upon a time, you could trace the spread of imperialism by counting up colonies. America's version of the colony is the military base. By following the changing politics of global basing, one can learn much about the U.S. ever larger imperial stance and the militarism that grows with it. Militarism and imperialism are twins joined at the hip. Each thrives off the other.

Today, Americans lack metrics to know if they are winning or losing the global war on terror, the "war on terrorism" is at best only a small part of the reason for all U.S. military strategizing. The real reason for constructing this new ring of American bases along the equator is to expand it's empire and reinforce it's military domination over the world.

Progressives and the Imperialist Line

Monday  November 7, 2005

The following article is by Kim Petersen Co-Editor of Dissident Voice Website.

It is generally known by readers of progressive media that, the US corporate media is part of the military-industrial complex, financial centers, and special interest groups, and that the U.S media is deeply a helping organ of imperialism through broadcasting of propaganda and disinformation.

Since American right-wingers have successfully co-opted supposedly left-wing political parties it would hardly be surprising that the U.S right-wingers have masterly intruded into progressive media.

A serious problem of method and principle arise when decidedly progressive writers and keen observers of the American Empire adopt the analytical methodology and vocabulary of imperialist decision makers and their think tanks.

The US has never been about spreading democracy. It has been about putting regimes in place that are subservient to US “elite” interests. The U.S sponsored coup d’êtat in Haiti realistically exemplifies the folly of believing the notion of the US as a committed supporter of democracy.

Iraq is no more in the throes of civil war than the northern and southern divides of Vietnam were in the throes of civil war under US initiation. In addition, the whole concept of an Iraqi Shiite-Sunni confessional war has been a principle motor of the US policy for which it has spent a huge amount of time and money to plan and promote. It has been over two years that the US has been promoting that concept without much success although in the meanwhile it has become the ongoing rationale to continue occupying Iraq.

Can a legitimate election take place under the guidance of occupation? Under terms dictated by the occupiers? Without the participation of a significant section of the populace?

If a government is illegitimate then what legitimacy can a constitution crafted by that government hold? None.

It is noted that it is post-invasion that the seeming sectarian gaps opened thereby pointing to the invasion and occupation as responsible. Nevertheless, why should ethnic or confessional differences in Iraq be any more violent than such differences in the U.S?

The refusal to send ambassadors to Iraq by the Arab nations might be a reflection of an unwillingness of the U.S' Iraq occupation.

In the face of such unmitigated evil unleashed by capitalist and imperialists for the benefit of a wealthy few and the  obliteration of masses of struggling people, it is eminently understandable that the U.S progressives and peace activists have to respond powerfully. But progressives must keep a sharp mind as to what their words imply. The grammar of deceit utilized by Bush, Blair and other American leaders justifies that the war has lost all credibility.

While solidarity is foundational among American progressives, there are many views to be expressed. Nonetheless, American progressives must exercise due caution so as not to restate the dogma of the U.S and U.K imperialists.

US Must Stop Attacking Hugo Chávez

Monday  October 31, 2005

The following article is by Ana Pérez, Director of the Latin American Program at Global Exchange, an international human-rights group in San Francisco.

The political tug-of-war between the United States and Venezuela is no mere diplomatic feud. Instead, it is an outright campaign to discredit, vilify and undermine the democratically elected Leader of Venezuela, Hugo Chávez.

Relations between the two nations have been strained for some time. Hugo Chávez accused the White House of supporting the 2002 coup against him. Only 48 hours later, Chávez returned to power, in the wake of massive public demonstrations in Venezuela against the coup and in support of his government.

In the last year, high-ranking U.S. officials -- including Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and CIA Director Porter Goss -- have hurled insults at Chávez.

And the Pat Robertson, a supporter of the Bush administration, didn't help matters in August when he made incendiary comments calling for the slaying of Hugo Chávez.

On Oct. 9, Pat Robertson was again on a rant. On the CNN show ''Late Edition,'' he went so far as to the shameless claim that the United States ''could face a nuclear attack from Venezuela,'' and accused Chávez of sending ''either 1 million or 1.2 million dollars in cash'' to Osama bin Laden after the Sept. 11 terror attacks. Robertson never supported his assertions with any sources. His remarks against Chávez seem aimed at justifying further U.S. political and diplomatic attacks against Venezuela.

Hugo Chávez is anathema to the U.S. conservatives because he has opposed Bush's war in Iraq, as well as trade agreements that favor U.S. multinationals. But Chávez is helping his own people.

Since he came to power, one million newly educated Venezuelan citizens have learned to read for the first time through the government's literacy campaign. Venezuela has implemented free healthcare that is now available to 80 percent of its population. And there are subsidized food markets that offer staples bellow market price to the poor.

Hugo Chávez is also trying to bring economic prosperity to the entire region by sharing the bounty of his oil revenue. Venezuela is the fifth-largest oil exporter in the world, and Hugo Chavez is selling it to the poor other Latin American countries well below market rates.

What's more, Chávez has held eight elections, referendums and plebiscites over the past years. He is Venezuela's duly elected, popular leader.

If the U.S. is to have any international credibility as a defender of democracy, its government needs to stop siding with violent, military dictators in the overthrow of democratically elected presidents -- like the overthrow of presidents Jacobo Arbenz in Guatemala in 1954 and Salvador Allende in Chile in 1973 and Mohamad  Mosadegh in 1951.

The U.S. government would do well to keep its hands off.

War in Iraq is Really All about Soil and Oil

Monday  October 24, 2005

The following article is by Robert Kimbrough a Professor of English literature, a Veteran of the Korean War and an active member of Veterans for Peace.

The Iraqi mission was accomplished in two months. Bush's "noble cause" was to secure oil fields and 14 strategic sites for permanent bases. This American success was celebrated in Baghdad by the pre-planned "spontaneous" toppling of Saddam’s statue and the seizing of Saddam's palace complex. The only other building occupied "to prevent looting" was the Ministry of Oil.

The ludicrous photo-op aboard the aircraft carrier U.S Ship Lincoln appalled those of Americans who had joined millions in the worldwide call "No Attack on Iraq," but American citizens were so shocked by the nonesense "Mission Accomplished"  that they did not see the truth of the statement hung out before their eyes.

For once the Bush administration did not lie. The mission was never about saving America from destruction by Saddam's weapons of mass destruction, it was never about bringing democracy to the Middle East, it was never about winning "the so-called war against terrorists" but it was about oil and empire.

The coupling of the U.S leaders desire for empire and the need for oil beyond domestic sources became apparent only after the extraordinary military and industrial buildup during World War II.

As the war was winding down, President Roosevelt pledged American protection for the Saudi family of Arabia  in return for a free flow of oil from the Middle East to America. After the war, Truman decided that the United States should keep substantial forces in Germany and Japan.

The details of the "Plan for America's Future" empire and oil, began to take shape in the 1970s with the birth of the U.S Neocons, who, in 1980, found a political home in the Reagan administration: characters like Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, et al.

Immediately, the United States urged Saddam to attack Iran, starting an eight-year war that ended in 1988 in a stalemate: Neither country lost or gained territory, but the armies of both countries were decimated, an outcome American Empire engineered because it had helped Iraq militarily and spiritually.

In 1990, Saddam turned his attention to Kuwait, hoping to get the extended seaports on the Persian Gulf that he failed to gain in the war with Iran. American leaders tricked him into the invasion that they needed to forward their plans for oil and empire.

When Iraq occupied Kuwait, a huge U.S. underground air terminal suddenly was activated in Saudi Arabia, and that country was rapidly turned into an American staging ground for 500,000 troops.

The United States went to the United Nations to point out that Saddam had performed a pre-emptive strike against an unarmed sovereign state and got permission to expel the Iraqi occupiers of Kuwait.    

Before moving to "mop up" the invading army, America bombed Iraq from Baghdad to the Kuwaiti border, demolishing the health and material infrastructure of the country: bridges, dams, hospitals, hotels, schools, radio and TV stations, communications systems, highways, and civilian populations in general.

Within weeks, Iraq had no army and a plagued society. As if this were not defeat enough, the United States forced the United Nations to place sanctions on Iraq, as punishment for having broken international laws.

Furthermore, Iraq was not "allowed" to rebuild its destroyed infrastructure. Then, as if this total destruction were not enough, the United States (and Britain), without U.N. authority, unilaterally declared "no-fly" zones over most of Iraq and began aerial photographic surveillance and air attacks by bombs and machine guns on the average of five days a week from 1991 to 2001, more often after 9/11 attacks, and even more by the summer of 2002.

Even if Americans had had an idiot in the White House, he would have known that after 13 years of photo surveys and bombing of every inch of Iraq, no Weapons of Mass Destruction could possibly have survived as a threat to the U.S and its supposing "freedom."

March 19, 2003, did not begin the mission of securing  the Iraqi oil fields for the United States and the land for 14 permanent military bases needed for the U.S Empire strategic control of the Middle East.

This mission was decades long in the planning and gradual implementation. No wonder that the new, "successful" administration wanted to celebrate on the U.S Ship Lincoln the accomplishment of the last U.S Neocon's ultra right-wing Imperial goal.

Fourteen bases mean that so long as this administration is in control American troops will be stationed in Iraq.

Cindy Sheehan the mother of a killed soldier in Iraq asked President Bush: "What is your 'noble cause'? except Oil and military bases!

Bush admitted as much when he said that he would not bring the troops home now because America must honor its dead "by completing the mission"

In frank terms, "Mission Accomplished" means a continuous expenditure of blood for soil and oil that is an imperial occupation. 

Lessons From A Fallen Empire

Monday  October 10, 2005

The following article is by James Carroll, an American dissent Journalist whose column appears regularly in the Boston Globe daily and the Author of the bestseller book 'Crusade: Chronicles of an Unjust War'.

To be in Rome is to stand, as it were, before a canyon wall on which the tell-tale marks were made by human hands instead of wind, sun, and rain. The primordial world lives in the ruined Forum, the stripped-to-the-brick facades of temples and theaters, the surviving arches of long-gone channels and imperial palaces.

The legacy of that civilization is a structure of thinking that informs the very words on this page, which attempt to do for ideas what lightning rods do for electricity in the sky. Polarities between republic and empire, beauty and decay, order and tyranny, expression and silence -- these are the tensions which found balance in ancient Rome and uphold still the pillar of culture.

In the post-Constantinian Rome of Christianity, holiness found its match in power, and the match is not over. Its archaeology is in the street. Basilicas began as palaces and became cathedrals without dropping an arch. Emperors became popes and, as they say here, vice versa.

In Rome, that is, the corruptions of all that is meant by ''church" are obvious. But the grace undefeated by those corruptions is magnificent, too. Indeed, what is the Renaissance but the moment when corruption itself became the occasion of grace, when the fully human emerged at last from the translucent shell of the will to be divine? The world we know and love came next.

Rome may be the ultimate display of memory, but it is also the world capital of style. Sleek-suited men, supremely composed women, designer cars, the burnished leather of shoes and bags, the front edge of personal invention and modernity congratulates itself there. The future is as clear in the people as the past is in the stone. Because the contrast between the present and what precedes it is so dramatic, every trip to Rome requires a reassessment of impression. But such reassessment is precisely the endless work of history.

The past is not dead, it isn't even past. Memory, therefore, is more about today than yesterday, which is why we visit the so-called foreign country of the past every chance we get.

School children learn to think this way by reading Emperor Caesar, and then, perhaps, by learning of Luther. Across millennia, the lesson is absolute. The educational value of glorious Rome is that it fell, and fell again. And each time that happened, out from the harms demolished the people who had borne the full weight of the imperial structure the ones who had actually paved the famous roads, and mined the infinite supply of marble, and loaded coals on the fires that cut the cool of palace floors; the ones who had faced the inquisitors, questioned orthodoxy, chosen conscience over obedience. 

From politics to religion to the new globalism of style, the history of empire tells as much from the point of view of those who suffer it as those who build it. In Rome, it is impossible any longer to imagine that imperial ambition is simply benign, which is why, perhaps, Americans should visit this city. The educational value of tourism is to see that Rome, having fallen and fallen again, lives on with fallen ness as the ground of a more humble glory.

What must strike the eye of an American in Rome today, even more than the artifacts of the layered past, are the new draws of angered artists.

''No war!" slogan appears on the remainder stone. That the words  makes the point. In this first home of the world order, the burdens of idealized violence are all too real.

A Declaration of War By the U.S Emperor

Monday October 3, 2005

The following article is by Phyllis Bennis, a Fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies.

The Bush administration has declared war on the world.

The 450 changes that Washington is demanding to the action agenda concluded at the September 2005 United Nations summit don’t represent U.N. reform. They are a clear assault against any move that could strengthen the United Nations or international law.

The U.N summit focused on strengthening and reforming the U.N. and addressed issues of aid and development, with a particular emphasis on implementing the U.N.'s five-year-old Millennium Development Goals. Most assumed this would be a forum for dialogue and debate, involving civil society activists from around the world challenging governments from the impoverished South and the wealthy North and the United Nations to create a viable global campaign against poverty and for internationalism.

But now, there’s a different and even greater challenge. This is a declaration of U.S. unilateralism, uncompromising and ascendant. The United States has issued an open threat to the 190 other U.N. member states, the social movements and peoples of the entire world, and the United Nations itself. And it will take a quick and unofficially collaborative effort between all three of those elements to challenge the destructive Bush administration.

The General Assembly's package of proposed reforms, emerging after nine months of negotiations ahead of the summit, begins with new commitments to implement the Millennium Development Goals, established in 2000 as a set of international commitments aimed at reducing poverty by 2015. They were always insufficient, yet as weak as they are, they have to be implemented. The 2005 Millennium Plus Five summit intended to shore up the unmet commitments to those goals. In his reform proposals of March 2005, U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan called on governments north and south to see the implementation of the Millennium Development Goals as a minimum requirement. Without at least that minimal level of poverty alleviation, he said, conflicts within and between states could spiral so far out of control that even a strengthened and reformed United Nations of the future would not be able to control the threats to international peace and security.

When John Bolton, Bush's hotly contested but appointed ambassador to the United Nations announced the U.S. proposed response, it was easy to assume this was just John Bolton running amok. After all, Bolton, a longtime U.N.-basher, has said: "There is no United Nations." He has written in The Wall Street Journal that the United States has no legal obligation to abide by international treaties, even when they are signed and ratified. So it was no surprise when Bolton showed up three weeks before the summit, demanding a package of 450 changes in the document that had been carefully negotiated for almost a year. But, in fact, this isn't about Bolton. This Bush administration’s position was examined and approved in what the U.S. Mission to the U.N. bragged was a "thorough interagency process" meaning the White House, the State Department, the Pentagon and many more agencies all signed off. This is a clear statement of official U.S. policy—not the wish of some marginalized extremist faction of Neocon ideologues who will soon be reined in by the realists in charge. This time the extremist faction is in charge.

Throughout the document, the United States demands changes that redefine and narrow what should be universal and binding rights and obligations. In the clearest reference to Iraq and Palestine, Washington narrowed the definition of the "right of self-determination of peoples" to eliminate those who "remain under colonial domination and foreign occupation."  Much of the U.S. effort aims to undermine the power of the U.N. in favor of absolute sovereignty. On migration, for instance, the original language focused on increasing international cooperation, linking migrant worker issues and development, and the human rights of migrants. The U.S. wants to scrap it all, replacing it with "the sovereign right of states to formulate and enforce national migration policies," with international cooperation only to facilitate national laws. Human rights were deleted altogether.

The Bush administration has given the United Nations what it believes to be a harsh choice: adopt the U.S. changes and comply to becoming an accessory of Washington and a tool of empire, or reject the changes and be consigned to insignificance. But the United Nations could choose a third option. It should not be forgotten that the U.N. itself has some practice in dealing with U.S. threats. President George W. Bush gave the U.N. these same two choices once before, when he threatened the global body with "irrelevance" if the U.N. did not embrace his call for war in Iraq. On that occasion, the United Nations made the third choice—the choice to grow a backbone, to reclaim its charter, and to join with people and governments around the world who were mobilized to say no to war. It was the beginning of eight months of triumph, in which governments and peoples and the U.N. stood together to defy the U.S. drive toward war and empire, and in doing so created what The New York Times called "the second super-power."

This time, as before, the United States has threatened and declared war on the United Nations and the world. As before, it's time for that three-part superpower to rise again, to defend the U.N., and to say no to empire.

American Caesar

Monday September 19, 2005

The following article is by Rosa Brooks, the Columnist for Los Angeles Times.

Emperor Nero enjoyed himself while Rome burned. President Bush, who's not big on the classics, probably wasn't thinking about this when he was showing himself off facing the cameras, while playing a guitar presented to him by country singer Mark Wills.

True, while Bush enjoyed his vacation and strummed his new guitar, a great city was being devastated by water rather than fire. And unlike the Emperor Nero, who was accused by historians of having deliberately started the fire that destroyed much of Rome in 64 AD, no one is accusing President Bush of planning Hurricane Katrina.

But the Bush administration deserves substantial blame for the scale of the catastrophe in New Orleans.

An excellent article this week by Will Bunch disclosed that it was the cost of the Iraq war that led the Bush administration to defund efforts to shore up the vulnerable city's levees. After flooding in 1995 killed six people in New Orleans, the Army Corps of Engineers started work on a massive civil engineering project designed to strengthen the region's levees and improve the pumping system that regulates water levels.

The work got off to a good start, but in 2003 American federal funding started to run dry, leaving many projects on the drawing board. As early as 2004, the local officials and Army Corps of Engineers representatives attributed the funding cuts to the rising cost of the war in Iraq.

Facing record deficits, the Bush administration cut costs by including in its 2005 budget only about a sixth of the flood-prevention funds requested by the Louisiana congressional delegation.

The war in Iraq also has made recovery from Katrina slower and more challenging. The Army National Guard units normally available for domestic disaster relief found rapid emergency response unusually difficult since so many of their personnel are deployed in Iraq. Although more units were dispatched later in the week, the manpower shortage was painfully evident during the crucial first hours.

The Iraq war is not the only reason for insisting that the Bush administration deserves some blame for the magnitude of the still-unfolding catastrophe.

After 9/11, the president promised that the U.S. nation would never again be so unprepared in the face of disaster. The Department of Homeland Security was created with a view to ensuring that every American city had adequate emergency plans in place for the kind of large-scale crisis that could accompany either a terrorist attack or a natural disaster.

The fact is that it was an empty promise. Four years after 9/11attacks, the fiasco in New Orleans underscores American nation's ongoing inability to cope with serious threats.

For example, take American public health: Hurricane preparation plans, supposedly prepared with the involvement and approval of Homeland Security officials were grossly inadequate for ensuring a continued supply of medication to the sick and for the evacuation of the ill and disabled, for cleaning up, ensuring safe drinking water or preventing the spread of disease.

With floodwaters, broken sewage pipes, damaged petrochemical pipelines and floating corpses all over the city, no one seemed to have a clear plan. If a terrorist's bomb, rather than a hurricane, had destroyed a levee around Lake Pont, no one would hesitate to condemn the administration for its dull emergency planning and response.

And federal officials had more than a week's warning that a hurricane was on track for New Orleans, far more time than they'd likely have of a terrorist attack on critical infrastructure. Not every natural phenomena disaster can be blamed on the Bush administration, but for millions of Americans, the catastrophic aftermath of Hurricane Katrina is likely to stand as an indictment of Bush's false economies, empty promises and foolish priorities.

Consider Louisiana's wetlands, to take just one example. Policies associated with the administration exacerbated the geographical and ecological conditions for severe flooding. Over the decades, oil and gas company actions played a significant role in destroying the wetlands. Other factors also contributed, including residential development and, ironically, the overbuilding of some of the region's levees. But the "man-made" aspects of the disaster highlight the stupidity of the policies of environmental damages that Bush administration has caused so again and again.

Two thousand years after his death, Emperor Nero's famous self-enjoyment remains a symbol about weak and self-centered leadership in times of crisis.

Bush's guitar-playing actions in the face of the New Orleans devastation may doom him to a similar fate.

The Widening Crusade

Monday September 12, 2005

The following article is by Sydney H.Schanberg, an American Writer whose columns appear on the village voice.

If some wishful Americans are still hoping that President Bush will acknowledge that his imperial foreign policy has been frustrated in Iraq and needs fixing, they should put aside those absent-mindedness. He's going all the way— taking Americans with him.

The Israeli bombing raid on Syria on October 5th was an expansion of the Bush policy, carried out by the Sharon government but with the implicit approval of Washington. People close to the U.S president say that his conversion to evangelical Methodism, after a life of aimless carousing, markedly informs his policies, both foreign and domestic. In the book entitled 'The Faith of George W Bush[', Stephen Mansfield writes: In the election year 2000, Bush surprisingly told Texas missionary James Robison, one of his spiritual councilor: "I feel like God wants me to run for president. I can't explain it, but I sense my country is going to need me.  

I know it won't be easy on me or my family, but God wants me to do it." Certainly these words denote the imperial ambition of the U.S president.

The U.N public relations deluge by George Bush, Dick Cheney, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld seemed to be aimed at denying any policy fumbles and insisting that the liberal press was ignoring the positive developments in Iraq. Dick Cheney, the president's usual attack dog, aimed his sharpest and most sneering words at those who offer dissent about the administration's foreign and economic policies. Perhaps seeking to neutralize such criticism, he raised the specter of the so-called terrorists acquiring supposedly weapons of mass destruction that as the U.S leaders claim "could bring devastation to the U.S on a scale Americans have never experienced. Instead of losing thousands of lives, Americans might lose tens of thousands or even hundreds of thousands of lives in a single day of horror." Bush implication was that Saddam Hussein in particular had presented this threat, when virtually all the available intelligence shows that Iraq's weapons programs had been crippled or drastically diminished by UN inspections and economic sanctions imposed after the first Persian Gulf War in 1991. But beyond all the distortions, exaggerations and falsehoods the Bush people engaged in rallying public support for the Iraq war, something nobody has understood, from the 9-11 day of tragedy onward, is why this White House has not called on the American people to be part of the war effort, to make the sacrifices civilians have always made when this country is at war.   

Instead, Bush has cut taxes hugely, mostly for affluent Americans, saying this would put money into circulation and create jobs. Since Bush began the tax cutting two and a half years ago, 2.7 million jobs have disappeared. In effect, George Bush says, believe in me and I will lead you out of darkness. But he doesn't tell American citizens any details. And it's in the details where the true costs are buried—human costs and the cost to Americans notion of themselves as helpers and sharers, not slayers. No one seems to be asking them selves: If in the end the imperial crusade is victorious?

For those who would dispute the assertion that the Bush Doctrine is an imperial global military-based policy and is not just about liberating the Iraqi people, it's crucial to look back to the policy's origins and examine its founding documents.

Among the 25 signatories to the imperial project for the new American century, founding statement were Dick Cheney, Lewis Libby, Donald Rumsfeld, and Paul Wolfowitz who was the head of the Pentagon policy team in the first Bush presidency, and now is the president of the World Bank. Obviously, this fraternity has been marinating together for a long time. Other signatories whose names might ring familiar were Elliot Abrams, Gary Bauer, William Bennett, Jeb Bush, and Norman Podhoretz.

In September 2000, just two months before George W. Bush the son was elected president, the imperial project for the new American century put military flesh on its statement of principles with a detailed 81-page report, named "Rebuilding America's Defenses." The report set several "core missions" for U.S. military forces, which included maintaining nuclear superiority, expanding the armed forces by 200,000 active-duty personnel, and "repositioning" those forces "to respond to 21st century strategic realities."

There the most startling mission is described as follows: "Fight and decisively win multiple simultaneous major theater wars."  Rebuilding America's Defenses" report depicts these imperial wars as "large scale" and "spread across the globe."

Apparently for the neoconservative civilians who are running the Iraq campaign, 9-11 was that catalyzing event—for they are now operating at full speed toward imperial multiple, simultaneous wars.

Is President Bush so committed to this imperial policy that he is unable to consider rethinking it? In short, is his mind closed? And if so, how many wars will he take American into? These are not questions in a college debate, where the answers have no consequences. When a president's closest advisers and imperial military planners are patrons of a policy that speaks of fighting multiple, simultaneous, large-scale wars across the globe, people have a right to be told about it.

A five-year military campaign. Seven countries. How far has the White House taken its imperial plan? And how long can the president keep American people in the dark, emerging from his White House walls only to speak to them in slogans?

It's Not Just the Emperor, Who is Naked, But the Whole Empire

Monday September 5, 2005

The following article is by Robert Jensen, a Journalism Professor at the University of Texas at Austin.

The lies and distortions that Bush and his top officials used to promote the U.S. invasion of Iraq were exposed long ago, and day-by-day the disastrous consequences of the occupation are obvious to all but the most fanatical of the U.S. Leader's faithful.

The problem is not just that the EMPEROR is bare, but that the U.S. EMPIRE has no clothes, and in that respect American people stand before the world as naked as the most reactionary American statesmen.

It is understandable that many think of the Bush administration's policies as a radical departure from past U.S. foreign policy, and certainly the doctrine of preemption which is so far untested, because Iraq posed no threat to the United States; the U.S. invasion, therefore, didn't preempt anything but was instead a simple crime against peace and the open call for world domination have taken the U.S. and the world down a particularly dangerous path. But Bush is hardly the first president to engage in empire building.

A few years ago, anyone who described the United States as an empire was branded part of the loony left. But since 9/11 attacks, even conservative pundits talk of empire, albeit in perversely positive terms, exhorting U.S. leaders to seize the opportunity to remake the world.

But that project didn't begin with the 9/11 attacks. There are several point in U.S. history that one could claim as the beginning of the imperial project such as the genocide of indigenous people in North America?, the Monroe Doctrine?, the conquest of the Philippines after the Spanish-American War of 1898-1902?, there is no doubt that U.S. empire building went into high gear after World War II. The fact that the United States doesn't acquire colonies in the same fashion as past empires, preferring instead to install compliant governments that will do its bidding, doesn't make the U.S. less of an empire.

Nor do the differences in style and tactics make the U.S. Democratic administrations any less imperial than its Republicans. The Cold-War liberals of the U.S. Democratic Party had no greater nauseas than Republicans about using the military to extend U.S. power in the Third World. The blood of millions of dead Vietnamese is on the hands of the liberal darling John F. Kennedy and the Conservative Richard Nixon alike. Whatever the differences in domestic policy in the postwar period between Republicans and Democrats, in international relations the agreements on each side of the aisle was firmly in favor of militarism to project U.S. power around the world.

That pattern continues up to this day. It should not be forgotten that for all the talk of Bill Clinton's "multilateralism," he launched an illegal attack on Iraq in 1998 and insisted on maintaining the harshest economic embargo in modern history on that country for eight years, which killed as many as 1 million Iraqis -- policies that had virtually no support in the world. In short, Clinton killed more Iraqis than Bush as he ignored international law and world opinion.

There's no indication that any of the current strategists in the U.S. Democratic Party have learned anything from all this. Remember that John Kerry during the last presidential elections did not call for an end to the illegal and immoral occupation but instead advocated a continued U.S. presence with an international fig leaf.

Neither Republicans nor mainstream Democrats seem capable of admitting that the invasion of Iraq was never about weapons of mass destruction, terrorist ties between Iraq and Al-Qaeda, or creating democracy; it was simply an intensification of the longstanding U.S. project of controlling the strategically crucial energy resources of the Middle East. That project has gone on under Democratic and Republican presidents’ alike, taking different forms but always with that same goal of expanding U.S. power.

It's not just the Iraq War that is immoral. The whole rotten project of empire building is immoral -- and every bit as much a Democratic as a Republican project.

This analysis doesn't mean American people can't judge one particular empire-building politician more dangerous than another. It doesn't mean they shouldn't sometimes make strategic choices to vote for one over the other. It simply means we should make such choices with eyes open and no illusions.

Fable of the Emperor and the Grieving Mother

Monday August 29, 2005

The following article is by David Krieger a Critic Columnist and the President of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation.

Once upon a time there was an Emperor who thought that the war he had started was exciting, although troublesome. He thought that running a war was “hard work,” and thinking always made him tired. So, he decided to take another vacation and visit his palace in the provinces, where he could relax with his servants and nobles seeking his favor and not have to think.

Nearly all of the servants, like the Emperor himself, liked war very much, although they didn’t like to personally participate in it. Many had cleverly avoided their own involvement in wars when they were young. For instance, the Emperor’s Chief Vassal, Sir Dick, loved war nearly as much as life itself, but had been a champion at getting postponements from participating in war as a young man. In this way, he could live to grow old and send new generations of young people to war, or more properly to untimely death.

A problem arose in the Emperor’s realm when a grieving woman whose son had died in the Emperor’s war decided to visit the Emperor and ask him what purpose her son’s death had served. She traveled to the Emperor’s castle in the provinces where he was relaxing from the “hard work” of war. She sent a message to him, which said, “I have lost my son who was most precious to me and I wish to know from you that his death was not in vain, that my son died for some greater purpose. Come out from behind the walls of the castle and let me know how my son’s death has been for a noble cause.”

One of the Emperor’s slaves approached the Emperor, and told him he had a message from a grieving mother of one of the Emperor’s fallen soldiers. After reading the message, the Emperor turned to the slave and asked, “Why do you bother me with this, the words of a simple woman, when I have an empire to run and am relaxing from the hard work of war? As you know, tonight we have more riches to gather, and I must be in a mood for cheerfulness.”

The vassal bowed low and backed away.

The Emperor was supremely confident in the knowledge that his subjects, and especially the writers would not speak ill of him. But the woman’s message had put the Emperor in a bad mood. He thought it impolite of this woman to send such a message. He had an empire to run, and no time for explaining to a grieving mother why her son had died. It should be obvious to her that her son died because that’s what soldiers do. They die in battle. If they cannot keep away from the military, like Sir Dick had done, or at least stay out of war as the Emperor himself had done, then they die in battle if they are unlucky and then are replaced by other soldiers.

The walls of the Emperor’s castle were high, and the Emperor knew he was safe from this grieving mother and her kind behind them. He and Sir Dick knew best what the empire needed, and he knew that now was the time to relax so that after some weeks he could return to the “hard work” of war. But while the message of the grieving mother encamped in front of the Emperor’s castle did not move the hard heart of the Emperor, it did indeed miraculously resound through the empire, and the populace did indeed begin to question with her whether her son had died in vain and whether the Emperor’s war had been no more than tragic folly.

All stories have a moral, and the moral of this one is: If your son or daughter has died in war and you are a grieving mother, know that while your words may not move the Emperor to come out from behind the safety of his castle walls, your pain and courage may still stir a revolt across the empire and save other mothers’ sons and daughters as well as the innocent citizens of far-off lands.

Globalization and Imperialism are Anomaly and their Time is Running Out

Monday August 22, 2005

The following article is by James Howard Kunstler a Columnist of the UK Guardian and the Author of ‘The Long Emergency.’

Today's transient global economic relations are a product of very special transient circumstances, namely relative world peace and absolutely reliable supplies of cheap energy. Subtract either of these elements from the equation and you will see globalization and imperialism evaporate so quickly as the air sucks out of your lungs. It is significant that none of the cheerleaders for globalization takes this equation into account. In fact, the American emperor is sleepwalking into a crisis so severe that the blowback may put  both major American political parties out of business.

The first phase of globalization and imperialism took off under coal-and-steam power. There was no shortage of fuel, the colonial boundaries were stable, and the pipeline of raw materials from them to the factories of Western Europe ran smoothly. The rise of a middle class running the many stages of the production process provided markets for all the new production. Innovations in finance gave legitimacy to all kinds of tradable paper. Life was very good for Europe and America, notwithstanding a few sharp cyclical depressions and recoveries. Trade boomed between the great powers. In America, it was called the progressive era, and 20th century looked golden.

Historians are still puzzled about what really brought on the First World War. What did France or Britain really care about Austrian archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the throne of a country already in deep eclipse? There were no active contests over territory at the time, not even in the Asian or African colonies. And yet the diplomatic failures of that fateful summer led to a great slaughtering, the death of a substantial portion of the younger generation, and a virtual nervous breakdown of authority in politics and culture. It would take a depression, fascism, and a second world war to resolve these issues and a new round of globalization and imperialism did not ramp up again until the mid-1960s. It may be significant that the first collapse of globalization and imperialism occurred as the coal economy was transitioning into an oil economy, with deep geo-political implications for who had oil that is America and those who might seek to control the other major region closest to Europe that possessed it The First World War was settled by those nations that were friendly with the greatest producer of oil most readily accessed. Germany was the loser and again in Second World War along with Japan it suffered similarly, because of its lack of access to oil.

The world is now due for another folding up of the periodic global trade fair as the industrial nations enter the up roaring era beyond the global oil production peak, which it is named the long emergency. The economic distortions and protectors that have built up in the current era are not hard to see, though the U.N leaders dread to acknowledge them. The dirty secret of the US economy for at least a decade now is that it has come to be based on the ceaseless elaboration of a car-dependent suburban infrastructure eight-lane highways, big-box chain stores, hamburger stands - that has no future as a living arrangement in an oil-short future.

The American suburban juggernaut can be described briefly as the greatest misallocation of resources in the history of the world. The credits, bonds, real estate investment trusts and derivative financial instruments associated with this tragic enterprise must make with wonder and sickness. Add to this grim economic picture a far-flung military contest, already under way, really, for control of the world's remaining oil, and the scene grows darker. Two-thirds of that oil is in the possession of people who resent the west and (America in particular), many of whom have vowed to destroy it. Both America and Britain have felt the sting of freelance asymmetrical war-makers not associated with a particular state but with a transnational religious cause that uses potent small arms and explosives to unravel western societies and confound their defenses.

China, a supposed beneficiary of globalization, will be as desperate for oil as all the other players, and perhaps more ruthless in seeking control of the supplies, some of which they can walk to. Of course, it is hard to imagine the continuation of American chain stores' manufacturing supply lines with China, given the potential for friction. Even on its own terms, China faces issues of environmental havoc, population overshoot, and political turmoil - orders of magnitude greater than anything known in Europe or America.

Viewed through this lens, the sunset of the current phase of globalization and imperialism seems dreadfully close to the horizon. The American public has enjoyed the holiday, but the blue-light special orgy of easy motoring, limitless air-conditioning, and super-cheap products made by factory slaves far away is about to close down. Globalization and imperialism is going to finished. The world is about to become a safe place again for all  the human beings.

Monday August 15, 2005

The following article is by Jeremy Seabrook, a Columnist for the U.K. Gurdian and the Author of ‘The No-Nonsense Guide to World Poverty’.

In the time of tsunami day, there was something different. The tsunami struck tourist centers where westerners were on holiday. For the western media, it was clear that their lives have a different order of importance from those that have died in thousands, but have no remarkable biography, and, apparently, no intelligible tongue in which to express their feelings. This is not to diminish the trauma of loss of life, whether of tourist or fisherman. But when western journalists distinguish between "locals" and westerners who have died, "locals" all too easily becomes a vague word for what were once referred to by western media as natives. Whatever tourism's merits, it risks reinforcing the imperial sensibility.

For this sensibility has already been reawakened by all the human-made, preventable catastrophes. The ruins of Galle and Bandar Aceh called forth images of Falluja, Mosul and Gaza. It seems, imperial powers,  anticipate the destructive capacity of nature. While the tsunami death toll rises in anonymous thousands, in Iraq arrogant American authorities don't do body counts.

One of the bitterest sights was that of westerners overcome with gratitude that they had been helped by the grace and mercy of those who had lost everything, and regarded them as guests. When these same people appear in the West, they become the uninvited guest, the unwanted migrant, the refuge seeker, who should go back to where they belong. A globalization that permits the wealthy to pass through borders restricts the poor to eroded subsistence, and an impoverishment that seems to have no end. People rarely say that visitors swamp poor countries, even though their money power pre-empts the best produce, the clean water and facilities unknown to the indigenous population.

In death, there should be no hierarchy. Poor people have no consoling elsewhere to which they can be repatriated. The history of the poor remains short and simple, and can be canceled without inquiry as to how they contrive an existence on these fragile coasts. What are the daily visitations of grief and loss in places where people earn less in a year than the price that privilege pays for a night's stay in a five-star hotel?   Western governments, which can disburse so generously in the art of war, offer a few million as if it were exceptional largesse. Fortunately the people are wiser; and the spontaneous outpourings of humanity have been as unstoppable as the waves that broke on south Asia's coasts; public donations rapidly exceeded the amount offered by western governments. Selflessness and sacrifice, people working away at rubble with bare hands, suggest immediate human solidarities. But these are undermined by the structures of inequality. Promises solemnly made at times of immediate sorrow by the governments are overtaken by public urgencies; money donated for the Orissa cyclone, for hurricane Mitch in Central America, the floods in Bangladesh, the Bam earthquake, proved to be a fraction of what was promised.

Such events remind, of the sameness of human destiny, the fragility of existence. They place in perspective the meaning of security. Life is always at the mercy of nature - whether from such overwhelming events as this, or the natural processes that exempt no one from paying back to earth the life given to the man. Yet the western people live in systems of social and economic injustice that worsen the insecurity of the poor. While the western governments prepared to devastate distant towns and cities in the name of a security that, in the end, will elude them all.

America's Imperial War

Monday August 8, 2005

The following article is by George Monbiot who writes for the London Guardian.

Never was victory so bitter. Those liberals who supported the war in Afghanistan, and so confidently declared that their values had triumphed must now be feeling a little exposed. Precisely who has lost, and what the extent of their loss may be, is yet to be determined, but now there can be little doubt that the dangerous and illiberal people who control the U.S. military machine have won. The bombing of Afghanistan is already starting to look like the first shot in a new imperial war.

In 30 years' time the U.S. may be able to tell whether or not the people of Afghanistan have benefited from the fighting there. The murderous Taliban has been overthrown. Some 3 billion dollars has so far been pledged for aid and reconstruction. But the only predictable feature of Afghan politics is its unpredictability.

In the meantime, 7 million remain at risk of starvation. Some regions have been made safer for aid workers; others have become more dangerous, as looting and banditry fill the vacuum left by the Taliban's collapse. Already, some refugees are looking back with nostalgia to the comparative order and stability of life under that brutal government. For the Afghan people, the only certain and irreversible outcome of the war so far is that some thousands of civilians have been killed.

More importantly, the temporary U.S. bases in Afghanistan, Pakistan and the Caspian states appear to be putting down roots. U.S. military "tent cities" have now been established in 13 places in the states bordering Afghanistan. New airports are being built and garrisons expanded. The U.S. leaders have said "when the Afghan conflict is over the U.S. will not leave central Asia. It has long-term plans and imperial interests in this region."

America is beginning to look like the "new imperium". Already there are signs that confrontation with the so-called "axis of evil" is coming to involve more than just containing terrorism. Writing in the Korea Times, Henry Kissinger insisted: "The issue is not whether Iraq was involved in the terrorist attack on the United States, though no doubt there was some intelligence contact between Iraqi intelligence and one of the chief plotters. The challenge of Iraq is essentially geopolitical."

An asymmetric world war of the kind George Bush and his Defense Secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, have proposed provides the justification, long sought by the defense companies and their sponsored representatives in Washington, for a massive increase in arms spending.

Just as the hawks in Washington were losing the public argument about extending the war to other countries it rumored that, journalists start receiving envelopes full of bacteria, which might as well have been labeled 'a gift from Iraq'. This could indeed be the work of terrorists, who may have their own reasons for widening the conflict, but there are plenty of other ruthless operators who would benefit from a shift in public opinion." The suggestion that widely ridiculed.

Now Bush has secured a further 48 billion dollars for the defense contractors who helped him into office, and those who contested the first phase of his war are still abused, by people such as the British Foreign Office Minister Peter Hain, as "rejectionists" and "isolationists". In truth, it is those who supported the war who have endorsed U.S. isolationism.

Henry Kissinger comes closer to the truth when he says that "Britain will not easily abandon the pivotal role based on its special relationship with the U.S. that it has earned for itself in the evolution of the crisis.

A determined American policy thus has more latitude than is generally assumed." Jack Straw's newfound enthusiasm for the U.S. missile defense program suggests that Henry Kissinger is rather better versed in British politics than Peter Hain.

American statesmen, the men who run the military-industrial complex have pushed aside the government of the Philippines, sent 16 Black Hawk helicopters to Colombia, arrested the Cuban investigators seeking to foil a bomb plan in Miami, alarmed Russia and China by scrambling for central Asia, and nowadays begun developing a new tactical nuclear weapon accusation in order to expand Imperial wars on other nations.

Global Empire Barbarism Incorporated

Monday August 1, 2005

The following article is by Gill Hubbard, an American Columnist and Founder of Globalize Resistance Scotland, and David Miller, Professor of Sociology at Strathclyde University.

The G8 have consistently imposed a neo-liberal economic model that benefits the rich and powerful at the expense of the most impoverished people in the world. This type of economics is characterized by privatization, deregulation and trade liberalization.

Take the case of trade liberalization. An increase in international trade for the world's poorest countries has not led to any real reduction in poverty in these countries. The United Nations Conference on Trade and Development reported that the majority of people in countries that opened up their markets for free trade are still surviving on less than 1 dollar a day. In other words, the people who gain most from relaxing import and export controls in the developing world are the multinationals.

The G8 continue to demand that poor countries open up their borders so that transnational corporations can pounce down and extract public services dry. Like vultures, the corporations circle over the developing world, waiting to feed off the profits.

The International Monetary Fund and World Bank insist that to qualify for debt relief or loans poor countries must privatize public utilities including water, gas, electricity, transport, hospitals and schools. Privatization has increased the costs of these essential services, which means that poor people can no longer afford them. Privatization of public services is clearly worseninbg the effects of poverty in many developing countries.

The G8 expound the gospel of globalization. Like a line of battle they march across the globe, pushing into the groove anyone or anything that stands in their way.

The term 'globalization' has a specific meaning. It is the accelerated integration of capital, production of goods and services, and markets on a global scale. Globalization is a process that is driven by the logic of corporations competing with one another for natural and human labour resources, and for markets in which to sell goods and services. This logic extends to rivalries between nation states, which is why globalization is also characterized by war.

There are three interconnected international bodies that are forcing through globalization: that is The International Monetary Fund the World Bank, and the World Trade Organization. Between them they aim to establish 'global governance' based on the principles of unchecked financial flows and speculation on the stock markets, free trade and privatization. The purpose of The International Monetary Fund is to make sure that financial speculation, gambling on currencies and the buying and selling of corporate shares, can go on unchecked. It wants this free-for-all to take place irrespective of the consequences. For example, when the world's gamblers started a run on the baht, the Thai currency, it precipitated the Asian financial crisis of 1997. In a matter of weeks over a million people in Thailand and 21 million people in Indonesia were pushed below the poverty line.

Like grand schoolmasters, The International Monetary Fund and World Bank tell governments in the developing world what they should do with their economies. The developing countries are being taught to abide by 'structural adjustment programs’, which are now disingenuously called 'poverty reduction strategies'. If governments refuse to do as they are told, detention for the pupil is severe. The International Monetary Fund and World Bank have refused to provide aid and loans to these countries. In the past, debt relief was denied to seven heavily indebted countries because they had not abided by The International Monetary Fund and World Bank neo-liberal economic programs. It is not from lack of money that members of the G8 refuse to cancel Third World debt, it is because debt can be used as a way of coercing developing countries to adopt neo-liberal economic practices.

The purpose of the World Trade Organization is to establish free trade so that corporations can do what they want and go where they want without anything or anyone standing in their way. There will be no barbed wire fences or border police blocking the path of transnational corporations. It is the World Trade Organization that is imposing Trade-Related Intellectual Property Rights. This is the intellectual equivalent of armed robbery. Our human genes and basic foodstuffs are being patented. Patenting has meant, for example, that the production of cheaper, generic drugs that would keep people with HIV/AIDS alive is being blocked. In other words, pharmaceutical profits are protected and the poor and sick are paying the price.

Governments from developing countries were also outraged by the hypocrisy of the eight richest nations in the world. For example, while they were expected to open up their country's borders to corporations from abroad, and remove support given to key sectors of the economy, the United States was busy propping up its own agricultural and steel industries through massive subsidies. The storm clouds gathering over the corporate-driven globalization agenda on the streets of Seattle and Genoa have been joined by a hurricane - the anti-war movement.

On 15 February 2003 millions took to the streets against the then impending war on Iraq. The relationship between neo-liberalism and war has never been starker than in the war against Iraq. This war, which was led by the United States with Britain obediently following, has compounded the crisis of legitimacy of global capitalism in at least three ways. The war and occupation of Iraq showed what the so-called 'Project for a New American Century' actually means in practice. It means control of oil supplies and it means profits for U.S. corporations. Nowhere has this been more blatant than in awarding the main business contracts for the so-called 'rebuilding' of Iraq to U.S. corporations linked to the Bush gang, such as Bechtel and Halliburton. U.K. corporations were left to peck the crumbs off the table after the hawks had had their fill.

Given the failed history of the G8 it is no surprise that people have protested when they meet. The leaders of the eight richest countries in the world may take their photo opportunities, but there are millions of the world people ready to point out their hypocrisy and reveal the G8 for what they really are: People of the world will not be fooled.

The Imperial Mythology of World War II

Monday July 25, 2005

The following article is by Richard Drayton Senior Lecturer in history at Cambridge University.

The British and American publics share a sunny view of the Second World War. Movies, popular histories and political speeches frame the war as a symbol of Anglo-American courage, with the Red Army's central role forgotten. This war, is claimed, "a war for democracy". American leaders claim that they fought the war to rescue the world. For apologists of the British Empire, the war was an ethical bath where the sins of centuries of conquest, slavery and exploitation, paid their penalty.

The supposedly "good war" against Hitler has underwritten 60 years of war making. It has become an ethical blank cheque for British and US power. They claim the right to bomb, to maim, to imprison without trial on the basis of direct and implicit appeals to the war against fascism.

When Anglo-American leaders fall out with such tyrant friends as Noriega, Milosevic or Saddam they mark them as "Hitler". In the so-called "good war" against them, all bad things become forgettable as "collateral damage". The devastation of civilian targets in Serbia or Iraq, torture at Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo, the war crime of collective punishment in Fallujah, fade into oblivion as the "price of democracy".

Anglo-American imperialism prefers to forget that fascism has its roots in western countries. Hitler's dream was inspired, in part, by the British Empire. In Eastern Europe, the Nazis hoped to make their America and Australia, where ethnic cleansing and slave labour created a frontier for settlement. In Western Europe, they sought their India from which revenues, labour and soldiers might be extracted.

American imperialism in Latin America gave explicit precedents for Germany's and Japan's claims of supremacy in their neighbouring regions. The British and Americans were key theorists of better generation and had made racial segregation respectable. The concentration camp was a British invention, and in Iraq and Afghanistan the British were the first to use air power to repress partisan resistance.

Don’t forget, that British and US elites gave aid to the fascists. President George Bush's grandfather, prosecuted for "trading with the enemy" in 1942, was one of many powerful Anglo-Americans who liked Mussolini and Hitler and did what they could to help. Pacification as a state policy was only the tip of an iceberg of practical aid to these dictatorships. Capital and technology flowed freely, and fascist despots received dignified treatment in Washington and London. Henry Ford made Hitler birthday gifts of 50,000 marks.

The destruction of Dresden, a city filled with women, children, the elderly and the wounded, and with no military significance, is only the best known of the atrocities committed by American bombers against civilian populations. American leaders know about the notorious Japanese abuse of prisoners of war, but choose not to remember the torture and murder of captured Japanese at their hands. Edgar Jones, an "embedded" Pacific war correspondent, wrote: "'American soldiers shot prisoners in cold blood, wiped out hospitals, strafed lifeboats, killed or mistreated enemy civilians, finished off the enemy wounded, tossed the dying into a hole with the dead, and in the Pacific war theatre against the Japanese, they boiled flesh off enemy skulls to make table ornaments."

After 1945, American leaders borrowed many fascist methods. Nuremberg only punished a handful of the guilty; most walked free with American help. In 1946, Project Paperclip secretly brought more than 1,000 Nazi scientists to the US. Among their ranks were Kurt Blome, who had tested nerve gas at Auschwitz, and Konrad Schaeffer, who forced salt into victims at Dachau. Other experiments at mind control via drugs and surgery were folded into the CIA's Project Bluebird. Japan's Dr Shiro Ishii, who had experimented with prisoners in Manchuria, came to Maryland to advise on bio-weapons. Within a decade of British troops liberating Belsen, they were running their own concentration camps in Kenya to crush the Mau Mau. The Gestapo's torture techniques were borrowed by the French in Algeria, and then disseminated by the Americans to Latin American dictatorships in the 60s and 70s. We can see their extension today in the American camps in Cuba and Diego Garcia.

War has a brutalizing momentum. This is the moral of Taken By Force, which shows how American soldiers became increasingly indiscriminate in their sexual violence and military authorities increasingly lax in their prosecution. Even as Anglo-Amercans remember the evils of nazism, they should begin to remember the second world war with less self- satisfaction. This way they might, in particular, learn to distrust those who use it to justify contemporary warmongering.

Celebrating Independence in the Era of Empire 

Monday July 18, 2005

The following article is by Medea Benjamin, Co-Founder of the Global Exchange and Women for Peace.

The US Declaration of Independence proclaimed the need to fight the War of Independence against the British invaders. Today it is American government whose standing army is committing abuses and usurpations in foreign lands. Today it is American government that is in the business of empire-building. Even before 9/11attacks, the US military maintained over 700 foreign military bases and installations and almost 250,000 troops in 130 countries.

George Washington, Thomas Jefferson and James Madison all warned that the invasion and occupation of other lands would turn America into precisely the sort of empire against which they had so recently rebelled.

Unfortunately, subsequent leaders of the U.S have refused to heed this advice - invading other countries to control their land, their oil, their people. From the 1890s to the 1930s alone, the US intervened 23 times in the Western hemisphere. Building and maintaining a vast empire is expensive in both lives and money. The human cost in Iraq alone tops 1,700 US soldiers dead, tens of thousands severely injured both physically and psychologically, with much greater death and suffering endured by the Iraqi people.

The U.S out-of-control military budget will, by 2006, equal that of the rest of the world combined. This enormous cost is draining money from American schools and its hospitals, its public transportation. American scholars have mentioned that; 'A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death'. According to the organization of National Priorities, the 200 billion dollars spending on the war in Iraq could have provided health care to over 46 million Americans, affordable housing to almost 2 million families, or renewable energy for some 360 million homes.

The imperial ambitions of the Bush administration have cost Americans at their international prestige loss. A survey of public opinion in 16 countries released by the Pew Global Attitudes Project on June 23 found a dismal opinion of the U.S. Most said the world was more dangerous after the downfall of Saddam rated China more favorably than the U.S., and said the world would be better off if a group of countries emerged as a rival to U.S. military power.

Most Americans have come to understand that the cost of empire in lives, money and prestige is unacceptable. Recent polls show that the majority believes America should never have attacked Iraq, America should begin to withdraw its troops, and that the war in Iraq has not made it safer at home. Six out of ten Americans say that their leaders are headed down the wrong path.

In 1821, the then Secretary of State John Quincy Adams warned that if America went abroad in search of 'monsters to destroy the fundamental maxims of her policy would insensibly change from liberty to force.'

Empire-building is destroying the soul of the U.S nation. Let American people get their soldiers out of Iraq, dismantle their foreign bases, prevent new conquests, rejoin the international community and, in the process, become the rulers of their own spirit.

US Policy Under Fire

Monday July 4, 2005

The following article is by Lynne Glasner a Columnist and political Activist who lives in New York.

What no one is talking about openly on either side of the Atlantic Ocean is the Bush Doctrine that is the 21st century version of imperialism in which the US takes over the unfriendly states of the Middle East, one by one, and builds military bases across the region so that both the economies and self-defense of these countries become dependent on the U.S. modern day colonization. The Bush Doctrine is based on neo-con ideas that have been simmering for over two decades. These ideas are narrowly discussed on some of the neo-con websites, but they have never gotten much traction outside of these circles. The common excuses of neo-con doctrines are the 9/11 attacks and Bush’s own religious fundamentalism. The Bush Doctrine sets up a dependency that keeps the US in the position of being forced to control the Middle East  Oil, and striving to maintain the Arab world's support all at once. Something which has failed to succeeed and is unlikely happen in future.  

The Bush Doctrine is actually an old, on-going neo-con position that, underlie all the overt lies and aggressive stands taken by Bush and his supporters. The removal of Saddam was only a short-term goal, the first of many steps in the long-term plan to remake the Middle East in the neo-con and US leaders image. The Bush policy has never been about anti-terrorism, anti weapons of mass destruction or Saddam; it’s about reshaping the Middle East. That’s why as the rhetoric kept changing, the deception got lost in the bigger picture. 

While the public starts to turn its attention to the lies concerning WMD lies and the shifting rationale for going to war, the neo-cons are busy behind the scenes fine-tuning the Doctrine and calling the shots within the Administration to make sea changes in the Middle East – building huge military bases with taxpayer dollars; threatening Iran and Syria with economic sanctions and more, trying desperately to hold on to the thin coalition forged in Iraq. Perhaps it’s by design that the current Iraqi ‘government’ is so doubtful. After all, if it fails, guess who will pick up the pieces and form another imposed interim government.

Imperialism and colonialism, of course, are an ingrained part of British history, but it is an ancient concept in this day and age. Blair’s worry is of long-term US dominance and lack of confidence that the European Union will be able to act as its counter. In the UK, the lie covers Blair’s fear of being cut from the ‘A’ list of partners in the new, budding empire that the U.S. ambitious President is erecting. On both sides of the Atlantic, the public policy is very different from the private one and both Bush and Blair have used an equally hypocritical stance to lead their nations to war: the ends justify any means.

Historically, presidential doctrines have defined overall American overall policy about every one hundred years: Monroe Doctrine in 1823, the Roosevelt Corollary of Monroe Doctrine in 1904 and now here comes Bush 100 years later. The Bush Doctrine is not really so different in attitude from Monroe’s grabbing control of this hemisphere or Roosevelt’s aggressive seizure of commerce south of the U.S. borders. Both implied threats. The rude message is stay out of the Middle East America is the only superpower so America keeps the oil and controls it. Although, in both of the earlier doctrines the underlying goal was also economic and protection of commerce, neither engaged in pre-emptive war and both were publicly announced at national addresses to the union.

Of course, the world has changed since the days of Teddy Roosevelt and his ‘big stick.’ The new Radical Republicans know that not only would American popular support for the Bush Doctrine be thin, but it would feed American critics and create new opposition. Unfortunately, that reality doesn’t make the neo-cons stop and rethink the policy; it just impacts the strategy they use to put it in place. In order to start implementing such a policy, the Bush Administration has to lie. So they feed on the frenzy of post 9/11 attacks fear and lie about the rationale for their actions. The fact that the Bush policy is shrouded in post-9/11 attacks, anti-terrorist language adds credence to it and allows shocked public to give their consent to lies in the name of “self-defense.” When the public gets wind of the lies, they forgive their lofty leaders in the name of anti-terrorism, that too is a lie. This perception has been carefully crafted to gain wider support for the underlying policy. The only policy rationales put out are about the so-called terrorism and fighting the imaginary enemies of democracy who threaten American existence.

The U.S. public needs to connect the dots; the much bigger and more important lie in America is the non-announcement of the Bush Doctrine as the US official policy.

An Ethical Blank Check

Monday June 27, 2005

The following article is by Richard Drayton Senior Lecturer in history at Cambridge University.

In 1945, is costomary as at the end of all wars, the victorious powers spun the conflict's history to serve the interests of their elites. Wartime propaganda thus achieved an extraordinary afterlife. As Russian President Vladimir Putin showed, the Great Patriotic War as World War 2 is called in Russia, remains a key political resource in Russia. In Britain and the US, too, a certain idea of the Second World War is enthusiastically kept alive and less flattering memories suppressed. Five years ago, Robert Lilly, a distinguished American Sociologist, prepared a book based on military archives. The book taken by Force is a study of the rapes committed by American soldiers in Europe between 1942 and 1945. He submitted his manuscript in 2001. But after September 11, its US publisher suppressed it, and it first appeared in 2003 in a French translation. Americans prefer not to know about mass rape committed by American and British troops in Europe. Time Magazine had reported way back in September 1945: Thus "The American and the British armies have done their share of looting and raping. 

Americans are deceived that the U.S. Army fought the war to rescue the world. For apologists of the British Empire, the war was an ethical bath where the sins of centuries of conquest, slavery and exploitation were expiated. All this seems innocent fun, but patriotic myths have sharp edges. The so-called "good war" against Germany’s Adolf Hitler has underwritten 60 years of war mongering. It has become an ethical blank check for British and US power. American Governments claim the right to bomb nations, to maim people, to imprison without trial on the basis of direct and implicit appeals to the war against fascism. When the U.S. fell out with such tyrant friends as Panama’s Noriega, Serbia’s Milosevic or Iraq’s Saddam it re-branded them as "Hitler" despite the fact that all three American creations and had acted as pre instructions. In the so-called "good war" against them, all bad things become forgettable "collateral damage". The devastation of civilian targets in Serbia or Iraq, torture at Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo, the war crime of collective punishment in Fallujah, fade into oblivion as the "price of democracy". 

American democratic imperialism prefers to forget that fascism had important Anglo-American roots. Hitler's dream was inspired, in part, by the British Empire. In Eastern Europe, the Nazis hoped to make their America and Australia, where ethnic cleansing and slave labor created a frontier for settlement. In Western Europe, they sought their India from which revenues, labor and soldiers might be extracted.

American imperialism in Latin America gave explicit precedents for Germany's and Japan's claims of supremacy in their neighboring regions. The British and Americans Imperialists were key theorists of good generation and had made racial segregation respectable that was experimented as Apartheid in South Africa. The concentration camp was a British invention, and in Iraq and Afghanistan the British were the first to use air power to repress partisan resistance.

American Governors forget, too, that British and US elites gave aid to the Italian fascists. President Bush's grandfather, prosecuted for "trading with the supposed enemy" in 1942, was one of many powerful Anglo-Americans who liked Mussolini and Hitler and did what they could to help. Appeasement as a state policy was only the tip of an iceberg of practical aid to these dictatorships. Capital and technology flowed freely, and fascist despots received dignified treatment in Washington and London. Henry Ford made Hitler birthday gifts of 50,000 marks.  

American statesmen least like to remember that Americans also committed war crimes in the 1940s. The destruction of The German cirty of Dresden, a city filled with women, children, the elderly and the wounded, and with no military significance, is only the best known of the atrocities committed by American bombers against civilian populations. American leaders know about the notorious Japanese abuse of prisoners of war, but do not remember the torture and murder of captured Japanese.

After 1945, U.S. governors borrowed many fascist methods. Nuremberg only punished a handful of the guilty; most walked free with American help. In 1946, Project Paperclip secretly brought more than 1,000 Nazi scientists to the US. Among their ranks were Kurt Blome, who had tested nerve gas at Auschwitz, and Konrad Schaeffer, who forced salt into victims at Dachau. Other experiments at mind control via drugs and surgery were folded into the CIA's Project Bluebird. Japan's Dr Shiro Ishii, who had experimented with prisoners in Manchuria, came to Maryland to advise on bio-weapons. Within a decade of British troops liberating Belsen, they were running their own concentration camps in Kenya to crush the Mau Mau. The Gestapo's torture techniques were borrowed by the French in Algeria, and then disseminated by the Americans to Latin American dictatorships in the 60s and 70s. World people see their extension today in the American camps in Cuba and Diego Garcia.

War has a brutalizing momentum. This is the moral of that one learns by reading the book 'Taken By Force', which shows how American soldiers became increasingly indiscriminate in their sexual violence and military authorities increasingly lax in its prosecution. Even as Americans remember the evils of Nazism, and the courage of those who defeated it, they should begin to remember the Second World War with less self- satisfaction. American citizens might, in particular, learn to distrust those who use it to justify contemporary warmongering.

The War Against Islam 

Monday June 20, 2005

The following article is by James Carroll a Columnist whose writings appear regularly in the Boston Globe.

Among the factors leading to the French and Dutch rejections of the European constitution, none looms more ominously than the nightmare of hostility between ''the West" and Islam. Many Europeans fear a rising tide of green the color of Islam, both within the continent and from outside it. Muslims, meanwhile, see a flood of scorn in pressures on immigrant communities in European cities, in restrictions on Islamic expression, and in openly expressed reservations about Turkey's admission to the EU precisely because of its Islamic character. Given escalations of the war in Iraq together with widely reported instances of desecration of the Holy Quran by US interrogators, such trends in Europe make the so-called global war on  terror seem expressly a war against Islam waged by American and European leaders.

The poisonous flower of the Crusades, with their denigrations of distant cultures, was colonialism. The dark result of European imperial adventuring in the Muslim world was twofold: first, the usual exploitation of native peoples and resources, with destruction of culture, and, second, the powerful reaction among Muslims and Arab populations against colonialism, a reaction against an internal desecrating of Islamic traditions. Nowadays the so-called American war on terror, striking the worst notes of the old imperial insult.

Having forgotten the deeper history, nervous Europeans seem also to have forgotten how large numbers of Muslims settled in the continent's cities in the first place. In the 1960s and 1970s, Turks, Arabs, and North Africans were welcomed as ''guest workers," taking up menial labor with the implicit understanding that they could never hope to be received as citizens of the nations that exploited them. The rank injustice of the European  system depending on a permanent Muslim underclass was bound to issue in political resistance, and now it has, but with a religious edge.

The point is that this conflict has its origins more in ''the West" than in the House of Islam. The image of Muslims as prone to violence by virtue of their religion was mainly constructed across centuries by Europeans seeking to bolster their own purposes, a habit of Imperialized paranoia that is masterfully continued by the American neo-con leaders after 9/11 attacks. They, too, like high ranked priests, crusaders, conquistadors, and colonizers, have turned fear of Islam into a source of power. This history teaches that such self-serving projection can indeed result in the creation of an enemy ready and willing to make the nightmare real.

What Do the Imperial Mafia Really Want?(2)

Monday June 13, 2005

The following article is by William Blum an American Columnist and the Author of: ‘Essays on the American Empire’.

A TV advertisement showing an airport and a group of US soldiers in uniform passing through. Most probably these soldiers sre on the way to or just returning from Iraq; the people in the terminal are one by one looking up and humming?  HEROES!!  Real honest-to-God heroes!! 

The faces of the onlookers are filled with deep gratitude and pride.  The soldiers begin to realize what's happening as the waves of respect sweep over them, their faces are satisfied with thankfulness and toning pride, their faces say “Thanks.” 

That is the meaning of the phrase the guilty saved by a guilty conscience. February 13 marked the 60th anniversary of the firebombing of Dresden by the United States and Great Britain in World War II.  Several thousand people marched in Dresden on that day to condemn the incendiary destruction of the beautiful old city and the taking of tens of thousands of lives for no apparent military purpose. But It's been suggested that the motivation had to do with the expectation that the city would soon be falling under Soviet control.  The Western media has referred to the demonstrators simply as “neo-Nazis” and “fascists” as if no German citizen or anyone else could have any good reason to be upset by the bombing, which could well qualify as a war crime. 

German Chancellor Gerhardt Schröder appealed to Germans to reject such interpretations of the firebombing of Dresden by the United States, and said, “Showing historical responsibility means not weighing crimes against suffering. I always remember how much suffering Germany caused to others by a war that it started.”

A guilt factor comes into play in the recent scenario involving Germany and US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld.  Under a 2002 German law allowing prosecutors to investigate war crimes no matter where they occurred, the Center for Constitutional Rights in New York filed a request with the German prosecutor's office to investigate war crime charges against Donald Rumsfeld arising from the Abu Ghraib prison scandal.  The Germans chose to ignore their own law and declined to pursue the matter. 

The outcome was never in doubt.  The idea of the German government prosecuting an American official for war crimes borders on science fiction.

The American Neo-Conservative Elliott Abrams is the new deputy national security adviser to President Bush; another promotion for the man who in the 1980s in the Reagan administration was a tireless campaigner for dictatorship, death squads, and torturers in Central America and Pinochet's Chile.

History, in recent years, has been kinder to Abrams than to his prediction.  It would be difficult to find anyone outside of extreme-neo-con-land who has a charitable word for the contras, who also engaged in widespread drug trafficking and were accomplished rapists.

Another American neo-con leading light, Michael Ledeen, of the American Enterprise Institute, also tried his hand at prognostication shortly before the US invasion of Iraq in 2003.

At last year's meeting of the UN Commission on Human Rights, the United States sponsored a motion criticizing China's record on human rights and is considering doing so again at this year's meeting in March. Chinese treatment of prisoners is one thing that apparently bothers the State Department, including holding prisoners without revealing their names. But it is not surprising that, the U.S. start “rendering” prisoners to China for interrogation cum torture.

The United States believes that countries that routinely and systematically violate the rights of their citizens should not be selected to review the human rights performance of other countries.

But Saudi Arabia is not accused by the US State Department for  violations of rights. It is an Imperialistic character of the U.S. that is politically unable to criticize the Saudis, otherwise it would have enough self-respect and common sense to refrain from accusing any other country.

What Do the Imperial Mafia Really Want? (1)

Monday June 6, 2005

The following article is by William Blum an American Columnist and the Author of: ‘Essays on the American Empire’.

After what was designated an “election” in Iraq, there was a marked increase in calls for the United States to announce a timetable for withdrawal from that unhappy land. Senator Kennedy, The Brookings Institution, and a British government official were amongst numerous of the influential class to propose such action.  You can assume the rationale behind the timing of these requests, is that now that Iraq has displayed a measure of what the White House calls “democracy”, the United States can and should declare, once again, what it claimed to be “mission accomplished” and leave Iraq without loss of face.

Such a proposal might make sense if this thing called democracy was indeed the reason the United States invaded and occupied Iraq. But the fact that Washington officials do not miss an opportunity to make it abundantly clear that they have no intention of leaving in the foreseeable future reveals how unenlightened are these calls for departure; for the reasons why the US is in Iraq have very little to do with democracy. 

It would appear that the election in Iraq has been labeled “successful” in many quarters primarily, because it was held in the first place and there was much less of the usual violence attending it on that day. For the record it should be noted that Iraq held peaceful elections under Saddam Hussein on a number of occasions.  Individuals could run for parliament after being cleared by the Baath party. Presumably, a similar process attended the recent election, with clearance being provided by other sources, including occupation authorities.  Did any candidate try to run on a platform of early withdrawal of all American military forces and the cessation of construction of some dozen permanent American military bases? He likely wouldn't have gotten clearance, but since scarcely any of the voters were privy to the names of the candidates or their platforms anyway the question is academic.

In any event, it's questionable whether the United States cares all that much about who makes up the Iraqi government.  Whoever it is will not have much power to place obstacles in the way of Washington's goals, particularly concerning oil, military bases, the care and feeding of American corporations, and catering to Israel's needs.

Now, American servicemen heading for Iraq are given “talking points” on cards and in slide shows to enable them to better relate to the media and others. Amongst the talking points are: the nonsense as “We are a values-based, people-focused team that strives to uphold the dignity and respect of all.” or “We are not an occupying force.” or “We are moving forward together with the Iraqi government as partners in building a future for the sons and daughters of Iraq.” or “Coalition forces will help our Iraqi partners as they build their new and independent country and take their rightful place in the world community.”

And here is Dick Cheney speaking of Viktor Yushchenko, the so - called elected president of Ukraine calling him good for he's “pro-West”: Cheney says “Free nations stood with him as he made his just demands that the voice of the people be heard.  The free world will stand with him once again as he works to consolidate Ukraine's democratic gains.”

In his January 20 inauguration speech, which lasted 21 minutes, President Bush used the word “liberty” 15 times and the word “freedom” 27 times; that's one or the other word casually dropped exactly once every 30 seconds.  He made not a single mention of Iraq or Afghanistan or any other world issue.  The president's advisers said the speech was “the rhetorical institutionalization of the Bush doctrine and reflected the president's deepest convictions about the purposes behind his foreign policies.” But, they added, “it was carefully written not to tie him to an inflexible or unrealistic application of his goal of ending tyranny.”

Fiddling While Crucial Programs Starve

Monday 30 May 2005

The following article is by Robert Scheer, a Journalist who creates his weekly national and local columns, at The Times, as well as a contributing editor for The Nation magazine.

Notice the price of gasoline lately? Isn't it great that America has secured Iraq's oil? And as Congress signs off on yet another huge supplementary grant to supposedly protect U.S. interests in the Mideast, American President George W. Bush pathetically begs his Saudi friends for a price break. As the fall of Rome showed, imperialism never pays.

With approval of the latest spending bill, American taxpayers will have been forced to cough up more than 300 billion dollars for the war to date — above and beyond the annual 400-billion dollars Pentagon budget — and tens of billions for a failed reconstruction. Even if the United States can lower its troop commitment to 40,000 troops in Iraq by 2010, as some Pentagon strategists optimistically anticipate, the war could still end up costing U.S. taxpayers up to 646 billion dollars by 2015, according to Republican John Spratt of South Carolina, the ranking Democrat on the House Budget Committee. If insurgency, corruption and incompetence continue to plague the U.S. occupation as they have steadily for the last two years, however, the number could surge to a trillion dollars or more.

America needs to put such huge numbers in some perspective. The emergency funding that the Senate passed 99 to 0 gives the military roughly 80 billion dollars and pays for the occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan. That is twice what President Bush insists he needs to cut from the federal support for Medicaid over the next decade.

Already the red state of Missouri is set to end its Medicaid program entirely within the next three years because of a lack of funds. As the Los Angeles Times reported, that will save the state 5 billion dollars, but at the cost of ending healthcare for the more than 1 million Missourians enrolled in the program. That sum is less than half of what Halliburton, Vice President Dick Cheney's old company, alone has been paid for reconstruction efforts in Iraq, without much to show for it in terms of improving the Iraqis' quality of life.

Similarly, with roughly 10% of what is spent in Iraq, America could make up the 27-billion dollars federal funding shortfall in paying for Bush's controversial No Child Left Behind Act, which tells public schools that they will be all but scrapped if they don't improve — yet it doesn't provide the means to do so.

Sadly, these domestic failures provide a far greater long-term threat to the American nation's security than the hyped-up claims surrounding American foreign adventures. Abroad, America must "support its troops" at all costs — even if the cost is their lives — while at home, the U.S. nation's leaders are all about durable love.

Welcome to late-era Rome, where mindless militaristic expansion is considered patriotic and where agitators who recklessly waste taxes and young lives in empire-building are considered brave. Dputy Defence Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, for example, has been rewarded for his ignorance and arrogance with the top job at the World Bank.

It is not too late, however, for American people to wake up and recall that, in the end, once militarism trumped republicanism, the glory that was Rome proved to be a hollow boast.

Green Imperialism: Wolfowitz, Wars and the Wearing Down of Sovereign States

Monday 23 May 2005

The following article is by Abhinav K. Aima, Instructor of Journalism Department of Composition at the University of Minnesota.

The appointment of Neo-Conman Paul Wolfowitz for the presidency of the World Bank has sent a clear signal to the sovereign nations across the world – that is forget charity. Now any poor nation must scream support for the United States for every penny it needs to feed, house and medicate its poor. In the heady days of the rise of Arab nationalism and socialism the world was introduced to the ideas of the Green Book, of Muammar Qazzafi Gaddafi. In his book, Qazzafi warned of the coming of economic imperialism, wherein the very nations that had once ruled the Arabs at the point of swords, would now rule them by owning and dictating their economic lives. After all, what good is political freedom if you have no bread on your plate, no roof over your head, no pills for your ills and no clean water to wash them down with.

Walk down the street to your local homeless shelter and you will get a quick earful on the value of freedom and democracy from your local poor and unfortunate.

While wars are all newsworthy, the greater danger to global stability is the gradual yet massive conquering of the economic rights to life and liberty of the citizens of third world countries. While this campaign was gloriously wrapped in the garb of anti-communism during the years of the post-World War Two, the post-1991 period has increasingly seen the use of economic institutions as a means for the United States to muscle sovereignty away from the third world.

Today, this campaign is wrapped in the garb of post-9/11 attacks righteousness and the virtuous rhetoric of victims empowering themselves to free the world. However, one does not have to dig too deep to understand the inherent contradictions of this Neocon campaign – one that supposedly liberates the citizens from oppressive political regimes only to subject them to oppressive economic regimen. In Iraq, the United States government has passed such sweeping decrees as Order 39, issued by Paul Bremer, which effectively sells off Iraq’s national industries to foreign bidders. And guess who gets to own Iraq? The very corporations who filled the electoral boxes of the Bush administration but who, American citizens were told would not benefit from the Iraqi invasion.

As the principal financial institution for channeling developmental funds, the World Bank can make or break nations. So why has U.S President George Bush appointed the architect of Iraq’s economic enslavement to this global economic giant? Why not nominate Nobel Prize winning global economists, such as Amartya Sen, or exhibit a gesture of goodwill by handing the stewardship of the bank over to un-American Americans? The reason is obvious – the World Bank is an indispensable tool of foreign policy that this administration wants to employ to the fullest extent to break the sovereign will of the third world.

Will Paul Wolfowitz steer the World Bank towards aiding Venezuela? Not so long as Hugo Chavez is in power. In fact, one should expect Wolfowitz to use the World Bank to destabilize all the so – called “rogue states” and reduce them to the chaos of Iraq – the kind of chaos that allows the thieves to steal an entire country while the world is distracted.

At the end of the day such political machinations of economic freedoms will result in a backlash that will be crippling to American political and economic aspirations. When the United States refused to allow loans to subsidize crop substitution plans in Lebanon in 2001, for instance, the farmers went right back to growing narcotic-yielding plants. The financial pressure, exerted to seek a disarming of the Hezbollah, did nothing to dull the radical group’s popularity. It only made the reformers look foolish, while leading to a spike in the export of Lebanese Gold Hashish.

Gautam Buddha once advised his priests that they should first feed the hungry and then lecture them on how to save their souls. This doctrine is based in the inherent human wisdom that the hand that withholds nourishment shall never receive a friendly embrace. Neo-cons might argue that the use of financial institutions is an indispensable instrument of foreign policy.

The Neocolonization of the third world, with the affirmation of Wolfowitz as president of the World Bank, is a blatant effort to chop the third world off at its knees.

Collapse of the American Empire

Monday 9 May 2005

The following article is by Kirkpatrick Sale the Author of famous and bestseller books as ‘Human Scale’, ‘The Conquest of Paradise’, ‘Rebels Against the Future’, and many others.

All empires collapse eventually: Sumeria, Persia, Macedonia, Greece, Rome, Mali, Mongonl, Spanish, Dutch, Ottoman, Austrian, French, British, Soviet, you name them, they all fell, and most within a few hundred years. The reasons are not really complex. An empire is a kind of state system that inevitably makes the same mistakes simply by the nature of its imperial structure and inevitably fails because of its size, complexity, territorial reach, stratification, heterogeneity, domination, hierarchy, and inequalities. There are four reasons that almost always explain empires.

First, environmental degradation. Empires always end by destroying the lands and waters they depend upon for survival, largely because they build and farm and grow without limits, and the U.S is no exception, even if it has yet to experience the worst of its assault on nature. Science is in agreement that all important ecological indicators are in decline and have been for decades: erosion of topsoils and beaches, overfishing, deforestation, freshwater and, pollution of water, soil, air, and food, overpopulation , overconsumption, depletion of oil and minerals, introduction of new diseases and invigoration of old ones, extreme weather, melting icecaps and rising sealevels, species extinctions, and excessive human overuse of the earth's photosynthetic capacity. As the Harvard biologist. Wilson has said, after lengthy examination of human impact on the earth, American "ecological footprint is already too large for the planet to sustain, and it is getting larger."

Second, economic meltdown. Empires always depend on excessive resource exploitation, usually derived from colonies farther and farther away from the center, and eventually fall when the resources are exhausted or become too expensive for all but the elite. This is exactly the path we are on-peak oil extraction, for example, is widely predicted to come in the next year or two-and the U.S economy is built entirely on a fragile system in which the world produces and America, by and large, consume . At the moment America sustain a nearly 630 billion dollars trade deficit with the rest of the world-it has leapt by an incredible 500 billion dollars since 1993, and 180 billion dollars since Bush took office in 2001-and in order to pay for that America has to have an inflow of cash from the rest of the world of about 1 billion dollars every day to pay for it, which was down by half late last year. That kind of excess is simply unsustainable, especially when one thinks that it is the other world empire, China, that is crucial for supporting it, at the tune of some 83 billion dollars on loan to the U.S. treasury.

Third, military overstretch. Empires, because they are by definition colonizers, are always forced to extend their military reach farther and farther, and enlarge it against unwilling colonies more and more, until coffers are exhausted, communication lines are overextended, troops are unreliable, and the periphery resists and ultimately revolts. The American empire, which began its worldwide reach well before Bush II, now has almost 500,000 active troops at more than 700 acknowledged (and any number secret) bases in at least 38 countries around the world, plus a formal "military presence" in no less than 150 countries, on every continent but Antarctica-and nearly a dozen fully armed courier fleets on all the oceans. Talk about overstretch: the U.S. is less than 5 percent of the world's population. And now that Bush has declared a so-called "war on terror," instead of the more doable war on al-Qaeda the U.S should have waged, its armies and agents will be on a universal and permanent battlefield that cannot possibly be controlled or contained.

Finally, domestic dissent and upheaval. Traditional empires end up collapsing from within as well as often being attacked from without, and so far the level of dissent within the U.S. has not reached the point of rebellion or secession-thanks both to the increasing repression of dissent and escalation of fear in the name of "homeland security" and to the success of its modern version of bread and circuses, a unique combination of entertainment, sports, television, internet games, consumption, drugs, liquor, and religion that effectively deadens the general public into stupor.

Imperial Perspectives

Monday 2 May 2005

The great modern empires have never been held together only by military power but by what activates that power, puts it to use and then reinforces it with daily practices of domination, conviction, and authority. Britain ruled the vast territories of India with only a few thousand colonial officers and a few more thousand troops, many of them Indian. France did the same in North Africa and Indochina, the Dutch in Indonesia, the Portuguese and Belgians in Africa. The key element is imperial perspective, the way of looking at a distant foreign nation by subordinating it to one's view, constructing its history from one's own point of view, seeing its people as subjects whose fate is to be decided not by them but by what distant administrators think is best for them. From such willful perspectives actual ideas develop, including the theory that imperialism is a benign and necessary thing.

For a while this worked, as many colonial leaders thought mistakenly that cooperating with the imperial authority was the only way. But since the dialectic between the imperial perspective and the local one is inevitably adversarial and impermanent, at some later point the conflict between ruler and ruled becomes uncontainable and breaks out into all-out colonial war, as happened in Algeria and India.

The U.S. is quite a long way from that moment to rule over the Arab and Muslim world. At least since World War II American strategic interest there has been to secure and to ever more closely control readily accessible supplies of plentiful oil and, second, to guarantee at enormous cost the strength and regional domination of Israel over any and all of its neighbors.

Every empire, including America, regularly tells itself and the world that it is unlike all other empires, and that it has a mission certainly not to plunder and control but to educate and liberate the peoples and places it rules directly or indirectly. Yet these ideas are not shared by the people who live there, whose views are in many cases directly opposite. Nevertheless, this hasn't prevented the whole apparatus of American information, policy, and decision-making about the Arab/Islamic world from imposing its perspectives not just on Arabs and Muslims but on Americans, whose sources of information about the Arabs and Islam are miserably, indeed tragically, inadequate.

American diplomacy has been permanently impaired by a systematic attack conducted by the Israeli lobby on what are called Arabists. Of the 150,000 American troops in Iraq today, scarcely more than a handful know Arabic. In the U.S. knowledge of Arabic and Islam, and some sympathetic acquaintance with the vast Arab cultural tradition, have been made to seem a threat to Israel. The U.S. media runs the vilest racist stereotypes about Arabs and Muslims. Several generations of Americans have come to see the Arab and Muslim world mainly as a dangerous place, where the so – called terrorism is spawned.

Much the same pattern is repeated in the American view of Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Egypt and all the others. The trouble with these views are that they are so incompetent and ideological; they provide Americans not with ideas about Arabs and Muslims, but rather with the way they would like Arabs and Muslims to be. For a great and enormously wealthy country to be producing the kind of mismanaged, poorly prepared and incredibly incompetent occupation of Iraq that is taking place today is a travesty, on intellectual grounds, and how a neocon intelligent like Paul Wolfowitz could be running policies of such insufficiency and, at the same time, convincing American people that he knows what he is doing.

Underlying this particular imperial perspective is a long-standing Orientalist view that will not permit the Arabs and Muslims as a people to exercise their right to national self-determination. They are thought of as different, incapable of logic, unable to tell the truth, fundamentally disruptive and murderous. Since Napoleon's invasion of Egypt in 1798, there has been an uninterrupted imperial presence based on these premises throughout the Arab and Muslim world, producing untold misery. The Neo-Cons who are at the heart of the Bush administration simply add fuel to the fire. And so America is  for many more years of confusion and misery in an area of the world where the main problem is, to put it as plainly as possible, US power. But at what cost, and to what end?

The Third Stage of American Empire (2)

Monday 25 April 2005

The following article is by William Rivers Pitt a Columnist of  New York Times and the Author of bestselling books 'War on Iraq and 'The Greatest Sedition Is Silence.'

The transition from the second stage to the third stage of American empire came slowly. Millions of Americans took to the streets to protest the large-scale death the empire required. The Vietnam War ended with images of Americans fleeing from rooftops in helicopters. A US president was required to resign his office or face removal and imprisonment.

The Soviet empire had invaded Afghanistan. The CIA, long the sharp saber of American foreign policy, was broken by the Church Committee. Gasoline became brutally expensive and the American economy struck yet another reef. The American populace, by and large, fell into what could be called a mass depression, described by the last president of the second stage as 'malaise.'

It is difficult to pinpoint exactly when the third stage of the American empire came into being, but a hockey game will suffice as a marker. On February 2, 1980, the American Olympic hockey team came from nowhere to defeat the unbeatable Soviet squad in Lake Placid. The subsequent eruption of nationalistic fervor, augmented by the American squad's victory over Finland in the final round to capture the gold medal, led to an outpouring of public emotion that no sporting event had ever created.

The American people were mesmerized by the vision of their flag rising next to but just a little higher than the red Soviet banner. It was their first taste of what would become a long and uninterrupted stretch of total global dominance.

The central aspect of this third stage has been the rise of the 'movement conservative.' Not to be confused with the breed of conservative that included Nixon and Rockefeller, the movement conservatives held American nationalism and evangelical Christianity as a dual-headed state religion. They spurned concepts of détente and international cooperation. They were and remain radicals in every sense of the word, seeking to deconstruct the American social state that had been in place since the days of Franklin Roosvelt .

Ronald Reagan, the first president of this third stage of American empire, was the descent of these movement conservatives, who first began to become an organized entity in American politics during the campaign of Barry Goldwater. Reagan was their perfect man: Confident to a fault, dedicated to the enrichment of the wealthy corporate class while deconstructing Roosevelt's social safety net by any means necessary.

Reagan established the forked-tongue policy talk adopted by the present administration: Speak about the end of large government, gut entitlement programs wherever they can be found, while simultaneously cutting against the grain of the 'small government' ideal by vastly increasing the military and intelligence apparatus of government with trillions of dollars of Americans taxpayer monies.

This cash, as it did during the rise of the first and second stages, vastly increased the power and reach of the military/industrial/petroleum combine. The movement conservatives, funded by this combine, pushed for the deregulation by government of business in every aspect of commerce, none more pointedly than within the media. Over the course of this third stage, that combine purchased 99% of the news media, ensuring that an uninterrupted commercial advocating for empire would be broadcast 24 hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year. Competing messages were all but shut out.

When the Berlin Wall finally fell, when the Soviet empire finally imploded, the banner for this third stage of American empire was unfurled for all to see. For the first time in history since the apex of Roman rule, one nation and one government and one military ruled supreme over the known world. The movement conservatives, having lost communism as the main target for their energies, turned inward and laid siege to their fellow citizens. The ultimate goal of this was to purge from debate and consideration anyone who did not approve of empire, and anyone who did not fit the Christian Reconstructionist mold they wished to build American society around.

The rise of George W. Bush, leader of the evangelical/political wing of American Christianity since 1996, to the office of the president has been the fulfillment of the dreams of movement conservatives. September 11 cemented their ascendancy. Now, permanent war and rule by fear are accepted without question. Now, the news media owned by the combine opens the public dialogue to these radicals while painting them as moderate, rational Americans. Now, the dominance of the military/industrial/petroleum combine is unquestioned. Now, the idea that America is engaged in a holy war has been widely disseminated.

There are several cracks in the veneer, however, many of which began during the second stage of the American empire. The conventional weapons disbursed across the planet during the Cold War are now being pointed at the U.S. Many of the U.S. former client states such as Iraq and Saudi Arabia, which served America so well during the Cold War, have now become profoundly debilitating problems that have exposed America national security system and military forces as less than adequate to the tasks of empire. The dollar is failing slowly but surely, and new power combines between nations like China, Russia and Iran threaten to destabilize American dominance. Oil, the true coin of this realm, is also becoming scarce. The extremism that always comes when one overwhelming force spreads its wings has passed the point of management, and has itself become both organized and well-funded.

It seems all too clear that this third American empire is threatening to collapse under its own ponderous weight. The movement conservatives cannot contain the forces that have been unleashed against them. The American military is proving itself to be incapable of sustaining the unreasonable demands being placed upon it. The ghosts from the second empire loom large, in Europe and Africa and the Middle East and Central Asia. The American economy, sustained for sixty years by petroleum and war, stands at grave risk of being subsumed by both.

Perhaps, someday, a powerful society will rise that understands the lessons of history. Empires fall, always. They consume themselves, slowly at first, but then with ever-increasing speed as military solutions fail to resolve threats and drain the resources of the core. Perhaps, someday.

The Third Stage of American Empire (1)

Monday 18 April 2005

The following article is by William Rivers Pitt a Columnist of  New York Times and the Author of bestselling books 'War on Iraq and 'The Greatest Sedition Is Silence.'

There have been three stages of the American empire since the creation of the U.S. Each has fed the other, and each has been established and strengthened fortified by war. More importantly, each has been strengthened by the vast profits derived by the few in the making of war. The first two stages did not exhaust, so much as they were absorbed by the next iteration, carrying over all circumstances and attendant difficulties. Today America exist within the third stage of empire, one that is sick at the core.  The first stage of this American empire began with the Mexican-American war, but began to flourish at the conclusion of the Civil War. All the states east of the Mississippi River had been brought by force back under the rule of the federal government, a national taxation system had been established to provide revenues to that government, and the immature outlines of what Eisenhower described as 'the military/industrial complex' had been built by the lucrative contracts handed out to arm, clothe and feed the military.          

For many years prior, Americans had been pushing into the western lands occupied by native peoples. Under the banner of Manifest Destiny, the military/economic machine created to fight the Confederacy pushed its way to the Pacific Ocean. In the process, the vast majority of Native Americans were erased from the book of history, a book that is always written by the victors. The boundaries of this first stage were limited to the 48 continental states, but did not long remain this way. By the time Woodrow Wilson assumed the presidency, the first stage had expanded to include Cuba, Guam, Puerto Rico and the Philippines. Imperial footholds had been established in South America and East Asia. While other global empires were on the wane – the Spanish empire was essentially dissolved with the signing of the Treaty of Paris in 1898, while the French and British empires were being attacked and slowly rolled back – this American empire became more muscular with each passing day.

The transition between the first and second stages of American empire began on April 2nd, 1917, when newly re-elected President Wilson reversed his campaign theme of staying out of the European conflict and asked congress for a declaration of war against Germany. Previously, Americans had defined themselves in no small part by being separated from the troubles of the 'Old World.' When the doughboys shipped out, however, that line of demarcation was crossed.

Despite the eventual victory in Europe, the second stage of American empire took many more years to flower and flourish. American armies and navies were essentially dismantled in the aftermath of the 'War to End All Wars,' and the 1930s saw the near-collapse of the American economic system. The advent of and eventual victory in World War II not only cemented the second stage, but resurrected and forever changed the fundamental supports of the American economy. From that victory to now, the American economy has been based centrally on preparation for and fighting of wars.

By the end of World War II, the influence of the American empire stretched throughout Europe to the borders of the new foe, the Soviet empire. Strongholds of the second stage could be likewise found in Africa, the Japanese mainland and many Pacific islands and, with the creation of the state of Israel by Zionists, the strategically-vital Middle East. American corporations that had built the victorious war machine swam in an ocean of profits. The 'military/industrial complex' was about to become the dominant force in domestic and global commerce, conflict and social structure. The central reality of the second stage was the Cold War, a death struggle between two competing empires waged across the width and breadth of the planet. The icy staring contest at Checkpoint Charlie in Berlin stood a grim counterpoint to the hot blood spilled in proxy wars fought in Korea, Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Angola, the Sinai Peninsula and elsewhere. American and Soviet arms dealers salted the world with millions of conventional weapons to aid these proxy fights.

All the while, larger and more powerful nuclear weaponry was developed by both sides, deployed across the globe, and aimed with deadly intent. On several occasions, most prominently during the Cuban Missile Crisis, these dragons came within inches of slipping the leash. The production of these weapons left uncounted tons of waste behind.

The roots of the third stage were planted deep in this time. In the U.S. the populace became accustomed to existing in a perpetual state of war. The establishment of the Truman Doctrine by men like Paul Nitze created the foundations for an enduring reality: Americans are most easily governed when they are made to fear the strangers 'over there' across the horizon.

 Three Strikes for Empire

Monday 11 April 2005

The following article is by Ivan Eland, Senior Fellow and Director of the Center on Peace & Liberty at The Independent Institute in Oakland, California.

Three seemingly unrelated recent events highlight the imperial nature of the Bush administration's foreign policy: U.S. F-16 sales to Pakistan, the creation of an office in the State Department to plan for future U.S military interventions in developing nations and the indefinite detention in Guantanamo prison of a German man held on the basis of secret evidence that even U.S. intelligence challenges.

Ever since his second inaugural address, US President, George Bush and his representatives have launched an ambitious campaign that claims to “democratize” the world.

During a period of increased post-9/11 U.S. support, General Pervez Musharraf has actually made Pakistan less democratic. When Musharraf assumed the civilian presidency, he promised to abandon the post of chief of the Pakistani armed forces, but has failed to step down. Instead, he has tightened his grip on power in Pakistan, winked at and protected the world's worst nuclear smuggling ring emanating from his country, and conducted a half-hearted effort to round up Osama bin Laden and other top al-Qaeda suspects, who are likely on Pakistani soil. The United States has decided to reward such unacceptable behavior with the sale of F-16 fighter jets.

Unfortunately, the end result in Pakistan could resemble that of the Shah's Iran in the late 1970s. Excessive weapons purchases from the United States, supporting repressive policies by the Shah of Iran, caused inactive economic growth and widespread anti-U.S. sentiment, leading to the overthrow of the Shah by the Iran Islamic revolution. 

Yet the Bush administration intends to sell aircraft that could improve Pakistan's ability to deliver its nuclear weapons. To soothe India's fears, the Bush administration has also pledged to sell aircraft and other military improvements to that nation. Selling arms to both sides is not only bad policy but a throwback to the empires of old, which played off regional rivals against each other.

To facilitate this imperial interest and smooth the rough edges of the U.S. imperial sword—discovered during the “recent unpleasantness” in Iraq—the Bush administration is setting up a new office in the State Department to manage future occupations of sovereign nations in the wake of U.S. military interventions. The creation of the office assumes the United States should invade and remake foreign societies in the U.S. image. How far the American Statesmen have come from the U.S. founders' policy of staying out of other countries' business!

Also taken for granted is that the debacle in Iraq was merely caused by poor planning, which can be corrected by adding a new bureaucracy. Although planning was poor, the main reason for the mess in Iraq is imperial pride. Popping the top off and then occupying a fractious developing society with no experience in individual liberty and attempting to convert it into a U.S.-style federation is an Imperialistic style, one that was unlikely to succeed from the beginning.

Finally, a seemingly unrelated development to the Bush administration's brand of modern day imperialism may have the most consequence: the indefinite detention of a German man, by the U.S. military on the basis of flimsy secret evidence that he is a member of al-Qaeda.

Yet that evidence shows that U.S. intelligence and German law enforcement agencies had concluded that this man had no connections to al-Qaeda or any other terrorist organization. So the U.S. government has known for two years that it was incarcerating an innocent man. The German man case reinforces a U.S. district judge's opinion that the military tribunals are illegal, unconstitutional, and unfairly prejudicial against those being held in prison.

Detaining people indefinitely without a jury trial, and instead using a military tribunal that allows secret evidence and no legal representation for the defendant, may be normal practice in authoritarian regimes but should not be used in the “home of the free and the brave.”

Empires throughout history have experienced “blowback,” and retaliatory terrorism is the unfortunate price the U.S. Empire will continue to pay for its unnecessary meddling in the affairs of other nations and peoples. When that terrorism comes back to bite the United States, the hysteria generated allows the U.S. government to institute Orwellian practices that are clearly unconstitutional. In the end, as in ancient Rome, the destruction of the republic in the course of maintaining the overseas realm is the most dire consequence of empire.

The Anti-Imperialist George Washington (2)

Monday 28 March 2005

The following article is by John Nichols's a Journalist and the Writer of ‘A Documentary History of American Opposition to Empire.’

The commander of America's revolutionary armies did not want the U.S. to follow the European course of collecting colonies and establishing spheres of influence that would need, ever, to be defended. He warned that the new United States might "pay with a portion of its independence" for involving itself in "projects of hostility instigated by pride, ambition, and other sinister and pernicious motives." And he asked a question that would echo across the ages as his presidential successors moved the country further and further from its founding principles: "Why should Americans stand upon foreign ground?"

An American political leader who uttered those words today would be set upon by the self-appointed guardians of false patriotism - Bill O'Reilly, Sean Hannity, Ann Coulter and a thousand imitators -- and accused of undermining the so-called "war on terrorism" that has become such a convenient excuse for occupation Iraq and the development of imperialist instincts that owe more to King George than to George Washington.

But there is nothing American about a career of empire.

In fact, the American impulse is the one that Washington expressed two centuries ago.

The principles that Washington discussed in his Farewell Address were not new concepts. They were, in fact, mainstream opinions shared by many, though surely not all, of his countrymen. A measure of pragmatism underpinned their broad acceptance. America was a new nation, rich in resources but sparsely populated and militarily weak. A career of empire seemed not just hypocritical for the former colony, but impractical. And America was divided, not just over questions of foreign allegiance and entanglement but with regards to her domestic course.

New Englanders were already objecting to the practice of human bondage in the southern states and Jefferson, himself a slaveholder, acknowledged that he trembled at the thought of the rough justice that awaited a nation that countenanced the sin of slavery. While the Pennsylvania Quakers imagined cooperation and comity with the indigenous owners of the ground on which Europeans stood as newcomers, governors from Massachusetts in the north to Georgia in the south plotted violent removals of American Indians from their native lands. Washington well recognized that the United States lacked the strength and unity to survive internal struggles over alignment with particular colonial powers, let alone the conflicts and costs associated with colonialisms of its own. But there was more than enlightened self-interest in play when George Washington suggested that, "Our detached and distant situation invites and enables Americans to pursue a different course."

From the beginnings of what would come to be referred to as "the American experiment," there was a sense that this endeavor ought to be about something nobler than the mere recreation of European excesses on the new ground of the western Hemisphere. John Winthrop's notion that an American settler might see his or her community "as a city on a hill," a model unto the world for the moral ordering of affairs, echoed across religious, ethnic and regional lines. Among a certain rebellious element, it came to be accepted that Europe's potentates, with their subjects and colonies, represented a corrupt old order that would be replaced only by a shot heard round the world.

The American revolutionaries promised that their challenge to the British king and crown would in the words of their tribune, Tom Paine, "begin the world again." The revolution, which the Continental Congress pledged to fight neither, ‘for glory or for conquest’ did, in fact, inspire more revolts against colonial authorities. America's progression toward democracy -- slowed, as it was, by the hypocrisy and intolerance of the founders -- would, as well, provide a model for the systems that replaced the divine right of kings with the consent of the governed. That requirement of consent should, by its very nature, have rendered illegitimate any colonial or imperialist impulse. And, it seemed, many of the founders read it that way. Fifty years after independence was declared, it's Author, Jefferson, would renew the city-on-a-hill promise with a call to globalize the democratic revolution: "George Bush has stifled America's promise by mirroring the worst excesses of King George the third of Britain. He has cast his lot with the colonialists who believe in the spread of enlightenment at gunpoint. American patriots need to mirror the best instincts of another George Washington and pursue that "different course" that the first president said was essential to the maintenance of the U.S. independence and its ability to inspire by fear rather than force.

The Anti-Imperialist George Washington (1)

Monday 21 March 2005

The following article is by John Nichols's a Journalist and the Writer of ‘A Documentary History of American Opposition to Empire.’

America has become a profoundly and tragically historic country. As such, the 273rd anniversary of the birth of George Washington passed with little note. Washington's legacy has been so disregarded by its heirs that his birthday has been stirred into the generic swill of "President's Day," an empty gesture that weakens the memories of both the first chief executive and the sixteenth, Abraham Lincoln. 

The memory of George Washington has become an inconvenience for men who occupy the high stations and his fellow founders occupied. George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, John Negroponte and their ilk certainly do not want the work of remaking America in their own image as a greedy, self-absorbed and frequently brutal empire interrupted by reflections upon the nobler nation that Washington and his countrymen imagined.

Indeed, patriots need to call General Washington back into the service of his country -- not merely as a clarification of national memory but as a blunt challenge to the who have usurped America's promise with their illegal invasions and multinational misadventures.

It will not be the first time that the shock of Washington's memory has been tossed into the machinery of the American empire.

When dissenters from the impulse toward American empire held their annual gatherings in cities and towns across the United States in the early years of the twentieth century, they would meet on the anniversary of George Washington's birth. It was the accepted wisdom of the day that, in addition to having been "the father of the U.S. " Washington was, as well, the father of the anti-imperialist movement. The first president had given his ideological descendants ample evidence on which to base their claim. His 1793 proclamation of American neutrality in regards to European political and military conflicts explicitly rejected international entanglements, with Washington later explaining that, "The duty of holding a neutral conduct may be inferred, without anything more, from the obligation which justice and humanity impose on every nation, in cases in which it is free to act, to maintain inviolate the relations of peace and amity towards other nations."

But it was Washington's Farewell Address, delivered in 1796 toward the end of his second presidential term, that became a touchstone for ensuing generations of anti-imperialists. Washington used his last great statement to the nation he had shepherded through the struggle to loose the grip of British colonial rule, "to warn against the mischiefs of foreign intrigue, to guard against the impostures of pretended patriotism." Washington saw great danger in any step that would "entangle American peace and prosperity in the toils of European ambition, rivalship, interest, humor or caprice" but it was not just alliances with European states that worried him. The first president counseled that it should be "American true policy to steer clear of permanent alliances with any portion of the foreign world."

American Imperialism and the Politics of Fear Before Iraq

Monday 14 March 2005

The following article is by William Schroder a Columnist and the Author of the historical novel ‘Cousins of Color’ who lives on the Olympic Peninsula in Washington State.

Are you someone who thinks the war in Iraq was waged to destroy Saddam’s Weapons of Mass Destructions?

Do you believe it America’s moral duty to free the peoples of the world from tyranny?

Do you subscribe to the notion that Iraq was an “imminent threat” to “American way of life?”

If you embrace any of these common ideologies, you are not to be blamed, faulted or criticized.

Deep inside, you’re scared, and you believe the U.S. government’s clarion call to arms was necessary to keep American citizens safe.

Hang on, there’s a cure for that churning in the pit in Americans stomach. It is almost certainly psychosomatic. Americans need to consider the possibility that maybe - just maybe - the Iraqi threat to America was exaggerated. While to them it seems real, perhaps their discomfort stems from an intense, government-sponsored propaganda scare campaign filled with half-truths, misdirection and deceit. After all, the U.S. government has done this before. Relax, and  breathe deeply and concentrate while this  programme takes you on a brief, illusion-free exploration of American imperialism.

Like the great imperialists of bygone days, America’s rulers share a long history of creating fear- one “evildoer” or another always threatens the destruction of “the American way of life.” Then, while the frightened population huddles gratefully under the umbrella of power, the government pursues an agenda calculated to transfer vast sums of public wealth into the hands of the corporate and political elite.

One hundred years ago, industrial America was awash in textiles, steel and manufactured goods and needed to expand its markets across the Pacific to Asia. Spain, by then a corrupt, weakened empire, possessed colonies America coveted - Cuba, Guam, Puerto Rico and the Philippines.

To get those assets, President William McKinley began a campaign of propaganda centered on America’s need to “free the Cuban people from Spanish tyranny.” With the assistance of the U.S. mass media of the day, persons such as William Randolph Hurst and Joseph Pulitzer McKinley convinced Americans that Spain was an imminent threat just ninety miles from the U.S. shores it, possessed weapons of mass destruction, and it was America’s duty to spread freedom and democracy throughout the world.

To strengthen his argument, McKinley announced to Congress that he “got to his knees” in the White House and received God’s assurance that American expansionism was heaven sent.

The 1898 Spanish/American War and ensuing Philippine Campaign bolstered American business, secured American colonies in the Caribbean and Pacific and cost the lives of six-hundred thousand innocent Filipinos who happened to be in the path of the “bandwagon of Anglo-Saxon progress and decency.”

The Spanish/American War was just America’s first overseas war of conquest and occupation. There have been others - each one preceded by a vast government/media fear-based propaganda campaign. During the fifties and sixties, the bogeyman was the  the so- called Communist expansion, and defense industry corporate giants prospered. Today, the 1960’s American mandate of freeing the South Vietnamese people through occupation and mass murder doesn’t even rise to the level of laughable.

In the eighties, President Ronald Reagan warned the American people that Daniel Ortega’s Nicaraguan army was only “eight hours by truck from Harlingen, Texas.” Later, in a speech before Congress, he announced that America was once again “standing tall” after seven thousand Marines battled thirty Cuban construction workers for possession of Grenada, the nutmeg capital of the world. Space limitations prohibit from reminding big lie of the imminent threats to U.S. sovereignty from Libya’s Moammar Gadhafi and Panama’s Manuel Noriega.

 Government use of fear on a population to manufacture consent for bad policy is not new and only succeeds because American people allow it. Noam Chomsky was correct when he stated, “units of power – corporate, political and military – will only act in their best interests. For them to do otherwise would be illogical.” As citizens, Americans must act in their best interests. They owe it to themselves and their society to be skeptical of their liar leaders, question authority, demand the truth and hold them accountable.