Imperial Musings in Washington

[QuietStorm]

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On a sweltering Washington sidewalk on July 17, a handful of protesters berated the stream of bespectacled wonks entering the "stink tank" known as the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) -- famous worldwide as the home of former Pentagon official Richard Perle and former House Speaker Newt Gingrich. In the air-conditioned comfort inside, the lusty strains of "Rule Britannia" welcomed a capacity crowd to AEI's version of a summertime idyll. We were assembled to hear two vaunted thinkers of the new, new world order debate the proposition that America is, and should be, an empire.

As recently as two years ago, describing the United States as an empire defined one as a Marxist. No longer. British imperial historian Niall Ferguson and neo-conservative guru Robert Kagan did not debate the proposition so much as quibble over the meaning of words. Both promoted an image of the US as a benevolent superpower with one discernible interest ­- to render the world safe for democracy and free enterprise. This interest, the debaters agreed, was noble, even altruistic.

But despite its virtue, posited Ferguson, the United States was an "empire in denial." Because Americans stubbornly refused to acknowledge their global dominion, the US did not act as an imperium should. It dispatched Marines to troubled tropical climes on the false premise that, once they disciplined the unruly natives, they would be home in time to carve the Thanksgiving turkey. The US practiced "Wal-Mart" expansionism, consistently spending a fraction of what was required to pacify conquered countries. Finally, it relied too heavily on military coercion, failing to secure the collaboration of vassal states that made empires last. In the era of suitcase-sized nukes and Osama bin Laden, such a "colossus with attention-deficit disorder" was a danger to itself and others. The US should come to terms with its supremacy, and rule the world more responsibly.

Not exactly, Kagan rejoined. The US was not a fumbling empire in denial, in fact not an empire at all, but merely the most successful "global hegemon" in history. After Ferguson's Oxonian verbal rigor, Kagan's reasoning seemed flaccid. The US, he asserted, could not be an empire because it had no stated imperial design. (Didn't Britain also acquire its domain "in a fit of absentmindedness?") Americans had neither an imperial hymn like "Rule Britannia" nor an imperial poet like Rudyard Kipling. Contrary to popular belief, the US became less imperialistic in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries -­ an implicit admission that manifest destiny was a doctrine of empire building. The ideology of American dominion subsided as American power grew. That, Kagan insisted, was the source of everyone's confusion.

read more...
http://www.merip.org/newspaper_opeds/oped_DS072603.html

[pfitz59]

1. Cesspools of mendacity!

AEI, Heritage Foundation, et al! Propaganda mills trotting out the latest fascist dogma. Goebbels would have been proud.

[QuietStorm]

4. We've Been Neo-Conned By Ron Paul US HR July 10, 2003

The modern-day, limited-government movement has been co-opted. The conservatives have failed in their effort to shrink the size of government. There has not been, nor will there soon be, a conservative revolution in Washington. Political party control of the federal government has changed, but the inexorable growth in the size and scope of government has continued unabated. The liberal arguments for limited government in personal affairs and foreign military adventurism were never seriously considered as part of this revolution.

Since the change of the political party in charge has not made a difference, who’s really in charge? If the particular party in power makes little difference, whose policy is it that permits expanded government programs, increased spending, huge deficits, nation building and the pervasive invasion of our privacy, with fewer Fourth Amendment protections than ever before?

Someone is responsible, and it’s important that those of us who love liberty, and resent big-brother government, identify the philosophic supporters who have the most to say about the direction our country is going. If they’re wrong – and I believe they are – we need to show it, alert the American people, and offer a more positive approach to government. However, this depends on whether the American people desire to live in a free society and reject the dangerous notion that we need a strong central government to take care of us from the cradle to the grave. Do the American people really believe it’s the government’s responsibility to make us morally better and economically equal? Do we have a responsibility to police the world, while imposing our vision of good government on everyone else in the world with some form of utopian nation building? If not, and the enemies of liberty are exposed and rejected, then it behooves us to present an alternative philosophy that is morally superior and economically sound and provides a guide to world affairs to enhance peace and commerce.

One thing is certain: conservatives who worked and voted for less government in the Reagan years and welcomed the takeover of the U.S. Congress and the presidency in the 1990s and early 2000s were deceived. Soon they will realize that the goal of limited government has been dashed and that their views no longer matter.

http://www.lewrockwell.com/paul/paul110.html

[bodhisattava]

2. Ow many more innocent people have to die before these imperialist assholes

are sent packing?Their academic exercises with PNAC have already caused thousands to die while these chickenhawks contemplate in the comfort of their airconditioned offices what comes next for the
"benevolent hegemon".

In a more fairly ordered universe, their so called mental gymnastics would be described by the correct terminology: lunacy.

[QuietStorm]

3. Retrospective: The "Neocons": From the Cold War to the "Global Intifada"

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April 1991, Page 27

As the first scenes from the Gulf war were broadcast on American television, more than a few victory signs were probably raised in the editorial offices of magazines like Commentary or the New Republic and in the study rooms of think tanks like the American Enterprise Institute or the Hudson Institute.

Indeed, as in the headquarters of the Likud party in Tel Aviv, there was a sense of triumph and celebration at these centers of the neoconservative movement on the East Coast. For the members of this intellectual group, who during the Reagan era produced and implemented the militant pro-Israel and anti-Soviet agenda of the administration, the Persian Gulf war signaled the success of the coordinated effort they launched at the end of the Cold War. Its goal was to replace the decaying Soviet threat with a new enemy, the Arab world, and to set in motion a collision course between the West and Islam, whose only beneficiary would be the uncompromising and annexationist Israeli government.

It was not difficult to trace in the first days of the war the sense of satisfaction reflected in the columns of such neo-conservative writers as William Safire, "Abe" Rosenthal, Charles Krauthammer or Daniel Pipes. All welcomed the possibility of an American-Arab war which would turn the Palestinian intifada into a sideshow.

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Among the major figures in the movement were former Trotskyites who studied in the '30s and '40s at the then "poor man's Harvard," the City College of New York, a center for socialist activism. They included Irving Kristol, who in the 1950s launched an anti-Soviet CIA front, the International Congress for Cultural Freedom; Norman Podhoretz, the editor of the American Jewish Committee's monthly magazine Commentary, which he turned into a major neoconservative outlet; Podhoretz's wife, Midge Decter, the chairperson of the now-defunct Committee on the Free World; sociologists Nathan Glazer and Daniel Bell; and Democratic Party pamphleteer Ben Wattenberg.

That neoconservative "nuclear family" was later joined by Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Jeane Kirkpatrick, Walt and Eugene Rostow, Richard Perle, Elliott Abrams (Podhoretz' son-in-law), Kenneth Adelman, and other Cold Warriors and advocates of hawkish Israeli policies. Individually and, later, as a group, they have had a major impact on the foreign policy of several administrations, beginning with that of Lyndon B. Johnson.

http://www.washington-report.org/backissues/0491/9104027.htm