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The Impossibility of American Empire
By William Pfaff
11/07/07 "ICH" -- -- Paris, October 30, 2007 – Since the return
of democracy in Spain, Spain’s political leaders and political
society have demonstrated an extraordinary determination to
start anew, after the crisis-afflicted 75 years that began with
what the Spaniards have called “the catastrophe” – the collapse
of the Spanish empire under blows from an exuberant and
adolescent United States that believed it was coming of age as a
world power. It’s evidence that empires end, but nations don’t,
and resurrection is possible.
America’s transcontinental expansion following the Civil War and
the garish joys of the Gilded Age gave Americans a taste for
foreign adventure, whetted by the proximity and vulnerability of
Cuba. And if Cuba, why not Puerto Rico, and the Philippines?
Admiral Alfred Mahan, America’s prophet of naval power and of
the economic necessity of colonialism, offered convincing
economic reasons for American colonial expansion, and the
failing Spanish empire was at hand.
A blow to it in the Caribbean, and another in Manila Bay, was
enough for it to splinter and collapse. The Spanish Caribbean
and the Philippines were ours.
Every empire has its day, and Spain’s phenomenal empire had its
during the four centuries that followed the expeditions of
Columbus, sailing westward. 1492, and the riches of South
American gold, led eventually, and one can say inexorably, to
failure in 1898. All things come to an end. You live to die, a
principle unpopular among Americans.
The Empire of the United States was launched in 1898, and has
since traversed a mere century, experiencing increasing
ambition, and suffering increasing difficulties. Could it too
last 406 years? The current evidence is not reassuring.
Take the capacity to rule. Take the current Republican party
candidates for their party’s presidential nomination. The level
of intelligence, emotional and intellectual maturity, and simple
information about the subjects on which they discourse, would
disqualify them from mainstream political rank in any other
major democracy.
This is seriously distressing – although in principle a soluble
problem, since there are plenty of intelligent people in the
United States, as well as great universities and a rich culture.
But elected U.S. government has been so debased by the national
willingness to submit elections to the values and habits of a
medium of entertainment, television, and to the corruptions of
money, that it is hard to see that such a nation can
indefinitely maintain representative government.
The Bush administration has demonstrated that major groups and
forces in American society indeed do not wish that form of
government to survive, and are deliberately engaged in
destroying the constitutional order, undermining the powers of
Congress and of the courts, so as to install unchecked executive
power, rationalized by a novel and authoritarian legal ideology,
and sustained by national security demagogy.
I have not spoken of the Democratic candidates for president in
the same way because the party’s candidates and debate have not
descended to quite the abysmal levels of the Republican
pre-primary campaign. But the Democratic party is equally
complicit in degrading and subverting the electoral debate and
practice of the country, since its candidates are unwilling or
unable to challenge the American imperial ideology that drives
the country’s foreign policy, an ideology of permanent,
unchallengeable global military supremacy.
This ideology is plainly written out in the American Defense
Department’s periodical statements of U.S. National Security
Strategy, in the latest of which the previously stated goal of
“security” in space has now become “supremacy” in space (as
everywhere else).
The most influential ground force doctrine foresees decades of
American asymmetrical war against urban insurgents springing up
in radicalized or “failed” states around the world (including
Europe, which the authors of this ideology of an unending World
War IV predict will soon be reduced to helotry in service to an
“Islamofascist” Caliphate). This hysterical American dystopia
feeds fantasies of conquest to its Islamic enemies that the
enemies themselves could not imagine. Paranoia reigns in some
American circles, close to leading Republican candidates.
All this might be taken as reason for American fear of what is
to come. But the dystopic future thus described is impossible.
What can come is a United States that burns itself out in the
attempt to deal with its paranoid fantasies.
The United States already wages two wasting wars that make no
sense. It will never, itself, dominate the disintegrative forces
in Iraq today. In Afghanistan it will never succeed in defeating
a Taliban radicalism that represents a real if obscurantist
national affirmation by a 40-million strong Pathan ethnic
community that has always been the dominant force in its
historical homeland.
It is not a question of whether these American objectives should
be done. That is irrelevant, since they can’t be done. They are
impossibilities.
The United States government, in its effort to execute its
national security strategy of dominating and defeating global
radicalism and extremism, is currently directly attempting to
manipulate and control the internal political processes of Iraq,
Afghanistan, Pakistan, Lebanon, the Palestinian Authority, Hamas
and Hezbollah, Somalia, Ethiopia, Sudan, Kenya; and indirectly
it attempts to exercise decisive influence on the affairs of
Iran, Syria, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Egypt, Turkey, Yemen, Libya,
the Gulf Emirates, and a non-existent Kurdistan – and this is to
take only a single zone of the world.
This is what the War on Terror has come to mean. It is an
attempt to create a universal empire that exists only in the
American imagination, by an effort that, because its aim is
impossible to achieve, is unlimited in the damage it could do to
Americans and others.
© Copyright 2007 by Tribune Media Services International. All
Rights Reserved.
This article comes from William PFAFF
http://www.williampfaff.com
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