The American Rome - Centre Spread - United States imperialism charged

Lewis Lapham

March 6, 2003 (A part of a talk at Victoria College University of Toronto)

The war in Iraq has all the components of the imperial project. The reformulation of the strategic doctrine, announced last September by U.S. President Bush allows the United Stales the privilege of preemptive strike and declares every country that is not our friend, is our enemy. It makes it quite that America is the only significant power either on heave or earth. This doctrine, first drafted in 1991 by Colin Powell and Dick Cheney has been waiting there to be used tint the occasion arose. I have read those documents and it is clear that the United Stales will tolerate no rival. The military budget must be kept lip to combat strength, even though there was no more Cold War and the Gulf War was little more than a Pentagon trade show.

The question then in Powell's mine and Cheney's mind was how do we keep the military/apparatus fully operational Thus tills doctrine. The attack on the trade towers presented these people with a new enemy, an unending war or terrorism.

Within one week Donald Rumsefeld was announcing the War on Terror which would take more than 30 year's That makes no sense to me. It is too abstract. It is like a war on drugs. There is never an end to it. It is however convenient. It serves the government which wishes to maintain the imperial project. Substitute Iraq for Al Qaeda Unable to find Osama, they now send a punitive assault to the Persian Gulf. They have had trouble explaining this to the Germans, French, Russians, Chinese as well as the American people. It is presented in the language of religious exorcism which President Bush prefers, used in his annual message to Congress, or chopped into nourishing sound bites by National Security Advisor Condaleeza Rice for CNN's Live with Larry King. The whole propaganda campaign rests on the principle announced by Rumsfeld a year ago June, at a press conference in Belgium. Asked for proof of assertions that Iraq presents a clear and present danger, he said: "The absence of evidence is not evidence of absence." It is the same kind of thinking which animates the justice department and the police power given random search, arbitrary arrest and the loss of civil liberties.

Then we had Colin Powell at the UN with the slide show on February 6 trying to convince the Security Council of the need to promptly attack Iraq. I watched that. We saw Iraqi trucks that demanded the same kind of arcane exposition that New York art critics attach to exhibitions of abstract painting. Very unconvincing. Also to make the argument on behalf of military empire, the government, a week later presents a tape with a message from Osama and Powell proclaims a link from Bin Laden to Iraq. No such conclusion could possibly be drawn and the government morphs Osama and Hussein into the same enemy. It is not convincing to our European allies, but it is immensely convincing to the American news media. I was surprised to hear the universal praise in the U.S. press. The Wall Street Journal calls it, "Echoes of Metternich and Talleyrand." The New York Times Magazine proclaims on its cover, "The American Empire: Get used to it!" Time Magazine proclaimed Bush "a warrior king" and Newsweek reported that "Bush was a leader comfortable in ermine." The adoration of American media for American empire is a sight to see.

Where else do we live but in fear?

Another objection to U.S. policy is this. Bush constantly makes the statement, (October 7 in Cincinnati), "We refuse to live in fear." Of all the lies being told by the government's faith healers and gun salesmen, I know none as cowardly as that one. Where else does the Bush administration ask the American people to live except in fear? On what other ground does it justify its deconstruction of the nation's civil liberties?

Ever since the 9/11 attacks on New York and Washington, no week has passed in which the government has failed to issue warnings of a sequel. Sometimes it is the director of the FBI, sometimes it is the Attorney General or the Department of Homeland Security, but always the same message: suspect your neighbor and watch the sky. Buy duct tape, avoid the Washington monument, hide the children. If too many citizens ask impertinent questions about the shambles of the federal budget or the disappearance of a forest in Montana, the government sends another law enforcement officer to a microphone with a story about a missing tube of plutonium or a newly discovered nerve gas. Washington today suffers no shortage of visionary geopoliticians touting the wonders of American empire, imposing by acts of conscience and force of arms, peace on earth and good will to men.

The prophets of empire, many of whom write for the extreme right wing press--the Murdoch papers, the National Interest, some of the columnists of the New York Times, almost gill of the cable news networks, the voices of Bill O'Reilly, Fox News etc.--enjoy the patronage of power. They envision a kind of slum clearance project for the whole Islamic Middle East--Iraq to be the first of modern democracies to be erected, followed by Iran, Syria, Libya, Egypt and Saudi Arabia. We do seem to have ideologues in power in Washington now and I find that frightening. I also find the messianic habit of mind frightening. I believe politics are secular; democracy is secular. People make their own democracy and politics is the way they do it. I think that is the greatness of the America experiment and the American constitution. That is not a view shared by Attorney General Ashcroft, or I am afraid, by president Bush.

Ashcroft continues to say, "there is no king but Jesus" and he begins every day with a bible reading and a hymn or a gospel song, often of his own composition. President Bush in his State of the Union address when he is on his crusade in Iraq says, "Liberty is the gift of God to mankind. It is not made by men." I find this attitude very dangerous as a matter of public policy. I do not argue against it as private belief.

The insolence of office

Another objection I find to this administration is the insolence of office. It is not only Rumsfeld saying, "the absence of evidence ...," which, of course, is not only an expression of contempt for the journalists asking their question, but also the reaction of President Bush to the demos of Felt 15--600 cities, in 24 time zones.... The major news media tended to discount it is the work of aging flower children or overly-liberal college props or B-list celebrities. Three days after the millions were in the streets Bush compared the event to "the assembling of an advertising agency's hired focus group, the expression of non-serious and uninformed opinion" and certainly not one to affect his own judgment or alter his course of action or in any way violate the temple of his own enlightenment. That unfortunately is the characteristic tone of voice of this administration.

Bob Woodward in his book, Bush at War. attributes to Bush the following remark, which just as easily could be attributable to Louis XIV: "That's the interesting thing about being president. Maybe somebody needs to explain to me why he or she says something. But I don't feel that I owe anybody an explanation." For a politician to speak in that manner I find it indicative of a poor understanding of the word politics. The same tone shows up in the attitudes of Rumsfeld, Powell and Bush about the objections raised by France and Germany about our incursion into Iraq. The French and German ambassadors raise questions about possible collateral damage, the effect on the world economy, the further consequences of religious war in the Middle east, the nature of the Western Alliance, the possibility of and the hope of such a thing as international law, the Charter of the UN. In almost every instance our government treats these questions with disdain and condescension. That is merely "the old Europe," Germany and France reduced to harmless tourist attractions. They are "irrelevant" and we will do as we please. I find that foolish and negligent.

All this has cost us dearly. After 9/11 there was an immense outpouring of pro-American feeling. In a manner of 16 or 17 months our administration has managed to waste or squander a good deal of that asset. When I see the maps of those countries advancing in Iraq I ask myself who other than Osama will grow with a high heart and great expectation who has as much to gain in Iraq? Whether it's recruits to Al Qaeda or the western democracies at odds with each other and the scourge of civil war spreading across, the whole Middle East. Allah sends him the American army to do the work of pious destruction.

The religious character of American foreign policy I have mentioned before It runs through the history of the past 100 years. Woodrow Wilson had trouble deciding whether the U.S. was a religion or a state. Prior to invading Mexico in 1913, he explained that he wished "to teach the Mexicans the importance of electing good men." When he brought the 14 points to Paris in the peace conference of 1919, the then French Prime minister Georges Clemenceau, on first reading the 14 points, looked up and said, "God only brought 10."

War is easier than peace

The question asked to me most often is: "Why now?" I suspect the best answer, even better than Kissinger's, "American prestige is at stake," is the simplest one and it is: War is easier than peace. Our government elects to punish a country it perceives as weak because it is easier to send the aircraft carriers to the Persian Gulf than to attempt the harder task of making an American society not so wretchedly defaced, as I think it is at the moment, lay its hungry children, its crowded prisons and its corporate thieves. The Bush administration owes its existence to our apathy and sloth. That we have allowed the American political argument to degenerate to mindless catch phrases and 15 second sound bites, how can we not expect our government not to think in the same language, to depend its authority on the easy and patriotic lie and whenever it does not know what else to do to arrest mysterious strangers and bomb Iraq.

I think we have a chance. I am by nature an optimist. We have let democracy go in the United States in the last 20 years. Voting has declined. Our universities no longer teach American history. They don't teach the story of American politics, the story that holds us together. America is an idea and unless you know where the idea comes from, unless you know that we are now in chapter 34 and you must know 1-33, you are at a loss and at the mercy of electronic media, which lives in the eternal present. It has no sense of the past and no vision of the future.

We have also been seduced by a notion, which became popular under the Reagan administration, which said that politics did not matter. I am old enough to remember the 1950s when the word public connoted something good--public service, public good, public health, public school--and there was a connotation of pride about doing something for the commonwealth. Private on the other hand, connoted selfishness and greed. We have allowed ourselves in the past 30 years to reverse those two. Public now is a synonym for sloth or corruption or bad government or greedy bureaucrats sucking the bones of noble free enterprise. This is the story sold to the American electorate together with the notion that it is the market that makes all the important decisions. The economic function is the preeminent one. That is a foolish mistake and having made that mistake, we now have the Bush administration.

The Bush administration is the past

I see the demonstrations of Feb. 5 and the rising of the bubbling hope of dissent among the U.S. electorate as proof that the U.S. people are not as dumb as the American elite like to think and believe. It does not want to believe this is happening. If it can be understand lay enough people that the ill-conceived war in Iraq comes to us courtesy of the same feeblemindedness that set up Enron and the WorldCom swindles, then maybe we can learn to elect politicians who speak to our courage and our intelligence instead of our weakness and our fear What he has at the moment is sentiment and a gradual awakening of the American electorate. Expressions of our best like Teddy Kennedy, Senator Byrd and Congressman Dennis Kusinich are still diffused and have not formed into a political expression of a new party or a visionary candidate.

I think the Bush administration is the past. I think when you talk about empire. one thought preoccupies the submerged mind of empire and that is how not to end, how to prolong its era. The Bush administration is back in 1945 with American supremacy, when the American hegemony was dominant. We have sustained that premise for 50 years. I no longer think it holds.

This administration wishes to make time stand still. New shifts are taking place--not only the asymmetrical power of the U.S. military and the terrorists with bombs in suitcases, but in the votes in the UN. Other countries are saying no, so maybe there is a better way than war. Bush likes to say (and he says it all the time) that the American model is the only one. I do not think we can make the world in our own image. Democracy is an ongoing project, a ceaseless process of change, which is both ongoing and difficult. I hope we can reawaken what we mean by the American ideal and 1 think that is about the future and not about the past.

Lewis Lapham is the editor of Harper's Magazine.

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