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CounterPunch
November
5, 2002
Botox, the Naked
Empire & War on Iraq
by FRANK BARDACKE
I'll get to Botox and Iraq in a bit. Let's start
with the Naked Empire. Naked in the sense that those who decide
on American policy and those whose job it is to sell that policy
to the American people and the world no longer feel a need to
camouflage their intentions, to dress up their empire in more
respectable clothes. American Empire and imperial ambition are
currently respectable enough. They need no ideological cover.
And that may turn out to be the longest lasting legacy of September
11.
It was not ever thus.
Although many of the framers of the Constitution
believed that their new system of government would work because
of the opportunity for expansion beyond the Alleghenies, and
although the US conquered the American continent and first moved
across the Pacific (to the Philippines) under the openly imperial
slogan of Manifest Destiny, in the 20th Century most official
US ideology was, at least tokenly, anti-imperial. As the US elites
moved from being junior partners in the English Empire to being
senior partners in the American one, they tended to play down
their imperial intentions. Even in the cold war, as they established
military bases around the world, their stated purpose was to
control the Russians, not to expand American power. And they
told us over and over during the Vietnam war that they had no
imperial interests in Southeast Asia -- they were merely trying
to stop the spread of communism.
Even after the fall of the Soviet Union,
only a few policy makers were willing to openly endorse the idea
of an American Empire. They called it a New World Order instead,
and they went through the motions of carefully building alliances,
multilateral decision making, and waiting to wage full-scale
war until they had the approval of the UN Security Council. Certainly,
it didn't take much sophistication to see in the policies of
Reagan, papa Bush, and Clinton the basic outlines of imperial
rule, but it wasn't until 9/11 that the imperialists fully came
out of the closet, and had the courage to say their name.
Harvard Magazine, whose mission is to
keep Harvard alumni up to date on recent political and cultural
devel-opments -- the alumni receive the slick papered, richly
colored, classy bimonthly for free -- delivered the news to those
who may have missed it, seven months after the toppling of the
Twin Towers. Professor Stephen Peter Rosen kept it simple.
"Let us start with some basics.
The United States has no rival. We are militarily dominant around
the world. Our military spending exceeds that of the next six
or seven powers combined, and we have a monopoly on many advanced
and not so advanced military technolo-gies. We, and only we,
form and lead military coalitions into war. We use our military
dominance to intervene in the internal affairs of other countries,
because the local inhabitants are killing each other, or are
harboring ene-mies of the United States, or developing nuclear
and bio-logical weapons.
"A political unit that has overwhelming
superiority in military power, and uses that power to influence
the internal behavior of other states, is called an empire. Because
the United States does not seek to control terri-tory or govern
the overseas citizens of the empire, we are an indirect empire,
to be sure, but an empire nonetheless. If this is correct, our
goal is not combating a rival, but maintaining our imperial position,
and maintaining imperial order."
Rosen went on to discuss the best way
to carry out these imperial goals, as did many others who jumped
on the band wagon in the wake of the ever-so-easy dislodg-ing
of the Taliban from state power. By last summer, Naked Empire
had become fashionable, and this fall, six days after the one
year anniversary of September 11, it became official US policy,
spelled out in a pamphlet called the "National Security
Strategy of the United States of America."
This White House document (supposedly
authored by Condoleeza Rice) still has, if not a foot, at least
a couple of toes rooted in the past. The word "empire"
is never used, and the document includes many references to multilateral
action, close cooperation with allies, and old-fashioned balance
of power. But this is not meant so much to camouflage the existing
empire, as to explain how it will work. Imperial principles dominate:
the American way is the one right way for the world ("right
and true for every person, in every society"); multilateral
action and cooperation with allies will never inhibit America's
right to act alone; the balance of power will leave the US as
the world's unchallenged military mas-ter, as "our forces
will be strong enough to dissuade potential adversaries [who
in the world is not a potential adversary?] from pursuing a military
build-up in hopes of surpassing, or equaling, the power of the
United States."
The transformed idea of the "balance
of power" is the key to the document. It is usually followed
by the phrase "in favor of freedom," and, thus, has
little relationship to anything we might mean by "balance,"
and no political roots in what European diplomats tried to establish
among competing states in times gone by. It is the bal-ance of
power of empire: an overweight adult on one end of the see-saw,
securely seated on the ground, and an emaciated child, uprooted
from the earth, hanging precar-iously in the air.
Botox
But all that is an argument about ideology:
September 11 relieved US ideologists of the burden of masking
their imperial intentions. What about an actual description of
the empire? What does it look like? How does it extract tribute
from its subordinate regions? Where are its points of weakness?
What are its corruptions? Where are the regenerative forces?
What are the dynamics of its con-tradictions? How does it compare
to the earlier versions -- especially the spectacularly successful
Romans and Brits? Those are the questions of the moment, for
all of us to answer. I have only two statistics and one image
to contribute.
The statistics are crude. According to
the Defense Department, on any given day before September 11,
60,000 US troops were conducting temporary operations and exercises
in about 100 countries, operating out of 40 major bases and more
than 700 other military installa-tions. At the same time, according
to United Nations fig-ures, the US, with about 5% of the world's
population consumes about 40% of the world's annual production
of goods. I don't think it is too large an analytical stretch
to say that these two facts go together, and provide a very rough
description of the size and impact of this empire's footprint
on the earth.
The image is perhaps equally crude. Empires
are known not only for the extent of their military power, and
the wealth they extract from their subjects, but also for their
domestic degeneracy. It seems that those who enjoy a disproportionate
amount of the world's goods can not help but become corrupt.
Rome's vomiting rooms fit perfectly with hunger on the Iberian
Peninsula. And now, in perfect step with the unveiling of the
Naked Empire, we have botox in Las Vegas and botulism in the
rest of the world.
Botulism is caused by a bacteria that
paralyses the nerves. It thrives in poorly preserved food. Periodic
out-breaks still sicken and kill thousands of people through-out
the empire. Botox is a form of the bacteria that has become popular
in the United States because it can tem-porarily reduce wrinkles
in the face. The botox is injected into the muscles around the
eyes to paralyze the nearby nerves. The paralyzed nerves prevent
the muscles from contracting (this is what kills you if the botulism
reaches the nerves and muscles of the chest), and thereby wipes
away the lines in the face that Americans call "crow's feet."
But the bacteria that is injected into
the face wears off in about four to six months. People need to
get periodic injections in order to maintain the smooth-faced
effect. These injections are now given collectively at what are
called Botox parties. The favorite place for these parties is
Las Vegas. People gather in various casinos, watch entertainers
dance and sing, while nurses move among the revelers and inject
a form of botulism into their faces.
This hardly needs explication. I hope
it stands by itself: botox at home, botulism in the periphery.
But I can't resist pointing out that the desire to cheat time
seems particularly imperial. People at the center of the empire,
with apparently unlimited temporal power, are highly vulnerable
to the temptation of perpetual youth. As is the empire itself.
"It is morning in America," the doddering Reagan said,
and stirred the nation. And now the boy emperor struts to the
podium, flexes his well-toned pectorals, and proclaims in his
every gesture that we are young, a young empire, ruling in the
place of the elderly, crow's-footed British, not only vigorous
enough to have outmuscled the Russians, but young enough to rule
the world for next millennium.
But I leave you to your own riff. The
Las Vegas botox parties do not so much provoke analysis as won-der,
bad poetry, and a rhetorical question. Does anything we know
about Rome top this?
Iraq
But why would the young empire make war
on Iraq? All agree that such a war involves some risks. Anatol
Lieven of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, writing
in the London Review of Books, puts the odds at five to one in
favor of a 'quick success' against the current Iraqi regime.
(I didn't know that the Carnegie Endowment kept book on such
things, and who knows how they set the odds, but I am sure that
the bet that Saddam Hussein can be replaced as easily as the
Taliban has been taken off the board.) If we trust Lieven's book-making
abilities, there is a 20% chance that war on Iraq will lead to
what he calls a "general conflagration" in the Middle
East. That seems like a pretty high risk, not the kind of gamble
an empire would make. Sure they want the oil; but wouldn't a
young, confident empire be will-ing to wait? It is the underdogs
who have to push their luck. The powerful can afford to play
it safe.
The official explanation -- that Hussein
is an immi-nent threat to the United States -- is backed by neither
evidence nor logic, and need not be addressed. I have heard six
other explanations. Three of them are trivial: Hussein tried
to kill the boy emperor's daddy; the Republicans want to win
the upcoming congressional elections; Bush is trying to divert
attention from the cur-rent business scandals. Great Empires
do not risk "general conflagrations" for such reasons.
If future his-torians discover some presidential tapes that reveal
that these were major calculations in the decision to go to war,
they will serve only as another measure of the empire's degeneracy,
not of its strength.
The other three make some sense. Let's
look at them one by one. The imperialists, sitting on top of
the world, are drunk with power. There is plenty of precedent
for that. History is full of powerful men who, like the intox-icated,
are blind to the limits that the sober can clearly see. And the
core people around the boy emperor who are driving this campaign
for war have good reason to be over-confident. They are some
of the very same people who engineered Iran-Contra, and miraculously
got away with it. But so blind so early in their reign? Although
possible, it seems doubtful.
My friend Brian VanArkadie argues that
the imperial-ists see war on Iraq as another opportunity to intimidate
the rest of the world. Empires do that. They exert their military
might just to maintain credibility. British gunboats firing on
some obscure Asian coast; Roman legions conquering some useless
piece of real estate -- all to remind folks of who's at the top.
But it doesn't work if the victim is too much of a pushover.
Granada made the US look foolish, not strong. Maybe even Afghanistan
was too easy a task. But knocking off Saddam would do the trick.
And doing it against the wishes and advice of those who have
a mistaken view of their own importance would be all to the good.
After all, the boy emperor does protest too much. He wants the
United Nations to become the League of Nations, as the UN is
the empire's only legitimate competitor as a world authority.
And how nice it would be to show the Russians and the French
just how insignificant they are. Teach them all what we now mean
by the balance of power. But again, the risk seems too high.
Surely, we could find some regime more difficult to obliterate
than the Taliban, but easier than Hussein's, and not located
in so dangerous a region. That leaves one last explanation of
the war on Iraq, and although still inadequate, it seems the
best so far. The US rulers are compelled to go to war because
the economy is much worse off than they have dared to admit.
If you travel in some of the same circles I do, you have no doubt
heard the arguments. World-wide over-capacity in just about everything
that matters -- steel, autos, aircraft, chips, fiber-optic cable...
Rates of profit dramatically falling. The US as a debtor nation,
the dol-lar insecurely resting on the rest of the world's forbear-ance
in not calling in its chits. The whole global econ-omy dependent
on the wild spending of US consumers, who some day may realize
that they are drowning in credit card debt, and might back away
from some of their more irrational expenditures. In this view,
with the whole shebang about to collapse, the US figures it can't
wait for the Iraqi oil to fall into its hands, we need it now,
and if a general conflagration in the Middle East is required,
so be it. The empire would be sure to win, and would not only
have the oil, but as a side benefit the power to settle the Israeli/Palestine
question once and for all. I have one major problem with this
theory. I have spent my whole adult life betting against capitalism,
and I haven't won yet. I would hate to count up the number of
times that brilliant Marxists have convinced me that the great
crisis was upon us. But every time, capital found some way to
regroup and muddle through. I find it hard to believe that this
time it's the real thing, that the direct ownership of Iraqi
oil has become an economic necessity, and that the capitalists
are willing to risk a major war to get it.
So where does that leave us? I offer
two other expla-nations of what's going on. First, maybe the
boy emperor is not about to make war on Iraq. Maybe it was all
a feint to win the congressional elections and to distract us
from the business scandals. That's believable. Those goals don't
explain war, but they could explain war bluster. Maybe, now that
Bush has the authority in his pocket, he will hold onto it, and
make war on Iraq only if he needs to insure his own re-election.
That scale makes more sense. War to hold onto the emperor's crown,
not to win some piddling congressional election between two nearly
identical parties in southern Wisconsin. Or maybe the empire
is not young at all, not nearly as powerful as it appears, and
therefore prone to adventures. This corollary to the capitalist
crisis theory, might postu-late that we are going to war not
because the empire is strong, but because it is weak. Maybe what
we are deal-ing with is not an empire that came on the scene
at the end of World War II, and is still flexing its muscles,
but rather the last days of the Anglo-Atlantic Empire, led first
by the British and now by its erstwhile colony, whose youth is
but a 17th Century memory, and now is befuddled by the infirmities
of old age.
The botox can smooth the wrinkles, but
can not cure the galloping macular degeneration which mercifully
blinds the eyes to the coming abyss.
That's what I meant by bad poetry.
FRANK BARDACKE
lives in Watsonsville, California. He the author of Good
Liberals and Blue Herons and is co-translator of Shadows
of Tender Fury: The Letters and Communiques of Subcomandante
Marcos and the Zapatista Army of National Liberation.
He can be reached at: bardacke@cruzio.com
Yesterday's
Features
Alexander Cockburn
Blowback,
Wellstone and Hitchens
Michael Neumann
Memo
to Christians
Re: Activism and the Israel/Palestine Conflict
Fran Shor
Militarized Masculinity and Homegrown Terrorists
Mary Hughes-Thompson
Olive
Orchards and Armed Zealots
Susan Davis
Proverbial Wisdom:
Right Place, Wrong Time
Jason Leopold
False
Profits:
Sec of Army Thomas White and Enron's Cooked Books
Adam Engel
Samson Agonistes:
Confessions of a Terrorist/Martyr
Russell Mokhiber and
Robert Weissman
A Day
at the American Enterprise Institute
John Stanton
Should States Secceed?
Gavin Keeney
Parting Shots
Anthony Gancarski
Concerned Citizen: Episode 6. Talk Show Host
David Krieger
The Children
of Iraq Have Names
M. Junaid Alam
No to War Rap
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October 26
/ 27, 2002
Michael Wolff
A Place
of Tears
Ilija Trojanow
Bali Mon Amour
Ben Tripp
Crocodile Tears
Hope Shand and Silvia Ribeiro
The Great Containment:
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Pappy
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William Hughes
A Free
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Daniel Wolff
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This Message
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