Wars
of the Laptop Bombers
Today's
Stories
February 22,
2005
Kirkpatrick
Sale
Imperial
Entropy: the Collapse of the American Empire
February 21,
2005
Hunter S. Thompson
"He
Was A Crook"
John Ross
Mexico:
the Pentagon's Proxy Army in Iraq
Ward Churchill
What Did I Really Say? Why Did
I Say It?
Dr. Teresa
Whitehurst
Military Recruiting on Channel One: Geometry 101, Brought to
You by the US Navy
David Swanson
Fighting for a Living Wage, State by State
Dave Lindorff
All the News That's Fit to Fake
Stew Albert
Fear and Loathing: HST
Michael Neumann
Strategies
in Palestine: a Shrinking Pie in the Sky
February 19
/ 20, 2005
Alexander Cockburn
Back
to Salem: Paul Shanley and the Return of "Recovered Memory"
Kathleen Christison
Struggling
for Justice in Palestine
Ted Honderich
On Being Persona Non Grata
Gary Leupp
Self-Hating Gays: Welcome to the White House & Welcome to
Commit Suicide
Don Santina
Reparations for the Blues
Jennifer Roesch
John Negroponte: Dirty Warrior
Scott Richard
Lyons
Ward
Churchill and the Identity Police
Chris Clarke
Ward Churchill and Liberal Outrage
George Beres
Censorship in the Land of Wayne Morse: Gagging W. Churchill in
Oregon
Harry Browne
The Belfast Heist: the Plot Unravels
Manuel García,
Jr.
Who Killed Rafik Hariri?
Mark Scaramella
Lessons from the Hidden Afghan War
Michael Donnelly
Whatever Happened to John Edwards?
John Pilger
First, They Attack the Past
Norman Madarasz
Death Wish for Reform in Brazil?
Surendra Devkota
The Monarchy in Nepal
Deborah Rich
How Anti-GMO Ballot Measures May Miss the Mark
Fred Gardner
When Dr. Tod Met Merle Haggard
CounterPunch
News Service
About King Mswati: Political Developments in Swaziland
Richard Oxman
CounterPunching Arthur Miller
Poets' Basement
Albert, Giebel, Tripp, Engel and Orkin
February 18,
2005
Ben Moxham
In
East Timor, the Nightmare Continues
Dave Lindorff
The
Scum Also Rises: the Bloody Career of John Negroponte
Larry Birns
Negroponte: a Resume of Death Squads, Deceptions and Bribery
Gregory Elich
N, Korea's Phantom Nukes and the US's Subversion of Diplomacy
Samuel Logan / John Meyers
The Future of Colombia's Paramilitary Death Squads
Nicole Colson
Shock and Awe on Civil Liberties: From Lynne Stewart to Ward
Churchill
Suzan Mazur
Whose National Security Are We Talking About?
Mickey Z.
"One
Man Has Stopped Killing"
February 17,
2005
Joshua Frank
Hogtying
of the Deaniacs
Paul Craig
Roberts
Bush's
Willing Sychophants: the Conservative Media
Robert Fisk
Under
the Shadow of Death in Lebanon
Christopher
Brauchli
Where
Time Stands Still: Kinsey and Darwin in Cobb County, GA
Dr. Teresa
Whitehurst
Military
Recruitment TV: Why Send Them to College, When Your Kid Can be
Cannon Fodder?
Alison Weir
Russia, Israel and Media Omissions
Ahrar Ahmad
A Review of Shahid Alam's "Is There an Islamic Problem?"
Saul Landau
An
Interview with Cuban VP Ricardo Alarcon: "The US Tramples
the Laws It Wrote"
Website of the Day
Petition to Support Ward Churchill
February 16,
2005
Robert Fisk
Lebanon:
a Battlefield for the Wars of Others
Kevin Zeese
Creating a Real Ownership Society: Share the Wealth; Protect
Retirement
Gary Leupp
Meanwhile, in Nepal...
Ron Jacobs
Why the Iranian Opposition Should Not Trust the Bush Administration
Jessica Leight
Oil-Flush Chavez Begins to Strut His Stuff
Greg Moses
Houston, You've Got a Problem: Documenting Voting Irregularities
in Texas
Mark Engler
The Last Porto Alegre
Jack McCarthy
Where's the Outrage About Pat? Buchanan Does a Churchill
Bill Christison
US
Foreign Policy Dangerously Slanted Toward Israel
Website of the Day
The
World is Melting: a Photo Survey by Gary Braasch
February 15,
2005
CounterPunch
News Service
Dean
a "Safe" Moderate, Says NYT Citing CounterPunch
Robert Fisk
The
Killing of Mr. Lebanon
Uri Avnery
"Sharm-al-Sheikh,
We Have Come Back Again"
Stan Cox
Fighting Big Pharma in Little Digwal
Mickey Z.
Radio
Active North of the Border: an Interview with Chris Cook
Dave Zirin
Bashing Bush: Jose Canseco Comes Clean
Nadia Martinez
Ending
World Poverty? Opening at the World Bank, Apply Now
Lila Rajiva
"Little Eichmanns" and the 'Harijan': the Danger of
Magical Thinking in Politics
Paul Craig
Roberts
The
American Job Sell Out
February 14,
2005
Robert Jensen
Ward
Churchill: Right to Speak Out; Right About 9/11
Brian Cloughley
Kuwait's Freedom, Bush-style
Patrick Cockburn
Outcome
of the Iraqi Elections: Shortages, Corruption, Guerrilla War
Gary Leupp
Post-election Iraq: What Next?
Michael Donnelly
Sacred Nature: Just Another Commodity?
Dave Lindorff
When Bush Came to My Neighborhood
Elaine Cassel
The
Lynne Stewart Verdict
February 12
/ 13, 2005
Alexander Cockburn
Ward
Churchill's Genes
Saul Landau
Alarcon
Speaks: an Interview with the Vice President of Cuba
Paul Craig
Roberts
Nothing
to Fear But Bush Himself
Patrick Cockburn
Two Years After the Fall of Saddam, the Resistance Controls All
Major Roads into Baghdad
John Feffer
Bush
v. N. Korea: Round Two
Mickey Z.
Right to Remain Silent; Duty to Speak
Kurt Nimmo
Viva la Cucaracha!
Fred Gardner
Waiting for Raich
Dave Zirin
Fighting the New Republic(ans)
John Chuckman
Hiroshima, Mon Amour
Ben Tripp
A Leftist on the Bush Payroll
Carol Norris
"Buddy, Can You Spare a Dwarf?"
Robert Fisk
No Middle East Peace Without Justice
Frank / Chowkwanyun
Muzzled Activist in an Age of Terror: the Case of Sherman Austin
Mike Whitney
Condi's Euro Tour
Deborah Frisch
A Psychologist's Defense of Ward Churchill
Niranjan Ramakrishnan
Reading Khomeini in Colorado
Christine TenBarge
What's So Special About Ward?
Ron Jacobs
Curtis Mayfield's Train to Jordan
Dr. Susan Block
Chemistry of Love: a Valentine's Greeting
Poets' Basement
Louise, Smith-Ferri, Ford and Albert
Website of the Weekend
Free Sherman
February 11,
20055
Manuel Garcia,
Jr
The
Eight Percent War
Kurt Nimmo
Ann
Coulter's Racism: Where's Geronimo When You Really Need
Him?
Dave Lindorff
Guckert
or Gannon? The Perfect Plant; He Fit Right In
Larry Birns
War is Peace; Slavery is Freedom: Democracy According to Elliott
Abrams
Bill Quigley
Twenty Questions: a Social Justice Quiz
Tom Barry
Bush's State of Delusion
Jennifer Van
Bergen
Lynne
Stewart's Conviction Hurts Us All
February 10,
2005
Dave Lindorff
What
Academic Freedom?
Christopher Brauchli
The Love of Slaughter: From Rwanda to Iraq
Patrick Cockburn
In Baghdad, It's Easy to Get Killed
Nicole Colson
Have the Democrats Surrendered on Abortion Rights?
Suzan Mazur
More
on the Assassination of Lumumba from Mr. Garsin of Kinshasha
Michael Donnelly
Salvaging an Opposition
Mike Stark
Driving Ossie Davis: "Give Them a Little Truth, a Little
Hope"
Greg Moses
Taking
Jesus Back from the Hijackers
Website of
the Day
The Missionary Positions
February 9,
2005
Jeffrey St.
Clair
Duck
and Cover Redux: Bunker Busters and City Levellers
Mickey Z.
What Ward Churchill Didn't Say
John Ross
Hecho
en Mexico: the Iraqi Election
Tom Barry
Ambassador of Lies: Elliott Abrams, the Neocon's Neocon
Conn Hallinan
The
Coup in Nepal: Nursing the Pinion
Patrick Cockburn
Sistani's Vision for Iraq: Cricket is Fine, But Chess is "Absolutely
Forbidden"
Steen Sohn
Danish PM Says It's OK for Israel to Violate UN Resolutions
Tim Wise
Reflections on Empire and Uppity Indians
Website of
the Day
Support Antiwar.com
February 8,
2005
Patrick Cockburn
Shia/Kurd
Coalition to Dominate New Iraqi Govt.: "It's an Electoral
Pact, Not a Party"
Brian Cloughley
Out
of the Mouths of Generals: "It's Fun to Shoot Some People"
Steve Breyman
Against the Selfishness of the "Ownership Society"
Harry Browne
"Don't
Get on that Plane!": Soldiers Seek Asylum in Ireland
Doug Giebel
"We Love Free Speech in America": the People, the President
and Ward Churchill
Nate Collins
The Censorship of Ward Churchill and Dancehall Reggae: It's the
Same Beast
Dave Lindorff
It's Time for a Labor-Oriented Newspaper
David Smith-Ferri
Sanctions and the Health Crisis in Iraq
February 7,
2005
Paul Craig
Roberts
Bush's
War on Jobs
Carolyn Baker
The New McCarthyism on Campus: Churchill and the Attack on Higher
Ed
Joshua Frank
Marc Cooper's Hit List: First Mumia; Now Ward Churchill
Mickey Z.
Warning: More Hate Speech from W. Churchill
Patrick Cockburn
The
Kidnapping Gangs of Iraq
Mike Whitney
Tom Friedman: Scribe for New Age Imperialism
Stacie Jonas
Pinochet: Fit to be Tried
Dave Zirin
A Miserable Super Sunday: Clinton, Bush and the FBI
Tariq Ali
Imperial
Delusions
February 5
/ 6, 2005
Alexander Cockburn
Ward
Churchill and the Mad Dogs
Kurt Nimmo
A Ward Churchill Kind of Day
Joshua Frank
Liberals Trash Ward Churchill
P. Sainath
Mumbai's Man-Made Tsunami
Patrick Cockburn
Sistani's Triumph; Allawi's Bust
Laura Carlsen
Bush, Rice and Latin America
Dave Lindorff
How the NYT Killed the Bush Bulge Story
Pamela Olson
West Bank Story
Behzad Yaghmaian
The Future of Sudanese Refugees in the West
Saul Landau / Farrah Hassen
A Threatened UN in King George's Court
Roger Burbach
World Social Forum: a Tale of Two Presidents
Robert Fisk
History by Laptop
David Swanson
James Forman and the Liberal-Labor Syndrome
Justin E.H. Smith
Gay Marriage: a Report from Canada
Cacie Hart
The "State" of the Union: More War and a Ban on Love
Ron Jacobs
Chairman Bob Avakian: a Revolutionary Life
Mickey Z.
Viewing America from the Outside
Ben Tripp
Republican Heroes: a New Breed of Good Guy
Ben Sonnenberg
France at the End of the Devil's Decade: Renoir's Rules of the
Game
Poets' Basement
Smith-Ferri, Davies, Collins, & Albert
Website of
the Weekend
John Trudell: How to Earn a 17,000 Page FBI File
February 4,
2005
Brian Cloughley
The
Army Symphonist: "Sometimes the Only Way to Change the Behavior
of Someone Like That is to Kill Them"
Bill Christison
Election
Parallels: Vietnam, 1967; Iraq, 2005
Elaine Cassel
Did Zoloft Make Him Do It?
Jacob Levich
Chomsky and the Draft
Kanak Mani Dixit
Return of the Royalists in Nepal
Ron Jacobs
The
Downward Spiral in Iraq
February 3,
2005
Ward Churchill
On
the Injustice of Getting Smeared: a Campaign of Fabrications
and Gross Distortions
Sharon Smith
Resisting
Soldiers Need Our Support
Mickey Z.
Leslie
Gelb Asks Iraq: Who's Your Daddy?
Mike Whitney
President of Alienation: a Desperate State of the Union
Jenna Orkin
9/11 the Sequel: the Toxic State of Lower Manhattan
Saul Landau
Elections Won't Prevent Civil War in Iraq
Yitzhak Laor
Strange is the Silence
Dave Lindorff
The
Assault on Social Security: a New Campaign of Lies
February 2,
2005
David Domke
/ Kevin Coe
Bush's
Brand of Christianity
Noam Chomsky
Iraq
After the Elections
M. Shahid Alam
O'Reilly's
Fatwah on "Un-American" Professors: FoxNews Puts Me
in Its Crosshairs
Richard Oxman
Ringing in 1984 with Ward Churchill and Derrick Jensen
Joshua Frank
The Suckering of Howard Dean
Dave Lindorff
A History Lesson from the NYT
Nina Hartley
Feminists for Porn
Website of the Day
War is a Racket
February 1,
2005
Joshua L. Dratel
The
Torture Memos
Patrick Cockburn
New Doubts About Allawi
Robert Fisk
"The Only Decent Food We Get is at Funerals"
Uri Avnery
The Stalemate
Col. Dan Smith
"W" Stands for Withdrawal
Alison Weir
Making America as "Secure" as Israel
Alan Farago
Heaven and Hell in the Everglades
Ray Hanania
Low Voter Turnout of Iraqi Expatriates: Less Than 10% of Qualified
Voters
Paul Craig
Roberts
American
Police State
Website of the Day
Statisticians Refute Official Rationale for Exit Poll Errors
December 22,
2004
James Petras
An
Open Letter to Saramago: Nobel Laureate Suffers from a Bizarre
Historical Amnesia
Omar Barghouti
The Case for Boycotting Israel
Patrick Cockburn / Jeremy Redmond
They Were Waiting on Chicken Tenders When the Rounds Hit
Harry Browne
Northern Ireland: No Postcards from the Edge
Richard Oxman
On the Seventh Column
Kathleen Christison
Imagining
Palestine
Website of the Day
FBI Torture Memos
December 21,
2004
Greg Moses
The
New Zeus on the Block: Unplugging Al-Manar TV
Dave Lindorff
Losing
It in America: Bunker of the Skittish
Chad Nagle
The View from Donetsk
Dragon Pierces
Truth*
Concrete
Colossus vs. the River Dragon: Dislocation and Three Gorges Dam
Patrick Cockburn
"Things Always Get Worse"
Seth DeLong
Aiding Oppression in Haiti
Ahmad Faruqui
Pakistan and the 9/11 Commission's Report
Paul Craig
Roberts
America
Locked Up: a System of Injustice
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Alexander Cockburn
Behold,
the Head of a Neo-Con!
Subcomandante
Marcos
The
Death Train of the WTO
Norman Finkelstein
Hitchens
as Model Apostate
Steve Niva
Israel's
Assassination Policy: the Trigger for Suicide Bombings?
Dardagan,
Slobodo and Williams
CounterPunch Exclusive:
20,000 Wounded Iraqi Civilians
Steve
J.B.
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February 22, 2005
Imperial Entropy
Collapse
of the American Empire
By
KIRKPATRICK SALE
It is quite ironic: only a decade or
so after the idea of the United States as an imperial power came
to be accepted by both right and left, and people were actually
able to talk openly about an American empire, it is showing multiple
signs of its inability to continue. And indeed it is now possible
to contemplate, and openly speculate about, its collapse.
The neocons in power in Washington
these days, those who were delighted to talk about America as
the sole empire in the world following the Soviet disintegration,
will of course refuse to believe in any such collapse, just
as they ignore the realities of the imperial war in Iraq. But
I think it behooves us to examine seriously the ways in which
the U.S. system is so drastically imperiling itself that it will
cause not only the collapse of its worldwide empire but drastically
alter the nation itself on the domestic front.
All empires collapse eventually:
Akkad, Sumeria, Babylonia, Ninevah, Assyria, Persia, Macedonia,
Greece, Carthage, Rome, Mali, Songhai, Mongonl, Tokugawaw, Gupta,
Khmer, Hapbsburg, Inca, Aztec, 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.
In my reading of the history
of empires, I have come up with four reasons that almost always
explain their collapse. (Jared Diamond's new book Collapse
also has a list of reasons for societal collapse, slightly
overlapping, but he is talking about systems other than empires.)
Let me set them out, largely in reference to the present American
empire.
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 ours is no exception, even if we have yet
to experience the worst of our 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 aquifer
depletion, pollution of water, soil, air, and food, soil salinization,
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 E.O. Wilson has said, after lengthy
examination of human impact on the earth, our "ecological
footprint is already too large for the planet to sustain, and
it is getting larger." A Defense Department study last
year predicted "abrupt climate change," likely to occur
within a decade, will lead to "catastrophic" shortages
of water and energy, endemic "disruption and conflict,"
warfare that "would define human life," and a "significant
drop" in the planet's ability to sustain its present population.
End of empire for sure, maybe end of civilization.
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 our economy is built entirely
on a fragile system in which the world produces and we, by and
large, consume (U.S. manufacturing is just 13 per cent of our
GDP). At the moment we sustain a nearly $630 billion trade deficit
with the rest of the world-it has leapt by an incredible $500
billion since 1993, and $180 billion since Bush took office in
2001-and in order to pay for that we have to have an inflow of
cash from the rest of the world of about $1 billion every day
to pay for it, which was down by half late last year. That
kind of excess is simply unsustainable, especially when you think
that it is the other world empire, China, that is crucial for
supporting it, at the tune of some $83 billion on loan to the
U.S. treasury.
Add to that an economy resting
on a nearly $500 billion Federal budget deficit, making up part
of a total national debt of $7.4 trillion as of last fall,
and the continual drain on the economy by the military of at
least $530 billion a year (not counting military intelligence,
whose figure we never know). Nobody thinks that is sustainable
either, which is why the dollar has lost value everywhere-down
by 30 per cent against the euro since 2000-and the world begins
to lose faith in investment here. I foresee that in just a few
years the dollar will be so battered that the oil states will
no longer want to operate in that currency and will turn to the
euro instead, and China will let the yuan float against the dollar,
effectively making this nation bankrupt and powerless, unable
to control economic life within its borders much less abroad.
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 some 446,000 active troops at more than 725
acknowledged (and any number secret) bases in at least 38 countries
around the world, plus a formal "military presence"
in no less than 153 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 per cent of
the world's population. And now that Bush has declared a "war
on terror," instead of the more doable war on Al Quada
we should have waged, our armies and agents will be on a battlefield
universal and permanent that cannot possibly be controlled or
contained.
So far that military network
has not collapsed, but as Iraq indicates it is mightily tested
and quite incapable of establishing client states to do our bidding
and protect resources we need. And as anti-American sentiment
continues to spread and darken-in all the Muslim countries, in
much of Europe, in much of Asia-and as more countries refuse
the "structural adjustments" that our IMF-led globalization
requires, it is quite likely that the periphery of our empire
will begin resisting our dominance, militarily if necessary.
And far from having a capacity to fight two wars simultaneously,
as the Pentagon once hoped, we are proving that we can't even
fight one.
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 our modern version of bread
and circuses, a unique combination of entertainment, sports,
television, internet sex and games, consumption, drugs, liquor,
and religion that effectively deadens the general public into
stupor. But the tactics of the Bush II administration show that
it is so fearful of an expression of popular dissent that it
is willing to defy and ignore environmental, civil-rights, and
progressive groups, to bribe commentators to put out its propaganda,
to expand surveillance and data-base invasions of privacy, to
use party superiority and backroom tactics to ride roughshod
over Congressional opposition, to use lies and deceptions as
a normal part of government operations, to break international
laws and treaties for short-term ends, and to use religion to
cloak its every policy.
It's hard to believe that the
great mass of the American public would ever bestir itself to
challenge the empire at home until things get much, much worse.
It is a public, after all, of which, as a Gallup poll in 2004
found, 61 per cent believe that "religion can answer all
or most of today's problems," and according to a Time/CNN
poll in 2002 59 per cent believe in the imminent apocalypse foretold
in the Book of Revelation and take every threat and disaster
as evidence of God's will. And yet, it's also hard to believe
that a nation so thoroughly corrupt as this-in all its fundamental
institutions, its boughten parties, academies, corporations,
brokerages, accountants, governments-and resting on a social
and economic base of intolerably unequal incomes and property,
getting increasingly unequal, will be able to sustain itself
for long. The upsurge in talk about secession after the last
election, some of which was deadly serious and led on to organizations
throughout most of the blue states, indicates that at least a
minority is willing to think about drastic steps to "alter
or abolish" a regime it finds itself fundamentally at odds
with.
Those four processes by which
empires always eventually fall seem to me to be inescapably operative,
in varying degrees, in this latest empire. And I think a combination
of several or all of them will bring about its collapse within
the next 15 years or so.
Jared Diamond's recent book
detailing the ways societies collapse suggests that American
society, or industrial civilization as a whole, once it is aware
of the dangers of its current course, can learn from the failures
of the past and avoid their fates. But it will never happen,
and for a reason Diamond himself understands.
As he says, in his analysis
of the doomed Norse society on Greenland that collapsed in the
early 15th century: "The values to which people cling most
stubbornly under inappropriate conditions are those values that
were previously the source of their greatest triumphs over adversity."
If this is so, and his examples would seem to prove it, then
we can isolate the values of American society that have been
responsible for its greatest triumphs and know that we will cling
to them no matter what. They are, in one rough mixture, capitalism,
individualism, nationalism, technophilia, and humanism (as the
dominance of humans over nature). There is no chance whatever,
no matter how grave and obvious the threat, that as a society
that we will abandon those.
Hence no chance to escape the
collapse of empire.
Kirkpatrick Sale is the author of twelve books, including
Human
Scale, The
Conquest of Paradise, Rebels
Against the Future, and The
Fire of His Genius: Robert Fulton and the American Dream.
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