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		PUT THE WORDS IN HERE:
		
	Mainstream Media Salute the Empire
	----------------------------------
	By: Matthew Rothschild


        When two of the leading magazines in the United States put stories 
	on their covers that deal with hitherto taboo subject of the American 
	empire, it's worth examining their presentations.

	I'm referring to "The American Empire (Get Used to It)" by Michael 
	Ignatieff, which ran on the cover of The New York Times Magazine of 
	January 5, and "The American Empire: Is the U.S. Trying to Shape the 
	World? Should It?" by Jay Tolson on the January 13 cover of U.S. 
	News & World Report.

	Surprise, surprise, both articles end up defending the U.S. empire, 
	though Tolson quibbles with the term.

	Both articles embellish the record of the U.S. empire to date.

	Both articles neglect the fundamental material basis of the empire.

	And both articles prattle on about the United States reluctantly 
	having to assume the imperial responsibilities that have allegedly 
	been thrust upon it.


	Buffing the Historical Record
        -----------------------------

	Tolson writes, "So far, the United States has seldom--with the 
	exception of 1898--demonstrated that it wants to directly dominate 
	the internal affairs of other nations." This is such a whopper--given 
	the U.S. interventions, meddlings, or subversions in Haiti, Cuba, 
	the Dominican Republic, Nicaragua, El Salvador, Guatemala, Grenada, 
	Panama, Chile, Angola, Namibia, the Congo, Ghana, Iran, Indonesia, 
	Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia, to name some--that even Tolson has to 
	immediately hedge, citing "heavy-handed meddling . . . in Iran, 
	South Vietnam, Chile, and other nations." And he embarrassingly 
	calls the U.S. war against Vietnam a "failed experiment in 
	'nation-building.' "

	For his part, Ignatieff writes: "America's success in the twentieth 
	century owed a great deal to the shrewd understanding that America's 
	interest lay in aligning itself with freedom."

	Such platitudes crumble upon even the most cursory examination of 
	the record. The United States didn't overthrow Allende, Mossadegh, 
	Lumumba, and Sukarno to ensure freedom but to make way for U.S. 
	capital and to project U.S. power.

	Or check out the actual words of chief U.S. policy planner George 
	Kennan in the late 1940s and 1950s. As Noam Chomsky has noted, 
	Kennan was quite jaundiced about the need to align the United States 
	with freedom. "It is better to have a strong regime in power than a 
	liberal government if it is indulgent and relaxed and penetrated by 
	Communists," Kennan wrote. He also favored, in his words, "police 
	repression by the local government" because "the results are on 
	balance favorable to our purposes." (See Chomsky's "Deterring 
	Democracy.")


	Obscuring the Material Motive, Then and Now 
	-------------------------------------------

	For the most part, Tolson and Ignatieff don't bother to explore the 
	material roots of the U.S. empire. Instead, they are satisfied with 
	exploring the rationalizations for that empire. But again, Kennan 
	was quite clear. "The protection of our resources" is a major concern 
	in Latin America, he wrote. And he underscored the need to encourage 
	"a climate conducive to private investment," one that would allow 
	"foreign capital to repatriate a reasonable return." Southeast Asia, 
	Kennan also wrote, has to "fulfill its major function as a source of 
	raw materials and a market for Japan and Western Europe."

	Tolson talks about the rebuilding of Europe and Japan, along with 
	the creation of the World Bank and the IMF, as examples of the 
	United States "doing good works abroad and generally making the 
	world a better place to live." But he does not mention the crucial 
	importance of that rebuilding process--and of the IMF and World 
	Bank---in securing profits for U.S. corporations.

	Tolson applauds Bush's pledge, spelled out in his new national 
	security doctrine, of "encouraging free and open societies on every 
	continent." But what Bush means by free and open societies, more 
	often than not, is free and open to U.S. investments.

	As to the overwhelming importance of oil in driving U.S. policy, 
	Tolson is absolutely silent.

	Ignatieff is smarter than that. He recognizes that when the United 
	States has intervened, it has often done so for "stability--which 
	means not only political stability but also the steady, profitable 
	flow of goods and raw materials." And he acknowledges that U.S. 
	interventions in the past were doing the bidding of U.S. 
	corporations. But he does so only to draw a specious distinction: 
	"America's empire is not like empires of times past, built on 
	colonies, conquest, and the white man's burden. We are no longer in 
	the era of the United Fruit Company, when American corporations 
	needed the Marines to secure their investments overseas. The 
	twenty-first century imperium is a new invention in the annals of 
	political science, an empire lite, a global hegemony whose grace 
	notes are free markets, human rights, and democracy."

	Certainly, it is for free markets--nothing new in the annals there. 
	But is it for human rights and democracy?

	Ignatieff cites Bosnia and Afghanistan. While the Bosnia case 
	appears closer to a humanitarian intervention, it also was a way for 
	the United States to justify NATO's existence. And the U.S. war 
	against Afghanistan was not designed to bring about democracy or to 
	restore human rights but to get Al Qaeda.

	Similarly, the war that Bush is planning today against Iraq is not 
	to liberate the people there but, in large part, to assure U.S. 
	control of oil supplies and flex U.S. power. I doubt Dick Cheney and 
	Donald Rumsfeld lie awake at night haunted by the plight of innocent 
	Iraqis. If they did, they would have lifted economic sanctions a 
	long time ago. But Cheney and Rumsfeld do worry about the needs of 
	the U.S. empire. Here's Cheney last August, speaking in Nashville to 
	the Veterans of Foreign Wars. He noted that Saddam has "a seat atop 
	10 percent of the world's oil reserves," and warned that if he got 
	weapons of mass destruction, he could "take control of a great 
	portion of the world's energy supplies."

	Ignatieff acknowledges that Iraqi exiles are worried that Bush might 
	settle for a new thug in Baghdad who "complied with the interests of
	the Pentagon and American oil companies." And he says that the Persian 
	Gulf, "because it has so much of the world's proven oil reserves," 
	serves as "the empire's center of gravity." 

	But then he leaps to the conclusion that "the case for empire is that 
	it has become, in a place like Iraq, the last hope for democracy and 
	stability alike."


	Inventing a Reluctant, Benign Emperor
	-------------------------------------

	For Tolson, the United States has been a reluctant interventionist 
	in the world since the days of McKinley. And he posits a "benign" 
	foreign policy before and after the Cold War. "At most, under 
	Clinton and Bush before him, the United States acted like the benign 
	but barely attentive custodian of globalism." Tolson manages to erase 
	the U.S. invasion of Panama and the Gulf War. And "barely attentive" 
	does not even come close to describing the aggressive foisting of the 
	free market model on economies around the world that so typified the 
	Bush/Clinton era.

	Today, Tolson brays talk about "the challenge of being the sole 
	superpower in the world," and he strongly implies, in his conclusion, 
	that America cannot afford to leave a vacuum. Ignatieff lays it on 
	even thicker. The first clue is the title inside: "The Burden," an 
	unfortunate term echoing Rudyard Kipling. Ignatieff is clear that he 
	wants the United States to assume "the burden of empire."

	Throughout his piece, he acts as though the United States is 
	valiantly accepting some heavy responsibility that has been placed 
	on its slender shoulders by its predecessors. Twice he writes that 
	"America has inherited" a crisis or a "world scarred," as if it had 
	nothing to do with creating the crisis or scarring the world.

	In this, Ignatieff is much like Bush, who himself has a thing about 
	inheritance and loves to indulge in this recurrent fantasy of 
	gallantly answering the call of duty.

	"A new imperialism has reluctantly stepped," Ignatieff writes, 
	reifying the entire concept even as he tries to engender pity for it.

	In the context of Iraq, he sounds hauntingly like Bush, Cheney, and 
	Rumsfeld. After discounting other options for dealing with Saddam, 
	Ignatieff concludes: "That leaves us, but only as a reluctant last 
	resort, with regime change."

	But there is nothing "reluctant" (or "last resort," for that matter) 
	about the Bush Administration's lust for war against Baghdad.

	The reality of Bush's eager belligerence would not seem to bother 
	Ignatieff, however.

	"Imperial powers do not have the luxury of timidity, for timidity is 
	not prudence; it is a confession of weakness," he writes.

	Having "inherited" an empire, the United States has no choice, he 
	implies, but to crack the whip.

	Thus does the mainstream media counsel war.


             
                                - Outbreak Staff
	
         
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