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Review
by Richard Cummings
 The
rantings by American pundits such as Thomas Friedman, as well as
by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, about the irrelevancy and
spoiler role of the garlic eating, wine-quaffing nation of France
misses the point entirely. All the talk about the meaning of perfidious,
the passion to be at the center of the world that can never be fulfilled,
and how India, and not France, belongs on the Security Council,
fails to take into consideration that France is a country with a
gigantic economy, with huge companies with vast resources that are
gobbling up banks in the west of the United States and various enterprises
elsewhere around the globe. And even as word spreads about the inevitability
of the American empire, Air Bus has overtaken Boeing in international
sales.
Perhaps
Brecht would have understood the current situation with regard to
Iraq best. Bush wants the lion’s share of the Iraqi spoils for America
(the correct meaning of "the lion’s share" is all of it,
not the biggest portion,), but France and Russia have prior claims,
by virtue of contracts they entered into with the government of
Saddam Hussein, if in violation of the embargo. After all, Haliburton
and Dick Cheney had no problem doing business with Saddam Hussein’s
Iraq, so why not France? They want those contracts recognized after
Saddam falls, not some vague promise that the oil fields will be
held in trust. The French and Russians have dealt with the Americans
long enough to know that such a promise is as ephemeral as the dew
on the Texas grass. Which is precisely why they have enlisted the
Germans to join with them to create obstacles to Bush’s plans for
a second Security Council resolution allowing him to give the go-ahead
to Rumsfeld to pull the trigger.
The
issue at stake is how does one define the empire that rules the
planet earth. DeGaulle envisioned the resurrection of the Holy Roman
Empire, with an alliance of France and Germany at its head, to counter
the power of America once the Soviet threat was eliminated. The
ever expanding European Union is now courting Russia as an ally,
to gain access to the vast mineral wealth of the Central Asian republics
that were once part of the old Soviet empire, and where America
is now playing the new Great Game to win control of the oil and
gas. There is no pretense in this game that human rights count.
All of the Central Asian republics are brutal dictatorships. In
Uzbekistan, they have a prison so vile it is know as "the place
from which no one returns." Don’t tell that to Jeff Goldblum,
the star of a new movie about the Uzbeks leading the glorious fight
against Al Queda.
Before
France agrees to abstain in the Security Council, along with Russia,
it will extract from Bush more than an empty promise. Bush will
have to sign in blood that France will get its fair share of the
spoils, and that Russia will also be present at the table, not just
America and Britain, which Tony Blair has defined as America’s pet
rock in the imperial stakes. Otherwise, America will have to act
in the face of a Security Council resolution that could upset the
American game plan, or at least, force it to veto what the rest
of the world not totally corrupted by cynicism, would perceive as
a last ditch effort to stop a bloody war that would destroy the
United Nations as a legitimate vehicle for international discourse
and the enforcement of international law. In any event, what is
at play is a dynamic that has thrown the entire field of post-colonial
studies into the junk heap of history, as imperialism is resurrected
with bravado. American anti-colonialism was always a mask to win
support of Third World countries from Soviet and Chinese inspired
Communist revolution. Once that menace was defeated, it was not
long before America stripped itself of that mask as evidenced by
the new National Security Strategy, which purports to allow no other
country or alliance of countries from usurping America’s role as
the sole super power on earth.
It
is just this Pax Americana that Andrew Bacevich analyses with such
panache and graceful erudition in his startlingly daring work, American
Empire – The Realities and Consequences of U.S. Diplomacy.
Bacevich comes to this self-appointed task as a product of West
Point and after a career in the American military. Armed with a
Ph.D. from Princeton, he began to rethink the orthodoxy of Cold
War history as set forth by George Kennan, as a professor of international
relations at Boston University and as the Director of its Center
for International Relations. He has produced a work of seminal importance
that rises to the level of a "must read" for anyone concerned
with the role of America in the world.
To
cut to the chase, it is Bacevich’s thesis that the American empire
was no accident; that it was the product of a concerted effort arising
from a vision that goes back to the so-called Founding Fathers.
In resurrecting the works of two revisionist American historians,
Charles Beard and William Appleman Williams, Bacevich acknowledges
that much of what has been written about the Cold War has missed
the essential truth that America was on the course of empire as
a result of concerted and conscious policy decisions, using every
excuse it could get its hands on, including two world wars, to expand
its global reach. Using preemptive strikes under false pretenses
when necessary, as with Spain, to annex the Spanish empire, to delaying
entry into global conflicts long enough so potential competitors
would be weakened, and then coming to the rescue to clean up the
mess and collect the spoils as the unchallenged leader of the world,
American became what it always longed to be, the new Rome.
Bacevich
sees American involvement in the Balkans in the same light, as well
as in its role in the Gulf War under Bush the Elder. "As a
feat of arms, the American-led victory in Desert Storm might qualify
as the most overblown achievement since the U.S. Navy, nearly a
century before, handily dispatched a rickety Spanish fleet in Manila
Bay," he writes. "Like Admiral Dewey’s storied victory,
Desert Storm appears in retrospect far less momentous than it seemed
at first blush while giving rise to outcomes far different from
and more problematic than those anticipated when the smoke of battle
first cleared. Above all – and contrary to expectations –
the liberation of Kuwait, like the naval action off Manila ended
up being decidedly peripheral to the era that it inaugurated."
Exploding
the myth of a liberal conservative dichotomy with regard to the
American imperial enterprise, Bacevich makes it clear that Bill
Clinton was as much a part of this project as the Bushes, attempting
only to put a human face on the empire. At that, he pulled the plug
on a human rights condition for aid to Colombia, the site of a Marxist
insurrection that is likely to become into American’s next Vietnam.
Bacevich
concludes: "The question that urgently demands attention – the
question that Americans can no longer afford to dodge – is not whether
the United States has become an imperial power. The question is
what sort of Empire they intend theirs to be. For policy makers
to persist in pretending otherwise – to indulge in myths of American
innocence or fantasies about unlocking the secrets of history – is
to increase the likelihood that the answers they come up with will
be wrong. That way lies not just the demise of the American empire
but great danger for what used to be known as the American republic."
But,
of course, as the rise and fall of the Roman Empire teaches us,
empire and the republic are incompatible, just as global intervention
and free market economics cannot ultimately be reconciled. As they
like to say in New Hampshire, "Live free or die."
February
11, 2003
Richard
Cummings [send
him mail] taught international law at the Haile Selassie
I University and before that, was Attorney-Advisor with the Office
of General Counsel of the Near East South Asia region of U.S.A.I.D,
where he was responsible for the legal work pertaining to the aid
program in Israel, Jordan, Pakistan and Afghanistan. He is the author
of a new novel, The
Immortalists, as well as
The Pied Piper – Allard K. Lowenstein and the Liberal Dream,
and the comedy, Soccer Moms From Hell. He
holds a Ph.D. in Social and Political Sciences from Cambridge University
and is a member of the Association of Former Intelligence Officers.
Copyright
© 2003 LewRockwell.com
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Cummings Archives
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