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Posted on 09/30/2011 9:50:06 PM PDT by rabscuttle385
People are reluctant to admit what they are when what they are is considered bad. Alcoholics often have a laundry list of excuses for their alcoholism. Adulterers often justify their cheating by blaming inattentive spouses. Murderers often plead that insanity or bad parenting is the real culprit.
Denying or excusing one’s own guilt is a permanent facet of human nature.
Understandably, Americans have long shirked the idea that their country is an empire. This is an attitude that dates back to the founding era. As Daniel McCarthy, the editor of The American Conservative, has noted:
Jefferson may have mused about an empire of liberty, but the founding generation and their sons rejected the imperial ways of Europe: America would be an exception to the entangling alliances of the European state system. Unlike every great power of the Old World, America would not seek hegemony. Were she ever to become “dictatress of the world,” John Quincy Adams warned, “she would be no longer the ruler of her own spirit.”
Needless to say, much has changed about America and the world since the 18th and 19th centuries, but even today our rhetoric reflects our historic antipathy to the concept of empire. Defending the Iraq and Afghanistan wars during his 2004 State of the Union address, President Bush said: “Our country does not seek the expansion of territory … [but] to enlarge the realm of liberty … We have no desire to dominate, no ambitions of empire …”
Bush’s denial that America is an empire has been reflected in some recent opinion columns. The Wall Street Journal’s Bret Stephens opined in a piece earlier this month titled “Ron Paul’s Fantasy Empire” that the amount of troops America has stationed in hundreds of bases around the world, often cited by the Texas congressman, are actually few in number and therefore relatively insignificant. This week, columnist Steven Crowder of Andrew Breitbart’s BigGoverment.com seconded President Bush’s point, saying that America “is no empire at all. The United States boldly walks in through the front door of these countries, provides unprecedented aid and/or overthrows their evil governments in an attempt to rightfully give power back to its citizens …”
To note that America is a different or unconventional empire is one thing. But to deny it altogether, well — doth protest too much.
In 2003, The Atlantic Monthly’s Robert Kaplan weighed in on the subject: “It is a cliché these days to observe that the United States now possesses a global empire — different from Britain’s and Rome’s but an empire nonetheless. It is time to move beyond a statement of the obvious.”
Kaplan is not the first to state or notice the obvious. In a 1969 televised debate with leftist intellectual Noam Chomsky, National Review founder William F. Buckley explained the necessity of American empire after World War II: “We became an imperial power, Mr. Chomsky, in the sense that we inherited primary responsibility for any chain of action that might involve us in a third world war …” Buckley’s point was not that America wasn’t an empire, only that it was right or necessary to be such for a time — a point of view shared by a majority of conservatives throughout the Cold War era.
But should America remain an empire forever? Conservative author and philosopher Russell Kirk asked at the end of the Cold War in 1991:
But there remains an American Empire, still growing — though expanding through the acquisition of client states, rather than through settlement of American populations abroad … In short, although we never talk about our empire, a tremendous American Empire has come into existence — if, like the Roman Empire, in a kind of fit of absence of mind. No powerful counterpoise to the American hegemony seems to remain, what with the enfeebling of the U.S.S.R.
And this is where we stand today. It is one thing to say that America was justified in becoming an empire after World War II, and it is one thing to debate today whether we should remain one. But it is quite another thing — even dangerous — to pretend that America is now anything less than imperial in its scope, psyche and affordability.
Or as Ronald Reagan’s former budget director David Stockman put it bluntly in 2010:
The Cold War is long over … The wars of occupation are almost over and were complete failures — Afghanistan and Iraq. The American empire is done. There are no real seriously armed enemies left in the world that can possibly justify an $800 billion national defense and security establishment, including Homeland Security.
Just as liberal Democrats don’t like to be criticized as “socialist” even when conservatives almost uniformly recognize them as behaving as such, it is understandable that most Americans don’t like to think of their government as behaving in an imperial manner. No one wants to believe the worst of themselves.
But just as an alcoholic must begin the recovery process by admitting that he has a problem, we must question whether our country has become abnormal or at least out-of-step with its founding principles. In fact, it is long past time to ask such questions.
Were the founders right about empire? Must America remain one? Can we afford to?
And can we finally admit it?
Meh...
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We do sit and smackdown troublemakers where they come from, instead of here. Which is fine with me.
If you can't run with the big dogs, stay on the porch. But don't call us imperial, when we're not trying to expand an empire.
That's just projection of what the mohamedeans are trying to do, bringing Islam (submission) to the entire world.
Leave the US alone, and we won't try to kill you. That's pretty simple.
/johnny
Is this a “blame America First” thread?
Too many words, by one.
“AMERICA FIRST”.
And what is so bad about empire? Or having armed forces that spend scarcely more than a bloated and inefficient public education system. Most Americans who hated the British Empire forgot that we prospered in the world made safe by the Royal Navy.
In contrast to the United States, I am not familiar with any empire that has every existed that responded to erstwhile allies by threatening to pull their troops from the ally’s land.
America has, as an ‘Imperial’ power, been quite literally, the single most benevolent power in the history of Earth.
Which makes the self-destruction called “free trade”, all the more tragic.
Well, we are not an empire in the same way that Spain, Holland, France, and Britain were, largely mercantilist in character. In a way we were more like Russia, landbased. But we were not landlocked. The whole history of the Russian empire would have been different of they had gained control of the Straits. What might have been can be seen that in 1912, Russia sent almost as much grain to the world as the United States. though the Bosporous and the Dardanelles.
The empire is not American or even empire. But it is an economic tyranny run by citizens of the world.
While they murdered, robbed and enslaved millions of Irish, Indian, and Africans (my family is Irish so you know my bias).
Worse can be said about the Romans. If they had done only those things, but like the Romans they left a much more benevolent legacy. Compare theirs with Genghis Kahn’s empire. Compare it with the Turkish empire which at one time was larger than that of the Romans.
After they set up “our” gangsters to run the place. Naturally they don’t want the troops to leave or their people will exact revenge.
Note: I’m love our dear country for the wonderful things we have done for the world. But when we stink, I personally like to call the stink what it is.
At least it is until you're declared an "enemy combatant" by The One or his designee.
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Jack Hunter is still germ chasing third-way wannabee who wants to get with any leftist he can find, hoping this time it will be different, while infecting as many conservatives as he can find.
Yeah, that’s why we still lord it over Germany, Japan, Cuba, the Philippines, Korea, Italy, Spain, Mexico, Iraq and France and all their economic activity goes into our coffers. [snort!]
Do our foreign alliances, or if your point of view is otherwise, "entanglements," make us more or less secure? Are their costs bearable, are they justifiable? Or, are the costs and risks so great that they actually weaken our security?
The author rehearses Bush's justification for Iraq and Afghanistan, not only the justification for the wars themselves but the articulated war aim as follows:
Defending the Iraq and Afghanistan wars during his 2004 State of the Union address, President Bush said: “Our country does not seek the expansion of territory … [but] to enlarge the realm of liberty … We have no desire to dominate, no ambitions of empire …”
So, in order to at least genuflect in the direction of our antipathy to empire, we said we were building democracy in Iraq. Why? Because democracies do not make war on each other, in other words so the theory goes, to make democracies of Iraq and Afghanistan is to make us safer.
What exactly was the syllogism that led us from a raid conducted by 19 terrorists with box cutters to sacrificing thousands of lives and tens of thousands of limbs and $1 trillion in Iraq and Afghanistan? The line of argument that convinced me at the time to support making war in Iraq was that Saddam Hussein was bent on securing a nuclear weapon which he was liable to turn over to terrorists who could easily smuggle it into the United States and destroy one or more cities in the homeland. It is not clear to me that in signing onto a war for that purpose we were knowingly as citizens signing on to a war to make Iraq safe for democracy. Was it necessary to occupy the country and buy the China because we broke it?
It was clear that containment of Hussein was not really working, the food for oil scandal alone proved that, therefore it was necessary to take out the regime, but was it necessary to build a new democracy?
I had no trouble whatsoever in supporting a war in Afghanistan to the degree necessary to destroy the Taliban regime and deny the Taliban the geography to conduct training camps. Was it necessary to back a corrupt regime in Kabul to do this? Obviously, the Taliban is operating in the Waziristan area of Pakistan and it is inconceivable that we would invade their to build a new democracy. Rather, we are attempting to police the Taliban with drone strikes-just as, gasp, Joe Biden recommended.
Similarly, we just killed Anwar al-Awlaki with a drone strike without anyone suggesting that we should go into Yemen, occupy it, and construct a democracy there. The problem is that Al Qaeda can move its base of operations to any number of countries simply by buying a few commercial airline tickets. We cannot make war on them all, occupy them all and make democracies of them all.
To attempt to do so would certainly guarantee that we will lose the war on terror and I can think of no strategy which would be more profitable to the Islamists then to suck us into interminable wars which both bleed and bankrupt us. At the end of the day we will probably witness the reversion of Afghanistan and Iraq to the Muslim norm.
I believe that we can afford to wage war by drone strike and that certainly is not to wage imperial warfare.
All of this should be the occasion for us to rethink our entire strategy and tactics in the war against Islamic terrorism. The first hypothesis of that analysis should be that we cannot afford to continue doing what we are doing. Worse, doing what we are doing is hastening the day when the homeland will be struck as it bankrupts the country and enervates our armed forces and our intelligence forces.
It is not so much a question of what is moral but a question of what works.
Just like Rome was a de facto empire well before the wars with Carthage, America has been an empire since 1803. We have a different ideology than past empires - professing the freedom of the individual. And we have armies in dozens of countries around the world to make sure those countries and their neighbors adhere to that ideology or else. We believe that states which adhere to that ideology will be generally benign to our interests and that is all we require as part of the empire. Woe to those who hold substantial other interests.
This is historically a practical necessity: You are either an empire or you are subservient to someone else’s empire. America proper, as 6% of the world, is far too small to concede the other 94% to someone else’s ideology and interests and remain viable.
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