---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Marx Laboratory <[email protected]>
Date: Fri, Apr 29, 2011 at 12:27 AM
Subject: Sleepwalking into the imperial dark
To: Marx Laboratory <[email protected]>
Sleepwalking into the imperial dark
*By Tom Engelhardt*
This can't end well.
But then, how often do empires end well, really? They live vampire-like by
feeding off others until, sooner or later, they begin to feed on themselves,
to suck their own blood, to hollow themselves out. Sooner or later, they
find themselves, as in our case, economically stressed and militarily
extended in wars they can't afford to win or lose.
Historians have certainly written about the dangers of overextended empires
and of endless war as a way of life, but there's something distant and
abstract about the patterns of history. It's quite another thing to take it
in when you're part of it; when, as they used to say in the overheated
1960s, you're in the belly of the beast.
I don't know what it felt like to be inside the Roman Empire in the long
decades, even centuries, before it collapsed, or to experience the waning
years of the Spanish empire, or the twilight of the Qing dynasty, or of
Imperial Britain as the sun first began to set, or even of the Soviet empire
before the troops came slinking home from Afghanistan, but at some point it
must have seemed at least a little like this - truly strange, like watching
a machine losing its parts. It must have seemed as odd and unnerving as it
does now to see a formerly mighty power enter a state of semi-paralysis at
home even as it staggers on blindly with its war-making abroad.
The United States is, of course, an imperial power, however much we might
prefer not to utter the word. We still have our globe-spanning array of
semi-client states; our military continues to garrison much of the planet;
and we are waging war abroad more continuously than at any time in memory.
Yet who doesn't sense that the sun is now setting on us?
Not so many years ago, we were proud enough of our global strength to
regularly refer to ourselves as the Earth's "sole superpower". In those
years, our president and his top officials dreamed of establishing a
worldwide Pax Americana, while making speeches and issuing official
documents proclaiming that the United States would be militarily "beyond
challenge" by any and all powers for eons to come. So little time has passed
and yet who speaks like that today? Who could?
*A country in need of Prozac*
Have you noticed, by the way, how repetitiously our president, various
presidential candidates, and others now insist that we are "the greatest
nation on Earth" (as they speak of the US military being "the finest
fighting force in the history of the world")? And yet, doesn't that phrase
leave ash in your mouth? Look at this country and its frustrations today and
tell me: does anyone honestly believe that anymore?
It wasn't a mistake that the fantasy avenger figure of Rambo became
immensely popular in the wake of defeat in Vietnam or that, unlike American
heroes of earlier decades, he had such a visibly, almost risibly overblown
musculature. As eye-candy, it was pure overcompensation for the obvious.
Similarly, when the United States was actually "the greatest" on this
planet, no one needed to say it over and over again.
Can there be any question that something big is happening here, even if we
don't quite know what it is because, unlike the peoples of past empires, we
never took pride in or even were able to think of ourselves as imperial? And
if you were indeed in denial that you lived in the belly of a great imperial
power, if like most Americans you managed to ignore the fact that we were
pouring our treasure into the military or setting up bases in countries that
few could have found on a map, then you would naturally experience the
empire going down as if through a glass darkly.
Nonetheless, the feelings that should accompany the experience of an
imperial power running off the rails aren't likely to disappear just because
analysis is lacking. Disillusionment, depression, and dismay flow ever more
strongly through the American bloodstream. Just look at any polling data on
whether this country, once the quintessential land of optimists, is heading
in "the right direction" or on "the wrong track," and you'll find that the
"wrong track" numbers are staggering, and growing by the month. On the rare
occasions when Americans have been asked by pollsters whether they think the
country is "in decline", the figures have been similarly over the top.
It's not hard to see why. A loss of faith in the American political system
is palpable. For many Americans, it's no longer "our government" but "the
bureaucracy". Washington is visibly in gridlock and incapable of doing much
of significance, while state governments, facing the "steepest decline in
state tax receipts on record", are, along with local governments, staggering
under massive deficits and cutting back in areas - education, policing,
firefighting - that matter to daily life.
Years ago, in the George W Bush era, I wanted to put a new word in our
domestic political vocabulary: "Republican'ts." It was my way of expressing
the feeling that something basic to this country - a "can do" spirit - was
seeping away. I failed, of course, and since then that "can't do" spirit has
visibly spread far beyond the Republican Party. Simply put, we're a country
in need of Prozac.
Facing the challenges of a world at the edge - from Japan to the Greater
Middle East, from a shaky global economic system to weather that has become
anything but entertainment - the United States looks increasingly incapable
of coping. It no longer invests in its young, or plans effectively for the
future, or sets off on new paths. It literally can't do. And this is not
just a domestic crisis, but part of imperial decline.
We just don't treat it as such, tending instead to deal with the foreign and
domestic as essentially separate spheres, when the connections between them
are so obvious. If you doubt this, just pull into your nearest gas station
and fill up the tank. Of course, who doesn't know that this country, once
such a generator of wealth, is now living with unemployment figures not seen
since the Great Depression, as well as unheard of levels of debt, that it's
hooked on foreign energy (and like most addicts has next to no capacity for
planning how to get off that drug), or that it's living through the worst
period of income inequality in modern history? And who doesn't know that a
crew of financial fabulists, corporate honchos, lobbyists, and politicians
have been fattening themselves off the faltering body politic?
And if you don't think any of this has anything to do with imperial power in
decline, ask yourself why the options for our country so often seem to have
shrunk to what our military is capable of, or that the only significant part
of the government whose budget is still on the rise is the Pentagon. Or why,
when something is needed, this administration, like its predecessor,
regularly turns to that same military.
Once upon a time, helping other nations in terrible times, for example,
would have been an obvious duty of the civil part of the US government.
Today, from Haiti to Japan, in such moments it's the US military that acts.
In response to the Japanese triple disaster of earthquake, tsunami, and
nuclear meltdown, for instance, the Pentagon has mounted a large-scale
recovery effort, involving 18,000 people, 20 US Navy ships, and even fuel
barges bringing fresh water for reactor-cooling efforts at the Fukushima
Daiichi nuclear complex. The effort has been given a military code name,
Operation Tomodachi (Japanese for "friend"), and is, among other things, an
obvious propaganda campaign meant to promote the usefulness of America's
archipelago of bases in that country.
Similarly, when the administration needs something done in the Middle East,
these days it's as likely to send Secretary of Defense Robert Gates - he
recently paid official visits to Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, and Egypt - as
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. And of course, as is typical, when a
grim situation in Libya worsened and something "humanitarian" was called
for, the Obama administration (along with NATO, the North Atlantic Treaty
Organization) threw air power at it.
Predictably, as in Afghanistan and the Pakistani borderlands, air power
failed to bring about speedy success. What's most striking is not that
Libyan ruler Muammar Gaddafi didn't instantly fall, or that the Libyan
military didn't collapse when significant parts of its tank and artillery
forces were taken out, or that the swift strikes meant to turn the tide have
already stretched into more than a month of no-fly zone NATO squabbling and
military stalemate (as the no-fly zone version of war against Saddam
Hussein's Iraq stretched to 12 years without ultimate success).
Imperially speaking, two things are memorable about the American military
effort in Libya. First, Washington doesn't seem to have the conviction of
what's left of its power, as its strange military dance in (and half-out of)
the air over that country indicates. Second, even in the military realm,
Washington is increasingly incapable of drawing lessons from its past
actions. As a result, its arsenal of potential tactics is made up largely of
those that have failed in the recent past. Innovation is no longer part of
empire.
*The uses of fear*
>From time to time, the US government's "Intelligence Community", or IC,
musters its collective savvy and plants its flag in the future in periodic
reports that go under the generic rubric of "Global Trends". The last of
these, Global Trends 2025, was prepared for a new administration taking
office in January 2009, and it was typical.
In a field once left to utopian or dystopian thinkers, pulp-fiction writers,
oddballs, visionaries, and even outright cranks, these compromise
bureaucratic documents break little ground and rock no boats, nor do they
predict global tsunamis. Better to forecast what the people you brief
already believe, and skip the oddballs with their strange hunches, the sorts
who might actually have a knack for recognizing the shock of the future
lurking in the present.
As group efforts, then, these reports tend to project the trends of the
present moment relatively seamlessly and reasonably reassuringly into the
future. For example, the last time around they daringly predicted a gradual,
15-year soft landing for a modestly declining America. ("Although the United
States is likely to remain the single most powerful actor, [the country's]
relative strength - even in the military realm - will decline and US
leverage will become more constrained.")
Even though it was assumedly being finished amid the global meltdown of
2008, nothing in it would have kept you up at night, sleepless and fretting.
More than 15 years into the future, our IC could imagine no wheels falling
off the American juggernaut, nothing that would make you wonder if this
country could someday topple off the nearest cliff. Twists, unpleasant
surprises, unhappy endings? Not for this empire, according to its corps of
intelligence analysts.
And the future being what it is, if you read that document now, you'd find
none of the more stunning events that have disrupted and radically altered
our world since late 2008: no Arab lands boiling with revolt, no Hosni
Mubarak under arrest with his sons in jail, no mass demonstrations in Syria,
no economies of peripheral European countries imploding down one by one, nor
a cluster of nuclear plants in Japan melting down.
You won't find once subservient semi-client states thumbing their noses at
Washington, not even in 2025. You won't, for example, find the Saudis in,
say 2011, openly exploring deeper relations with Russia and China as a
screw-you response to Washington's belated decision that Mubarak should
leave office, or Pakistani demands that the Central Intelligence Agency and
American special operations forces start scaling back activities on their
turf, or American officials practically pleading with an Iraqi government it
once helped put in power (and now moving ever closer to Iran) to please,
please, please let US troops stay past an agreed-upon withdrawal deadline of
December 31, 2011, or Afghan President Hamid Karzai publicly blaming the
Americans for the near collapse of his country's major bank in a cesspool of
corruption (in which his own administration was, of course, deeply
implicated).
Only two-plus years after Global Trends 2025 appeared, it doesn't take the
combined powers of the IC to know that American decline looks an awful lot
more precipitous and bumpier than imagined. But let's not just blame our
intelligence functionaries for not divining the future we're already in.
After all, they, too, were in the goldfish bowl, and when you're there, it's
always hard to describe the nearest cats.
Nor should we be surprised that, like so many other Americans, they too were
in denial.
After all, our leaders spent years organizing their version of the world
around a "Global War on Terror", when (despite the September 11, 2001,
attacks) terror was hardly America's most obvious challenge. It proved
largely a "war" against phantoms and fantasies, or against modest-sized
ragtag bands of enemies - even though it resulted in perfectly real
conflicts, absolutely genuine new bases abroad, significant numbers of
civilian dead, and the expansion of a secret army of operatives inside the
US military into a force of 13,000 or more operating in 75 countries.
The spasms of fear that coursed through our society in the near-decade after
9/11, and the enemy, "Islamic terrorism", to which those spasms were
attached are likely to look far different to us in retrospect. Yes, many
factors - including the terrifyingly apocalyptic look of 9/11 in New York
City - contributed to what happened. There was fear's usefulness in
prosecuting wars in the Greater Middle East that Bush and his top officials
found appealing. There was the way it ensured soaring budgets for the
Pentagon and the national security state. There was the way it helped the
politicians, lobbyists, and corporations hooked into a developing
homeland-security complex. There was the handy-dandy way it glued eyeballs
to a one-event-fits-all-sizes version of the world that made the media
happy, and there was the way it justified ever increasing powers for our
national security managers and ever lessening liberties for Americans.
But think of all that as only the icing on the cake. Looking back, those
terror fears coursing through the body politic will undoubtedly seem like
Rambo's muscles: a deflection from the country's deepest fears. They were,
in that sense, consoling. They allowed us to go on with our lives, to visit
Disney World, as Bush urged in the wake of 9/11 in order to prove our
all-American steadfastness.
Above all, even as our imperial wars in the oil heartlands of the planet
went desperately wrong, they allowed us not to think about empire or, until
the economy melted down in 2008, decline. They allowed us to focus our fears
on "them", not us. They ensured that, like the other great imperial power of
the Cold War era, when things began to spiral out of control we would indeed
sleepwalk right into the imperial darkness.
Now that we're so obviously there, the confusion is greater than ever.
Theoretically, none of this should necessarily be considered bad news, not
if you don't love empires and what they do. A post-imperial US could, of
course, be open to all sorts of possibilities for change that might be
exciting indeed.
Right now, though, it doesn't feel that way, does it? It makes me wonder:
could this be how it's always felt inside a great imperial power on the
downhill slide? Could this be what it's like to watch, paralyzed, as a
country on autopilot begins to come apart at the seams while still
proclaiming itself "the greatest nation on Earth"?
I don't know. But I do know one thing: this can't end well.
-------------------------------------
*Tom Engelhardt, co-founder of the American Empire Project, runs the Nation
Institute's TomDispatch.com. His latest book is The American Way of War: How
Bush's Wars Became Obama's (Haymarket Books).*
------------------------------------
--
You cannot build anything on the foundations of caste. You cannot build up a
nation, you cannot build up a morality. Anything that you will build on the
foundations of caste will crack and will never be a whole.
-AMBEDKAR
http://venukm.blogspot.com
http://www.shelfari.com/kmvenuannur
http://kmvenuannur.livejournal.com
--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups
"Green Youth Movement" group.
To post to this group, send an email to [email protected].
To unsubscribe from this group, send email to
[email protected].
For more options, visit this group at
http://groups.google.com/group/greenyouth?hl=en-GB.
