Where Majors Fear To Tread Telegraph.co.uk

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The Continuity of Empire: Obama's Pentagon

Ray McGoverns pleads with the president to not send more American soldiers to Afghanistan.
But as he does, The Guardian reports:

Islamabad - The US military is investigating claims that more than two dozen Afghan civilians were killed during an attack on militants [on Monday]. The issue has badly undermined support for the international coalition and President Hamid Karzai.

And The Washington Post reports:

Two remote U.S. missile strikes that killed at least 20 people at suspected terrorist hideouts in northwestern Pakistan yesterday offered the first tangible sign of President Obama's commitment to sustained military pressure on the terrorist groups there, even though Pakistanis broadly oppose such unilateral U.S. actions.

Ron Jacobs, wonders why Gate's is still there:

The American people did not elect the Pentagon. They elected Barack Obama based a good deal on his promise to get US troops out of Iraq sooner rather than later. Since he was elected, Mr. Obama has hedged on this promise. Since he was inaugurated, the Pentagon and its civilian boss Robert Gates have hedged even more. Now, they insist, US troops should remain until the Iraqis hold a national election that is as of today not even scheduled. Then, even after that election is held, the departure of some US troops should depend on the outcome of the election. In other words, the Pentagon and Defense Department are telling Mr. Obama that no US troops should leave Iraq unless the election results meet the expectations of Washington.

This is exactly why Robert Gates should be removed from his position.

But rather than getting rid of Gates, it looks as though Gates is actually calling the shots. As the LA Times reports:

William Lynn III, the top lobbyist for Raytheon Co., was chosen by Obama and Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates for the position of deputy secretary of Defense.

The new ethics rules banned lobbyists from serving in the administration. But the executive order allowed waivers to let some former lobbyists take government jobs if doing so was in the public interest.
...
Gates pushed hard for Lynn's appointment and favored him over other officials suggested by the Obama transition team. At a news conference Thursday, Gates said he was impressed with Lynn and argued he should get the job despite the lobbying ban.

"I asked that an exception be made because I felt that he could play the role of the deputy in a better manner than anybody else that I saw," Gates said.

And this from Obama's Admiral:

"He [Blair] said that the Obama administration would carry out a review of interrogation policy, and that both military and intelligence interrogators would follow a uniform standard. Under questioning, however, he said he believed that some interrogation procedures and methods ought to remain secret so potential adversaries cannot train to resist them."

Obama and the "Graveyard of Empires"

Historian Gary Leupp on pentagon plans to send an additional 30,000 troops to Afghanistan:

this will increase the total number of foreign troops in Afghanistan to 93,000, which is just shy of the 100,000 that the Soviets had in Afghanistan at their peak in 1987. He points out that the Soviets had the advantage of supply lines from the immediately neighboring USSR, and including numerous ethnic Uzbeks and Tajiks who could speak local languages and had some understanding of local culture, could not repress the rag-tag CIA-supplied guerrillas and secure control of the country... Does Obama, often described as lacking knowledge of foreign affairs, and praised (by all the wrong people) for reaching out to (all the wrong) “experienced” foreign policy wonks, really believe that he can succeed in Afghanistan where so many others have failed?

And he points to the real objective behind the troop increase:

Most importantly, it can finally get that oil pipeline done---the one that’s to run from the Caspian Sea through Turkmenistan and Afghanistan, Pakistan and India to the Indian Ocean bypassing Russia and unfriendly Iran. The deal was signed in December 2002 but construction has been stymied by the situation on the ground in Afghanistan. That pipeline is, I believe, the big prize.

The war on Iraq has been in my opinion less “a war for oil” actually promoted by Big Oil than a war engineered by neoconservative ideologues to reconfigure Southwest Asia for longterm U.S. and Israeli geopolitical advantage. But it’s in fact been disastrous for the interests of U.S. imperialism, and bitterly divided the ruling class. It’s produced the highly unusual situation where one faction of that class has bet its money on an African-American named Barack Hussein Osama (accused of “socialism” by his right wing critics) to rectify the situation. While I don’t expect a precipitous withdrawal from Iraq under what will in fact be a center-right administration, the focus will be on the competition for control over Central Asian oil and gas. That means a degree of control over Afghanistan that has eluded Washington since the invasion of 2001.

The Heart of Darkness

Chris Hedges offers a penetrating review of Joseph Conrad:

Conrad saw cruelty as an integral part of human nature. This cruelty arrives, however, in different forms. Stable, industrialized societies, awash in wealth and privilege, can construct internal systems that mask this cruelty, although it is nakedly displayed in their imperial outposts.

Those who believe that history is a progressive march toward human perfectibility, and that they have the moral right to force this progress on others, no longer know what it is to be human. In the name of the noblest virtues they sink to the depths of criminality and moral depravity... The great institutions of European imperial powers and noble ideals of European enlightenment, as Conrad saw in the Congo, were covers for rapacious greed, exploitation and barbarity.

Empire: reflections on one of history's most enduring political structures

My teacher's (Gordon Chang) teacher (Arno J Mayer, emeritus professor of history at Princeton University) warns against any premature obituaries for American empire. In his view we have "Two Parties, One Imperial Mission: The US Empire will Survive Bush." In his analysis the Mid East is the fulcrum of world power - and when it comes to US ME policy he sees only continuity and bi-partisan consensus.

Sooner or late we will have to wrestle honestly with this problem of Empire. One thoughtful effort (though perhaps not completely "honest") in this direction is the eminent historical sociologist Charles Maier's recent book Among Empires: American Ascendancy and its Predecessors (Harvard UP: 2006). Maier seeks to define empire, explain why they emerge, and whether the US constitutes such a formation.

He defines empire:

"Empire is a form of political organization in which the social elements which rule in the dominant state - the 'mother country' or the 'metropole' - creates a network of allied elites in regions abroad who accept subordination in international affairs in return for the security of their position in their own administrative unit (the 'colony' or - in spatial terms, the 'periphery')" (p. 7)

Throughout most of the work he seeks to exorcise the ghost of Marx. When seeking to explain empire he attempts to move beyond economic theories of imperialism- toward a more encompassing theory of the psychic and sentimental advantages of power for its own sake - but he definitely gives Hobson, Hilferding, Lenin and Luxemburg their due.

Most importantly, he asks some very important questions:

“The issue is to discern what long-term implications for international and domestic society and politics arise if we have in fact become an empire. Do we safeguard or subvert our domestic institutions? Do we make world politics more peaceful or more violent? Do we make it more or less likely that the peoples of poorer nations will share in, or be excluded from, economic development and welfare?”

But when it comes to answering these questions, he chooses to punt. He ultimately avoids "claiming that the United States is or is not an empire," as such claims tend to be “polarizing” (again trying to exorcise the ghost of Marx). He ultimately concludes that despite his masterful reflections on the world history of empire- he can not decide whether the bloodshed associated with raising imperial frontiers is justified by the "order and peace" they bring about.

And what he is most concerned about are the domestic implications of empire: the concentration of power in the hands of the imperial presidency- the tendency towards an authoritarian political culture. But when push comes to shove, he suggests that empire may be a necessary alternative to anarchy- and that there is nothing predetermined about the Empire's corrosive affect on Republican values and institutions- America just might be different: America may be exceptional. Despite his claims to agnosticism, these suggestions betray a deeply conservative spirit and his close association with unapologetic imperial booster Niall Ferguson (they co-teach courses in international history at Harvard).

Boston University prof of History and IR Andrew Bacevich has no patience for this kind of waffling. In his review he writes:

Without meaning to be disrespectful, this is not good enough. The United States has pursued its “duckish” or “duck-like” course for many decades now. The arrangements that Professor Maier describes as an empire of consumption have existed at least since the 1970s. There is no need to speculate on how empire might affect American democracy; there is every need to assess how empire has affected and is affecting our democracy – the evidence continues to accumulate before our eyes.

So come on, Professor Maier, give it to us straight.

Speaking of Bacevich, he wrote the introduction to the 2007 reprint of William Appleman Williams' Empire as a Way of Life (1980). I hope to review Williams soon. But for now, Bacevich's autobiographical comments are worth posting:

"I never had the privilege of meeting Williams. When as a graduate student I was introduced to his work, the encounter was a disconcerting one. During that interval between the fall of Saigon and the Iran hostage crisis when I attended graduate school, history departments still reflected the divisions that had occurred during the prior decade. Ideological barricades remained much in evidence and the pressure to choose sides was great. Seeing myself as a conservative (of sorts) [and as an officer in the US Army, I might add], I instinctively aligned myself with the defenders of orthodoxy. From this perspective, Williams, the self-described radical who flirted with Marxism and appeared oblivious to to the crimes of Stalin and Mao, became something of a personal nemesis.

But over time my understanding of politics evolved so too did my appreciation of Williams... [Bacevich began to realize that] At root, empire as a way of life is an exercise in evasion. Americans look abroad to avoid looking within...

Well, it's time to face the music, curb our profligacy, and start paying our bills. Or as [the Angry Prophet] Jeremiah [Bacevich's name for Williams] wrote back in 1980, "Its time to turn in the credit cards and stop passing the buck onto the next generation."

The jig is up. Let Americans heed the prophet's words - or suffer the consequences."

Bacevich wrote these words one year before he lost his son 1st Lt. Andrew John Bacevich (7/8/1979 - 5/13/07) to the Iraq War. So his own personal tragedy cannot explain his intolerance for the brand of Romanticism that leads Maier to write: "the elections [in Iraq] that took place in January and December 2005 suggested that American aspirations had awakened democratic resonances."

This kind of romanticism underwrites murder and mayhem.

Bacevich on the other hand writes with all of the clear-eyed realism of one who carried a rifle for more than twenty years. For him the blood that flows at the edge of empire is anything but Maier's theoretical abstraction.

Hunt on Maier

Maier responds to his critics.