The Blog
Recent Posts by American Empire Project Authors and other Influencers
The Bush Legacy (Take One)
Tom Engelhardt
"Give me your tired, your poor,Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,I lift my lamp beside the golden door!" — Emma Lazarus, 1883 If you don’t mind thinking about the Bush legacy a year early, there are worse places to begin than with the case of Erla Ósk Arnardóttir Lilliendahl. Admittedly, she isn’t an ideal "tempest-tost" candidate for Emma Lazarus’ famous lines engraved on a bronze plaque inside the Statue of Liberty. After all, she flew to New York City with her girlfriends, first class, from her native Iceland, to partake of "the Christmas spirit." She was drinking white wine en route and, as she put it, "look[ing] forward to go shopping, eat good food, and enjoy life." On an earlier vacation trip, back in 1995, she had overstayed her visa by three weeks, a modest enough infraction, […]
Death Squads, Disappearances, and Torture -- from Latin America to Iraq
Greg Grandin
The world is made up, as Captain Segura in Graham Greene’s 1958 novel Our Man in Havana put it, of two classes: the torturable and the untorturable. "There are people," Segura explained, "who expect to be tortured and others who would be outraged by the idea." Then — so Greene thought — Catholics, particularly Latin American Catholics, were more torturable than Protestants. Now, of course, Muslims hold that distinction, victims of a globalized network of offshore and outsourced imprisonment coordinated by Washington and knitted together by secret flights, concentration camps, and black-site detention centers. The CIA’s deployment of Orwellian "Special Removal Units" to kidnap terror suspects in Europe, Canada, the Middle East, and elsewhere and the whisking of these "ghost prisoners" off to Third World countries to be tortured goes, today, by the term "extraordinary rendition," a hauntingly apt phrase. "To render" means not just to hand over, but to […]
How the Bush Administration "Endures"By Tom Engelhardt The title of the agreement, signed by President Bush and Iraqi Prime Minister Maliki in a "video conference" last week, and carefully labeled as a "non-binding" set of principles for further negotiations, was a mouthful: a "Declaration of Principles for a Long-Term Relationship of Cooperation and Friendship Between the Republic of Iraq and the United States of America." Whew! Words matter, of course. They seldom turn up by accident in official documents or statements. Last week, in the first reports on this "declaration," one of those words that matter caught my attention. Actually, it wasn’t in the declaration itself, where the key phrase was "long-term relationship" (something in the lives of private individuals that falls just short of a marriage), but in a "fact-sheet" issued by the White House. Here’s the relevant line: "Iraq’s leaders have asked for an enduring relationship with America, […]
The Road from Washington to Karachi to Nuclear Anarchy
Jonathan Schell
The journey to the martial law just imposed on Pakistan by its self-appointed president, the dictator Pervez Musharraf, began in Washington on September 11, 2001. On that day, it so happened, Pakistan’s intelligence chief, Lt. General Mahmood Ahmed, was in town. He was summoned forthwith to meet with Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage, who gave him perhaps the earliest preview of the global Bush doctrine then in its formative stages, telling him, "You are either one hundred percent with us or one hundred percent against us." The next day, the administration, dictating to the dictator, presented seven demands that a Pakistan that wished to be "with us" must meet. These concentrated on gaining its cooperation in assailing Afghanistan’s Taliban regime, which had long been nurtured by the Pakistani intelligence services in Afghanistan and had, of course, harbored Osama Bin Laden and his al-Qaeda training camps. Conspicuously missing was any […]
Noam Chomsky
Neoconservative stalwart Bill Kristol recently suggested in the Weekly Standard that, in response to “Iranian aggression,” the United States should seriously consider “a military strike against Iranian nuclear facilities.”[i] As Kristol certainly knows, the shoe is on the other foot. The Iranian government has been proposing negotiations for years. We now know, and he undoubtedly knows, that in 2003 the Khatami government, the moderate government, but with the approval of the hard-line clerical rulers, offered to negotiate all outstanding issues with the United States. That included nuclear issues. It also included a two-state settlement for the Israel-Palestine problem, which, as I mentioned, Iran officially supports. The Bush administration didn’t reject the negotiation offer. It didn’t even reply to it. Its response was to censure the Swiss diplomat who brought the offer.[ii] It’s the United States that’s refusing negotiations. The big hoopla that Iran is now willing to negotiate seriously because […]
Intellectual Fallacies of the War on Terror
Chalmers Johnson
[This essay is a review of The Matador’s Cape, America’s Reckless Response to Terror by Stephen Holmes (Cambridge University Press, 367 pp., $30).] There are many books entitled "A Guide for the Perplexed," including Moses Maimonides’ 12th century treatise on Jewish law and E. F. Schumacher’s 1977 book on how to think about science. Book titles cannot be copyrighted. A Guide for the Perplexed might therefore be a better title for Stephen Holmes’ new book than the one he chose, The Matador’s Cape: America’s Reckless Response to Terror. In his perhaps overly clever conception, the matador is the terrorist leadership of al Qaeda, taunting a maddened United States into an ultimately fatal reaction. But do not let the title stop you from reading the book. Holmes has written a powerful and philosophically erudite survey of what we think we understand about the 9/11 attacks — and how and why the […]
Fortress Big Apple, 2007
Nick Turse
One day in August, I walked into the Daniel Patrick Moynihan United States Courthouse in lower Manhattan. Nearly three years before I had been locked up, about two blocks away, in "the Tombs" — the infamous jail then named the Bernard B. Kerik Complex for the now-disgraced New York City Police Commissioner. You see, I am one of the demonstrators who was illegally arrested by the New York City Police Department (NYPD) during the protests against the 2004 Republican National Convention (RNC). My crime had been — in an effort to call attention to the human toll of America’s wars — to ride the subway, dressed in black with the pallor of death about me (thanks to cornstarch and cold cream), and an expression to match, sporting a placard around my neck that read: WAR DEAD. I was with a small group and our plan was to travel from Union […]
Wall Street Brokers, Ivy League Professors, Soldiers of Fortune, Ad Men, Newsmen, Stunt Men, Second-Story Men, and Con Men on Active Duty for the United States
Chalmers Johnson
This essay is a review of Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA by Tim Weiner (Doubleday, 702 pp., $27.95). The American people may not know it but they have some severe problems with one of their official governmental entities, the Central Intelligence Agency. Because of the almost total secrecy surrounding its activities and the lack of cost accounting on how it spends the money covertly appropriated for it within the defense budget, it is impossible for citizens to know what the CIA’s approximately 17,000 employees do with, or for, their share of the yearly $44 billion–$48 billion or more spent on "intelligence." This inability to account for anything at the CIA is, however, only one problem with the Agency and hardly the most serious one either. There are currently at least two criminal trials underway in Italy and Germany against several dozen CIA officials for felonies committed in […]
How the Pentagon Came to Own the Earth, Seas, and Skies
Nick Turse
Recently, the Wall Street Journal reported on a proposal, championed by Defense Secretary Robert Gates, to reduce the number of U.S. troops in Iraq in exchange for bipartisan Congressional support for the long-term (read: more or less permanent) garrisoning of that country. The troops are to be tucked away on "large bases far from Iraq’s major cities." This plan sounded suspiciously similar to one revealed by Thom Shanker and Eric Schmitt in the New York Times on April 19, 2003, just as U.S. troops were preparing to enter Baghdad. Headlined "Pentagon Expects Long-Term Access to Four Key Bases in Iraq," it laid out a U.S. plan for: a long-term military relationship with the emerging government of Iraq, one that would grant the Pentagon access to…. perhaps four bases in Iraq that could be used in the future: one at the international airport just outside Baghdad; another at Tallil, near Nasiriya […]
Is Imperial Liquidation Possible for America?
Chalmers Johnson
In politics, as in medicine, a cure based on a false diagnosis is almost always worthless, often worsening the condition that is supposed to be healed. The United States, today, suffers from a plethora of public ills. Most of them can be traced to the militarism and imperialism that have led to the near-collapse of our Constitutional system of checks and balances. Unfortunately, none of the remedies proposed so far by American politicians or analysts addresses the root causes of the problem. According to an NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll, released on April 26, 2007, some 78% of Americans believe their country to be headed in the wrong direction. Only 22% think the Bush administration’s policies make sense, the lowest number on this question since October 1992, when George H. W. Bush was running for a second term — and lost. What people don’t agree on are the reasons for […]
Putting the Iran Crisis in Context
Noam Chomsky
Unsurprisingly, George W. Bush’s announcement of a "surge" in Iraq came despite the firm opposition to any such move of Americans and the even stronger opposition of the (thoroughly irrelevant) Iraqis. It was accompanied by ominous official leaks and statements — from Washington and Baghdad — about how Iranian intervention in Iraq was aimed at disrupting our mission to gain victory, an aim which is (by definition) noble. What then followed was a solemn debate about whether serial numbers on advanced roadside bombs (IEDs) were really traceable to Iraq; and, if so, to that country’s Revolutionary Guards or to some even higher authority. This "debate" is a typical illustration of a primary principle of sophisticated propaganda. In crude and brutal societies, the Party Line is publicly proclaimed and must be obeyed — or else. What you actually believe is your own business and of far less concern. In societies where […]
Billboarding the Iraqi Disaster
Anthony Arnove
As you read this, we’re four years from the moment the Bush administration launched its shock-and-awe assault on Iraq, beginning 48 months of remarkable, non-stop destruction of that country … and still counting. It’s an important moment for taking stock of Operation Iraqi Freedom. Here is a short rundown of some of what George Bush’s war and occupation has wrought: Nowhere on Earth is there a worse refugee crisis than in Iraq today. According to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, some two million Iraqis have fled their country and are now scattered from Jordan, Syria, Turkey, and Iran to London and Paris. (Almost none have made it to the United States, which has done nothing to address the refugee crisis it created.) Another 1.9 million are estimated to be internally displaced persons, driven from their homes and neighborhoods by the U.S. occupation and the vicious civil war it […]
Anthony Arnove
On January 30th, 2007 Representatives Lynn Wooley and Maxine Waters invited authors to speak in the Longworth House Office Building to the Out of Iraq caucus about books on Iraq. Anthony Arnove, author of Iraq: The Logic of Withdrawal spoke about the issue of withdrawal. His testimony is below. Representatives Waters and Woolsey, members of Iraq Veterans Against the War in the gallery, colleagues: It is an honor to speak today about my book Iraq: The Logic of Withdrawal. The title of my book is borrowed from Vietnam: The Logic of Withdrawal, written in 1967 by the historian Howard Zinn. In his book, Zinn argued the U.S. should pull out of Vietnam immediately and unconditionally. The consequences of not heading this call were enormous: tens of thousands of U.S. troops and millions in Indochina paid the price of the escalation and expansion of the war. There are differences between Vietnam […]
The Punishment of David Hicks
Alfred McCoy
On or about 11 January 2002, a small, slender 26-year-old Australian named David Hicks, recently captured fighting alongside the Taliban in Afghanistan, was one of the first detainees flown to Camp X-Ray at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. As a high-school dropout, former drug addict, sometime car thief, mercenary soldier in Kosovo, Taliban fighter against America, graduate of four Al Qaeda terrorist-training courses and an unconvincing convert to radical Islam, Hicks seemed to many the despicable face of global terror. Within days, US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld branded the 700 Guantanamo detainees “hardened criminals willing to kill … for their cause” and swore to keep them there indefinitely. Prime Minister John Howard seconded that view, saying of Hicks: “He knowingly joined the Taliban and Al Qaeda. I don’t have any sympathy for any Australian who’s done that.” On 18 January, Attorney-General Daryl Williams backed the prime minister’s position: replying to a plea […]
Michael Klare
Ever since the collapse of the Soviet Union, foreign policy analysts have struggled to find a term to characterize the epoch we now inhabit. Although the “Post-Cold War Era” has been the reigning expression, this label now sounds dated and no longer does justice to the particular characteristics of the current period. Others have spoken of the “Post-9/11 Era,” as if the September 11 attacks on the Twin Towers and the Pentagon were defining moments for the entire world. But this image no longer possesses the power it once wielded—even in the United States. I propose instead another term that better captures the defining characteristics of the current period: the Post-Abundance Era. If there is one thing that most inhabitants of the late 20th century shared in common, it was a perception of rising global abundance in virtually all fields: energy, food, housing, consumer goods, fashion, mass culture, and so […]