The Blog
Recent Posts by American Empire Project Authors and other Influencers
From Imperial Offense to Imperial Defense
Michael Klare
There are many reasons why President George W. Bush might have wanted to replace Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld with Robert M. Gates: To distance himself from the current military disaster in Iraq, to make the adoption of a new Iraqi strategy easier, to prevent further disunity within the military, or to clear the path for a revival of Republican fortunes in the 2008 elections. All of these may, in fact, have been contributing factors in Gates’ appointment; yet, on a deeper level, the move can also be read as signaling a momentous shift in America’s global posture — from imperial offense to imperial defense. For the past six years, the top officials in charge of American foreign and military policy have known how to play rough-and-tumble offensive football, but were simply clueless when it came to defense. However, just as every football team must, at some point, surrender possession […]
Anthony Arnove
Each day the occupation of Iraq goes on, the situation for most Iraqis gets worse. The trend is unmistakable, and has persisted through each of the many “turning points” announced by the Bush administration and its handpicked Iraqi clients, and then duly reported by a still overly deferential establishment media. Consider the following: In August 2006, the New York Times reported that “the number of daily strikes against American and Iraqi security forces has doubled since January.” The Times quoted “a senior Defense Department official who agreed to discuss the issue only on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak for attribution” as saying, “The insurgency has gotten worse by almost all measures, with insurgent attacks at historically high levels…. The insurgency has more public support and is demonstrably more capable in numbers of people active and in its ability to direct violence than at any point […]
Will the Democrats Blow It Again as They Did in 1986?
Greg Grandin
A Republican Party on the ropes, bloodied by a mid-second-term scandal; a resurrected Democratic opposition, sure it can capitalize on public outrage to prove that it is still, in the American heart of hearts, the majority party. But before House Democrats start divvying up committee assignments and convening special investigations, they should consider that they’ve been here before, and things didn’t turn out exactly the way they hoped. It was twenty years ago this November 3rd — exactly one day after the Democrats regained control of the Senate after six years in the minority — that the Lebanese magazine Ash-Shiraa reported on the Reagan administration’s secret, high-tech missile sale to Ayatollah Khomeini’s Iran, which violated an arms embargo against that country and contradicted President Ronald Reagan’s personal pledge never to deal with governments that sponsored terrorism. Democrats couldn’t believe their luck. After years of banging their heads on Reagan’s popularity […]
Jonathan Schell
The reported North Korean nuclear test, occurring in a mine shaft in a place called Kilju, was pretty much on the opposite side of the earth from the United States, yet it felt very close, almost as if it had occurred here, or maybe, in that peculiar way of atomic explosions, everywhere on earth at once. (For one thing, the pictorial representations of the seismic shocks radiating outward from the ground zero to measuring stations all over the globe reinforce this feeling.) There is something about nuclear explosions that collapses distance. Americans felt the effect immediately after Hiroshima. Truman had said, “We thank God it has come to us instead of to our enemies.” But many also instantly felt that American cities, too, were at risk, or soon would be. James Reston of The New York Times wrote, “In that terrible flash 10,000 miles away, men here have seen not […]
Michael Klare
The common wisdom circulating in Washington these days is that the United Statesis too bogged down in Iraq to consider risky military action against Iran–or, God forbid–North Korea. Policy analysts describe the U.S. military as “over-burdened” or “stretched to the limit.” The presumption is that the Pentagon is telling President Bush that it can’t really undertake another major military contingency. Added to these pessimistic assessments of U.S. military capacity is the widespread claim that a “new realism” has taken over in the administration’s upper reaches, that cautious “realists” like Condoleezza Rice have gained the upper hand over fire-breathing neoconservatives. Ergo: No military strike against Iran or North Korea. But I’m not buying any of this. Just as an empire on the rise, like the United States on the eve of the invasion of Iraq, is often inclined to take rash and ill-considered actions, so an empire on the decline, like […]
Ann Jones
The morning after the U.S. hit Iraq with Shock and Awe, I went out to the street in Kabul—the Street of Martyrs, as it happened—to face Sharif, my driver. He was in a deep, sorrowful rage. “Already you forget Afghanistan,” he said. “Just like before.” “Before” was 1992, after the Soviet occupation. Soviet troops had already gone home when we dispatched the Afghan mujahidin—our proxy Cold Warriors—to bring down the central government they’d left behind. Then we abandoned the country to civil war. Every Afghan remembers that American betrayal. Suddenly, the Bush administration recalls it too. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice recently warned Canadians, alarmed by their soldiers’ rising death toll, against abandoning Afghanistan “again.” Rice said, “The consequences will come back to haunt us.” The consequences the first time around were bad enough. For Afghans, the chaos of civil war led to the rule of the Sharia-law-and-order Taliban, sponsored—some […]
Tom Engelhardt
This post originally appeared on The Nation Blog: Watch most TV channels and if Iraq is the subject, you see bombs going off. You hear grisly tales of tortured Iraqis slaughtered in the internecine strife that’s gripped that country, and you get the almost daily accounts of American troops dying in small but steady numbers. But just as the Bush administration promised us, there is good news, Virginia — and it’s been over on Fox for the last two months. Since late July, if your timing was right, you might have caught a lilting, almost Edenic-looking ad at Fox, one of a series from "the other Iraq." We’re talking about the autonomous region of Kurdistan here. The ad begins with a male over-voice in mellifluous English: "Saddam’s goal was to bury every living Kurd. He failed." By now, you’re seeing Kurds of every stripe, young and old, many with small […]
The American Empire Project
President Chavez of Venezuela spoke to the UN General Assembly earlier today. During his remarks he held up a copy and recommended that everyone read Noam Chomsky’s Hegemony or Survival. Here is the transcript of his comments. "Representatives of the governments of the world, good morning to all of you. First of all, I would like to invite you, very respectfully, to those who have not read this book, to read it. Noam Chomsky, one of the most prestigious American and world intellectuals, Noam Chomsky, and this is one of his most recent books, ‘Hegemony or Survival: The Imperialist Strategy of the United States.’" [Holds up book, waves it in front of General Assembly.] "It’s an excellent book to help us understand what has been happening in the world throughout the 20th century, and what’s happening now, and the greatest threat looming over our planet. The hegemonic pretensions of the […]
Noam Chomsky
The editors of this blog asked Noam Chomsky to comment on Thomas Friedman’s "Land for NATO" editorial in the September 13th edition of the New York Times. The following is Mr. Chomsky’s response. I’ve been asked for comments on Thomas Friedman’s "Land For NATO" editorial, NYT, Sept. 13, 2006. Friedman’s main point is that the UN force in Southern Lebanon offers a possible model for peace between the Israelis and the Palestinians: "Israel withdraws and the border is secured by a force that is U.N. on the outside but NATO on the inside." Friedman’s thesis is based on two crucial tacit assumptions. The first is that “the border is secured” for Israel; the problem of security arises for Israel, not for the Palestinians and Lebanese. The second is that Israel has been willing to withdraw from the occupied territories if security is guaranteed, or would even contemplate that possibility. The […]
Michael Klare
On September 5, Chevron and two allied energy firms announced the biggest oil discovery in U.S. territory in years: the 30,000-feet deep “Jack No. 2 Well” located some 175 miles south of New Orleans in the Gulf of Mexico. Early estimates suggest the new field may house as much as 3 to 15 billion barrels of oil, equivalent to 10 to 50 percent of America’s proven reserves of 29 billion barrels. Because other energy firms are exploring in adjacent areas of the Gulf, some industry analysts predict a new Golden Age of American oil production. But before we set aside all our anxieties about future energy shortages, there are several aspects of the Chevron discovery that bear closer attention. First, the Jack No. 2 field sits beneath five and half miles of ocean water plus additional hundreds or thousands of feet of rock and salt, and will require costly and […]
Robert Dreyfuss
In August, even before the official announcement that some two dozen would-be terrorists had been arrested in London, President Bush and his top advisers swung into action. Their goal was not to stop the terrorists, who were already safely behind bars, but to use the threat to justify the president’s seemingly endless “War on Terror.” The problem is, almost everything that President Bush understands about his own war on terrorism is wrong. According to nearly a dozen former high-ranking officials who have been on the front lines of the administration’s counterterrorism effort, the president is not only fighting the wrong war — he is fighting it in a way that has actually made the threat worse. The war on terrorism, they say, has been mismanaged and misdirected almost from the start, in no small part because the president simply does not understand the nature of the enemy he is fighting. […]
Anthony Arnove
As the United States and its allies debate how to salvage the disastrous occupation of Iraq, many ideas have been put forward of how to move forward, from sending more troops, to partitioning the country, to redeploying all troops to Kurdistan or to neighboring countries. But the one option no one is seriously considering is the one that makes the most sense: withdrawal and an end to the occupation. The reality is, the longer the occupation continues, the worse things get for most Iraqis. Rather than being the solution to Iraqi troubles, the occupation is the problem. Indeed, The arguments for why the Unites States and its partners cannot leave Iraq are just as specious as the claims that were used to get us into Iraq in the first place. The occupation is not preventing civil war from breaking out, but instead is fueling sectarian conflict and increasing the chance […]