Examines Empire and Myopia

...Now the United States is tying itself to Central Asian dictatorships for the sake of new oil sources, and underwriting counter-guerrilla military action in Colombia to protect an oil pipeline...

...George II's career is nothing if not a protracted exercise in getting away with overreach...

...then raise piles more money to run for president...

...Leaving aside al-Qaeda, is the problem that America has too much power...

...It is not surprising that an administration so heavily beholden to oil companies thinks that such policies will secure American wealth and power in the twenty-first century...

...A career that culminates in a bloodless coup d'état gives a man a sense that he can get away with an awful lot...

...Earlier, oil lubricated our disastrous support for the brutal shah of Iran—another gift to Islamic fundamentalism, as it turned out...

...It is a perennial one: war whenever we get around to it...

...As the historian Anthony Pagden writes in his excellent primer Peoples and Empire, "because of their size and sheer diversity, most empires have in time become universal, cosmopolitan societies...

...In order to rule vast and widely separated domains, imperial governments have generally found themselves compelled to be broadly tolerant of diversity of culture and sometimes even of belief, so long as these posed no threat to their authority" To be sure, threats to their authority have frequently been met by ruthless, disproportionate violence...

...The public goes back to business...

...cover up various holes in your résum...

...You could easily feel anointed, born to rule...

...We need more, not less, UN power...

...One benefit that had better be faced headon is that empire is sometimes better than the alternative, if the alternative is a local autocracy, or al-Qaeda, or a rival empire like Nazi Germany or Imperial Japan...

...The risk of unprecedented massacre looms...

...This is myopic not because al-Qaeda is anti-imperialist but because development combined with better intelligence and policing is likely to reduce the number of American-hating terrorists in the world and the damage they can do...

...So the trick is to use power for justice as much as possible, then (like the British Empire in its sunset, leaving aside crucial mistakes like the allocation of Kashmir to India) arrange to fade wisely, yield power fairly gracefully—not to the perpetrators of mass murder, but to alliances and multinational institutions better, more legitimately, able to wield it...

...If the United States forgoes the legitimacy of its power, it weakens its promise of producing stability...

...we need, for example, wellfunded UN support to police the post-Taliban order in Afghanistan—and this is impossible without a strong American contribution...

...Having achieved legitimacy after September 11 by invoking the principle of self-defense, one that no nation willingly forgoes, the United States now threatens to cast legitimacy overboard as a luxury it cannot afford...

...Oil makes America grovel to Saudi tyrants, who funded the Taliban in Afghanistan and Wahhabi madrassas throughout the world...

...Inevitably, they grow smug, bite off too much, inspire too much resentment, collide with too many enemies too strategically placed...

...Here is the pathos of empire—that, even in the face of murderous attacks, it should retain its innocence to the end...

...In the 1960s, unwillingness to listen—in particular to warnings from Charles de Gaulle, who knew something about the limits of Western hegemony in Southeast Asia—cost us dearly...

...Access to Saudi and Gulf oil looks like a triumph of empire but could easily be its undoing...

...September 11, 2001, is his latest rationale for unilateral action, but the Bush administration was already heading this way—with its unilateral opposition to the Kyoto Treaty, the International Criminal Court, biological weapons inspection, and the antiballistic missile treaty...

...But at times there is more...

...American power needs legitimacy, which depends upon sharing power with allies, which in turn depends on being willing to listen...

...The world is too complex and intricately bound together to permit for long the harsh use of any super-sovereign power...

...It is unwilling to pay to reduce the unprecedented inequality in the world, spending as we do a mere 0.1 percent of our gross domestic product on development aid...

...Whatever doesn't destroy him makes him stronger...

...Sometimes, empire can exercise power to achieve justice at a distance...

...And there are others who, as soon as they deploy the word "empire" with a curl of the lip, think they have settled the case against the United States whatever it does—for the United States is, after all, the closest thing to an imperial force in the world today...

...lose piles of other people's money in bad investments...

...The life-lesson he's learned is that you can drink yourself into one stupor after another for decades...

...The dangers of an omniflexible "war on terrorism," obscured by the successDISSENT / Spring 2002 n 25 AFTERSHOCKS ful prosecution of the Afghanistan War, now emerge full-blown, for what kind of a war is this without a war aim, an end-point, a definition of victory...

...But dependents also submit to imperial power because they enjoy its benefits...

...Hubris is their custom...

...In the prevailing American version of empire, ignorance goes with belligerence...

...Truth be told, there is on occasion something to be said for empires—not their cruelty, their violence, or their exploitation of subject peoples, but the law, citizenship, and stability that historically they can bring...

...THERE ARE SOME who think that because the United States has global interests and a heart of gold, it is entitled to act just as it pleases, economically and militarily, anywhere it pleases—not a bad first approximation to the classical meaning of empire...

...THE FAILURE OF intelligence that afflicted the United States before September 11 has more than one dimension...

...It wants to lord it over much of the world on the cheap, riding a wave of military superiority...

...Over the coming decades, empire is very unlikely to disappear, but more legitimate distributions of power are possible...

...Then, you and your entourage, including your brother, his staff, and a Supreme Court chosen during your party's long stays in power, stop the Florida recount—and what do you know, you're in power, unelected...

...Imperial politics could be more inclusive, less brutal, with more fairly enforced law and less blatant invasion of other nations' sovereignty...

...What is genuinely shocking is the dead silence that greets this absurdity, as if our politics should remain innocent of any substantial debate about the stakes and costs of American power...

...Having learned that brute power pays off, Bush merrily proceeds with his modus operandi and moves toward a permanent bruteforce footing...

...The UN has recommended 0.7 percent...

...TODD GITLIN is the author most recently of Media Unlimited: Haw the Torrent of Images and Sounds Overwhelms Our Lives...

...Fearing backlash, Democrats and independents have been slow to tangle with him...

...To the amazement of our allies in Europe, Japan, South Korea, and elsewhere (not least an elected reform government of Iran), Bush declares that Iran, Iraq, and North Korea are now in his sights...

...Even after September 11, the United States goes on in taking pride in its imperviousness to foreign criticism...

...as if everyone who objects and worries is no more than an ignorant whiner...

...It can be better not only for the metropole of power, but also for the periphery...

...26 n DISSENT / Spring 2002...

...We need to seek, and require, Security Council sanction for any further military action (as during the Gulf War and after September 11...

...The White House of George W. Bush wishes to enlarge a just, coalitional war of selfdefense to a generalized and unilateral war against an "axis of evil," a war to be undertaken at times and places of its own choosing, and with little or no regard for international law...

...Some realism...

...Yet George W. Bush's administration is moving in precisely the wrong direction...

...Defending "our way of life" in a manner no othernation is willing to accept...

...Allies are brushed aside...

...If you believe that the United States should exert leverage on Israel to adhere to United Nations resolutions and abandon the Occupation, if you believe that 24 n DISSENT / Spring 2002 AFTERSHOCKS the United States should impose a reasonable two-state solution and help guarantee it, whatever the worst inclinations of Palestinians and Israelis alike, you are not against American power—you are for a particular use of American power, a just and wise one...

...In Europe, whose concerns are shrugged off in Washington, even the European Union commissioner for international relations, the Conservative Chris Patten, has expressed alarm...

...Eventually, the UN will need some sort of police force in readiness—not a full-fledged army, but a constabulary capable of enforcing resolutions of the Security Council...

...Toward that end, there is no more legitimate global force than the United Nations...

...The answer is both, because empire tends to make the winners complacent and stupid—perhaps even more so when Americans pretend to be disinterested in the uses of power...

...Much about the American version of empire is ignorant, cheap, and myopic...

...Mainly, of course, the recommendation comes from those in the metropolitan core who fatten on the advantages of empire and suffer few of the costs...

...Or that America, with its military supremacy, its immense wealth, its governmental and corporate command over resources, suffers from too little intelligence for all that power...

...Toward this end, American self-protection cannot afford to look like unbridled domination...

...EMPIRES FADE...

...It cannot forever shoot down all the "evildoers...

...and still hustle up more of other people's money for bigger investments, including a baseball team, which you use as a launch to the governorship of a large state...

...For half a century, purported realists in Washington have thought nothing of greasing the palms of Middle Eastern tribal leaders so that they will grant us (and the Japanese and Europeans to an even greater degree) the favor of buying their oil...

...The stabilities that accrue to empire at its best are now jeopardized by empire in a state of advanced overreach...

...Oil floated, and continues to float, the terror regime of Saddam Hussein...

...In an age of weapons of mass destruction, the collisions are more dangerous than ever before...

...As the historian Paul Kennedy points out, sooner or later American economic advantages are likely to erode, and then where are we...

...It is ignorant because, harboring the fantasy that the United States represents only values and not power, it is unwilling to face the responsibilities of power—the debt that rulers owe the ruled—which include the pursuit of just ends and the persuasion of dependents that they are getting something valuable in exchange for their dependency...

...and—as long as you started with the right parents—you can come out on top...

...The world is going to need UN, NATO, and other interventions and, in effect, protectorates, as in Cambodia, East Timor, Bosnia, and Kosovo...

...Television is predictably supine...

...Oil dependency also ranks high on the list of gross, unexamined irresponsibilities...

...The extension of American power in 1945 was excellent for Germans and West Europeans in general...

...It bears remembering that the Islamist terrorists who demolished the twin cathedrals of the World Trade Center have no claim whatsoever to anti-imperialist credentials...

...THE CIRCUMSTANCES Of Bush's presidency are not irrelevant to his penchant for unilateralism...

...Insofar as there is any political program attached to their version of jihad against "infidels" and "hypocrites"—their term for Muslim leaders who disagree with them—they cherish the caliphate of yore that was defeated by the West, and would resurrect it if they could, with no qualms about inflicting disaster not only upon America but upon the poor countries of the world whose misery they worsened with the attacks of September 11...