Empire Unbound

...Hegemony or Survival offers much of the same stuff that Chomsky has dished out before, albeit in an updated form...

...That is not to say that there isn't fresh and insightful material here to keep the reader going...

...Johnson has done some good research for the book...

...That constellation—the syndrome—developed in the aftermath of World War II but has recently taken an extreme, world-endangering form...

...Niall Ferguson, a British professor, has desperately tried to ingratiate himself with conservatives by extolling the virtues of the British Empire in his book Empire and in a subsequent piece in The New York Times Magazine...

...By transgressing international law's traditional doctrine of self-defense, it sets a disastrous example for other nations claiming their own exceptionalist logic...

...base in the Indian Ocean, to Mauritius and the Seychelles...

...Many of the authors fall back on their favorite tropes, which limits the usefulness of the books for those familiar with their previous work...

...A curious corollary has been the touting of the British Empire as a role model...

...Superpower syndrome did not require 9/11, but the attacks on the Twin Towers and the Pentagon rendered us an aggrieved superpower, a giant violated and made vulnerable, which no superpower can permit...

...Today, the concept has entered the mainstream...

...The central argument of his Incoherent Empire is that it is doomed to failure, even in the short term...

...The murderous events of 9/11 hardened that sense of entitlement as nothing else could have...

...Meanwhile, progressive intellectuals have heightened their critiques of empire since September 11—so much so that Metropolitan Books has launched an American Empire Project, a series of titles dealing with the subject...

...If there's one central flaw in the book, it is that Johnson has such an unrelentingly deterministic, bleak assessment of U.S...

...And he provocatively asks: "Have these bases become ends in themselves...

...The more we grasp it, the better we can resist it...

...The United States does not have a lot of power "when trying to interfere inside individual nation states," Mann asserts...

...Incoherent Empire By Michael Mann Verso...

...278 pages...

...It may be that the ultimate causes of twenty-first-century mayhem in the Middle East are American militarism and imperialism—that is, our empire of bases itself...

...As Barber himself admits, however, Powell was one of the most public faces advocating the Iraq War...

...Johnson's book includes the notions that he introduced in Blowback...

...These include the disturbing inequalities of the North/South divide, the anarchic marketization of the global economy, and the pervasive homogenization of cultures that has followed the spread of McWorld...

...empire, however, Chomsky is surprisingly hopeful in the end...

...This chain, he says, constitutes an empire, especially post-September 11...

...Amitabh Pal is Managing Editor of The Progressive...

...Does their existence cause the United States to look for ways to use them...

...The question that I always ask myself after reading a book is: Does it enhance my understanding of the topic...

...Using Pentagon data, he counts 254,788 military personnel deployed overseas as of September 2001...

...Although there have been a number of media reports about the private outsourcing trend, Johnson provides new information, such as a detailed description of Camp Bondsteel in Kosovo, constructed by Kellogg Brown & Root, a subsidiary of Halliburton...

...By shooting first and asking questions later, it opens the way to tragic miscalculation," he writes...

...Where the book fails is in its second half...

...does not have imperial political powers...

...In his critique of U.S...

...Barber also sees conflicts coming...

...Michael Mann has a quirky take on the issue...

...To this is added, he says, the threats the United States faces from nations with weapons of mass destruction, guerrillas, and terrorists...

...This complex, which I am calling empire," he writes, "consists of permanent naval bases, military airfields, army garrisons, espionage listening posts, and strategic enclaves on every continent of the globe...

...Did you know, for example, that the National Security Agency's top spy base is in North Yorkshire, England...

...Barber fits in some of the theorizing that he did in Jihad vs...

...389 pages...

...I have been an admirer of Chomsky and the analysis he has had to offer over the years, even when I have disagreed with it...

...Barber lays out the problems with the doctrine of preventive war...

...Faced with a world of nation states, the U.S...

...Superpower Syndrome: America's Apocalyptic Confrontation with the World By Robert Jay Lifton Thunder's Mouth Press/Nation Books...

...Such cosmic ambition is accompanied by an equally vast sense of entitlement, of special dispensation to pursue its aims...

...Lifton offers some sharp insights...

...Bush's war on terror, writes Lifton, "is a manifestation of what I call 'superpower syndrome,' a medical metaphor meant to suggest aberrant behavior that is not just random but part of a more general psychological and political constellation...

...He divides the Bush Administration into unilateralist eagles and wise, multilateralist owls, placing Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld in the former camp, and Powell in the latter...

...September 11 has opened the floodgates...

...The result is a disturbed, misshapen monster stumbling clumsily across the world...

...211 pages...

...Vice President Dick Cheney sent out a Christmas card quoting Benjamin Franklin: And if a sparrow cannot fall to the ground without His notice, Is it probable that an empire can rise without His aid...

...In its unprecedented power lies an unprecedented vulnerability: for it must repeatedly extend the compass of its power to preserve what it already has, and so is almost by definition always overextended," he writes...

...Given the depressing record of the U.S...

...By Amitabh Pal We are at a new moment in U.S...

...Even though this country has presided over an empire both formal and informal at least since the Spanish-American War, it's been rare in mainstream circles to admit that the United States aspires to global domination...

...One can discern two trajectories in current history: one aiming toward hegemony, acting rationally within a lunatic doctrinal framework as it threatens survival...

...And Robert Kaplan wrote a long cover story for the July/August 2003 issue of The Atlantic Monthly, urging the United States to establish an empire covertly...

...Will it ease the burden of body bags by commanding levies, as the British and other imperialists did...

...Two of the books under review, Noam Chomsky's Hegemony or Survival and Chalmers Johnson's The Sorrows of Empire, are part of that project, as are upcoming ones by Professor Michael Klare and Mexican cartoonist Rafael Barajas...

...history...

...No longer is the discussion of the American empire confined to progressives...

...Have you heard, for instance, that Cofer Black, the CIA's counterterrorism deputy, actually ordered boxes to literally bring Bush Osama's head...

...Did you know that some Okinawans who protested the U.S...

...Fortunately, Lifton also engages in some fresh analysis...

...Or that the British transferred pretty much the entire population of Diego Garcia, a massive U.S...

...278 pages...

...the other dedicated to the belief that 'another world is possible,' in the words that animate the World Social Forum, challenging the reigning ideological system and seeking to create constructive alternatives of thought, action, and institutions," he writes...

...Barber detects a tension within the very operation of the empire...

...In one chapter, Johnson focuses on the training and arming of allies ("train and sell," Johnson calls it), and the use of surrogate private armies such as the Vinnell Corporation and DynCorp...

...In the final chapter, Mann recapitulates his earlier conclusions...

...Still, Mann does give some cogent counterarguments to those who think that it will be easy for the United States to dominate the world...

...Max Boot, a former editor of The Wall Street Journal, has asked the United States to take as its role model "self-confident Englishmen in jodhpurs and pith helmets...

...Woodrow Wilson makes an appearance, as do Dean Acheson and James Madison...

...This network of overseas possessions, Johnson says, first achieved a global presence in the wake of the demise of the Soviet Union, when the pretenses of the United States being a defensive superpower first started to come off...

...But no point of collision has been more dramatic or more perilous than the one disclosed by evolving American strategic doctrine...

...And more have been created since the announcement was made...

...Lifton summarizes his research on Hiroshima-Nagasaki and the Japanese cult Aum Shinrikyo...

...There are multiple pressure points where American hegemony and global interdependence can be found colliding," he says...

...Nearly nothing that Mann has to say in these chapters adds much to the information or analysis already out there...

...The Sorrows of Empire: Militarism, Secrecy, and the End of the Republic By Chalmers Johnson Metropolitan Books...

...Which is the same with Chomsky...

...12.95...

...empire and an up-to-date critique of the Bush Administration's policies...

...Lifton advises the United States to "step off the treadmill" of attempting to maintain its status as a global superpower, although he does not provide details of how this alternative world would be arrived at or what it would look like...

...Johnson devotes much of the rest of the book to an analysis of the institutions of militarism and descriptions of the network of bases abroad, often with interesting particulars of the sort that at least I have not come across before...

...The United States, Mann argues, has many of the necessary requisites for global domination—nuclear weapons, conventional forces in large numbers, global deployment capability, and firepower—but its unwillingness to take casualties in large numbers makes it vulnerable...

...Maybe that is the problem, since perhaps I have read so much of his previous work that I have become overfamiliar with his writings...

...All the books in the bunch offer enough stimulation to keep engaged even a reader who has read ad infinitum about the perils of American imperialism...

...Mann asks...

...Barber does provide some juicy details that I didn't know about...

...Lifton's book has some of the same shortcomings as Chomsky's...

...There are some intriguing tidbits here...

...About Afghanistan, for instance, Johnson writes: "As the journalist Patrick Martin has commented, 'If history had skipped over September 11 and the events of that day had never happened, it is very likely that the United States would have gone to war in Afghanistan anyway, and on much the same schedule.' " Really...

...The books I discuss here by political scientist Benjamin Barber, sociologist Michael Mann, and psychiatrist Robert Jay Lifton, along with Chomsky's and Johnson's, are just a sampling of the offerings that have hit the market on this issue over the past year...

...Hegemony or Survival: America's Quest for Global Dominance By Noam Chomsky Metropolitan Books...

...The Age of Empire has gone...

...Even if, like me, you've already overdosed on American imperialism, the empire is a fact of life...

...This leads him to make some questionable assertions...

...These books should help in that urgent effort...

...One prominent example was Michael Ignatieff's January 5, 2003, cover story for The New York Times Magazine...

...bases in Britain...

...The Pentagon has acknowledged that as of September 2001 "at least 725 American military bases existed outside the United States," he writes...

...By slapping together information available elsewhere (I suspect partly due to time constraints) with a touch of analysis, Mann undermines the value of his book...

...The American Empire will turn out to be a military giant, a back-seat economic driver, a political schizophrenic, and an ideological phantom," he writes...

...He focuses on the chain of bases that the United States has set up around the world, providing invaluable information on many of them, especially those set up in recent years...

...occupation of the Japanese island from 1945 to 1972 were deported to the jungles of Bolivia...

...Even ideologically, Mann contends, the United States faces formidable challenges from ethno-nationalism (in places such as the Occupied Territories and Chechnya), religious fundamentalism, and the decline of imperial ideology...

...Johnson's book is the most fascinating of all...

...Actually, there are many more, since some bases exist under leaseholds, informal agreements, or disguises of various kinds...

...The rebuke the Reagan Administration received from the World Court for its Contra War operations receives a mention, as do the multiple plots against Castro and Cuba...

...Mann sets up a straw man of sorts by attempting to disprove the notion of a formal American empire, since few people envision the empire to be consisting of territorial possessions like the empires of the past...

...This section consists of chapters on the war in Afghanistan, the broader war against terrorism, "rogue" states and how to deal with them, and the Iraq War...

...Would any U.S...

...Superpower Syndrome is partially a recap of his earlier work...

...More than merely dominate, the American superpower now seeks to control history," he writes...

...No longer, though...

...Not to be outdone, two natives of India turned loyal Americans, Dinesh D'Souza (enthusiastically) and Fareed Zakaria (a bit less enthusiastically), have been busy endorsing their former colonial masters...

...McWorld...

...Saul Landau, Rahul Mahajan, George Soros, and Immanuel Wallerstein all have books out on the empire...

...The answers for these books range from a qualified to a full-throated yes...

...By the time one reaches the end, there's a sense of having been there before...

...government be prepared for the military routines of territorial Empire—permanent garrisons from which troops would sally forth to crush risings and riots, American lives dribbling away through raids on isolated garrisons and patrols, punitive raids into rebellious areas, destroying villages, relocating populations into secure environments...

...The book contains a mix of historical analysis of the U.S...

...Was the assault against Iraq driven by Iraq's actions or by military capabilities in American hands...

...The books by Benjamin Barber and Chalmers Johnson are the best of the lot...

...Barber is in his analytical political scientist mode, while Johnson's book is much more fact-based and detail-oriented...

...Now even the powerful are acknowledging—even celebrating—the American empire...

...While he seems overly fond of his coinage, the concept does represent a stark contrast to Bush's unilateralism...

...Which trajectory will dominate, no one can foretell...

...By throwing its weight around, the empire sows resentment among its allies and hatred among its foes...

...foreign policy, Barber sometimes offers simplistic metaphors or repeats what other analysts have said...

...These bases, he argues, "are not needed to fight wars but are instead pure manifestations of militarism and imperialism...

...In its pages, The New York Times has carried repeated references to the American empire...

...Barber juxtaposes Pax Americana with what he calls lex humana, a world undergirded by universal law and what he terms preventive democracy...

...Or that there are as many as 104 U.S...

...He details how the Pentagon has recently set up bases in the Middle East and Central Asia, ranging from Qatar and Bahrain to Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan...

...policy that he even outdoes Chomsky...

...And Noam Chomsky reprises, well, Noam Chomsky...

...News & World Report devoted a cover to the issue in the same month...

...And in abandoning the prudent logic of social contract and deference to law that was perhaps the finest achievement of American independence, it finally abjures the very idealist legacy in which it pretends to be grounded...