The
Failure of Empire
The United States is facing the prospect of a major defeat in Iraq that is
likely to constitute a serious setback in the ongoing campaign to expand
the American empire.
By the Editors
of Monthly Review
January 2004
Posted by Bulatlat
The United States is facing the
prospect of a major defeat in Iraq that is likely to constitute a serious
setback in the ongoing campaign to expand the American empire. Behind the
pervasive war propaganda as evidenced in the “victorious” attack on
Fallujah lies the reality of a U.S. war machine that is fighting a futile
battle against growing guerrilla forces, with little chance for a
stable political solution to the conflict that could possibly meet
U.S. imperial objectives. |
Iraqis carry a man killed by U.S.
troops during a protest action in Fallujah |
Nevertheless,
the U.S. ruling class, though not unaware of the dangers, is currently
convinced that it has no choice but to “stay the course”—a slogan adopted
by both political parties and accepted by virtually the entire economic,
political, military, and communications establishment. The reason for this
seemingly irrational determination to stick it out at all costs can only
be understood through an analysis of the logic and limits of capitalist
empire.
The Logic of Imperialism
Capitalism is by its very nature a
globally expanding system geared to accumulation on a world scale. Since
its beginnings in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries it has been a
world economy with an international division of labor ruled over by
competing nation-states. Cutting across this global system is a structure
of inequality variously described as center-periphery,
metropolis-satellite, developed-underdeveloped, North-South—all of which
point to the wide gap that exists between states at the center and those
in the periphery of the system. From the outset, the leading capitalist
states engaged in an outward, imperialistic movement. Precapitalist
societies in the Americas, Africa, and Asia were pillaged, their
populations enchained, and the plunder sent back to Europe. Wherever
possible, noncapitalist societies were destroyed and transformed into
colonial dependencies. Meanwhile, the great powers fought over the
territories and spoils. As Marx wrote in “The Genesis of the Industrial
Capitalist” in volume 1 of Capital:
The discovery of gold
and silver in America, the extirpation, enslavement and entombment in
mines of the indigenous population of that continent, the beginnings of
the conquest and plunder of India,
and the conversion of Africa into a
preserve for the commercial hunting of blackskins, are all things which
characterize the dawn of the era of capitalist production. These idyllic
proceedings are the chief moments of primitive accumulation. Hard on their
heels follows the commercial war of the European nations, which has the
globe as its battlefield. It begins with the revolt of the Netherlands
from Spain, assumes gigantic dimensions in England’s Anti-Jacobin War, and
is still going on in the shape of the Opium Wars against China, etc.
By the end of the Napoleonic Wars,
Britain, which led the way in the industrial revolution, had emerged as
the hegemonic imperial power of the capitalist world economy. In this
period the European powers divided up the world, either exercising direct
political rule over their colonies or where this was not practicable
creating conditions for the subordination of peripheral states to the
needs of those at the center by means of unequal treaties. Britain’s most
important colonial possession, the jewel of its empire, was
India.
But Britain
also exercised informal economic control in areas that were not formal
colonies, as in Latin America.
Wealth extracted from these colonial domains flowed into the coffers of
the center capitalist nations, enriching them and enhancing their power.
British hegemony over the world economy came under increasing challenge in
the early twentieth century, particularly from Germany, and collapsed as a
result of the First and Second World Wars, to be replaced in the aftermath
of the Second World War by American hegemony as the
United States
rose to dominance over the world capitalist system.
In the immediate postwar world the
United States was, in terms of the sheer material force at its disposal,
the most powerful nation that the world had ever seen. It accounted for
about half of total world output and 60 percent of its manufacturing and
had a monopoly over nuclear weapons. In place of the earlier gold
standard, the Bretton Woods Agreement enshrined the U.S. dollar as the
main international currency, which was backed up by Washington’s agreement
to redeem dollars held by the central bankers of other countries for gold.
U.S. military bases in the thousands stretched across the globe. U.S.
multinational corporations seized control of whole economies in the third
world and, although doing so on the basis of so-called “free trade,” were
backed up in their economic operations and interests whenever necessary by
U.S. military power.
But in many ways U.S. power was
constrained. The existence of the Soviet Union, which had arisen out of a
socialist revolution in the midst of the First World War, meant that there
was another military superpower, which, if nowhere near as powerful as the
United States, nonetheless could constrain U.S. actions, placing certain
regions off-limits to imperialist expansion, and offering material support
to third world revolutions. Still, the real threat to capitalism as a
whole and to U.S. global dominance came not from the Soviet Union directly
but from the waves of revolution taking place throughout the twentieth
century as peoples in Latin America, Africa, and Asia sought to break
loose from colonialism or neocolonialism, i.e., from the position to which
they had been relegated in the imperialist division of labor. As the
United States surrounded the Soviet Union and China with military bases
and alliances and at the same time sought to counter revolutions
throughout the third world it found itself up against the global limits of
its power.
Vietnam and the Limits of Empire
Nowhere were the limits of U.S. power
more evident than in the Vietnam War. In that war the United States took
over what had been a colonial war on the part of the French, blocked
elections from taking place throughout the country as established by the
Geneva Agreements of 1954, and divided Vietnam in half, creating a puppet
regime in the South. In the 1960s a massive buildup of U.S. troops took
place in what amounted to an invasion and occupation of the southern part
of Vietnam. Unable to win in a guerrilla war, despite expending more than
twice as much explosive power as it had employed in the entire Second
World War and despite millions of Vietnamese dead, and unable to succeed
at “nation building” in South Vietnam, where it sought to prop up a
corrupt regime of its own creation, the United States was compelled by
growing dissension amongst the U.S. civilian population and by signs of
rebellion within the lower military ranks to withdraw under the cover of
the “Vietnamization” of the war. The distortions in the U.S. balance of
payments in this period contributed to the diminishing hegemony of the
dollar as a world currency and the end of the dollar-gold standard. For
decades after the United States began its pull-out from Vietnam, the U.S.
capacity to intervene militarily was severely limited by what
conservatives labeled “the Vietnam Syndrome”—standing for the
unwillingness of the U.S. population to engage in major military
interventions in other countries.
The War in Vietnam, like other major
imperial wars, revealed the logic and limits of capitalist empire. It is
often said that the United States had no significant economic interests in
Vietnam that would have justified its major intervention there. Niall
Ferguson, a professor of financial history at New York University and
senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, declares in his new book,
Colossus: The Price of America’s Empire, that “The United States lost
face [in Vietnam]. That was about all it lost.” Such views tend to
reinforce the ideology that since the United States had nothing material
to lose in Vietnam it must have been there for no other reason than to
promote freedom and democracy. In reality U.S. objectives in Vietnam were
dedicated to the maintenance of imperialism as a system. In the broadest
sense, this involved strategic goals that have been classically understood
under the rubric of “geopolitics,” in which the political, economic, and
military requirements of empire are placed within a strategic context that
takes into account the geographic, demographic, and natural resource
characteristics of particular regions. Such a geopolitical understanding
of imperial expansion and defense is of course completely in accord with
the necessity of the greatest possible expansion of the capitalist world
economy.
The Vietnam War illustrates perfectly
the importance of such geopolitical goals. The object of the U.S.
intervention was to control the Pacific Rim
and to surround and “contain” China
as part of a more general geopolitical strategy of global dominance of the
“rimlands” of Eurasia—that
is, Western Europe, the Pacific Rim, and the Middle East.
It was these rimlands that were the main focus of
U.S. global military alliances; and it is
here that the United States devoted the most resources to establishing and
maintaining a military presence. They represented in fact the borders of
the imperialist system, in which the United States was the hegemonic
power—thus the borders of a loosely constructed American empire.*
Viewed in this way, the enormous
commitment of the United States to securing Vietnam as part of its
imperial sphere—a commitment maintained over five successive presidencies
of both parties—was not simply irrational but part of a larger global
strategy. For the U.S. ruling class and its military and foreign policy
strategists the defeat in Vietnam is remembered as a major failure in
defending U.S. interests. In the 1970s the world capitalist economy
entered a long-term crisis or stagnation that continues to haunt its every
step. In the same period U.S. economic hegemony slipped. This partial
withdrawal of the United States from the world stage after the Vietnam
War, as its military interventions were curtailed despite growing
revolutionary movements in the third world, was often seen by those at the
top of U.S. society and in the military as a source of the general
sickness or malaise affecting the U.S. order.
The Return to War
Since the late 1970s Washington has
sought to reconstruct its capacity to engage in imperialist wars. Covert
wars in Afghanistan and Central America were followed by the direct
exercise of American military imperialism in Lebanon, Grenada, and Panama.
With the fall of the Soviet bloc and the demise two years later of the
Soviet Union itself, the United States moved to fill the vacuum of world
power, carrying out military interventions in the Middle East, the Horn of
Africa, and the former Yugoslavia
that would have previously been unthinkable. Following the attacks of
September 2001, the U.S. invasions and occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq
and the construction of military bases in the former Soviet republics of
Central Asia constituted a vast expansion of the American empire into
hitherto inaccessible regions. Such extension of U.S. imperial power was
partly enabled by economic gains—although of a transitory nature—that the
United States had made in the 1990s relative to its leading capitalist
competitors. It was this that helped give the “antiterrorist” hawks in the
administration of George W. Bush the confidence to exploit the fear
engendered by the September 2001 attacks to issue the National Security
Strategy of the United States of America, in September 2002. This
declared that the United States would do all in its power to prevent the
appearance of another “peer competitor” in the military realm and would
not hesitate to engage in “preemptive” (or preventive) interventions to
advance its national security interests. This was nothing other than a
declaration of perpetual war, making it clear that the
United States
was willing to brandish its armed might in order to expand its empire and
thus its geopolitical position in the world at large. Never before in the
history of the modern world has any nation laid claim to such a
far-reaching strategy for indefinite global domination.
Helping to pave the way for this
reassertion of U.S. imperial ambitions was a transformation that took
place in the dominant historical account of the Vietnam War. Conservative
interpretations of the war propounded by the military leadership and
rightwing commentators—at first scarcely taken seriously in the public
discussion—became more influential and pervasive as memories of the war
receded. In the new climate of making
America
“stand tall” again, the defeat in Vietnam was increasingly relegated to
the classic propagandistic category of a “betrayal” brought on in this
case by the disloyalty of the media and by extremists within the civilian
population.*
The focus of this reinterpretation
centered on the war’s turning point in the Vietnamese Tet Offensive of
1968. Tet, it was now said, was a resounding military victory for the U.S.
and South Vietnamese military forces, which decimated their National
Liberation Front attackers. Yet, in a “betrayal” of the first order, we
are told, it was turned into a defeat by the U.S. media and a vocal
minority of war protestors, which had the effect of inducing Johnson to
throw in the towel. In effect establishment opinion adopted the same
verdict on the war offered earlier by General William Westmoreland,
commander of the U.S. forces in Vietnam, who wrote in A Soldier Reports
(1976) that the Tet offensive represented “a striking military defeat
for the enemy on anybody’s terms....Unfortunately, the enemy scored in the
United States the psychological victory that eluded him in Vietnam, so
influencing President Johnson and his civilian advisors that they ignored
the maxim that when the enemy is hurting you don’t diminish the pressure,
you increase it.” For Westmoreland, speaking of the Indochina War as a
whole, “a lack of determination to stay the course...demonstrated in
Cambodia, South Vietnam, and Laos that the alternative to victory was
defeat.”
References to U.S. failure to “stay the
course” became a major theme of conservative accounts of the war. This
phrase had been frequently employed in the war itself. For example,
President Johnson had used it in 1967 to convey his resolve to continue
the war. In another instance, Townsend Hoopes, the under secretary of the
Air Force, had presented Secretary of State Clark Clifford in February
1968 with a strategy for “staying the course for an added number of
grinding years” by concentrating merely on controlling populated areas.
But the phrase became even more important later on as a hawkish slogan to
explain the U.S.
defeat. This happened after the noted journalist Stewart Alsop recalled in
his memoir, Stay of Execution (1973), that Winston Churchill had
stated in his presence: “America,
it is a great and strong country, like a workhorse pulling the rest of the
world out of despond and despair. But will it stay the course?” Vietnam
hawks like Democratic Senator Henry M. Jackson turned to Churchill’s
question at every opportunity—insisting that the United States had failed
to stay the course in Vietnam and should not make this mistake again.*
So powerful has this right-wing,
military understanding of the Vietnam War become that it is now a force to
reckon with in the current war in Iraq. Thus when President George W. Bush
declared with respect to Iraq in April 2004 that “We’ve got to stay the
course and we will stay the course,” his Democratic opponent Senator John
Kerry echoed that the United States should “stay the course” in Iraq,
adding that “Americans differ about whether and how we should have gone to
war. But it would be unthinkable now for us to retreat in disarray and
leave behind a society deep in strife and dominated by radicals” (Robert
Scheer, “Don’t Stay the Course Senator,” Salon.com, April 28, 2004; Evan
Thomas, “The Vietnam Question,” MSNBC.com, April 19, 2004).
The Road to Ruin in Iraq
This repeated insistence on staying the
course is sometimes reduced to a mere willingness to countenance
continuing bloodshed. According to Max Boot, a senior fellow at the
prestigious Council on Foreign Relations, in his Savage Wars of Peace
(a title drawn from Kipling’s poem the White Man’s Burden):
“Any nation bent on imperial policing will suffer a few setbacks. The
British army, in the course of Queen Victoria’s little wars, suffered
major defeats with thousands of casualties in the First Afghan War (1842)
and the Zulu War (1879). This did not appreciably dampen British
determination to defend and expand the empire; it made them hunger for
vengeance. If Americans cannot adopt a similarly bloody-minded attitude,
then they have no business undertaking imperial policing.”
But adoption of a “bloody-minded
attitude”—something that is not lacking at present in Washington—will not
save the United States in Iraq. Despite the much proclaimed “victory” in
Fallujah—where the level of destruction unleashed against a city in an
already occupied country is probably unequaled in modern times—war
planners are working overtime to find a way to stave off a defeat that
appears increasingly likely. The most important recent treatment of the
Iraq War from within the national security establishment has come from
Anthony H. Cordesman, a long-time national security adviser for the
Department of Defense, specializing in the Middle East and energy issues,
who oversaw the assessment of the Yom Kippur War for the Defense
Department in 1974. Cordesman is now Alreigh A. Burke Fellow in Strategy
at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington and
the national security analyst for ABC News. In his report “Playing the
Course:” A Strategy for Reshaping U.S. Policy in Iraq and the Middle East
(fourth draft, November 22, 2004, CSIS.org) Cordesman argues that the
United States should not “stay the course” if a pragmatic strategy for
success, which he calls “playing the course,” does not work. “The US faces
too much Iraqi anger and resentment to try to hold on in the face of clear
failure, and achieving any lasting success in terms of Iraqi political
acceptance means that the US must seek to largely withdraw over the next
two years.” Moreover, given the degree of U.S. failure so far the question
of a U.S. defeat in Iraq needs to be considered. “The odds of lasting US
success in Iraq,” he states, “are now at best even, and may well be worse.
The US can almost certainly win every military battle and clash, but it is
far less certain to win the political and economic war.”
Cordesman believes that the United
States can only save itself from a clear defeat and the resulting loss of
“face” in Iraq by renouncing at once all imperial objectives. As he
declared in an interview for the Council on Foreign Relations in late
November: “We’ve never said to the Iraqis that we won’t take their oil,
that we won’t steal their economy, that we won’t establish military bases,
that we’ll leave when an elected government asks us to. We’ve never said
that any government that is elected is OK with us.” As he writes in
Playing the Course, the United States should “conspicuously”
abandon the following objectives: (1) using “Iraq as a tool or lever for
changing the region”; (2) using Iraq as “a US military base”; (3)
interfering with “Iraq’s independence in terms of its politics, economics,
and above all oil”; and (4) blocking “total transparency” in the U.S.
relation to the Iraqi economy. U.S. assurances he insists must include its
explicit commitment to withdraw entirely from the Green Zone in Baghdad,
which cannot be maintained as an imperial headquarters in a supposedly
independent Iraq.
The United States, Cordesman advises,
should narrow its objectives to the creation of a stable government backed
up by an adequate Iraqi military force—even if the new political regime is
only moderately better than that of Sadaam Hussein and even if openly
antagonistic to the United States. If
Washington
can “succeed” even to this extent, he says, it can declare “victory” and
get out within two years with a minimum amount of damage to its
credibility as an imperial power. However, in case it should fail to
create a stable political solution or to create an adequate Iraqi army
within that period—as now appears most likely—the
United States
needs to start making plans immediately for what it will do in the case of
a clear defeat. “Even ‘victory’ in Iraq,” we are told, “will be highly
relative, and defeat,” which can occur in any number of ways as Iraq spins
out of control, “will force the US to reinforce its position in the entire
region.”
Even more important than the formation
of a stable regime, from Cordesman’s standpoint, is the replacement of
U.S. with Iraqi forces. “‘Iraqiazation,’” he writes, “either has to be
made to work, or Iraq will become a mirror image of the failure of
‘Vietnamization’ in Vietnam: Coalition military victories will become
increasingly irrelevant.” After a detailed assessment of Iraqi forces and
training he concludes: “the Iraq military and security forces are now far
too weak to take over the security mission and will almost certainly
remain so well into 2005....The US can only ‘play the course’ effectively
if it works out goals and plans with the Iraqi Interim Government that go
far beyond the 28,000 man [Iraqi] armed forces—and the roughly 40–55,000
man total of military, paramilitary, and National Guard—the US currently
says are ‘required.’”
The truth is that the presence of
150,000 U.S. troops in Iraq, which has stretched available U.S. forces to
the limit, has not been enough, even when supplemented by troops from
Britain, to bring the country to heel. “The US has already learned that it
can win virtually any direct military battle or clash, but it cannot
secure the country....As in Vietnam, if the interim Iraqi government
cannot win the political battle,
U.S. victories in the military
battles become irrelevant.” Given the political turmoil in
Iraq and the difficulty of creating any
political solution, or even avoiding the outbreak of civil war, Cordesman
believes that the United States needs to concentrate on how to shore up
its position in the remainder of the Middle East
in the event of a defeat:
Fighting a
counterinsurgency campaign is one thing; the US must not stay if Iraq
devolves into civil war....No one can guarantee success in Iraq; or that
Iraq will not descend into civil war, come under a strongman, or split
along ethnic or confessional lines....[I]t is one thing to play the game
and quite another to try to deal with defeat by reinforcing failure or
“doubling the bet.” If it is clear by 2006 that the US cannot win with its
current level of effort, and/or the situation serious[ly] deteriorates to
the point where it is clear there is no new Iraq government and security
force to aid, the game is over. There no longer is time to fold; it is
time to run.
If forced “to run,” he says, the United
States will have to offer reassurances to the rulers of the “friendly Gulf
states and other Arab allies.” It will have to prevent any expansion of
Islamic jihad in Afghanistan resulting from Islamic declarations of
“victory” in Iraq. At the same time the United States will have to keep
Iran from intervening in Iraq. More pressure than ever will be placed on
the United States to solve the Israeli-Palestinian problem. Finally, the
threat to U.S.
strategic position with respect to Middle Eastern oil will have to be
planned for, requiring that the
United States not withdraw from the Middle East
but if anything step up its involvement.
No doubt is left in Playing the
Course that the major issue for the United States in Iraq as in the
Middle East as a whole is oil. Continual attacks on the oil pipelines by
the Iraqi resistance have limited the flow of oil from Iraq, undermining
one of the principal U.S. objectives, and highlighting the overall U.S.
failure. In the event of a clear defeat and a U.S. withdrawal from Iraq,
the oil situation will become even more critical. “The US,” Cordesman
writes “can and must find substitutes for petroleum, but this will take
decades. In the interim, the US and the global economy will actually
become steadily more dependent on energy imports, and particularly on
energy imports from the Gulf.” By the end of 2025 the industrialized
countries alone, according to estimates by the U.S. Energy Information
Agency (EIA) in its International Energy Outlook, 2004, are
expected to increase their petroleum imports from OPEC by an additional
11.5 million barrels a day beyond the 16.1 million barrels a day in 2001,
with the Persian Gulf supplying more than half of the increase. North
American imports from the Persian Gulf are expected to double over the
period. Meanwhile, demand for oil from China and other developing
countries is expected to increase dramatically. The strategic importance
of oil for the world economy will accelerate accordingly.
In order to meet this demand for
additional production, the EIA estimated that a further $1.5 trillion
would have to be invested in the Middle East between 2003 and 2030. The
long-term potential for investment in the expansion of production in Iraq
is greater than elsewhere since many oil analysts and institutes (for
instance the Baker Institute, Center for Global Energy Studies, the
Federation of American Scientists) believe that, in addition to its proven
reserves of 115 billion barrels of oil, Iraq may have, in the 90 percent
of its territory that remains unexplored, 100 billion barrels or more of
additional oil reserves. (Estimates coming from some agencies, like the
U.S. Geological Survey, are less optimistic, with median estimates of
additional Iraqi reserves at 45 billion barrels.) According to Cordesman
it is the enormous level of investment necessary for the expansion of
Middle East oil production, which must occur in order to ensure adequate
supplies for future consumption, that is the most pressing “practical
problem” presented by the Persian Gulf from the standpoint of the global
economy. Not only must such investments be made but they must then be
protected. In this regard it would not be easy for the United States to
pull out completely from Iraq or to refrain from stepping up its
involvement elsewhere in the Middle East if compelled to leave that
country.
Relative to most analyses emanating
from national security circles in the United States, Cordesman’s
Playing the Course has the advantage, we think, of being strong on
realism. It is therefore reasonable to ask whether the powers that be in
the United States can be expected to follow his prescription, beginning by
renouncing all imperial objectives in Iraq. We think this is unlikely to
happen. The operational phrase remains to “stay the course.” On March 30,
2004, former secretary of defense under Nixon and Ford, James Schlesinger,
and former U.S. ambassador to Russia and under secretary for political
affairs under Clinton, Thomas Pickering (the two co-chaired the Council on
Foreign Relations task force that produced the report Iraq: One Year
Later), editorialized in the Los Angeles Times that Iraq should
remain “above politics” and that the United States should “stay the
course.” The reasons they offered included preventing Iran from
influencing Iraq; guaranteeing “long-term stability in the production and
supply of oil”; blocking the rise of a new power in Iraq opposed to the
United States; and avoiding a perception of American defeat that would
serve to destabilize American power and its interests both in the Middle
East and globally. In short, the imperial objectives for which the United
States intervened in the region must be maintained at all costs.
Nothing coming out of Washington these
days suggests that this dominant view has altered in any way. Although it
is well understood among those at the top of the social hierarchy that a
series of disasters may well await the United States in Iraq if it simply
sticks to its guns, to not do so is seen as guaranteeing a still bigger
disaster—a confession of defeat that will diminish the future U.S.
capacity to make war at will on third world societies and thus to employ
force directly as a means to promote its imperial designs. Moreover, there
is still the question of Iraqi oil and who will control it. Thus in the
ruling class view, even an absolute failure in establishing a stable
political regime and the requisite military force to defend it in Iraq
does not necessarily mean that the United States should get out. Thomas
Friedman, the Op-Ed columnist on foreign affairs at the New York Times,
whose views can usually be taken as a good barometer of establishment
opinion, concludes a November 18, 2004, report from Iraq with the
statement that “Without a secure environment in which its new leadership
can be elected and comfortably operate, Iraq will never be able to breathe
on its own, and U.S. troops will have to be here forever.” The attitude
here is that the U.S. occupation would need to continue endlessly in the
case of a failure to realize the goal of a stable political situation in
Iraq acceptable to the United States. Given the enormous Iraqi oil
reserves Washington could decide that whatever costs it had to pay in Iraq
would be amply rewarded in the end.
If the foregoing reading of the U.S.
leadership’s current determination to stay the course is right, then the
failures to be experienced by U.S. imperialism in Iraq are likely to
persist and be all the greater. The continuing presence of U.S. troops
will mean that the U.S. military will continue to take its bloody toll
(which has already descended to systematic torture and the reintroduction
of napalm, outlawed by the United Nations in 1980), and Iraqi opposition
to the American “liberators” will only grow. Meanwhile any Iraqi
government that is elected under these circumstances will either have to
be opposed to the U.S. occupation or lose any claims of legitimacy within
Iraqi society. The entire U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq may be
creating the conditions for a civil war, lighting a powder keg under the
entire Middle East. To get an idea
of just how serious this can be one has only to look at present Israeli
arming and training of the Kurdish militias, with the object of then
setting them—if the need should arise—against the Shiite or Sunni forces
in Iraq. Israel’s
possession of hundreds of nuclear weapons poses the continual threat of
the “Samson option” should that government perceive itself or its
occupation of Palestine as
seriously threatened.*
Wider speculation at this point would
be foolhardy. But there is no doubt that in invading Iraq the United
States opened the doors of hell not only for the Iraqis and the Middle
East as a whole but also for its own global imperialist order. The full
repercussions of the failure of the U.S. empire in Iraq have yet to be
seen and will only become evident in the months and years ahead. Posted
by Bulatlat
Notes
*
Michael Klare, “The New Geopolitics,” in John Bellamy Foster and Robert W.
McChesney, ed., Pox Americana
(New York: Monthly Review Press, 2004), 51–56.
*
For a critique of this new conservative/military history of the war see
Robert Buzanco, Masters of War: Military Dissent and Politics in the
Vietnam Era (Cambridge University Press, 1996).
*
The Pentagon Papers, vol. 4 (Gravel edition) (Boston: Beacon
Press), 668; Noam Chomsky, “Foreword” in Peter Limqueco and Peter Weiss,
ed., Prevent the Crime of Silence: Reports from the Sessions of the
International War Crimes Tribunal founded by Bertrand Russell (London:
Penguin, 1971), 19; Dorothy Fosdick, ed., Staying the Course: Henry M.
Jackson and National Security (Seattle: University of Washington
Press, 1987), 190.
*
Seymour M. Hersh, Chain of Command: The Road from 9/11 to Abu Ghraib
(New York: HarperCollins, 2004), 356–60, and The Samson Option:
Israel’s Nuclear Arsenal and American Foreign Policy (New York: Random
House, 1991).
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