Whither American Empire

October 19, 2004 2:08 PM

Dreams of Empire, by Tony Judt.Via the indispensable Arts and Letters Daily, an excellent liberal-left critique of current American thought on foreign policy. In the past I've not been a huge fan of Judt, but events have proven him right more often than not, and these days I take him very seriously indeed. And he's an excellent writer.
posted by mojohand (6 comments total)

The Strategy to Secure Iraq Did Not Foresee a 2nd War  Gen. Tommy R. Franks climbed out of a C-130 plane at the Baghdad airport on April 16, 2003, and pumped his fist into the air. American troops had pushed into the capital of liberated Iraq little more than a week before, and it was the war commander's first visit to the city...
Huddling in a drawing room with his top commanders, General Franks told them it was time to make plans to leave. Combat forces should be prepared to start pulling out within 60 days if all went as expected, he said. By September, the more than 140,000 troops in Iraq could be down to little more than a division, about 30,000 troops. To help bring stability and allow the Americans to exit, President Bush had reviewed a plan the day before seeking four foreign divisions - including Arab and NATO troops - to take on peacekeeping duties. As the Baghdad meeting drew to a close, the president in a teleconference congratulated the commanders on a job well done. Afterward, they posed for photos and puffed on victory cigars.
posted by y2karl at 5:50 PM on October 19, 2004

OK, not a great first post, but...I read A & L Daily daily...except when I'm vacation, like now...I'll read the article tomorrow, at work...but..."liberal-left?" Probably not to the average MeFier. (Metafilteralist?)

As one who religiously reads Atrios and Alternet and So On, A & L's (almost Daily) right-wing academic rants are a refreshing slap in the face.
posted by kozad at 6:07 PM on October 19, 2004

kozad, the "liberal-left" probably refers to the article, not the carrier (A&L), given that A&L does more than critique US foreign policy.
posted by Gyan at 7:00 PM on October 19, 2004

This is poorly written, and this is just nuts:

That is why US administrations have sought to underwrite overseas adventures (first in Vietnam and now in Iraq) by borrowing money rather than taxing the American citizenry, and have tried, so far as possible, to outsource—i.e., privatize—the unglamorous nation-building part.

See, I was under the impression that we *were* getting taxed--albeit in very secretive ways, some of which we won't see for years and years--for our companies, like Halliburton, to do this. What's being outsourced? Our tax dollars are going to Halliburton to "outsource" this "adventure". We just don't see it yet.
posted by interrobang at 7:51 PM on October 19, 2004

Of course we pay taxes, I know that. *blink blink blink*

But the United States has gone into quite a bit of debt (AKA borrowing) in the process of financing the Iraq war.
posted by 4easypayments at 9:35 PM on October 19, 2004

This is also poorly researched:

The crimes of Abu Ghraib were as nothing set against what King Leopold of Belgium did to his Congolese slave laborers or the British massacre of 379 civilians at Amritsar in the Punjab in 1919. The difference is that everyone has seen what happened at Abu Ghraib. We don't know how ordinary Belgians would have responded to seeing what their government was doing in central Africa; but in any case our own sensibilities are heightened.

Tony Judt, I (sorrowfully) give you The Kodak vs. the King -- images of the Conradian Horror that was the Belgian Congo, in the context of the reform movements of the day, which used photography for full advantage (as did their opponents). Discussed here. I'm sorry, but it seemed historically obvious.

My very first thought on reading that was the camera had already been invented; my second was surely someone had used it to publicize the atrocities; and my third was, Wait a minute -- I know that site!.

interrobang, I think you are conflating two related thoughts from his (unclear) sentence. We are borrowing against our future (tax cuts today are tax increases for our children); we are outsourcing the work to private entities (rather than accountable, transparent public entities). I don't know that Halliburton, in the end, is qualitatively that much different from the British East India Co., which ran its own private armies under the Union Jack, but surely the principle is roughly the same. In the end outsourcing is financed by borrowing, but present-day taxes are not increasing, which is the key thought: both actions make the occupation more palatable to a democratic public.

I'm glad he slammed Empire, though; it's an embarassment to the intellectual left, or should be.

Since he talks about me, I'll address that.

Isn't Michael Ignatieff folding the tent just a little bit hastily [in saying that liberal justifications for military intervention are wholly discredited]? He is one of a number of prominent liberal intellectuals ... who supported Bush's Iraq policy as part of the ongoing struggle against political tyranny and moral relativism. Having thus deluded themselves into believing that the American president was conducting his foreign policy for their reasons, some of them are understandably disgruntled.

I don't think I was ever deluded in quite that way, although I certainly expected that more than one aim could be served by the same intervention. What I'm disgruntled about is, indeed, the discredit that Ignatieff sees; and that is a function of the misleading WMD justification as well as the ineffectual execution of the nation-building. (Not only do they formally despise it, but the Bushies clearly won't even do it right when they themselves say it's necessary to the survival of the republic. Ours.) Perhaps one shouldn't have trusted it before, but surely few will now trust the claim that we're doing it for democracy. It was my firm belief that the WMD issue was as the administration laid it out; but the human rights issue was one for which I bore no guilt. I didn't like sanctions, but I didn't like Saddam having a highway to a WMD program even more. In the Clinton years I held out hope for an international carrot/stick rehabilitation of the regime toward a more acceptable range of behavior, but in large part domestic politics (*cough* blue dress) made that impossible (not to mention fuzzy short-term utilitarian thinking from Albright and crew; a conceit which has continued despite a change of administrations).

But I digress. Judt is better wrapping up the article with Slaughter's book. His final thoughts bruiting the double-edged sword of sovereignty, from a liberal perspective, might have been better had he contrasted them with the double-edged sword as seen from the right, as well. It's a funny thing, sovereignty, and interdependence doesn't simply trump it by fiat. We're going to be working that one for a generation at least. But as Iraq has shown, once the "rogue" Bush administration is gone and saner heads prevail, we'll have to deal with it.
posted by dhartung at 10:08 PM on October 19, 2004