An Imperial Defeatist-- And Proud of It

Empire; the very idea of Empire should be executed and buried deep in a 50' foot grave.

An Imperial Defeatist-- And Proud of It:

Just recently, I was accused by a writer for the ultra-Right Washington Times of being a 'defeatist' when it comes to America's expansionist military policy abroad. The giveaway, it seems, is that I penned a book for the American Empire Project -- a series of critical volumes published by Metropolitan Books. Contributors to the series, the article claimed, want 'a retreat from Iraq to be the prelude to a larger collapse of American preeminence worldwide.' My initial response on reading this was to insist -- like so many anxious liberals -- that no, I am not opposed to American preeminence in the world, only to continued U.S. involvement in Iraq. But then, considering the charge some more, I thought, well, yes, I am in favor of abandoning the U.S. imperial role worldwide. The United States, I'm convinced, would be a whole lot better off -- and its military personnel a whole lot safer -- if we repudiated the global-dominance project of the Bush administration and its neo-conservative boosters.

Supposedly, the U.S. military has expanded its presence and combat role around the world to foster democracy and prevail in the President's War on Terror; and, without a doubt, many brave Americans have risked their lives -- and some have died, in the pursuit of these noble objectives. But this is not, I believe, what has motivated Messrs. Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld in their pursuit of global supremacy. Rather, they appear driven by a messianic determination to impose American dominance on large swaths of the planet and to employ this hegemonic presence to gain control over global energy supplies. In attempting to do so, they are bankrupting the nation and exposing American citizens to a higher, not lower, risk of terrorist attack.