by Robert Jensen, <rjensen@uts.cc.utexas.edu>
http://educate-yourself.org/cn/defeatforempire10dec04.shtml
December 10, 2004
Published Fort Worth Star-Telegram
A Defeat For an Empire
The United States has lost the war in Iraq, and that's a good
thing.
I don't mean that the loss of American and Iraqi lives is
to be celebrated. The death and destruction are numbingly tragic, and the
suffering in Iraq is hard for most of us in the United States to comprehend.The
tragedy is compounded because these deaths haven't protected Americans or
brought freedom to Iraqis. They have come in the quest to extend the American
empire in this "new American century."
So, as a U.S. citizen, I welcome the U.S. defeat for a simple
reason: It isn't the defeat of the United States -- its people or their
ideals -- but of that empire. And it's essential that the American empire
be defeated and dismantled.
The fact that the Bush administration says we are fighting
for freedom and democracy (having long ago abandoned fictions about weapons
of mass destruction and terrorist ties) does not make it so.
We must look at the reality, no matter how painful. The people
of Iraq are better off without Saddam Hussein's despised regime, but that
does not prove our benevolent intentions or guarantee that the United States
will work to bring meaningful democracy to Iraq.
In Iraq, the Bush administration invaded not to liberate but
to extend and deepen U.S. domination. When Bush said, "We have no territorial
ambitions; we don't seek an empire," on Nov. 11, 2002, he told a half-truth.
The United States doesn't want to absorb Iraq or take direct
possession of its oil. That's not the way of empire today; it's about control
over the flow of oil and oil profits, not ownership.
In a world that runs on oil, the nation that controls the
flow of oil has great strategic power. U.S. policy-makers want leverage
over the economies of competitors -- Western Europe, Japan and China --
that are more dependent on Middle Eastern oil.
The Bush administration has invested money and lives in making
Iraq a platform from which the United States can project power.
That requires not the liberation of Iraq but its subordination.
But most Iraqis don't want to be subordinated, which is why the United States
in some sense lost the war on the day it invaded. One lesson of contemporary
history is that occupying armies generate resistance that, inevitably, prevails
over imperial power.
When we admit defeat and pull out -- not if, but when -- the
fate of Iraqis will depend in part on whether the United States makes good
on legal and moral obligations to pay reparations and allows international
institutions to aid in creating a truly sovereign Iraq.
We shouldn't expect politicians to do either without pressure.
An anti-empire movement -- the joining of anti-war forces with the movement
to reject corporate globalization -- must create that pressure.
We should all carry a profound sense of sadness at where decisions
made by U.S. policy-makers -- not just the gang in power today but a string
of Republican and Democratic administrations -- have left us and the Iraqis.
But that sadness should not keep us from pursuing the most courageous act
of citizenship in the United States today: pledging to dismantle the American
empire.
The planet's resources do not belong to the United States.
The century is not America's. We own neither the world nor time. And if
we don't give up the quest -- if we don't find our place in the world instead
of on top of the world -- there is little hope for a safe, sane and sustainable
future.
Robert Jensen is a journalism professor at the University
of Texas at Austin and the author of "Citizens of the Empire: The Struggle
to Claim Our Humanity." He can be reached at rjensen@uts.cc.utexas.edu
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Forward courtesy of B.Z.B.<matrix00@wildmail.com>
"Government is not reason, it is not eloquence. It is
force! Like fire, it is a dangerous servant and a fearful master."
-- George Washington
"The Constitution can only end in Despotism as other
Forms have done before it, when the People shall have become so corrupted
as to need Despotic Government, being incapable of any other."
-- Ben Franklin
"In the next voyage of the Mayflower, after she carried
the Pilgrims, she was employed in transporting a cargo of slaves from Africa."
-- Nathaniel Hawthorne
"When the game is over, the king and the pawn go into
the same box."
-- Italian proverb
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