United States: Intervention or Empire?

Tony Judt, in a review entitled "The New World Order", writes in the most recent edition of the New Review of Books about the dilemma facing the United States in light of the world situation, post-Iraq.

Interestingly, in the first part of his review he compares the war in Iraq with the interventions in Bosnia and Kosovo(and the failure to intervene in Rwanda), and challenges those on the left to see the similarities between those previous humanitarian interventions and the positive humanitarian consequences of the invasion of Iraq, which are undeniable. This leads to a discussion of the difficulties of humanitarian intervention in the fact of the "new world order", and the general inability of the United Nations to reliably convene any international effort to deal with humanitarian crisis.

The alternative to the United Nations is, of course, the United States. In fact without the United States, there would have no intervention in either Bosnia or Kosovo. Of course without the United States there also would have been no invasion of Iraq. But war in Iraq, and the larger "war on terror", has led the United States to engage in questionable, illegal and frequently immoral tactics.

"The unrepublican veneration of our presidential 'leader' has made it uniquely difficult for Americans to see their country's behavior as others see it. The latest report from Amnesty International—which says nothing that the rest of the world doesn't already know or believe but which has been denied and ridiculed by President Bush —is a case in point. The United States 'renders' (i.e., kidnaps and hands over) targeted suspects to third-party states for interrogation and torture beyond the reach of US law and the press. The countries to whom we outsource this task include Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Syria (!), Pakistan— and Uzbekistan. Where outsourcing is impractical, we import qualified interrogators from abroad: in September 2002 a visiting Chinese 'delegation' was invited to participate in the 'interrogation' of ethnic Uighur detainees held at Guantánamo."

All of this is of course well known to those who have followed the progress of the "war on terror" and the war in Iraq. But Judt has a larger point to make about the corrupting influence of these tactics:

"Historians and pundits who leap aboard the bandwagon of American Empire have forgotten a little too quickly that for an empire to be born, a republic has first to die. In the longer run no country can expect to behave imperially—brutally, contemptuously, illegally—abroad while preserving republican values at home. For it is a mistake to suppose that institutions alone will save a republic from the abuses of power to which empire inevitably leads. It is not institutions that make or break republics, it is men. And in the United States today, the men (and women) of the country's political class have failed. Congress appears helpless to impede the concentration of power in the executive branch; indeed, with few exceptions it has contributed actively and even enthusiastically to the process."

I think what Judt is discussing is clearly the worst case scenario. And yet it is clear that the potentially unending "war on terror" has had a profound effect on our domestic politics, with Republicans more then willing to use the issue of terrorism and national security to pound Democrats at the polls. How profound has the effect been on our nation? Could an uneding war threaten our very democracy? Judt says yes.

"For there is a precedent in modern Western history for a country whose leader exploits national humiliation and fear to restrict public freedoms; for a government that makes permanent war as a tool of state policy and arranges for the torture of its political enemies; for a ruling class that pursues divisive social goals under the guise of national "values"; for a culture that asserts its unique destiny and superiority and that worships military prowess; for a political system in which the dominant party manipulates procedural rules and threatens to change the law in order to get its own way; where journalists are intimidated into confessing their errors and made to do public penance. Europeans in particular have experienced such a regime in the recent past and they have a word for it. That word is not 'democracy.'"

It's quite obvious what "precedent" he's referring to. While the historical circumstances are almost completely different, the principles he's referring to, such as the use of or threat of war to influence politics at home, remain the same. And the similarities to much of what is happening in America today are troubling. Is our democracy threatened? I think the ideals of American democracy are considerably stronger then many on the left or the right believe, and yet it's hard to not worry about the willingness of those on the right who would divide the American public on something as crucial as our own security for their personal political gain. To what lengths will they go for political gain? Certainly even the most staunchly Republican politicians believe whole-heartedly in American democracy. Yet democracy is undermined one small step at a time, and can't each step be justified by the need to defend the American people from an outside danger?

I can't say for sure what, if any, threat there is to American democracy right now. I don't believe such a thing can be known except in hindsight, unfortunately. But the topic is worth considerably more discussion, and I'll return to again another time.