The Fall of the One-Party Empire
by JONATHAN SCHELL
[from the December 12, 2005 issue]
For some time I have been suggesting here that the aim of Republican strategy has been a Republican Party that permanently runs the United States and a United States that permanently runs the world. The two aims have been driven by a common purpose: to steadily and irreversibly increase and consolidate power in GOP hands, leading in the direction of a one-party state at home and a global American empire abroad. The most critical question has been whether American democracy, severely eroded but still breathing, would bring down the Republican machine, or whether the Republican machine--call it the budding one-party global empire--would bring down American democracy. This week, it looks as if democracy, after years of decline, has gained the upper hand.
The choice was and remains: empire or republic? Just a few years ago the "sole superpower," the new Rome, master of the "unipolar" world, seemed to many to be bestriding the globe. Some, like columnist Charles Krauthammer, were reveling in the triumph of "the American hegemon." "History has given you an empire, if you will keep it," he said, traducing Benjamin Franklin, who had said at the Constitutional Convention that the United States was a republic if you can keep it.
Others, like writer Michael Ignatieff, in a more somber mood, were preparing to shoulder the empire's inescapable global "burdens," which meant "enforcing such order as there is in the world and doing so in the American interest." Still others, like journalist Robert Kaplan, were touring the empire's far-flung garrisons, lionizing the "imperial grunts" and counseling that America's civil leaders should yield to military direction. Indeed, he said that the "very distinction between our civilian and military operations overseas is eroding." The model for the future, he thought, should be the United States' long history of military intervention in Latin America.
But where is the American empire now, where the new Rome? Where are its subject peoples, its provinces, its Macedonias and Carthages and Egypts, its victorious armies and triumphal parades? Where, for that matter, are its arts and letters, its Colossus of Rhodes, its Pyramids? Where is its Virgil? Would that be Bill O'Reilly, fountain of abusive misinformation, or Dan Bartlett, the White House Misspokesman? Can someone give me a tour of this realm? We might begin in Iraq. But perhaps we had better not. The tour would have to be cut short in the Green Zone, the American compound in downtown Iraq and the only "secure" territory in the country. Some 200 Iraqis have been killed recently in bomb attacks (horrors scarcely mentioned in the debate in this country). As for the Iraqi "government," these quislings are unable to follow imperial orders--they are deficient even as puppets. Their main accomplishment has been to open a torture center, perhaps in imitation of our own Abu Ghraib, or perhaps following the model of Saddam Hussein...http://tinyurl.com/c3u6z
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by JONATHAN SCHELL
[from the December 12, 2005 issue]
For some time I have been suggesting here that the aim of Republican strategy has been a Republican Party that permanently runs the United States and a United States that permanently runs the world. The two aims have been driven by a common purpose: to steadily and irreversibly increase and consolidate power in GOP hands, leading in the direction of a one-party state at home and a global American empire abroad. The most critical question has been whether American democracy, severely eroded but still breathing, would bring down the Republican machine, or whether the Republican machine--call it the budding one-party global empire--would bring down American democracy. This week, it looks as if democracy, after years of decline, has gained the upper hand.
The choice was and remains: empire or republic? Just a few years ago the "sole superpower," the new Rome, master of the "unipolar" world, seemed to many to be bestriding the globe. Some, like columnist Charles Krauthammer, were reveling in the triumph of "the American hegemon." "History has given you an empire, if you will keep it," he said, traducing Benjamin Franklin, who had said at the Constitutional Convention that the United States was a republic if you can keep it.
Others, like writer Michael Ignatieff, in a more somber mood, were preparing to shoulder the empire's inescapable global "burdens," which meant "enforcing such order as there is in the world and doing so in the American interest." Still others, like journalist Robert Kaplan, were touring the empire's far-flung garrisons, lionizing the "imperial grunts" and counseling that America's civil leaders should yield to military direction. Indeed, he said that the "very distinction between our civilian and military operations overseas is eroding." The model for the future, he thought, should be the United States' long history of military intervention in Latin America.
But where is the American empire now, where the new Rome? Where are its subject peoples, its provinces, its Macedonias and Carthages and Egypts, its victorious armies and triumphal parades? Where, for that matter, are its arts and letters, its Colossus of Rhodes, its Pyramids? Where is its Virgil? Would that be Bill O'Reilly, fountain of abusive misinformation, or Dan Bartlett, the White House Misspokesman? Can someone give me a tour of this realm? We might begin in Iraq. But perhaps we had better not. The tour would have to be cut short in the Green Zone, the American compound in downtown Iraq and the only "secure" territory in the country. Some 200 Iraqis have been killed recently in bomb attacks (horrors scarcely mentioned in the debate in this country). As for the Iraqi "government," these quislings are unable to follow imperial orders--they are deficient even as puppets. Their main accomplishment has been to open a torture center, perhaps in imitation of our own Abu Ghraib, or perhaps following the model of Saddam Hussein...http://tinyurl.com/c3u6z
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posted by Dan at 4:32 PM
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