Part of a longer post on Rachel Maddow’s new book Drift, at Rick Congress’s Politics, Music and Irony blog:
Maddow suggests restoring the balance between the executive and the legislative branches of government (take some power from the Presidency and give more to the House and Senate…somehow), banning private contractors like Blackwater from war making and having not so much secrecy. The odds of these things happening are, of course, slim to none. Why? Because Maddow’s own fellow Democratic Party liberals are just as much gung-ho for permanent US warfare, and military bases being spread around the world, as any Republican. Also because everyone is on the take from the military-industrial complex among other businesses.
Maddow herself is adrift: untethered to reality. The USA has been an imperialist, predatory nation from the beginning. “Manifest Destiny” was the watchword for the march across the continent and the wiping out of the Indians; which begat the 1848 theft of half of Mexico, the 1898 war with Spain that led to planting the flag in Puerto Rico and Manilla; which presaged a revolving door of US military attacks and occupations in Haiti, Dominican Republic, Nicaragua and on and on morphing in more recent history to funding and using the local military and oligarchs to put US puppet governments in power (Brazil, Argentina, Chile, El Salvador among others). Then there is 1954 and reinstalling the Shah in Iran and then the overthrow of a democratically elected government in Guatamala, both of which were CIA capers. Democrats and Republicans collaborated on all of these interventions.
There is a seamless trail of US intervention in Vietnam from Truman,Eisenhower, JFK, LBJ and Nixon. The legislative branch has happily ceded it’s warmaking powers to the executive. Sometimes there is a ritual of pseudo democracy to rubber stamp executive imperialism.
There is no “drift.” There are a couple of centuries of policy: the US will dominate politically and economically whoever it can. If there’s no submission, then send in the Marines, or in our higher tech world, the drones. Mark Twain could figure this out. He participated in the Anti-Imperialst League,which opposed the US war of conquest in the Philippines over 100 years ago. Maddow can’t figure it out. The stark truth blows her whole rationale out of the water: the USA is good, good, good. But it makes mistakes that can be corrected…by Democrats.
The fact that Obama is far worse than Bush in committing war crimes and shredding democratic rights has escaped Maddow’s notice.
Some commentators have suggested that the neo-cons and their obsession with supporting Israel at all costs are behind all this interventionism, at least in the mid-east. We can’t point to The Weekly Standard or AIPAC as the motivating forces behind, say, the US marines occupation of Nicaragua from 1927 to 1933; but they have been enthused backers of the war in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Libya, Yemen, Somalia, and now Kenya and soon to be Mali.
The use of threats, bullying and military force is a longstanding tradition of the good ole’ USA and the latest mid-east wars fit right in. You could say that AIPAC and the neo-cons make everything more reducto ad absurdum and shrill. Also they do hamper the use of more flexible tactics by US imperialism by their “Israel firstism.” But in no way would US policy in the world be benign if they had no influence. This is a case of a falling out among thieves. The American people have no stake in what is euphemistically called our “National Interest.” National Interest is a code word for the interests of banks, mulit-national corporations, and their political operatives in both parties.
I feel like Richard Congress went into my comment archive and wrote this as a summary!! haha. THANK YOU RICHARD!! Very well done.
Semper Fidelis,
Dan
OK Robert Kagan!
Actually, everything here is true. Kagan’s book Dangerous Nation has a point. But I would still like to cling to the myth that the Philippines marked a turning point. It’s one thing to expand in a continent, even at the shameful expense of American Indians. But it’s another thing to exercise imperialism halfway around the world. I don’t think we should be so quick to blur this distinction.
“But in no way would US policy in the world be benign if they had no influence.”
The war ended in many parts of the world inlcuding in Phillipnies and Vietnam and n Korea for Americans were fighting for their interest and losing peopel who were Americans.cost became too much. In a paroxical world of parasite -host relationship , this equation does not hold up to the weight of the reality. In ME wars American have lost war,lost people and its business have suffered, despite this, it continues on same path.It does not know when to stop for the war-managers from Tel Aviv does not lose people and does not lose money while accumulating all the benefits. The only explanation is the stranglehold Israel enjoys over the Congress ,finances,and the media. Americans dont know that they have been losing money,people,and the wars.
“Maddow herself is adrift: untethered to reality.”
All of our political ‘industry’ is untethered from reality.
BWTTGASO.
American imperialism precedes Zionism, but today the two are almost synonymous. America’s Middle Eastern-centric foreign policy and strategic doctrine is incomprehensible without the Israel Lobby.
Not to provide apologies for it, but America’s original imperialism was Western Hemisphere and Pacific oriented. U.S. isolationism meant periodic interventions in Caribbean and Central American Banana Republics and Pacific island outposts. America’s rise as a world, rather than hemispheric power, largely coincides with the ascendance of American Jewry. Today the Obama administration makes noises about returning to an Asia-Pacific focused foreign policy, but in fact Syria, Iran, Afghanistan, Yemen, etc. seem more important than ever to American policy makers and defense establishment.