PRETENSIONS TO EMPIRE: Notes on the Criminal Folly of the Bush Administration
By LEWIS LAPHAM
The New Press, 2006, 288 pp, $45 (hb)
Review by Phil Shannon
The crisis happened in 1991. The collapse of the Soviet Union, writes a satirical Lewis Lapham in his latest collection of essays, Pretensions to Empire, “had deprived the United States of an asset as precious to the national economy as General Motors and Iowa corn, the sine qua non that had provided nine American Presidents with a just and noble cause, supplied the dark black cloth of Communist menace against which every freedom-loving politician could project the wholesome images of American innocence and goodness of heart”.
But with the Red hordes now gone, a new enemy was needed to justify a violent American empire – “the Japanese couldn’t play the part because they were lending the United States too much money; the Colombian drug lords were too few and too well-connected in Miami … and the Chinese were busy making shirts for Ralph Lauren”. Arab terrorists attacking US soil, however, were made for the part – foreign, fanatical and requiring a global response and a massive defence budget.
Overlook for a minute, says Lapham, the illogic that when the US was attacked by Saudi Arabian Islamic jihadists on September 11, “we responded by attacking a secular regime in Iraq”, to note the pious rhetoric of ‘staying the course’ and the moveable feast of excuses for war (from Iraq’s ‘Weapons of Mass Disappearance’ to protecting the Iraqi people from the scourge of civil war) and you have the debacle of the Vietnam War revisited.
Like that earlier imperial war, says Lapham, there was a “criminal intent” that will never make it to an episode of the eponymous TV cop show. The Bush regime was gunning for Iraq long before the Twin Towers. Like Vietnam, the invasion of Iraq was not a case of ‘good intentions gone astray’, not a ‘tragic mistake’, not based on ‘faulty intelligence’ but another example of state terrorism, “precision-guided and electronically accessorised”, but terrorism all the same. Like the long and inglorious century of US imperialism, the corporate looters and their militaried muscle went on a Middle Eastern rampage, glorified as ‘national security’, wrapped up in a super-patriotic love of the flag and cheered on by a “loyal media” which routinely confines large, orderly protests to the margins unless violence is provoked and made headline-worthy.
After the depleted-uranium dust and cluster bomb pellets settled in Iraq, “government prefects” moved in to dispense the “no-bid government reconstruction contracts” to “Bechtel, Halliburton, and any other friend of liberty willing to lend a hand with the oil derricks around Baghdad and the balloons at next year’s Republican nominating convention”. The word-warriors and policy managers also swung into action to maintain the semblance of noble cause - polite language disguised the killing of Iraqis, the bodies of the ‘unworthy’ Iraqi dead were not tabulated.
Another theme from Vietnam (‘to save the village, we must destroy it’) could also be heard, with the Bush administration suggesting that we preserve our liberties by placing them – “temporarily and for our own good, of course” – in administrative detention. Abolished were human rights for arrestees in the Pentagon’s torture chambers and wound back were civil liberties and freedom of speech for Americans - on Labor Day in 2002 in Pittsburgh, a retired steel-worker was arrested for walking around outside a ‘free speech zone’ (“protest pens” at a safe distance from Presidential speech or motorcade) for carrying a sign saying “The Bush Family Must Surely Love the Poor, They Made so Many of Us”.
Complementing this triumphant work of liberty-spreading around the world, writes Lapham, is liberty-spreading at home under the baton of the born-again, evangelical right who make up one quarter of American voters and around 130 House of Representatives’ politicians, zealots all, “saving life from Satanic feminists” in abortion clinics but “blind to cruise missiles in Baghdad”.
And, when Hurricane Katrina exposed “a society divided across race and class” in the Mississippi mud, the President discovered a silver lining in the cyclonic cloud, offering deliverance “for Vice-President Dick Cheney’s duck-shooting companions at Halliburton” if not for the black, poor and illiterate residents of Biloxi and Gulfport, as the reconstruction cash-flow rose to a government-guaranteed high water mark.
From imperial occupations to corporate health care, from civil ill-liberties to censorship of scientists, it is class warfare all round, says Lapham, his attractive blend of satirical wit and literary elegance bringing into savagely ironic relief the decidedly unattractive injustice of modern American global capitalism.