Practice makes perfect (aka neo-imperialism, C/D?)

(also, the phrase "special assistant to Donald Rumsfeld" makes my skin crawl for some reason)

http://www.cis.upenn.edu/~davidj2/neo.jpg

This is not:

http://www.regiments.org/img/maps/bemap.gif

That said the last quote--"This is the future for the world we're in at the moment," he said. "We'll get better as we do it more often"--is injudicious.

NICE CONTINGENCY PLANNING!

Same shit, different day. We don't use boats anymore, is all.

Why do you say that, Kenan?

Why do you say that, Kenan?

Invade, control politics and economy and natural resources, profit from invaded country. It's just slippery imperialism.

the old stuff seems to end up being burnished and retroactively justified

Doesn't that work both ways?

"control" is a bit of an overstatement at this point isn't it?

Don't worry, though. The North Korean troops will surely turn against their government if we confuse 'em enough.

"Other ideas include setting up a fund like Alaska's and making payments to individual Iraqis, perhaps by establishing individual retirement accounts. Some officials want to privatize Iraq's oil industry and use revenues for a widely held private company. Still others say that the revenues could be managed by a development board for use in major projects."

I don't know that we did get all neo-imperialist in Bosnia. We intervened, sure, but in accordance with international law. What makes the Iraq debacle look like neo-imperialism is the incredibly thin justification we have for being there, other than for imperialist purposes. In Iraq, the imperialist tendency is clear, while the political justification is very fuzzy at best, and an outright lie at worst. And as for Rwanda, well... can open, worms everywhere. If you want to know whether it was our duty to be there or not, you'll have to start another thread.

Hm. They may have faced veto, but as sure as Iraq?

I'll take "not even bothering" for 1000, Alex.

However, just because the UN authorises it doesn't mean its not and imperialist/collonialist endeavour.

I thinkwe still have to wait and see re: iraq. How committed is the US going to be. If the US stays and stays in force then there isn't going to be much left over for further military adventures.

I don't currently think it's an argument-winner to merely assume imperialism is bad IN ITSELF, and that all agree (this not so in the 50s/60s/70s, when the pro AmEmp was busily taking apart the remnants of BritEmp, FrenchEmp etc, and of course battling SovEmp, while INSISTING IT WAS NOT ITSELF AN EMIRE — so there wz rhetorical heft against the idea of Empire, which all agrere wz a "bad thing"; kinda like there is in the word "racist" today, when even obvious racists flail away to agree racism's bad and that's excatly not what they are).

I think to reanimate the rhetorical power of the word used solo, the entire story has to be told in full, of what went wrong before, and why it ended up trumping all the stuff which you could/should call good. "In full" = taking special account of those elements which were minor back in the day but are now central: eg the contradictions contained in the notion of National Sovereignty (esp.as it's invoked by leftists perhaps...)

One of the BIG reasons 19th centiry empire was bad was this: imperialist rivalry => world war one (and all that came after). As Brit.Emp wz faffing abt in South Africa against the Boers, Germany reached a tipping point where it decided it wz actually more cultured and efficient and wd do a better job colonising three-quarters of the globe => result, courtesy irreversible railway timetables (©AJPTaylor), carnage of the trenches, pan-European turmoil and displacement, death camps replacing concentration camps (which the Brits invented in S.Africa btw).

I think I suggested elsewhere on ILE that if 9-11 wz AmEmp's Indian Mutiny, then Iraq is its Boer War: that's an Empire-is-Empire-and-evermore-shall-be-so type position, no "neo" needed. But AmEmp's WW1 requires AmEmp's Germany. Who is this? (China, Russia, The EU? Be detailed and plausible please... ) Or are we in an actually structurally novel situation? Current geo-economic dynamic, coupled with contestation of international law, sets Human Rights Arguments *against* the shaping concept of National Sovereignty, the latter — central to the manoevres which produced WW1 — is kinda deliquescing before our eyes... What place does THIS fact have? If none then show so.

One of the problems I have with the 'neo-imperialism' critique of US policy is that it's terribly selective about its readings from history - it looks to history for examples of empire-building and administration and tut-tuts over that, ignoring the other salient historical lesson which is that an Empire has never been dismantled peacefully (with the 'colonies' tending to bear the brunt of the resulting violence and instability). The 'what do we do about it?' part of the analysis always looks optimistic, basically, no matter how sophisticated the analysis of the current situation.

ie instead of hunting round for a place outside to stand with the lever to the world — there is no place outside anymore — shift intellectual resources to radical agitation from within (cz everything's now within anyway, inc. russia, china and the entire third world....)

another way of saying this = the 60s are over, move on move on

(momus said if the US was being just and open in its current movement, it wd IMMEDIATELY make all iraqis US citizens and then the question of the rights and wrongs of the present situation etc wd shift to the law courts => i think the evident daftness of this as a genuine solution [momus wz being rhetorical and sarcastic, I think] somewhat undoes the Agitate-from-Within line, *but* the issue of postponement of a Decent Civil Life (for eg Iraqis) in fact undoes the argument on BOTH sides, as currently stated...)

The intellectual and organisation heart of the Anti-War Movement is now distinctively American also, and its political hegemony is a kind of soft cultural imperialism sometimes (listen to Chomsky being sarcastic abt the Brit govt!!): there's actually a quite large parochialism overlap as a result...

in early BritEmp the pioneering OmniCorps (East India Co., West India Co.) were dismantled (after a series of catastrophes) in favour of state structures — among other things to accord with ideologies of National Sovereignty as guarantor of liberty

currently the reverse is happening everywhere though: and i fear that the history of the british labour party 1945-85 = object lesson in the bankruptcy of the assumption that National Sovereignty can function as a satisfactory ideological bulwark against encroaching capital

view from US will be very difft on this point of course

ignoring the other salient historical lesson which is that an Empire has never been dismantled peacefully

Yeah. So figuring out how to learn from that lesson without repeating it is the challenge. I don't think the present course is irreversible -- or unalterable I guess is a better word, because I don't think "reverse" is a particularly good option (i.e. we can't/don't want to go backward, but that still leaves 180 degrees of possible directions). My hope is that we can accelerate the whole process, work our way through this shit in a couple of years and come out the other side without having to actually go through the decades of mounting resentment, constant capital-W War, impoverishment of domestic resources, etc. etc. If we could get past that, we could minimize longterm damage to ourselves and others, and we could also once and for shut the door on the fucking 19th century. That's an optimistic scenario, I know, but I think it's what the internal agitation from all quarters can do -- speed things up, remind people we've been through this stuff before, talk about different ways of doing things, show people that there are actually alternatives. Basically, we can do this in 100 years with a lot of violence and poverty, or we can do it in, you know, 10 or 15 with a lot less shooting. I'll take the 10 to 15, your honor.

british labour party 1945-85 = object lesson in the bankruptcy of the assumption that National Sovereignty can function as a satisfactory ideological bulwark against encroaching capital

The sad thing is to see so many leftists holding onto national sovereignty as a defense; it makes them reactionary, for one thing, and it's a doomed cause anyway. The left shouldn't be clinging to national sovereignty. Corporations and, now, the U.S. military have basically said fuck-you to national sovereignty -- so, OK, fine, let it go. It just pushes us closer to international law, real actual globalization. If people don't feel like national sovereignty provides adequate security any more, they're going to turn more and more to international structures. That's why the Bush people are ultimately fighting a losing battle: you can't have selective globalization. It's an oxymoron. Once you globalize a little, once you crack that door (and man, we've just about blown that door off the hinges), you can't close it again.

The question at this point isn't what will ultimately happen, I don't think, but how long and stupid and painful the process will be.