Why Can’t We Say “Empire”?
October 28, 2011 by admin
Filed under News Stories
October 28, 2011
Salon Media
By David Sirota
Early Saturday morning, I spent two hours at 30 Rockefeller Plaza with a distinguished panel of guests on Chris Hayes’ terrific new MSNBC show “Up.” The theme of the discussion, which you can watch here, was the state of national security policy after Moammar Gadhafi’s death and President Barack Obama’s announcement of the end of the Iraq war. The conversation soon turned to a topic that is almost never mentioned, much less seriously explored, in the traditional media: the subject of American Empire. Our dialogue provided a perfect example of how troublesome newspeak continues to muddle our foreign policy discussions.
Here’s the excerpted exchange that kicked it off; I introduced the subject and then P.J. Crowley, my former colleague at the Center for American Progress, fired back (there was a break in between, so I’ve put the two statements together for brevity’s sake):
SIROTA: On my radio show in Denver, you are talking to callers every day, and every so often I mention the fact that if you look at the last 50 years after WWII, American foreign policy is in part about empire — it’s an imperial project. You’ll get some folks who will agree with you, but you get conservative callers who say that is the most offensive thing I’ve ever heard. Now if you look at it empirically, I think our foreign policy has been a project of empire.
CROWLEY: I just couldn’t disagree more… In the last 100 years there’s been a battle against fascism, a battle against communism, and there’s been the construction of a remarkable what John Ikenberry at Princeton calls a liberal hegemonic project where you have a World Trade Organization, a functioning United Nations, an open liberal system, a remarkable number of democracies that have come into the world in the last 30, 40, 50 years. The United States is the lone superpower in the world. We throw our weight around. Not all of our policies are effective or consistent necessarily with our values. But you cannot describe the United States as an empire. We have created a system that we invite everyone in the world to participate in. And the last point is that, look, an Empire would never leave Iraq. The fact is, we had a negotiation, Iraq said we can’t live with these conditions, and we are in fact leaving. That’s not what an Empire does.
A former public affairs officer for the National Security Council and then mouthpiece for the U.S. State Department, Crowley was a perfect guest for this discussion. Despite his recent — and laudable — acknowledgment of the inhumane treatment of Bradley Manning, this is a guy who has been a loyal spokesman for America’s national security establishment. Consequently, his retort is an important example of how that establishment employs euphemisms and coded phrases to mainstream, sugarcoat and obscure an imperial project that might make rank-and-file Americans uncomfortable.
Crowley bridles at the idea that America’s long history of geopolitical aspirations, invasions, occupations and various extensions of power is part of an imperial project. Instead, we are told that it’s all just one “liberal hegemonic project” (as if alleged liberalism somehow makes it a “hegemonic project” not an “imperial project”). Yet, even beyond this almost overt contradiction of himself, his examples betray what really drives American foreign policy.
The World Trade Organization, for example, uses the imperial threat of sanctions to help American corporate interests trample the will of local governments in order to exploit host nations for profit. Likewise, the United Nations — which certainly does a lot of good, important work — is still structurally rigged with a security council to make sure America has outsize imperial influence in proportion to its population.
While Crowley is correct that “a lot of democracies have come into the world in the last 30, 40, 50 years,” many of those democracies have emerged in spite of America’s imperial ambitions — not because of America’s non-imperial benevolence (think: Latin American democracies emerging in the face of Reagan administration meddling, or Egypt’s move toward democracy in spite of the Obama administration’s backing of dictator Hosni Mubarak). Additionally, more democracies might have come into the world if the U.S. hadn’t been propping up dictators.
Finally, the idea that we wouldn’t end an imperial occupation if we were an empire not only assumes that we actually are leaving Iraq (a shaky assumption, to say the least), but also glosses over the fact that forcibly bringing another nation into our sphere of influence, or fully propping up a client government, is also a part of the imperial project — it’s just more polite than a full-on military occupation.
Click here for the full report from Salon.
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The WikiLeaks Guide to the Gadhafi Clan
February 25, 2011 by admin
Filed under News Stories
February 25th, 2011
AOL News
By: Theunis Bates
Libyan dictator Col. Moammar Gadhafi heads a fractious family obsessed with power, wealth and chart-topping R&B stars, according to U.S. diplomatic cables released by anti-secrecy site WikiLeaks.
Those damning documents portray the tyrant and his eight children as a bizarre and brutal Brady Bunch, who were seemingly so fixated on building petty fiefdoms and fighting one another that they didn’t realize the country was collapsing around them.
Here’s what WikiLeaks has taught us about the secret life of the Gadhafi clan.
Moammar Gadhafi
The 68-year-old colonel — who grabbed power from King Idris I in a bloodless coup in 1969 — was described by America’s ambassador to Tripoli, Gene Cretz, in 2009 as a “mercurial and eccentric” figure who has “an intense dislike or fear of staying on upper floors, reportedly prefers not to fly over water, and seems to enjoy horse racing and flamenco dancing.”
These amusing details might suggest that the self-described “King of Kings” is a comedy tyrant. But the cables also paint him as a master tactician, who after 42 years in charge still oversees every aspect of the North African nation’s economic, domestic and foreign policy — as well as its brutal security apparatus.
He also manipulated his family in order to prevent any premature challenges to his rule. “[Gadhafi] has placed his sons,” Cretz wrote in 2009, “on a succession high-wire act, perpetually thrown off balance, in what might be a calculated effort by the aging leader to prevent any one of them from authoritatively gaining the prize.”
Saif al-Islam
The tyrant’s second eldest son and heir apparent attempted, until recently, to portray himself as a dedicated umanitarian and modernizer. The 38-year-old earned a Ph.D. from the prestigious London School of Economics, and his Gadhafi International Charity and Development Foundation spent millions shipping aid to earthquake-damaged Haiti.
A 2010 cable reported that many young Libyan men “aspire to be like Saif and think he is the right person to run the country.” They describe him as educated, cultured and someone who wants a better future for Libya, in contrast with his more irresponsible brothers, the cable reported.
However, Saif — who, like every member of the family, has profitable links with numerous Libyan oil companies — does have a wild side. A March 2009 document noted his “hard-partying, womanizing ways.” Another cable stated that he had purportedly paid Mariah Carey $1 million to sing at a New Year’s Eve bash on the Caribbean island of St. Barts. “Saif’s Oea newspaper hotly denied that their boss had been the financier,” the cable continued, “and corrections were printed in western media noting that Muatassim, not Saif al-Islam, was the organizer of the party in question.”
Irrespective of who paid for the celebration, Libyans now hate Saif as much as his brothers. On Sunday, he appeared on Libyan TV and justified atrocities against protesters, whom he called drunks, drug addicts and terrorists.
Click here for the full report from AOL News
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Ex-Minister Says Gadhafi Ordered Lockerbie Bombing
February 23, 2011 by admin
Filed under News Stories
February 23rd, 2011
AOL News
By: Karl Ritter
Swedish tabloid Expressen says Libya’s ex-justice minister claims Moammar Gadhafi personally ordered the Lockerbie bombing that killed 270 people in 1988.
Expressen on Wednesday quoted Mustafa Abdel-Jalil as telling its correspondent in Libya that “I have proof that Gadhafi gave the order about Lockerbie.” He didn’t describe the proof.
Abdel-Jalil stepped down as justice minister to protest the violence against anti-government demonstrations.
He told Expressen Gadhafi gave the order to Abdel Baset al-Megrahi, the only man convicted in the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, which killed all 259 people on board and 11 on the ground.
“To hide it, he (Gadhafi) did everything in his power to get al-Megrahi back from Scotland,” Abdel-Jalil was quoted as saying.
Al-Megrahi was granted a compassionate release from a Scottish prison in August 2009 on the grounds that he was suffering from prostate cancer and would die soon. He is still alive.
Expressen spokeswoman Alexandra Forslund said its reporter, Kassem Hamade, interviewed the ex-justice minister at “a local parliament in a large city in Libya.” She didn’t want to name the city, citing security concerns.
Expressen taped the interview, which was conducted in Arabic and translated to Swedish, Forslund said.
Gadhafi has been trying to bring his country out of isolation, announcing in 2003 that he was abandoning his program for weapons of mass destruction and renouncing terrorism.
Gadhafi also accepted Libya’s responsibility for the Lockerbie bombing and paid compensation to the victims’ families. But he hasn’t admitted personally giving the order for the attack.
Most of the victims in the Lockerbie bombing were Americans, and al-Megrahi’s release has been criticized by members of the U.S. Congress and the victims’ families
