With
an occupying army waging war in Iraq and Afghanistan, with military
bases and corporate bullying in every part of the world, there is
hardly a question any more of the existence of an American Empire.
Indeed, the once fervent denials have turned into a boastful, unashamed
embrace of the idea.
However, the very idea that the United
States was an empire did not occur to me until after I finished my work
as a bombardier with the Eighth Air Force in the Second World War, and
came home. Even as I began to have second thoughts about the purity of
the "Good War," even after being horrified by Hiroshima and Nagasaki,
even after rethinking my own bombing of towns in Europe, I still did
not put all that together in the context of an American "Empire."
I
was conscious, like everyone, of the British Empire and the other
imperial powers of Europe, but the United States was not seen in the
same way. When, after the war, I went to college under the G.I. Bill of
Rights and took courses in U.S. history, I usually found a chapter in
the history texts called "The Age of Imperialism." It invariably
referred to the Spanish-American War of 1898 and the conquest of the
Philippines that followed. It seemed that American imperialism lasted
only a relatively few years. There was no overarching view of U.S.
expansion that might lead to the idea of a more far-ranging empire --
or period of "imperialism."
I recall the classroom map
(labeled "Western Expansion") which presented the march across the
continent as a natural, almost biological phenomenon. That huge
acquisition of land called "The Louisiana Purchase" hinted at nothing
but vacant land acquired. There was no sense that this territory had
been occupied by hundreds of Indian tribes which would have to be
annihilated or forced from their homes -- what we now call "ethnic
cleansing" -- so that whites could settle the land, and later railroads
could crisscross it, presaging "civilization" and its brutal
discontents.
Neither the discussions of "Jacksonian democracy"
in history courses, nor the popular book by Arthur Schlesinger Jr., The
Age of Jackson, told me about the "Trail of Tears," the deadly forced
march of "the five civilized tribes" westward from Georgia and Alabama
across the Mississippi, leaving 4,000 dead in their wake. No treatment
of the Civil War mentioned the Sand Creek massacre of hundreds of
Indian villagers in Colorado just as "emancipation" was proclaimed for
black people by Lincoln's administration.
That classroom map
also had a section to the south and west labeled "Mexican Cession."
This was a handy euphemism for the aggressive war against Mexico in
1846 in which the United States seized half of that country's land,
giving us California and the great Southwest. The term "Manifest
Destiny," used at that time, soon of course became more universal. On
the eve of the Spanish-American War in 1898, the Washington Post saw
beyond Cuba: "We are face to face with a strange destiny. The taste of
Empire is in the mouth of the people even as the taste of blood in the
jungle."
The violent march across the continent, and even the
invasion of Cuba, appeared to be within a natural sphere of U.S.
interest. After all, hadn't the Monroe Doctrine of 1823 declared the
Western Hemisphere to be under our protection? But with hardly a pause
after Cuba came the invasion of the Philippines, halfway around the
world. The word "imperialism" now seemed a fitting one for U.S.
actions. Indeed, that long, cruel war -- treated quickly and
superficially in the history books -- gave rise to an Anti-Imperialist
League, in which William James and Mark Twain were leading figures. But
this was not something I learned in university either.
The "Sole Superpower" Comes into View
Reading
outside the classroom, however, I began to fit the pieces of history
into a larger mosaic. What at first had seemed like a purely passive
foreign policy in the decade leading up to the First World War now
appeared as a succession of violent interventions: the seizure of the
Panama Canal zone from Colombia, a naval bombardment of the Mexican
coast, the dispatch of the Marines to almost every country in Central
America, occupying armies sent to Haiti and the Dominican Republic. As
the much-decorated General Smedley Butler, who participated in many of
those interventions, wrote later: "I was an errand boy for Wall
Street."
At the very time I was learning this history -- the
years after World War II -- the United States was becoming not just
another imperial power, but the world's leading superpower. Determined
to maintain and expand its monopoly on nuclear weapons, it was taking
over remote islands in the Pacific, forcing the inhabitants to leave,
and turning the islands into deadly playgrounds for more atomic tests.
In
his memoir, No Place to Hide, Dr. David Bradley, who monitored
radiation in those tests, described what was left behind as the testing
teams went home: "[R]adioactivity, contamination, the wrecked island of
Bikini and its sad-eyed patient exiles." The tests in the Pacific were
followed, over the years, by more tests in the deserts of Utah and
Nevada, more than a thousand tests in all.
When the war in
Korea began in 1950, I was still studying history as a graduate student
at Columbia University. Nothing in my classes prepared me to understand
American policy in Asia. But I was reading I. F. Stone's Weekly. Stone
was among the very few journalists who questioned the official
justification for sending an army to Korea. It seemed clear to me then
that it was not the invasion of South Korea by the North that prompted
U.S. intervention, but the desire of the United States to have a firm
foothold on the continent of Asia, especially now that the Communists
were in power in China.
Years later, as the covert
intervention in Vietnam grew into a massive and brutal military
operation, the imperial designs of the United States became yet clearer
to me. In 1967, I wrote a little book called Vietnam: The Logic of
Withdrawal. By that time I was heavily involved in the movement against
the war.
When I read the hundreds of pages of the Pentagon
Papers entrusted to me by Daniel Ellsberg, what jumped out at me were
the secret memos from the National Security Council. Explaining the
U.S. interest in Southeast Asia, they spoke bluntly of the country's
motives as a quest for "tin, rubber, oil."
Neither the
desertions of soldiers in the Mexican War, nor the draft riots of the
Civil War, not the anti-imperialist groups at the turn of the century,
nor the strong opposition to World War I -- indeed no antiwar movement
in the history of the nation reached the scale of the opposition to the
war in Vietnam. At least part of that opposition rested on an
understanding that more than Vietnam was at stake, that the brutal war
in that tiny country was part of a grander imperial design.
Various
interventions following the U.S. defeat in Vietnam seemed to reflect
the desperate need of the still-reigning superpower -- even after the
fall of its powerful rival, the Soviet Union -- to establish its
dominance everywhere. Hence the invasion of Grenada in 1982, the
bombing assault on Panama in 1989, the first Gulf war of 1991. Was
George Bush Sr. heartsick over Saddam Hussein's seizure of Kuwait, or
was he using that event as an opportunity to move U.S. power firmly
into the coveted oil region of the Middle East? Given the history of
the United States, given its obsession with Middle Eastern oil dating
from Franklin Roosevelt's 1945 deal with King Abdul Aziz of Saudi
Arabia, and the CIA's overthrow of the democratic Mossadeq government
in Iran in 1953, it is not hard to decide that question.
Justifying Empire
The
ruthless attacks of September 11th (as the official 9/11 Commission
acknowledged) derived from fierce hatred of U.S. expansion in the
Middle East and elsewhere. Even before that event, the Defense
Department acknowledged, according to Chalmers Johnson's book The
Sorrows of Empire, the existence of more than 700 American military
bases outside of the United States.
Since that date, with the
initiation of a "war on terrorism," many more bases have been
established or expanded: in Kyrgyzstan, Afghanistan, the desert of
Qatar, the Gulf of Oman, the Horn of Africa, and wherever else a
compliant nation could be bribed or coerced.
When I was
bombing cities in Germany, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and France in the
Second World War, the moral justification was so simple and clear as to
be beyond discussion: We were saving the world from the evil of
fascism. I was therefore startled to hear from a gunner on another crew
-- what we had in common was that we both read books -- that he
considered this "an imperialist war." Both sides, he said, were
motivated by ambitions of control and conquest. We argued without
resolving the issue. Ironically, tragically, not long after our
discussion, this fellow was shot down and killed on a mission.
In
wars, there is always a difference between the motives of the soldiers
and the motives of the political leaders who send them into battle. My
motive, like that of so many, was innocent of imperial ambition. It was
to help defeat fascism and create a more decent world, free of
aggression, militarism, and racism.
The motive of the U.S.
establishment, understood by the aerial gunner I knew, was of a
different nature. It was described early in 1941 by Henry Luce,
multi-millionaire owner of Time, Life, and Fortune magazines, as the
coming of "The American Century." The time had arrived, he said, for
the United States "to exert upon the world the full impact of our
influence, for such purposes as we see fit, and by such means as we see
fit."
We can hardly ask for a more candid, blunter declaration
of imperial design. It has been echoed in recent years by the
intellectual handmaidens of the Bush administration, but with
assurances that the motive of this "influence" is benign, that the
"purposes" -- whether in Luce's formulation or more recent ones -- are
noble, that this is an "imperialism lite." As George Bush said in his
second inaugural address: "Spreading liberty around the world… is the
calling of our time." The New York Times called that speech "striking
for its idealism."
The American Empire has always been a
bipartisan project -- Democrats and Republicans have taken turns
extending it, extolling it, justifying it. President Woodrow Wilson
told graduates of the Naval Academy in 1914 (the year he bombarded
Mexico) that the U.S. used "her navy and her army... as the instruments
of civilization, not as the instruments of aggression." And Bill
Clinton, in 1992, told West Point graduates: "The values you learned
here… will be able to spread throughout the country and throughout the
world."
For the people of the United States, and indeed for
people all over the world, those claims sooner or later are revealed to
be false. The rhetoric, often persuasive on first hearing, soon becomes
overwhelmed by horrors that can no longer be concealed: the bloody
corpses of Iraq, the torn limbs of American GIs, the millions of
families driven from their homes -- in the Middle East and in the
Mississippi Delta.
Have not the justifications for empire,
embedded in our culture, assaulting our good sense -- that war is
necessary for security, that expansion is fundamental to civilization
-- begun to lose their hold on our minds? Have we reached a point in
history where we are ready to embrace a new way of living in the world,
expanding not our military power, but our humanity?
With an occupying army waging war in Iraq and Afghanistan, with military bases and corporate bullying in every part of the world, there is hardly a question any more of the existence of an American Empire. Indeed, the once fervent denials have turned into a boastful, unashamed embrace of the idea. 
