[Reader-list] Empire & the New Loyalists

[zehra rizvi]

>excellent article by Tariq Ali taken from Counterpunch. Apologies if you've
>already read it. i realize its a couple of days stale.
>
>z.rizvi
>---------------------
>"They laugh in Washington when they hear European politicians talk of
>revitalising the UN. There are 189 member states of the UN. In 100 of these
>states there is a US military presence. For UN, read US?"
>---------------------
>
>
>March 16, 2002
>
>
>The New Empire Loyalists
>
>Former Leftists Turned US military Cheerleaders are Helping Snuff Out Its
>Traditions of Dissent
>By Tariq Ali
>
>
>Exactly one year before the hijackers hit the Pentagon, Chalmers Johnson, a
>distinguished American academic, staunch supporter of the US during the 
>wars
>in Korea and Vietnam, and one-time senior analyst for the CIA, tried to
>alert his fellow-citizens to the dangers that lay ahead. He offered a
>trenchant critique of his country's post-cold war imperial policies:
>"Blowback," he prophesied, "is shorthand for saying that a nation reaps 
>what
>it sows, even if it does not fully know or understand what it has sown.
>
>"Given its wealth and power, the United States will be a prime recipient in
>the foreseeable future of all of the more expectable forms of blowback,
>particularly terrorist attacks against Americans in and out of the armed
>forces anywhere on earth, including within the United States."
>
>But whereas Johnson drew on his past, as a senior state-intellectual within
>the heart of the American establishment, to warn us of the dangers inherent
>in the imperial pursuit of economic and military domination, former critics
>of imperialism found themselves trapped by the debris of September 11. Many
>have now become its most vociferous loyalists. I am not, in this instance,
>referring to the belligerati - Salman Rushdie, Martin Amis and friends -
>ever-present in the liberal press on both sides of the Atlantic. They might
>well shift again. Rushdie's decision to pose for the cover of a French
>magazine draped in the stars and stripes could be a temporary aberration.
>His new-found love for the empire might even turn out to be as short-lived
>as his conversion to Islam.
>
>What concerns me more is another group: men and women who were once
>intensely involved in leftwing activities. It has been a short march for
>some of them: from the outer fringes of radical politics to the 
>antechambers
>of the state department. Like many converts, they display an aggressive
>self-confidence. Having honed their polemical and ideological skills within
>the left, they now deploy them against their old friends. This is why they
>have become the useful idiots of the empire. They will be used and dumped. 
>A
>few, no doubt, hope to travel further and occupy the space vacated by
>Chalmers Johnson, but they should be warned: there is already a very long
>queue.
>
>Others still dream of becoming the Somali, Pakistani, Iraqi or Iranian
>equivalents of the Afghan puppet, Hamid Karzai. They, too, might be
>disappointed. Only tried and tested agents can be put in power. Most
>one-time Marxists or Maoists do not yet pass muster. To do so they have to
>rewrite their entire past and admit they were wrong in ever backing the old
>enemies of the empire - in Cuba, Vietnam, Angola, Afghanistan or the Arab
>East. They have, in other words, to pass the David Horowitz test. Horowitz,
>the son of communists and biographer of the late Isaac Deutscher, underwent
>the most amazing self-cleansing in post-1970s America. Today he is a 
>leading
>polemicist of the right, constantly denouncing liberals as a bridge to the
>more sinister figures of the left.
>
>Compared to him, former Trotskyists Christopher Hitchens and Kanaan Makiya
>must still appear as marginal and slightly frivolous figures. They would
>certainly fail the Horowitz test, but if the stakes are raised and Baghdad
>is bombed yet again, this time as a prelude to a land invasion, how will 
>our
>musketeers react? Makiya, recently outed in this paper as "Iraq's most
>eminent dissident thinker", declared that: "September 11 set a whole new
>standard... if you're in the terrorism business you're going to start
>thinking big, and you're going to need allies. And if you need allies in 
>the
>terrorism business, you're going to ask Iraq."
>
>Makiya's capacity to spin extraordinary spirals of assertion, one above
>another, based on no empirical facts and without any sense of proportion,
>becomes - through sheer giddiness of fantastical levitation - completely
>absurd. Not a single US intelligence agency has managed to prove any Iraqi
>link with September 11. For that reason, in order to justify a war, they
>have moved on to other issues, such as possession of "dangerous weapons".
>Not even Saddam's old foes in the Arab world believe this nonsense.
>
>Hitchens reacted more thoughtfully at first to the New York and Washington
>attacks. He insisted that the "analytical moment" had to be "indefinitely
>postponed", but none the less linked the hits to past policies of the US 
>and
>criticised George Bush for confusing an act of terrorism with an act of 
>war.
>He soon moved on to denounce those who made similar, but much sharper
>criticisms, and began to talk of the supposed "fascist sympathies of the
>soft left" - Noam Chomsky, Harold Pinter, Gore Vidal, Susan Sontag, Edward
>Said et al. In recent television appearances he has sounded more like a
>saloon-bar bore than the fine, critical mind which blew away the haloes
>surrounding Henry Kissinger, Bill Clinton and Mother Teresa.
>
>What unites the new empire loyalists is an underlying belief that, despite
>certain flaws, the military and economic power of the US represents the 
>only
>emancipatory project and, for that reason, has to be supported against all
>those who challenge its power. A few prefer Clinton-as-Caesar rather than
>Bush, but recognise this as a self-indulgence. Deep down they know the
>empire stands above its leaders.
>
>What they forget is that empires always act in their own self-interests. 
>The
>British empire cleverly exploited the anti-slavery campaigns to colonise
>Africa, just as Washington uses the humanitarian handwringing of NGOs and
>the bien pensants to fight its new wars today. September 11 has been used 
>by
>the American empire to re-map the world. European continental pieties are
>beginning to irritate Cheney and Rumsfeld. They laugh in Washington when
>they hear European politicians talk of revitalising the UN. There are 189
>member states of the UN. In 100 of these states there is a US military
>presence. For UN, read US?
>
>Neo-liberal economics, imposed by the IMF mullahs, has reduced countries in
>every continent to penury and brought their populations to the edge of
>despair. The social democracy that appeared an attractive option during the
>cold war no longer exists. The powerlessness of democratic parliaments and
>the politicians who inhabit them to change anything has discredited
>democracy. Crony capitalism can survive without it.
>
>At a time when much of the world is beginning to tire of being 
>"emancipated"
>by the US, many liberals have been numbed into silence. One of the most
>attractive aspects of the US has always been the layers of dissent that 
>have
>flourished beneath the surface. The generals in the Pentagon suffered a far
>greater blow than September 11 in the 1970s, when tens of thousands of
>serving and former GIs demonstrated in front of it in their uniforms and
>medals and declared their hope that the Vietnamese would win. The new 
>empire
>loyalists, currently helping to snuff out this tradition, are creating the
>conditions for more blowbacks.
>
>Tariq Ali is a frequent contributor to CounterPunch. His most recent book 
>is
>The Clash of Fundamentalism, published by Verso.


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