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AS SHORT AS POSSIBLE: I As the world accelerates into the new millennium, talk of empire is once again being heard in the corridors of power. In reaction to 9/11, American foreign policy has become more imperial as it shifts from informal to formal rule—policing and administering territory. President Bush’s declaration of global “war against terror” coincides with a rapidly growing population, failing states and a heightened race for control of the Earth’s strategic resources. At the same time, foreign policy elites in New York, Washington and London seem to be suggesting that force in the service of human rights can provide a public good by establishing civil order in the face of the global trend towards ungovernability that economic globalization is producing. Publicists throughout the cold war promoted American power in novel terms, such as “The American Century,” “Pax Americana,” “Super Power” or “Hegemon,” and avoided the word “imperial,” which Marxist-Leninism had coupled with capitalism. After the Soviet Union imploded, imperial-capitalism became ideologically irrelevant. American policy-wonks and spin-doctors were free to change public rhetoric. Today’s influential opinion pieces on America’s liberal Imperium are reminiscent of the late-19th century when the U.S. first set off to build an empire overseas. Even domestic opposition to empire shares parallels with the Anti-Imperialist League of 1898. However, for many Americans and Europeans this came as a great shock. Imperialism represents a reversal of many of our cherished assumptions about liberal democracy, the postcolonial world and international peace. Yet, for those living outside U.S territory, especially inhabitants of Mesopotamia and Afghanistan, ‘democracy promotion’ appears as the latest rhetoric in a long chain of distant imperial powers. Imperialism has become the dominant subtext for domestic and international affairs across the news spectrum: from newspapers—concerned with recording the steady flow of events—to weekly newsmagazines which interpret current events—turning news into history. Attempts to portray post 9-11 events has created, what Walter Isaacson calls, impressionistic history: “Like an Impressionist painting, it relies on dots of varying hues and intensity.” The picture of the Bush Presidency, for example, resembles a jigsaw puzzle in which the consumer of public information connects the pieces in accordance with the total meaning that is slowly emerging from special reports, official interviews, memoirs of major players and leaks from anonymous sources. Inside narratives on bureaucratic turf battles over strategy and policy without documentation will remain problematical for decades to come. A common thread running through this picture is the growing body of observations forming around the constitutional crisis arising from the Bush administration’s so-called “war on terror.” The imperial presidency of George W. Bush has curbed the rights and liberties of individuals and has politically attacked both the independency of the judiciary and media by using one of the oldest political tricks in history. The war on terror has been strategically used to whip up a panic and thus dismiss dissenting voices as unpatriotic and soft on terror. Bush has created a classic situation in which the excesses of power abroad have led to abuses at home. The concentration of executive power is seriously challenging America’s liberal democracy and its developed system of checks and balances. However, the imperial system was actually established in the aftermath of the Second World War. The National Security Act of 1947 reorganized the United States' armed forces, foreign policy and Intelligence Community apparatus, and created new institutions of extra constitutional power, such as the National Security Council, the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the Central Intelligence Agency. It is too simplistic to suppose that only autocratic administrations or despotic governments practice imperialism. A nation’s internal arrangements are irrelevant criteria for defining imperialism because plenty of democratic polities have pursued imperial policies. Nor should liberal governments be seen as a source of weakness. Liberal constitutions impose constraints on power, but Paul Starr has shown how this disciplined constraint makes them strong: “By binding those in power, making their behavior more predictable and reliable, and thereby increasing the trust and the confidence of citizens, creditors, and investors, constitutionalism amplifies the long-term power and wealth of a state.” Moreover, from a long term perspective, Starr argues that warfare with a high level of mobilization and participation ratio has created democratizing effects in so far it makes authority concede power, for example, opening the way to citizenship, housing and education. In short, the cycles of Anglo-American history reveal a unique pattern. The mass democratic revolutions in 19th century Europe and North America created a situation in which urban laborers and frontiersmen began to demand a say in domestic affairs. Though the great influx of laborers and the dissemination of radical ideas throughout the second half of the 19th century brought the whole problem of mass against class to the fore, the vagaries of the mass mind were something statesmen could, more or less, ignore since it did not significantly impinge on the conduct of diplomacy and war. Napoleon III, Disraeli and Bismarck never really cared much about what the masses thought about geopolitics. They rather manipulated the mass mind through the control of the press. International affairs belonged securely in the hands of the gentlemanly classes and the enlightened public. After the tragedy of the First World War, attitudes limited to a small circle of elites had to defer to the public’s aversion to war. The man in the street has become more insistent about his right to express his opinion on international as well as domestic affairs; consequently, weakening the resolution of governments’ international commitments and objectives. The heightened importance of public sentiment necessitated the growth of publicity and propaganda. The irruption of anti-imperial sentiment expressed in Britain’s opposition press triggered the counter rhetorical charge which the World War I-era imperialist intellectuals managed and who are, incidentally, now, greatly admired by American neoconservatives. The figure of the journalist emerged from the Second World War as history’s acknowledged eyewitness. The mass media have given audiences a new form of eyewitness accounting of history through photographic and cinematic experience. The men at the likes of Fox Movietonews, who headed the news, newsreel and newspaper expeditions during WWII, quickly recognized the propagandistic power of celluloid psychology. Now that Western war correspondents are increasingly being targeted, they either become embedded within the U.S. military or risk becoming part of the media spectacle themselves. Thus, some things are not so much different today. Robert Kaplan has taken the opportunity to colorfully depict the reality on the ground through America’s powered-down command structure in a dramatic as well as credible fashion. He covers guerilla warfare from the perspective of America’s N.C.O.’s and imperial grunts on the one hand and insurgents and terrorists on the other. However, no journalist can dig deep enough to get to the bottom of empire, which according to David Rieff “is a general question, not a particular one, a subject that may be illuminated by historical and moral analysis, but not by reportage, no matter how vivid and valiant.” Indeed, all good investigative reporting enlivens contemporary history, but the philosophical implications of empire and imperial rivalry in the 21st century have to be discussed in grand historical terms and with an eye for novelty. If the political climate in which journalists work does not subvert the pursuit of truth, then economic pressures surely do through the marketplace of ideas which is regulated by a bottom line mentality of increasing profits and the dumbing down process, which replaces serious coverage with infotainment. Yet, at the same time, a new political space has opened up, where one may sense the dark stirrings of the collective unconscious. Professional journalists and traditional media institutions, as Time Magazine’s 2006 person of the year recently admitted, no longer have exclusive social control of the globalized informational terrain. The distinction between amateur and professional journalists is slowly dissolving with the rise of new communication media, such as e-mail, web video, satellite cell phones: text messaging, cameras and videos. This anarchy of aural, verbal, and visual media has also revolutionized insurgency and terrorism. Any small scale violent act can be symbolically amplified through cyberspace which is politically more explosive than gunpowder. Insurgents and terrorists are becoming experts at using propaganda and subversion as an instrument of warfare—making counterinsurgency even more complicated. At any rate, interpreting the twin features of insurgency and counterinsurgency within the framework of imperialism simplifies our understanding of current events. Imperial police actions occur either on sea or land, and involve the integration of military, intelligence and civil activities. Because the U.S can project power and impose sea-lane control anywhere in the world, international insurgency and terrorism facing the U.S. today has a minimal maritime dimension. The U.S. Navy’s effective control of the world's oceans since World War II is still the most significant geopolitical fact of contemporary history. Nonetheless, America’s superior sea and air power has not been successful in dislodging enemies from territory, which requires occupation by ground forces. “That,” Edward Luttwak asserts, “however, is bound to cost casualties that might not be tolerated; it is also bound to provoke an insurgency.” An insurgency always runs through a given population, whose support provides insurgents with the necessary invisibility for avoiding direct confrontation with advanced conventional forces. Thus, many liberals assume the only way of defeating an insurgency and establishing successful governance is through gaining popular support. For example, General Petraeus’ manual on counterinsurgency states: victory will never be achieved until “the populace consents to the government’s legitimacy.” Yet according to Luttwak, “the extraordinary persistence of dictatorships as diverse in style as the regimes of Cuba, Libya, North Korea, and Syria shows that in fact government needs no popular support as long as it can secure obedience,” which only comes into existence through strict authoritative prohibitions and sure punishment. First, governments can maintain obedience without popular support. Second, popular support can take on diverse forms, depending upon the moral, legal and ideological principles that constitute a society. Third, although liberals want to establish order in Iraq and Afghanistan—being post-imperial themselves—they never think of security in terms of conquest, which reveals their propensity to overlook history. Afghanistan since becoming a nation has exhibited the sort of instability that one usually associates with failed states. All invading powers that have been drawn into its vicinity have, on balance, been poor investments in blood and treasure. Mesopotamia, on the other hand, has essentially been ruled through either corruption or terror since; the British, who inherited it after the Ottoman Empire collapsed, abandoned the newly created state of Iraq when the British-built institutions failed to take root; its people simply have little experience with self-governance. Yet, Iraqi history does show that obedience can be established when a strongman dominates the various ethnic tribes. Past empires always developed strategies of collaboration, and established social control of a populace through a system of rewards and threats, since they lacked the manpower to govern vast spaces of territory. Instead of hunting down every hidden rebel, Luttwak tells us, imperial policing involved going “to the village chiefs and town notables” and demanding “their surrender, or else.” Imperial power essentially rests on “social pressure rather than brute force.” In short, there is no contradiction between burning down villages and winning the “hearts and minds” of a populace. In fact, counter-terror and random massacres are well proven methods for effectively controlling a broad population. In the information age, problems arise when news and brutal images of counter-insurgency get out, and contradict a democracy’s own liberal ideology. This issue raises questions concerning the use of force. Tony Blair’s foreign policy guru Robert Cooper thinks the postmodern world needs “to get used to the idea of double standards.” The British diplomat argues: “Among ourselves, we keep to the law but when we are operating in the jungle, we must also use the laws of the jungle.” The “war on terror" is primarily a global informational war. Plainly, the use of strategic communications to spin events or strengthen a nation’s public image is much more difficult to do abroad than domestically. Frank Rich’s story of how the Bush administration sold a war of choice to the American public by using the latest PR techniques rested on the collapse of news standards during the 1990s and the rise of “an overheated 24/7 infotainment culture [that] trivialized the very idea of reality.” Whether one is living in the big city, suburbs or rural America, reality has been reduced to what gets filtered through TV. New forms of instantaneous communication have given rise to new structures of feeling and thought, yet the imagery and content of the system continues to be commercially driven. The new aesthetic and political order is more conducive to mythical than historical consciousness. Myth is a conservative force that is concerned with preserving the existing order by reinforcing accepted modes of conduct, and by excluding alternative solutions to life’s essential conflicts. In short, manipulation is made easier when man lives in a state of cultural amnesia, where actions have neither consequences nor causes. The masses will never grasp the reasons behind today’s headlines until they pull themselves out of the pseudo world of sacred-causality. However, investigating current affairs through the constraints of world history not only discourages wishful-thinking, but gives one a sense of what is novel as well as improbable. In any case, America’s management of minds and the spectrum is limited. Older notions of manipulation—propaganda and advertising—have since the 1970s been replaced with models drawn from the field of communications theory, which insists that perception and reception are creative acts. The old stimulus-response models in which the transmitter of messages directly influences the behavior of recipients were replaced by models which acknowledge the ability of recipients to interpret messages selectively. The power to change the behavior of a citizen-consumer through manipulation had been exaggerated, except in dictatorships where all lines of communication are centrally controlled. (Yet, people in dictatorships, at least, know that all information is controlled, and so are more skeptical of news than those in democracies.) Theorists, now, see manipulation in terms of influencing existing tendencies and shaping the perceptions of individuals or groups, and even this assumes intimate knowledge of a culture. Al Jazeera, the most popular source of news for the Arabic speaking world since the mid-1990s, depicts a very different reality from the one Fox or CNN portrays. US public diplomacy is constantly being preempted by images of actions that seemingly contradict America’s scripted messages. The Bush and Blair administration’s Middle East foreign policy—especially their joint reaction to Israel’s 2006 invasion of Lebanon—has destroyed their nation’s credibility in the region for decades. The privatization of war and intelligence and the growth of homegrown Islamic terrorism are two increasing trends that have arisen since the collapse of the Soviet Union. An open world inundated with information enhanced by developments within communications has radically altered peace and security. The Pentagon’s newly released estimate of Private Military Contractors working in Iraq is around 100,000—far outnumbering Bush’s so-called “coalition of the willing.” The dramatic increase of PMCs can partially be explained by the general trend towards privatization and the need for managing domestic perception—nobody has to report PMC casualties. Despite all the hype about the blogosphere, engaged citizens and the new digital democracy, al Qaeda propaganda on the Internet is inspiring and radicalizing alienated—primarily, second and third generation children of immigrants—citizens to attack soft targets. Finally, the director of Britain’s domestic intelligence agency in 2006 publicly warned of the threat from within multicultural Europe and North America; potentially, a greater danger than international terrorism itself. |
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