Empire means never having to say you're sorry

The debate over the treatment of detainees will now bump up another notch in fury. US Attorney General Eric Holder has announced the appointment of a special prosecutor to investigate allegations that CIA personnel and contractors abused detainees in a variety of ways not covered by law, not even by the infamous Justice Department torture memos that delineated in painstaking detail what could be done to detainees--from placing the detainee in a confinement box together with an insect to waterboarding (some of these memos can be found here; and for a summary of the "litany of C.I.A. tactics," see the NY Times article here).

Republicans predictably oppose this investigation--for a variety of reasons. There's the hyperbolic claim that the administration is walking the fine line between incompetence and treason, with all our lives at stake. According to the Drudge Report, House Republican Peter King exclaimed:

"It’s bulls***. It’s disgraceful. You wonder which side they’re on," he said of the attorney general's move, which he described as a "declaration of war against the CIA, and against common sense."

And

"They’ve declared war on the CIA. We should resist and fight back as hard as we can," he said. "It should be a scorched earth policy. ... This isn't just another policy. This goes to the heart of our national defense. We should do whatever we have to do."

A calmer Peter Hoekstra, the ranking Republican on the House Intelligence Committee, says it will distract from "the CIA's current counterinsurgency efforts." Or, according to nine Republican Senators in a letter to Attorney General Holder, such an investigation would "chill intelligence activities" and subject it to the "political winds" of the day. One of these nine, Kit Bond, considered the investigation a presidential "power grab" according to a CBS source, a bizarre attack on one of administration's own senior appointees, CIA Director Leon Panetta.

Senator Bond's complaint is curious. Evidently he and others can't understand an administration which doesn't staff its intelligence and justice agencies with abject loyalists. Bond also seems to forget all the power the Bush-Cheney administration grabbed in the realms of domestic and foreign security.

The nine GOP Senators are correct in seeing the "political winds" at work in intelligence activities--but that's what elections are about in democracy. They are supposed to lead to substantive changes in policy, even foreign policy, if that's indeed what electoral winners had promised in their campaigns. The GOP lost big-time in '06 and '08. Now some of its members think it's somehow wrong that their minority status means they don't get to dictate policy? And do these particular Republicans really want more European style foreign and intelligence services well-insulated from the public eye, from partisan influence?

As for the contention that this investigation will hamper counterinsurgency efforts--well, that is a stronger claim, but one that rests on contested evidence that torture and all the other extra-legal tactics do mean increased security for the US. It also ignores evidence that there are other effective methods of getting information, not to mention alternatives to a "scorched earth" policy in protecting the US. Nor do the defenders of torture seem to contemplate its costs, such as the diminished standing of the US in world opinion (what some call "soft power"), blowback, the risk to our captured soldiers, as well as the viral creep of organizational practices--if we can do this, maybe we can do that. . . .People, and nations, don't go to hell in one fell swoop, they go there step by step.

The problem is that we have a prosperous democracy, but we are also an empire. That is, we are a state (a country or national government in the US lexicon) that has increased its relative power and wealth in part by subordinating peoples outside our territorial borders. And subordination inevitably means resistance, and ergo violence. As Max Weber tells us, all states depend on monopolizing the legitimate means of violence (though some are more successful than others). Empires are states that dominate people outside their borders because of their preponderant power--rarely a monopoly, though, and even more rarely, legitimate.

But not for want of trying. In his excellent book, Among Empires: American Ascendancy and its Predecessors, Charles Maier notes the importance to imperialists of constructing a rationale for their rule or dominance, whether direct or indirect. The recurring resistance and violence on imperial frontiers require some sort of logic beyond naked national self-interest to convince people at home that empire is worth the cost, and convince subjects in the frontier that empire is really better for them than complete sovereignty (so stop fighting us!). This rationale is usually very principled. Empire brings the peace (Pax Romana, Pax Britannica, Pax Americana). Empire brings modernity. Empire brings democracy. "Imperial ideology," Maier says, "must always be an exercise in lofty denial" (Harvard University Press, 2006, p. 61). Especially in a liberal democracy, we could add.

Liberal imperialists will always deplore killing and beating, imprisoning and humiliating civilians, burning their homes, and torturing suspects as aberrant and counterproductive. But if empire is to be maintained, the soldiers assigned the dirty work know that it is sometimes necessary even at the price of their later disavowal and disgrace. Ultimately a mix of secrecy or "deniability" must be developed if leaders are not prepared to renounce the imperial project. Hypocrisy is the tribute imperialism pays to democracy (p. 64).

We get whiffs of that hypocrisy in the jargon we use for torture, such as the phrase "refined interrogation techniques,' or in the legal hair-splitting in the torture memos that makes waterboarding okay but fracturing a cranium perhaps not.

But not all our leaders have been liberals, of course, nor are they worried about apologies. Hence the argument that whatever you call torture, it works, even if morally dubious. Former Vice-President Cheney is of course convinced that it does, like he's convinced that all of his decisions were necessary in pushing the country to invade Iraq, and in centralizing authority within the Executive, particularly his office--though he criticizes the Obama administration for doing so:

. . .President Obama’s decision to allow the Justice Department to investigate and possibly prosecute CIA personnel, and his decision to remove authority for interrogation from the CIA to the White House, serves as a reminder, if any were needed, of why so many Americans have doubts about this Administration’s ability to be responsible for our nation’s security.

Along with this bit of hypocrisy, there's another in that Cheney has rested his reputation on an ends-justifies-the-means sort of argument that one would think is inimical to the party of "family values." Together with these situational ethics, there's the familar drumbeat of fear that worked so well for the Bush-Cheney-Rove team until the 2006 elections. "They" will get us unless we resort to brutal methods that contradict domestic and international law, as well as belie our principles.

And the way we can reconcile these contradictions, counteract these hypocrisies, is to hold on to the assertion that what we do in the world is right, because the United States can do nothing but. Go to Townhall.com and you'll see a cute blonde woman selling T-shirts with the logo "I'd rather be waterboarding." What a brave, bold statement! And clearly no embarrassment about selling a thing by mixing sex and violence. That's the attitude needed to get us over all this hand-wringing over nasty things we've done to terrorists, well, suspected terrorists usually, but who cares when 24 Hours TV scenarios are unfolding about us, or even within our borders. In our case, Might is Right, and there's no need to say we're sorry.

Well, I've descended into sarcasm now, a big weakness of mine when I'm upset. I should temper all this that I don't buy the notion that everything the US has done in the world, even as empire, is evil. It's intellectually lazy to turn to this sort Manichean dualism. It's the kind of thing a cynical leader does trying to stir up the crowd. It's the narrative the Bush administration employed, as has Al Qaeda.

I love my country, places (the Oregon coast, the White Mountains, the New York Public Library), people (my family and friends, of course, but also the icons like Madison, Lincoln, and Martin Luther King), and things like NPR, or Scorcese and Coen Brothers films, or the Lutheran church I grew up in, or its tremendous diversity and pluralism, and I'm grateful that the US government created programs such as the Peace Corps and Fulbright fellowships (not to mention Pell Grants) that gave me opportunities to experience a much larger world than the one in which I was born. The US to me is like that person we've all known who is lovable and loving, who is inspirational, with remarkable accomplishments, and who turns out to have some pretty horrific character flaws.

Nor do I romanticize those who resist our empire on its frontiers. I'm no fan of those among the Islamic fundamentalists who yearn for our destruction, who desire to spread regimes inimical to pluralism, who resort to indiscriminate violence to achieve their ends.

Yet I criticize. I criticize because I think we can do better than this. Not because of some crude Calvinistic notion that our great power and wealth prove we know how to do what's best for the world. Not because of some rosy-eyed vision of the past that makes history equal progress. It is this little kernel of hope--we can do better--that has been behind what we now look back on as a good change--expanding suffrage beyond property owners, ending slavery, extending (if not always enforcing) equal political rights to blacks, women, and other marginalized people, signing on to international human rights accords, and so on. These momentous changes also required a great deal of struggle, some of it dramatic, much of it the daily nitty-gritty that comes with organizing collective action. But the hope of doing better mattered throughout.

Wouldn't it be something if the President called on Americans to dedicate their energies to coming up with new ways of life that didn't depend on extending and defending the picket lines of empire? Could we give up on empire without being forced to by defeat, or overreach, or implosion--as has been the fate of past ones? Could we infuse our political system, and our foreign relations, with the axiom that Might inevitably subverts Right, and act with due caution when it comes to the use of violence?

Yep, I'm that oxymoron--a hopeless idealist.

At least more folks around the world like us now. . .

In my last post, I groused about President Obama's continuation of imperial ambitions.  I suppose an anti-imperialist position in the heartland of empire is hopelessly idealistic, or foolish (though there are pragmatic considerations related to the costs of managing empire, and of what Chalmers Johnson calls "blowback").  I suppose I should also recognize that anyone moving into the US executive necessarily takes the reins of empire, and I can't expect him (or her in the future) to drop them and let the horses run where they will.

And clearly Obama's no Bush, thank god.  He showed that last night in the press conference, where he was, as always, articulate and thoughtful, and clearly, he's just plain smart--it's a relief that many Americans appreciated such characteristics enough that they would put him into the presidency, and that the yahoos in this country who equate anti-intellectualism with virtue don't always win the day.

Obama's character, and his foreign policy endeavors, are apparently producing positive consequences abroad, according to a recent Pew study (found here).  In brief:

The image of the United States has improved markedly in most parts of the world, reflecting global confidence in Barack Obama. In many countries opinions of the United States are now about as positive as they were at the beginning of the decade before George W. Bush took office.

I still am heartily opposed to our ongoing efforts to turn Afghanistan and Iraq into stable, manageable outposts of US empire, especially in the name of democratization.  But I shouldn't evaluate the Obama administration on that one policy alone.

Innocent Americans

The road to hell is paved with good intentions.  That's basically Andrew Bacevich's message in his new essay in the recent edition of World Affairs (you can find an interview and a link to the essay here).  It's something William Appleman Williams--one of my professors at Oregon State, and a source for Bacevich's writings--argued 30 years ago.  "Empire as a way of life," was Williams' term for the US worldview in which Americans act like an empire, deny they are an empire, refuse to acknowledge the sins of empire, and foist the costs of empire onto the backs of their soldiers and their families, as well as peoples in other lands that we, with our innocent good intentions, are determined to save from themselves.

Bacevich's essay is a review of Graham Greene's marvelous book, The Quiet American. Published in 1955, it was one of the earliest accurate gauges of the style and consequences US involvement in Vietnam.  We apparently learned little from that bloody fiasco now memorialized on a simple, somber wall with the names of 58,195 dead.  I remember hearing some NSA analyst at a 2003 International Studies conference--as Bush pushed our country willy-nilly to war, with many Americans marching in lockstep--blithely arguing that we needed to win the "hearts and minds" of the Iraqis.  My god, I thought, what's next? Strategic hamlets?  In The Quiet American  Greene says "Innocence is a kind of insanity."  It can also be a kind of stupidity.

Bacevich argues that

Those who conceived the Iraq War, the cheerleaders who promoted it from the sidelines, and critics of that war who have now succeeded to positions of power share a common interest in wiping the slate clean, refurbishing the claim that the United States meant well because the United States always means well. No doubt mistakes were made.  Yet America's benign intentions expiate sins committed along the way--or allow those in authority to assign responsibility for any sins to soldiers who in doing Washington's bidding became sources of embarrassment.

It's not only expiation we seek.  We deny the costs of our imperial sins.  Guantánamo is a good example. President Obama made a campaign promise to shut down the prison there, a place chock-full of victims of the notion that good intentions trump egregious violations of our Constitution and international human rights law.  Yet he can't.  Americans and their state governments all refuse to have the prisoners resettled on their presumably innocent turf.  Congress has cut off funding for the closure (see story here).  All those Americans who backed the Bush Administration's war and other 'global war on terror' actions now don't want to pay for the consequences of those policies.  I guess that's the privilege of empire.

But it's not like President Obama is innocent of innocence.  As Bacevich suggests, the President's Afganistan-Pakistan gambit is evidence that his administration has learned little from the past, for all his allusions to Lincoln, FDR, and Kennedy.  While the tone and style differ dramatically from those of Bush, Obama shares Bush's fervor, or perhaps fever.  We can do this thing in Afghanistan, as if he's stumbled on to the magic warring-while-nation-building formula that no previous administration has ever been able to produce.  I guess that's another privilege of empire--the ability to say without a qualm that, this time, we'll get it right, we can "destroy a village in order to save it."