American imperialism should only be resisted whenever it targets Europe (by having the courage to take retaliatory commercial measures, for instance). We have no duty whatsoever to show solidary towards the Muslim-Arab world, a world that has done us no favours since the 8th century CE. It is normal for a ‘good European’ (a term proposed by Nietzsche) to systematically strive to impede American imperialism, especially since the latter exerts itself tirelessly to wage a merciless economic and industrial war upon us and subject us to political enslavement (which is in its interest, naturally). This is not really the point, however. What is crucial is for us not to lose sight of what is vital, namely our own survival, as well as Europe’s.
It would be too easy and too convenient to consider America our chief enemy. It is but an intellectual reflex that betrays one’s refusal to acknowledge the actual invasion of Europe through the construction of mosques and the wombs of Muslim women. American power is factitious, temporary and far less dangerous than the Third World / Muslim ethnic and religious bulldozer. Why should we do the USA (a country that is, in fact, losing face in this crisis) the favour of overestimating it? Just like the Chinese, we too should display cynicism and indifference in the face of the war that Bush has been waging.
Last, but not least, the USA has suffered three setbacks in Europe: firstly, owing to their clumsy insolence and their scornful attitude towards the UN, the Americans have alienated the European public opinion and thus enabled the exacerbation of anti-American sentiments, regardless of their efforts to bribe the governments of Eastern and Southern Europe; secondly, by viewing the British government as a vassal ever at its disposal, the USA has robbed itself of British solidarity for good; thirdly, the Americans have managed to shape a Paris-Brussels-Berlin-Moscow (-Beijing) axis in the course of the current crisis, the very axis that has been the stuff of nightmares to them. Furthermore, the Iraqi crisis has highlighted the huge importance of sovereign states, which living-room intellectuals have declared ‘obsolete’ as a result of their own geopolitical ignorance, believing that such states could be replaced by some international or local ‘networks’.
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Let us now conclude our study with the remarks made by certain American analysts. In January 2003, nationalist Patrick Buchanan stated the following in his magazine entitled The American Conservative: ‘The American army that has been deployed in Baghdad provoked an automatic appeal for jihad spreading from Morocco to Malaysia’. Buchanan predicts the outbreak of a religious and civilisational war that will engulf the entire planet. He criticises the American neoconservatives who practice small-scale anti-Iraqi imperialism in order to smooth the path of immigration in the USA itself:
The conservative movement has been abducted and perverted to the point where it has become a globalist and interventionist ideology, one that is favourable to the opening of borders and unrestricted immigration.
In the same issue of the above-mentioned magazine, Eric Margolis expresses an identical opinion when speaking of the ‘pirate-like’ attitude embraced by the New American Imperialism, an imperialism that pays no attention to the domestic problems faced by White Americans.
On his hackworth.com.USA website, Colonel David Hackworth, a man considered to be a great American military figure, advocates the notion that the current US administration has adopted ‘mafia-like’ behaviour and is driven by false morals and sordid financial interests. In The Washington Times (02/02/2003), Craig Roberts expresses the view that, instead of containing Islamic terrorism on Western soil, Bush’s warmongering policy will only serve to increase it.
Even when thinking beyond any Vietnam-style neo-pacifism (all of Hollywood is actually against Bush), there are many people in the US who feel that it would be wiser for Bush to control the Muslim-Arab communities that have begun to proliferate in Michigan (their numbers total 1 million already!) and put a stop to the immigrant waves originating from Mexico. This American intellectual current, which is either indifferent or hostile towards Zionist lobbies and strongly opposed to Islam, implicitly advocates ‘an alliance comprising the entire White race on our planet’, thus transcending any notion of a ‘Western world’.
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Why did the USA invade Iraq, then? The first answer, one which has every chance of being correct and is repeated everywhere, is that the Bush administration (with its ‘petropoliticians’) aims to take control of the country’s oil resources (which are the cheapest to exploit) in case those of Arabia become inaccessible. This explanation is advocated by all those Anglo-Saxon media analysts who do not appreciate the current Republican policy. They denounce the new and illegal theory of ‘pre-emptive war’, the violation of the UN charter and the counterproductive impact that this unbridled imperialism has on America itself (including the stimulation of Islamic terrorism and global anti-Americanism, the destabilisation of the Middle-East, the disastrous increase in oil prices, etc.), while generally condemning the harmful naivety displayed by the Bush administration. What is interesting to point out is that this position is not only espoused by the ‘Democratic’ Left, but also by traditional conservatives, who consider their country’s current aggressive militarism to be harmful to both its prestige and its leadership role. Paradoxically, the most solid criticism of ‘American imperialism’ has not been coming from French (or rather Parisian) Americanophobes of the Monde Diplomatique type, but from the Republican nationalist milieus located overseas.
There is, however, a second possible explanation which is just as convincing. Some American leaders, including those who surround and manipulate the indigent G. W. Bush, namely Wolfowitz, Rumsfeld and Perle, are truly convinced that had Saddam Hussein (who was Bin Laden’s secret friend and a new Hitler in his own right) actually remained in power, he would have developed his own weapons of mass destruction in the medium-term (even if he did not possess any at the time) as part of a desperately fanatical strategy that would have ultimately targeted Israel, perhaps even the USA itself. Therefore, what accounts for the American military velleities against Iraq is not merely the hypocritical cynicism that characterises petropolitics, but also the Israeli desire to avoid a ‘second holocaust’, to use the American press’ favourite terminology, and the pressure exerted in this regard by Israel. Hence the pertinent concept of a ‘pre-emptive war’ embraced by the NAI.
To put things differently, one cannot exclude the possibility that the American aggression against Iraq is the result of the current Republican submission to Israeli strategies and fears, since the latter now finds itself cornered and in demographic decline, feeling ever more assailed by its Arab neighbours. American nationalists are convinced that the American imperial eagle is being instrumentalised on a geopolitical level (and directed like a hunting falcon) by the Jewish state and is thus not, strictly speaking, genuinely independent, unlike perhaps China and India, for example.
Is the American imperialistic fury a sign of strength or one of weakness? The answer is obvious. The Pax Americana was once founded upon persuasion, muffled threats, diplomacy and the benevolent prestige of a protective world power. The war against Iraq, a small, impoverished country against which the Americans mobilised colossal resources, may well turn into another Vietnam. In the eyes of the whole world, the USA is making a fool of itself and losing the very moral leadership that it holds so dear. This is why China, its challenger, has misled it into making a mistake in a most discrete and gentle fashion, by using the UN Security Council to grant America permission to attack Iraq, in a typical Chinese ‘encircling game’ ploy5 .
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Through its Iraqi campaign, the USA has managed to disrupt the flow of sympathy that it enjoyed following the 9/11 attacks, when Le Monde published its very servile ‘We are all Americans’ headline. However, a recent electronic survey conducted by the American magazine Time Europe (which gathered a total of 700,000 responses) revealed that when asked which country represented the greatest danger to world peace in 2003, 5.8 % of all respondents opted for Nort
h Korea, 6.4 % for Iraq and as many as 87.9 % for the USA.
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One may of course feel indignant at the sight of the small Iraqi boy whose entire body was burnt and whose arms were severed by an ‘intelligent’ bomb, or the Iraqi tradesman wearing a keffiyeh and screaming in agony after his entire family were slaughtered by a gratuitous shot fired by a Bradley Fighting Vehicle (as seen in the international media); especially considering how American casualties are subject to highly mediatised funerary ceremonies or wakes and how lightly injured prisoners of war enjoy a ‘hero’s welcome’ upon being brought back to the USA. The (truly numerous) Iraqi military casualties of the American attack are never mentioned, for they were all just pawns to be eliminated, human material to be neutralised, their deaths equated to the destruction of an armoured vehicle. Massacred Iraqi civilians were worth slightly more, playing the part of semi-human mediatic objects and offering viewers a visual spectacle. As for the American victims, their importance was of an entirely different calibre, for they were all considered very real indeed.
We witnessed the same thing in World War II, during which European and Japanese civilians were never the focus of a special kind of commemoration, even though they had been decimated in the millions.
Are we to feel indignant about it? Is it just an American specificity? The answer to both questions is a negative one. The demonisation of one’s enemies has been constant throughout human history. The fact of considering enemy casualties to be equal to one’s own, in a display of sportsmanlike conduct, is beyond human rationality. The Athenians only paid homage to their own dead, never their Persian enemies. The cemeteries where the fallen belong to both sides of the conflict, particularly those of France, remain a historical exception. For in no way is war a sport, and never could it become ‘civilised’.
This is precisely why the indignation uttered by Parisian intellectuals from the depths of their troubled hearts and living rooms at both the ‘massacres’ resulting from American bombardments and the devastation of US ‘collateral strikes’ has had no effect whatsoever. For in no way is it all an American specificity. The Russians, from Berlin (1945) to Grozny, have done the exact same thing.
One may also notice that the terror bombardments against civilian populations practiced by the British and Americans from 1943 to 1944 and targeting both Germany and Japan (the inspiration for which originated in Great Britain, by the way) no longer take place these days. For the NAI takes public opinion into account and has adopted the following calculating behaviour: the imperative of having ‘the lowest possible number of casualties’ among the ‘boys’ is balanced by the necessity to predetermine a maximal number of civilian victims. Compared to the conventional form of American imperialism, the NAI claims fewer civilian lives (Saddam Hussein murdered a larger number of Iraqis than the Bush family), which highlights its skilful ability to keep a veneer of moral semblance while simultaneously implementing puritan cynicism in the most unflinching fashion.
C. Could American Imperialism Ever Be Successful?
I have repeatedly advocated the theory which states that the American ‘hyperpower’ is actually nothing of the sort; that Europe overestimates the USA’s power and thus becomes the latter’s consenting vassal; that the American economy has fragile foundations; that the military expeditions conducted in the Gulf, the Balkans and Afghanistan were counterproductive from Uncle Sam’s perspective; and that any act of aggression against Iraq would lead to disaster, particularly for the USA itself. In short, one could indeed say that America is both a ‘toothless tiger’ and a ‘colossus with feet of clay’, a country that has surrendered to a power delirium which is becoming ever more chaotic, as America gradually becomes aware of the fact that it no longer controls global happenings as it once did, having aroused a growing sentiment of worldwide hatred.
This viewpoint is shared by American political scientist Gabriel Ash, as expressed in his article entitled The Coming crisis of American Imperialism (Yellowtimes.org), which we shall now summarise.
America’s global domination has vanished into the distance, having typified a time when its army was ‘an international policing force’ and its rule over international institutions (the UN, the IMF, the World Bank, the Group of 7, etc.) remained uncontested. American power reached its peak during the period that spanned from the fall of the USSR to Bush’s reaction to the 9/11 attacks and then decreased, thanks to the manner in which Bush managed to unsettle the balance with his simplistic unilateralism and nationalism. The USA no longer dominates the ROW (Rest of the World); instead, it confronts it. The latest setback suffered by the US took place in the UN, where the Americans failed to obtain an immediate blank check that would allow them to attack Iraq. It is not the UN that they have discredited, but themselves, since excessive imperialism is harmful to one’s imperialistic ambitions. The Pax Americana is dead, ‘having lost all of its legitimacy’.
Meanwhile, American economic imperialism is being challenged on a worldwide scale, since it advocates absolute liberalism for others and protectionism for itself.
Bush’s imperialism is no longer “imperial”, but constitutes a regression towards nationalism and the pre-war forms of British and French intervention. “America first” is the primary slogan espoused by a selfish foreign policy that violates arms control treaties, refuses to sign the Kyoto protocol, etc.
The disastrous G. W. Bush has instrumentalised anti-terrorism so as to indulge in plain and simple acts of aggression, which has robbed his diplomatic endeavours of both their prestige and their authority. Bush comes across as ‘the most hated tyrant of all’, surpassing Saddam, Bin Laden and their consorts. ‘It is Bush and his administration that actually embody the Axis of Evil’. Furthermore, everyone has realised that Bush and his ‘falcons’ (Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz and Perle) only intended to appropriate other people’s oil resources in a highly clumsy and brutal fashion, without actually managing to do so! One could truly question the efficacy of this enormous army, which, bombardments aside, has never succeeded in claiming control over any country’s soil.
Ash draws the following conclusion:
The policy adopted by the Bush administration undermines American global hegemony. It has awakened anti-American patriotism everywhere. Its clumsy imperialism has jeopardised American capitalism and given worldwide anti-Americanism its wings. Soon, investments may well cease to throng to the US. Historically, Bush’s presidency will be remembered as the one that initiated our hegemony’s destruction.
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American imperialism is counterproductive. Times reporter Anthony Browne, who is stationed in Baghdad, published an inquiry entitled ‘Radical Islam Is Beginning to Fill the Void Left by the Collapse of the Iraqi Government’ (04/06/2003), in which he showed that the entire Iraqi civil society had been reclaimed by Islamism, a claim that he supported with numerous examples. On his part, (anti-Bush) nationalist Patrick Buchanan argues (World Net Daily, 02/06/2003) that the American intervention in Iraq will drive several countries towards the acquisition of weapons of mass destruction and increase the terrorist threat: ‘With the War in Iraq, the USA seems to have succeeded in accelerating the proliferation of nuclear weapons which it was supposed to prevent’. Everyone knows that Iran has resumed its nuclear armament programme, a programme that was originally initiated by Akbar Etemad before being put on ice by the Shah in his desire not to indispose the USSR.
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Kennedy’s former advisor, Arthur J. R. Schlesinger, explained in Le Figaro (23/06/2003, The Limits of the Bush Doctrine) that the ‘pre-emptive war’ doctrine used to justify the Iraqi campaign contradicted the principles promulgated by Abraham Lincoln in 1848, when he was pressured into preventively attacking Canada, a country from which a British aggression could come about at any time. Lincoln rejected this approach. From Schlesinger’s perspective, the doctrine of pre-emptive war has been discredited by the blatant lie regarding Saddam Hussein’s alleged ‘weapons of mass destruction’:
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This credibility deficiency could destroy the foreign policy founded on pre-emptive war. […] It is doubtful whether Bush, who has lost all credibility, could ever lead his people to wage war against Iran or North Korea through the mere virtue of his presidential assertions.
Overall, the author is convinced that the ‘Bush doctrine’ is weakening and discrediting the American empire.
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In an article entitled On to Baghdad — And Beyond, Patrick Buchanan develops the idea that a warmongering America may temporarily end up winning wars while simultaneously losing any hope for peace. ‘Following our victory, our problems are just about to begin’. In other words, the NAI will result in a chain of military conflicts, which is somehow reminiscent of the unjust 1918 peace agreement that led to the next conflict. In Buchanan’s eyes, the Pax Americana will not bring about peace (especially in the Near-East), but simply ‘paves the way for a coming war’ (The American Conservative, 21/04/2003).
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Highlighting all the lies, diplomatic blunders and neoconservative mistakes made during the invasion of Iraq, American military historian and geopolitician Gabriel Kolko wrote a Counterpunch article entitled The Age of Unilateral War (29/04/2003), where he not only expresses the same feelings as Emmanuel Todd and Patrick Buchanan with regard to his country’s inane and absolute hegemonic will, but also his conviction that this attitude will hasten the decline of American power. He says:
The fact is that the world is becoming increasingly multipolar, both economically and technologically, and that the American desire to maintain absolute military supremacy over the world is a delusion. Russia remains a military superpower, while China is in the process of becoming one.
In order to put a stop to the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction during the next 20 years,
A Global Coup Page 8