Commencement Speech to Graduates of the Bush Years: Empire Continues in the Obama Era

By Tom Engelhardt, Tomdispatch.com. Posted June 12, 2009.

And that's nothing really. If you want to know something about American "impunity" -- a fine nineteenth century word that should be more widely used today -- when it comes to Iraq's borders, get your hands on the text of Order 17. That order was issued by our viceroy in Baghdad, L. Paul Bremer III, back in the salad days of the Bush administration, when that era's neocons thought the world was their oyster (or perhaps their oil well).

Promulgated on the eve of the supposed "return of sovereignty" to Iraq in 2004, Order 17 gave new meaning to the term "Free World." In intent, it was a perpetual American get-out-of-jail-free card. If I were the president of this college, I would assign Order 17 to be read as part of a campus-wide course on magical imperial realism. Here's but one passage I've summarized from that document:

All foreigners (read: Americans) involved in the occupation project were to be granted "freedom of movement without delay throughout Iraq," and neither their vessels, vehicles, nor aircraft were to be "subject to registration, licensing or inspection by the [Iraqi] Government." Nor in traveling would foreign diplomats, soldiers, consultants, or security guards, or any of their vehicles, vessels, or planes be subject to "dues, tolls, or charges, including landing and parking fees," and so on. And don't forget that on imports, including "controlled substances," there were to be no customs fees (or inspections), taxes, or much of anything else; nor was there to be the slightest charge for the use of occupied Iraqi "headquarters, camps, and other premises," nor for the use of electricity, water, or other utilities.

Or, since actual architecture, like the architecture of language, is revealing, consider our most recent embassy-building practices. An embassy is, almost by definition, the face of our country, of us, abroad. For our embassy in embattled Iraq, the Bush administration ponied up almost three-quarters of a billion dollars (including cost overruns). The result, now opened, is the largest embassy compound on the planet.

It's about the size of Vatican City, a self-enclosed world with its own elaborate defenses and amenities inside the citadel of Baghdad's Green Zone. Staffed by approximately 1,000 "diplomats," it's the sort of place Cold War Washington might once have dreamed of building in Moscow (not that the Russians would have let them).

Do the Iraqis want such an establishment in their capital? Would you, if it was a foreign "embassy" in your land? Once again, that old-fashioned word "impunity," which once went so well with words like "freebooter" and "extraterritoriality," seems apt. We still practice a version of freebooting, we still have our own version of extraterritoriality, and we do it all with impunity.

In our era, the imperial mother ship landed in a country the size of California, but with a smaller population, that just happens to have a lot of untapped reserves of hydrocarbons. But that, I'm sure you're thinking, was the Bush era. You know, the years of over-the-top unilateralism that crashed and burned along with those dreams of a global Pax Americana and a domestic Pax Republicana.

You might think so, but the news -- what's left of it anyway -- tells a different story. When it comes to "change you can believe in," a recent piece by Saeed Shah and Warren P. Stroebel of the McClatchy newspapers caught my eye. They wrote: "The White House has asked Congress for -- and seems likely to receive -- $736 million to build a new U.S. embassy in Islamabad, along with permanent housing for U.S. government civilians and new office space in the Pakistani capital."

In other words, the Obama administration is asking Congress to fork over almost the exact price of our monster embassy in Baghdad (after staggering cost overruns). Figure those always predictable overruns into this project, and you may indeed have the first billion-dollar embassy. To use a term the U.S. military once loved, this will result in a large "footprint" on Pakistani soil. It is, to say the least, not normal practice to build and staff such mega-embassies. So if you have a taste for symbolism, this sort of embassy says a lot about how Washington imagines power relations on this planet. Think of these as our ziggurats, our temples (as well as command centers) in foreign climes.

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Tom Engelhardt, editor of Tomdispatch.com, is co-founder of the American Empire Project and author of The End of Victory Culture.

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