An Imperial Defeatist -- And Proud of It

By Michael T. Klare, Tomdispatch.com. Posted July 20, 2006.

Just recently, I was accused by a writer for the ultra-Right Washington Times of being a "defeatist" when it comes to America's expansionist military policy abroad. The giveaway, it seems, is that I penned a book for the American Empire Project -- a series of critical volumes published by Metropolitan Books. Contributors to the series, the article claimed, want "a retreat from Iraq to be the prelude to a larger collapse of American preeminence worldwide." My initial response on reading this was to insist -- like so many anxious liberals -- that no, I am not opposed to American preeminence in the world, only to continued U.S. involvement in Iraq. But then, considering the charge some more, I thought, well, yes, I am in favor of abandoning the U.S. imperial role worldwide. The United States, I'm convinced, would be a whole lot better off -- and its military personnel a whole lot safer -- if we repudiated the global-dominance project of the Bush administration and its neo-conservative boosters.

Supposedly, the U.S. military has expanded its presence and combat role around the world to foster democracy and prevail in the President's War on Terror; and, without a doubt, many brave Americans have risked their lives -- and some have died - in the pursuit of these noble objectives. But this is not, I believe, what has motivated Messrs. Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld in their pursuit of global supremacy. Rather, they appear driven by a messianic determination to impose American dominance on large swaths of the planet and to employ this hegemonic presence to gain control over global energy supplies. In attempting to do so, they are bankrupting the nation and exposing American citizens to a higher, not lower, risk of terrorist attack.

Take a look at U.S. policy in the greater Persian Gulf/Caspian Sea region - the main site of American military activism and home to seven-tenths of the world's remaining petroleum reserves. Bush and Cheney have spoken eloquently of their determination to promote democracy in this troubled region, but what they have largely done, in practice, is to continue to prop up the kings, sheikhs, and dictators who rule the local petro-states.

Remember the President's touching moment of hand-holding with Saudi Prince Abdullah a year ago at his ranch in Texas? Abdullah (now King) may be a tad more moderate than his pro-jihadist brothers and cousins, but he is no advocate of democracy. More recently, Bush gave Ilham Aliyev, the dictator of pipeline-cluttered Azerbaijan, a gala White House reception; while, at about the same time, Cheney lauded the democratic aspirations of

Nursultan Nazarbayev, the dictator of Kazakhstan, during a visit to that energy-rich country. These moves are consistent with a neo-imperial strategy not even faintly aimed at "democracy," but rather at the procurement of energy sources -- or the control over the distribution of oil and natural gas to other energy-hungry nations.

What about the U.S. invasion Iraq? This was not about oil, we were assured at the time. We invaded to do away with weapons of mass destruction said to be controlled by Saddam Hussein, or because of Hussein's alleged ties to Al Qaeda, or to spread democracy in Iraq and the surrounding region -- in other words, for anything you can name, except oil. But there were no WMD stockpiles in Iraq, no ties to Al Qaeda, and few signs of an incipient democracy.

Why, then, are we squandering so many lives and so much treasure in a desperate effort to hold on in Iraq? Only one answer makes any sense from a Washington policymaker's point of view -- to remain the dominant military power in the Persian Gulf and thereby control the global flow of oil. This is the only interpretation that fits with the Pentagon's admission that it plans to retain at least some bases in Iraq indefinitely, no matter what sort of future government emerges in Baghdad (or whether such a government approves of our presence or not).

The striking expansion of the U.S. military presence in Central Asia, Southwest Asia, and Africa in recent months reveals a similar geopolitical impulse. All of these areas are becoming increasingly important to the United States as sources of oil and natural gas, and in none of them can it be said that we are setting up our bases to serve as beacons for the further advance of freedom and democracy, not given the nature of most of the governments we support in those places. Because many of our leading energy suppliers in these regions are subject to internal unrest and ethnic conflict -- a reaction, in most cases, to despotic regimes that remain in power with Washington's blessing -- the United States is becoming ever more deeply involved in their defense, whether through the delivery of arms and military aid (as in Angola, Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, and Nigeria) or via a direct U.S. military presence (as in Iraq, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates).

Michael Klare is a professor of peace and world security studies at Hampshire College in Amherst, Mass., and the author of Blood and Oil: The Dangers and Consequences of America's Growing Petroleum Dependency.

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