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It’s Time to Talk about the U.S. Empire
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Anne Winkler-Morey, W A M M
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It is not easy to talk about the U.S. empire. We have been conditioned to see the United States as an exception to the old super-power-as-empire rule. Yet, from the first “Indian removal” to the last “regime change,” the U.S. has acted like all other empires: using its superior military to advance the interests of a tiny elite. From Standard Oil in Mexico in the 1920s to Enron in Argentina in the 1990s, from the Dulles brothers’ reign over Washington and Central American banana companies in the 1950s to Cheney and Bush’s reign over Washington and global oil investments in the 21st century, corporate profits have motivated military action.
Today’s war and occupation is no more about ridding the world of weapons of mass destruction or a brutal dictator than the war of 1898, which gave the United States a territorial empire, was (in the doublespeak of the day) “the war for Cuba’s freedom.” Someday we will be able to bundle up all these lies and throw them in the trash heap next to “white is better,” “women are lesser,” and “homosexuality is a disease.”
Uncover the Lies to Expose the Empire
Thomas Jefferson said the U.S. was building an “Empire of Liberty.” I imagine that as he wrote these words, he surveyed a map of the expansive West, turned his greedy gaze southward to the long Caribbean island of Cuba, and then looked nervously out his window at the one hundred people enslaved on his plantation. From the age of Jefferson and his buddies Adams and Monroe, to the era of Bush, Powell, and Rumsfeld, U. S. cheerleaders for empire have felt the need to justify their domination with claims about self-defense and humanitarian need—justifications liberally laced with racism and sexism. A public taught to hiss at the evil British and cheer on Paul Revere wanted to be reassured that the U.S. was not at all like those European empires of old.
The U.S. government has been willing to fabricate or misuse events to make it appear that the United States is under attack. Review these justifications for aggression: Mexican soldiers attacking U.S. troops at the Rio Grande (1846), the sinking of the U.S. battleship Maine in a Cuban harbor (1898), the Gulf of Tonkin (Vietnam 1964), and the Soviet ships in Nicaraguan harbors (1984). Today, as the “weapons of mass destruction” lie is exposed, new lies are being manufactured to convince us that aggression, even pre-emptive aggression, is self-protection. But a lie about self-defense alone is not enough to motivate U.S. citizens.
As my daughter Emily pointed out, we all want to be heroes. So, throughout U.S. history, the people have been told their tax dollars and our soldiers advance the cause of freedom in the world. In 1898 we were fighting a “war for Cuba’s freedom.” In 1991, we fought for the defense of tiny Kuwait against its aggressing neighbor, Iraq. In 2002, we fought for the liberation of women in Afganistan. These altruistic justifications are usually mixed with a good measure of racism and sexism to keep us from identifying with the enemy.
The United States was depicted as noble and fatherly as it rode across the Midwestern plains, down into Mexico, across the Caribbean into Cuba and Puerto Rico, across oceans to grab the Philippines and Hawaii, all over Latin America, Asia, Africa, and the Middle East securing railroad lines, sugar plantations, and oil wells for U.S. corporations. The natives were savages and/or children and/or as helpless as young maidens. They needed to be eliminated, removed, taught, or protected.
How the Peace Movement Can Talk About Empire
We can talk about history. To understand the current policy in Iraq it is helpful to review U.S. policy toward Native America. American Indians were removed when they stood in the way of Jefferson’s “liberation empire.” They were eliminated when they defended their lands. They were sent to boarding schools and denied their religious rituals, taught Christianity to “protect” them from their own culture.
Today in Iraq, the natives are being eliminated, or removed from their positions in society. Their institutions and infrastructure, from universities to water treatment plants, have been dismantled as a result of the U.S. war and occupation. New textbooks produced by the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) will greet children next fall to teach them the U.S. version of Iraqi history, economy, and political theory. Adults are being taught to blame Saddam for their unemployment and immigrant workers are being taught to produce petroleum for U.S. corporations from the oil fields U.S. soldiers are risking their lives to protect.
As the United States sets up its occupation state in Iraq, it is important to consider the many forms that U.S. empire has taken in the past and to be ready for the many forms it may take in the future. It appears, at the moment, that our government has decided to use the old-fashioned European model of empire in Iraq—the type used by the U.S. in Puerto Rico. In this case, the government is run by U.S. officials and/or Iraqis picked by U.S. officials while U.S. soldiers ensure the “pacification” of the people.
But there are many other options that could be exercised in Iraq and in other nations and regions of the world that the United States wants to control. Perhaps we will see a military occupation followed by gunboat diplomacy, where the U.S. military oversees a new constitution and agrees to leave if Iraqis promise not to overturn it. Any breach of that promise will result in U.S. intervention. This is the Cuba model under the Platt amendment from 1902 to 1934.
Or perhaps a longer occupation will be deemed necessary, as was true in Haiti, Nicaragua, and the Dominican Republic. The U.S. occupied these sovereign nations for 20, 21, and 10 years respectively from 1910 through the 1920s. Or perhaps they will set up a surrogate dictatorship—the kind of relationship the United States had with Somoza in Nicaragua, Trujillo in the Dominican Republic, and the Shah in Iran. The U.S. provides military aid in exchange for a protection of its economic interests. The problem with this is, sometimes the locals rebel, as in Cuba in 1959, and Nicaragua in 1979. And sometimes the puppet rebels, as in the case of Manuel Noriega in Panama in 1989 and Saddam Hussein in the early 1990s.
One thing is certain: The United States will try to set up a so called “free trade” zone. That is, after all, what this is all about. I understand that oil companies throughout most of the Persian Gulf region rely on migrant workers—particularly Palestinians, but also people from Thailand and Malaysia—to keep wages low and conditions abominable so that profits will be high. The United States would like to secure a so-called free trade zone throughout the region just as they would like to in Latin America. The goal is to have neighboring nations race each other to the bottom of the wage heap, catapulting the region into a slave zone as obscene profits multiply for the already rich.
But guaranteeing a union-free labor zone, whether in Central America, the Persian Gulf, or Jefferson, Wisconsin (where Tyson meat packers are on strike), requires some type of policing mechanism to keep the natives in line. Exactly what form that policing will take is up for grabs: colony, occupation, surrogate dictator, or a so-called “international peacekeeping force”—it is all imperialism and we need to oppose it all.
It is not enough, however, to only speak historically. We also have to connect this history to the lives of individuals and communities. I have been reading about a historical policeman, Smedley Butler, a major general in the U.S. Marine Corps from 1912 to 1930. In his own words he “raped half a dozen Central American republics for the benefit of Wall Street.”
I was curious about what made him turn from a booster of Jefferson’s “empire of liberty” to one who saw in himself a “gangster for capitalism.” Apparently it was not anything that happened in Haiti, Mexico, Cuba, or China. It was his years between military adventures when he was posted in New York City as head of the “vice squad.” He soon discovered that his bosses were not concerned about vice, they just wanted to lock up poor people—people like his own family members. Then he realized his bosses were the same people who profited from his military adventures. In both New York and Managua he was a “high-class muscle man for big business.”
For Butler, and for many of us, history lectures are not going to do it. We need to see the connection in our own lives. So we need to talk about empire in a way that aids people in their struggles with rising health care costs, cuts in education programs and day care facilities, unemployment, and police brutality. The Minnesota legislature has given us more guns and less after-school programs. The federal government has given us, the Afghanis, and Iraqis more death and less clean water. It is time to fight back. |
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© 2003 Women Against Military Madness. All rights reserved.
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