Lately, again, in an attack that is hardly link-worthy, John McCain took Barack Obama to task for taking his presumptuous trip to Iraq... and for not visiting Iraq since, get this, January 2006! How stupid Obama must be, to mount a 50-state strategy in a year where, yes, there are 51 states. With a July 2006 population of 26,783,383 (and falling), I'm pretty sure the McCain camp is counting on Iraq's 40-50 electoral votes in November, even though Iraq's "Caliph" endorses our guy.
John McCain, it seems, is running for Emperor. And perhaps that's a fitting issue to address in this campaign, the first (to my knowledge) where neither candidate was born on mainland U.S. Two candidates from colonial reaches of empire strive to address its overextension. With PNAC's progenitors putting their tail between their legs and running, let's take a look at the election through colonial lenses, as you travel with me to the once-sovereign nation of There'sMoreland.
UPDATED, 9/01/08: THIS DIARY IS SO MUCH COOLER NOW THAT JOHN MCCAIN PICKED A SECCESSIONIST FOR VEEP!
Both candidates were born in lands that became American in the context not of manifest destiny but of our military/colonial grandeur. This election is if anything a referendum on American Empire, and it's an old but persistent American idea, an idea that peaceniks (Marvin Gaye, Ned Lamont) and so-called paleo-conservatives (Wendell Wilkie, William F. Buckley) alike can break bread around:
Why would we rebuild schools in a bombed-out Tehran when we haven't rebuilt bridges in a crumbling Minneapolis?
McCain and Obama were both born at the outskirts of Empire, and now we face a crucial challenge: are we going to conquer the rest for the Pax Americana, or are we ready to change the soiled sheets of a failed reach at neo-colonialism as we decide our future in this "New American Century?"
To first define colonialism, I will use the OED's second definition:
- The colonial system or principle. Now freq. used in the derogatory sense of an alleged policy of exploitation of backward or weak peoples by a large power.
I don’t think, for this audience, I need to work too hard to connect the dots between the Iraqi invasion and a policy of naked colonialism. In many senses, the infamous holdings of the now gloriously defunct Project for a New American Century resembles nothing more than--I'm overplaying it here, but it's true--Hirohito's Japan. We are searching for new markets and raw materials, but really, with the PNAC folks, our main export is the elusive idea.
Corporate welfare crony capitalism Democracy is our chief commodity, our chief export. We offer it this commodity not like we did to the Russians--as a "pull yourself up by your kleptocratic bootstraps" encouragement--because that's too easy to screw up. No, rather, we have set up a sort of Amwayfranchise of fool-proof capitalistic industries. Hell--we'll even provide the industries! The roll-in of ostensibly American private industries--from mercenaries to oil supplies (which just happen to be Halliburton specialties)--was, in and of itself, the end-game. You just put up the oil capital, and your little guy could get a job. He'd have a job and get a job selling kabobs to Americans working on the oil-rigs. It's win-win!
Along the way, we win liberate a valuable colony ally and establish a sort of democratic outlet mall. Hell, within three years, I'm sure those entrepreneurs will be suicide bombing on behalf of democracy!
The New American Century folks believed this garbage, and honestly, as an academic, we really have liberal academia to blame. (Are you listening, Sean Hannity?) Listen to a Rumsfeld or Wolfowitz or their impotent Yoda, Francis Fukuyama, and what you hear is the language of deconstruction, coming out of the rhetorical tradition of Foucault or Derrida, ironically, Edward Said.
"Facts" are destabilized, and language itself is a weapon wherein terms are deployed. For every term--freedom, responsibility, liberty, democracy, peace, right, evil--the meaning is deployed hegemonically by an aggressive ideology. This way of looking at language is fundamentally Marxian, filtered through the noble, cloudy lens of "post-colonial theory." But the neo-cons, coming out of liberal academia, took the religious cause of purifying the middle-east and decided to use language as a weapon of neo-colonialism.
Anyone who's familiar with navelgazing deconstruction could easily mistake Rumsfeld's words for Edward Said's:
Now what is the message there? The message is that there are known "knowns." There are things we know that we know. There are known unknowns. That is to say there are things that we now know we don't know. But there are also unknown unknowns. There are things we don't know we don't know. So when we do the best we can and we pull all this information together, and we then say well that's basically what we see as the situation, that is really only the known knowns and the known unknowns. And each year, we discover a few more of those unknown unknowns.
Look at situations as contingent, not as inevitable, look at them as the result of a series of historical choices made by men and women, as facts of society made by human beings, and not as natural or god-given, therefore unchangeable, permanent, irreversible.
Now, Rumsfeld's passage shows a disdain for facts. But to produce a colossal disaster, combine that with the moral assuredness of the Project of the New American Century:
• we need to increase defense spending significantly if we are to carry out our global responsibilities today and modernize our armed forces for the future;
• we need to strengthen our ties to democratic allies and to challenge regimes hostile to our interests and values;
• we need to promote the cause of political and economic freedom abroad; [and]
• we need to accept responsibility for America's unique role in preserving and extending an international order friendly to our security, our prosperity, and our principles.
Realities are unimportant, but ideas are enduring, and ideas are the battleground through which America will conquer the world.
In the process of researching this diary, I decided to visit the Project for the New American Century website:
Schadenfreude :) A where-are-they-now of the PNACers would be very funny. Do it yourself, it's a hoot and a holler.
But while Cokie and Mark Penn blather on about Barack Obama's purported foreignness, John McCain largely gets a free pass for his foreignness except for a few clever yukson here and elsewhere. But how many of Obama's advisers have ties, indeeds, obligations to foreign governments? What does the McCain campaign say about the American presidency by its insistence that this election is about foreign policy?
Yes, the world is global. Newsflash. But if your mayor spent all of his time annexing the neighboring city, fixing up its schools, sending your police and equipment over to keep law and order in the absence of a city council, what do you think his or her chances of reelection would be?
We musn't drink the Kool-Aid. Sure, maybe Barack Obama's mother was an anthropologist, and spent her career studying "the other," and John McCain was born in a zone that was fundamentally important in America's development of a free-trade power.
"McSame" is a catchy nickname, but how about Emperor John? Barack Obama's quest for a humble, robust, actually defensive national defense is at its core a historically conservative (albeit pre-cold war) idea. His vision for our country respects what our founding fathers had in mind: Jefferson's yeoman farmers for a new millennium, producing the energy, in wind-farms and soy fields, to power a global economy; Monroe, Washington, and Eisenhower's warnings of entangling alliances and outright bluster; and even George H.W. Bush's professed lack of "the vision thing."
Like Bush 41, McCain seems to find domestic policy--or, I don't know, that whole "being the president" thing--troublesome and pesky. So, how about we send him a message: Barack Obama, born in a recent colony-cum-state, has decided to help us form a more perfect union, establish justice, and ensure domestic tranquility. But Panama-native John McCain's fathers had some strange dreams, and he is threatening to make them come true. It is John McCain who is fundamentally un-American in his attitudes, who is the outsider, who--if he got the chance--would rather move the White House to Baghdad.
After all, what's the big deal about keeping Iraq in tact? There's no such thing as "the Iraqi nation." It's a collection of people groups crammed uncomfortably into one land for the purposes of easy rule by the British imperialists.
In the comments, how about we start a list of sovereign nations belligerent states on Emperor John's to-conquer list? I'll go first.