The Romans at least, when they espoused an ideology of Empire, had an actual Empire to go along with it. The Americans do not, and will never. The "Roman" - American echo comes from the old pre-capitalist, and even anti-capitalist, lineage of American Constitutionalism (whose ideological history was so excellently described by JA Pocock, and so deeply misunderstood by Negri/Hardt). That line snapped a long time ago.
But the perpetual war, the global military bases, the Schindler contractor camp followers and the rest of the military-police-terror-exploitation apparatus _is_ the reality, and not a metaphor for anything else. So too is the "Stalin-like" US Congress - "Stalin" here is not a metaphor, but the reality of this rubber-stamp of the perpetual war.
This apparatus is not Empire, but anti-Empire. It is radically opposed to the stability of Empire, and (and because) it has the closest correspondence to the specifically capitalist utopia of statelessness on a global scale yet seen in history. Even Ellen Meiksins Wood's "Empire of Capital" is but this same metaphor pushed to the limit, where it is then simply exposed as an impossibility, as impossible as a purely capitalist state. For if you really think about it, however well they conditioned capitalist accumulation, every state of importance has either been "pre-capitalist" (including the US) or "post-capitalist" (the USSR, PRC), but never "purely capitalist", though Germany/France and (to a lesser extent, hobbled still by internal pre-capitalist remnants and the external restriction of the US Security treaty) Japan, approximate a "capitalist steady-state" most closely, since, especially in the former, many of the precapitalist relics were wiped out in WW2, without "post-capitalism" having made an appearence, except in Eastern Germany.
Wood: "This war without end without purpose and time belongs to an endless empire without boundaries or even territory. Yet this is an empire that must be administered by institutions and powers that do indeed have territorial boundaries". These latter would ber nation-states, not empires. But even good Marxist thinkers have been somewhat taken in by the Empire psychosis. At least Wood understands neoconservatism as in the mainstream of American _imperialist_ ideology, and not as some accident or "temptation", as with Negri/Hardt.
But why not just do the math and figure that, at the limit, there is no "Empire", not now or ever, except in pure metaphor? The reality, instead, is the universal nation-state.
-Brad -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Right, this is precisely the point of the war metaphor and the actual war being waged to give the metaphor 3-dimensionality.
In fact, during his Stalin-light-esque performance last night, Bush (via his speechwriters and, ultimately we can guess, Karl Rove) addressed the question of why the US waged war and spoke of war when policing and investigation seems to be the appropriate way to deal with terrorist organizations.
His non-answer was that 'on September 11 the terrorists declared war on the United States and war is what they got!' (cue applause).
Good enough it seems for many (perhaps most) people who were startled by the Hollywood scale spectacle of mass murder into a state of deep suggestiveness - enhanced by a near complete lack of background info and murky preconceptions of Islamic societies.
Geo-political and petro-dollar considerations aside (just for moment now) we can re-think the Iraq war as part of an effort to create - through a 'deed of negative daring' as the mid 20th century militarists of Japan described such things - a situation no successor administration can walk away from with ease. Since the US cannot leave, the agenda of the Perles of the earth has a greater chance of being pursued - whether Bush is in office or not.
They may have succeeded in creating the conditions they wanted, a meta-state beyond the reach (they believe) of conventional politics. Given the enthusiasm of warrior liberals such as Paul Berman and company (including some of the Dem contendors) for the contradictory and really, quite mad dream of 'benevolent empire' it is not clear that a Democratic President would take the necessary steps to divert this lava flow.
As Zizek has written, they want to rewrite the norms of domestic life (all surveillance, all the time) and international life (un-apologetic aggression masked by Baudrillardian simulations of virtue - at least the Romans had the good manners to announce your impending death was because you were in the way of SPQR's glorous expansion).
There is as much killer clown circus as psycho-pathology as murderous geo-politics at work in the present moment as any practical hegemonic concerns. ...
Let me take a moment here to thank William Gibson and Phillip K. Dick for mentally preparing me for our slow but steady national descent to new depths of bizareness.
DRM