> For example, the assumption seems to be that Obama is surging forces
> into Afghanistan now because this is somehow an imperative for running
> "the empire." As far as I can tell, though, Obama is doing it just
> because he promised he would in the campaign. And he made the promise as
> a way to signal to the electorate that he wasn't a peacenik, in light of
> his pledge to withdraw from Iraq. As far as aggrandizing an American
> empire is concerned, I can't think of a place less relevant to doing
> that than Afghanistan. (During the Cold War, Afghanistan was the
> standard example people would cite of a place that was strategically
> irrelevant for America. We ended up sponsoring the Mujahideen to give
> the Soviets their own Vietnam; what we're doing today is more likely to
> end up giving ourselves one.)
Irrelevant Afghanistan, then, has cropped up twice in my lifetime as a theater of great-power activity, and famously attracted the Brits' attention during their tenure as top country. It's odd, isn't it, how these imperialists keep getting themselves distracted by irrelevancies.
I'm not sure I quite understand the argument that SA is making here. The _public_ wants these wars (Story Of O is just keeping a campaign promise)? Or do the managers of the nation just somehow blunder into these things, and don't know how to extricate themselves -- kind of a random walk across a sheet of flypaper? Why exactly *are* we killing and getting killed in these unimportant places?
I should add that I personally don't always feel sure of the answer to this question in detail, in all cases. The Iraq adventure, in particular, seemed hard to understand in the light of what you might call "imperial rationality" -- which is one of the reasons that I kinda thought maybe the Israel lobby swung at least some of the weight on that one.
However, as a general principle, it seems reasonable to think that people possessed of great power and ample information do what they do with some purpose in mind. If it's not (speaking generally) maintaining and expanding the empire -- what is it?
Enlighten me, somebody.
--
Michael Smith mjs at smithbowen.net http://stopmebeforeivoteagain.org