U.S. Power, after 9/11 and before It: If Not an Empire, Then What?
Today in Afghanistan, the world is seeing that America acts not to conquer but to liberate, and remains in friendship to help the people build a future of stability, self-determination, and peace. We would act in that same spirit after a regime change in Iraq. With our help, a liberated Iraq can be a great nation once again. Iraq is rich in natural resources and human talent, and has unlimited potential for a peaceful and a prosperous future. Our goal would be an Iraq that has territorial integrity, a government that is democratic and pluralistic, a nation where the human rights of every ethnic and religious group are recognized and respected.
Dick Cheney, speech to war veterans, 29 August 2002
Is the United States running a new global empire? Is it acting imperial when it deploys military force against terrorists? Is terrorism a growing threat? Has the United States, perhaps like all states in more recent years, lost coercive control? Has “the state” lost its monopoly on coercive force? Has something irreversibly changed the global order of sovereignties and specifically the distribution and use of means of coercion? Have information technologies, for example, changed the means of coercion irreversibly? And, alternatively or contrapuntally, have new military technologies increased the powers for state military intervention? What is driving current U.S. military deployments and “force transformation” plans: new, “smart,” military technologies or new, stupid, military policies or both?
It has become vital in social theory to carry analysis beyond party ideologies and electoral politics and toward the more sublime politics of governmentality, modernity, and critique of liberalism. But events now call us back to reconsider more quotidian things as well, such as new global deployments of actual military force. Deployments of actual military force have unbearable heaviness of being.
First of all and unavoidably, they are matters of “mere” power over death in Foucauldian terms. But nevertheless, they are things that should not be left for the realists of political science to assess and explain. We could use a different kind of realism.
Critical scholarship can and should attack the premise that history reset on September 11, by remembering all that led to, as well as from, the terrorist attacks and the quintessential U.S. responses to them. We can rejoin a struggle that now moves through the events of response to 9/11 but began long before: a struggle over war powers and, in fact, new world order. Conflicts over rules of war are global and multivalent. A century of domestic conflicts between the two major U.S. political parties over war powers has had and continues to have global ramifications, in large part because of the leading role of the United States in the settlements after the first two world wars. The U.S. military responses to 9/11 are intensifications of a U.S. interventionist military plan, launched by a Republican Party–dominated government that was already planning to intensify and develop its assertions of sovereignty but was unsure, before 9/11, what public face to give its actions. This U.S. government is still unsure, not only about how to describe its military plans but also, more importantly, about what changes to impose in arrangements of sovereignty, limitations on warfare, and other controls on might and right that were established largely by Democratic Party administrations and congresses over half a century of Cold War and Pax Americana. Of course U.S. military responses to the events of September 11 have a great deal to do with the events themselves, but 9/11 gained specific meanings in the context of already existing uncertainties and initiatives within the world of U.S. military politics.
This essay pursues a new realism about might and right, in hopes of generating a more productive criticism of U.S. military culture and politics, beginning with the allegation of a U.S. empire. I argue that uncovering a latent imperialism in U.S. hegemony is an old and ineffective critical project, a project not cognizant of a specifically anti-imperial mainspring in American military tactics. An American military organized persistently for occasional intervention and continuing threat of force projection, rather than for imperial conquest and control, has aided and enforced the scheme of open doors, limited rights, and limited liabilities crucial to American global-economic policy. The need for criticism not of virtual empire but of actual nation-state self-determination and its limited liabilities then takes us back to the present, to U.S. power, now, and the debates over its proper use in U.S. and global public culture. We will reconsider September 10, 2001, what was already known about terrorism, U.S. national and global politics in ways buried in current U.S. public memory. And we will reconsider in this light the logics of contemporary U.S. responses to 9/11.
I write in the United States, about it, and in significant ways to it, but especially to intellectuals, outside of the United States and inside it, who themselves seek to influence public culture not only of the United States but also outside of it. We, then, are interpreting the United States, concerning ourselves with it, engaging it, trying to understand it, and above all trying to change it and the new world order it did so much to constitute. Ranajit Guha once made an argument that inscribed for me the difference between history and my own discipline of anthropology. Borrowing from Sanskrit, which I know well, he argued that history was best understood as itihasa, as the re-telling—not the telling—of our story. Anthropology, especially U.S. anthropology, has generally preferred to present its revisions as new visions. And at least as importantly it has preferred description of others to estimation of self. To seek to produce in an anthropological mode, as if from the outside, a new vision of the ways and means of U.S. hegemony is also to produce one’s own alibi of inceptive intervention, to instantiate a moral culture that I will describe as if from the outside. I hope this undermines my innocence from the outset. In any case I write as, of, and to Americans, but not exclusively so, and thus refuse to use we to mean U.S. citizens, even while also seeking the burden of Guha’s itihasa, revision of the story to be told about U.S. power. We, in this essay, refers to intellectuals whose time and space is secondary to our intention to understand and to engage the organization of social and political power in the contemporary world. Thus a question we should get clearer on.
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