U.S. Imperialism 

U.S. Imperialism

President Bush: "In the long term, the peace we seek will only be achieved by
eliminating the conditions that feed radicalism and ideologies of
murder."

"And because democracies respect their own people and their
neighbors, the advance of freedom will lead to peace."

This is bit more sober than what he said in the Inaugural, and it actually articulates the Bush Doctrine a bit.

Michael Young has reviewed three books on U.S. imperialism, and the one that interests me the most--the one I want to read, in fact, is Colossus: he Price of America's Empire, by Neill Ferguson.

Ferguson's creativity is emancipating. An inescapable conclusion about the modern Middle East is that indigenous liberal reform has been a spectacular illusion. Nowhere was this more apparent than in Saddam Hussein's Iraq. As Arab countries embarked on post-colonial independence, they became less free. Most Arab civil societies have been bludgeoned into silence by their regimes, with even the more representative systems denying their citizens true political participation.

Ferguson, positing the need for a liberal American empire, suggests a possible mechanism for change from the outside, even as he wonders whether the U.S. is up to the task. And while there has been much denigration of the notion that democracy and free markets can be imposed, Ferguson suggests it is indeed possible. More pertinently, the 9/11 attacks underlined how the success of this ambition in the Middle East is intimately tied to U.S. national security.

Ferguson is known for the line that "America is an empire in denial," which sums up his thoughts fairly well. Like Perle and Frum, he aims to stiffen America's back at a time of volatility, particularly in Iraq. But more important, Ferguson wants to make the U.S. conscious of its imperial destiny.

"I believe the world needs an effective liberal empire and that the United States is the best candidate for the job," Ferguson writes. But he is skeptical that the Americans will play along, warning, "For all its colossal economic, military and cultural power, the United States still looks unlikely to be an effective liberal empire without some profound changes in its economic structure, its social makeup and its political culture."

This is Ferguson's gentle way of saying that the Americans aren't cut from imperial cloth. As Iraq has shown, they're not good at holding overseas territories (though they seize them quickly enough), have developed no effective imperial governing class, seem to believe what they say when promising "liberation" to peoples they have conquered, and have a tendency to become impatient to leave once the bullets start flying and American blood is shed.