Yet we’re having trouble with just Iraq and Afghanistan, which are hardly powerful first-world nations.

Doesn’t this mean we’re getting a terrible return on our investment?

I’d agree with Kevin that the managerial state is the institutional expression of the Empire, though in terms of ideological superstructure I’d be more inclined to consider the US empire to be moving towards a mixture of cultural leftism and fascism. I wrote about that in this article on Rudy Giuliani:

http://attackthesystem.com/the-significance-of-rudy-giuliani/

The norm for quite some time, indeed for perhaps most of American history, has been that the US consistently moves leftward culturally but becomes more imperialist, militarist, statist, and corporatist (i.e., fascist) politically.

The first generation of Americans expelled the monarchy and the Church but set up an even more centralist, mercantilist state in the former colonies. Lincoln abolished slavery but consolidated a nationalist state-capitalist regime. The Progressive/Wilson era saw female suffrage and other expansions of “democracy” combined with greater militarism (WWI and all that), Palmer Raids and Prohibition. The New Deal/WW2 period saw the institutionalization labor unions into the mainstream but the growth of the corporate state and the military-industrial complex.
Since the 60s and 70s we’ve seen the expansion of “cultural liberation” and “civil rights” in countless ways, but the degeneration of the US politically into even greater militarism and domestic statism.

I suppose the end result of all this will be a Mussolini-like right-wing political totalitarianism with a Cabinet, Senate and Supreme Court composed of “butch” women, transexuals, vegetarians , a rainbow of ethnic colors and eco-freaks.

Welcome to Brave New World.

As Matt Yglesias recently made all too clear, the liberal-center wing of the foreign policy establishment shares a majority of its operating assumptions with the right wing of the foreign policy establishment.

I used to hear a song called “Star Trekkin’” on the Dr. Demento show. One of the verses was “We come in peace–shoot to kill, shoot to kill, shoot to kill…” That was the perfect summation not only of the archtypical Kennedy liberal, Captain Kirk, but of the “liberal” foreign policy establishment today.

The notion that this good, anti-militarist Obama will “return” implies that he used to exist. Tell me when this was, exactly? Obama has been insisting for at least a year that he wants to expand the military by something like a hundred thousand troops and dramatically increase the U.S. presence in Afghanistan. These aren’t new points for him; they’ve always been there. The anti-war Obama was always a figment of the Democratic imagination.

(I’m going to be pretty surprised if he isn’t a centrist Dem somewhere near Bill Clinton.)

And this is a source of comfort how? Clinton started military interventions in Haiti and Kosovo, massively escalated the American military operation against Iraq, and carried out a number of other “police actions” (like the bombing of the al-Shifa pharmaceutical factory in Sudan) during his time in office - and all that during a period of “peacetime.” How many wars do you expect a similarly “centrist” Obama to undertake in the name of fighting the Global War on Terror?

To grasp the sheer exceptionalist arrogance involved in this sort of thing, imagine if China back in the ’80s had started defining as a “threat” America’s actions in Central America. Now we’ve got JCS generals saying, with a straight face, that a Chinese military budget a tiny fraction of ours goes beyond their “legitimate defensive needs. Well, hell, maybe they ought to just start defining as a “threat” any country in the world that refuses to take orders from them or presents a credible ability to resist a Chinese attack; that’s the U.S. gov’s standard for determining its own “legitimate defensive needs.” And it’s sickening that these so-called “soft on defense” liberals are too fucking stupid to even question all the assumptions underlying this ass-brained view of the world.

People used to joke about nuclear overkill in terms of the ability to make the rubble bounce higher. We’ve already got a military budget larger than those of all the rest of the world combined. Are we going to start defining “enough” in terms of increased *multiples* of the rest of the world’s military capability?

That’s a mighty big leap of faith…

(I’m going to be pretty surprised if he isn’t a centrist Dem somewhere near Bill Clinton.)