Stop Unwittingly Supporting Imperialism
“An Urgent Warning to Critics of the Iraq War”…
Consider these familiar assertions:
1. If Donald Rumsfeld had listened to the generals and invaded with more troops, Iraq would be stable today.
2. If the U.S. had provided security and basic services after the initial invasion, Iraqis would have embraced America’s presence and agenda by now.
3. If Paul Bremer had neither de-Ba’athified nor disbanded the Iraqi army after the invasion, the insurgency would have been manageable or non-existent.
If you agree with any of these claims, you are an unwitting participant in American Imperialism. You criticize the “handling of the war” but you display faith in the capacity of the US to remake the world in its image through military force and administration. Such faith reinforces the logic of imperialist misadventures like Iraq, and paves the way for future ones. This illustrates an important feature of the discourse surrounding the war: In the wake of failed imperialist projects, critics often leave military imperialism itself unquestioned and unchallenged. Indeed, they participate in its rehabilitation.
… read the rest at Counterpunch. Part one of a three part series, “Becoming Imperialist,” by Arjun Chowdury, Mark Hoffman, and Kevin Parsneau (U of Minnesota political scientist grad students). And here’s part 2: “The Can-Do Troops and the New-Anti Politics”.
