Why Liberals Should Be Against Empire,
Why All Americans Should Be Against Empire,
Appropriate Foreign Policy for the Modern Age,
Conclusion

excerpted from the book

The Empire Has No Clothes

U.S. Foreign Policy Exposed

by Ivan Eland

The Independent Institute, 2004, hardcover

p69
When many conservatives rail against profligate government spending, they seem to disregard massive defense expenditures. But defense spending has the same ill effects on the economy as any other federal spending. In a defense industry that is rife with socialism, industrial policy, and excessive regulation and produces no goods beneficial to consumers, every dollar spent on research, development, and production is taken away from the much more productive and efficient equivalent in the commercial sector. In fact, the workers and capitalists in the commercial sector have to support workers and capitalists in the non productive defense sector by producing consumer goods for them.

Curiously, many conservative and neoconservative hawks admire Milton Friedman and other free market economists, but seem to be Keynesians when it comes to defense spending. They somehow believe that defense spending is good for the economy, but that other government spending are not.

p115
With European monarchs of the day in mind, the founders designed the American system of checks and balances to keep the leader from conducting wars of aggrandizement at the expense-in blood and treasure-of the citizens. Although the founders gave the president the power to command the armed forces (and the militia when it is called to serve the federal government), they clearly vested most of the war powers with Congress. Yet in examining the events leading up to wars after World War II, that congressional preeminence is not apparent. During the post-World War II period, Congress has forfeited those powers or constrained itself in exercising them.

The U.S. Constitution gives Congress the following major war powers:

* to provide for the common defense,

* to declare war and to grant letters of marque and reprisal (which approve situations short of all-out war),

* to raise and support armies and fund them,

* to provide and maintain a navy,

* to regulate the land and naval forces,

* to provide for calling forth the militia to execute federal laws, suppress insurrections, and repel invasions,

* and to provide for organizing, arming, and disciplining the militia governing the parts of it employed by the federal government.

Debates at the Constitutional Convention in 1787 clearly indicate that the founders intended that the president have a right to take defensive action if the country was under imminent or actual threat of attack. Even then, however, the founders felt that the Congress should meet to declare a state of war at the earliest possible time. For offensive warfare (a designation that fits all major wars in U.S. history except the War of 1812 and World War II), the founders intended that a declaration of war would be needed before hostilities began. Unfortunately, starting with the Korean War during the first years of the cold war, this vital safeguard against presidential aggrandizement of power went out of fashion. No congressional declaration of war has been issued since World War II. The executive branch has spent more than fifty years usurping Congress's war powers. As a result, the common belief now among policymakers, legislators, and the media is that the president, as commander in chief, can take the country to war without congressional approval.

Demonstrating the erosion of the congressional war power subsequent to World War IL presidents have conducted many U.S. military actions without getting even a congressional resolution of support (a lesser means of approval than a formal declaration of war). Before the first Gulf War, President George H.W. Bush asked the Congress for a resolution approving the conflict. He claimed, however, that he had all the authority needed to make war, even without such approval and that he was only seeking it as a courtesy. President Clinton did not see fit to get Congressional approval for this bombing of Serbia and Kosovo or his threatened intervention of Haiti.

Presidents have also taken it upon themselves to wage secret paramilitary wars via the CIA and military Special Forces-in many instances without getting approval of the full Congress. For example, several presidents carried out paramilitary action in Tibet against communist China for twenty years. 144 Secret or overt, war is still war. In fact, for a republic, secret war without public or full congressional approval may be the most threatening to the liberties of the people. Yet some conservatives, such as Robert Kaplan, openly advocate that the U.S. empire be even more evasive of constitutional checks and balances than it already is: "Covert means are more discreet and cheaper than declared war and large-scale mobilization . . . . There will be less and less time for democratic consultation, whether with Congress or with the UN." 141 But after the end of the cold war, and even during that era, what threat is (was) so menacing that the republic needs to be destroyed in order to save it?

Even Congress's all-important power of the purse is rarely used to rein in executive branch warfare. Obviously, if funding for a military operation is cut off, the armed intervention has to cease. Once in a great while, Congress gets fed up with an unpopular military adventure and shuts off the funding, as in the Vietnam War. Even when Congress cuts off funding for an imperial foray, the executive branch sometimes ignores it. For example, in the Iran-Contra affair, Oliver North circumvented a congressional ban on funding to the Nicaraguan Contras by selling arms to the state sponsors of terrorism in Iran and using the proceeds to finance the Contras. (This flouting of the congressional power of the purse cuts to the core of the American constitutional system of checks and balances, and was therefore probably a more severe abuse of presidential power than Watergate.) In most cases, however, Congress comes up with the cash-sometimes after grumbling about the costs or holding extensive hearings to register its displeasure.

p118
Why is Congress so shy about reasserting its constitutional authority to declare war or to disapprove of certain military interventions by refusing to fund them? At the time that the Constitution was drafted, the founders believed that a system of checks and balances would work because the president would assert his prerogatives, and members of Congress would push back by defending that institution's powers. Very few members of Congress, however, stand up for institutional prerogatives. Instead, the members are more concerned about their own reelection. They know that when the president sends American troops into battle-whether the reason is good or not-the public usually, at least initially, rallies to support his decision. They also know that the initial groundswell of such "patriotism" among the public will allow the president to use his office as a powerful "bully pulpit" to paint anyone opposing the war, or even asking questions about it, as unpatriotic. If the conflict goes well, the president will remind voters in the next election of who opposed the war. For example, after the crushing U.S. victory against Iraq in the first Gulf War in 1991, those members of Congress who had opposed going to war had the unenviable position of trying to defend their stance in the next election. Antiwar members had that public relations problem despite the fact that General Cohn Powell, the Bush I administration's Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, had expressed in internal administration debates before the conflict a reluctance to conduct the military action.

With that unpleasant experience in mind, many fewer members opposed George W. Bush's invasion of Iraq in 2003, even though much information in the public domain prior to the conflict called into question Saddam Hussein's alleged links to the September 11 attackers and the Bush administration's characterization of Iraq as an imminent threat that required a preemptive war. Instead of challenging a president still basking in high poll numbers from the September 11 attacks, members of Congress lay in the weeds waiting for an opening. When the American occupation of Iraq turned into chaos, congressional critics saw their chance and began to attack not only the occupation but also the need for the war itself.

Although better late than never, such postintervention criticisms of unnecessary wars-that is, Congress pointing its finger to the wind before openly opposing the president-do not comport well with Congress's constitutional responsibilities to act as a check against the locomotive of presidential warfare. The cold war thus led to a perversion of the U.S. Constitution (which continues to this day) that has allowed the president to imitate the kings of eighteenth-century Europe. He can conduct war for his or the government's purposes without the proper consent of the representatives of the people, imposing costs in blood and treasure on those very citizens. Some of the lost treasure is in the form of international commerce forgone because of the war.

p121
President George W Bush

"The United States will use this moment of opportunity to extend the benefits of freedom across the globe. We will actively work to bring the hope of democracy, development, free markets, and free trade to every corner of the world.

p124
The old left is not protesting the post-World War II American empire as much as it is protesting the perceived arrogance with which the more unilateralist Bush II administration is going about preserving and expanding it. The liberal Wilsonian penchant for promoting international organizations and multilateralism causes Wilsonians to be angry when the Bush II administration foreign policy blatantly marginalizes both. The Bush II administration received widespread criticism among liberals for sidestepping the United Nations in its march toward the invasion of Iraq. But in 1999, when the United Nations refused to endorse Bill Clinton's attack on Serbia over Kosovo, he merely used another multilateral organization, the U.S.-dominated NATO alliance, as a fig leaf and did it anyway. In fact, unlike Bush II in the second Iraq war, Clinton failed even to get congressional approval for the bombing of Serbia and Kosovo or the threatening of Haiti with invasion. But the congressional okay for the exercise of U.S. military power seems to be less important to Wilsonian liberals than the approval of international organizations.

Unlike the formal imperialism of the British empire; the United States uses the United Nations, World Bank, International Monetary Fund, and other international bodies to legitimize imperial interventions into the political and economic systems of developing nations. Rather than using such institutions to constrain U.S. power, Wilsonian liberals astutely use them to veil it. For example, Robert Cooper, director general for external affairs at the European Union and senior advisor to Prime Minister Tony Blair of Britain, advocates a "new kind of imperialism" in which Western states, acting under the guidance of the United Nations, take responsibility for zones in conflict.' But the veiled nature of this liberal version of imperialism is exposed: on security issues, the United Nations does the bidding of the five great powers that are permanent members of the UN Security Council.

p129
During and after the cold war, despite all of the harsh rhetoric between the two parties for electoral purposes, they both peddle slightly different versions of military interventionism to retain U.S. worldwide preeminence.

p131
Andrew Bacevich best summed up the post-World War II continuity in U.S. foreign policy, even as power has been transferred between American political parties.

Like Eisenhower in 1953, George W. Bush in 2001 by and large embraced the policies of his predecessor. As in 1953, Republicans vigorously denied that such was the case, and Democrats found it expedient to minimize similarities. But those similarities far outweighed the differences. As a result, although the rhetoric changed, the overarching grand strategy-aimed at creating an open and integrated international order dominated by the United States-emerged from the transfer of power intact. This was the case prior to September 11, 2001. And it continued to be the case after that date.

As Bacevich implies, the two key tenets of the U.S. foreign policy consensus since the Truman administration have been (1) ensuring an open world commercial order and (2) doing so with U.S. Military supremacy. Wilsonian liberals rhetorically cloak support for overseas military interventions more in terms of serving "hu-manitarian" ends than neoconservatives do. But a closer historical examination of humanitarian interventions-even under Democratic administrations-indicates that such rhetoric usually veils imperial motives.

p133
During the cold war, both Democratic and Republican presidents, using the veneer of fighting communism in part as a disguise, preserved the American empire by supporting petty tyrants in backwater regions of the world. For example, the United States supported Ferdinand Marcos in the Philippines, General Suharto in Indonesia, Chiang Kai-Shek in Taiwan, and despotic rulers in South Korea, South Vietnam, Cambodia, and many other countries. In fact, despite U.S. rhetoric about spreading democracy, in Iran and Guatemala the CIA sponsored coups against democratically elected leaders whose policies did not favor U.S. corporations. Similarly, in Indonesia and post-World War II Italy, the U.S. government intervened because those governments were too democratic, allowing participation by parties on the left . In Indonesia, the forces of General Suharto, whom the United States helped into power in 1965, killed hundreds of thousands of people-with the U.S. embassy providing lists of whom to execute. In Argentina, during the 1970s, newly released records indicate that the White House encouraged the right-wing autocratic government to accelerate its human rights violations.

p157
... in the post-cold war world, U.S. foreign policy has become militarized. The Pentagon has more influence on the formulation of U.S. foreign policy than the State Department and many more resources to carry it out.

p190
The founders wanted to escape the militarism of Europe. To guard against what could have been the death knell of the new republic the founders, in the Constitution, gave most of the war powers to Congress rather than to the executive branch. James Madison, the principal author of the document, noted, "In no part of the Constitution is more wisdom to be found than in the clause which confides the question of war and peace to the legislature, and not the executive department . .. . The trust and temptation would be too great for any one man."' Although the president was the commander in chief of the armed forces after a conflict began, the powers to declare war, raise armies, maintain the navy, and fund and regulate them fell to the branch of government closest to the people-the Congress.

Madison was very right about the executive temptation for war. U.S. presidents, much like the European monarchs of old, have a rich history of finding excuses-or manufacturing them-to go to war. Some examples should illustrate the point. In 1898, an explosion on the U.S. warship Maine in Havana harbor was used to stoke war fervor toward the Spanish. That jingoism led to the Spanish-American War and the acquisition of Spanish possessions in the Caribbean and the Pacific. In 1846, the United States provoked a Mexican attack by sending troops into a disputed region on the Texas-Mexican border. The United States wanted to start a conflict with the much weaker foe to grab huge tracts of Mexican land in what is now the American West. In 1964, the Johnson administration either fabricated or exaggerated a North Vietnamese attack on a U.S. ship in the Gulf of Tonkin to escalate U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War. The Reagan administration deliberately provoked conflict with Libyan leader Moammar Qaddafi in the Gulf of Sidra in the 1980s and used the excuse of rescuing medical students to invade Grenada in 1983. In 1989, the Bush I administration labeled Manuel Noriega a drug-running thug and invaded Panama to oust him. The Bush H administration dubiously asserted that Saddam Hussein's "weapons of mass destruction" were an imminent threat, implied a false link between Saddam and the September 11 attacks, and launched an invasion to remove him from power.

Unfortunately, with the post-World War II advent of the American empire, the vital congressional war powers as a check on presidents have eroded considerably. Repudiating the Constitution and an American tradition up until that point, beginning during the long cold war with the Korean conflict, presidents no longer felt the need to ask Congress for a declaration of war. Since 1945, more than one hundred thousand U.S. service men and women have died and another four hundred thousand have been injured in wars that were never declared as such.

p193
Disgust with the Vietnam War temporarily roused the Congress from its constitutional slumber to cut off funding and pass the War Powers Resolution in 1973. Unfortunately, the funding termination occurred very late in the game-only as the war was already winding down. Presidents have always regarded the War Powers Resolution as an unconstitutional restriction on their powers as commanders in chief to commit U.S. forces to war. In fact, the resolution is unconstitutional because it allows the president a free pass to employ troops for ninety days without a prior congressional declaration of war before a congressional vote is required to keep those troops in the field. In practice, once American troops are on the ground in a foreign land, Congress politically has little choice but to approve their continued presence on the battlefield or face charges from the president that it is being unpatriotic by endangering American forces. It is a curious form of patriotism and "support for the troops" to approve getting them killed in a military action 'overseas that has nothing to do with U.S. security. But such are the political pressures if Congress waits to approve the military action after the president has created a fait accompli. Thus, the War Powers Resolution undermines the constitutional requirement for the Congress to declare war, and so approve of a conflict before it starts.

In short, during the cold war with the rise of the global American empire and an environment of perpetual conflict, Congress abdicated one of its most potent powers under the Constitution. That shirking of responsibility continued during the initial post-cold war years and the state of perpetual "war against terror" after September 11. Such lack of congressional courage in keeping the president out of foreign wars would make the founders roll over in their graves. The signers of the Constitution recognized the intrinsic geographical advantages of the United States in the security realm and thus believed it was unnecessary to get embroiled in foreign intrigues and conflicts. They also realized that Britain's isolation from the conflict-ridden European continent had fostered individual freedoms there. There was less need for a large standing army for defense, which also could be used to oppress people domestically. Those British freedoms were in turn transmitted to English colonies in the new world. In other words, the founders realized that war eroded the freedoms of a republic. Yet modern U.S. presidents are allowed by Congress to lead the country into wars of empire on a whim. When blowback occurs-as dramatically illustrated by the terrorist attacks on September 11-and civil liberties are curtailed, the founders' worst fears have come to pass. The American empire is undermining the American republic.

p197
Although in America the president, other high-level policymakers, the foreign policy elite, the media, and even large segments of the public are in a state of denial, that factor is obvious to the rest of the world: the interventionist U.S. foreign policy in support of the informal American global empire.

p199
Amy Chua quotes bin Laden as saying in 1993: "The United States has been occupying the lands of Islam in the holiest of its territories, Arabia, plundering its riches, overwhelming its rulers, humiliating its people, threatening its neighbors, and using its peninsula as a spearhead to fight neighboring Islamic peoples."

p199
Amy Chua then quotes Abdul-Bari Atwan, an associate of bin Laden, as saying after the al Qaeda bombings of American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, "America's insistence on imposing its own puppets on the Muslim world in order to expedite exploitation of oil and other riches-and not U.S.-Israeli relations-was at the core of the Islamist eruption."

p200
The U.S. interventionist foreign policy that is designed to maintain the informal American empire is the main reason the United States has a much greater problem with terrorism than other industrialized nations. The United States is the only country in the world that regularly intervenes militarily outside its own region, and it does so in almost every region of the world.

p203
The first responsibility of any government is to protect its citizens, their property, and the homeland territory from attack. But unfortunately, as public choice theory argues, the government itself can develop interests separate from its citizens. The government reflects the interests of powerful pressure groups and the interests of the bureaucracies and the bureaucrats in them.

p204
The president, the government, and the vested interests can usually manipulate for their own ends the nationalistic impulses of an understandably enraged citizenry. Instead of following where the evidence leads-to the fact that the U.S. government's foreign policy might have had a primary role in motivating the terrorists to do their evil deed in the first place-citizens usually close ranks behind their president and government. The citizenry is thus persuaded to support even more aggressive policies that merely exacerbate the threat to U.S. security from terrorists. As alleged causes for disproportionate terrorist attacks on U.S. targets, the vested interests and the foreign policy establishment focus on American wealth, culture, or freedoms, which cannot be changed easily, to divert attention from interventionist U.S. foreign policy, which is the principal cause of the terrorism and could be rolled back rapidly. In fact, the policymakers in Washington usually manipulate fear and feelings of "patriotism" caused by terrorist incidents to garner support for further empire-building.

p205
Instead of fighting only al Qaeda, the attackers on September 11, in Afghanistan and elsewhere, the Bush administration used the public fear and outrage after the September 11 attacks to obtain support for an expansive, "preemptive" global war on terror and "rogue" states. One reason for this may be that the September 11 terrorists were too hard to find and neutralize, and the administration hoped to perform a "bait and switch."

But imperial designs more likely drove the wider war. Donald Rumsfeld candidly admitted that "maybe out of this [September 11] tragedy comes opportunity ... the kind of opportunities that World War II offered, to refashion much of the world . In the name of eradicating support for terrorism or eliminating weapons of mass destruction that could fall into the hands of terrorists, the war on terror has provided a cover to launch offensive warfare against any country the United States does not like. The U.S. National Security Strategy indicates the administration believes that the "best defense is a good offense,"" which Jack Snyder, an eminent academic researcher on foreign policy and empires, has called one of several imperial myths." The administration has put in U.S. crosshairs groups and nations that had nothing to do with the September 11 attacks, for example, Iraq and the other countries of the axis of evil.

p206
Invading and occupying Iraq, the country with the world's second largest oil reserves, also gave the United States a new military outpost to guard Persian Gulf oil just in the nick of time. The Saudi government had indicated that the U.S. military presence in Saudi Arabia had to end soon because of the instability it caused in the desert kingdom-read agitation by radical Islamists of the bin Laden variety. In addition, in the name of fighting terrorism, the United States also established new bases in Central Asia and sent troops to the Philippines, moves that were really designed to tighten the containment ring around China.

President George W. Bush managed to convince many Americans that his offensive, "preemptive" strategy was the correct one, but it has been wildly unpopular with almost everyone else in the world. The strategy is better designed to expand and maintain an empire than to reduce the number of Americans killed by terrorism. In fact, attacking groups and countries-particularly Islamic ones-that have no connection to the September 11 attacks is a sure way to paint ' an even bigger bull's-eye on Americans, both at home and abroad.

p207
The Quran mandates that Muslims defend, even ruthlessly, the dar al Islam-homeland of Muslim nations. Traditional Jewish teachings obligate Jews also to use ruthless tactics to reconquer traditional biblical Jewish lands from non-Jews. But the mainstreams of both faiths now reject such notions. 12 Unfortunately, militants in both faiths prefer more traditional interpretations ...

p216
[Paul] Wolfowitz]

"The most important difference between North Korea and Iraq is that economically, we just had no choice in Iraq. The country swims on a sea of oil."

p257
All Americans should be against a U.S. empire, because it destroys the republic. This is probably the most important argument against empire. Repeated wars undermined democracy in Ancient Greece and doomed the Roman Republic. In the United States, an imperial foreign policy has lead to an imperial presidency that is much more powerful than the founders intended.

The Empire Has No Clothes

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