An Imperial Presidency, Like It Or Not

“Empire,” “emperor,” and “imperial” all derive from the Latin word imperare, to command. Originally the term imperator was given by acclamation to a successful military commander. It later obtained its more political meaning.

With President Obama’s announcement of an escalation of troop numbers in Afghanistan, the word empire takes on a new meaning for me. It’s a question of who, or what, is commanding.

I can pile up many arguments as to why remaining in Afghanistan, much less increasing our presence, is a bad idea. I can point to history, with the stories of empire after empire breaking their teeth on the rock-strewn mountains of Central Asia. I can lay out the thesis of Jonathan Schell in his book The Unconquerable World, where he outlines the inevitable long-term failure of imperial occupations when opposed by determined indigenous forces. I can point to the mission creep of this invasion, which sought to eliminate an Al Qaeda presence that is no longer there. (The best estimate of the U.S. government is that there are perhaps 100 people associated with Al Qaeda hunkered down in Afghanistan. Not including Osama bin Laden.)

I can consider the unsavory lose-lose choice we face in Afghan government. Presently we support the second most corrupt government on the planet. Hamid Karzai’s warlord and crony-ridden kleptocracy, kept in place by U.S. cash and firepower, has near zero legitimacy after a clumsily rigged election. About 30 of the 238 members of the Afghan parliament are actually showing up to work. What is left of the hundreds of millions of dollars in aid money after Karzai’s friends and relatives have skimmed their share isn’t even being spent.

The alternative force is the Taliban, a group of medievalist religious fanatics. They gained control of Afghanistan originally because the Afghan people preferred legalistic religious zealotry to the indigenous mafiosi known as the Northern Alliance.

So, what shall it be, murderous thieves or murderous zealots? In some provinces, after experiencing extortion and rape at the hands of the Afghan National Police the locals are swinging towards the Taliban. I’ll predict that the Taliban will win this one. They are religious reactionaries, but only a century retrograde of most of the rural Afghan population. They offer people some level of personal security and rule of law. 14th century law, but law nevertheless.

But none of this really matters. What matters is the imperator, and Barack Obama does not hold that office.

An empire has its own momentum. The arc of its story line is stronger than the people who serve it. An empire has its own reasons. Like a shark, it has to keep moving or die.
We still have over 750 military bases around the globe. Like the British Empire of the 19th century, the sun never sets upon us. We are, however, a waning empire. Our client states are leaving us. We have overspent. The corporate virus that infects our body politic has restructured our economy from a manufacturing powerhouse into an unsustainable paper chase. And yet our president can’t look at an obvious disaster in the making, perhaps our final disaster, and turn in a different direction.

I am reminded of a couple of parasitic organisms that modify the host’s behavior. The lancet fluke has a life cycle that includes the cow, the snail, and the ant. When it infects an ant it takes over the ant’s motor nerve system and makes it climb to the top of a grass stem and wait. This makes it more likely to be eaten by a grazing cow and continue the cycle. Likewise, the Toxoplasma gondii parasite, which cycles between the guts of cats and mice, makes mice less fearful of the smell of cats. Biologists have found many other instances where parasites have modified the behavior of their hosts to their own benefit and the host’s peril.

So it is with the U.S. We, the people, have been sold a narrative of the necessity of military force. Evidence that it isn’t working is marginalized in our public discourse. I should be more precise – it isn’t working for the average Afghan or for the average American. For the average Fortune 500 military contractor it is working fine. Hundreds of billions of dollars have churned into the accounts of Kellogg, Brown & Root (KBR), Lockheed Martin, Blackwater, and hundreds of other corporate beneficiaries. They, in turn, finance the campaigns of like-minded legislators. KBR even blackmailed generals in the field into approving suspicious invoices with threats of non-performance of vital support services. The Department of Justice is underfunded and understaffed so it can’t adequately pursue these corporate criminals. The military-industrial complex is taking us down from within.

Obama’s call for more troops was inevitable. He could no more back out of Afghanistan than the CEO of Exxon Mobil could transform that company into an environmental non-profit. He was swept along by a legacy of imperial narrative, a corrupt Congress, the demands of thoroughly integrated corporate parasites, and the advice of generals focused on “kinetic operations” (shooting things). I shouldn’t under-emphasize the power of the imperial narrative. We keep telling ourselves a story of our exceptional nature as a nation, the inevitability of our eventual triumph, our essential goodness, our destiny as a world leader, and the justice of our military exploits. Obama couldn’t deny any of that. Political suicide is a mild term for that kind of truth telling.

The imperator is not a man in an oval office. It is the structure of our empire itself. That structure, parisitized to the crumbling point, will lurch forward till it can’t sustain itself any longer. The long, torturous, bloody, losing proposition of occupying Afghanistan is on that path.

Comments

[King of Paine]

An impressively comprehensive yet concise accounting of the inherently unsustainable nature of empire and the contemporary clusterf*ck that is Afghanistan. There are innumerable sparring matches ongoing within the block of those people labeling themselves Democrats or Progressives concerning whether or not Obama has abandoned his "base" or merely followed through on his campaign promise to pursue the "necessary war" in the graveyard of empires. Many now defend Obama's escalation by reminding the outraged citizenry that he had pledged to do this almost from the start. My principal objection to this "excuse" is that even as Barack campaigned against McShame and the cipher from Wasilla, things weren't as bleak in our own country as they now appear. It might be more accurate to say that we hadn't fully grasped just how desperately off the rails our economy was. To doggedly stick to this appalling preference for more troops, more war, more death, more obscene expenditures of blood and treasure while failing to enact meaningful health care reform, revive our economy (beyond the breathlessly giddy "banking" sector), or committing to substantive climate and environmental policy changes is both baffling and despicable in spite of what might be politically practicable. I am now convinced that the rudderless Democrats are going to suffer significant Congressional losses in 2010 and that Obama's current term is his last. This is a pity and not because our nation will have lost "leaders" possessed of integrity and courage, but rather because 2008 - 2012 will ultimately amount to little more than a brief leveling off (if that) before the decline of our country resumes in earnest.