WSJ: Manifesto Warns of Dangers Associated With an Empire

[HereSince1628]

(Even the Republicans are seen to be having doubts...)

Allan Murray, Wall Street Journal On-line

An unusual manifesto is circulating through the e-mail boxes of prominent Washingtonians from an ad hoc group calling itself the "Committee for the Republic." Its five sponsors include conservative C. Boyden Gray, a White House lawyer in the first Bush administration; Chas. W. Freeman, a former ambassador to Saudi Arabia; and Stephen Cohen, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution.

The manifesto is a work in progress, its authors say. But the goal is clear: to educate Americans about the dangers of empire.
A decade ago, being against empire would have been like being against rape. To all but the perverse few who cheered for the wrong side in Star Wars movies, "empire" was a dirty word. Today, it has re-emerged, newly laundered.

The most aggressive advocates are "neoconservatives" such as William Kristol, publisher of The Weekly Standard, who said on Fox television recently that "if people want to say we're an imperial power, fine." Or Max Boot, a veteran of this paper's editorial page, who wrote shortly after Sept. 11, 2001, that "Afghanistan and other troubled lands today cry out for the sort of enlightened foreign administration once provided by self-confident Englishmen in jodhpurs and pith helmets."
<snip>

The Committee for the Republic is saying, in effect: "Whoa, hold on a minute. Shouldn't we talk about this first"?

"The American Revolution was a nationalist revolt against the British Empire," the draft manifesto argues. "Our country was born as a defiant rejection of the legitimacy of imperialism." Citing the lessons of the classics, it argues that the "inevitable cost of empire" is a loss of political and economic freedom at home. "Domestic liberty is the first casualty of adventurist foreign policy."

While the draft was written before the latest flap over bad intelligence used in the State of the Union address, it also argues: "To justify the high cost of maintaining rule over foreign territories and peoples, leaders are left with no choice but to deceive the people."
<snip>

The Committee for the Republic thinks it is time to have a great national debate about America's role in the post-Cold War world. I say: Bring it on.



http://online.wsj.com/article_email/0,,SB105821991056891800,00.html

[DrBB]

1. It's about goddamn TIME

This was one of the things I thought would happen much sooner. I think it was what all of us who were pushing for the PNAC to get more exposure were hoping for: that as soon as people saw what the neo-cons were dreaming of, the whole Pax Americana thing, that the cries of disgust and derision would drown out the loonies, just like it did when the original white paper was bruited by Wolfie back under Bush I.

There have been some pretty good attacks on this from the right--Pat Buchanan has been consistently, virulently anti-imperial, like the conservative he is. But so far they've done a good job of deflecting serious criticism (what else is new).

My own view is simple: the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution it ultimately gave birth to were explicitly anti-imperial statements. "We won't be your colony; we will rule ourselves. Here's how." I suppose if I was a real historian I would do an analysis that might show that ambivalent feelings about empire got woven in there. But this is the basic message, the basic communication at the founding of our nation.

To my mind that means this: You can have an empire, or you can have the Constitution. You can't have both. To move in the direction of empire is necessarily to curtail, silence and otherwise overwrite the liberties and dignities we have inalienably claimed for ourselves (and by extension, all human beings, at least in principle) in those founding documents. History bears out that the more we have acted like an empire, the more violence we have done to those basic constitutional values. You can have an empire or the Constitution; you can't have both.

edit: unclear pronoun (only one?), spelling
edit 2: didn't like "awarded." Still trying to get this right.

[LiberalLibra]

2. Great article and right on target. Let's hope people read and learn....

....what it is they voted in and need to vote back out.