The imperialism Chalmers Johnson is fighting is a bi-partisan effort. Bush is just issuing the coup the grace to the dying empire which is one reason he's so passionately disliked by a segment of our society that's still clinging to dreams of Empire.
Bill Clinton was a better imperialistPeople sometimes think that I’m attacking the Bush administration. But empire has a much longer history than just the Bush administration, and I would be the first to argue (as I do in my book), that Bill Clinton was a better imperialist than George Bush because he cleverly disguised what we were doing under various rubrics that he invented. That is the essence of strategy: not to give away one’s true purpose but to use an indirect approach. For example, Clinton argued that our attack on Serbia in 1999 was humanitarian intervention. In other cases, he disguised our imperialism as part of a newly discovered ineluctable process called “globalization.”
I’m not going to say that there aren't circumstances under which the use of military force to prevent genocide might be called for, but the issue always is who decides that it’s legitimate to do so. If you yourself say, “I’m invading Panama but this is humanitarian intervention,” well, no, that’s imperialism. The odd thing about our humanitarian intervention is that we invoked it for Kosovars against Milosevic, and for starving Somalis back in 1993; but we’ve not invoked it for Rwandans, Palestinians, Tibetans, East Timorese, and any number of people that one might have argued need protecting, even if it required the use of military force to do so.
Even more important was Clinton’s camouflaging American imperialism under the cover of globalization. He suggested that rather than this being American policies to exploit defenseless Third World farmers for the sake of our own wealth, we were simply reacting to technological forces that were transcending national boundaries.
http://www.inmotionmagazine.com/global/cj_int/cj_int1.html#Anchor-Bill-13458====
There's no question that a group of intellectuals who have served in the government for many years -- in the Reagan administration, in the first Bush administration, now prominently represented in the Department of Defense; people like Wolfowitz, Richard Perle, others -- these people made, in my view, a very wrong conclusion after the demise of the Soviet Union, namely that we won the Cold War. I don't think we did; I think we just didn't lose it the way the Soviet Union did. But they concluded from that we were a new Rome; that we were beyond good and evil; that our policy should be the famous old Roman phrase, "We don't care whether they love us, so long as they fear us." Wolfowitz was writing back at the very end of first Bush administration on how our policy should be the military domination of the globe to ensure that no one, enemy or ally, offers competition to our military force.
On the other hand, just as you were saying, particularly in the Clinton administration, there were those imperialists who spoke of the duty to intervene in the case where human life was at risk and things of this sort. The issue here is not that such a duty or obligation doesn't exist; it is how it's legitimatized. It is not just up to us to decide that we are now going to do a humanitarian liberation of Kosovo from Yugoslavia, but not Chechens, or Palestinians, or East Timorese, or whoever else that we don't want to get involved with. Humanitarian intervention, if it is not legitimatized -- and the only form of legitimacy we have is by sanction of the U.N. Security Council -- is simply a euphemism for imperialism, in which we declare that we have good intentions, but nobody is going to stop us.
Q. So for you, Iraq isn't surprising at all -- that there are no weapons of mass destruction; that the Senate essentially passed the resolution; that we ignored the U.N. and that, now, we've changed our mission. In the end, we may not get democracy, but we will have four or five bases.There's a lot of continuity here, too. What Americans don't realize is how remarkably hard the Clinton administration worked at promoting the Taliban in Afghanistan -- our purpose there to get a stable government in Afghanistan with which we could, then, for the sake of the Union Oil Company of California, build gas and oil pipelines from Tajikistan across Afghanistan, and emptying through Pakistan into the Arabian Sea. Jim Baker, the very distinguished former Secretary of State, his law firm, Baker Botts, has five attorneys in Baku, Azerbaijan. Now, I want to tell you, there's not a lot of legal work going on in Baku these days. This is the military-petroleum complex at work. The involvement of very high-ranking advisors in our government, of the Kissinger-Brzezinski-Scowcroft class, as advisors to these oil companies is ubiquitous.
globetrotter.berkeley.edu/ people4/CJohnson/cjohnson-con4.html
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