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Other Nations Won’t Dismantle the Empire For Us

Because even the right already knows how this movie will end, with the Fifth Fleet leaving the Gulf with its tail between its legs and Israel forced to negotiate one man-one vote, the hunt for the enemy within has already begun in earnest. ~Jack Ross I have been focused on Libya over the last two […]

Because even the right already knows how this movie will end, with the Fifth Fleet leaving the Gulf with its tail between its legs and Israel forced to negotiate one man-one vote, the hunt for the enemy within has already begun in earnest. ~Jack Ross

I have been focused on Libya over the last two weeks because there is overwhelming agitation in support of starting another war. If “the right” already knows what is going to happen in the future, that would be remarkable. As it happens, both of the outcomes Jack mentions seem highly improbable.

I have no idea who or what would “force” Israel to do anything, much less give in to a one-state solution. Ben Ali and Mubarak are gone because their respective military officials wanted them gone, and Washington was content to see them go. King Hamad remains in power in Bahrain because his security forces apparently have no intention of getting rid of him, and because Washington has no desire to see him gone or to see a Saudi invasion aimed at propping him up.

Sometimes anti-hegemonists in the West fall into the habit of assuming that foreign nations can somehow solve our misguided, dysfunctional, warped foreign policy simply by withdrawing their governments’ support for it. What we have seen in each case from Turkish opposition to invading Iraq to Japanese discontent over Okinawa bases to more recent episodes is that the U.S. ignores the opposition and insists on pursuing its policy anyway. Sometimes this involves simply bypassing the other government, as the U.S. did in 2003 with Turkey, and sometimes it involves pressuring the other government until it is forced to cave. If the Bahraini majority managed to prevail and overthrew or significantly changed the existing government, my guess is that we will be surprised at how little of an effect that is going to have on U.S. military basing.

If we want U.S. forces and bases out of the Gulf, the Near East and Central Asia, we have to realize it here at home by changing the policies behind that military presence. Arab countries are not eastern European countries, and Obama isn’t Gorbachev. The empire needs to be dismantled by Americans, because there are far too many people and institutions invested in sustaining it for it to disintegrate. Of course, regional instability makes it that much harder to disentangle the U.S. from the region, as the sudden surge in mindless interventionism over Libya shows us.

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