ROLL BACK THE AMERICAN EMPIRE

It's time for America to get out of the empire business. We've got a big enough nation already and a huge economy and don't need to gain another square inch of anybody else's land just because we can. Our armies and navies are stationed all over the world in a lot of other people's countries, even those with whom we have no quarrel. Why? To protect American interests? Shouldn't American interests be more focused on, oh, I don't know, maybe, say... America? Anything outside of our borders is not our jurisdiction and the only "interests" we have in other countries are business interests. Businesses are private concerns, not entitled to protection of our military outside of this country if they are not being physically attacked.

We have military personnel in more places than in any time in our history, including World War 2 when we were fighting all over the world. That war ended in 1945, at which point America had 15 million men under arms in many different nations. Today, our all-volunteer armed services numbers around a million and a half on active duty and another million and a half in reserve units, many of whom have been called to active duty to fight in Iraq and Afghanistan. There are also around 450,000 National Guardsmen in all 50 states plus Washington D.C and 3 territories whose job it is to protect their home state and assist in natural disasters and domestic emergencies.

Many of these National Guard units have been shipped overseas to fight as well, as was the case in 2004 when the Louisiana National Guard was 10,000 miles away in East Asia when Hurricane Katrina drowned New Orleans and much of the Gulf Coast. Apparently this administration thought that saving American citizens inside America was less in America's interest than fighting Iraq, a nation that never threatened America or her so-called interests. Iraq's crime was having a tyrannical dictator, which in and of itself is not a criteria America uses to conquer nations, or else we'd be awfully busy all the time all over the world. Iraq's other crimes were sitting on a sea of oil and being vulnerable. No other Administration in America's history ever invaded a country for no reason at all, until Bush The Younger took office with his direct superior Shotgun Dick Cheney. They figured Iraq and its oil were ripe for the taking if only a plausible excuse could be found.

This administration used the attacks of 9/11/01 by Osama bin Laden on the United States as that excuse to attack a nation that had nothing at all to do with those attacks. Only in an atmosphere where America had developed into an Empire could this have been possible. That Congress allowed this bumbling idiot of a president the authority to invade a sovereign nation who had done us no harm at all would have been unthinkable at one time. After our victory in World War 2 Americans somehow got it into our heads that we were now the world's policeman, and for 40 years there was some validity to that argument due to the menacing presence of another super power, the Soviet Union, one that preached world-wide communist revolution and had swallowed up half of Europe following the war.

The Soviet Union collapsed in the early 1990's and by that time America was already established as a world-wide military presence. Even now, with no other super power close to our military capabilities this country spends more on armaments than the rest of the world combined. It seems it's a habit we cannot break and it is fueled by our far-flung business interests who demand the protection of our armed forces to defend their private ventures in the oil, agricultural, mining, and other international businesses. It's very similar to the protection offered by the British Navy to their various trading companies and the Netherlands to the Dutch East India Company. At least those nations openly admitted they were in the empire business and made no bones about subduing underdeveloped countries and pillaging their wealth.

We do the same but pretend we do not. Our covert spy organizations and our military have had a clandestine or open hand in changing any number of governments of foreign nations who annoyed American corporate business interests. The most notable attempt was a failure, the CIA-run invasion of Cuba in 1961 that was defeated by Castro. There have been other failures but mostly successes, if you can call interfering with and overthrowing the governments of sovereign nations you don't approve of a "success." The Shah of iran was re-installed by America in 1953, replacing a democratically elected government that had the temerity to want to control their own natural resources rather than surrendering them to Big Oil for a pittance.

Iran had ousted the royal family and elected a popular Prime Minister, starting on the road to democracy similar to our own adventure in 1776, but the CIA pulled that rug out from under them and shoved the royals down their throats again. Look at where Iran is today, a modern nation ruled by Medieval bloodthirsty religious thugs, torn between two worlds. Thanks, CIA! It is said the move was made for strategic reasons having to do with the Cold War, as if the rest of the world and their political, social and personal ambitions, and their very countries themselves were expendable pawns on America and Russia's chess board. The paranoia evoked by a Soviet dominated world was used as an excuse for too many years and in too many instances of criminal interference with the affairs of other nations.

The truth was that many of these operations were done at the behest of corporate interests, especially in South America where oil and agricultural conglomerates have a long and shameful history of exploiting poor people in collaboration with a series of corrupt governments. The corporations and the corrupt governing elite grew wealthy while small nations saw their national wealth siphoned off, leaving their people hungry, ill and illiterate. When one of these nations would try to redress this situation through elections or rebellions the U.S. corporations would call out the Marines, or in more recent history, the CIA. The sin is that our government would comply. The same government founded on the principle that all men are created equal and a champion of tolerance and liberty time and again denied small nations the liberty to control their own destiny.

It's about time we stopped this crazy nonsense. A nation that grew and thrived by trading in good faith with other nations need not throw her military weight around. Number one, it is wrong, and all the explaining away and rationalizing in the world won't make it right. Never have we been as blatantly wrong as in Iraq, all pretense of being a peaceful nation stripped away by this heinous crime. The excuse used, that Sadam hussein might have weapons of mass destrucction, was absurd. The administration knew this to be untrue and sent Colin Powell to the United Nations to lie to the world about it, even going so far as to use drawings and calling them reconnaissance!

And even if Hussein did have weapons of mass destruction, he was no threat to America. The weapons of mass destruction this nation possesses make any weapons he could have had look like pea-shooters by comparison. And as far as him threatening our allies, hardly. He was evil, not stupid, and would never have attacked Israel, for example. The fact is, Sadam Hussein was not a religious man and his government was not one of the fanatical jihad governments in that region that are always threatening to wipe out Israel. Not that we should go to war over Israel either. It's not our 51st State and doesn't exactly have an admirable record when it comes to the human rights of the Arab peoples living under its thumb. We should tell israel that our alliance isn't written in stone if they don't clean up their own oppressive act.

But first we've got to clean up ours. America needs to get out of everybody's business and tend to our own. Already our Imperial tendencies have come home to roost with this administration's actions to strip Americans inside America of the protections of our Bill of Rights. This imperial/corporate government that has evolved since World War 2 has become as indifferent to the rights of its own citizens as it has been to the rights of the nations we have been bullying. The disparity between the haves and have-nots is growing greater by the day as Bush the Younger and his band of thugs transfer massive amounts of wealth from the working classes to the wealthy. Home foreclosures are epidemic and unregulated banks are playing Monopoly with the nation's wealth again, further limiting access to cash and credit for the non-wealthy.

The dollar is eroding compared to the Euro and other world currencies so apparently this government by the wealthy elite isn't working out so well. Our military that costs us so much is being stretched thin by wars of corporate adventure while the perpetrator of the 9/11/01 attacks sits unmolested in Pakistan, our supposed ally. Why we maintain these crazy alliances is a mystery. Do we really need to still be a part of NATO? Can't Europe defend its own damned self anymore?Should we give a crap about Japan's ability to compete with China? Do we need to guarantee that Taiwan will have our protection for ever and ever? Or the Philippines? Our nuclear arsenal pretty much guarantees that nobody will try to invade this country. And if we station our soldiers here we will have a lethal deterrent right here where it belongs, not all over the world making enemies.

That doesn't mean we need to become isolationist, which is sort of impossible in today's global economy anyway. But we should re-evaluate our priorities as a nation and and re-negotiate our crippling alliances to more realistic terms. And whatever happened to Jimmy Carter's idea simply not to deal with nations who oppress their citizens? That was a good idea, and a very traditionally American one. He was the least imperial minded of our recent presidents and his presidency is deemed a failure by many who view him as too weak to be an emperor. Too smart is more like it, and too principled. He knew there are many other ways to affect the way other nations behave other than militarily. There's plenty of places to buy bananas, oil and bauxite. Deal with the ones who don't slay and oppress their own citizens and countries will get the message. A good example goes a lot further than a visit by the Marines.

As far as our "obligations" to the world? Other than being a good citizen, what exactly are they? Being the world cop and sacrificing our soldiers for lost causes? Protecting multi-national corporations' bottom lines? Intimidating nations? Hardly. Let the world take care of itself. It's not as if our world-straddling presence has ushered in a Pax Romana, a hundred years of relative peace. The globe is still rife with wars large and small and genocide is on the rise. So one supposes we're not suited to be the new Rome. What we can do, however, is rededicate ourselves to pursuing the best America we can create, following the blueprint created by political geniuses in 1776. Until somebody comes up wih a better idea, it's time to get out of the empire business and tend to our own garden. Either that or make the president wear a toga like Caesar.