Dilemmas of American Empire: Can Obama Pull Off a Game-Changer in Iraq, Iran and Afghanistan?
June 22nd, 2009By Gary Dorrien
For Obama to steer us back to the softer side of Empire, withdrawing from Iraq and Afghanistan—and negotiating with Iran—he’ll have to overrule the his key officials, HIllary Clinton and Dennis Ross, risk alienating Israel for its own good, and stand up to bracing public attacks. And he’ll need a hand from a strong, anti-imperial religious and secular peace movement.
Iraq War Memorial. Dogtags representing military dead. Image courtesy flickr user Ewan McIntosh
In the wake of the Bush administration’s disastrous resort to neoconservative ideology the Obama Administration is seeking to reclaim the liberal internationalist and diplomatic way of relating to the world. The United States is going to be an aggressive imperial power no matter whom it elects as president; what is called “neoconservatism” is merely an extreme version of normal American supremacism, one that explicitly promotes and heightens the U.S.’s routine practices of empire. But it matters greatly whether the American empire tries to work cooperatively and respectfully with other nations instead of conspiring mainly to dominate them. In Iraq, Afghanistan, Iran, and the Middle East as a whole, the legacy of George W. Bush is not very good and Obama has an overabundance of leftover crises to manage.
In Iraq the U.S. is slowly withdrawing military forces while in Afghanistan the U.S. is escalating; but in both cases the work is grinding, perilous, and ambiguous. There are no breakthroughs coming in Iraq or Afghanistan. The fix is in, and the new administration is simply trying to find a decently tolerable outcome. Iran is a different story diplomatically, where there is a real possibility of a breakthrough, but also the greatest danger. [more]