gracchusdixit

On September 20, 2001, scarcely 10 days after the attack that caused the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center to come crashing down in a cascade of rubble and toxic ash, George W. Bush addressed a joint session of Congress to announce how the United States would respond.  Not since the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor had the nation suffered such an assault, not only on its citizens but on its sense of self.  

Toward the end of his speech, Bush asked:  “Why do they hate us?”  He was convinced that he knew the answer:

They hate our freedoms:  our freedom of religion, our freedom of speech, our freedom to vote and assemble and disagree with each other…These terrorists kill not merely to end lives, but to disrupt and end a way of life.  With every atrocity, they hope that America grows fearful, retreating from the world and forsaking our friends.  They stand against us because we stand in their way.

Bush’s answer was self-congratulatory and conveniently comforting, assuring Americans that they stood on the side of right and that those who attacked them were ipso facto evil.  It was also a recantation, for the umpteenth time, of  a false and anesthetizing fairy tale that we’ve been telling ourselves since the end of the Second World War.  In that tale, we are the knights in shining armor who saved the world from the powers of darkness; we are the selfless champions of freedom, civilization, and human decency; we are the “exceptional and indispensable nation,” without which the world would sink into the abyss of tyranny or utter anarchy. 

As throngs of embittered and angry Iraqis stormed our embassy in Baghdad just days ago, Americans might be forgiven for asking themselves once again why, if we are the decent and benevolent nation in that tale, so many people around the world continue to hate us.  Certainly, they got no answer from our current president.  What they got, instead, was the assassination of one of Iran’s most senior military and political leaders on the still unsubstantiated pretext that he was planning an imminent attack on Americans somewhere in the world.  They also got threats of retributive armageddon if the Iranians don’t toe the line and henceforth do what the United States demands.  In the 20 years since the attack on the World Trade Center, our political leaders seem to have learned exactly nothing.

For three quarters of a century, the United States has been running nothing less than an empire, unprecedented in its reach and global impact, in which military power and money-making have become one and the same.  In the waning days of the Second World War, the president of General Motors, which was piling up record profits producing millions of tanks and trucks, planes and guns, urged the federal government to create a “permanent war economy” when the war itself was over.  He got what he wanted.  Today, we have more than 800 military, naval, and air bases around the world, and several hundred more here at home.  American troops are deployed in more than 150 countries. We spend more than half the federal budget on “defense,” and that doesn’t count the largely secret sums we spend on so-called “intelligence” agencies or on the Department of Homeland Security, which wouldn’t exist if we were content to stop interfering in the affairs of other nations.

Unlike earlier “colonial” empires, we do not rule by inhabiting, investing in, or trying to improve (however selfishly) the lands we dominate.  There are no American equivalents of the peerless roads, public baths, and awe-inducing civic monuments of the Roman Empire; there is no American version of the parliamentary and judicial institutions bequeathed by the British to their former colonies and dominions; there is not even the intangible but precious gift of language, which the nations once dominated by the French preserve to this day.  Our empire is wholly military in its manifestations and solely economic in its motivations.

Far from being a benevolent beacon of hope and freedom, the United States has, since the end of the Second World War, used violence to advance its economic interests more systematically than any other country in the world.  We have fomented 59 coups d’état or insurrections against foreign governments, many of them democratically elected. We have invaded more than a dozen countries for no reason other than the fact that we did not approve of the political choices their citizens had freely made.  Long before the Russians hacked our own 2016 presidential election, we manipulated dozens of elections in Europe, Asia, and Latin America.   We planned the assassination of 50 foreign political leaders who dared to oppose our interests and succeeded in murdering at least a dozen.  The drone attack that killed Qasem Soleimani on the tarmac in Baghdad was just the latest episode in this long and shameful history—a history that most Americans know little about and one that our government would like all of us to forget.

It is not my intention to defend a man like Qasem Soleimani, or to sanitize his actions.  He is responsible for thousands of deaths and deserves condemnation for every single one.  But so do the political and military leaders who have presided over the American empire for the last 75 years.  Soleimani’s crimes, if that is what they are, pale in comparison with the countless numbers who have been thwarted or threatened, killed or maimed, orphaned or displaced, to advance American interests.

Anyone who dares to question American imperialism is invariably accused of propagating a false moral equivalency between a fundamentally “good” country that must occasionally do bad things to protect itself and a country like Iran that is supposedly evil through and through.  

The true false equivalency, however, lies in asserting that our overt imposition of military power and our covert use of violence, intimidation, and murder is justified by the righteousness of our cause.  For all the self-congratulatory rhetoric, for all the euphoric talk about freedom, for all the sermonizing that the United States is a shining “city upon a hill,” Americans have yet to confront the blunt and brutal reality of what our country has actually become.  

We are not hated because of our freedoms of religion or speech or free assembly.  We are hated, because we demand the freedom to rob other human beings of theirs.  We are an empire, no less ruthless than the empires that came before us.  The only “exceptional” quality of our empire is its self-righteous hypocrisy.  Until we face up to that reality, we will never answer the question, “Why do they hate us?”  Until that day comes, their hatred will endure.