David Brooks: American Imperialist

May 17 2004
Counterbias.com
Frank Wallis
P O W E R   S K E P T I C

In a stunning op-ed piece, "Crisis of Confidence" in the New York Times (8 May 2004), David Brooks repeats his support for American empire building done via the cunning deceitfulness of "nation building":

We've got to acknowledge first that the old debates are obsolete. I wish the US could still go off, after Iraq, at the head of "coalitions of the willing" to spread democracy around the world. But the brutal fact is that the events of the past year have discredited that approach. Nor is the U.N. a viable alternative. A body dominated by dictatorships is never going to promote democratic values. For decades, the U.N. has failed as an effective world power.

We've got to reboot. We've got to come up with a global alliance of democracies to embody democratic ideals, harness U.S. military power and house a permanent nation-building apparatus, filled with people who actually possess expertise on how to do this job.

From the looting of the Iraqi National Museum to Abu Ghraib, this has been a horrible year. The cause is still just, but to keep it moving forward, we have to reinvent the enterprise.

I'll tell you one debate that is dead as a doornail: Rome is not coming back. Rome was also built with coalitions of the willing including mercenaries, but the vice, gangsterism, and tyranny of Rome is not something I would care to revive, even if it marched under the Stars and Stripes, as Brooks wishes it might.

Brooks pines for the good old days when democracy could be "spread" at the point of a gun and a Hellfire missile. Like all such good old days, it never happened. Brooks then condemns the UN and asserts that is dominated by dictators and cannot exert influence as a world power. This is astonishing. Conservatives in America have tried to destroy and impede the UN for decades. The Bible Christians denounce "one world government" threatened by the UN, and see it as the launch pad for Antichrist. If the UN is discredited, then Brooks and his conservative peers deserve credit. President Bush made sure the UN was effectively sidelined in his plan to destroy Iraq and avenge his father's disgraceful failure in the Gulf War. It was not a dictator who eliminated the UN as an effective institution for world peace, but president George W. Bush, the conservative.

After claiming to have given up on building foreign democracies at gunpoint, Brooks contradicts himself by proposing a "permanent nation-building apparatus" powered by the Pentagon. A prescription for empire building. Just who are these experts Brooks mentions? One must assume such nation-building bureaucrats will be hired directly from the American Enterprise Institute, the Heritage Foundation, and JINSA. They would know best how to institute puppet regimes favorable to American interests. No need for direct rule: too expensive, too old-fashioned. The nation-building crusade must be outsourced and offshored, as the Pentagon has done with Ahmed Chalabi in Baghdad.

Brooks asserts his and Bush's cause is just. No, the cause of invading foreign countries and imposing American freedom on them is madness at best, imperial arrogance at worst. What Brooks proposes is neo-imperialism engineered by neo-conservatives.

The best course is to follow liberal progress and emulate the policy invented by the Truman regime in the 1940s. It is called containment. If the Mighty US military could contain the Soviet Union, Warsaw Pact, and Red China for half a century, then certainly it could contain the pathetic and miserable dictators of the Middle East and elsewhere. Otherwise, the US looks the hypocrite for not launching neo-conservative pre-emptive wars of liberation against dozens of other horrid regimes.

Frank Wallis runs Powerskeptic.net, a website that "questions authority, including Republicans, conservatives, fascists, communists, and other authoritarians who abuse power."