Tom Engelhardt answers Jonathan Schell
As Chalmers Johnson has, to my mind, effectively explained in his book The Sorrows of Empire, from 1945 on, the United States pursued an imperial policy based on the military base rather than the colony. We would set up our bases -- little Americas -- in other countries, get extraterritorial rights for our troops, and with our economic power at our backs and close ties with local elites, go about our global business. Iraq, it seems to me, represents a striking deviation from this path. It is the closest thing in our lifetimes to a straightforward colonial land-grab (whatever pretty words the neocons may have woven around it). And it is clearly failing, hence all the military and intelligence officials up in arms and angry indeed. A Kerry administration would undoubtedly try to return us to our older form of imperial creep. The question is: Could it do so? Or rather, has the world so changed in the brief but wrenching interim that imperial policy in any form will prove bankrupt?