Evidence Of Things Unseen: The Rise of a New Movement

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To globalize and militarize are the two strategies of the US will to empire, driving our movements toward a unified opposition.

The National Security Strategy of September 2002, which announced the Bush Doctrine of pre-emptive war, also included the free market, free trade and the FTAA as principles the Pentagon is bound to advance and protect. So our official national security policy is about more than terrorism, nuclear proliferation or legitimate military threats; it is about defending what the document proclaims is a "single sustainable model for national success."

Or as Thomas Friedman, globalization's leading defender, puts it: "The hidden hand of the market will never work without a hidden fist. McDonalds cannot flourish without McDonnell-Douglas."

Take the example of Iraq today, the complete stripping and privatization of the public sector (with only oil exempted so far). L. Paul Bremer, the man who dresses in pinstripe suits and combat boots, who represents Henry Kissinger's invisible corporate clients, is very clear that his mission is to replace sovereign Iraqi control of its economy with a free-market model controlled by absentee foreign owners primarily from the US. Helping ourselves to the spoils of war is part of our national security strategy.

While there is growing opposition in this country to the American death toll and budgetary costs of the Iraqi quagmire, there is virtually no debate about our assault on the Iraqi public sector by the writ of Bremer. Only a deeper joining of the global justice movement with the peace movement can begin to expose and protest these policies.

Of course these are not new developments. Halliburton is connected to Kellogg, Brown and Root, the Texas corporation that funded Lyndon Johnson's rise to power. It also built the airstrips in Vietnam, which became the corrugated metal fences at the US-Mexico border, and which is today reincarnated as a virtual Dick Cheney subsidiary on the battlefields of Iraq.

Similarly, the author of the so-called "clash of civilizations" thesis, Samuel Huntington, is the same policy advisor who invented the doctrine of "forced urbanization" for South Vietnam, deliberately turning a 90-percent peasant culture into an urban "Honda culture" in a decade.

What's new is the audacity of the drive for an American-dominated planet. "Empire is coming out of the closet" writes Charles Krautheimer. "What's wrong with dominance?" asks William Kristol. And Max Boot calls for a return to British-style imperialism complete with "enlightened administrators in jodhpurs and pith helmets."

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