Schell was on Washington Journal Friday, so I looked up and read his article. A very good overview of America's place in the world, and what we can and cannot accomplish.
http://www.thenation.com/doc/20060814/schell He looks at the McCarthy-Red Scare era, the Johnson-Nixon-Vietnam era, and the present Bush-Cheney-Iraq debacle and ties them all together under one theme: give it up boys, it cannot be done, even when you break the law!!
He also tells how this time it's worse due to one-party rule and the GOP noise machine which drowns out the truth, so that only about 25% of us know what's really going on, and the rest believe the spin. He says that the cure for this problem is not telling truth to power, now, as much as it is telling the truth to the people who vote and getting some changes made.
He says that desire for Empire tend to lead to law-breaking on the part of presidents (Nixon, Bush)--it's all part of the pattern. They'll do anything to try to get to their goal (as we've seen in the last few years!).
It's long but it's a good read. I learned some important things.
A few good snips:
It wasn't just that Nixon's wiretapping was directed against Daniel Ellsberg, war critic and leaker of the Vietnam-era Pentagon Papers; or that the "plumbers" outfit that carried out the Watergate break-in was founded to spy on, disrupt and attack war critics; or that Nixon's persistence in trying to win the war even as he withdrew American troops from it drove him into the paranoia that led him to draw up an "enemies list" and sponsor subversions of the electoral process--it was that his entire go-it-alone, imperial conception of the presidency originated in his pursuit of his war policy in secrecy and without Congressional involvement.
And now, thirty years later, we find ourselves facing an uncannily similar combination of misconceived war abroad and constitutional crisis at home.
snip
As has often been pointed out, whether the United States "lost China" depends on whether you think the United States ever had it. The question has lasting importance because the alleged loss of one country or another--China, Laos, Vietnam, Chile, Iran, Nicaragua, Iraq--became a leitmotif of American politics, especially at election time. In each of these cases, the United States "possessed" the countries in question (and thus was in a position to "lose" them) only insofar as it somehow laid claim to control the destinies of peoples on a global basis, or, as Fulbright said, an imperial basis. But if there is one clear lesson that the history of recent empires has taught, it is that modern peoples have both the will and the capacity to reject imperial rule and assert control over their own destinies. Less interested in the contest between East and West than in running their own countries, they yearned for self-determination, and they achieved it. The British and French imperialists were forced to learn this lesson over the course of a century. The Soviet Union took a little longer, and itself collapsed in the process. The United States, determined in the period in question to act in an imperial fashion, has been the dunce in the class, and indeed under the current Administration has put forward imperial claims that dwarf those of imperial Britain at its height. It is only because, in country after country, the United States has attempted the impossible abroad that it has been led to blame people at home for the failure.
snip
In this larger context the repeated constitutional crises of the last half-century assume an altered aspect. The conventional understanding is that an excess of power abroad brings abuses at home. The classic citation is Rome, whose imperial forces, led by Julius Caesar, returning from foreign conquest, crossed the river Rubicon into the homeland and put an end to the republic. (Thus both the proponents of American empire and its detractors can cite Rome.) But that has not been the American story. Rome and would-be Rome are not the same. Empire and the fantasy of empire are not the same. It is rather the repeatedly failed bid for imperial sway that has corrupted. It was not triumph but loss--of China, of the atomic monopoly, among other developments--that precipitated the McCarthyite assault on liberty at home. It was persistent failure in the Vietnam War, already a decade old and deeply unpopular, that led an embattled, isolated, nearly demented Richard Nixon to draw up his enemies list, illegally spy on his domestic opposition, obstruct justice when his misdeeds became known, ramble drunkenly in the Oval Office about using nuclear weapons and ultimately mount an assault on the entire constitutional system of checks and balances. And it is today an unpopular President Bush, unable either to win the Iraq War or to extricate himself from it, who has launched his absolutist assault on the Constitution. Power corrupts, says the old saw. But is power the right word to use in the face of so much failure? The sometimes suggested alternate--that weakness corrupts--seems equally appropriate. In a manner of speaking perhaps both saws are true, for in terms of military might the United States is unrivaled, yet in terms of capacity to get things done with that might, it so often proves weak--even, at times, impotent, as McCarthy said. The pattern is not the old Roman one in which military conquest breeds arrogance and arrogance stokes ambition, which leads to usurpation at home. Rather, in the case of the United States, misunderstanding of its historical moment leads to misbegotten wars; misbegotten wars lead to military disaster; military disaster leads to domestic strife and scapegoating; domestic strife and scapegoating lead to usurpation, which triggers a constitutional crisis. Crises born of strength and success are different from crises born of failure. Fulbright warned of the corruption of imperial ambition and the arrogance of power. But we need also to speak of the corruption of imperial failure, the arrogance of anxiety.
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