CounterPunch Exclusives

CounterPunch Exclusives

The Empire versus Iran: Which Side Are You On?

Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair

Fifty-eight years ago in Chicago, I marched down State Street with other antiwar protestors heading toward the site of the Democratic National Convention and made three discoveries. The first was that having a very large, truck-mounted M2 Browning 50 caliber machine gun pointed at you by U.S. Army troops is scary. The second was that CS tear gas makes it very hard to breathe. The third was that U.S. civilians like us were subjects of the same Empire that was then subjugating the people of Vietnam. Some of the soldiers understood this as well.  When ordered to deploy to Chicago to suppress the demonstrations, 43 of them – all Black servicemen — refused to leave Fort Hood, Texas, were tried for mutiny, and were sentenced to hard labor in the prison stockade.

I learned in the sixties that despite personalized slogans and chants (“Hey, hey, LBJ, How many kids did you kill today?”) the war in Indochina was not Lyndon Johnson’s or Richard Nixon’s war.  It was an ultra-violent struggle to preserve and extend the U.S. Empire, with the Americans acting as successors to the French, the former imperial rulers of Vietnam. In the same way, the current “war of choice” against Iran waged by the U.S. and Israel is not just Trump’s or Netanyahu’s adventure but another imperialist campaign led by the Americans, this time acting as successors to the Middle East’s British and French colonizers.

 Not just Trump’s war but the Empire’s. Why is this description important?  Because other characterizations lead well-meaning opponents of the war to misunderstand it and to advocate ineffective cures for the systemic disease that produces it.  For example, if the war in Iran is primarily a product of Trump’s megalomania or Netanyahu’s desire to stay in office, the cure is to replace these rulers with calmer, more diplomatic, more enlightened and liberal leaders.  Right?

Wrong.  The quality of leadership can make a difference, but if the system that the leader serves is an empire, he or she will finally act like an emperor.  It was Lyndon Johnson, elected in 1964 as a liberal “peace candidate,” who began a war of choice against Vietnamese rebels that killed several million Vietnamese and more than 50,000 U.S. combatants.  A generation later George W. Bush, the “compassionate conservative” who insisted that “America has never been an empire,” invaded Afghanistan and occupied Iraq, killing and maiming close to a million civilians in those state-building interventions. Bush’s successor, Barak Obama, an icon of liberalism and diplomacy, conducted more than 500 drone attacks against suspected terrorists in Asia and Africa without Congressional authorization and presided over the destruction and dismemberment of Libya by U.S. and NATO forces.  And Joe Biden, his former vice-president, supplied Israel with weapons and intelligence used for genocide in Gaza, vetoed anti-Israel resolutions in the Security Council, struck the Houthis in Yemen with U.S. missiles, and authorized military operations labeled “counterterrorist” in 77 other nations.

With liberal diplomats like these as his predecessors, it’s no wonder that Donald Trump decided to run for president as a peace candidate!  Perhaps, even as Trump sinks more deeply into the Iranian quagmire, he still believes that he can end the “forever wars” fomented by the “deep state.”  But his own imperial style bears witness to the fact that the state that he claims to command is no longer a republic.  It is quite clearly an empire – a violence-generating entity with a complex political, economic, and military structure that includes some 800 U.S. bases in 90 countries, an armaments budget larger than those of the next ten heaviest military spenders, and a list of deceased war victims running into the millions.

The structure and violence of empire

Even as volatile and idiosyncratic a ruler as Trump discovers that his leadership role is largely defined by the system that encompasses it.  The fact that this president is a flag-waving ethno-nationalist with fascistic inclinations makes his transformation from would-be peacemaker to imperialist warmaker highly likely.  But the transformation and the wars that attend it are not just manifestations of Trump’s personality and ideology; they are also products of the Empire’s deep structure.

The outlines of that structure are well known.  Imperial institutions are designed to project the power of a ruling elite beyond a nation’s borders to subject less powerful territories and peoples to its economic, political, and cultural control.  Since ancient times, hierarchy is the name of this game, with a center dominating subordinate peripheries and a warrior class empowered to enforce that domination. Today, the imperial elite is composed of two major components: oligarchs and politicians, with the military an important but subordinate element of that leadership. The oligarchs are driven by the “iron laws” of the late-capitalist system to invest in and exploit peripheral nations. The politicians provide the empire with taxpayer funds, civilian and military manpower, and (to the extent possible) popular ideological consent. Together, these leaders create and fund a military-industrial complex that enables the imperial state to overwhelm its opponents with violent force.

No doubt, some leaders are more violent or crazier than others. Nevertheless, no matter who leads, the imperial structure generates three characteristic types of violence: rebellion/repression, civil and regional wars, and world wars.  First, imperial domination naturally provokes resistance, and rebels must either be bought off or slaughtered.  Second, since imperialism tends to unite the natives in opposition to foreign rule, imperial rulers seek to turn local groups against each other using “divide and rule” strategies that produce civil and........

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