How is That Empire Thing Going For You?
Posted by M. C. on June 23, 2012
Reading Justin Raimondo’s piece on political candidates got me to thinking about empire building. The US is in the empire building business (though some confuse it with the oil pipeline routing business). No doubt about it. The methodology seems unusual. Take Europe, please. The Huns, Romans and others have occupied Europe to some extent throughout history. Lands were occupied, property taken and people enslaved or made to work for the enrichment of the occupiers. The US occupies land, improves the land (if building military burn pits that pollute with unmatched efficiency can be called improvement-think Subic Bay) and otherwise contributes vastly to the occupied’ s economy. We do this in UK, Germany and some former soviet satellites, all at taxpayer expense. The same is happening in Japan, Australia and Kuwait. We occupy, though the occupied may not realize they are being occupied, and pay for the privilege.
The Middle East is a little different. First we decide a former ally is really an enemy and for humanitarian reasons, embargo it for years killing half a million children.
Then bomb what is left to smithereens. We force “democracy” upon those that do not yearn for it by installing a puppet ruler that takes us for all he can while building enormous temporarily permanent military bases and embassies. We rebuild the formerly functional country using such ingenious techniques as building a multi-million dollar Tramway of Chicken Death that does zero business in areas with no electricity nor refrigerators.
The security forces we spend ten years building are worthless and desert as soon as they discover the enemy pays better. Another novel practice is paying the “enemy” not to attack our troop support transports.
We paid to support our former ally the Mujahedeen who then became our enemy Al Qaeda. We are still paying to support them playing the resistance in Syria. One must be careful about what one pays for. The old timey empire builders weren’t loved but they at least made a few bucks off the conquered. Not US. We, you and me, pay for the privilege.
We battle a stone-age country for longer than it took to finish two world wars and our embassy staff can’t walk through the “safe zone” without catching an RPG round. We were told we would be greeted with open arms. Instead we get open fire.
We are not good at the empire thing.
Most that practice it don’t last long. Fighting terrorism creates more enemies than it eliminates. This appears to be a losing proposition. Maybe we should let people who otherwise don’t affect our interests settle their own issues. They can’t end up any worse than when we “help”.
Be Seeing You
MCViewPoint 
Mike Rowley said
The USA will install a puppet ruler to do their bidding and at a later date they always sabotage them. We in the mean time bleed the country dry of most of their assets. We’ll supply the puppet ruler with all sorts of nasty weapons to keep the serfs in line, and when we get ready to hang the puppet out we express astonishment that they have such weapons. Thus the reason to sweep them away is in place. America is addicted to war. The USA has never waged war though with an equal one on one. Even manufactured enemies like Japan and Germany, who were really not equal in strength, population, and size, the US needed to gang up with a coalition of others. America picks a fight with stone age nations and it always takes at least a decade to just bring them to their knees. Then the raping of natural resources begins in earnest. England imploded economically in the late 19th. century by sweating it’s colonies in Asian Sub-Continent. Bringing in cheap products thereby killing off their own industries. Britain has been broke for a century, and the USA is on the same well travelled path.
Doug Rowley said
Empiring is a dangerous game of exploitation and manipulation. Sooner or later it implodes, as history has shown so clearly and so often.