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April 17, 2011
The liberal internationalist's humanitarian case for intervention in Libya does look like a continuation of America's self-ordained role as global policeman that has seen the US fight several genuine wars (Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan etc) and engage in countless military interventions. Libya is about regime change at the point of a gun.
Martin Rowson
America, as Chalmers Johnson pointed out, acquired an empire as it expanded its military bases during the Cold War, and it now appears after the Cold War to be engaged in a war without end to advance global peace and freedom. The "American Century" has been only 70 years (from 1940-2010). The key to this empire is hard power of the hammer:--whatever needs to be done is to be done by the military.
More often than not the tools of American foreign policy are those of force and hard power, especially with respect to the core US response to events in the regional politics of the Islamic world. Congress now plays no role in deciding on wars and military interventions within the the changes sweeping through the Middle East. The President calls the shots. Congress agrees. America is not the beacon of democracy anymore.
This time round in the greater Middle East the US empire intervenes into a civil war in Libya. We hear "humanitarian intervention" and understand that to mean "regime change" and we do it without blinking even though we know that the only way that solves America's fiscal problems is by sensibly cutting both defense spending as well as increasing revenues.
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Sadly, pride in being righteous and comparatively unselfish, such as the USA could justifiably feel in 1945, can easily turn into the paranoid self-congratulation of contemporary American Exceptionalism. Much US foreign policy seems motivated these days by nothing more than a juvenile obsession with punishing people they don't like and showing the world they are still The Man. That Gaddafi is rude to us and wears a funny hat! Bomb the bastard!!