Against Empire : Intervention: Whose gain? Whose pain?

[Raymond]

Against Empire
by Michael Parenti

Chapter 3: Intervention: Whose gain? Whose pain?

Today, the United States is the foremost proponent of recolonization
and leading antagonist of revolutionary change throughout the world.

Emerging from World War II relativelyunscathed and superior to all
other industrial countries inwealth, productive capacity, and armed
might, the United States became the prime purveyor and guardian of
global capitalism.Judging by the size of its financial investments and
military force, judging by every imperialist standard except direct
colonization, the U.S. empire is the most formidable in history,far
greater than Great Britain in the nineteenth century or Rome during
antiquity. A Global Military EmpireThe exercise of U.S. power is
intended to preserve not only the international capitalist system but
U.S. hegemony of that system.The Pentagon's "Defense Planning
Guidance" draft (1992) urges the United States to continue to dominate
the international system by discouraging the advanced industrialized
nations from challenging our leadership or even aspiring to a larger
global or regional role." By maintaining this dominance, the Pentagon
analysts assert, the United States can insure "a market-oriented zone
of peace and prosperity that encompasses more than two- thirds of the
world's economy".

This global power is immensely costly. Today, the United States
spends more on military arms and other forms of "national security"
than the rest of the world combined. U.S. leaders preside over a
global military apparatus of a magnitude never before seen in human
history. In 1993 it included almost a half- million troops stationed
at over 395 major military bases and hundreds of minor installations
in thirty-five foreign countries,
and a fleet larger in total tonnage and firepower than all the other
navies of the world combined, consisting of missile cruisers, nuclear
submarines, nuclear aircraft carriers,
destroyers, and spy ships that sail every ocean and make port on every
continent. U.S. bomber squadrons and long-range missiles can reach any
target, carrying enough explosive force to destroy entire countries
with an overkill capacity of more than 8,000 strategic nuclear weapons
and 22,000 tactical ones. U.S. rapid deployment forces have a
firepower in conventional weaponry vastly superior to any other
nation's, with an ability to slaughter with impunity--as the massacre
of Iraq demonstrated in 1990-91

Cont'd
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