[Editorial note: The following is an excerpt from the book of the same name, which the New York Times Book Review called "a valuable rebuttal to the drumbeat...from the right." Parenti (PhD, Yale University) is one of the foremost U.S. writers and lecturers opposed to imperialism. We encourage readers to purchase Against Empire (or other of his books) from their local bookshop, at Amazon.com, or to get a copy from their library. Further information about the publisher, and about obtaining audiotapes is available at the end of this excerpt (which is ©1995 by Michael Parenti, all rights reserved)--SeeingRed]

Today, the United States is the foremost proponent of recolonization and leading antagonist of revolutionary change throughout the world. Emerging for World War II relatively unscathed and superior to all other industrial countries in wealth, productive capacity, and armed might, the United States became the prime purveyor and guardian of global capitalism. Judging from 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 Empire

The 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 ensure "a market-oriented zone of peace and prosperity that encompasses more than two-thirds of the world's economy" [italics added].

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.

Since World War II, the U.S. government has given over $200 billion in military aid to train, equip, and subsidize more than 2.3 million troops and internal security forces in some eighty countries, the purpose being not to defend them from outside invasions but to protect ruling oligarchs and multinational corporate investors from the dangers of domestic anticapitalist insurgency. Among the recipients have been some of the most notorious military autocracies in history, countries that tortured, killed, or otherwise maltreated large numbers of their citizens because of their dissenting political views, as in Turkey, Zaire, Chad, Pakistan, Morocco, Indonesia, Honduras, Peru, Columbia, El Salvador, Haiti, Cuba (under Batista), Nicaragua (under Somoza), Iran (under the Shah), the Philippines (under Marcos), and Portugal (under Salazar).

U.S. leaders profess a dedication to democracy. Yet over the past five decades, democratically elected reformist governments in Guatemala, Guyana, the Dominican Republic, Brazil, Chile, Uruguay, Syria, Indonesia (under Sukanrno), Greece, Argentina, Bolivia, Haiti, and numerous other nations were overthrown by pro-capitalist militaries that were funded and aided by the U.S. national security state.

The U.S. national security state has participated in covert actions or proxy mercenary wars against revolutionary governments in Cuba, Angola, Mozambique, Ethiopia, Portugal, Nicaragua, Cambodia, East Timor, Western Sahara, and elsewhere, usually with dreadful devastation and loss of life for the indigenous populations. Hostile actions also have been directed against reformist governments in Egypt, Lebanon, Peru, Iran, Syria, Zaire, Jamaica, South Yemen, the Fiji Islands, and elsewhere.

Since World War II, U.S. forces have directly invaded or launched aerial attacks against VietNam, the Dominican Republic, North Korea, Laos, Cambodia, Lebanon, Grenada, Panama, Libya, Iraq, and Somalia, sowing varying degrees of death and destruction.

Before World War II, U.S. military forces waged a bloody and protracted war of conquest in the Philippines from 1899 to 1903. Along with fourteen other capitalist nations, the United States invaded and occupied parts of socialist Russia from 1918 to 1921. U.S. expeditionary forces fought in China along with other Western armies to suppress the Boxer Rebellion and keep the Chines under the heel of European and North American colonizers. U.S. Marines invaded and occupied Nicaragua in 1912 and again fro 1926 to 1933; Haiti, from 1915 to 1934; Cuba, from 1898 to 1902; Mexico, in 1914 and 1916. There were six invasions of Honduras between 1911 to 1925; Panama was occupied between 1903 and 1914.

Why Intervention?

Why has a professedly peace-loving, democratic nation found it necessary to use so much violence and repression against so many people in so many places? An important goal of U.S. policy is to make the world safe for the Fortune 500 and its global system of capital accumulation. Governments that strive for any kind of economic independence or any sort of populist redistributive politics, that attempt to take some of their economic surplus and apply it to not-for-profit services that benefit the people--such governments are the ones most likely to feel the wrath of U.S. intervention or invasion.

The designated "enemy" can be a reformist, populist, military government as in Panama under Torrijo (and even under Noriega), Egypt under Nasser, Peru under Velasco, and Portugal after Salazar; a Christian socialist government as in Nicaragua under the Sandinistas; a social democracy as in Chile under Allende, Jamaica under Manley, Greece under Papandreou, and the Dominican Republic under Bosch; a Marxist-Leninist government as in Cuba, VietNam, and North Korea; an Islamic revolutionary order as in Libya under Qaddafi; or even a conservative militarist regime as in Iraq under Saddam Hussein, if it should get out of line on oil prices and oil quotas.

The public record shows that the United States is the foremost interventionist power in the world.

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[Editorial note: In the continuing section in his book Against Empire, Parenti gives three reasons for U.S. interventionism, alongwith numerous examples: protecting direct investments, creating opportunities for new investments, and preserving politico-economic domination and the capital accumulation system. This excerpt was taken from chapter 3 of Against Empire, which is available online at Amazon.com. The book is published by City Lights Books, 261 Columbus Avenue, San Francisco, CA 94133 to which address personal orders can be directed. Large orders should be directed to the distributor at 800.847.5274. City Lights Books are edited by Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Nancy J. Peters.

Audio and video tapes of lectures by Michael Parenti are sold on a not-for-profit basis by People's Video, PO Box 99514, Seattle, WA 98199. Telephone 206.789.5371. --SeeingRed]

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