It is not a great stretch on my part to say Kaplan sees our ruthless slaughter of the Indians and a legacy of southern militarism rooted in a need to maintain a slave economy and the later Jim Crow, KKK order as a golden age legacy.
The picture Kaplan paints is of a glorious imperial expansion that did not stop when Manifest Destiny hit the Pacific Ocean. It went on to the Philippines and other adventures, got mired down and humiliated in Vietnam, secured oil and mineral rights all over the globe along the way, and now finds itself "maintaining" the realm in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Can we afford to maintain an empire?
Leftists like myself agree with Kaplan that we are an empire. We've been saying it for years. Where we disagree is that he thinks it's a good, healthy state of affairs. What those of us on the left hoped for when we voted for Barack Obama was that, in his heart, despite all the campaign talk of supporting Afghanistan, he agreed with this analysis.
We also hoped, as has been the case with many presidential candidates, that when he got to the White House he would re-evaluate and use his bully pulpit to ratchet back what has become a costly, runaway imperial overreach.
It seems we were kidding ourselves. The best we can ask for, apparently, is a shift from full blown counter-insurgency to Vice President Biden's favorite plan, counter-terrorism, which amounts to a scaled down emphasis on killing "bad guys." Add to this an investment in the powerful mythic and imperialist warrior worship constructed by Kaplan and others, and, either way, you're in the second act of a classic tragedy.
The White House and power-Democrats avoid any serious response to the antiwar left's most legitimate questions: whether the escalation of war in Afghanistan is necessary for US security, and whether the more we escalate or imperially invest in the war, the more we won't be able to leave? And, finally, the biggest question of all: At a time of epochal global economic reckoning, when the US faces a looming dollar and government debt crisis, can the United States any longer afford this kind of very costly imperial overreach?
NBC News says our education system in American "is an embarrassment." Un-maintained bridges are collapsing; sewer lines are crumbling. Health security for working Americans is still a dream. Alternative energy is still not getting the support it needs. Oversight and regulation of corporate greed is a joke. And the nation needs to make a major investment in jobs.
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