Early in December 2001, Reprise Records began distributing a new Neil Young song to radio stations. It was called "Let's Roll." Young wrote it he says after reading a story about Tod Beamer, one of the passengers on the hijacked plane that had crashed in Pennsylvania. We cannot say who was first to bring the phrase into the market known as popular culture and I don't know when the first t shirts appeared. President Bush used the slogan at the end of what Time magazine called "a high-level pep talk" in Atlanta early in November, which ended with the line "my fellow Americans, let's roll." (11/9/01) But we also know that not too many people were watching because NBC kept broadcasting Friends and CBS Survivor.
Young's long time manager, Eliot Roberts, says Young "wrote the song on the Tuesday before Thanksgiving and recorded it the very next day with Booker T. & the MG's and Poncho [guitarist Frank Sampedro] of Crazy Horse." Roberts brought the song back from Young's ranch to L.A., the following Monday, and it premiered on KLOS-FM (95.5) before anyone from Young's record company knew the track existed.
Imus was playing it every morning for a while. And one website reports that for the week of Jan. 10, it was the 25th-most-played song on rock radio. 1
Evocative of 1970 when Young also produced a song extremely quickly in response to the Kent State demonstrations in 1970. Four Dead in Ohio.
It was finally released in March 2002 on Young's 37th album, Are You Passionate, the first recorded with Booker T and the MGs. The reviews were mixed.
[2:00 excerpt here]
As we heard, and as the Washington Post reported, Let's Roll "begins with an overdrawn one-note drone from Young's European church organ and several chirps of a telephone." Then comes the overdriven guitar — a guitar line some think is a homage to David Bowie's "Fame," — followed by Booker T.'s organ and, finally, Neil Young's unmistakable voice (December 15, 2002)
When I listen to it now, it is the first four lines in the second verse that grab me: that "represent" What we have is as compact a statement of the administration's rationale for current policy as I know, all in 2 simple lines
No time for indecision,
We got to make a move,
And in the next 2 lines anticipation of the admin's fiercest critics and a response to them
I hope that we're forgiven,
For what we gotta do.
The only difference is, we know how this all got started and it is actually pretty easy to understand.
And so let's turn to understanding it, 'cause time is running out...
Here is my basic take. Elements in our government and in our society are coalescing or have coalesced around a strategy of transforming the regional order in the Middle East and Persian Gulf. It is a truly audacious project of engineering changes in regimes, political life, and energy markets — to remake the geopolitical map in short. It takes one's breath away, literally.
By now we have numerous accounts of these visions — in the Boston Globe, New York Times, among the oil industry's insiders and so on.
So as New Yorker staff writer Mark Danner explained in a long NYT op ed on October 9,
"Behind the [plans for Iraq]... lies a project of great ambition. It envisions a post-Saddam Hussein Iraq — secular, middle-class, urbanized, rich with oil — that will replace the autocracy of Saudi Arabia as the key American ally in the Persian Gulf, allowing the withdrawal of US troops from the kingdom." Our transformation of Iraq in turn will lead to weakening support of radicalism in Iran and Syria, would "spell the definitive end of Yasir Arafat and lead eventually to a favorable solution to the Arab Israeli problem." 2
This is [still quoting Danner] a vision of great sweep and imagination: comprehensive, prophetic, evangelical ... It means to remake the world ... represents a great step on the road toward President Bush's ultimate vision of "freedom's triumph over all its age-old foes."
Danner then brings up the two (too) obvious objections or problems — the first, that such "grand visions" have not worked well in the Middle East in the past (unintended consequences and resistance) and the second, that "the new crusade might collapse for "lack of political will" at home, quote "that the public, unprepared for the imperial ambitions about to play out in the ME will quickly lose heart if [emphasis mine] the project comes to grief. I leave these ultimately unconvincing arguments aside for a few moments.
I want us to meditate for 30 seconds more on the soaring rhetoric of "freedom's triumph" because we might imagine the president and his men singing along with Neil Young, no?
Let's roll for freedom,
Let's roll for love,
We're going after satan,
On the wings of a dove,
Let's roll for justice,
Let's roll for truth,
Let's not let our children,
Grow up fearful in their youth
At the same time we would not want to mistake the crusade's anthem or other similar artifacts, including the September 2002 Document titled the National Security Strategy of the United States, for an explanation of what is happening.
So, then what are the things that matter to understanding the post 9.11 turn toward unilateral and overt (rather than covert) intervention and political engineering in the region — or empire to use the terms that the New York Times Magazine now uses — a term that we have not seen in the mainstream press to refer to the United States since the 1920s. And it is not just in the NYT.
As Hendrik Hertzberg wrote (New Yorker 10/14 and 21, 2002, p. 65), "The vision laid out in the Bush document is a vision of what used to be called, when we believed it to be the Soviet ambition, world domination.... This goes much further than the notion of America as the policeman of the world. It's the notion of America as both the policeman and the legislator of the world."
Fareed Zakaria says "America's dominance now seems self evident" with "no real historical precedent. Imperial Britain, which at its peak reigned over a quarter of the world's population, is the closest analogy to the US today, but it is still an inadequate one." (New Yorker, 10/14 and 21, 2002, p. 74) 3
Christopher Layne, the self-styled Taft Republican (and critic) says the "Bush administration officials seem to think the U.S. enjoys a special exemption from history ... Flushed with triumph in Afghanistan, and the awesome display of American power, they talk of a quote "new American empire." 4
Now, lest you confuse me for someone who has spent the past 10 years carrying on about American imperialism — in Central America, the Middle East, Europe, film markets, the Global South, the Caspian, etc. — the opposite is the case and the current moment causes my past accounts of US policies some problems. I have written elsewhere about the tendency to exaggerate American power and desires. Some analysts speak about America's so called quote total hegemony over the Middle East, meaning by this that we are informal rulers of kind of empire with "puppet rulers" that we control. People insist for example that this is true about us and the Saudis.
It is of course common today and has been for a while now to argue that the U.S. is a hegemonic power. As Christopher Layne says, "Hegemony" is the fancy term ... political scientists use to describe a single great power that dominates international politics by virtue of its overwhelming military and economic power."
But I have taken pains in what I write to distinguish "hegemony" from something else called "empire" or "imperialism." Most people treat these as synonyms. But this is mistake and they are better seen as opposites, antonyms, two distinct forms of international order rather than a new fancy way of describing the same old thing.
-I don't have time to get into the finer points of theory but if you take the case of Great Britain in the 19th c. as many do you can see the distinction I want to hold on to. In the 19th c. many states were imperial, that is, to give a straightforward defintion, they sough to exercise effective control over the foreign and domestic politics of other smaller, weaker states or would-be states or peoples or tribes. My colleague Brendan O'Leary sees despotism as the heart of empire. Think of French rule in Algeria and Viet Nam. But no one argued that France was a hegemon or the world hegemon. When we speak of GB as a hegemon in the same period we are talking about something quite different, its exercise of a certain leadership over and influence on other great powers, themselves possibly imperialist. GB actually becomes more of an imperialist power precisely as its hegemony or leadership over its rivals diminishes. The scramble for Africa in the last quarter of the 19c, the rivalry for the Middle East from the 1880s to the 1920s..
Hegemony today works by us, the US, paying a significant share of the costs for international institutions and by acting with restraint rather than predatorily. Hegemonic power is "restrained" and the order that it buttresses is a "penetrated" one, in which western allies have (or had) a great degree of "voice" in American domestic politics.
The more one emphasizes American hegemony's essentially consensual dimensions, the easier it is to draw the boundaries beyond which more prosaic mechanisms work to secure what I would call domination. So, invasion, assassination, torture, bribery, ideologies of the naturalness of supremacy or hierarchy — These latter things are some of the basic contrasting institutions and norms of empire. I thought we were gradually coming to leave these instruments behind.
So, I am actually surprised to see a project discussed more or less openly in terms of "regime change" redrawing boundaries, carving up countries, creating protectorates, occupying oil fields, destroying OPEC, nation building, putting an end to Arafat and so on. — more expansive than we have witnessed in the recent past on the one hand and more old fashioned on the other.
Since we started down this road (with the discussion of distinguishing hegemony from empire) let us continue from the vantage of students of strategy or diplomacy or international relations — the perspective of pentagon planners and think tanks devoted to defining and lobbying for projects of so called "grand strategy."
From this vantage, it would seem that the intent in some quarters to move US policy in the direction of regional if not world transformation was clear prior to 9.11 but 9.11 also matters to the story, for instance, in bringing otherwise more pro-Saudi folks along to accept the risks and in general to drive further and faster down the road.
Let me give an example from a document produced a year before 9.11 during the transition from the Clinton to the Bush administration by some of those who took power on Bush's coattails.
"America's global leadership, and its role as the guarantor of the current great-power peace, relies upon the safety of the American homeland; the preservation of a favorable balance of power in Europe, the Middle East and surrounding energy producing region, and East Asia; and the general stability of the international system of nation-states relative to terrorists, organized crime, and other "non-state actors." ...
"In the Gulf, American power and presence has achieved relative external security for U.S. allies, but the longer-term prospects are murkier. Generally, American strategy for the coming decades should seek to consolidate the great victories won in the 20th century — which have made Germany and Japan into stable democracies, for example — maintain stability in the Middle East, while setting the conditions for 21st-century successes, especially in East Asia"
The paper goes on to map the frontiers of US power globally, including NATO expansion, allied troops in the Balkans ...
"in effect, the region is on the road to becoming a NATO protectorate. In the Persian Gulf region, the presence of American forces, along with British and French units, has become a semi-permanent fact of life. Though the immediate mission of those forces is to enforce the no-fly zones over northern and southern Iraq, they represent the long-term commitment of the United States and its major allies to a region of vital importance. Indeed, the United States has for decades sought to play a more permanent role in Gulf regional security. While the unresolved conflict with Iraq provides the immediate justification, the need for a substantial American force presence in the Gulf transcends the issue of the regime of Saddam Hussein." 5
What is there to note about these passages?
1. Places Iraq and the ME in the global/strategic context as assets in a policy of preventing (preemption in its wider sense of the term) the rise of any rival power that might check our ambitions.
2. Thus, it becomes a means to extend our supremacy. As I have said, it is an extraordinary moment, one where some have come to believe it possible to reorder matters to improve our military and economic positions against all future foes. So, there is the emphasis on keeping bases in the region.
But what is it about the region that matters so much in global terms?
This too is easy to understand. The answer is of course oil. Historically, and today, how does oil matter in the analysis.
Well, if you can tolerate some complexity, more certainly than what you can fit on an antiwar bumper sticker or poster, then imagine a continuum of thinkers and arguments who see the world as a giant chess board, some of whom are more military oriented and some of whom are more economic oriented
-For some, say, among military planners and those who hold on to the lessons of WW II, oil matters geopolitically in the remote but possible circumstances of a future world war at which point one must have control over these vital resources to fuel one's own war machine and to deprive the enemy of these same resources
-For others, more geopolitical strategists of the day-to-day, oil, particularly Middle East oil, matters as a kind of guarantor for keeping those allies most dependent on these supplies — Germany slash Europe and Japan — in line.
Further from the military slash strategic and closer to the macro slash economic frames of viewing the world
-there are those who see intervention in Iraq as a means to reorder world energy markets to our advantage. The combination of cheapness of production and sheer volume of reserves — stuff still in the ground that we can count on in the future — makes the Persian Gulf the most important oil producing region. If we have a friendly government in Iraq we have added leverage in influencing pricing. This becomes even more important for those who after 9.11 find Saudi Arabia, traditionally, our partner in stabilizing the price of oil and greasing the wheels of the world economy, as less trustworthy or dependable than before.
-finally there are those who are even more visionary, bold, and audacious in their views for reorganizing world energy markets, that see Russian + Caspian Sea Oil as open to us for the first time since the 1920s (when the rules of the game in the ME were created) and that in time will spell the end of Saudi Arabian slash OPEC influence. SA know this and has been messing about, as much as it can e.g., trying to hinder Russian oil development, repairing relationships with Iran, and of course funding Wahhabi movements in Central Asia ... In the geo-economics of oil, Iraq becomes a piece in the game that weakens SA and OPEC too.
Returning to the document I read to you a few minutes ago, you can begin to see what they mean when they say that "the need for a substantial American force presence in the Gulf transcends the issue of the regime of Saddam Hussein."
And you can see how oil matters to those who are convinced that by acting decisively now we reap big returns in our objective to secure US predominance for the foreseeable future.
Starting the analysis in the way I have here, from a systemic or structural level, allows us to make sense of our present moment by placing it in a framework that appears robust over time, and so it focuses our minds on what matters and allows us to deal quickly with what otherwise might be distractions. Notably, we dispense with much of the official line of the day, stump speeches, Neil Young songs, and so on about evil or the idea that the war against Iraq is an extension of the war against terrorism.
Certainly, we know that all countries or as we say in political "states" portray all their actions in the international arena as defensive and in protection of their vital so called national interests.
This holds for those kinds of policies, actions, and projects that we look at in retrospect and call aggrandizing or offensive or expansionist or, to use the current technical term, preemptive. And it holds for more than just warmaking and nationbuilding, it holds for trade issues. Immigration policy. Joining in coalitions to defeat aggression, and so on.
We also know that a second kind of justification typically accompanies imperial adventures, namely that it is to help or serve or benefit others.
What you don't ever do is celebrate your acting out of selfish interests or to enhance your power (rather than your security), to satisfy the needs of sections of your society and so on. No aggrandizing state or expansionist state publicly justifies such action as out of desire or greed or private accumulation or to secure better means to dominate others, longer.
So, when we make assessments about say German expansionism or British Imperialism or Iraqi aggression or Israeli settlement building and so on, we are, presumably, stepping outside the current terms of debate and trying to make a judgment based on other information. This is what I am trying to do here.
Now, there is a famous and predictable argument to counter some of these points I have made about the routine practices of expansionist states, namely, that the US is in fact an exceptional case. We are different. We don't act like other aggrandizing or expansionist powers in world history. Fareed Zakaria hopes this is true (he is not sure). Paul Wolfowitz is, since he says that our "leadership" in the world is uniquely benign.
The problem with this is that you basically find this claim made routinely by all such states. It doesn't amount to much more than nationalism and zealotry to my mind.
More significantly, these facts — meaning these rhetorical circumlocutions and tropes of modern statecraft — are themselves evidence that an international norm against empire has grown more powerful in the 20th century (remember America's own powerful anticolonialist currents or traditions, the critique of the Soviet empire, and the intervention to reverse Iraq's conquest of Kuwait).
Now I don't argue that we should stop here at the geopolitical or "systemic" level. The story of why we are at the precipice of war is more complicated, still, as it is in all the historical cases we know, and as common sense itself tells us.
Thus I invite you now to imagine the same moment not from the Pentagon planner's room but from the White House's domestic advisers and politicos — as some accounts do. We will learn some more as leaks appear in the coming weeks, as investigative journalists do their jobs, and as the never ending political battle goes forward, but we can be pretty sure that what happens next is shaped by concerns for party politics, the midterm elections, and so on. Again, there is nothing surprising here.
And extending this kind of domestic oriented analysis of foreign policy we are also confident that the coalition building and log rolling that goes on as part of this process is tied up with powerful investors, firms, industries, ethnic lobbies, fights between the CIA and Pentagon, and so on. Again, it is always the case. Nothing surprising.
But here is where the analysis in the hands of an opposition movement goes awry. There is a belief that to prove that there are so called narrow, or ethnic, or special, or regional, or business or private interests involved is to somehow discredit the policy. I don't get this. Take the subject I have now spent some time on — oil. A big part of the story is about oil but so what? Even if there were firms likely to benefit or involved in pushing for policies or concern for energy — that fact alone doesn't make it a good or bad policy. It is orthogonal, at right angles to rather than aligned with what it is that we are seeking to understand.
[read from pamphlet] — Bush, Cheney ... are planning to send tens of thousands of young Gis to kill and be killed in another war for Big Oil ... — such ideas are echoes of old and highly suspect populist visions and fables]
There is another standard mistake or problem in many arguments in opposition to the coming war, left and right. Somehow, it seems, the administration is confused or mistaken or stupid. Project will flounder. It is more complicated. Baghdad isn't Mogadishu, and so on. We somehow can see clearly what they cannot.
The truth is that the administration's thinkers know what we know, which is that the future is unknowable. There may be more and less likely outcomes, and it is of course by definition impossible to predict the unintended consequences of actions. Administration figures are in fact gambling but there are real and predictable consequences to their betting wrong. Consequences for them personally I mean. This is not the case for virtually any op ed writer or trusted ally of the Saudis or scholars who, from their perches in Palo Alto and Morningside Heights (or Center City), tell us what is really going to happen. There are no costs to them to being wrong, which is in part why so many pretend to be able to see the future with such remarkable acuity. Even after getting it wrong time and time again in the past 10 years.
Thus I ground my own opposition to the course we appear set on, not on unknowable outcomes, costs and benefits, but on certain principles which is about all I feel I can legitimately do. I have already suggested one such principle — the norm against empire or preemption that has been uneasily upheld for the past 50 years for good reason.
Keep in mind that empire requires rather than simply allows the making of invidious distinctions among peoples. Before World War II the international caste system was defended by policy makers, intellectuals, and the white working class as a natural order among "races." Recall W. E. B. Du Bois, who was perhaps America's most trenchant critics of global hierarchy, identifying the "color line" as the problem of the twentieth century.
Until now modern empire has always come wrapped up in ideas about the naturalness of hierarchy, a putative division of superior and inferior peoples, cultures, ethnicities, nations, races, and a self-proclaimed imperative and right to uplift the benighted — else on what grounds do you get to rule over others while liberating them or preparing them for civilization and so on?
One of my fears is that If norms against racism and empire both grew more powerful for a time, the weakening of one — anti-imperialism — might well lead to if not depend on the weakening of the other — anti-racism.
A second principle that I would put forward is the idea that resort to war is a matter of last rather than first resort, and that generally we should "tread with care in matters of life and death." There is no clear and present danger today to, quote, ourselves and to others that demands action. The just war theorist Michael Walzer lays out the arguments here much better than I can at this moment. See his discussion "No Strikes" in the New Republic, September 30, 2002.
I have come to realize that these are more or less classically conservative principles so I may as well go all the way down that road. Basically, I would argue that we and the world are better off by our acting more in accordance with the norm, first, do no harm, than with whatever the crusade of the day happens to be — democracy, nation-building, humanitarianism, religious freedom, and so on.
I have gone on a long time and moved far from Neil Young in the past 30 minutes. Let me offer what I see as the one possibility that would mean my analysis is simply and thoroughly wrong. It might be that all of what we have witnessed proves to be an elaborate bluff to get the inspectors back to Iraq, this time "with teeth." (You might think of this as the null hypothesis" that there is in reality no empire effect as predicted). It would mean that there is in fact no grand strategy and coalition taking the US down the road of empire.
This is different from the possibility that the project does indeed flounder, that the political will is not there, that the coalition falls apart, and that the war plans are given up (or defeated). As far as I can tell, only Bruce Cumings in the Nation (10/28/02 I think) has argued that this is in fact what is happening. But he makes clear that this is a prediction.
If Cumings prediction comes true, it would not, of course, prove my analysis wrong. Far from it, I have emphasized throughout the facts of contingency and open-endedness in politics. If you haven't gotten that message from this talk, let me reinforce it here.
The campaign to remake the Middle East is not the only road open to the United States at the present moment, far from it. It is a project imbued with a false sense of the ability to escape history — we Americans and America are exceptional, unique, different from other powers in the past. There is a messier, complex, long winding road that doesn't end, where you don't get "to roll" but instead you forge alliances, cut deals, make treaties, and the like, and it is the one we ought to get back on.
1 http://www.flakmag.com/opinion/letsroll.html (as of October 29, 2002)
2For another version although one cast (characteristically) in terms of a bleaker understanding of what the US must do to preserve residual prerogatives in a world spinning out of control, see Robert Kaplan, "A Post-Saddam Scenario," Atlantic, November 2002, electronic, pre-publication version (n.p.).
3Ultimately, Zakaria says, the US will not turn to the imperial option, "upholding the international system by itself ... America is not an imperial power." (p. 81)
4 Christopher Layne, "The Right Peace: Conservatives against a war with Iraq," L.A. Weekly, October 25 - 31, 2002.
5 "Rebuilding America's Defences: Strategies, Forces And Resources For A New Century" (September 2000), Project for the New American Century. See http://www.newamericancentury.org/.