Empires Then and Now
By Dr. Paul Craig Roberts
Global Research, March 27, 2012
URL of this article: www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=29988
Great
empires, such as the Roman and British, were extractive. The empires
succeeded, because the value of the resources and wealth extracted from
conquered lands exceeded the value of conquest and governance. The
reason Rome did not extend its empire further east into Germany was not
the military prowess of Germanic tribes but Rome’s calculation that the
cost of conquest exceeded the value of extractable resources.
The Roman empire failed, because Romans exhausted
manpower and resources in civil wars fighting amongst themselves for
power. The British empire failed, because the British exhausted
themselves fighting Germany in two world wars.
In his book, The Rule of Empires (2010), Timothy H.
Parsons replaces the myth of the civilizing empire with the truth of the
extractive empire. He describes the successes of the Romans, the
Umayyad Caliphate, the Spanish in Peru, Napoleon in Italy, and the
British in India and Kenya in extracting resources. To lower the cost of
governing Kenya, the British instigated tribal consciousness and
invented tribal customs that worked to British advantage.
Parsons does not examine the American empire, but in
his introduction to the book he wonders whether America’s empire is
really an empire as the Americans don’t seem to get any extractive
benefits from it. After eight years of war and attempted occupation of
Iraq, all Washington has for its efforts is several trillion dollars of
additional debt and no Iraqi oil. After ten years of trillion dollar
struggle against the Taliban in Afghanistan, Washington has nothing to
show for it except possibly some part of the drug trade that can be used
to fund covert CIA operations.
America’s wars are very expensive. Bush and Obama
have doubled the national debt, and the American people have no benefits
from it. No riches, no bread and circuses flow to Americans from
Washington’s wars. So what is it all about?
The answer is that Washington’s empire extracts
resources from the American people for the benefit of the few powerful
interest groups that rule America. The military-security complex, Wall
Street, agri-business and the Israel Lobby use the government to extract
resources from Americans to serve their profits and power. The US
Constitution has been extracted in the interests of the Security State,
and Americans’ incomes have been redirected to the pockets of the 1
percent. That is how the American Empire functions.
The New Empire is different. It happens without
achieving conquest. The American military did not conquer Iraq and has
been forced out politically by the puppet government that Washington
established. There is no victory in Afghanistan, and after a decade the
American military does not control the country.
In the New Empire success at war no longer matters.
The extraction takes place by being at war. Huge sums of American
taxpayers’ money have flowed into the American armaments industries and
huge amounts of power into Homeland Security. The American empire works
by stripping Americans of wealth and liberty.
This is why the wars cannot end, or if one does end
another starts. Remember when Obama came into office and was asked what
the US mission was in Afghanistan? He replied that he did not know what
the mission was and that the mission needed to be defined.
Obama never defined the mission. He renewed the
Afghan war without telling us its purpose. Obama cannot tell Americans
that the purpose of the war is to build the power and profit of the
military/security complex at the expense of American citizens.
This truth doesn’t mean that the objects of American
military aggression have escaped without cost. Large numbers of Muslims
have been bombed and murdered and their economies and infrastructure
ruined, but not in order to extract resources from them.
It is ironic that under the New Empire the citizens
of the empire are extracted of their wealth and liberty in order to
extract lives from the targeted foreign populations. Just like the
bombed and murdered Muslims, the American people are victims of the
American empire.
