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The Geography of American Empire American Empire: Roosevelt's Geographer and the Prelude to Globalization, by Neil Smith, The University of California Press.
EMPIRE is BACK in fashion. British academics promote their new books by lecturing us in the New York Times Magazine on the proper way to run our empire. The Atlantic Monthly offers us articles on the rules of empire in which arrogance gets to pass as realism, and history is reduced to lessons for our time. Politicians and journalists deck out our empire in gaudy historical trinkets - a lesson from Rome, a parallel with Britain. Pundits of all stripes tell us we lack both the attention span and the stomach for empire; we are too likely to bolt and run. What much of this advice assumes is that all empires are alike, and that, much like spare parts, lessons can be salvaged from one and used to repair another.
But all empires are not alike, although this is not immediately apparent when daily coverage of the empire is provided by amnesiacs. The coverage is not only chaotic and often nonsensical, but it is also so distracted that on any given day Kobe Bryant is likely to get more airtime than empire. All the particulars of the summer during which I write this-the dead soldiers, the protesting Shiites, Sadaams dead sons, the destruction of the United Nations headquarters in Baghdad-may be forgotten by the time it is published, but the question is, do they fit into a long are of something more significant? Are they twinklings of some fading, or rising, imperial star?
It is hard to tell what is going on. The empire speaks only in abstractions, slurs, and slogans. Yet things are clearly not going as well as they might. Donald Rumsfeld evades the obvious: there is a guerilla war being fought against us. On 23 June, we killed Sadaam again. We had already killed him several times during the war. This time his death dissolved into badly wounded Syrians, some burned SUVs, and a wrecked village. Eventually we will kill him for good as we have now killed his sons. Maybe we will kill him before this is published, most likely before our next election. Until then, and probably after...