"Bush-bashing has become not only a national but international sport -- and a diversion.
"Although Caligula, the third Roman emperor, was despotic and brutal, he is rumored to have entertained a self-deprecating idea: to appoint his favorite horse, Incitatus, first to a seat in the Senate and then to the position of Consul. This may have been Caligula's perverse way of suggesting that the Roman Empire had a dynamic of its own, largely independent of its cascade of caesars.
"Today, with the disaster in Iraq and a ticking time bomb in the Greater Middle East, the problem is less the person of President George W. Bush than the nature of the American imperium -- born of the Spanish-American War, and transformed after the Second World War into the Pax Americana.
Just as the U.S. not only easily survived the Vietnam misadventure (and actually emerged strengthened from it), so it is apt to surmount the Iraq fiasco virtually unscathed. Though momentarily disconcerted, the empire is bound to continue on its way, under bipartisan and corporate direction, and sanctified by evangelical blessings.
"It is a defining characteristic of the mature imperial state that it can afford costly failures, paid for not by its elites but by the lower orders at home and abroad. To be sure, like all others, the American empire will decline. But it will not fall or collapse overnight: like old soldiers, empires "do not die, they just fade away." Even rumors of its imminent decline are greatly exaggerated, especially since for the foreseeable future it remains the sole superpower.Found on Counterpunch.org--by Arno Mayer
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