Oh, for Pete's sake. There was a time when one could at least count on the left to understand the importance of economic motivations in global affairs, and to produce hard-headed economic analyses of world events. Indeed the problem, if anything, was that these analyses were too one-dimensional and reductive, and boiled every action down to the acquisitive instincts of homo economicus.

But now the problem is the exact opposite. Liberal analysts of the current generation see political ideology and moral philosophy everywhere. They seem to think the world is primarily a struggle of "ideas", and that events like the Iraq war must be explained in terms of the philosophical predilections of competing camps of theory-drunk ideologues.

We need to get out of these philosophical clouds, and challenge the assumption that events like the Iraq war are motivated in the first place by some species or other of political theory - whether new-fangled neoconservatism, old right cold warriorism or lofty liberal idealism. Beneath and behind the noisy ideological wrangling of the chattering classes, states conduct their business and make decisions on the basis of more quiet, more practical, less high-minded considerations. An intervention like Iraq happens because it fits in with the schemes and desires of a variety of practical interests, and most of these interests are quite down-to-earth and material.

Dick Cheney had his eye on Iraq for a long time, and I don't think it was because he was hell-bent on defeating "evil". Cheney had been the head of Halliburton, and had chafed under the government restrictions that had been imposed on doing business in Iraq, restrictions that were part of a corrupt and crumbling sanctions regime, and that were allowing various foreign competitors to outmaneuver US firms for one of the world's great economic prizes. When he and Bush were elected, his first move was to convene private meetings of energy executives and experts, form an energy task force and issue a report on US energy needs which signaled, for anyone with even a modest ability to read between the lines, the need for the US to use its muscle to acquire more assets abroad.

And that's how it has played out. The only building the US invasion force protected when they marched into Baghdad was the oil ministry. Administration calls for political reform in Iraq since then have obsessed with the "oil law", and the long-awaited bidding for development rights to Iraqi oilfields has already begun. Iraq is mainly just a run-of-the-mill imperial takeover. Events like this are so common in world history, one wonders why so many thinkers feel compelled to search out the deep ideological roots of the "mystery" of the Iraq war. The war is only a mystery to those who are so committed to doctrines of American exceptionalism that they think none of the ordianry, banal and unromantically material causal factors explaining the movements of states and their armies over the face of the earth apply to the US.

Yes, there were many ideologically motivated cold warriors like Buckley and Whittaker Chambers back in the day. They wrote famous books, and edited famous magazines, and their thinking appeals to a lot of bookish and magazine-reading citizens on the right, and antagonizes a lot of bookish and magazine-reading citizens on the left. But there was also just a lot of unsentimental economic competition and plundering going on back then. The US has been intervening in Latin America, for example, for over a century. The pattern of that intervention has a lot more to do with keeping the region safe for the United Fruits of the world, and protecting the assets of US firms, than the need to win the Twilight Struggle against International Communism, because Communism is so evil. (Of course, stakeholders in foreign assets no doubt found Old Nick's evil afoot whenever those assets are seized by a left-wing government.)

You can't understand the history of an era by looking only at what kinds of books and op-ed pieces were written in that era. Businessmen don't write a lot of books. They just do business. Of course, they are always happy when they can help sell their agenda to national leaders by appealing to the grand flights of theorists and moralists in the various politburos. Much of the political, military and commercial elite, however, doesn't care much about ideology. They move back and forth between government and the private sector, and pursue the same interests when wearing either kind of hat. Even when they are sufficiently high-minded and dedicated to pursue some conception of a broad national interest, rather than the mere narrow interests of themselves and their friends, that national interest is typically defined in terms of wealth, the security to preserve the wealth the nation already possesses, and the power to acquire more of the wealth the nation does not yet possess.

Well, I dunno. What Bosnia and then Kosovo did was show liberals that the Cold War didn't end in voluntarily full aquiescence to real democratization.

Yugoslavia's breakup showed that some of the Soviet cordon of militarist Stalin-model dictators were going to hold on to power and exploit/generate problems and dilemmas in ugliest violent fashion.

Kosovo was imho when a lot of American liberals decided that it wasn't all over, that violence was still on occasion necessary to stamp out militarist residues of the Cold War. Not that they would propose or actively agree with it, but small actions to limit the damage were reasonable.

The Right went farther, with e.g. the Axis of Evil concept. I think what was truly surprising to American liberals in 2002 was not that but the 'Coalition of the Willing'- that membership was the apposite of the Soviet Cold War cordon of militarist dictators.

The core of the 'Coalition' were governments that were propped and inspired by Victorian Age colonialist/imperialist ideologies and neocolonial interests- 'Christian' interests, Murdoch, British international corporations, the corporate friends of the Saudi monarchy, the Texas oil interests, Francoists, neo-Mussoliniists....

So Iraq was always two things- dealing with Hussein as a problem Cold War relic, and Iraq itself as one more (perhaps last) chance for a real colonial/imperial project. Quite what that latter project was was probably not clearly defined in 2002- but Iraq's oil and population were its only assets. And the invasion and show of force would probably cow Iraq's neighbors into concessions of power and wealth that would add to the booty.

Iraq has been moderately efficient at paring down the 'Coalition'- all the ex-Soviet countries feel they've paid off what debt and gratitude they have. One by one the right wing(ish) European neo-colonial/imperial interest propped governments have ground down their public support and become inviable. Brown's government and Berlusconi's second chance government are a little hard to gauge. Full British withdrawal would precipitate the endgame in Iraq, presumably- collapsing the 'Coalition'.

Any evidence that be presented that the Right works for selfish, crass personal gain is welcome to me, yet I would echo and support our host author's considerations. The American left has been disintegrating rather than organizing for most of my lifetime (since late Truman), as our host didn't say most leftists who managed to published anywhere near the mainstream accepted the basic logic of empire, and specifically that the Clintonian intervention in Kosovo was a superhighway to the bipartisan rush to a predictably disastrous war in late 2002 and early 2003. Milosevic was a medium-sized monster, yet a non-imperialist America could have dealt with his menace far differently. The media organizations and attitudes even among D. party pundits that helped the rush to war in 1999 felt justified in then using the next years in demonizing Saddam Hussein to justify the war that would eventually be launched, to the great detriment and debt of all of us.

My larger message is still on my copy and paste function, let's have it again:

As usual, I come late to the party, worn out by a work schedule w. two jobs, and thoroughly mashed tonite by the contradictory directives and the double-binds of the bosses at one of America's largest supermarkets. C'est la Vie.

Nevertheless. The problem is, there is no one really speaking for the necessary position: America the democratic nation needs to NOT have an imperialist foreign policy.

Unfortunately, by winning World War II our grandfathers were put in an untenable Imperial position, and they slid and slided and postured as best they could with it, but somehow for the last few decades the Imperial Imperative on not upsetting America's imperial position has become the norm; or not just the norm, the ring that must be kissed in every "official" discussion of the situation, such as on TV by anyone or by any political candidate anywhere.

And it's killing us and killing the planet. All of our efforts to maintain the empire grow more frantic with less success. We spend more money THAN ALL OTHER NATIONS ON EARTH COMBINED on "defense" and "security" and "intelligence," yet we are noticeably MORE afraid of attack, MORE insecure and MORE stupid than other nations. (Please, please, repeat this in thousands of letters to AP-associated newpapers.)

The comments on the blogs show it: there is a minority, maybe ten million of us, maybe just five or three million of American citizens and residents, who understand: America the democratic nation needs to NOT have an imperialist foreign policy.

(Certainly both Clinton and Obama are deeply flawed and deficient in this respect, for those of us who understand. However, in my prev. posts on TPM I explain why I will swim with the Obama tide as I'm one of the few who still have the chance to vote against Hillary.)

There is no political organization that speaks for us, and the zeitgeist of the culture militates AGAINST serious people giving serious, organized, attention to the problem of American imperialism ... indeed the culture as whole, including all the anti-authoritarian people who OUGHT TO be on "our" side, seems to be going straight to ignorant hell in an SUV at high speed.

Global Exchange and Code Pink come the closest to speaking to our concerns, but certainly GE and probably as far as I understand CP also are organized as 501(c)3's, in other words legally barred from endorsing candidates and overt political lobbying.

The millions of American citizens and residents who understand that America the democratic nation needs to NOT have an imperialist foreign policy deserve to have a FRANKLY POLITICAL organization that reflects their views. If people with even greater activist reputations and expertise do not do so first, I will re-organize my life to accomplish this much-needed goal ... and to reprise the ancient junior high joke that was used against me plenty ... that's BOTH a threat and a promise. (Oh, and by the way, I have a solid reputation for organizing small-d democratic activist organizations.)

See my previous TPM posts on this subject, going back at least a year, for further ramifications of this basic postulate of the need for an activist POLITICAL organization focused on lobbying and educating AGAINST American imperialism in all its manifestations. Just before I got my vacation near the end of Feb., another TPM reader put up a gmail box for communications toward this organization -- did he, or will he, ever receive any email ?