Book Review: America Undressed

[bemildred]

Now that George W Bush has been re-elected president of the United States, neo-conservatives and war hawks, both pundits and policymakers, will likely feel vindicated and even emboldened to continue on their course of enlarging the American empire, all under the rubric of fighting the global "war on terror". As one of the new political slogans puts it, "four more years, four more wars".

But, as it turns out, wanting a US empire and benefiting from one are markedly different things. This is something not well appreciated in many of the recent books analyzing the American empire. Most of them assume, regardless of the overall morality of the undertaking, that the US has only to snap its militarized fingers and the deed is done, rather like the slogan "resistance is futile" of the Borg in the Star Trek television series, leaving the rest for historians to debate.

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Fortunately, we have just such a work in The Empire Has No Clothes. It is a worthy tome written by Ivan Eland, who is senior fellow and director of the Center on Peace and Liberty at the Independent Institute in Oakland, California.

Eland deserves more than a little credit for writing this book. Not just any author can detail the similarities between ancient Sparta and the US-dominated North Atlantic Treaty Organization, for example, but he manages to pull it off quite nicely.

Asia Times

[NJCher]

1. that's the chimp for ya'

All of the disadvantages of and empire and none of the advantages.

For us, that is.

Now for Halliburton, it's a different story.


Cher