The American Empire: Triumph of Triumphalism

The fifth anniversary of the U.S.-led invasion and subsequent occupation of Iraq in March 2003, in anticipation of the seventh anniversary of the U.S.-led invasion of Afghanistan in October 2001, and in commemoration of the second anniversary of the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in July 2006, occasions a moment to redirect our attention from the terrors of death and destruction that the U.S. and Israel have caused in these countries (and in occupied Palestine) and wonder what precisely is the nature and disposition of this imperial project. Whatever the U.S. is up to in Afghanistan and Iraq (and perhaps in Iran), and whatever Israel is plotting in Lebanon and Palestine (and perhaps Syria), it is ultimately the domestic echoes of all this globalized warmongering in the United States—particularly in a presidential election year—that will have a definitive impact on the nature and disposition of this empire. The barometer of the overheated U.S. imperial imagination is nowhere better gauged and measured, felt and palpable, than inside a country now in the full swing of casting its political future over the next generation.