EMPIREK LABCaCa

J(E)DI 2010 LAB CaCa
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EMPIRE K INDEX
EMPIRE K INDEX....................................................................................................................... 1 SHELL ........................................................................................................................................... 3 SHELL ......................................................................................................................................... 3 SHELL ......................................................................................................................................... 5 SHELL ......................................................................................................................................... 7 UNIQUENESS OF THE EMPIRE ............................................................................................. 9 U IMPERIALISM IS ADAPTED TO CAPITALISM ............................................................. 9 U EMPIRE FRAGILE NOW ................................................................................................. 11 LINKS .......................................................................................................................................... 13 LINK - GENERIC ..................................................................................................................... 13 LINK GENERIC/ECONOMY ............................................................................................... 14 LINK THE STATE ................................................................................................................ 15 LINK THE STATE ................................................................................................................ 17 LINK BENIGN INTENTIONS .............................................................................................. 18 LINK DEMOCRACY/HUMAN RIGHTS ............................................................................ 19 LINK - DEMOCRACY ............................................................................................................. 20 LINK REDUCE PRESENCE ................................................................................................. 21 LINK REDUCE TROOPS ..................................................................................................... 22 LINK REDUCE TROOPS ..................................................................................................... 23 LINK REDUCE TROOPS ..................................................................................................... 24 LINK REDUCE TROOPS ..................................................................................................... 25 LINK - EXTINCTION .............................................................................................................. 26 LINK - EXTINCTION .............................................................................................................. 27 LINK HEGEMONY ............................................................................................................... 28 LINK HEGEMONY ............................................................................................................... 29 LINK - AFGHANISTAN .......................................................................................................... 30 Link iran ................................................................................................................................. 31 Link - Japan ............................................................................................................................... 32 LINK - TERRORISM ............................................................................................................... 33 LINK - TERRORISM ............................................................................................................... 34 Link - Soft Power ...................................................................................................................... 35 LINK - OIL............................................................................................................................... 36 IMPACTS .................................................................................................................................... 37 IMPACT - BLOWBACK .......................................................................................................... 37 IMPACT - DEMOCRACY ....................................................................................................... 38 IMPACT - DEMOCRACY ....................................................................................................... 38 IMPACT MILLIONS OF DEATHS ...................................................................................... 39 IMPACT - GENOCIDE ............................................................................................................ 40 IMPACT NORTH/SOUTH GAP ........................................................................................... 41 IMPACT TO TERRORISM NO V2L .................................................................................... 42 A2: EXISTENCE PRECEDES VALUE TO LIFE ................................................................... 43 COMPARATIVE IMPACT VALUE TO LIFE O/W SURVIVAL ....................................... 44
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ALTERNATIVES ....................................................................................................................... 45 Ontology Key ............................................................................................................................ 45 ALTERNATIVE - RESISTANCE ............................................................................................ 46 REJECTION SOLVES .............................................................................................................. 46 QUESTIONING SOLVES ........................................................................................................ 47 A2: INEVITABILITY ............................................................................................................... 48 2NC DISSENT - ROLE OF THE BALLOT OVERVIEW ...................................................... 49 2NC A2:........................................................................................................................................ 50 A2: INEVITABILITY ............................................................................................................... 50 A2: EMPIRE INEVITABLE ..................................................................................................... 51 A2: FRAMEWORK ................................................................................................................ 52 A2: FRAMEWORK .................................................................................................................. 53 A2: PERMUTATION................................................................................................................ 54 A2: permutation ......................................................................................................................... 55 A2: LINK TURNS WE REDUCE TROOPS ..................................................................... 56 A2: LINK TURN WE REDUCE TROOPS......................................................................... 57 A2: PREDICTIONS GOOD ...................................................................................................... 58 A2: PREDICTIONS - KURESAWA ........................................................................................ 59 A2: REALISM ........................................................................................................................... 60 A2: UTIL/COST BENEFIT RATIONALITY .......................................................................... 61 A2: OBAMA ISNT IMPERIALIST ........................................................................................ 62 A2: CAP GOOD IMPACT TURNS .......................................................................................... 63 A2: ONTOLOGY BAD............................................................................................................. 64 A2: PERKINs/HUMANISM GOOD ........................................................................................ 65 AFF ANSWERS .......................................................................................................................... 66 WESTERN IMPERIALISM GOOD ......................................................................................... 66 WESTERN IMPERIALISM GOOD ......................................................................................... 67 WESTERN IMPERIALISM GOOD ......................................................................................... 68 2AC PERMUTATION/DISAD TO ALT.................................................................................. 69 ANTI-IMPERIALISM FAILS .................................................................................................. 70 ANTI-IMPERIALISM FAILS .................................................................................................. 71 ALT FAILS MCLEAN .......................................................................................................... 72 Cap Good - Prevents War .......................................................................................................... 74 Realism Good SOLVES WAR / ALT FAILS ........................................................................ 75 A2: Spanos ................................................................................................................................ 76 A2: ONTOLOGY FIRST .......................................................................................................... 77 A2: ONTOLOGY FIRST .......................................................................................................... 78
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SHELL SHELL
We have entered the stage of the Pax Americana facilitated by an expanding militarism that assaults the environment and constantly creates new threats to intervene against. This infinite quest for good will inevitably destroy itself and possibly the globe along the way BOGGS 2005 [Carl, Professor of Social Sciences at National University in Los Angeles, Adjunct Professor at Antioch University in Los Angeles, Imperial Delusions: American Militarism and Endless War, isbn: 0742527727, p __ix-xi___]-AC
This book explores the resurgence of United States militarism in its multiple dimensions--historical, economic, political, cultural, globalas the imperial ethos becomes ever more deeply embedded in the very fabric of American life .
At the start of the twentyfirst century it seems appropriate to refer to the militarization of both U.S. foreign policy and American society as a whole. Whether or not the nation has become "addicted" to war (and preparation for war), there can be little doubt that warfare motifs, discourses, and priorities increasingly shape all phases of social life, impacting everything from language, media representations, and popular culture to the workplace, forms of consumption, and politics. War is the most
profitable area of corporate investment, marketed by public-relations firms, lobbies, political action committees (PACs), think tanks, and foundations, and glorified on TV, in video games, and in film .
The impulse toward militarism is embellished by the gun culture, local militias, gangs, and parts of the sports establishment. As an ideology, the contemporary merging of flag-waving patriotism, militarism, and imperial hubris furnishes American citizens with a powerful (if no doubt fleeting) sense of national unity and global purpose. Above all, militarism stands as an enabling mechanism of US. Empire, of an expanded Pax Americana-an awesome instrument at the disposal of American elites in their drive toward unchallenged world domination. There is nothing fundamentally novel about any of this, even as altered historical circumstances create new openings for US. global power; the
impetus toward colonial exploits through military force goes back to the earliest days of the republic. Since the turn of the last century the us. worldwide armed presence-on the seas and land, in the air, and now in outer space-can be said to have no historical parallels, a reality quite at odds with the torrents of propaganda affirming a benevolent, peaceful, democratic US. foreign policy. A guiding theme of this book is that US. history up to the present contains a peculiarly militaristic strand, a phenomenon increasingly visible since the end of World War II.
To speak of a "new militarism" thus hardly suggests a radical departure from long-standing patterns but rather an extension and deepening of those patterns, so that we arrive today at a more aggressive, globalizing definition of "Empire." As explored in the following pages, a revitalized US. imperialism and militarism flows from several interrelated factors: a growing mood of American exceptionalism in international affairs, the primacy of military force in U.S. policy, arrogation of the right to intervene around the world, the spread of xenophobic patriotism, further consolidation of the permanent war system. With the end of the cold war, and more dramatically since the terrorist attacks of 9/11, the result is an increasingly militant and arrogant US. foreign behavior marked by outright rejection of important global treaties, repeated violations of international law, disregard for the United Nations, elevated assaults on the natural environment, militarization of space, and flagrant acts of military intervention-all giving Pax Americana a refurbished mission. Beneath everything has congealed an ideological fundamentalism grounded in superpatriotism and a rigid neoliberalism in the service of corporate power. As the United States moves to reshape the geopolitical terrain of the world, with hundreds of military
bases in 130 countries added to hundreds of installations stretched across its own territorial confines, the vast majority of Americans refuse to admit their nation possesses anything resembling an Empire. Yet U.S. global expansion is far more ambitious than anything pursued or even
the "new militarism" is rooted in a "new imperialism" that aspires to nothing short of world domination, a project earlier outlined by its exuberant
imagined by previous imperial powers. It might be argued that proponents and given new life by the Bush II presidency, which has set out to remove all vestiges of ideological and material impediments to worldwide corporate power-by every means at its disposal.
It is hard to resist the conclusion that the United States, its strong fusion of national exceptionalism, patriotic chauvinism, and neoliberal
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fundamentalism fully in place, has evolved into something of an outlaw, rogue state--the kind of fearsome entity conjured up by its Own incessant propaganda. Celebrations of power, violence,
and conquest long associated with warfare ineVitably take its architects and practitioners into the dark side of human experience, into a zone marked by unbridled fanaticism and destructive ventures requiring a culture of lies, duplicity, and double standards .
Militarism as a tool of global power ultimately leads to a jettisoning of fixed universal values, the corruption of human purpose, the degradation OF those who embrace it, and finally social disintegration. As Chris Hedges writes in Mlar Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning: "War never creates the society or
harmony we desire, especially the harmony we briefly attain during wartime,"! Here the critical observer is entitled to ask whether the staggering costs and consequences of u.s. imperial domination can possibly be worth any of the goals or ideals invoked as their political justification.
We seem to have reached a point where u.s. leaders see themselves as uniquely entitled to carry out warfare and imperial agendas simply owing to the country's status as the world's lone superpower and its preponderance of military force. In the wake of 9/11 and the onset of Bush's war against terrorism, the trajectory of U.s. militarism encounters fewer limits in time and space as it becomes amorphous and endless, galvanized by the threat of far-flung enemies. As at the height of the cold war, the power structure embellishes an image of the globe where two apocalyptic forcesgood versus evil, civilized versus primitive-are locked in a battle to the death. u.s. expansionism is thereby justified through its quest, its apparent need, for an increase in both domestic and global power-a quest destined to bring the superpower to work against even its own interests. Empires across history have disintegrated on the shoals of their boundless elite hubris, accelerated by global overreach, internal decay, and collapse of legitimacy, and there is little reason to think that Pax Americana will be able to avoid the same fate. While a feverish nationalism might
sustain elite domestic legitimacy temporarily, it cannot secure the same kind of popular support internationally, any more than could a
To the extent the United States is determined to set itself above the rest of the world, brandishing technologically awesome military power and threatening planetary survival in the process, it winds up subverting its own requirements for international stability and hegemony.
United States-managed world economy that sows its own dysfunctions in the form of mounting chaos, poverty, and inequality.
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SHELL
THE AFFIRMATIVE PLAN SUSTAINS A CORRUPT MILITARISTIC GIANT THAT RECREATES ITS OWN VIOLENCE. THE ACT OF WITHDRAWING TROOPS IS PART OF A PLOY OF NEW IMPERIALISM TO EXTEND ITS CONTROL AROUND THE GLOBE Mann 2003 [Michael, British-born professor of Sociology at the UCLA and Visiting Research Professor at Queen's University Belfast Incoherent Empire, isbn: 1859845827, p ____1314_____ ]-AC
My argument can be illustrated with a rather ghastly metaphor.
The American Empire will tum out to be a military giant, a Back-seat economic driver, a political schizophrenic and an ideological phantom. The result is a disturbed, misshapen monster stumbling clumsily across the world. It means well. It intends to spread order and benevolence, but instead it creates more disorder and violence. I further argue that the us has more uneven imperial powers than any of its historic predecessors, and I make comparisons with the
Roman and with recent European Empires, from the massive British to the tiny Belgian Empire. Within their conquered terrains they were all far more powerful than the United States can be.
But the new imperialists do not want to rule permanently over foreign lands. They want only an indirect and informal Empire, though one that threatens, coerces and even sometimes invades foreign states, improves them and then leaves. Nor do they threaten the whole world. The prosperous North of the world contains neither disorder, nor military rivals, nor collective resistance. All that the us requires is that the Northern states stick to their own affairs and not interfere in American imperial projects elsewhere. It expects they will be too divided to do this anyway, and believes it can divide and rule among them.
This was the purpose of Donald Rumsfeld's division between the "old" and the "new" Europe when European opposition did surface in late 2002.
ADDITIONALLY, THE IMPERIALISM OF THE STATUS QUO HAS FACILITATED A COMPLETE NUMBNESS TO VIOLENCE THAT HAS CREATED A ROUTINZATION OF MASS MURDER BOGGS 2005 [Carl, Professor of Social Sciences at National University in Los Angeles, Adjunct Professor at Antioch University in Los Angeles, Imperial Delusions: American Militarism and Endless War, isbn: 0742527727, p __187-188___]-AC One of the more tragic parts of the U.S. war crimes legacy has been its almost total absence from the public discourse: mass media, politics, academia, mtellectual life. This can be understood as
the result partly of civic ignorance, partly of collective denial, partly of what Gilbert Achcar refers to as "narcissistic compassion," indifference to the suffering of others. 64 However understood ,
there is little question about the degree to which the horrible costs and consequences of American Empire have become largely routinized within both elite and popular consciousness; the very idea of U.S. culpability for terrible atrocities, including war crimes, human rights
violations, and crimes against humanity, is generally regarded as too far off the normal spectrum of discourse to be taken seriously. Given the postwar historical record,
we are dealing here with nothing less than large-scale insensitivity to mass murder. The United States has become such a dominant world superpower that its crimes are more or less invisible, that is, they appear as an integral, acceptable, indeed predictable element of imperial power. Rarely a loser in war, the United States has never had to confront the grievances of those who have been wronged. This condition is exacerbated by the phenomenon of technowar, which, since World War II, has increasingly removed any sense of immediate personal involvement in warfare, meaning that feelings of guilt, shame, and moral outrage that might be expected to accompany killing, and especially acts of mass murder, are more easily sidestepped, repressed, forgotten-more easily yet where such acts are carried out by proxies. Long experience tells us that ordinary people, once having completed military training,
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can all too often calmly plan and implement the killing of vast numbers of unknown, faceless, innocent, defenseless human beings, whether by firing missiles, dropping bombs from thirty thousand feet, shooting off long-distance artillery shells, or engaging in traditional ground combat (increasingly rare for the U.S. military ). Once the enemy is portrayed as a sinister beast and monster, dehumanized as a worthless other, then the assault becomes a matter of organization, technique, and planning, part of the day-to-day routi~e~ of s.imply obeying commands, carrying out assigned tasks, fitting all acnvities .Into a bureaucratic structure . Within this universe the human targets of military action are regularly defined as barbaric, subhuman, deserving of their fate and possibly even complicit in it: Native Americans, Filipinos, Japanese, Guatemalan peasants, Koreans, Vietnamese, Iraqi, erb. As on the frontier, mass killing may be understood as necessary, a moral imperative to ensure human survival and save "civilization." Viewed accordingly, forces giving expression to racial supremacy, imperialism, and xenophobia converge with a cult of violence (like that discussed in chapter 4) to
form an ideological cauldron where crimes of war may come to seem natural, logical. Within the culture of militarism, large-scale massacres, authorized and legitimated by political and military commands, take on the character of the ordinary, where guilt and culpability are routinely evaded.P Actions viewed from outside this culture as heinous and criminal appear rather normal, acceptable, even praiseworthy within it, part of a taken-for-granted world. Ethical discourses are roundly silenced, jettisoned. Surveying U.S. war crimes, one can see that taken-for-granted barbari m takes many forms: the saturation bombing of civilian populations, free-fire zones, chemical warfare, relocations, search-and-destroy massacres, the torture and killing of prisoners-all sanctioned through an unwritten code of regular military operations.
In technowar especially, all human conduct becomes managerial, clinical, distant, impersonal, rendering the carnage technologically rational; individual emotional responses, including the pain and suffering of victims, disappear from view. Even the most ruthless, bloody actions have no villains, insofar as all initiative vanishes within the organizational apparatus and the culture supporting it. War managers' ideology contains specialized military/technical discourses with their own epistemology, basically devoid of moral criteria. As Gibson writes in the context of Vietnam:
"Technowar as a regime of mechanical power and knowledge posits the high-level command positions of the political and military bureaucracies as the legitimate sites of knowledge."66 Here bureaucratic jargon conveniently serves to obscure militarism and its victims with familiar references to the primacy of "national security," the need for "surgical strikes," the regrettable problem of "collateral
Words like "incursion" substitute for real armed attacks, "body counts" for mass slaughter, "civilian militias" for death squads. The very structure of language helps to establish a moral and political gulf between perpetrators and victims, between war criminals and the crimes they commit. In general those who plan do not kill, and those who kill are merely following orders-and they too are usually shielded from psychological immediacy by the mechanism of technowar.
damage," and "self-inflicted" casualties.
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SHELL
OUR ALTERNATIVE IS TO DO NOTHING IN THE FACE OF THE AFFIRMATIVES IMPERIAL STRATEGY. OUR STRATEGY FRUSTRATES THE LOGIC OF IMPERIALISM BY REFUSING TO BE ANSWERABLE TO AMERICAN EXCEPTIONALISM. THIS PRAXIS ENABLES US TO PLACE ONTOLOGICAL QUESTIONS ABOUT THE WORLD AS A PRIOR CONCERN TO THE AFFS DEMANDS THUS MAKING A RETHINKING OF IMPERIALISM POSSIBLE.
SPANOS 2000 [William, Americas Shadow, p 197-202]-AC

If, however, we forcibly dislocate the pervasive, if symptomatic, disclosure of the specter out of the ontological matrix where it has been embedded in the discourse of poststructuralism and reconstellate it into the specific political history of the 1960s particularly, the military strategy of the Vietnamese insurgents its meaning undergoes a productive estrangement.
The genocidal violence perpetrated by the United States against the Vietnamese people and their land in the name of the "free world" not only exposed the European origins of the myth of American exceptionalism. It also exposed the metaphysical principle of decidability informing this grand imperial narrative. And it was in some sense the recognition of this arrogant American intolerance of undecidability that the Vietnamese Other exploited to abort the goals of the cultural and political armies of a much more powerful United States. That strategy, it will be recalled, which has been aptly called "guerrilla warfare" in the annals of Western military history, refused to accommodate itselfto be "answerable"to the European concept of warfare: the binary "frontal engagement" of opposing visible armies whose story would end in a "decisive victory." Instead, these Vietnamese insurgents resorted to a "barbarian" strategy. They resisted invasion of their Asian homeland not by direct confrontation, but by an invisible nomadic mobility a "spectral" tactics, as it were that reversed the see-er/seen binary of Western imperialism and in so doing demolecuralized the more formidable invading army and reduced its otherwise invincible war machine to utter ineffectiveness . This disclosure of the Achilles' heel of the Western imperial project constitutes the second directive of the Vietnam War for the task of rethinking thinking in the American age of the world picture, more specifically, for the
articulation of a theory of resistance against the Pax Metaphysica that is simultaneously a practice of political resistance against the Pax Americana. In reconstellating the Vietnamese strategy into the postcolonial context, we not only discover the hitherto overlooked connection between the spectral ontological Other precipitated by the fulfillment of the logical economy of Western metaphysics in the "Americanization" of the planet and the multitude of displaced political Others the "nonexistent" beings precipitated by the fulfillment (the coming to its "end") of the project of Western imperialism at large. In recognizing the indissoluble relationship between these two hitherto disparate Others ,
we are also compelled to appropriate the "eccentric" Vietnamese strategy of "unanswerability" that defeated America as a directive for thinking the positive emancipatory possibilities of the postcolonial occasion, that is, of the vast and various population of people unhomed by the depredations of Western imperialism. This effort to theorize an "eccentric"
adversarial political strategy of unanswerability from the global demographic shifts incumbent on the fulfillment of the imperial project has, is fact, already been inaugurated by Edward Said at the close of Culture and Imperialism, if only in a tentative way. Symptomatically, if not fully, conscious of the implications of the interregnum for thinking, Said, like Salman Rushdie in his fiction, takes his point of departure in this theoretical initiative from his exilic experience as migr as an irreversibly "unhoused" Other whose difference is indissolubly related to, indeed, was produced by, the colonizing (at-homing) imperatives of Occidental imperialism. In so doing, he invokes a theoretical motif that was fundamental to but inadequately thought by the early postmodernists (Heidegger, Derrida, Lyotard, for example) who overdetermined the decentering of the Occidental logos, a motif that Said finds thought in some degree by Paul Virilio (L'Insecurite du territoire), Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari (Thousand Plateaus), and Theodor Adorno (Minima Moralia), among others. I am referring to the possibilities not only for refuge but for political resistance and emancipation that, according to Said, are paradoxically inherent in the unhomed, estranging, and dereifying mobility the spectral political being, as it were of the displaced persons, the migrants, and the historyless Others of the imperial Occident who, in the postcolonial era, exist "between domains, between forms, between homes, and between languages." These are the possibilities of e-mergence precipitated on a global scale by the thinning out or occasional breaking of the lines of force that, by way of cultural familiarization, domestication, and pacification, have historically bound the periphery to the metropoli- tan center/homeland. I have quoted a passage from Said's all-too-brief summation of his oppositional postcolonial project in chapter 2, but the resonant suggestiveness precipitated by
the reconstellation of the estranged political perspective he overdetermines into the ontological context I have inferred from the decentering and disarticulating guerrilla strategy of the nomadic Vietnamese insurgents warrants its retrieval at this culminating point of my argument:It is no exaggeration to say that liberation as an intellectual mission, born in the resistance and opposition to the confinements and ravages of imperialism, has now shifted from the settled, established, and domesticated dynamics of culture to its unhoused, decentered, and exilic energies, energies
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whose incarnation today is the migrant, and whose consciousness is that of the intellectual and artist in exile, the political figure between domains, between forms, between homes, and between languages. From this perspective then all things are indeed counter, original, spare, strange. From this perspective also, one can see "the common consort dancing together" contrapuntally. And while it would be the rankest Panglossian dishonesty to say that the bravura performances of the intellectual exile and the miseries of the displaced person or refugee are the same, it is possible, I think, to regard the intellectual as first distilling then articulating the predicaments that disfigure modernity mass deportation, imprisonment, population transfer, collective dispossession, and forced immigration.Having thematized the estrangement latent in the exilic condition of the emigre the uncanny ability to see what from the point of view of the imperial discourse of the dominant culture is otherwise invisible Said goes on to invoke the exemplary migrant discourse of the exiled German intellectual Theodor Adorno: " 'The past life of emigres is, as we know, annulled,' says Adorno in Minima Moralia, subtitled Reflections from a Damaged Life.... Why? 'Because anything that is not reified, cannot be counted and measured, ceases to exist' or, as he says later, is consigned to mere 'background.' " In the Heideggerian/Derridian rhetoric I have emphasized in my effort to think the implications of ontological imperialism, the migr becomes the spectral Abgeschiedene in the "realm of the Between" who haunts the Being of the imperial culture that has reduced him/her to nonbeing. Said rightly acknowledges "the disabling aspects of this fate." But it does not blind him, as it does so many "progressive" postmodern or postcolonial thinkers, to "the virtues or possibilities" of this spectral marginalization. They are and here Said announces the post-postmodern and -postcolonial project of the inter-regnum "worth exploring." "Adorno's general pattern," he writes, "is what in another place he calls the 'administered world' or, insofar as the irresistible dominants in the culture are concerned, 'the consciousness industry.' There is then not just the negative advantage of refuge in the emigre's eccentricity; there is also the positive benefit of challenging the system, describing it in a language unavailable to those it has already subdued.""Admittedly, the possibilities for this "freedom from exchange" this "last refuge" from the globalization of late capitalism that Said proffers as an alternative to the existing oppositional discourses are, like Adorno's, the minima moralia of a damaged political life, and, in its emphasis on survival, his alternative lacks the force of a truly positive hope. But if, as the resonant doubleness of the language I have italicized amply warrants, the terms of his global elaboration of these postcolonial possibilities are reconstellated into the occasion of the struggle of the Vietnamese people against American imperialism in the 1960s, one need not, at least on this count, be quite as pessimistic as Adorno and Said about the role of the intellectual in the global postCold War period I have called the interregnum, without at the same time succumbing to "the rankest Panglossian dishonesty." For, to reiterate ,
it was precisely the Vietnamese's exploitation of the very ontological conditions of their enforced confinement by a formidable imperial culture that estranged that colonized space and, in so doing, disintegrated both the cultural narrative and the decisive end-oriented imperial practice this narrative was designed to enable. The powerless Vietnamese masterfully transformed the
United States's arrogant and clamorous strategy to reduce the unaccountable and immeasurable Other to nonexistent status or, to invoke Adorno's language, to consign its spectral Otherness to "mere background" in its metanarrative which is to say, to silent invisibility before the panoptic imperial gazeinto a powerful polyvalent de-structive and e-mancipatory (projective) weapon. And it was this transformation of the debilitating, that is, passivizing and silencing, effects of reification that enabled this "damaged" Third World country precisely by way of its spectral invisibility to disable the otherwise irrefragable operations of reification and thus to defeat the most powerful nation in the history of
To think the spectral as the menacing precipitate of the indissoluble relationship between the Pax Metaphysica and the Pax Americana: this, not the "reformist" initiative of those liberals like Sacvan Bercovitch and Richard Rorty whose oppositional discourse continues to be answerable to the imperial language informed by the idea of America, is the resonantly silent imperative of the interregnum, especially for American intellectuals of the Left.13 This appeal to contemporary American intellectuals to think the nomadic political migr who haunts the postCold War
the world.12 New World Order simultaneously with the ontological specter that postmetaphysical European theorists" have thematized as the paradoxical consequence of the fulfillment of the logical economy of Western philosophy is an appeal to think America globally. And it no doubt will be criticized by those nation-oriented American intellectuals to whom it is addressed as "traveling theory," the importation of a foreign interpretive discourse into a historically specifically American context's Lest this vestigial American exceptionalist conclusion be drawn, let me finally invoke the testimony of an American writer one to whom Said often refers, but only in passing whose work at large, as I have shown elsewhere," is decisively pertinent to the occasion of the Vietnam War and its aftermath. For this American writer's testimony not only anticipates in a fundamental way the essence of the American intervention in Vietnam the essentially imperial ontological/cultural origins and character of its Adamic errand in the Vietnamese wilderness. It
also constitutes a prolepsis of the essence of the Vietnamese resistance and, above all, of the adversarial strategy of "refusal" of spectral "unanswerability" that, as all these postmetaphysical European theorists as well as Said imply, is more than any other adequate to the task of "deterring" the global
pretensions of "America" in the postCold War era. I am referring to the radically exilic witness of Herman Melville, of what, to underscore its spectral ec-centricity, I have called his "errant art," a negational or antinarrative strategy that was deliberately intended to call the metaphysically ordained uni-directionality of America's exceptionalist imperial project into question. Thus, for example, in "Bartleby, the Scrivener," this ghostly preterite's resonant silence his refusal to respond in kind to the reifying and reified "premises" of American Wall Street logic (to be "counted and measured" by "the administered world," as it were) utterly confounds, derails, and neutralizes its "unerring" and vaunted practical efficacy. Thus also in Moby-Dick, Ishmael's errant narrative its endlessly differentiating and deferring language comes to be understood not simply as an alternative to the "unerring" discourse of the dominant American culture. As
Bartleby's minimalist "I prefer not to," his maximalist "white" or "unnaming" saying also comes to be understood as the most effective means of rendering impotent the positive globally oriented power that proceeds from a totalizing "monomaniacal" naming, a stridently vocal Ahabian saying that reifies the unnameable whiteness of being in order to make it "practically assailable."17 Indeed, as Pierre, Israel Potter, The Confidence-Man, and Billy Budd make manifest, this effort to think positively the nothing that the
in the case of exceptionalist global discourse of America will have nothing to do with this effort to get "a voice out of silence"18 constitutes the supreme theme of this unhomed American writer's fiction. Melville's American project, in fact, has more in common with Heidegger's and the European poststructuralists' than it has with that of the American intellectuals who are "against theory" because it is foreign to American culture. 19
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UNIQUENESS OF THE EMPIRE U IMPERIALISM IS ADAPTED TO CAPITALISM

IMPERIALISM IS NOW ADAPTED TO A SPECIFIC CAPITALIST LOGIC. THE QUESTION OF THE STATE OR CAPITALISM IS NOT SPECIFIC ENOUGH TO ADDRESS THIS DETAILED LOGIC. TO UNDERSTAND NEW IMPERIALISM WE MUST ADDRESS THE ONTOLOGICAL QUESTION OF BOTH Borst 2006 Allan G. Department of English University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign The New Imperialism, or the Economic Logic of Late Postmodernism 2006 PMC 16., Review of: David Harvey, The New Imperialism. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2003. ]-AC The book's identity takes its shape and its major contributions are made once Harvey establishes his concept of "capitalist imperialism." The basic assertion is that if the United States is the new imperialism, then this imperialism is in turn a specifically capitalist one. According to Harvey's diagnosis of current global trends, this new imperialism marks a contradictory
fusion of "the politics of state and empire" (imperialism as a distinctively political project on the part of actors whose power is based in command of a territory and a capacity to mobilize its human and natural resources towards political, economic, and military ends) and "the molecular processes of capital accumulation in space and time" (imperialism as a diffuse politicaleconomic process in space and time in which command over and use of capital takes primacy). (26) This complex definition clearly echoes the claims of Harvey's earlier
books, especially The Limits to Capital (1982), The Condition of Postmodernity, and Spaces of Capital (2001). Consequently, the new imperialism epitomizes Harvey's long-developing thesis that adjoins a capitalist state apparatus with the ideological and geographical construction of space and time. These often contradictory, always dialectical impulses and motivations that push the state or the capitalist market toward one agenda or another are as crucial to Harvey's argument as they are problematic for global stability. That Harvey identifies the United States as the centrifuge of globalization is not surprising, nor is the association of the United States with an empire or imperial power. But Harvey overtly rejects claims found in other globalization scholarship that suggest that capitalism is the mere handmaiden of U.S. state power or vice versa. Initially, these rejections appear to achieve a clever sleight-of-hand and reveal Harvey's wariness of an either/or logic. "Capitalist imperialism" is not about capitalism or the state setting the imperial agenda. Instead, Harvey considers the neo-liberal U.S. empire to be a product of capitalism and the state simultaneously vying for control. Employing the mix of geography and Marxist criticism that he calls "historical-geographical materialism" (1), Harvey claims that most discussions of capitalism and state hegemony perform oversimplified misreadings of the global order. Harvey's book suggests that what the United States has been doing around the globe should be subordinated to how these military, political, and economic maneuvers have been and continue to be made if we are to understand the "new imperialism." While Harvey acknowledges the widely reported examples of Halliburton and other corporations directly interacting with and profiting from U.S. global affairs, he asserts that a happy and cooperative alliance between power-hungry politicians and profiteering capitalists does not exist as it appears. Some popular versions of the happy alliance claim argue that the state makes an initial foray into a new region, usually through military intervention and then capitalism follows with a stabilizing marketplace as the supposed seed of a
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nascent democracy. A widely accepted alternative happy alliance theory contends that capitalism opens new markets first and then opens a door for the state through trade agreements, treaties, and other mechanisms such as the World Bank or WTO, thus preserving the profitable new market. While these scenarios dominate much of the thinking about globalization and empire, Harvey argues that they also overlook the "outright antagonism" (29) between the state and capitalism: The fundamental point is to see the territorial and the capitalist
logics of power as distinct from each other. Yet it is also undeniable that the two logics intertwine in complex and sometimes contradictory ways. The literature on imperialism and empire too often assumes an easy accord between them: that the political-economic processes are guided by the strategies of state and empire and that states and empires always operate out of capitalistic motivations. (29) In short, Harvey highlights the overlooked fact that the
alliance between politicians and capitalists manages a balance of state power and capitalism that is always already unstable. This inherent instability always threatens to transform the state and capitalism into their own gravediggers.
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U EMPIRE FRAGILE NOW

U. S. Empire is fragile now and the Affirmative plan solves for NONE of the reasons why Ferguson 10 (Niall Ferguson, MA, D.Phil.,Laurence A. Tisch Professor of History at Harvard University, William Ziegler Professor of
Business Administration at Harvard Business School, Senior Research Fellow at Jesus College, Oxford University, and a Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, America, the fragile empire, Los Angeles Times, http://articles.latimes.com/2010/feb/28/opinion/la-oeferguson28-2010feb28/4)
In the same way, the challenges that face the United States are often represented as slowburning. It is the steady march of demographics -- which is driving up the ratio of retirees to workers -- not bad policy that condemns the public finances of the United States to sink deeper into the red. It is the inexorable growth of China's economy, not American stagnation that will make the gross domestic product of the People's Republic larger than that of the United States by 2027.As for climate change, the day of reckoning could be as much as a century away. These
threats seem very remote compared with the time frame for the deployment of U.S. soldiers to Afghanistan, in which the unit of account is months, not years, much less decades.But what if history is not cyclical and slow-moving but arrhythmic -- at times almost stationary but also capable of accelerating suddenly, like a sports car?
What if collapse does not arrive over a number of centuries but comes suddenly, like a thief in the night? Great powers are complex systems, made up of a very large number of interacting components that are asymmetrically organized, which means their construction more resembles a termite hill than an Egyptian pyramid. They operate somewhere between order and disorder. Such systems can appear to operate quite stably for some time; they seem to be in equilibrium but are, in fact, constantly adapting. But there comes a moment when complex systems "go critical." A very small trigger can set off a "phase transition" from a benign equilibrium to a crisis -- a single grain of sand causes a whole pile to collapse.Not long after such crises happen, historians arrive on the scene. They are the scholars who specialize in the study of "fat
tail" events -- the low-frequency, high-impact historical moments, the ones that are by definition outside the norm and that therefore inhabit the "tails" of probability distributions -- such as wars, revolutions, financial crashes and imperial collapses. But historians often misunderstand complexity in decoding these events. They are trained to explain calamity in terms of long-term causes, often dating back decades. This is what Nassim Taleb rightly condemned in "The Black Swan" as "the narrative fallacy."In reality, most of the fat-tail phenomena that historians study are not the climaxes of prolonged and deterministic story lines; instead, they represent perturbations, and sometimes the complete breakdowns, of complex systems.To understand complexity, it is helpful to examine how natural scientists use the concept. Think of the spontaneous organization of termites, which allows them to construct complex hills and nests, or the fractal geometry of water molecules as they form intricate snowflakes. Human intelligence itself is a complex system, a product of the interaction of billions of neurons in the central nervous system.All these complex systems share certain characteristics. A small input to such a system can produce huge, often unanticipated changes -- what scientists call "the amplifier effect." Causal relationships are often nonlinear, which means that traditional methods of generalizing through observation are of little use. Thus, when things go wrong in a complex system, the scale of disruption is nearly impossible to anticipate.There is no such thing as a typical or average forest fire, for example. To use the jargon of modern physics, a forest before a fire is in a state of "selforganized criticality": It is teetering on the verge of a breakdown, but the size of the breakdown is unknown. Will there be a small fire or a huge one? It is nearly impossible to predict. The key point is that in such systems, a relatively minor shock can cause a disproportionate disruption.Any
large-scale political unit is a complex system. Most great empires have a nominal central authority -- either a hereditary emperor or an elected president -- but in practice the power of any individual ruler is a function of the network of economic, social and political relations over which he or she presides. As such, empires exhibit many of the characteristics of other complex adaptive systems -- including the tendency to move from stability to instability quite suddenly.The most recent and familiar example of precipitous decline is the collapse of the Soviet Union. With the benefit of hindsight, historians have traced all kinds of rot within the Soviet system back to the Brezhnev era and beyond. Perhaps, as the historian and political scientist Stephen Kotkin has argued, it was only the high oil prices of the 1970s that "averted Armageddon." But this did not seem to be the case at the time. The Soviet nuclear arsenal was larger than the U.S. stockpile. And governments in what was then called the Third World, from Vietnam to Nicaragua, had been tilting in the Soviets' favor for most of the previous 20 years.Yet, less than five years after Mikhail Gorbachev took power, the Soviet imperium in central and Eastern Europe
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had fallen apart, followed by the Soviet Union itself in 1991. If ever an empire fell off a cliff, rather than gently declining, it was the one founded by Lenin.If empires are complex systems that sooner or later succumb to sudden and catastrophic malfunctions, what are the implications for the United States today? First, debating the stages of decline may be a waste of time -- it is a precipitous and unexpected fall that should most concern policymakers and citizens. Second, most imperial falls are associated with fiscal crises. Alarm bells should therefore be ringing very loudly indeed as the United States contemplates a deficit for 2010 of more than $1.5 trillion -- about 11% of GDP, the biggest since World War II.These numbers are bad, but in the realm of political entities, the role of perception is just as crucial. In imperial
crises, it is not the material underpinnings of power that really matter but expectations about future power. The fiscal numbers cited above cannot erode U.S. strength on their own, but they can work to weaken a long-assumed faith in the United States' ability to weather any crisis.Over the last three years, the complex system of the global economy flipped from boom to bust -- all because a bunch of Americans started to default on their subprime mortgages, thereby blowing huge holes in the business models of thousands of highly leveraged financial institutions. The next phase of the current crisis may begin when the public begins to reassess the credibility of the radical monetary and fiscal steps that were taken in response.Neither interest rates at zero nor fiscal stimulus can achieve a sustainable recovery if people in the United States and abroad collectively decide, overnight, that such measures will ultimately lead to much higher inflation rates or outright default. Bond yields can shoot up if expectations change about future government solvency, intensifying an already bad fiscal crisis by driving up the cost of interest payments on new debt. Just ask Greece.Ask
Russia too. Fighting a losing battle in the mountains of the Hindu Kush has long been a harbinger of imperial fall. What happened 20 years ago is a reminder that empires do not in fact appear, rise, reign, decline and fall according to some recurrent and predictable life cycle. It is historians who retrospectively portray the process of imperial dissolution as slow-acting. Rather, empires behave like all complex adaptive systems. They function in apparent equilibrium for some unknowable period. And then, quite abruptly, they collapse.Washington, you have been warned.
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LINKS LINK - GENERIC

All actions taken by the military are connected by the grander strategies of the empire Mann 2003 [Michael, British-born professor of Sociology at the UCLA and Visiting Research Professor at Queen's University Belfast Incoherent Empire, isbn: 1859845827, p ___1-2______ ]-AC Bush the Elder offered a vision of "enduring peace," to be achieved by US leadership, but together with allies and through the United Nations. The speech did not mention any future military action by the US. This was an optimistic and apparently multilateral vision of world order. Bush the Younger was much more pessimistic. He called for "perpetual vigilance" against terrorists and w.ielders of weapons of ~a~s destruction. Faced with "hostile acts," he said the US would act militarily, preemptively and on its own. Allies, he suggested, are. only ad hoc and temporary. The United Nations is mentioned only 1ll th~ .san:e breath as the WTO and NATO. This is a unilateralist and militanst vision of how to overcome world disorder. It is the new imperialism. The world should know that the present United States government embraces the new imperialism. Do not think that US policy toward Kyoto, land-mines, Star Wars, Iraq, Iran or the Southern Philippines are ad hoc or unconnected. They ate all part of the grand strategy for a global American Empire, first envisioned as theory, then after 9-II becoming reality.
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LINK GENERIC/ECONOMY
The question is imperialism is no longer just about occupation but the role our actions play in economic and extra-economic coercion which is the new avenue for sustaining imperial control and interventions WOOD 2003 [Ellen, Ph.D Political Science from UCLA, Empire of Capital, isbn: 1859845029, p _4-5___]-AC What makes class domination or imperialism specifically capitalist is the predominance of economic, as distinct from direct 'extraeconomic' - political, military, judicial - coercion. Yet this certainly does not mean that capitalist imperialism can dispense with extraeconomic force. First, capitalism certainly does not rule out more traditional forms of coercive colonization. On the contrary, the history of capitalism is, needless to say, a very long and bloody story of conquest and colonial oppression; and, in any case, the development of economic imperatives powerful enough to replace older forms of direct rule has taken a very long time, coming to fruition only in the twentieth century. But, more particularly, capitalist imperialism even in its most mature form requires extra-economic support. Extra-economic force is clearly essential to the maintenance of economic coercion itself. The difficulty, again, is that the role of extra-economic force, in capitalist imperialism as in capitalist class domination, is opaque, because in general it operates not by intervening directly in the relation between capital and labour, or between imperial and subordinate states, but more indirectly, by sustaining the system of economic compulsions, the system of property (and propertylessness) and the operation of markets. Even when direct force is applied in the struggle between classes - as when police arrest strikers _ the
If U.S. controls the world economy it will be able to shape the world
Callinicos 05 (Alex Callinicos, Trotskyist political theorist and Director of the Centre for European Studies at King's College London. Imperialism and Global Political Economy, October 17, 2005, isj.org)
In my view, Panitch and Gindin are mistaken both in holding to an over-politicised theory of crisis and in asserting that global capitalism in general, and the US in particular, have overcome the crisis of profitability that developed in the 1970s. I dont have the time or space to argue this here: Brenner has done so elsewhere in a response to a paper by one of Panitch and Gindins co-thinkers.15 The work of Brenner, Harvey and other Marxist political economists such as Grard Dumnil and Fred Moseley provides plentiful evidence to refute Panitch and Gindins
Panitch and Gindin. Their narrative of post-war capitalism gives primacy to a single actorthe American statethat is able to shape and then reshape the world as its informal empire relatively unconstrainedboth because of its power relative to other actors and because of the power of states and capitalist classes collectively to determine the fate of the world economy. But if tendencies to boom and crisis are the consequence of structural realities in particular, relatively decentralised and anarchic competition among capitalsthat are not easily amenable to collective interventions even by the most powerful capitalist states, then these states, the US included, are much more constrained in their actions than Panitch and Gindin are prepared to concede.
assertions. If these arguments are correct, the implications are very serious for Here it would be useful to compare their work with that of Harvey, who in The New Imperialism seeks to integrate the geopolitical strategy of the US under George W Bush with the continuing effects of what Brenner calls the long downturn (indeed, Harveys major theorisation of Marxist political economy in The Limits to Capital [1982] already concluded with a discussion of contemporary inter-imperialist rivalries).
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LINK THE STATE

The state is a crucial point of control for capitalist expansion that fosters the new forms of imperialism WOOD 2003 [Ellen, Ph.D Political Science from UCLA, Empire of Capital, isbn: 1859845029, p 139-141]-AC Just as the state is far from powerless, multinational corporations are far from allpowerful. Scrutiny of corporate operations is likely to reveal that 'multinational enterprises are not particularly good at managing their international operations', and that profits tend to be lower, while costs are higher, than in domestic operations." These enterprises 'have very little control over their own international operations, let alone over globalisation'. Any success such companies have had in the global economy has depended on the indispensable support of the state, both in the locale of their home base and elsewhere in their 'multinational' network. The state, in both imperial and subordinate economies, still provides the indispensable conditions of accumulation for global capital, no less than for very local enterprises; and it is, in the final analysis, the state that has created the conditions enabling global capital to survive and to navigate the world. It would not be too much to say that the state is the only non-economic institution truly indispensable to capital. While we can imagine capital continuing its daily operations if the WTO were destroyed, and perhaps even welcoming the removal of obstacles placed in its way by organizations that give subordinate economies some voice, it is inconceivable that those operations would long survive the destruction of the local state. Globalization has certainly been marked by a withdrawal of the state from its social welfare and ameliorative functions; and, for many observers, this has perhaps more than anything else created an impression of the state's decline. But, for all the attacks on the welfare state launched by successive neoliberal governments, it cannot even be argued that global capital has been able to dispense with the social functions performed by nation states since the early days of capitalism. Even while labour movements and forces on the left have been in retreat, with so-called social democratic governments joining in the neoliberal assault, at least a minimal 'safety net' of social provision has proved to be an essential condition of economic success and social stability in advanced capitalist countries. At the same time, developing countries that may in the past have been able to rely more on traditional supports, such as extended families and village communities, have been under pressure to shift at least some of these functions to the state, as the process of 'development' and the commodification of life have destroyed or weakened old social networks - though, ironically, this has made them even more vulnerable to the demands of imperial capital, as privatization of public services has become a condition of investment, loans and aid. Oppositional movements must struggle constantly to maintain anything close to decent social provision. But it is hard to see how any capitalist economy can long survive, let alone prosper, without a state that to some extent, however inadequately, balances the economic and social disruptions caused by the capitalist market and class exploitation. Globalization, which has further undermined traditional communities and social networks, has, if anything, made this state function more rather than less necessary to the preservation of the capitalist system. This does not mean that capital will ever willingly encourage social provision. It simply means that its hostility to social programmes, as being necessarily a drag on capital accumulation, is one of capitalism's many insoluble contradictions. On the international plane, too, the state continues to be vital. The new imperialism, in contrast to older forms of colonial empire, depends more than ever on a system of multiple and more or less sovereign national states. The very fact that
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'globalization' has extended capital's purely economic powers far beyond the range of any single nation state means that global capital requires many nation states to perform the administrative and coercive functions that sustain the system of property and provide the kind of day-today regularity, predictability, and legal order that capitalism needs more than any other social form. No conceivable form of 'global governance' could provide the kind of daily order or the conditions of accumulation that capital requires. The world today is more than ever a world of nation states. The political form of globalization is not a global state or global sovereignty. Nor does the lack of correspondence between global economy and national states simply represent some kind of time-lag in political development. The very essence of globalization is a global economy administered by a global system of multiple states and local sovereignties, structured in a complex relation of domination and subordination.
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LINK THE STATE

The main objective of military conflict revolves around sustaining the u.s. military-industrial complex. This has created a cycle of endless wars with which to wield imperialism from. The plan is an institutionalization of this very logic. WOOD 2003 [Ellen, Ph.D Political Science from UCLA, Empire of Capital, isbn: 1859845029, p _166-8]-AC Yet whatever specific objectives US wars may have, there is always something more. There is, of course, the long-established need to sustain the 'military-industrial complex', which has been so central to the US economy. Just as the Cold War did in its time, the new endless war is vital to an economy so dependent on military production, on the militarization of the aerospace industry and on the global arms trade. An endless state of war can serve many other domestic purposes too - as the Cold War also did. The climate of fear deliberately fostered by the Bush administration is being used not only to justify military programmes and the erosion of civil liberties, but a far more wide-ranging domestic agenda, which seemed unattainable before September 11. Even the threat of war in Iraq was timed to influence Congressional elections. There is nothing like a state of war to consolidate domestic rule, especially in the US. But, again, the larger purpose of the perpetual state of war goes beyond all this: to shape the political environment in a global system of multiple states. This complex system, which includes not just 'evil' states with 'weapons of mass destruction' but also friendly competi- tors and exploitable economies, requires a complex strategy and a variety of military functions. In some cases, the object of military force is indeed exemplary terror, pour encourager les autres, or what has been called the 'demonstration effect'. This was, according to right-wing US commentators like Charles Krauthammer, the main purpose of the war in Afghanistan, designed to spread fear throughout the region and beyond. In other cases, there may be direct intervention to bring about 'regime change'. In the Middle East, we are already seeing
something like a return to an earlier imperialism, with the fairly explicit intention of restructuring the region even more directly in the interests of US capital. The new imperialism may here be coming full circle. Like the British in India, when commercial imperialism gave way to direct imperial rule, the US may be finding that empire creates its own territorial imperative. In yet other cases, especially in the advanced capitalist states, the political environment is shaped indirectly. Just as the state of war is intended to create the right political climate at home in the US, allies are drawn into its hegemonic orbit by their implication in pacts and alliances and by means of a military supremacy so daunting and expensive that other major economic powers will see no point in seeking to match it." In all cases ,
the overriding objective is to demonstrate and consolidate US domination over the system of multiples states. Such purposes help to explain why the US wields such disproportionate military power, why there has developed a pattern of resort to military action by the US in situations ill-suited to military solutions, why massive military action is anything but a last resort, and why the connection between means and ends in these military ventures is typically so tenuous, This war without end in purpose or time belongs to an endless empire without boundaries or even territory. Yet this is an empire that must be administered by institutions and powers which do indeed have territorial boundaries. The consequence of a globalized economy has been that capital depends more, not less, on a system of local states to manage the economy, and states have become more, not less, involved in organizing economic circuits. This means that the old
capitalist division of labour between capital and state, between economic and political power, has been disrupted. At the same time, there is a growing gulf between the global economic reach of capital and the local powers it needs to sustain it, and the military doctrine of the Bush regime is an attempt to fill the gap.
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LINK BENIGN INTENTIONS

The new imperialism masks its goals with benign intentions like peace freedom and democracy Mann 2003 [Michael, British-born professor of Sociology at the UCLA and Visiting Research Professor at Queen's University Belfast Incoherent Empire, isbn: 1859845827, p __9-10_______ ]-AC Inside the American military/strategic community-though not yet in the High Commandit also seemed that the US now had the military wizardry to achieve victory followed by moral good without risking the lives of American soldiers or civilians. Since we now could do these things, they reasoned, why not give it a try? That was the military temptation underlying the shift toward the new imperialism. The new imperialists in charge of the Department of Defense now had the mobilizing power and the budgetary resources to lure the more cautious armed forces into their plans. The notion of civilian control of the military became meaningless, since civilians were the leading militarists. We will see that the so-called new imperialism actually became something much simpler and much nastier-the new militarism. But the new imperialists see their goals as entirely benign. These have been spelled out most fully by neo-conservative journalists and scholars close to the White House. They tend to avoid terms like "militarism" and "imperialism," but they do like the resonance of the noun "Empire" and its adjective "imperial." These terms suddenly seem full of noble, civilizing, even humanitarian sentiments. The Empire will bring peace, freedom and democracy to the world! They will save oppressed peoples from their own "rogue" leaders! Some hark back to the days of the British Empire. This is why I have styled the two Presidents Bush the Elder and Bush the Younger, recalling the titles of the two Pitts, father and son, the British Prime Ministers who led their country at the height of its imperial greatness. But for most Americans the British analogy raises uncomfortable images of redcoats and taxes. Anyway, they say, the US today has a lot more pow~r than. the B~ts ever did and their power didn't last long (a potentially disquieting thought): Better skip the centuries to the noblest imperialists of them all, and to the couplet pax ramana, pax americana.
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LINK DEMOCRACY/HUMAN RIGHTS

Democracy and human rights concerns become a ruse to subject other nations to imperial control. Mann 2003 [Michael, British-born professor of Sociology at the UCLA and Visiting Research Professor at Queen's University Belfast Incoherent Empire, isbn: 1859845827, p __11_______ ]AC Philip Bobbitt is the author of a massive book on the modern history of states. He emphasizes both their militarist origins and their recent drive toward peace and legitimacy. This is a grand teleological tome, history as destiny, culminating in a global benevolent American Empire-a terrible "Long War" between sovereign states ending with an American-guaranteed peace. His "constitutional theory" rates democracy and human rights above state sovereignty (which, he says, was responsible for the Long War). If a state is not democratic and does not protect human rights, then its "cloak of sovereignty" should no longer protect it from military intervention. He instances Iraq as just such a case. The United States, being immensely powerful, democratic and committed to human rights, is the only power which combines the might and the right to attack Iraq and others. For the same reason, he says the US has the right to take preemptive action against weapons of mass destruction, and to have immunity from international law for its own military forces. II Since over half the states in the world are neither genuinely democratic nor respectful of human rights, Bobbitt's so-called constitutional theory would seemingly place much of the world at risk of American invasion. This is a theory doing imperial service.
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LINK - DEMOCRACY
The goal of democracy is a faade to extract more resources for American interests, Iraq proves BOGGS 2005 [Carl, Professor of Social Sciences at National University in Los Angeles, Adjunct Professor at Antioch University in Los Angeles, Imperial Delusions: American Militarism and Endless War, isbn: 0742527727, p __xi-xii___]-AC In a perpetual struggle to legitimate their actions, American leaders invoke the familiar and trusted, but increasingly hollow, pretext of exporting democracy and human rights. With the eclipse of the Communist threat, U.S. foreign policy followed the path of "humanitarian intervention," cynically employing seductive motifs like multiculturalism, human rights, and democratic pluralism-all naturally designed for public consumption. Few knowledgeable observers outside the United States take such rhetoric seriously, so its propagandistic merit is confined mainly to the domestic sphere, although even here its credibility is waning. "Democracy" becomes another self-serving facade for naked u.s. geopolitical interests, even as its popular credibility has become nearly exhausted, all the more with the fraudulent claims invoked to justify the war on Iraq. Strikingly, the concept of democracy (global or domestic) receives little critical scrutiny within American political discourse, the mass media, or even academia; the den:ocratIc ~umanitarian motives of US. foreign policy have become an article of faith, and not just among neoconservatives. Yet even the most cursory inventory of the postwar historical record demonstrates a pervasive legacy of U.S. support for authoritarian regimes across the globe and a rather flagrant contempt for democracy where it hinders (imputed) national interests. Throughout the Middle East and Central Asia the United States has established close ties with a variety of dictators and monarchs willing to collaborate with American geopolitical and neoliberal agendas. The recent armed interventions in the Balkans, Mghanistan, and Iraq have left behind poor, chaotic, violence-ridden societies far removed from even the most generous definition of pluralist democracy. The case of Iraq is particularly instructive. Framing "preemptive" war as a strike against Saddam Hussein's tyranny and for "liberation," the Bush administration-its assertions regarding terrorist links, weapons of mass destruction, and imminent Iraqi military threats shown to be liesscandalously trumpets the old myths while corporate boondoggles become more transparent by the day. The recent experience of US. involvement in Iraq reveals everything but democratic intent: support for Hussein throughout the 1980s, including his catastrophic war against Iran; two devastating military invasions; more than a decade of United States-led economic sanctions costing hundreds of thousands of lives; surveillance and bombings spanning more than a decade; repeated coup and assassination plots; cynical use of the UN inspections process for intelligence and covert operations; aid to terrorist insurgents; an illegal, costly, and dictatorial military occupation. As elsewhere, US. ambitions in Iraq were never about democracy but were and are a function of resource wars, geopolitical strategy, and domestic pressures exerted by a powerful war machine.
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LINK REDUCE PRESENCE

THE ROLE OF MILITARY PRESENCE IS NOT TO CONQUER BUT TO MANAGE THE WORLD. MILITARY PRESENCE IS SOLELY A QUESTION OF A SOCIAL POLITICS SUBORDINATED TO CORPORATE CONTROL JOXE 2002 [Alain Joxe is the leading French specialist in strategic issues. He is the head of a group in sociology of defense at the Ecole des Hautes Civil Wars Everywhere: EXCERPT FROM A DIALOGUE WITH SYLVERE LOTRINGER http://www.borderlands.net.au/vol1no1_2002/joxe_interview.html Volume 1 Number 1, 2002]AC Given the current state of things, everything that is connected with free trade, with economic neo-liberalism, goes Americas way. The State officially intervenes in favor of free trade, but to them it seems like a non-intervention. If you add a little historical depth and political culture here, from the European perspective, you will find it to be a pretty limited way of seeing things. It is obvious, and all the American leaders say so, that this intervention is intended to "shape" [mettre en forme] social and political forms. Shaping is the catchword of the moment: "to shape the world," "to shape Europe" And if this is not politics, what is it? Politics does not disappear, it is merely relegated to "shaping" the political world so that it is favorable to direct action by corporations. This version of things is certainly not prohibited, but you cannot say that it is a non-political policy. It is politics. It is social politics, economic politics, but also military politics. And there is the shaping carried out by a military presence. "Making the state," at the same time, means making the army, the politics and the conditions of the economy. In the encounter between a European project for the Balkans and an American project for the Balkans, normally, there should have been a nice debate that would have been completely real On "shaping" on shaping what do we mean by "shaping." If there is no agreement on what we mean by shaping, there will be confusions, even open conflicts, and in any case, brokendown peace in the projection zones. Exactly. The United States yet has to find their shape. At the moment it might happen through the war in Iraq, Kosovo, etc., or independently of real conflicts in the field. It might not even be shaping a military conception of political strategy. Yes, but we have to suspend our judgement about that topic a bit. If you say that the military is very important, you have to say that it is absolutely fundamental because it represents the threat of death. And the threat of death is essential for creating power. But the problem is that this threat of death is not aimed at conquering. The Americans refuse to take a territory by military means and install their troops to resolve political problems. What they want is the world. They want the world, but they dont want to invade the world. Their military action is therefore intended to manage the world by using this threat. But to do what? When the economy is the objective, you could say that the objective is not exactly to create the reign of a pure free market in the world, because what would reign would be a march open under a threat and regulated by that threat. Of course, if you say that to Americans, they wont recognize their generous, democratic country; but strategically, that is what comes down the pipeline. This worries even the American military.
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LINK REDUCE TROOPS

TROOP WITHDRAWAL SOLVES NO IMPERIAL VIOLENCE. PLAN WILL BE COOPTED AND ATTACKS WILL HAPPEN BEFORE THE DEADLINE JOXE 2002 [Alain Joxe is the leading French specialist in strategic issues. He is the head of a group in sociology of defense at the Ecole des Hautes Civil Wars Everywhere: EXCERPT FROM A DIALOGUE WITH SYLVERE LOTRINGER http://www.borderlands.net.au/vol1no1_2002/joxe_interview.html Volume 1 Number 1, 2002]AC If we are reasoning in terms of deterrence, that does not work. There is something psychological involved. If you send an expeditionary force and you reduce its numbers without obtaining anything, your naval blockade loses credibility as well. Moreover, a naval blockade has never been very effective. They find ways around it, especially since Iraq is not even an island, there are holes everywhere. Psychologically, the idea that he would say: alright, they are too strong, we will negotiate that idea could not occur if the blockade was maintained alone with a contingent that would continue to grow smaller. But informational and technological deterrence is also psychological Then they didnt have a choice. They had to attack immediately. No, as soon as you know that on a certain day you have to reduce the number of troops, you have to attack before. And that is exactly what happened. And he said it in September, in other words before it was theoretically decided to attack. Returning to the notion of deterrence: in order to have a deterrence that replaces nuclear deterrence, first there has to be a threat; then there has to be a real danger. And there have to be some room for strategy It is common these days to study deterrence using the tools Tom Shelling forged under the term "coercion." Shelling is a game and nuclear strategy theorist, but he also conceived of the postnuclear or para-nuclear starting with the Vietnam War. When the bombing started in Vietnam, everyone thought that the message of these bombings, limited but targeted, would force the Vietnamese to think and say: "OK, under these conditions we will negotiate." That is "coercion" thinking, in other words a pressure that is sufficiently well done to obtain precise results. It did not work in Vietnam, maybe because the North Vietnamese were communists. Now that there are no more communists, this pressure should work and above all, they did not have this electronic time, progress has been made since then but there was a return to Shellings thought. These schemas are rational from a certain point of view, from the point of view of strategy on the scale of universal history, but this does not hide the fact that it did not work. Now they think that maybe it could work since the atom is no longer part of the game, because precision electronics, etc., have been improved, satellite observation can observe details down to the metric level, so we should see a system as perfect as Benthams Panopticon being established, or more what we could call "Panopolitics" This system is a dream, and dreams are not reality.
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Troop presence is limited in totality. Reductions in one area are critical to redeployment elsewhere Mann 2003 [Michael, British-born professor of Sociology at the UCLA and Visiting Research Professor at Queen's University Belfast Incoherent Empire, isbn: 1859845827, p ___1920______ ]-AC Lack of numbers might also detract from lesser imperial roles. Add up the forces necessary for military interventions, a global network of bases, and heightened security for the homeland and US embassies, pipelines, etc. abroad, and US forces are almost fully engaged. How many "wars" can it pursue at once? When General Ralston, US Commander of Europe, was asked by lawmakers whether he had the resources to invade Iraq while maintaining commitments in Europe, the Balkans and elsewhere, he replied, "We do not have forces to do the missions you have outlined."> He seems to have exaggerated, but current policy is that the US could fight one and a half wars at once, one being an active engagement, the other a holding operation. But the latter would have to involve very few new troops. But the major problem of numbers would come after the war in pacification, especially if enduring occupation is involved. For, as we shall see, this requires more soldiers than war itself The problem of numbers worsens if wars are Won through technological superiority in fire-power. The European Empires increasingly faced this problem, as their handguns and artillery gave them increasing superiority ove~ the peoples they conquered. In Africa 3,000-5,000 men would be typically enough to secure a large colony. A force of 1,000 could win a small one. This force could generate a concentrated fire-power to destory any native levy. But holding the colony down required dispersion of forces, in garrisons and patrols across the land. This required larger numbers. They had a solution, as we shall see.
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WAR IS NO LONGER A STRUGGLE OF PHYSICAL FORCES SO MUCH AS A CONSTANT SHIFTING OF TROOP DEPLOYMENTS, OBJECTS AND PICTURES. THE PREPARATION FOR WAR KEEPS SOCIETY IN CONSTANT SUSPENSE.
CHOW IN 2006 [Rey, Age of the World Target, p_______33-4_______]-AC
The dropping of the atomic bombs effected what Michel Foucault would call a major shift in epistemes, a fundamental change in the organization, production, and circulation of knowledge.25 War after the atomic bomb would no longer be the physical, mechanical struggles between combative oppositional groups, but would increasingly come to resemble collaborations in the logistics of perception between partners who occupy relative, but always mutually implicated, positions.26 As in the case of the competition between the United States and the Soviet Union for several decades, war was more and more to be fought in virtuality, as an exchange of defensive positionings, a tacitly coordinated routine of upping the potential for war, a race for the deterrent. Warring in virtuality meant competing with the enemy for the stockpiling, rather than actual use, of preclusively horrifying weaponry. To terrorize the other, one specializes in representation, in the means of display and exhibition. As Virilio writes, "A war of pictures and sounds is replacing the war of objects (projectiles and missiles)."27 In the name of arms reduction and limitation, the SALT and START agreements served to promote, improve, and multiply armament between the United States and the Soviet Union, which were, strictly speaking, allies rather than adversaries in the so-called "Star Wars" or SDI (Strategic Defense Initiative).28Moreover, war would exist from now on as an agenda that is infinitely self-referential: war represents not other types of struggles and conflicts what in history classes are studied as "causes"but war itself. From its previous conventional, negative signification as a blockade, an inevitable but regretted interruption of the continuity that is "normal life," war shifts to a new level
of force. It has become not the cessation of normality, but rather, the very definition of normality itself. The space and time of war are no longer segregated in the form of an other; instead, they operate from within the here and now, as the internal logic of the here and now. From being negative blockade to being normal routine, war becomes the positive mechanism, momentum, and condition of possibility of society, creating a hegemonic space of global communication through powers of visibility and control.
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OUR SOCIETY EXISTS IN PREPARATION FOR WAR. THE AFFS DISCUSSION OF TROOP REDUCTIONS AND ROLES CHANGES IS MERELY AN EXTENSION OF LOGISITSICAL PLANNING THAT CONTINUES OUR IMPERIAL SOCIETY VIRILIO AND LOTRINGER IN 2004 [Paul and Sylvere, Pure War 1570270783 page __9193______]-AC
Let's come back to the superseding ofthe Nation-States, which led people to conceive ofthe end ofpolitics-the end, shall we say, ofa period ofgrowth and progress in civilian societies. How did we end up with such an inversion? --Ifwe can say that war was entirely strategy in past societies, if strategy governed the Nation-States at the beginning of the twentieth century, we can now say that strategy is no more than logistics. In turn, logistics has become the whole of war; because in an age of deterrence, the production of arms is already war. -Deterrence, then, doesn't mean to ensure peace, but rather to settle into war. -Deterrence is the development of an arms capacity that assures total peace. The fact of having increasingly SOPHISTIcated weaponry deters the enemy more and more. At that POint. war is no longer in its execution, but in its preparation. The perpetuation of war is what I call Pure War, war which isn't acted out in repetition, but in 'infinite preparation. Only this infinite preparation, the advent of logistics, also entails the nondevelopment of society in the sense of civilian consumption. --The age ofdeterrence completely transforms the nature of war: direct confrontation becomes scarce, but civilian SOciety pays the price ofits infinite postponement. And yet, hasn't it always been the case? Before civilian society was bled dry by war, now it's crushed to death by peace. War can always change character. That tendency, at least, remains the same. --In the past. the execution of war was an exchange-brutal, ofcourse, and enonnously draining, but strictly relative with respect to civilian economy. With the development of the war economy, we saw an inversion. Now, with the development of deterrence-not only the "all points" strategy of the 1950's and 1960's, but also the "all weapons" strategy ofthe 1970's and 1980's-we're heading toward a generalized non-development which, in tenns of war economy, is similar to zero growth in ecological tenns. The notion of ecological zero growth corresponds to zero growth in "eco-Iogistics." --What do you mean by ecologistics"? I mean the development of an overall logistics: of rockets and all-points missiles as well as the conventional weapons supposedly necessitated by the Soviet adversary, which builds thousands upon thousands of tanks, strengthens its naval power considerably, and tends to fuUy develop both the traditional and exceptional aspects of war. That war economy promotes the nondevelopment of civilian societies is not only true of the Third World, as some tend to
II
think, but also of the "middle power" countries of Europe; hence the debate currently raging over Euro-missiles. Eventually it will also be true of the United States. I won't mention the Soviets, since they refused to follow the path of civilian consumption long ago. Remember that it was Eisenhower, when he left the White House, who denounced the military-industrial complex that he himself had helped create (probably because of ms religious beliefs: he wanted to confess his sins before dying). Immediately afterward, we had Maxwell Taylor's theory on the uncertain trumpet, the "flexible response"-in other words on the need to develop conventional weapons alongside strategic nuclear weapons. At about the same time-all this happened within a space ofseveral years-Nikita Khrushchev found himself in direct contact with the head military official, Zhukov or Malinovsky, and was dismissed because he wanted to promote civilian consumption in the USSR in order to catch up with the United States. Khrushchev knew that American imperialism could only be fought on the grounds of an imperialism of the Soviet way of life. They couldn't keep developing military institutions and still claim that Soviet imperialism would be attractive to future societies. Khrushchev wanted to stay with all-points strategy. It would be enough to perfect the great thenno-nuclear vectors, and then develop civilian society. The Soviet military class said: no, it's out of the question. You can see how non-development is at the very center of trans-politics.
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The affs extinction claimed is used heavily by American culture in a paranoid scheme to continue imperialism Mann 2003 [Michael, British-born professor of Sociology at the UCLA and Visiting Research Professor at Queen's University Belfast Incoherent Empire, isbn: 1859845827, p _103104________ ]-AC Ignorance breeds fear. Countless Hollywood movies narrated alien attacks on peaceful American communities during the cold war, and they have recently revived. Forty-five percent of Americans believe intelligent aliens have visited Earth." There are repeated national scare about invasive plant and insect species-"Africanized killer bees," "South American fire ants." These have the same sub text: harmles , peace-loving American (sometimes European) species are overwhelmed by more aggressive foreigners. There was the anthrax scar of 200 I, the smallpox scare of 2002, the dirty bomb and duct-tape scare of 2003 (seal your windows against a chemical attack). The level of paranoia is hard for foreigners to understand, in this continental country so wellprotected by its oceans and armaments. Reds have given way to terrorists under the beds. Americans arm themselves with handguns and tank-like SUVs. Only one in six Americans even have passports, and after 9-II they travel abroad much less than before. Neighboring Mexico sees few American tourists outside of Americanized high-rise beaches. They see Mexico as dangerous, though the US murder rate is much higher. Cultivating paranoia is a Bush the Younger specialism: sweeping arrests of Middle Easterners, repeated denunciations of foreign "evildoers," calls for perpetual vigilance, the extraordinary precautions against the near-zero chances of a smallpox virus attack (several medical personnel actually died from this panic by being forced to take the supposed antidote), the repeated claims that Iraq, a battered, impoverished country of only 23 million people, half of them children, with a rag-tag army, constituted an "imminent threat" to the United States." Since 9- I I terrorism in the US has been zero-intensity warfare. After 20 months it had not killed one more person in the US. Almost 3,000 people were killed on 9- I I itself, a terrible number. But in the same year in the United States there were 30,000 firearmrelated deaths, 38,000 deaths in auto accidents, 15,000 deaths from lung cancer, and 250,000 rape victims. The US is one of the safest places of the world, except from other Americans. But Bush the Younger's call to arms against Muslims appeared to be winning the ideological war within the US. Though most Americans initially said they would prefer a stronger United Nations, and an Iraq disciplined through the UN, Bush's approval ratings on "the war against terrorism" and the invasion of Iraq remained very high. In 2002 a quarter of Americans viewed Muslim countries favorably, a majority favored restricting or ending Muslim immigration, and two in three of them thought Muslims would be better off if they adopted American values." The public had been made compliant with imperialism by fear of the alien unknown and an extraordinarily self-muzzling mass media. Few Democrats offered any opposition to the new imperialism, giving Bush a blank congressional check to invade Iraq as he saw fit-less because they agreed with him than because they believed the people did so. They were right.
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LINK - EXTINCTION
The war economy thrives because of representations of extinction BOGGS 2005 [Carl, Professor of Social Sciences at National University in Los Angeles, Adjunct Professor at Antioch University in Los Angeles, Imperial Delusions: American Militarism and Endless War, isbn: 0742527727, p __115-116___]-AC The war economy thrives on foreign threats, real or contrived, to American national interests that are essentially marketed to the public as a menace to the very security and survival of ordinary citizens. Since World War II a series of "threats" to U.S. security have justified not only massive deployment of military force but its expansion across many different areas of the world. In this context a heightened readiness for armed intervention-and the recurrent actuality of intervention-favor an elite impulse toward military ventures, bureaucratic routine, technological efficiency, and patriotic mobilization. Superiority in military strength readily equates in the elite mind with moral supremacy, further adding to xenophobic and chauvinistic sentiments-a linkage starkly visible at the time of the two Gulf Wars. Within this matrix state power easily develops into an object of (elite) deification, the very embodiment of ethical national goals, following a trajectory outside the scope of democratic processes. During both Gulf Wars, war making by and through the security state provided an aura of monolithic unity where doubts, ambiguities, and reservations were concealed or suppressed, if only temporarily. In the euphoria of war the public can find strength in the exercise of brutal military force, transferring loyalties and aspirations onto the terrain of state power and thereby helping to sustain the Leviathan.
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LINK HEGEMONY
US Hegemony Subjugates the rest of the world to Neo-liberal Capitalism Ferguson '04 [Niall Ferguson, Professor of History at Harvard University, 2004, "Colossus: The Rise and Fall of the American Empire, pg. 10]-AC To the majority of Americans, it would appear, there is not contradiction between the ends of global democratization and the means of American military power. As defined by their president, the democratizing mission of the United States is both altruistic and distinct from the ambitions of past empires, which (so it is generally assumed) aimed to impose their own rule on foreign peoples. The difficulty is that President Bush's ideal of freedom as a universal desideratum rather closely resembles the Victorian ideal of "civilization." "Freedom" means, on close inspection, the American model of democracy and capitalism; when Americans speak of "nation building" they actually mean "state replicating," in the sense that they want to build political and economic institutions that are fundamentally similar, though not identical, to their own. They may not aspire to rule, but they do aspire to have others rule themselves in the American way. Yet the very act of imposing "freedom" simultaneously subverts it. Just as the Victorians seemed hypocrites when they spread "civilization" with the Maxim gun, so there is something fishy about those who would democratize Fallujah with the Abrams tank. President Bush's distinction between conquest and liberation would have been entirely familiar to the liberal imperialists of the early 1900s, who likewise saw Britain's far-flung legions as agents of emancipation (not least in the Middle East during and after WWI.) US Hegemony Is Used To Subordinate The Rest of the World To US Led Capitalism Hardt and Negri 2000 (Michael, PhD In Comparitive Literature from U Washington and Antonio, Professor @ U of Paris, Empire]-AC As the global confluence of struggles undermined the capitalist and imperialist capacities of discipline, the economic order that had dominated the globe for almost thirty years, the Golden Age of U.S. hegemony and capitalist growth, began to unravel. The form and substance of the capitalist management of international development for the postwar period were dictated at the conference at Bretton Woods, New Hampshire, in 1944.[8] The Bretton Woods system was based on three fundamental elements. Its first characteristic was the comprehensive economic hegemony of the United States over all the nonsocialist countries. This hegemony was secured through the strategic choice of a liberal development based on relatively free trade and moreover by maintaining gold (of which the United States possessed about one third of the world total) as the guarantee of the power of the dollar. The dollar was "as good as gold." Second, the system demanded the agreement for monetary stabilization between the United States and the other dominant capitalist countries (first Europe then Japan) over the traditional territories of European imperialisms, which had been dominated previously by the British pound and the French franc. Reform in the dominant capitalist countries could thus be financed by a surplus of exports to the United States and guaranteed by the monetary system of the dollar. Finally, Bretton Woods dictated the establishment of a quasi-imperialist relationship of the United States over all the subordinate nonsocialist countries. Economic development within the United States and stabilization and reform in Europe and Japan were all guaranteed by the United States insofar as it accumulated imperialist superprofits through its relationship to the subordinate countries. The system of U.S. monetary hegemony was a fundamentally new arrangement because, whereas the control of previous international monetary systems (notably the British) had been firmly in the hands of private bankers and financiers, Bretton Woods gave control to a series of governmental and regulatory organizations, including the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, and ultimately the U.S. Federal Reserve.[9] Bretton Woods might thus be understood as the monetary and financial face of the hegemony of the New Deal model over the global capitalist economy. The Keynesian and pseudo-imperialist mechanisms of Bretton Woods eventually went into crisis when the continuity of the workers' struggles in the United States, Europe, and Japan raised the costs of stabilization and reformism, and when anti-imperialist and anticapitalist struggles in subordinate countries began to undermine the extraction of superprofits.[10]
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LINK HEGEMONY U.S. hegemony uses capitalism and forces other capitalist economies to be dependent on it. This makes the U.S. able to control other nations
Callinicos 05 (Alex Callinicos, Trotskyist political theorist and Director of the Centre for European Studies at King's College London. Imperialism and Global Political Economy, October 17, 2005, isj.org)
Even if Arrighi is right to suggest that US hegemony is unravelling, it is important to state the implications with care. Let us return to the issue of inter-imperialist rivalries. Claude Serfati has given a good account of why, in his view,
there is no chance that the intercapitalist economic rivalries among countries of the transatlantic zone will break out into military confrontations.27 The reasons he gives are both positive and negative. Negatively, the military gap between the US and all other states singly and combined is so great as to create very strong threshhold effects impeding any state (or, more realistically, block of states, such as the EU) from developing military capabilities comparable to the US. Positively, the extent of the interdependence among the leading capitalist economies gives them strong incentives to cooperate and means that US hegemony is the source of public goods that benefit them all.
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LINK - AFGHANISTAN
Afghanistan is irrelevant to our imperial ambitions. Withdrawal doesnt effect anything but afghani citizes. The plan is an ideological service to imperial strategy. Mann 2003 [Michael, British-born professor of Sociology at the UCLA and Visiting Research Professor at Queen's University Belfast Incoherent Empire, isbn: 1859845827, p ___154155______ ]-AC But what could we expect, given such a low commitment of resources? In contrast, the international community deployed 60,000 peacekeepers to Bosnia, a much smaller country. Afghanistan was not even "nation-building lite." This would be very disappointing if the US had intended nation-building or imperial pacification. Bush had initially promised "another Marshall Plan." He was lying. The US would not commit such resources to such a peripheral country. There are shorter, less vulnerable routes to bring Central Asian oil to the West. Afghanistan, with its history of failed states and warlordism is difficult to rule. But the US had no vital interest in AFghanistan beyond the removal of terrorism. It used the Northern Alliance and Karzai to force al-Qaeda out of the country, just as in the 1980s it used bin Laden and other Islamists to force out the Soviets. It then abandoned them. It now wants out again. The problem is how to get US troops out without causing too obvious and immediate a collapse so that the world condemns American opportunism. Only if this happened would the US have done better than the Soviets. In achieving battlefield victory and installing a client regime in Mghanistan, the Soviets took even less time than the US did. In 1979 they airlifted troops straight into Kabul, seized power, brought in 115,000 troops to occupy all the cities, and installed a client regime. Since the US deployed far fewer US troops, it had to wait longer for the Northern Alliance warlords to drive their pick-up trucks into the capital. But having conquered, the Soviets made their big mistake. They did not leave it to their client, but stayed and attempted to impose order. Ten years later, after one million Mghan and 25,000 Soviet casualties, they retreated out of the country, leaving it to civil war. The Soviets had also been too protective of their soldiers-too much armor, not enough light infantry. By the 1980s communism was also reluctant to make sacrifices in imperial ventures. Has the US done any different? Not yet. Can it do more? Probably not. It lacks the imperial will to consolidate victory and pacify Mghanistan. If this was ever an attempt at Empire, it is ending pitifully. But in reality it was just a punitive expedition. Over a century ago the British lost an expeditionary force in the Khyber Pass, and realized that they could not rule this country. Two decades ago the Soviets came to the same realization after more protracted defeat. The US reached the same conclusion with almost no losses. Al-Qaeda was kicked out of the country, which was the main 'point. But did Afghanistan benefit? I doubt it.
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Link iran
THE FRAMING OF IRAN AS A THREAT ORIGINATES FROM OUR VIEW THAT THEY ARE AN UNPREDICTABLE OTHER IN NEED OF IMPERIAL CONTROL NOORANI IN 05 [ Yaseen, CR: The New Centennial Review 5.1 (2005) 13-41, rhetoric of security]-AC The Iranian Revolution marked a dramatic watershed in this state of affairs. After a brief sixmonth period of secular nationalism, the government was taken over by religious forces. The secular nationalists were out of power and Iran became an Islamic republic. Suddenly the rules for interaction between Iran and the United States changed. Iran's leaders adopted an independent set of international relations goals, summed up in the phrase "neither East nor West." They expressed the desire to establish a true Islamic Republic based on religious law. They became deeply suspicious of U.S. motives, fearing that, as in 1953, the United States would attempt to reinstate the monarchy in order to regain the economic benefits enjoyed during the reign of the shah. More disturbing for American politicians was the attitude of the new Iranian leaders. They assumed an air of moral superiority, and were not interested in cooperation with Western nations on Western terms. Moreover, they seemed comfortable committing acts which outraged the United States with no apparent thought as to the possible consequences. This kind of behavior was inexplicable for most Americans. To add to the difficulty, in the immediate post-Revolutionary period, the Iranian leaders were not in full control of their own nation. Though identified by U.S. policy makers as elites, they had very little capacity for independent action on the foreign policy scene. As will be seen below, their ability to act vis--vis the United States was especially limited. In short, post-Revolutionary Iran violated every tenet of the U.S. policy myth. Iran looked like a nation-state, but its political structure was, both under the shah and today, far more tenuous than that of any Western nation. After the revolution it was not concerned with the East-West struggle, preferring to reject both sides. Its national concerns transcended matters of military and economic power; it was often far more concerned about questions of ideology, morality and religious sensibility. Its elites were and continue to be informal power brokers and balancers of opinion rather than powerful actors able to enforce their will directly on the population. Moreover they have had to be extremely careful about contact with foreign powers, since their offices do not protect them from political attack as a result of such contact. All of this has given U.S. leaders fits. Iran does not conform to the set model of international behavior with which the foreign policy community is prepared to operate. As a result the Iranians are "crazy outlaws."
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Link - Japan The U.S. will continue its imperialism economically and not with military presence. Post-World War 2 economic relations have altered the imperial strategy of the U.S.
Callinicos 05 (Alex Callinicos, Trotskyist political theorist and Director of the Centre for European Studies at King's College London. Imperialism and Global Political Economy, October 17, 2005, isj.org) (3) The structure forged at the beginning of the 1980s holds good today, Panitch and Gindin argue. If anything it is stronger now than it was then. Not only has the Soviet Union gone, but, while the earlier period was characterised by the relative economic strength of Europe and Japan, the current moment underlines their relative weakness (GCAE, p55). It is, moreover, quite misleading to characterise economic competition within the advanced capitalist world as a case of inter-imperialist rivalries. Not simply does this overstate the extent of the competition, which unfolds within the context of a global neo-liberal economic order dominated by the US, but the implication that these economic tensions might be translated into geopolitical confrontations, even military rivalries, is entirely false. The European Unions attempts to develop military capabilities are feeble and dependent on NATO, while Japan remains heavily reliant on Americas markets and security shield.
American imperialist strategy is to control the economies of Japan under capitalism

Callinicos 05 (Alex Callinicos, Trotskyist political theorist and Director of the Centre for European Studies at King's College London. Imperialism and Global Political Economy, October 17, 2005, isj.org) (1) Following Poulantzas, Panitch and Gindin claim that the post-war era was characterised by the internationalisation of the state, understood as a states acceptance of responsibility for managing its own domestic capitalist order in way [sic] that contributes to managing the international capitalist order (GCAE, p42). The US used the Cold War system of alliances and the Bretton Woods international financial institutions to construct a global capitalist order in which not simply were the economies of Western Europe and Japan laid open to American capital, but the US state and transnational corporations were able systematically to penetrate and reorganise under its leadership the ruling classes of these zones of advanced capitalism: With American capital a social force within each European country, domestic capital tended to be dis-articulated and no longer represented by a coherent and independent national bourgeoisie (GCAE, p47).11
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LINK - TERRORISM
Terrorism discourse is hijacked to produce fear paranoia ad ensure more imperial violence BOGGS 2005 [Carl, Professor of Social Sciences at National University in Los Angeles, Adjunct Professor at Antioch University in Los Angeles, Imperial Delusions: American Militarism and Endless War, isbn: 0742527727, p _88____]-AC
Terrorism as both political act and imminent possibility is usually accompanied by fear, despair, and paranoia-emotional responses hardly conducive to open discourses and democratic politics. People find themselves isolated, atomized, and thus more vulnerable to governmental controls. Dissent and protest are stigmatized and marginalized, negated or crowded out within an atmosphere of superpatriotism, demonization of enemies, and scapegoating ; political complexities and nuances quickly vanish. In
the United States after 9/11, differences between Republicans and Democrats, Bush supporters and loyal opposition -already narrowed after decades of bipartisan foreign policy-became hard to distinguish. The terrorist attacks generated a united patriotic response that continued into the second Gulf War . Congressional action was hurriedly taken without the distractions and impediments of debate: both the nearly carte-blanche war powers delivered to Bush and the Patriot Act, for example, won quick passage in both Houses, over minimal and easily discredited opposition. Bush's military option, starting with the bombing of Afghanistan in October 2001, shortcircuited discussion of possible alternative courses of action. The jingoism and
ethnocentrism that came to define patriotic unity seemed to repeat the popular mood of the Desert Storm period, again legitimating many of the symbols and rituals vital to militarism and Empire.
Fighting terrorism serves the ideology of imperialism resulting in an expanded military industrial complex BOGGS 2005 [Carl, Professor of Social Sciences at National University in Los Angeles, Adjunct Professor at Antioch University in Los Angeles, Imperial Delusions: American Militarism and Endless War, isbn: 0742527727, p __96-97___]-AC
If the war on terrorism-however justified-serves elite power, a more robust patriotism becomes the cornerstone of its mass legitimating ideology. It might be argued, as Norman Mailer has, that 9/11 provoked a "mass identity crisis" in American society, introducing new levels of anxiety, fear, and paranoia into public life. Dismissing the notion that the attacks brought a heightened sense of national unity, Mailer finds
instead an "odious selfserving patriotism" contaminating an American politics already diminished by the cult of violence, the fetishism of technology, election frauds, and corporate scandals." Mailer is not the only commentator to find an ideological emptiness in American society tied to an erosion of effective governance, brought to the surface by 9/11-a predicament that also provided new
One way out has been to extend U.S. global power in the face of new enemies, with hopes of refashioning a domestic consensus. Surely an
opportunities for solving the legitimation crisis. energized patriotism wedded to a revitalized militarism constitutes one possible remedy for a nation that long ago had grown ideologically and culturally stale .
Corporate globalization, the war on terrorism, the doctrine of preemptive strikes, aggressive moves in the Middle East, an expanded militaryindustrial complex-all this is the work of an imperial agenda having precious little to do with the requirements of national security.
Patriotic ideology, however, lends an aura of necessity to these trends, and the terrorist attacks provided the fuel. After 9/11, Mailer writes, "we were plunged into a fever of patriotism. If our long-term comfortable and complacent sense that America was just the greatest country ever had been brought into doubt, the instinctive reflex was to reaffirm ourselves .
We had to overcome
the identity crisis-hell, overpower it, wave a lag."15
And these highly emotional attitudes were made
palatable to a public bombarded with the inces sant rantings of a jingoistic media. It is easy enough to see how wa..f:i ... --could become a safety valve for a variety of challenges, from economic stagnation to resource needs to the electoral worries of politicians.
War and preparation for war can revive the national psyche, as shown during the first Gulf War, offering the illusion of empowerment mixed with the allure of high-tech entertainment. And terrorism, even more than Communism before it, represents the perfect target . It conjures images of
unspeakably criminal villains carrying out evil designs against innocent civilians, whereas Communism, though godless and evil, was always a more distinctly political threat. The time-honored idea that patriotic citizens ought to stand up, fight back, and help vanquish the evildoers fits domestic even more than the global needs of the system. In Mailer's words: "Flag conservatives truly be - lieve America is not only fit to run the world but that it must. Without a commitment to Empire the country will go down the drain."16 If Mailer proves to be correct, the future implications of such desperate maneuvers might be too horrifying to contemplate.
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LINK - TERRORISM
TERRORISM DISCOURSE CONSTRUCTS THE TERRORIST AS THE BARBARIC OTHER JUSTIFYING MASSIVE RETALIATION ON THE FACELESS OTHER. THIS ONTOLOGY JUSTIFIED THE EXTERMINATION OF NATIVE AMERICANS AND THE VIETNAMESE SPANOS IN 2003 [William, prof at SUNY-Binghamton, A Rumor of War: 9/11 and the Forgetting of the Vietnam War, project muse]-AC
What struck me, after the first shock of the attack on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on September 11 began to subside, was the way the American media's coverage of this horrific event unfolded. In the early hours after the attack, the anchors of all the networks dutifully emphasized the "speculative" nature of their suspicion that the perpetrators were Islamic terrorists, no doubt to compensate for the blunder they had made in the immediate aftermath of the Oklahoma City bombing, when, unanimously and without reflection, they attributed that disaster to Middle Eastern terrorist organizations. Later, however, as the "pundits" they had carefully selected to comment on and
analyze this unprecedented eventformer high-ranking military officers, former CIA, FBI, and government officials, as well as Orientalists of Arabic descent, who were unlikely to introduce the question of the role the United States had played on a global scale in producing this kind of hatred of America in the Third World and Islamic countriesbegan to refer to the attack in the ancient imperial binaries, as a "war perpetrated by barbarism against civilization itself, the appearance of objectivity faded quickly out of their representational discourse. Armed with the "authority" of these "reliable" experts, these deputies of the dominant culture, as Antonio Gramsci would call themI think of the grotesque
example of Henry Kissinger, who, according to the persuasive research of Christopher Hitchens, as the secretary of state in the Nixon administration, committed crimes against humanity (in Timor, Vietnam, Chile, and Cyprus) on a scale equal to, if not greater than, those of General Augusto Pinochet in Chile 4 these anchors of the media abandoned the pretense of speculation [End Page
32] and began, instead, a process of "concentering" (Herman Melville's term, to which I will return) on the symbolic name "Osama bin Laden" and the Taliban government of Afghanistan that harbored him. By the end of the day, the "faceless" and therefore bewilderingly indeterminate enemy had been identified and made practically assailable. From that time until the present moment, which bears witness to the United States' massive and unrelenting retaliation, all alternative interpretations of the complex global occasion that is the result of a long history of Western imperialism culminating in the United States' singular domination of global affairs have been demonized and effectively silenced in favor of a relentlessly single-minded global policy intended to rid the world once and for all of this seemingly malignant evil. As President George W. Bush put it that first day and
repeatedly ever since, "Freedom itself was attacked this morning by a faceless coward. And freedom will be defended. Make no mistake, the United States will hunt down those responsible for these cowardly acts." This extraordinarily reductive representation and self-
righteous, inexorable, and unilateral practical response to the violence committed against Americans, which in large part is the consequence of the West's and, in recent times, of the United States' depredations in the East, is not, as I have suggested, unprecedented. On the contrary, it is the predictable manifestation of a deeply inscribed and naturalized cultural belief in America's divinely or historicallythat is to say, ontologically ordained exceptionalist mission in the world's "wilderness," one that, in fact, has informed the entire violent history of American expansionism. It informed the American Puritans' identification of the Native Americans, who resisted their plantation of God's Word in the forests of New England, with the expendable agents of Satan; it informed the period of westward expansionism, which, in the name of Manifest Destiny, justified, first, the wholesale removal, and then the extermination, of the Native American population; and, most tellingly, it informed the American representation and conduct of the Vietnam War, which, to repeat, bore witness to the destruction of a Southeast Asian country
and the indiscriminate slaughter of untold numbers of its population by the all but full force of the American military machine, which, we should not forget, included terror: the use of psychological and chemical weapons (what, in referring to Middle Eastern states, American officialdom calls weapons of indiscriminate mass destruction) in the insanely rational name of saving Vietnam for the free world. This, among other good reasons I cannot go into here, is why, it seems to me, it is worth retrieving the by now [End Page 33] strategically buried history of the Vietnam War by way of the highly representative example of A Rumor of War 5 at this profoundly perilous moment of world history when the dominant culture in the United States is once again concentering an extremely complex and volatile global condition, which it, and the West over which it has unilaterally claimed leadership, has gone far to produce, in the figure of a single but symbolic person (and the Taliban government that harbored him) for the purpose of decisive retaliation. For Caputo's memoir, perhaps more than any other book about the Vietnam War, bears powerful witness, if only in a symptomatic way, to the dark underside of the American exceptionalism that justified not only the United States' intervention in Vietnam and its unerringly cold-blooded and massively destructive conduct of the war but also, because its rhetoric betrays a deep historical sense, the violent American history of which the Vietnam War was only one example.
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Link - Soft Power

the underpinnings of soft power are part of the same knowledge production of imperialism Liam Kennedy, Prof. American Studies @ University College (Dublin), and Scott Lucas, director of the Center for U.S. Foreign Policy, Media, and Culture @ Birmingham, 2005 (Enduring Freedom: Public Diplomacy and U.S. Foreign Policy. American Quarterly 57.2 pg. 309-333. Muse) The term "public diplomacy" was coined by academics at Tufts University in the mid-1960s to "describe the whole range of communications, information, and propaganda" under control of the U.S. government.7 As the term came into vogue, it effectively glossed (through the implication of both "public" and diplomatic intent) the political valence of both its invention and object of study through emphasis on its role as "an applied transnational science of human behaviour."8 The origin of the term is a valuable reminder that academic knowledge production has itself been caught up in the historical foundations and contemporary conduct of U.S. public diplomacy, with the American university a long-established laboratory for the study of public opinion and of cross-cultural knowledge in service of the state.9 American studies, of course, has had a particularly dramatic entanglement with public diplomacy and the cold war contest for "hearts and minds," and legacies of that entanglement still haunt the field imaginary today.10 We do not intend to directly revisit that history here, but we do contend that the current regeneration of public diplomacy by the U.S. government is an important topic for [End Page 310] critical study by American studies scholars, in particular as they negotiate the "internationalization" of their field in the context of post- and transnational impulses, now conditioned by the new configurations of U.S. imperialism. In this essay we posit a need to retheorize the modes and meanings of public diplomacy in order to reconsider the ways in which the power of the American state is manifested in its operations beyond its national borders, and to examine the conditions of knowledge-formation and critical thinking shaped by the operations of this power. At issue is not so much the way in which American studies has been shaped internationally through diplomatic patronage (though this remains an important and underexamined issue) but rather the articulation of field identities in the expanding networks of international and transnational political cultures.
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LINK - OIL
OIL IS A CRITICAL COMPONENT OF MIDDLE EASTERN IMPERIAL STRATEGY Callinicos 05 (Alex Callinicos, Trotskyist political theorist and Director of the Centre for European Studies at King's College London. Imperialism and Global Political Economy, October 17, 2005, isj.org) Now, Marx famously said that if essence and appearance coincided then science would be superfluous. All these weighty strategic analyses could be so much epiphenomenal fluff, beneath which lies the reality of a secure and invincible American empire. Personally I find it more economical, however, to take this material at face value, and to treat it as evidence of the very long-standing preoccupation of US grand strategy to prevent the emergence of a hostile Great Power or coalition on the Eurasian landmass. This then supports the interpretation of the Iraq war offered by both Harvey and myself, namely that seizing Iraq would not simply remove a regime long obnoxious to the US, but would both serve as a warning to all states of the costs of defying American military power and, by entrenching this power in the Middle East, give Washington control of what Harvey calls the global oil spigot on which potential challengers in Europe and East Asia are particularly dependent.24
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IMPACTS IMPACT - BLOWBACK

American empire is incoherently infatuated with just military power which will lead to its demise due to blowback and self destruction Mann 2003 [Michael, British-born professor of Sociology at the UCLA and Visiting Research Professor at
Queen's University Belfast Incoherent Empire, isbn: 1859845827, p ___15-16______ ]-AC I here assess progress so far, and the prospects for opposition against the imperial project. We shall see that the new imperialists overestimate American power by focusing only on military power. They forget that US economic power is somewhat fragile, they neglect political power altogether (especially in their incompetent planning of the Iraq attack), and their actions completely contradict the sources of American ideological power. Thus they consistently generate what Chalmers Johnson calls "blowback," resistance coming as the unintended consequence of their own actions." Blowback may be from the victims and their sympathizers. That is why I devote much attention to detailing the experiences and opinions of Arabs, who are at present at the receiving end of the Empire. But blowback may also come from America's discontented allies. We shall see that the new imperialism creates more, not fewer, terrorists, that it creates more determined "rogue states," and that it weakens American leadership in the world. But the enemies of the United States are wrong to see it as the Great Satan or the Evil Empire. It is not that well organized. This is an incoherent Empire whose overconfident, hyperactive militarism will soon destroy it. In response to their limitations, the new imperialists are grasping ever more firmly on to the one power they do possess in abundance-offensive military devastation. My conclusion will be that in reality the new American imperialism is becoming the new American militarism. But that is not sufficient for Empire. Those who live by the sword ...
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IMPACT - DEMOCRACY
Imperialism destroys a vibrant public sphere BOGGS 2005 [Carl, Professor of Social Sciences at National University in Los Angeles, Adjunct Professor at Antioch University in Los Angeles, Imperial Delusions: American Militarism and Endless War, isbn: 0742527727, p __202___]-AC As the militarization of American society proceeds, the confluence of the domestic war economy and global Empire generates popular attitudes inconsistent with a vibrant, democratic public sphere: fear, hatred,jingoism, racism, and aggression. We have arrived at a bizarre mixture of imperial arrogance and collective paranoia, violent impulses and a retreat from the norms of civic engagement and obligation that patriotic energies furnish only falsely and ephemerally. Further: the celebration of guns and violence in American society, cavalier attitudes toward war and military escapades abroad, and widespread indifference to established moral and legal codes gives elites wider autonomy to pursue their global schemes. As war becomes more acceptable to elites, often the preferred instrument to fight ubiquitous enemies, we can expect further erosion of the domestic infrastructure and culture. For many in the upper echelons of power this could well be tolerable, but the long-term consequences for u.s. imperial hegemony-both domestically and globally-are certain to be disastrous. Corruption of the public sphere, hastened along by militarism and imperial overreach, is easily enough detected across the political landscape, perhaps nowhere more than in the remarkable deceits and criminal conduct of the Bush presidency itself. Bush's long parade of lies and schemes used to justify an illegal and immoral war against Iraq have brought political discourse to a new low, evidence of a corrosive leadership with few parallels in U.S. history. Lies have become a recurrent feature of Bush officialdom, put forward with sheer contempt for public opinion and democratic politics. Such behavior in high places counters all the platitudes about American democracy, devaluing citizenship and public life while further delegitimating':I--U.S. international power, already compromised by the hubris of an aggres- SIVe Empire.
IMPACT - DEMOCRACY
Militarism and imperialism closes off true democratic participation BOGGS 2005 [Carl, Professor of Social Sciences at National University in Los Angeles, Adjunct Professor at Antioch University in Los Angeles, Imperial Delusions: American Militarism and Endless War, isbn: 0742527727, p __81___]-AC One of the great casualties of an expanding security state, of the militarization of American society in general, is democratic politics, generally considered to be the centerpiece of the U.S. historical experience. Empire, the war economy, a national security apparatus, militarism in the service of corporate and geopolitical interestsall of these have had a powerfully corrosive impact on domestic politics since the onset of the cold war. The events of 9/11 and their aftermath, including the war on terrorism and new military adventures abroad, have only deepened this trend. A shrinking public sphere, marked by increasing xenophobia, jingoism, celebrations of armed violence, and narrowing political debates, has become a seemingly durable feature of American society: not only in politics but in mass media, popular culture, professional life, and academia.
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IMPACT MILLIONS OF DEATHS

u.s imperialism has resulted in millions of bombs being dropped across the globe destroying civilians and soldiers alike with indiscriminate violence BOGGS 2005 [Carl, Professor of Social Sciences at National University in Los Angeles, Adjunct Professor at Antioch University in Los Angeles, Imperial Delusions: American Militarism and Endless War, isbn: 0742527727, p _172-174____]-AC Since the final months of World War II, the U.S. military has dropped tens of millions of tons of bombs on several mostly defenseless countries, with casualties (the vast majority civilian) also running into the tens of millions. Since the 1920s war managers have placed overriding faith in the efficacy of aerial warfare: at that time planes were seen as awesome destructive ... ---chines capable of bringing order to the general chaos and unpredictability of ground and naval operations. Bombing from high altitudes was indeed a nascent form of technowar. By 1944 and 1945 this faith assumed new dimensions as first Britain and then the United States embraced plans for "strategic," or area, bombing in Germany and Japan, ostensibly to end the war more quickly but in reality for purposes of revenge, weapons testing, and sending political messages. With incendiary assaults on German cities (Hamburg, Dresden, Berlin) by the Royal Air Force, U.S. General Curtis LeMay saw a new model of aerial warfare with vast possibilities for punishing the Japanese, literally burning cities to the ground, while minimizing American casualties. This legacy remains a cornerstone of u.s. imperial power to the present day. One problem with aerial bombardment is that it obliterates the timehonored distinction between combatants and noncombatants, between military and civilian targets-a maxim especially applicable to strategic bombing, which, by definition, rains death and destruction indiscriminately across wide parcels of territory. Article 25 of the Fourth Hague Convention in 1907 states that "bombardment, by whatever means, of towns, villages, dwellings, or buildings which are undefended, is prohibited"-still a valid principle of international law. 27 Efforts to deepen and further codify these provisions have been, predictably, fiercely resisted by the United States and Britain, nations that refused to prosecute the Germans and Japanese after World War II for bombing civilian populations, knowing they were even more guilty of the same crimes. Such rejectionism continued into the Geneva Convention of 1949, with the United States especially opposed to any restraints on aerial bombing (including the use of nuclear weapons). The two countries worked diligently to block any reference to aerial "war crimes" from the convention. As Lindqvist notes: "The victorious powers could hardly forbid bombing of civilians without incriminating themselves for what they had already done and planned to continue doing."28 Finally, in 1977 Protocol One of the Geneva Conventions was signed by 124 countries, despite continued U.S. resistance to any laws guaranteeing the protection of civilians. The basic rule states: "In order to ensure respect for and protection of the civilian population and civilian objects, the parties to the conflict shall at all times distinguish between the civilian population and combatants and between civilian objects and military objectives and accordingly shall direct their operations only against military objectives." Article 52 further states that "attacks shall be limited strictly to military objectives." Article 54 contams additional references-for example: "It is prohibited to attack, destroy, remove, or render useless objects indispensable to the survival of the civilian population, such as foodstuffs, agricultural areas ... crops, livestock, dnnking water installations and supplies and irrigation works." Article 57 warns those planning military attacks to "refrain from deciding to launch any attack which may be expected to cause incidental loss of civilian life, injury to civilians, damage to civilian objects, or a combination thereof."
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IMPACT - GENOCIDE
Innocent civilians have always been the intended victims of u.s. imperial strategy. It is an ideology fueled by the deaths of millions in genocidal violence BOGGS 2005 [Carl, Professor of Social Sciences at National University in Los Angeles, Adjunct Professor at Antioch University in Los Angeles, Imperial Delusions: American Militarism and Endless War, isbn: 0742527727, p __177-178___]-AC Contrary to popular mythology, civilian populations have always bee.n .the main victims of US. military ventures, and, more often than not, such victims were clearly intended. Tariq Ali is not exaggerating when he writes: "The mas-sacre of civilian populations was always an integral part 0F war strategy. . Nor is Edward Herman overstating the case when he observes that u.s. military policy has long been based on strategies and tactics that involve a heavy civilian toll."41 This is patently true of aerial warfare, as we have seen, but the perpetual, bloody onslaught against civilians also includes ground operations. The record of European settler military assaults on native peoples, as Ward Churchill documents, spans at least four centuries, part of a "vicious drive toward extermination" that killed tens of millions. Upon its founding the United States became a powerful force behind exterminism even as its military forces proclaimed civilizing agendas. Carried out within a matrix of capitalism, imperialism, and racism, massacres of Indian tribes were often systematic, planned, and accompanied by utter destruction of land and culture--war crimes and crimes against humanity by any reckoning, although such crimes were not yet internationally codified.f- So much of the American tradition of war--savage, total, racist-was inherited from the Indian wars, then given ideological meaning through such nationalist discourses as Manifest Destiny and the Monroe Doctrine. It was a tradition that, to varying degrees, generally allowed for merciless attacks on civilian populations.f The legacy was continued during wars with Mexico and Spain, turning outward with colonial expansion in the twentieth century. Not surprisingly, the United States has consistently rejected international treaties and protocols for protecting civilians against the horrors of war. As Caleb Carr writes, the United States was historically adept at constructing an "evangelical military" bereft of any respect for other nations and cultures, which, thoroughly devalued as a matter of imperial arrogance, were readily demonized and offered up for destructionv' The United States has pursued global ambitions through every conceivable barbaric method: wars of attrition, carpet bombing, free-fire zones, massacres of unarmed civilians, support for death squads, forced relocations, the destruction of public infrastructures, the burning down of cities, and the use of weapons of mass destruction, including atomic bombs. Often propelled by imperial contempt for others and sense of moral supremacy, U.S. leaders have established themselves as beyond the reach of international law, immune to moral or legal rules of engagement.
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IMPACT NORTH/SOUTH GAP

Imperialism increases the standard of living for the upper classes of society, while the situation deteriorates for the lower classes North 10 (David, international editorial board chairperson of the World Socialist Web Site, a leading figure in the Fourth International for nearly four decades, and author of numerous works on socialist history and politics, The crisis of American capitalism and the war against Iraq, WSWS, http://www.wsws.org/articles/2010/mar2010/iraq-m20.shtml)
5. The aggressive policies of American imperialism produced the desired consequences: within the United States the living standards of the working class either stagnated or declined; within the so-called Third World there occurred a horrifying deterioration in the conditions of hundreds of millions of people. For the ruling class and the wealthiest sections of the upper-middle class, these policies produced benefits of which they could have only dreamed. Depressed wage levels within the United States, an inexhaustible supply of low-cost labor overseas, and the availability of cheap commodity prices, produced the ideal environment for the massive stock market boom of the 1990s (which, it should be recalled, began in the aftermath of the first Gulf War of 1991).The economic stability of American capitalism and, with it, the vast fortunes accumulated by its ruling elite in the course of the speculative boom on Wall Street became dependent, or, one might say, addicted, to depressed wage levels in the United States and the continuing supply from overseas of cheap raw materials (especially oil) and low-cost labor. The staggering enrichment of Americas ruling elite during the last decade and the horrifying destitution of Latin America, Africa, Asia and the former USSR are interdependent phenomena. If a mathematician were to study the relationship between wealth accumulation in the United States and the social consequences of low commodity prices and the super-exploitation of labor overseas, he might be able to calculate how many millions of premature poverty-induced deaths were collectively required in Africa, Asia, Eurasia and Latin America in order to harvest a new Wall Street billionaire.The American ruling elite is hardly unaware of the relationship between its own wealth and the exploitation and plundering of the great mass of the worlds population. This relationship has created the objective basis for a social constituency for imperialist barbarism among a noisy, stupid, and arrogant milieu of nouveau riche spawned by the speculative boom of the 1980s and 1990s. It is this corrupt social element that dominates the mass media and imparts to the airwaves and press their distinctly egotistical, self-absorbed and generally reactionary characteristics. The brazen glorification of American militarism within the mass media reflects the correspondence of this stratums self-interest with the geo-political ambitions of American imperialism. And so, Thomas Friedman of the New York Times, who epitomizes the outlook of the pro-imperialist nouveau riche, writes without the slightest sense of embarrassment, I have no problem with a war for oil.
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IMPACT TO TERRORISM NO V2L

THIS RHETORIC OF SECURITY IS A DISCOURSE THAT JUSTIFIES EXTERMINATION AND REDUCES THE VALUE OF ALL NON-AMERICANS TO NOTHING - ALL AGENCY OF EVERY PERSON ON EARTH MUST BE SUSPENDED TO THE UNITED STATES NOORANI IN 05 [ Yaseen, CR: The New Centennial Review 5.1 (2005) 13-41, rhetoric of security]-AC It is important to recognize that the rhetoric of security with its war on terrorism is not a program for action, but a discourse that justifies actions. The United States is not bound to take any specific action implied by its rhetoric. But this
rhetoric gives the United States the prerogative to take whatever actions it decides upon for whatever purpose as long as these actions come within the rhetoric's purview. Judged by its own standards, the rhetoric of security is counterproductive. It increases fear
while claiming that the goal is to eliminate fear. It increases insecurity by pronouncing ever broader areas of life to be in need of security. It increases political antagonism by justifying U.S. interests in a language of universalism. It increases enmity toward the United States by according the United States a special status over and above all other nations. The war against terror itself is a notional war that has no existence except as an umbrella term for
various military and police actions. According to a report published by the Strategic Studies Institute of the U.S. Army, "the global war on terrorism as currently defined and waged is dangerously indiscriminate and ambitious" (Record 2003, 41). This assessment assumes that the actions comprehended under the rubric of the "war on terrorism" are designed to achieve a coherent military objective. The impossible "absolute security," feared by the report's author to be the "hopeless quest" of current policy (46), may be useless as a strategic objective, but it is eminently effective in organizing a rhetoric designed to justify an open-ended series of hegemonic actions. The rhetoric of security, then,
provides the moral framework for U.S. political hegemony through its grounding in the idea of national agency and in the absolute opposition between the state of civility and the state of [End Page 37] war. Designating the United States as the embodiment of the world order's underlying principle and the guarantor of the world order's existence, this rhetoric places both the United States and terrorism outside the normative relations that should inhere within the world order as a whole. The United States is the supreme agent of the world's war
against war; other nations must simply choose sides. As long as war threatens to dissolve the peaceful order of nations, these nations must submit to the politics of "the one, instead of the many." They must accept the United States as "something godlike," in that in questions of its own securitywhich are questions of the world's securitythey can have no authority to influence or oppose its actions. These questions can be decided by the United States alone. Other nations must, for the foreseeable future, suspend their agency
when it comes to their existence. Therefore, the rhetoric of security allows the United States to totalize world politics within itself in a manner that extends from the relations among states down to the inner moral struggle experienced by every human being.
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A2: EXISTENCE PRECEDES VALUE TO LIFE

PLACING THE FOCUS OF YOUR AFF ON SURVIVAL NECESSITATES EVERY ATROCITY AND ALLOWS US TO DETERMINE WHO'S LIFE IS WORTH LIVING - WE MUST REJECT THIS SURVIVALIST NOTION NOORANI IN 05 [ Yaseen, CR: The New Centennial Review 5.1 (2005) 13-41, rhetoric of security]-AC In The Concept of the Political, first published in 1932, Schmitt develops the Hobbesian notion of the state of war always in effect among nations. On this basis, he distinguishes the "political" from other areas of human existence by its concern with the preservation of one's existence as such. The agency that exists for the purpose of preserving existence is the state, and its means of fulfilling this purpose is its capacity to distinguish friends from enemies. Schmitt's point of departure is the possibility that some alien group of people may at some time try to destroy the group of people to which I belong. In this case, normative considerations go out the window, and my group of people simply does whatever it can to preserve itself from extinction. According to Schmitt, selfpreservation is a primordial fact outside of moral normativity. War, the readiness of combatants to die, the physical killing of human beings who belong on the side of the enemyall this has no normative meaning, but an existential meaning only, particularly in a real combat situation with a real enemy. There exists no rational purpose, no norm no matter how true, no program no matter how exemplary, no social ideal no matter how beautiful, no legitimacy nor legality which could justify men in killing each other for this reason. If such physical destruction of human life [End Page 18] is not motivated by an existential threat to one's own way of life, then it cannot be justified. (Schmitt 1996, 4849) The idea here is that no end or objective having to do with the way we think things ought to be can justify dying and killing. We are only driven to these in cases of pure necessity, when we merely need to survive. For Schmitt, this non-normative condition of the state of war is the essence of the political, because the possibility of destruction at the hands of an enemy is always present and must therefore govern the nature of social organization and political authority. The problem with liberalism, in Schmitt's view, is that it does not even take this foundational eventuality of politics into account in formulating its principles. Since liberal doctrine holds that individuals and nations may live peacefully by respecting each other's autonomy, liberalism provides no incentive for organizing society so as to confront potential threats to it. Liberal principles endanger the nation by placing all value in individual liberty and rights and none in the requirements of national security. Indeed, liberal individualism has no means of demanding selfsacrifice from citizens for the sake of the nation. But most significantly, liberalism can only call upon individuals to participate in a war that claims to be moral and just, a war on behalf of humanity that supposedly aims at putting an end to war. "When a state fights its political enemy in the name of humanity, it is not a war for the sake of humanity, but a war wherein a particular state seeks to usurp a universal concept against its military opponent" (Schmitt 1996, 54). The introduction of morality into the nonmoral realm of self-preservation makes matters worse, indeed vitiates the state of war entirely by condemning the enemy as an immoral and inhuman agency that must be exterminated. Such moral claims for prosecuting a war are designed to veil ulterior motives, such as greed,6 or indicate internal fissures in the state, the posturing of political parties to gain power through control of the government's authority to wage war. This sort of political contestation within the state is for Schmitt the negative form of politics that must be eliminated by the repudiation of moral normativity in the political.7 "The justification of [End Page 19] war does not reside in its being fought for ideals or norms of justice, but in its being fought against a real enemy" (49). Sheer existence is the only standard allowed, and protecting the existence of the nation/state is the only orientation politics can have. This ensures for Schmitt that only necessary wars will be fought and that wars will indeed be fought when necessary.
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COMPARATIVE IMPACT VALUE TO LIFE O/W SURVIVAL

VALUE TO LIFE OUTWEIGHS YOUR DEATH IMPACTS BECAUSE BIOLOGY IS NOT THE EXTENT OF LIFE. ESTABLISHING VALUE TO LIFE IS A PRIOR CONCERN TO CONCERNS ABOUT PRESERVING LIFE POLOKOVA 2004 [Jolana, chapter 2: struggle for human dignity in extreme situations, http://www.crvp.org/book/Series04/IVA-18/chapter_ii.htm ]-AC
An animal which finds itself in a life endangering situation tries to escape quite unambiguously and at any cost, although sometimes in a mediated fashion as dictated by the instinctive attachment to ones offspring, mate or herd. Under such a situation humans do not always behave so unequivocally. Their attitude to their own life is not determined solely by instinct, but is freer and more complicated .
Humans are capable not only of saving their own life, but also of sacrificing it; they are capable of running the risk of losing their life and even of giving it up in passive resignation. Such a free and differentiated approach attests to the fact that humans do not identify what they intrinsically are with their physical existence; somehow they can confirm their humanity independently of their own survival, sometimes even against it. Evidently, they strive to exist somewhat
differently than a biological entity, trying to transcend their physical existence. To put it in positive terms: they strive for a spiritually independent existence. Only on such a basis is it possible to compare life with other values and freely avail oneself of it. This spiritual existence implements a
Humans can sacrifice or save their life because of something that exceeds the value of biological life. That is, because of values towards which their life aspires, on which it is based, in which humans invest, with which they identify themselves, and to which they attach supreme meaning. Only a threat to such values "sublime" or "mundane", but always vitally important constitutes an extreme situation characteristic of man. If the principal values of his life have been destroyed or devalued, ones bare life retains value only if and as one is capable of retaining at least some hope of discovering or creating new values. Then life becomes, provisionally, a supreme value only in the name of those unknown values and in linkage with them. From a human viewpoint, mere survival does not appear to be an end in itself. It is not something absolute or unconditioned, but rather something to which one can assume a personal attitude; that is, one which is not arbitrary but spiritually free and connected with values. The fact that one carries within oneself something one protects more than ones own life and without which ones life would lose its meaning and humanity points to the conclusion that, unlike other live beings, ones specific extreme situation involves a threat to values which one regards as supreme. A threat to life is perceived by humans as an extreme situation only insofar as it jeopardizes also their possibility of living for certain values. In a situation of a total value vacuum and hopelessness life tends to become virtually irrelevant to a human person. Thus, one may attach to a certain value, rather than to ones bare life, that which is intrinsically ones own, ones most profound identity, namely, independence and integrity. This reveals the ontologically unique spiritual nature of the person. What seems to be significant in extreme human situations, therefore, is not any boundary of human potential for biological survival, but rather a limit of this or that individuals value orientation and attachment.
purely human possibility of self-transcendence through a principal attachment to values.
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ALTERNATIVES Ontology Key

Questions of ontology must be asked and answered first- they crucially inform all other aspects of policy making Dillon, (Prof of Politics, University of Lancaster), 99 (Moral Spaces, p. 97-98). Heirs to all this, we find ourselves in the turbulent and now globalized wake of its confluence. As Heidegger-himself an especially revealing figure of the deep and mutual implication of the philosophical and the political4-never tired of pointing out, the relevance of ontology to all other kinds of thinking is fundamental and inescapable. For one cannot say anything about anything that is, without always already having made assumptions about the is as such. Any mode of
thought, in short, always already carries an ontology sequestered within it. What this ontological turn does to other regional modes of thought is to challenge the ontology within which they operate. The implications of that review reverberate throughout the entire mode of thought, demanding a reappraisal as fundamental as the reappraisal ontology has demanded of philosophy.
With ontology at issue, the entire foundations or underpinnings of any mode of thought are rendered problematic. This
applies as much to any modern discipline of thought as it does to the question of modernity as such, with the exception, it seems, of science, which, having long ago given up the ontological questioning of when it called itself natural philosophy, appears now, in its industrialized and corporatized form, to be invulnerable to ontological perturbation. With its foundations at issue, the
very authority of a mode of thought and the ways in which it characterizes the critical issues of freedom and judgment (of what kind of universe human beings inhabit, how they inhabit it, and what counts as reliable knowledge for them in it) is also put in question. The very ways in which Nietzsche, Heidegger, and other continental
philosophers challenged Western ontology, simultaneously, therefore reposed the fundamental and inescapable difficulty, or aporia, for human being of decision and judgment. In other words, whatever ontology you subscribe to, knowingly or unknowingly, as a human being you still have to act. Whether or not you know or acknowledge it ,
the ontology you subscribe to will construe the problem of action for you in one way rather than another. You may think ontology is some arcane question of philosophy, but Nietzsche and Heidegger showed that it intimately shapes not only a way of thinking, but a way of being, a form of life. Decision, a fortiori political decision, in short, is no mere technique. It is instead a way of being that bears an understanding of Being, and of the fundaments of the human way of being within it. This applies, indeed applies most, to those mock innocent political slaves who claim only to be technocrats of decision making. Ontological questions must be asked and answered first Cropsey, History of Political Philosophy 1987 p. 891 On the surface there is little indication that this project has a practical or political motive. Indeed, the work presents itself only as an attempt to recover the foundations of science. In this sense it stands within the horizon of phenomenology. A somewhat closer examination, however, reveals a fundamental continuity of the theoretical and practical. The question of Being, according to Heidegger, is the source and ground of all ontologies or orderings of beings and thus of all human understanding. In forgetting this question, man thus forgets the source of his own knowledge and loses the capacity to question in the most radical way, which is essential to both real thought and authentic freedom. Without it, man is reduced to a calculating beast concerned only with preservation and pleasure, a "last man," to use Nietzsche's terminology, for whom beauty, wisdom, and greatness are mere words. The nihilistic brutality of this last man thus seems to lie behind Heidegger's concern with the foundations of science.
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ALTERNATIVE - RESISTANCE
WE MUST RESIST THE CHOICE TO A PART OF IMPERIALISM NAYAR 99 [Jayan, U of Warwick school of law, RE-FRAMING INTERNATIONAL LAW FOR THE 21ST CENTURY: Orders of
Inhumanity, 9 Transnat'l L. & Contemp. Probs. 599, fall, 1999]-AC
"We" are participants in ordered worlds, not merely observers. The choice is whether we wish to recognize our own locations of ordered violence and participate in the struggle to resist their orderings, or whether we wish merely to observe violence in far-off worlds in order that our interventionary participation "out there" never destabilizes the ground upon which we stand. I suggest that we betray the spirit of transformatory struggle, despite all our expressions of support and even actions of professionalized expertise, if our own locations, within which are ordered and from which we ourselves order, remain unscrutinized.
REJECTION SOLVES
OUR ALTERNATIVE HAS POLITICAL VALUE IN ITS VERY LOCALIZED SPEECH REJECTION OF THE IMPERIALISM OF THE AFFIRMATIVE. THE SHEER EVERYDAYNESS OF OUR SPEECH ACT IS JUST AS IMPORTANT AS A REVOLUTION BECAUSE IT ALLOWS US TO INTERVENE AGAINST THE IDEOLOGIES OF THE STATUS QUO
Roland Bleiker in 2000; Popular Dissent, Human Agency and Global Politics, p
201-2]-AC
De Certeau clearly detects human agency in everyday life. For him, normal people are not simply faceless consumers, they are '[u]nrecognised producers, poets of their own affairs, trailblazers in the jungles of functionalist
rationality'. 36 De Certeau makes use of Foucault's research by turning it upside down. He strongly opposes Foucault's notion of a panoptical discourse, one that sees and controls everything. He considers it unwise spending one's entire energy analysing the multitude of minuscule techniques that discipline the subject and paralyse her/him in a web of micro-level power relations. Such an approach, de Certeau stresses, unduly privileges the productive apparatus. Instead, he proposes an anti-Foucauldian path to understanding domination and resistance: If it is true that
the grid of 'discipline' is everywhere becoming clearer and more extensive, it is all the more urgent to discover how an entire society resists being reduced to it, what popular procedures (also 'minuscule' and quotidian) manipulate the mechanisms of discipline and conform to them only in order to evade them, and finally, what 'ways of operating' form the counterpart, on the consumer's (or 'dominee's'?) side, of the mute processes that organize the establishment of socioeconomic order. 37 These 'ways of operating', are the practices by which people can re-appropriate the space controlled through the existing discursive order. It is
not my intention here to provide an exhaustive account of everyday forms of resistance that take place in these 'networks of anti-discipline', as de Certeau calls them. 38 Such a task would be doomed from the start, for the range of daily acts of dissent is unlim- ited. I simply illustrate the persuasive aspects of de Certeau's argument via a few examples, leaving it to chapters 8 and 9 to analyse in detail more specific everyday forms of transversal dissent, those related to speaking and writing. De Certeau focuses primarily on the uses of space in Western consumer societies, on how everyday practices like walking, shopping, dwelling or cooking become arts of manipulation that
intervene with the prevalent discursive order. Other authors locate daily practices of subversion in different spheres of life. James Scott has dealt in detail with everyday forms of peasant resistance. For him too, the big events are not peasant rebellions or revolutions. They occur rarely anyway. What deserves our attention, he argues, is the constant everyday struggle between the peasantry and those who seek to extract labour, taxes, rents and the like
from them. 39 Through extensive, detailed and highly compelling research Scott demonstrates the prevalence of lowprofile forms of resistance.
These are the critiques spoken behind the back of power, the utterances that make up the earlier-mentioned hidden transcript. Although such critique is never spoken openly, it nevertheless is in the open. Indeed, this form of critique is almost omnipresent in folk culture, disguised in such practices as rumours, gossip, jokes, tales or songs. They are the vehicles of the powerless by which they 'insinuate a critique of power while hiding behind anonymity or behind innocuous understandings of their conduct'. 40 We find a perfect example of such a practice in Margaret Atwood's fictional, but all too real authoritarian word: There is something powerful in the whispering of obscenities about those in power. There's something delightful about it, something naughty, secretive, forbidden, thrilling. It's like a spell, of sorts. It deflates them, reduces them to the common denominator where they can be dealt with. In the paint of the washroom cubicle someone unknown had scratched: Aunt Lydia sucks. It was like a flag waved from a 41 hilltop in rebellion.
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QUESTIONING SOLVES
THIS QUESTIONING OF WAR AS AN ONGOING PHENOMENA CAN WE FOSTER AN ETHICAL RELATIONSHIP TO THE OTHER THAT ADDRESSES MILITARISM IN OUR EVERYDAY LIVES CHRIS J. CUOMO is assistant professor of philosophy and women's studies at the University of Cincinnati. She
teaches courses in ethics, feminist philosophy, social and political philosophy, environmental ethics, and lesbian and gay studies, fall 1996 [War is not just an event: reflections on the significance of everyday violence, Hypatia, v11.n4, pp30(16),]
Emphasizing the ways in which war is a presence, a constant undertone, white noise in the background of social existence, moving sometimes closer to the foreground of collective consciousness in the form of direct combat yet remaining mostly as an unconsidered given, allows for several promising analyses. To conclude, I will summarize four distinct benefits of feminist
philosophical attention to the constancy of military presence in most everyday contemporary life. 1) By considering the presence of war and militarism, philosophers and
activists are able to engage in a more effective, local, textured, multiplicitous discussion of specific examples and issues of militarism, especially during "peacetime" (when most military activities occur). These include environmental effects, such as the recent French decision to engage in nuclear testing; and effects on conceptions of gender and on the lives of women, such as the twelve-year-old Japanese girl who was recently raped by American soldiers stationed in
Okinawa.
Expanding the field of vision when considering the ethical issues of war allows us to better perceive and reflect upon the connections among various effects and causes of militarism, and between aspects of everyday militarism and military activities that generally occur between declarations of war and
2)
the signing of peace treaties. 3) As Robin Schott emphasizes, focusing
on the presence of war is particularly necessary given current realities of war, in an age in which military technology makes war less temporally, conceptually, and physically bounded, and in which civil conflict, guerilla wars, ethnic wars, and urban violence in
response to worsening social conditions are the most common forms of large-scale violence.
a more presence-based analysis of war can be a tool for noticing and understanding other political and ethical issues as presences, and not just events. In a recent article in The New Yorker, Henry Louis Gates relays the following:
4) Finally, to return to a point which I raised earlier, it is my hope that "You've got to start with the families," [Colin Powell] says of the crisis in the inner cities, "and then you've got to fix education so these little bright-eyed five-year-olds, who are innocent as the day is long and who know right from wrong, have all the education they need. And you have to do both these things simultaneously. It's like being able to support two military conflicts simultaneously." Military metaphors, the worn currency of political discourse in this country, take on a certain vitality when he deploys them. (Indeed, there are those who argue that much of the General's allure stems from a sort of transposition of realms. "I think people are hungry for a military solution to inner-city problems," the black law professor and activist Patricia Williams says.) (Gates 1995, 77) How (where? when? why?) are institutions of law enforcement like military institutions? How is the presumed constant need for personal protection experienced by some constructed similarly to the necessity of national security? How does the constancy of militarism induce
Looking at these questions might help interested parties figure out how to create and sustain movements that are attentive to local realities and particularities about war, about violence, and about the enmeshment of various systems of oppression.
complacency toward or collaboration with authoritative violence?
It is of course crucial that the analysis I recommend here notice similarities, patterns, and connections without collapsing all forms and instances of militarism or of state-sponsored violence into one neat picture. It is also important to
emphasize that an expanded conception of war is meant to disrupt crisis-based politics that distract attention from mundane, everyday violence that is rooted in injustice. Seeing the constant presence of militarism does not require that middle-class and other privileged Americans suddenly see themselves as constantly under siege. It does require the development of abilities to notice the extent to which people and ecosystems can be severely under siege by military institutions and values, even when peace seems present.
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A2: INEVITABILITY
THE DISCOURSES OF IMPERIALISM ARE NOT INEVITABLE BUT CAN BE FRACTURED WITH COUNTERDISCOURSES LIKE OUR ALTERNATIVE ALLOWING US THE ABILITY TO CONSTRUCT REALITY DIFFERENTLY GUSTERSON ET AL IN 1999 Jutta Weldes, lecturer in international relations at University of Bristol, Mark Laffey, independent scholar, Hugh, Gusterson, professor of anthropology at MIT, AND Raymond Duvall, professor of political science at University of Minnesota, George Marcus, professor of anthropology at Rice, Cultures of Insecurity: States, Communities, and the Production of Danger, 1999, pg. 16-17 The fact that cultures are composed of multiple discourses or codes of intelligibility, and that the world therefore can be and is represented in different, and often competing, ways, has significant implications. In particular, it means that any representation can potentially be contested and so must actively be reproduced. Meanings are not given, static, or final; rather, they are always in process and always provisional. The production of insecurities thus requires considerable social workof production, of reproduction, and, possibly, of transformation. Dominant discourses must constantly reproduce themselves to answer challenges to their
constructions of the world and their identification of those insecurities worthy of a response. Defining security and insecurity requires
Contesting discourses, in turn, attempt to rearticulate insecurities in ways that challenge the dominant representations (see, for example, Ballinger, this volume). In addition, discourses are themselves not perfectly coherent but always entail internal contradictions and lacunae. These contradictions make possible both resistance to a dominant discourse and the transformation of discourses. It is in this sense, then, that culture can be
considerable ideological labor. viewed as a field on which processes of discursive contestation are set. It should be noted that, in analyzing such constructive processes, we are not examining mere rhetoric. It is in any case misleading to associate the notions of culture, of discourse, or of codes of intelligibiliry with the merely linguistic. As Laclau and Mouffe have argued (1987: 8284), discourses are composed of linguistic and nonlinguistic (that is to say, material) practices, both of which are indispensable to the production of worlds and of insecurity. 17 After all, discursive
articulations, including the construction of insecurities, are always materialized in concrete practices and rituals and operate through specific state [and other] apparatuses (Hall, 1988: 46). Discourses and their codes of intelligibility have concrete, and significant, material effects. They
allocate social capacities and resources and make practices possible. We use the terms construction and production loosely to maintain the distinction between linguistic and nonlinguistic practices. Linguistically,
discourses are the vehicle for the construction of categories (of difference, of identity, of threat, etc.). Through both linguistic and nonlinguistic practices, they are the vehicle for the production of social facts (such as insecurities).
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2NC DISSENT - ROLE OF THE BALLOT OVERVIEW

THE ROLE OF THE BALLOT IS TO ENDORSE THE BEST INTELLECTUAL ADVOCACY IN THE ROUND. OUR AFFIRMATIVE WILL NOT ALTER EVERY INSTITUTION OVERNIGHT. OUR ADVOCACY IS A GOOD IDEA BECAUSE IT IS A REJECTION OF ENTRENCHED IMPERIALISM. THE VERY ACT OF DISSENT HAS REAL EFFECTS. WE REINVIGORATE A CONCEPT OF HUMAN AGENCY. YOUR BALLOT RESISTS THE STATIC FUTURE IMBEDDED BY THE IMPERIAL ONTOLOGY. YOUR PEN RESTORES VALUE TO LIFE DENIED BY POLICIES THAT DENY ANY AGENCY AND DIGNITY DENIED BY IMPERIAL VIOLENCE THIS IS BLEIKER IN 2000 [Roland; Popular Dissent, Human Agency and Global Politics, p 281-2]-AC
Transversal forms of dissent cannot succeed overnight. An engagement with linguistically and discursively entrenched forms of domination works slowly and indirectly. The effects of such interferences are difficult to see or prove, especially if one approaches the question of evidence with a positivist understanding of knowledge. But transversal dissent is nevertheless real. It enters the social context in the form of what the East German poet Uwe Kolbe called 'a trace element'. 7 It does not directly cause particular events. It engenders human agency through a multilayered and diffused process, through a gradual transformation of societal values. This process has no end. No matter how successful they are, discursive forms of dissent, even if they manage to transgress national boundaries, are never complete. There is no emancipatory peak to be climbed. Dissent is the very act of climbing, daily,
doggedly, endlessly. It is not an event that happens once, a spectacular outburst of energy that overcomes the dark forces of oppression and lifts liberation into an superior state of perpetual triumph. 'Everything becomes and returns eternally', Nietzsche says. 'Escape is impossible!' 8 Even the most just social order excludes what does not fit into its view of the world. Inclusiveness lies in a constant process of disturbing language and rethinking meaning, rather than in an utopian final stage. If
we are to gain and retain a viable understanding of human agency in global politics we must embrace the transversal and the transitional as inevitable aspects of life. Human agency not only engenders transition, it is itself transition. The role
and potential of agency, its ability to open up new ways of perceiving global politics, can be appreciated once we accept, with Rilke, and as a permanent condition of life, that we always 'stand in the middle of a transition where we cannot remain standing'. A discursive notion of human
there is no end to circles of revealing and concealing, of opening and closing spaces to think and act. Revealing is always an act, not something that remains stable. Anything else would suggest a static view of the world, one in which human agency is annihilated, one in which
agency is grounded precisely in this recognition that the future can never tear down the boundaries of the present. Just as the interaction of domination and resistance has no end, efforts at coming to terms with them will never arrive at a stage of ultimate insight. Because discursive dissent operates through a constant process of becoming something else than what it is, a theoretical engagement with its dynamics can never be exhaustive. It can never be more than a set of open-ended meditations. An approach to understanding dissent and human agency thus remains useful only as long as it resists the temptation of digging deeper by anchoring itself in a newly discovered essence, a stable foundation that could bring the illusion of order and certainty to the increasingly transversal domain of global politics.
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2NC A2: A2: INEVITABILITY

Their inevitability claims are only as good as the acceptance of them. Hegemony creates a system of consent to world order that is unquestioned and leaves imperialism in tact. Capital expansion is used to produce acceptance to American power Mann 2003 [Michael, British-born professor of Sociology at the UCLA and Visiting Research Professor at Queen's University Belfast Incoherent Empire, isbn: 1859845827, p ____1112_____ ]-AC A broader point lies behind such arguments. An Empire of pure benevolence might seem impossible. But an Empire to which the ruled routinely consent is not unusual. This is what we call "hegemony," a word which indicates that the imperial power establishes "the rules of the game" by which others routinely play. Others may come to approve of the rules as well, so that hegemony is also partly legitimate. But the basis of hegemony is more of a matter-of-fact acceptance of things "as the way they are." Then people's own everyday actions help reproduce the dominance without much thought. For example, the US dollar is the world's reserve currency, stable, secure, so foreigners routinely invest in the US economy, subsidizing American consumers and indirectly paying for the US military, without their even being much aware of this. Foreigners see this mainly as the way the global economy works, and so it is also the way they can make profits. In practical terms they consent, though they may occasionally grumble. Of course, the catch is that to be hegemonic, the US has to play by the rules it has established. If unilateral militarism abandons the rules, it risks losing hegemony. That is the worry of the liberals. Leftists have long denounced American imperialism-the word itself is theirs. By fusing two giants together-the United States and capitalism-they have often blamed most of the world's ills on a single Leviathan, the capitalist-imperialist US. Leftists often credit the United States with simply enormous powers, and the conspiracy theorists among them see it as extraordinarily well organized. They agree with the hawks that this is imperialism, they just see it as a bad thing. Even much more sophisticated post-Marxists, like Perry Anderson, partake of this view. He sees no significant challenge to US power and hegemony anywhere. Other powers grumble, but they acquiesce. Even the consent of victims can be bought out by American capitalist development, he says.13 Left, liberals and conservatives all agree: this is the Age of American Empire.
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A2: EMPIRE INEVITABLE

This new militarism is self defeating. Their impact turns are irrelevant because this empire will inevitably collapse Mann 2003 [Michael, British-born professor of Sociology at the UCLA and Visiting Research Professor at Queen's University Belfast Incoherent Empire, isbn: 1859845827, p ___266-267______ ]-AC But outside the scattered "black holes" of ethnic/religious conflict, many of them amid failing states and economies, the world is not actually very dangerous. It should not be dangerous at all for Americansso prosperous, so comfortable and so well-protected in the seagirded continent we dominate. Dangers loom because of American militarism-seeking to drive into the ground the few failing communist remnants in the world, seeking extra-territorial control over oil supplies, stationing American troops where they
have no business, invading foreign countries uninvited and supporting state terrorists. No sig nificant danger would occur if the US stopped doing all these things. Quite the contrary.
The new militarists argue that all their enemies could be crushed by American power. They are wrong. American powers are uneven and unsuited for Empire,
especially a benevolent one. The American Empire is not yet over-stretched, but its stretch is incoherent. This giant's military might sits uneasily with economic and geopolitical resources that originate in multilateral arrangement. It is too stingy to invest prop erly to
Its militarism also greatly outstrips its political capacity to rule any conquered country and contradicts the ideology of freedom and democracy that the US (and the world) holds dear. The giant is forced back to militarism alone, and this is not enough for Empire. The new militarism becomes part of the problem, not the solution. The world is not black and white, good and evil. It is imperfect and various shades of gray. Whatever our ideological goals, virtuous and otherwise, we also
consolidate Empire, as we saw in Afghanistan and Iraq. need pragmatism to cope with the real, imperfect, messy world. Luckily, the United States is a democracy, with the political solution close at hand in November 2004. Throw the new militarists out of office. Otherwise the world will reduce Americans' powers still further.
Imperial decline is inevitable, history shows us that this empire cannot sustain itself BOGGS 2005 [Carl, Professor of Social Sciences at National University in Los Angeles, Adjunct Professor at Antioch University in Los Angeles, Imperial Delusions: American Militarism and Endless War, isbn: 0742527727, p __211-2___]-AC
The U.S. "preemptive" move into Iraq has ironically shown the entire world just how fragile the military juggernaut, with all of its logistical and technological advantages, can be. The historical record is clear: armed force can achieve a string of military victories, but it cannot sustain legitimacy in the form of popular support for imperial ambitions, especially the kind of grand ambitions
Even the most sophisticated forms of technowar, moreover, cannot serve as a viable instrument of occupation by a foreign power within an intensely nationalistic milieu. When the Soviet Union invaded Czechoslovakia in 1968, hoping to quell unrest and an upsurge of anti-Communist
embraced by American elites today. ferment-in other words, to maintain its greatpower control-the aggression backfired terribly, doing egregious damage to Soviet interests. The superpower could impose its coercive rule briefly, but the action was internationally condemned, the Brezhnev regime emerged from the crisis as a pariah state, and the USSR suffered a loss of legitimacy across Eastern Europe from which it would never recover. In the 1980s the Mghanistan quagmire turned out to be the final blow against Soviet bloc hegemony. As with the French in Algeria, the Japanese in China, the Nazis in Russia, and the Americans in Vietnam, national chauvinism combined with militarism and imperial overreach turned out to be brutally self-defeating.
Of course the American political and media systems work indefatigably to convince the nation and the world that the U.S. brand of imperial and military power is fundamentally different from anything in the past, embracing the most noble, democratic ends possible, and that wars to secure global domination are just replays of the good war. As Edward Said writes: Every empire tells itself and the world that it is unlike all other empires, that its mission is not to plunder and control but to liberate.
These ideas are by no means shared by the people who inhabit that empire, but that hasn't prevented the u.s. propaganda and policy apparatus from imposing its imperial perspective on Americans, whose sources of information about Arabs and Islam are woefully inadequate.P
Such an apparatus, however, will never be enough to guarantee the kind of ideological hegemony the United States will require to sustain its global domination over the coming decades.
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A2: FRAMEWORK
Their framework justifies violence. War is the product of hegemonic forms of knowledge which herald themselves as objective and rational. The aff enframes being and discursively constrains agency to their worldview. The current policymaking apparatus is bound to this American exceptionalist ontology which culminates in massive violence while masking itself as inevitable. Only a questioning of the aff allows a restoration of agency. Burke, Anthony 2007 [Ontologies of War: Violence, Existence and Reason Theory & Event Volume 10, Issue 2, 2007 ]-AC
My argument here, whilst normatively sympathetic to Kant's moral demand for the eventual abolition of war, militates against excessive optimism.86 Even as I am arguing that war is not an enduring historical or anthropological feature, or a neutral and rational instrument of policy -- that it is rather the product of hegemonic forms of knowledge about political action and community -- my analysis does suggest some sobering conclusions about its power as an idea and formation. Neither the progressive flow of history nor the pacific
The violent ontologies I have described here in fact dominate the conceptual and policy frameworks of modern republican states and have come,
tendencies of an international society of republican states will save us. against everything Kant hoped for, to stand in for progress, modernity and reason. Indeed what Heidegger argues, I think with some credibility, is that the enframing world view has come to stand in for being itself. Enframing, argues Heidegger, 'does not simply endanger man in his relationship to himself and to everything that is...it drives out every other possibility of revealing ...the rule of Enframing threatens man with the possibility that it could be denied to him to enter into a more original revealing and hence to experience the call of a more primal truth.'87 What I take from Heidegger's argument -- one that I have sought to extend by analysing the militaristic power of modern ontologies of political existence and security -- is a view that the challenge is posed not merely by a few varieties of weapon, government, technology or policy, but by an overarching system of thinking and understanding that lays claim to our entire space of truth and existence. Many of the most destructive features of contemporary modernity -- militarism, repression, coercive diplomacy, covert intervention, geopolitics, economic exploitation and ecological destruction -- derive not merely from particular choices by policymakers based on their particular interests, but from calculative, 'empirical' discourses of scientific and political truth rooted in powerful enlightenment images of being. Confined within such an epistemological and cultural universe, policymakers' choices become necessities, their actions become inevitabilities, and humans suffer and die. Viewed in this light, 'rationality' is the name we give the chain of reasoning which builds one structure of truth on another until a course of action, however violent or dangerous, becomes preordained through that reasoning's very operation and existence. It creates both discursive constraints -- available choices may simply not be seen as credible or legitimate -- and material constraints that derive from the mutually reinforcing cascade of discourses and events which then preordain militarism and violence as necessary policy responses, however ineffective, dysfunctional or chaotic. The force of my own and Heidegger's analysis does, admittedly, tend towards a deterministic fatalism. On my part this is quite deliberate ; it is important to allow this possible conclusion to weigh on us. Large sections of modern societies -- especially parts of the media, political leaderships and national security institutions -- are utterly trapped within the Clausewitzian paradigm, within the instrumental utilitarianism of 'enframing' and the stark ontology of the friend and enemy. They are certainly tremendously aggressive and energetic in continually stating and reinstating its force. But is there a way out? Is there no possibility of agency and choice? Is this not the key normative problem I raised at the outset, of how the modern ontologies of war efface agency, causality and responsibility from decision making; the responsibility that comes with having choices and making decisions, with exercising power? (In this I am much closer to Connolly than Foucault, in Connolly's insistence that, even in the face of the anonymous power of discourse to produce and limit subjects, selves remain capable of agency and thus incur responsibilities. 88) There seems no point in following Heidegger in seeking a more 'primal truth' of being -- that is to reinstate ontology and obscure its worldly manifestations and consequences from critique. However we can, while refusing Heidegger's unworldly89 nostalgia, appreciate that he was searching for a way out of the modern system of calculation; that he was searching for a 'questioning', 'free relationship' to technology that would not be immediately recaptured by the strategic, calculating vision of enframing. Yet his path out is somewhat chimerical -- his faith in 'art' and the older Greek attitudes of 'responsibility and indebtedness' offer us valuable clues to the kind of sensibility needed, but little more.When we consider the problem of policy, the force of this analysis suggests that choice and agency can be all too often limited; they can remain
confined (sometimes quite wilfully) within the overarching strategic and security paradigms. Or, more hopefully, policy choices could aim to bring into being a more enduringly inclusive, cosmopolitan and peaceful logic of the political. But this cannot be done without seizing alternatives from outside the space of enframing and utilitarian strategic thought, by being aware of its presence and weight and activating a very different concept of existence, security and action.90 This would seem to hinge upon 'questioning' as such -- on the questions we put to the real and our efforts to create and act into it . Do security and strategic policies seek to exploit and direct humans as material, as energy,
or do they seek to protect and enlarge human dignity and autonomy? Do they seek to impose by force an unjust status quo (as in Palestine), or to remove one injustice only to replace it with others (the U.S. in Iraq or Afghanistan), or do so at an unacceptable human, economic, and environmental price? Do we see our actions within an instrumental, amoral framework (of 'interests') and a linear chain of causes and effects (the idea of force), or do we see them as folding into a complex interplay of languages, norms, events and consequences which are less predictable and controllable?91 And most fundamentally: Are we seeking to coerce or persuade? Are less violent and more sustainable choices available? Will our actions perpetuate or help to end the global rule of insecurity and violence? Will our thought?
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A2: FRAMEWORK
ROLEPLAYING UNIQUELY TRICKS US INTO A MINDSET THAT WE CAN CONTROL THE WORLD. INSTEAD OF FOCUSING ON HARMS AT HOME, WE FOCUS ON THE STRUGGLE AHEAD. WE MUST ABANDON THE GEO-POLITICAL SYSTEM KNOWN AS DEBATE. NAYAR 99 [Jayan, U of Warwick school of law, RE-FRAMING INTERNATIONAL LAW FOR
THE 21ST CENTURY: Orders of Inhumanity, 9 Transnat'l L. & Contemp. Probs. 599, fall, 1999]-AC
[*604] Indeed, much of what provides the descriptive content of world-order narratives appears to be happening. Increased interaction at the global, let alone international, level is taking place. Leisurely meanderings through the streets of any major city, or even minor town, anywhere, provide ample sensory evidence of a globalization-led rise in homogeneity of social experience and aspiration. From advertising hoardings to cinema posters, restaurants to cyber-cafes, shopping malls to banks, hotels to discotheques, muzak to top-tens, fashion of the chic to that of the executive, monocultures prevail. Everywhere, local flavors provide an exotic touch of difference to the otherwise comfortable familiarity of the global. Of course, such leisurely meanderings are limited to those who have the resources by which to make such a comparative study, to those with the mobility to "be anywhere "--the professional, the corporate player, the "global
activist," the footloose academic. For these, narratives of a "global world" find appeal. Thus, a "globalized" world-order has come to fit snugly within the common parlance of these "global citizens" (politicians, lawyers, corporate actors, professional NGOists, academics), and world-order possibilities have infused their imaginations. The struggle ahead, from such vantage points, lies in determining what the image of order might be, what the structures of a global order might look like . The rush to capture the symbolic and futuristic landscape of world-order provides us with the rich exhortations of "new beginnings," open to the intellectual expertise of both "right" and "left" politico-economic orientations. These range from the "ordering" inclinations of U.S. State officials asserting the right of "benign imperialism," 9 to the "reordering" demands of progressive internationalists calling for "humane governance" 10 and "neighborhood" perspectives. 11 Regardless of political and ideological orientations, the underlying message of the rhetoric of world-order, however conceptualized, is one of increased human welfare, freed now [*605] from the ideological constraints of an outdated, geo-politically based state system. A new order for these exciting times is the order of the day. Setting aside these divergent articulations of the vision of world-order, let us locate the rhetoric of worldorder within the realm of social experience. The point of our concern is not simply about "world-order-talk," after all, but rather, about the real or potential impacts of world-orders, real or imagined. I suggest we begin this
exploration into an alternative narrative on world-order by stepping off the bandwagon of world-order narratives to reflect on the connotations of its very terminology.
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A2: PERMUTATION
THE PERMUTATION IS WORSE THAN THE PLAN. IT ATTEMPTS TO ACCOMMODATE OUR ONTOLOGICAL QUESTIONING INTO IMPERIAL PRACTICE MASKING THE IMPERIAL AGENDA. THIS IS PROVEN BY THE PACIFICATION OF POST-VIETNAM PROTEST SPANOS 2000 [William, Americas Shadow p 175-176]-AC "Jamesonian" representation of postmodernity seems to be blinded by its insight into the late capitalist detemporalization of history to the amnesiac and banalizing strategy of accommodation. This is the strategy, most subtly developed by the United States in the aftermath of the Vietnam War to pacify and domesticate the visible contradictions exposed by its virulent will to save Vietnam for liberal democracy, that has increasingly become the essential
From the decentered perspective precipitated by what I have called the epistemic break that occurred in the 1960s, then, the technology of power of neocapitalist imperialism. A postmodernism that remembers its historically specific origins as a discursive practice of resistance against a genocidal assault on a Third World people undertaken in the name of the ontological principles of humanist freedom discloses a different understanding of the logic of late capitalism. Such a retrieval implies not only that this logic is "the spatial logic of the simulacrum," of fragmentation, superficiality, depthlessness, pastiche, but that this totally disjunctive field of simulacra is a seductive appearance. As I have suggested, the Vietnam War bore genealogical witness to the continuous complicity between the post-World War II American (neoimperial) capitalist initiative in the "wilderness" of Vietnam and the rugged individualist entrepreneur of the late nineteenth century, the self-reliant "westering" frontiersman of the early nineteenth century (Manifest Destiny), the colonial pioneer,and the Puritan planter, whose errand in the wilderness was providentially (ontologically) ordained. To remember this epochal event this first postmodern war, as Jameson has rightly identified it is to estrange the "Jamesonian" representation of postmodernism. The fractured "field of stylistic and discursive heterogeneity without a norm" becomes the "look" the re-presentation produced by a recuperative reorganization of the operative functions of the American logos in the wake of its decentering in the 1960s. (This reorganization, it should be noted, is in the process of being reproduced in Europe as the EC.) The
postVietnam War self-representation of "America" in the hegemonized terms of radical and untethered diversity is precisely intended to make such "postmodern" cultural production appear to correspond with the emancipatory imperatives of the decentering of the Vietnam era that is, to mask the imperial agenda of
the recuperated accommodational center in the soft features of a tolerant and ameliorative benevolence, that is, in the rhetoric of "development." This is tacitly the point Edward Said makes in recalling contemporary postcolonial criticism to the critical task demanded by the absolute affiliation between culture and imperialism: One can recognize new patterns of dominance, to borrow from Fredric Jameson's description of postmodernism, in contemporary culture. Jameson's argument is yoked to his description of consumer culture, whose central features are a new relationship with the past based on pastiche and nostalgia, a new and eclectic randomness in the cultural artifact, a reorganization of space, and characteristics of multinational capitalism. To this we must add the
culture's phenomenally incorporative capacity, which makes it possible for anyone in fact to say anything at all, but everything is processed either toward the dominant mainstream or out to the margins.15
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A2: permutation
The affs form of problem-solving takes the current understanding of world politics and only moves around pieces to fit them together better. This can only entrench current realist and statecentric practices, guaranteeing the plan wont solve. Roland Bleiker. Popular Dissent, Human Agency, and Global Politics. 2000. Page 16-17.
Dissent in global politics is precisely about redirecting this path. It is about interfering with the very manner in which international relations have been constituted, perceived and entrenched. The point. then, is not to 'rescue the exploration of identity from postmodernists', but to explore questions of agency and identity in the context of an understanding of social dynamics that takes into account how ideas and practices mutually influence each other. This is to accept and deal with the recognition 'that our rationalization of the international is itself constitutive of that practice'. The purpose and potential of such an approach are well recognized at least since Robert Cox introduced a distinction between critical and problem-solving
approaches to world politics. The latter, exemplified by realist and positivist perceptions of the international, take the prevailing structure of the world as the given framework for action. They study various aspects of the international system and address the problems that they create. The problem with such approaches, according to Cox, is that they not only accept, explicitly or implicitly, the existing order as given, but also, intentionally or not, sustain it. Critical theories, by contrast, prolematise the existing power relations and try to understand how they have emerged and how they are undergoing transformation. They engage, rather than circumvent, the multi-layered dynamics that make up transversal struggles. The notion of discourse, I shall demonstrate, is the most viable conceptual tool for such a task. It facilitates an exploration of the close linkages that exist between theory and practice. It opens up possibilities to locate and explore terrains of transversal dissent whose manifestations of agency are largely obscured, but nevertheless highly significant in shaping the course of contemporary global politics.
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A2: LINK TURNS WE REDUCE TROOPS

Empirically troop reductions have helped to sustain imperialism across the globe. Surveillance, authoritarianism, and manipulation have been the result BOGGS 2005 [Carl, Professor of Social Sciences at National University in Los Angeles, Adjunct Professor at Antioch University in Los Angeles, Imperial Delusions: American Militarism and Endless War, isbn: 0742527727, p _81-82____]-AC
Despite troop and base reductions here and there over the past few decades, the U.S. military has steadily extended its power across both the international and domestic terrain. As we have seen, the Pentagon system functions to protect Empire, which, since the fall of the USSR and end of the cold war, has risen to unchallenged hegemony. The military and security network presided over by the United States requires patriotic mobilization that in turn depends on an efficient propaganda system operating largely in the service of government agendas. Where such mobilization is highly effective, as in the case of the two Gulf Wars, the result is a strong authoritarianism marked by ideological conformism, institutional narrowing, a regime of surveillance, media manipulation, secrecy in government decision making, the growing concentration of power in a few hands. If Empire signifies an increasingly militarized politics and society, where "national security" priorities shape elite agendas, then democracy winds up as something of a charade where lies, myths, distortions, and cover-ups that shape public life are embraced and passed on by Republican and Democratic politicians alike. This is
probably more true of international affairs than of any other realm. The maintenance of Empire, always costly and destructive, requires ongoing legitimation, which it receives from politicians, officials, the media, and intellectuals who exercise their influence within reputedly free and open public forums. With the disappearance of any semblance of a Soviet challenge by the early 1990s, glob al terrorism soon furnished the perfect demonized enemy, joined by a few "rogue states" led by modernday Hitlers.
Public support
for U.S. militarism was of course much easier to galvanize after 9/11, patriotism reaching its highest point since
World War II as the fear of new terrorist episodes lent a sense 'of national urgency to crucial state functions: surveillance, intelligence, law enforcement, military preparedness. In such a setting, new weapons systems were much easier to justify and sell. In his 2 002 State of the Union address Bush argued for a military budget reaching nearly $400 billion, including new requests for high-tech weaponry, mobile anti terror units, space militarization, nuclear modernization, and expanded worldwide military deployments .
The plans act of demilitarization is ineffective, it doesnt change the endemic culture of imperialism abroad BOGGS 2005 [Carl, Professor of Social Sciences at National University in Los Angeles, Adjunct Professor at Antioch University in Los Angeles, Imperial Delusions: American Militarism and Endless War, isbn: 0742527727, p __207___]-AC
To the degree military force serves as the cornerstone of US. global strategy, imperial power grows paradoxically ever more fragile as the world system faces mounting dysfunctions: economic breakdown, political
instability, terrorism, urban chaos and violence, the spread of weapons of mass destruction. Global decline can be expected to have immediate
the American economy (and society) is so fully intertwined with the world capitalist system. While militarization appears to demonstrate national strength, and surely does so in a variety of combat situations, in reality it only masks or deflects these dysfunctions: armed supremacy ironically works to compensate for imperial weaknesses, not only economic decline but, more crucially, the erosion of ideological
carryover into the domestic realm because hegemony. U.S. competitive advantage relative to Europe and Asia-both materially and politically--has been sliding for some time, even as the United States retains its superpower military status. So too has the domestic infrastructure of American society gone into decline, owing in part to the burdensome costs of global expansion and the dysfunctions of its grand strategy.
The war on terrorism, certain to be a durable feature of American political life for decades, can only reinforce this trajectory, pushed along by the quagmire in Iraq and, more generally, the Middle East. If global domination requires broad and firm popular support within the matrix of a stable (administered, multinational) corporate economy, then heavy reliance on military force-affirming coercion over consent-is ultimately counterproductive. If demilitarization of US. foreign policy (and society) is the more rational strategy, the problem is that militarism has become so endemic to American society as a whole, creating an inbred way of life within the economy, politics, and culture Gust as President Eisenhower said he feared in 1959), that it will be very difficult to reverse.
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A2: LINK TURN WE REDUCE TROOPS

The new imperialism is a creation of capitalist market forces that altered the function of the nation state WOOD 2003 [Ellen, Ph.D Political Science from UCLA, Empire of Capital, isbn: 1859845029, p _9-10]-AC
The new imperialism is what it is because it is a creature of capitalism. 1 Capitalism is a system in which all economic actors producers and appropriators - depend upon the market for their most basic needs. It is a system in which class relations between producers and appropriators, and specifically the relation between capitalists and wage labourers, are also mediated by the market. This is in sharp contrast to non-capitalist societies, where direct producers typically had non-market access to the means of production, especially land, and therefore were sheltered from the forces of the market, while appropriators relied on superior force to extract surplus labour from direct producers. In capitalism, the market dependence of both appropriators and producers means that they are subject to the imperatives of competition, accumulation and increasing labour productivity; and the whole system, in which competitive production is a fundamental condition of existence, is driven by these imperatives. The effect is, among other things, a distinctive relation between political and economic power, which has consequences both for class relations and imperial expansion.
Capitalist imperialism doesnt rely on military presence to subjugate peoples, it uses economic coercion WOOD 2003 [Ellen, Ph.D Political Science from UCLA, Empire of Capital, isbn: 1859845029, p _21-2]-AC Older forms of imperialism depended directly on conquest and colonial rule. Capitalism has extended the reach of imperial domination far beyond the capacities of direct political rule or colonial occupation, simply by imposing and manipulating the operations of a capitalist market. Just as capitalist classes need no direct political. command over propertyless workers, capitalist empires can rely on economic pressures to exploit subordinate societies. But just as workers had to be made dependent on capital and kept that way, so subordinate economies must be made and kept vulnerable to economic manipulation by capital and the capitalist market - and this can be a very violent process.
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A2: PREDICTIONS GOOD

YOUR PREDICTION ARGUMENTS ARE NONSENSE. THEY ANNIHILATE HUMAN AGENCY WHILE SIMULTANEOUSLY CREATING A SELF-FULFILLING PROPHECY OF THEIR IMPACTS Roland Bleiker in 2000; Cambridge University Press, Popular Dissent, Human Agency and Global Politic, p48-49 2000. The very notion of prediction does, by its own logic, annihilate human agency. To assert that international relations is a domain of political dynamics whose future should be predictable through a convincing set of theoretical propositions is to assume that the course of global politics is to a certain extent predetermined. From such a vantage-point there is no more room for interference and human agency, no more possibility for politics to overtake theory. A predictive approach thus runs the risk of ending up in a form of inquiry that imposes a static image upon a far more complex set of transversal political practices. The point of a theoretical inquiry, however, is not to ignore the constantly changing domain of international relations. Rather, the main objective must consist of facilitating an understanding of transversal struggles that can grapple with those moments when people walk through walls precisely when nobody expects them to do so. Prediction is a problematic assessment tool even if a theory is able to anticipate future events. Important theories, such as realist interpretations of international politics, may well predict certain events only because their theoretical premises have become so objectivised that they have started to shape decision makers and political dynamics. Dissent, in this case, is the process that reshapes these entrenched perceptions and the ensuing political practices.
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A2: PREDICTIONS - KURESAWA

Your predictions are inaccurate scare tactics. Their apocalyptic representations reinforce status quo institutions resulting in culture of fear makes public sphere deliberation and cultural change impossible Kurasawa 04, [Fuyuki, Assistant Prof. of Sociology @ York University, Cautionary Tales, Constellations Vol. 11, No. 4, Blackwell Synergy]-AC
In a word, then, procrastination makes little sense for three principal reasons: it exponentially raises the costs of eventual future action; it reduces preventive options; and it erodes their effectiveness. With the foreclosing of long-range alternatives, later generations may be left with a single course of action, namely, that of merely reacting to large-scale emergencies as they arise. We need only think of how it gradually becomes more
Preventive foresight is grounded in the opposite logic, whereby the decision to work through perils today greatly enhances both the subsequent room for maneuver and the chances of success. Humanitarian,
difficult to control climate change, let alone reverse it, or to halt mass atrocities once they are underway. environmental, and techno-scientific activists have convincingly shown that we cannot afford not to engage in preventive labor. Moreover, I would contend that farsighted cosmopolitanism is not as remote or idealistic a prospect as it appears to some, for as Falk writes, [g]lobal justice between temporal communities, however, actually seems to be increasing, as evidenced by various expressions of greater sensitivity to past injustices and future dangers.36 Global
civil society may well be helping a new generational selfconception take root, according to which we view ourselves as the provisional caretakers of our planetary commons. Out of our sense of responsibility for the well-being of those who will follow us, we come to be more concerned about the here and now. IV. Towards an Autonomous Future Up to this point, I have tried to demonstrate that transnational socio-political relations are nurturing a thriving culture and infrastructure of prevention from below, which challenges presumptions about the inscrutability of the future (II) and a
stance of indifference toward it (III). Nonetheless, unless and until it is substantively filled in, the argument is vulnerable to misappropriation since farsightedness does not in and of itself ensure emancipatory outcomes. Therefore, this section proposes to specify normative criteria and participatory procedures through which citizens can determine the reasonableness, legitimacy, and effectiveness of competing dystopian visions in order to arrive at a socially self-instituting future. Foremost among
the possible distortions of farsightedness is alarmism, the manufacturing of unwarranted and unfounded doomsday scenarios. State and market institutions may seek to produce a culture of fear by deliberately stretching interpretations of reality beyond the limits of the plausible so as to exaggerate the prospects of impending catastrophes, or yet again, by intentionally promoting certain prognoses over others for instrumental purposes. Accordingly, regressive dystopias can operate as Trojan horses advancing political agendas or commercial interests that would otherwise be susceptible to public scrutiny and opposition. Instances of this kind of manipulation of the dystopian imaginary are plentiful: the invasion of Iraq in the name of fighting terrorism and an imminent threat of use of weapons of mass destruction; the severe curtailing of American civil liberties amidst fears of a collapse of homeland security; the neoliberal dismantling of the welfare state as the only
remedy for an ideologically constructed fiscal crisis; the conservative expansion of policing and incarceration due to supposedly spiraling crime waves; and so forth. Alarmism constructs and codes the future in particular ways, producing or reinforcing certain crisis narratives, belief structures, and rhetorical conventions. As much
as alarmist ideas beget a culture of fear, the reverse is no less true. If fear-mongering is a misappropriation of preventive foresight, resignation about the future represents a problematic outgrowth of the popular acknowledgment of global perils. Some believe that the world to come is so uncertain and dangerous that we should not attempt to modify the course of history; the future will look after itself for better or worse, regardless of what we do or wish. One version of this argument consists in a complacent optimism perceiving the future as fated to be better than either the past or the present. Frequently accompanying it is a self-deluding denial of what is plausible (the world will not be so bad after all), or a naively Panglossian pragmatism (things will work themselves out in spite of everything, because humankind always finds ways to survive).37 Much more common, however, is the opposite reaction, a fatalistic pessimism reconciled to the idea that the future will be necessarily worse than what preceded it. This is sustained by a tragic chronological framework according to which humanity is doomed to decay, or a cyclical one of the endless repetition of the mistakes of the past. On top of their dubious assessments of what is to come,
alarmism and resignation would, if widely accepted, undermine a viable practice of farsightedness. Indeed, both of them encourage public disengagement from deliberation about scenarios for the future, a process that appears to be dangerous, pointless, or unnecessary. The resulting depublicization of debate leaves dominant groups and institutions (the state, the market, techno-science) in charge of sorting out the future for the rest of us, thus effectively producing a heteronomous social order. How, then, can we support a democratic process of prevention from below? The
answer, I think, lies in cultivating the public capacity for critical judgment and deliberation, so that participants in global civil society subject all claims about potential catastrophes to examination, evaluation, and contestation. Two normative concepts are particularly well suited to grounding these tasks: the precautionary principle and global justice.
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A2: REALISM
CALLS OF REALISM ARE HIJACKED BY IMPERIALISTS TO JUSTIFY A NEVER ENDING WAR. THIS BLINDNESS TO THE BLOOD LOST BY IMPERIALISM WILL PRODUCE ANOTHER AMERICAN DEFEAT OR THE END OF THE GLOBE Spanos, William V. 2008 [American exceptionalism in the age of globalization : the specter of
Vietnam P 96]-AC
To reiterate, I have invoked Samuel Huntington's latest books in my attempt to demonstrate the quite remarkable relevance of Greene's The Quiet American to the post-9/11 global occasion, not for their uniqueness, but because they are, like York Harding's books in the context of the Cold War, representative of the discourse of the policy makers of the Bush administration about America's global war against terror. The differenceand it is a crucial one, as we shall see when I return to him in chapter 6is that Huntington makes quite explicit the deeply back- grounded religiocultural or "civilizational" foundation of this extremely dangerousbut finally self-defeatingnational initiative that most of his other neoconservative colleagues conceal behind the geopolitical "realism" of their global vision. I mean specifically the American exceptionalist problematic of the frontier (the Puritan "errand in the wilderness"), epitomized by the American jeremiad, that determined the theory and practice of those who inaugurated and executed the American war in Vietnamand, in the fulfillment of its oversight, inadvertently turned that which was invisible to it into a spectral force that defeated the most powerful army in the world.As I have been suggesting by way of pointing to the indissoluble relationship between York Harding's policy books and Alden Pyle's American Protestant "textual attitude" and its disastrous practical consequences, Greene's novel about America's initial intervention in Vietnam is proleptic of the post 9/11 occasion. In perceiving the United States' original intervention in Vietnam in terms of the perennial American exceptionalist/Cold War/Orientalist problematic, it enables us a half- century later to retrieve the singular actualities of the Vietnam War from the oblivion to which they were relegated by the American culture industry in its aftermath. By overdetermining the role of York Harding's books in the clandestine terrorist practice of Alden Pyle, Greene anticipates not simply that this American exceptionalist problematic, in privileging oversight, in spatializing
time/history, manifested itself in the following decade as an oversight that ultimately resulted in the devastation of an inordinate number of innocent Vietnamese people (it is estimated that about half of the two million that were killed were civilians) and of their land in the name of saving them for the free world. Insofar as this problematic was necessarily blind to the blood of its subaltern victims, it also rendered that invisible blood visiblemade it a specter that haunted the American exceptionalist problematic, a specter whose visible invisibility molecularized and eventually defeated the most powerful army in the history of warfare.'"By thus anticipating these paradoxical consequences of the American exceptionalist problematic in the Vietnam War, Greene's novel also anticipates the disastrous consequences of the exceptionalist "civilizational" problematic of the intellectual deputies of the Bush administration that is now determining America's global "war on terror":
not simply the carnage its relentlessly single-minded (Ahabian) perspective ("staying the course," as the president has insistently put it) is wreaking in the Islamic Middle East in the name of saving it for the "civilized world," but also, as the sporadic and dispersed but increasingly frequent acts of a "terrorism" suggest, the emergence of
a spectral forceone that promises to become globalthe visible invisibility of which, as in the Vietnam War, is molecularizing the American juggernaut and thus threatens to eventually produce an impasse that is likely
to terminate in the peculiar kind of defeat that America suffered in the Vietnam Waror the annihilation of the planet.
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A2: UTIL/COST BENEFIT RATIONALITY

The political logic employed by cost benefit utilitarianism is a form of ethical decision-making that strips life of any value. This produces a calculus that routinizes the killing of others where any atrocity is forgotten in the name of exceptionalist progress. SPANOS 2000 [William V, anatomy of an empire,P 272]-AC 20. Michael Herr, Dispatches (New York: Vintage, 1991), 71. The terrible banality of the American colonel's response should not be understood as either unique or confined to the American military leaders. On the contrary, it reflects the thinking of the American cultural army that planned the Vietnam War that the military executed by way of the indiscriminate strategy of the body count. As Richard Ohmann's brilliant analysis of the appallingly banal inhumanity of the language of The Pentagon Papers demonstrated a quarter of a century ago only to be forgotten - the policy makers in the Pentagon relied on an unrelenting "problemsolving" rationality: the fulfilled allotrope of the American pragmatist tradition. They based their futural projections on a pre- preestablished but unacknowledged narrative scenario that was informed by a purely quantitative measure absolutely stripped of any consciousness of particularity, especially human particularity. It is a mistake to read the dehumanizing logic of these memoranda as simply a conscious strategy, cynical or otherwise, intended to render the conduct of the war more efficient by obliterating from view the particularities of that occasion that would complicate and impede the progress of the war. On the contrary, the logic of these Pentagon thinkers - they were "the best and the brightest" - was the logic of common sense taken to its end. Those who practiced it were not unique conspirators, evil men in the conventional sense of the word; they were Americans whose thought was consonant with the truth as most Americans understood it. That is the real horror of these inhuman documents that routinize killing: they show no evidence of their authors' consciousness of the reality they were indiscriminately obliterating. As Ohmann says, "The main point to make [in the context of the terrible effects of this "cost/benefit" rhetorical framework of this problem-solving thinking] is that since the suffering of the Vietnamese didn't impinge on the consciousness of the policy-makers, it had virtually no existence for them" (Ohmann, English in America, 202).
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A2: OBAMA ISNT IMPERIALIST

JUST BECAUSE OBAMA WON DOESNT MEAN THAT POLICIES WILL CHANGE THEY REMAIN TRAPPED IN THE SAME REALIST PROBLEMATIC BACEVICH 2009 [Andrew, Former Military, The Limits of Power: The End of American Exceptionalism, Holt Paperbacks 2009 pp. 187] Consider Obama's national security team, headed by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, General James Jones as national security adviser, and Admiral Dennis Blair as director of national intelligence. Each and every one is a seasoned professional: competent, well- informed, pragmatic, and wise in the ways of Washington. Yet however imposing their rsums, they are establishment figures, utterly conventional in their outlook. That a career intelligence official like Gates or a retired Marine four-star like Jones will question the core assumptions informing standard national security practices is by no means an impossibility. It's just not especially likely. One might as well look to the CEOs of Detroit's Big Three to promote mass transit as a preferred alternative to the automobile. OBAMA STILL CONTINUES THE GLOBAL WAR ON TERROR USING THE SAME RHETORIC AS THE BUSH ADMINISTRATION BACEVICH 2009 [Andrew, Former Military, The Limits of Power: The End of American Exceptionalism, Holt Paperbacks 2009 pp. 185-] Prior to November 4th, Obama's hawkish posturing on these issues may have reflected a conscious effort to insulate himself from charges, regularly flung at Democrats, of being soft on national security. At least implicitly, however, he also appeared to signal his own personal commitment to the global war on terror, a term he continued to use. Candidate Obama differed with Bush (and with the man who ran against him, Senator John McCain) not on fundamental principles but on operational priorities. Obama never directly questioned the wisdom of perpetuating the global war that Bush had conceived; he merely conveyed the sense that he would fight that war more effectively. Obama is behind an imperialist strategy in Afghanistan Bill Van Auken JULY 18, 2008 Obama outlines policy of endless waR http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=9616 Speaking before a backdrop of massed American flags at the Reagan Building in Washington, Obama made it clear that he opposes the present US policy in Iraq not on the basis of any principled opposition to neo-colonialism or aggressive war, but rather on the grounds that the Iraq war is a mistaken deployment of power that fails to advance the global strategic interests of American imperialism. What emerges from the speech by the junior senator from Illinois is that the November
election will not provide the American people with the opportunity to vote for or against war, but merely to choose which of the two colonialstyle wars that US forces are presently fighting should be escalated. As in his op-ed piece published in the New York Times on Monday, his call on Tuesday for the withdrawal of US combat troops from Iraq was linked to the proposal to dispatch as many as 10,000 troops to Afghanistan to
Obamas speech was a critique of the Bush administrations incompetence in pursuing an imperialist strategy, combined with an implicit commitment to advance the same basic strategy in a more rational and effective manner once he enters the White House.
escalate the war there. The thrust of
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A2: CAP GOOD IMPACT TURNS

Capitalist logic justifies hegemonic expansion promoting aggressive instability resulting in nuclear war, environmental destruction, and planetary collapse Foster, Oregon University Department of Sociology Professor, 05
(John B., Monthly Review, http://www.monthlyreview.org/0905jbf.htm, September,) From the longer view offered by a historical-materialist critique of capitalism, the direction that would be taken by U.S. imperialism following the fall of the Soviet Union was never in doubt. Capitalism by its very logic is a globally expansive system. The contradiction between its transnational economic aspirations and the fact that politically it remains rooted in particular nation states is insurmountable for the system. Yet, ill-fated attempts by individual states to overcome this contradiction are just as much a part of its fundamental logic. In present world circumstances, when one capitalist state has a virtual monopoly of the means of destruction, the temptation for that state to attempt to seize full-spectrum dominance and to transform itself into the de facto global state governing the world economy is irresistible. As the noted Marxian philosopher Istvn Mszros observed in Socialism or Barbarism? (2001)written, significantly, before George W. Bush became president: What is at stake today is not the control of a particular part of the planetno matter how largeputting at a disadvantage but still tolerating the independent actions of some rivals, but the control of its totality by one hegemonic economic and military superpower, with all meanseven the most extreme authoritarian and, if needed, violent military onesat its disposal.The unprecedented dangers of this new global disorder are revealed in the twin cataclysms to which the world is heading at present: nuclear proliferation and hence increased chances of the outbreak of nuclear war, and planetary ecological destruction. These are symbolized by the Bush administrations refusal to sign the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty to limit nuclear weapons development and by its failure to sign the Kyoto Protocol as a first step in controlling global warming. As former U.S. Secretary of Defense (in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations) Robert McNamara stated in an article entitled Apocalypse Soon in the MayJune 2005 issue of Foreign Policy: The United States has never endorsed the policy of no first use, not during my seven years as secretary or since. We have been and remain prepared to initiate the use of nuclear weaponsby the decision of one person, the presidentagainst either a nuclear or nonnuclear enemy whenever we believe it is in our interest to do so. The nation with the greatest conventional military force and the willingness to use it unilaterally to enlarge its global power is also the nation with the greatest nuclear force and the readiness to use it whenever it sees fitsetting the whole world on edge. The nation that contributes more to carbon dioxide emissions leading to global warming than any other (representing approximately a quarter of the worlds total) has become the greatest obstacle to addressing global warming and the worlds growing environmental problemsraising the possibility of the collapse of civilization itself if present trends continue. The United States is seeking to exercise sovereign authority over the planet during a time of widening global crisis: economic stagnation, increasing polarization between the global rich and the global poor, weakening U.S. economic hegemony, growing nuclear threats, and deepening ecological decline. The result is a heightening of international instability. Other potential forces are emerging in the world, such as the European Community and China, that could eventually challenge U.S. power, regionally and even globally. Third world revolutions, far from ceasing, are beginning to gain momentum again, symbolized by Venezuelas Bolivarian Revolution under Hugo Chvez. U.S. attempts to tighten its imperial grip on the Middle East and its oil have had to cope with a fierce, seemingly unstoppable, Iraqi resistance, generating conditions of imperial overstretch. With the United States brandishing its nuclear arsenal and refusing to support international agreements on the control of such weapons, nuclear proliferation is continuing. New nations, such as North Korea, are entering or can be expected soon to enter the nuclear club. Terrorist blowback from imperialist wars in the third world is now a well-recognized reality, generating rising fear of further terrorist attacks in New York, London, and elsewhere. Such vast and overlapping historical contradictions, rooted in the combined and uneven development of the global capitalist economy along with the U.S. drive for planetary domination, foreshadow what is potentially the most dangerous period in the history of imperialism.
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A2: ONTOLOGY BAD

There is no link to your argument. We utilize ontological questioning because it has been forgotten by the status quo rush to action. We focus on ontology in a practical manner. Must combing ontology With socio-politics reading heidegger into Foucault overcomes the shortcomings of each side. Spanos in 90 (William V., A conversation with William V. Spanos, conversation with bove, Boundary 2, Volume 17,
issue 2, summer 1990, Prof. At binghamton, known baller, pp. 29,)
Foucaultand especially his followers in this countryhas not been explicit about the Heideggerean sources of his critique of the panoptic machinery, and so has left the disabling "two cultures" opposition more or less intact, thus lending his discourse to this kind of
Spanos: But it seems to me that exculpation. It's true that all through Discipline and Punish there are references to sources that go way back beyond the Enlightenmentto the Roman camps, to the Protestant concern for detail demanded by the "Providential Eye"all of which picks up on Heidegger's recognition that the originative thinking of the Greeks became disciplined by the Romans
when they translated aletheia to veritas, technologized it, disciplined itall on behalf of empire. But Foucault doesn't foreground these references; so his followers don't see the continuity between his genealogies and Heidegger's destructions, between the ontic and ontological critiques. Foucault limits the Roman references to the historically specific use to which they were put in France in the classical period.
Heidegger says that humanism per se begins with the Romans, when, in a way analogous with the translation of aletheia to veritas, they reduced the originative thinking of the Greek paideia to institutio et eruditio in bonas artes, which means "scholarship and training in good conduct." And what is implicit in that, of course, though Heidegger doesn't'say it, is the recognition that the Romans wanted to produce very dependable, disciplined citizens who could be relied on to secure Rome as the metropolisthe determinant centerof the peripheral provinces, that is to say, of the imperium sine fini. I'm not saying that Heidegger is at all conscious of that. His privileging of the ontological over the ontic, despite his theoretical insistence on their simultaneity, precluded that awareness. But it's inherent in his text. And I think that Foucault articulates precisely the
socio-political possibilities Heidegger misseswith momentously unfortunate consequences for Heidegger and his politics. It's this continuity between Heidegger and Foucault as I've tried to describe itthat I feel is still useful and that makes Heidegger very crucial to the project of contemporary theory... to the fuller understanding, the fulfillment of the potentialities of the contemporary socio-political project, of the posthumanist discourse. And I say this despite the fact of Heidegger's failure to think adequately the ontic, the socio-political implications
of his undermining of the logos, of the centered circle.
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A2: PERKINs/HUMANISM GOOD

WE ARE NOT ANTI-HUMANISTS WE ARE POST-HUMANISTS WHO THINK DIFFERENCE POSITIVELY. SPANOS 2006 William V, Interview with Jeffery J. Williams, The Minnesota Review, ns67, fall 2006, http://www.theminnesotareview.org/journal/ns67/interview_spanos.shtml] Spanos: Yes. I go back to Heidegger's great essay "Letter on Humanism," which is his answer to Jean Beaufret's question; is there any way of recovering the word "humanism" in a useful way? Heidegger's response to this is a very complicated response. He begins the whole "antihumanist" momentum that was picked up by Derrida, Foucault, Lacan, Althusser. But I detect not a rejection of humanism by Heidegger in that essay, but a rethinking of the human, which is to say a rethinking of the entire Western tradition's understanding of the human. According to Heidegger, humanism begins with the Roman translation of what I would call an originative Greek thinking, which is always already on the way, to a derivative form of thinking which can be characterized by calculativity, knowing what you want from the end. So the idea of humanism that is precipitated by this translation of Greek thinking, originative thinking, to derivative thinking by the Romans, was intended, according to Heidegger, to give man a metaphysical identity that was universal, unchanging, and therefore, a concept of man which involved predictability, because the primary concern was the production of good citizens. How did Heidegger put this? "Eruditio et institutio in bonas artes"scholarship and education in good conduct. And that was necessary because their primary concern was the conquest and subordination of the world outside the Roman metropolis.In other words, what the Roman tradition does is to create a concept of man in which man is the measure of all things. Man is the determinant of all the differential aspects of Being, from the ontological all the way through to the humanity outside of the Western world which privileges Man with a capital letter. So this humanismthis humanist thinkingis profoundly imperial from its ontological roots, and this concept of Man as the measure, as the master, the overlord of Being, becomes fundamental, especially in the period of the Enlightenmentthe so-called anthropological era, when the anthropologos has taken the place of the theologos. Although Heidegger doesn't do a good job of articulating his new humanism, he does offer directives that I follow. That's why I use the word "posthuman," not "antihuman," in the book on education. It's a humanity that is demoted from the status of overlord of Being. That is the corrupt use of humanism, Man as the conqueror, Man as conquering force against the world or even against Being. That is opposed to the more positive force, the existential category of care.
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AFF ANSWERS WESTERN IMPERIALISM GOOD

Their totalizing rejection of Eurocentric thinking ignores the positivity of European influence upon the law freedom of speech, science, methodological freedom, female genital mutilation and oppression, and totalitarianism are all positive examples of the type of imperialism we would promote Tariq Ramadan, Winter 2008, Why the West Is Best, City Journal, http://www.cityjournal.org/2008/18_1_snd-west.html
Last October, I participated in a debate in London, hosted by Intelligence Squared, to consider the motion,
We should not be
reluctant to assert the superiority of Western values.

Islamic societies. Here, condensed somewhat, is the case that I made.
Muslim intellectual Tariq Ramadan, among others, spoke against the motion; I spoke in favor, focusing on the vast disparities in freedom, human rights, and tolerance between Western and
The great ideas of the Westrationalism, self-criticism, the disinterested search for truth, the separation of church and state, the rule of law and equality under the law, freedom of thought and expression, human rights, and liberal democracyare superior to any others devised by humankind. It was the West that took steps to abolish slavery; the calls for abolition did not resonate even in Africa, where rival tribes sold black prisoners into slavery. The West has secured freedoms for women and racial and other minorities to an extent unimaginable 60 years ago. The West recognizes and defends the rights of the individual: we are free to think what we want, to read what we want, to practice our religion, to live lives of our choosing. In short, the glory of the West, as philosopher Roger Scruton puts it, is that life here is an open book. Under Islam, the book
is closed. In many non-Western countries, especially Islamic ones, citizens are not free to read what they wish. In Saudi Arabia, Muslims are not free to convert to Christianity, and Christians are not free to practice their faithclear violations of Article 18 of the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights. In contrast with the mind-numbing enforced certainties and rules of Islam,
Western civilization offers what Bertrand Russell once called liberating doubt, which encourages the methodological principle of scientific skepticism. Western politics, like science, proceeds through tentative steps of trial and error, open discussion, criticism, and self-correction. One could characterize the difference between the West and the Rest as a difference in epistemological principles. The desire for knowledge, no matter where it leads, inherited from the Greeks, has led to an institution unequaledor very rarely equaledoutside the West: the university. Along with research institutes and libraries, universities are, at least ideally, independent academies that enshrine these epistemological norms, where we can pursue truth in a spirit of disinterested inquiry, free from political
pressures. In other words, behind the success of modern Western societies, with their science and technology and open institutions, lies a distinct way of looking at the world, interpreting it, and recognizing and rectifying problems .
The edifice of modern science and scientific method is one of Western mans greatest gifts to the world. The West has given us not only nearly every scientific discovery of the last 500 yearsfrom electricity to computersbut also, thanks to its humanitarian impulses, the Red Cross, Doctors Without Borders, Human Rights Watch, and Amnesty International. The West provides the bulk of aid to beleaguered Darfur; Islamic countries are conspicuous by their lack of assistance.
Moreover, other parts of the world recognize Western superiority. When other societies such as South Korea and Japan have adopted Western political principles, their citizens have flourished .
It is to the West, not to Saudi Arabia or Iran, that millions of refugees from theocratic or other totalitarian regimes flee, seeking tolerance and political freedom. Nor would any Western politician be able to get away with the anti-Semitic remarks that former
Malaysian prime minister Mahathir Mohamad made in 2003. Our excusing Mahathirs diatribe indicates not only a double standard but also a tacit acknowledgment that we apply higher ethical standards to Western leaders. A culture that gave the world the novel; the music of Mozart, Beethoven, and Schubert; and the paintings of Michelangelo, da Vinci, and Rembrandt does not need lessons from societies whose idea of heaven, peopled with female virgins, resembles a cosmic brothel.
Nor does the West need lectures on the superior virtue of societies in which women are kept in subjection under sharia, endure
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genital mutilation, are stoned to death for alleged adultery, and are married off against their will at the age of nine; societies that deny the rights of supposedly lower castes; societies that execute homosexuals and apostates. The West has no use for sanctimonious homilies from societies that cannot provide clean drinking water or sewage systems, that make no provisions for the handicapped, and that leave 40 to 50 percent of their citizens illiterate. As Ayatollah Khomeini once famously said, there are no jokes in Islam. The West is able to look at its foibles and laugh, to
make fun of its fundamental principles: but there is no equivalent as yet to Monty Pythons Life of Brian in Islam. Can we look forward, someday, to a Life of Mo? Probably notone more small sign that Western values remain the best, and perhaps the only, means for all people, no matter of what race or creed, to reach their full potential and live in freedom.
WESTERN IMPERIALISM GOOD

Denouncing Western values degrades into relativism it paves the way for violent cultures to exercise ideological control David Rothkopf, managing director of Kissinger Associates and adjunct professor of international affairs at Columbia, Foreign Policy, June 22, 1997
Many observers contend that it is distasteful to use the opportunities created by the global information revolution to promote American culture over others, but that kind of relativism is as dangerous as it is wrong. American culture is fundamentally different from indigenous cultures in so many other locales. American culture is an amalgam of influences and approaches from around the world. It is melded consciously in many cases - into a social medium that allows individual freedoms and cultures to thrive. Recognizing this, Americans should not shy away from doing that which is so clearly in their economic, political, and security interests - and so clearly in the interests of the world at large. The United States should not hesitate to promote its values. In an effort to be polite or politic, Americans should not deny the fact that of all the nations in the history of the world, theirs is the most just, the most tolerant, the most willing to constantly reassess and improve itself, and the best model for the future. At the same time, Americans should not fall under the spell of those like Singapore's Lee Kuan Yew and Malaysia's Mahathir bin-Mohamad, who argue that there is "an Asian way," one that non-Asians should not judge and that should be allowed to dictate the course of events for all those operating in that comer of the world. This argument amounts to selfinterested political rhetoric. Good and evil, better and worse coexist in this world. There are absolutes, and there are political, economic, and moral costs associated with failing to recognize this fact. Repression is not defensible whether the tradition from which it springs is Confucian, Judeo-Christian, or Zoroastrian. The repressed individual still suffers, as does society, and there are consequences for the global community. Real costs accrue in terms of constrained human creativity, delayed market development, the diversion of assets to enforce repression, the failure of repressive societies to adapt well to the rapidly changing global environment, and the dislocations, struggles, and instability that result from these and other factors. Americans should promote their vision for the world, because failing to do so or taking a "live and let live" stance is ceding the process to the not-always-beneficial actions of others. Using the tools of the Information Age to do so is perhaps the most peaceful and powerful means of advancing American interests. If Americans now live in a world in which ideas can be effectively exported and media delivery systems are powerful, they must recognize that the nature of those ideas and the control of those systems are matters with which they should be deeply concerned. Is it a threat to U.S. interests, to regional peace, to American markets, and to the United States's ability to lead if foreign leaders adopt models that promote separatism and the cultural fault lines that threaten stability? It certainly is. Relativism is a veil behind which those who shun scrutiny can hide. Whether Americans accept all the arguments of Huntington or not, they must recognize that the greater the cultural value gaps in the world, the more likely it is that conflict will ensue. The critical prerequisite for gaining the optimum benefits of global integration is to understand which cultural attributes can and should be tolerated - and, indeed, promoted - and which are the fissures that will become fault lines.
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WESTERN IMPERIALISM GOOD

Western thinking is crucial to human survival. Only Western values are inherently selfreflexive, allowing us to escape the trap of human violence Alan Charles Kors, Professor of History at the University of Pennsylvania, The West at the Dawn of the 21st Century: Triumph Without Self-Belief, Volume 2, Number 1, February, 2001, http://www.fpri.org/ww/0201.200102.kors.westatdawn.html
In the final analysis, it is that last trait, the Wests commitment to a logically ordered philosophical realism, that undergirds its ways of thinking, valuing, and, indeed, worshiping. Such philosophical realism was defended by Augustine, Aquinas, and almost all fathers and doctors of the Church. While various extreme epistemological and ontological skepticisms and various radical irrationalisms have flourished, sometimes with brilliance and profundity in our history, Western civilization always has had at its core a belief that there is a reality independent of our wishes for and ideas of it; that natural knowledge of that reality is possible, and, indeed, indispensable to human dignity, and that such knowledge must be acquired through a discipline of the will and mind; and that central to that discipline is a compact with reason. The West has willed, in theory at least, to reduce the chaos of the world to natural coherence by the powers of the mind. Indeed, the belief that truth is independent of particular time and place is precisely what has led the West to borrow so much from other cultures, such that, ironically, whole schools of tendentious thought decry Western thefts, as if the recognition of compelling example and argument in others were a weakness, not a strength. The West recognized and adopted Eastern systems of number superior to that of the Romans; it took the Aristotle of its high Middle Ages from the Islamic scholars who had preserved and interpreted it in manners superior to the schools of the West; it took music, art, forms of expression, and new foods from around the earth that, in large part out of restless curiosity about realities beyond its own, it had explored. The West always has renewed and revitalized itself by means of recognizing superior ways to its own. It did so, however, with a commitment to being a rational culture. The Greek principle of self-contradiction as the touchstone of error, and thus, its avoidance as a touchstone of truth, is the formal expression of a commitment to reason that the Christian West always understood to separate us from beasts and madmen. To live with self-contradiction was not merely to fail an introduction to philosophy, it was to be less than human. Induction from experience always had a logic, and the exploration of that logic was one of the great and ultimately triumphant pursuits of the Western mind. To live with error was to deny oneself the fruits of that human light. Again, the core philosophical assumption of Western civilization is that there is a reality that exists independently of our will and wish, and that this reality can be known by human inquiry and reason. There were many radical ruptures in the history of certain disciplines in the West; there were no radical ruptures with the Western compact with reality and reason. It is that compact that led to a civilization of self-scrutiny and honest borrowings; to a civilization in which selfcriticism gave rise to a critical scholarship that could question and either strengthen or repair the Wests received beliefs themselves; to a civilization in which the mind could appeal to the rational against the irrational with ultimate success; to a way of understanding that led to the sciences that have changed both the entire human relationship to nature and our sense of human possibilities, always tempered by our knowledge of human nature. The fruits of that civilization have been an unprecedented ability to modify the remediable causes of human suffering, to give great agency to utility and charity alike; to give to each individual a degree of choice and freedom unparalleled in all of human history; to offer a means of overcoming the station in life to which one was born by the effort of ones labor, mind, and will. A failure to understand and to teach that accomplishment would be its very betrayal. To the extent that Western civilization survives, then, the hope of the world survives to eradicate unnecessary suffering; to speak a language of human dignity, responsibility, and rights linked to a common reality; to minimize the depredations of the irrational, the unexamined, the merely prejudicial in our lives; to understand, with the possibility of both interest and charity applying that knowledge for good to the world in which we find ourselves.
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2AC PERMUTATION/DISAD TO ALT

Permutation: do both - Working within the system is the only alternative: It opens the door to radical appropriation. Hybridity of multiple cultural ideas is the only way to avoid the disads to the alt. Helen Tiffin et. al., Associate Professor in the Department of English at the University of Queensland, 1989, The Empire Writes Back Theory and Practice in Post-Colonial Literatures, p. 180
Despite the force of critiques like Parrys it is hard to go along, finally, with their belief in the practical possibility of decolonizing projects which can avoid the pitfalls of a reverse discourse replicating and therefore re-installing the linguistic polarities devised by a dominant centre. This difficulty is not only experienced
by those concerned with deconstructing the text of colonialism. It is arguably installed in the very practices and politics of everyday existence in post-colonial societies. Syncretism is the condition within which post-colonial societies operate, and accepting this does not, in any simple sense, involve hiding the role culture plays in the continuing neo-colonial hegemonic formation of the day-to-day experience of those societies. It is quite understandable that many post-colonial critics have felt an urgent need to reject European
theory (and even theory as such) as irredeemably Eurocentric in both its assumptions and political effect. But to reject the possibilities of appropriation in this way is to refuse to accept that the same condition of hybridity as exists in the production of the post-colonial text also exists in the production of theory. Critical texts as well as creative texts
are products of post-colonial hybridity. In fact, it is arguable that to move towards a genuine affirmation of multiple forms of native difference, we must recognize that this hybridity will inevitably continue. This is a prerequisite of a radical
appropriation which can achieve a genuinely transformative and interventionist criticism of contemporary post-colonial reality.
Rejecting attempts at political engagement is co-opted by the right, giving elites more room to consolidate power, resulting in more violent and authoritarian politics. Their becoming out/law is a miserable failure. Carl Boggs -professor of social sciences and film studies at National University in Los Angeles2001- The End of Politics- Corporate Power and the Decline of the Public Sphere- p.250-251
But it is a very deceptive and misleading minimalism. While Oakcshott debunks political mechanisms and rational planning as either useless or dangerous, the actually existing power structure-replete with its own centralized state apparatus, institutional hierarchies, conscious designs, and, indeed, rational plans-remains fully intact, insulated from the minimalist critique. In other words, ideologies and plans are perfectly acceptable for elites who preside over established governing systems, but not for ordinary citizens or groups anxious to challenge the status quo. Such one-sided minimalism gives carte blanche to elites who naturally desire as much space to maneuver as possible. The flight from 'abstract principles" rules out ethical attacks on injustices that may pervade the status quo (slavery or imperialist wars, for example) insofar as those injustices might he seen as too deeply embedded in the social and institutional matrix of the time to be the target of oppositional political action. If politics is reduced to nothing other than a process of everyday muddling - through. then people are condemned to accept the harsh realities of an exploitative and authoritarian system, with choice but to yield to the dictates of "conventional wisdom." Systematic attempts to ameliorate oppressive conditions would, in Oakesliott's view, turn into a
to argue that all politicized efforts to change the world are necessarily doomed either to impotence or totalitarianism requires a completely different (and indefensible) set of premises. Oakeshott minimalism post's yet another, but still related, range of problems: the shrinkage of politics hardly suggests that corporate colonialization, social hierarchies, or centralized state and military institutions will magically disappear from people's lives. Far from it: the public space vacated by ordinary citizens, well informed and ready to fight for their interests, simply gives elites more room to consolidate their own power and privilege. Beyond that, the fragmentation and chaos of a Hobbesian civil society, not too tar removed from the excessive individualism, social Darwinism, arid urban violence of the American landscape, could open tilts door to a modern Leviathan intent on restoring order and unity in the face of social disintegration. Viewed in this light, the contemporary drift toward antipolitics might set the stage for a reassertion of politics in more authoritarian and reactionary guise-or it much simply end
political night-mare. A belief that totalitarianism might result from extreme attempts to put society in order is one thing: up reinforcing the dominant state-corporate system. In either case, the state would probably become what Hobbes anticipated: the embodiment of those universal, collective interests that had vanished from civil society. And either outcome would run counter to the facile antirationalism of Oakeshott's Burkean muddling-though theories.
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ANTI-IMPERIALISM FAILS
Anti-imperialism devastates our attempts to form an empathetic relationship with those suffering under true domination Martin Shaw, Professor of International Relations and Politics, University of Sussex, The Problem of the Quasi-Imperial State: Uses and Abuses of Anti-Imperialism in the Global Era, April 7, 2002, http://www.martinshaw.org/empire.htm It is worth asking how the politics of anti-imperialism distorts Western leftists' responses to global struggles for justice. John Pilger, for example, consistently seeks to minimise the crimes of Milosevic in Kosovo, and to deny their genocidal character - purely because these crimes formed part of the rationale for Western intervention against Serbia. He never attempted to minimise the crimes of the pro-Western Suharto regime in the same way. The crimes of quasi-imperial regimes are similar in cases like Yugoslavia and Indonesia, but the West's attitudes towards them are undeniably uneven and inconsistent. To take as the criterion of one's politics opposition to Western policy, rather than the demands for justice of the victims of oppression as such, distorts our responses to the victims and our commitment to justice. We need to support the victims regardless of whether Western governments take up their cause or not; we need to judge Western power not according to a general assumption of 'new imperialism' but according to its actual role in relation to the victims. The task for civil society in the West is not, therefore to oppose Western state policies as a matter of course, la Cold War, but to mobilise solidarity with democratic oppositions and repressed peoples, against authoritarian, quasi-imperial states. It is to demand more effective global political, legal and military institutions that genuinely and consistently defend the interests of the most threatened groups. It is to grasp the contradictions among and within Western elites, conditionally allying themselves with internationalising elements in global institutions and Western governments, against nationalist and reactionary elements. The arrival in power of George Bush II makes this discrimination all the more urgent. In the long run, we need to develop a larger politics of global social democracy and an ethic of global responsibility that address the profound economic, political and cultural inequalities between Western and non-Western worlds. We will not move far in these directions, however, unless we grasp the life-and-death struggles between many oppressed peoples and the new local imperialisms, rather than subsuming all regional contradictions into the false synthesis of a new Western imperialism.
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ANTI-IMPERIALISM FAILS
The criticism boils down to a complaint about U.S. imperialism that provides no alternative political course. Their jargon-riddled theory is politically useless Todd Gitlin, Professor of Sociology, Journalism, and Communications at Columbia, 2006, The Intellectuals and the Flag, p.83-85 The rights masterful apparatus for purveying its messages and organizing for power is not the only reason why the left has suffered defeat after defeat in national politics since the 1960s. The lefts intellectual stockpile has been badly depleted, and new ideas are more heralded than delivered. When the left has thought big. it has been clearer about isms is to opposemainly imperialism and racismthan about values and policies to further. At that, it has often preferred the denunciatory mode to the analytical, mustering full-throated opposition rather than full-brained exploration. While it is probably true that many more reform ideas are dreamt of than succeed in circulating through the brain- dead media, tire liberal-left conveys little sense of a whole that is more than the sum of its parts. While the right has rather successfully tarred liberals with the brush of tax-and-spend, those thus tarred have often been unsure whether to reply Its not so or It is so, were proud to say. A fair generalization is that the lefts expertise has been constricted in scope. showing little taste for principle and little capacity to imagine a reconstituted nation. It has been conflicted and unsteady about values.. It has tended to disdain any design for foreign policy other than U.S. out, which is no substitute for a foreign policyand inconsistent to hoot when you consider that the left wants the United States to intervene, for example to push Israel to end its occupation of the West Bank. All this is to say that the left has been imprisoned in the closed world of outsider politics. Instead of a vigorous quest for testable propositions that could actually culminate in reform, the academic left in particular has nourished what has con-ic to be called theory: a body of writing (one can scarcely say its content consists of propositions) that is, in the main, distracting, vague, self-referential, and wrong-headed. Theory is chiefly about itself: thought to the second power. as Fredric Jameson defined dialectical thinking in an early, dazzling American exemplar of the new theoretical style.2 Even when theory tries to reconnect from language and mind to the larger social world, language remains the preoccupation. Michel Foucault became a rock star of
theory in the United States precisely because he demoted knowledge to a reflex of power, merely the denominator of the couplet power/knowledge, yet his preoccupation was with the knowlleft edge side, not actual social structures. His famous illustration of the power of theory was built on Jeremy Benthams design of an ideal prison, the Panopticona model never built.3 The linthought guistic turn in the social sciences turns out to be its own prison house, equipped with funhouse mirrors but no exit. When convenient, theory lays claim to objective truth, but in fact the chief criterion by which it ascended in status was aesthetic, not empirical. Flair matters more than explanatory power At crucial junctures theory consists of flourishes, intellectual performance pieces: things are said to be so because the theorist says
the problem with theory goes beyond opaque writingan often dazzling concoction of jargon, illogic, and preening. If you overcome bedazzlement at the audacity and glamour of theory and penetrate the obscurity-, you find circularity and self-justification, often enough (and self-contradictorily) larded with populist sentimentality about the people or forces of resistance. You see steadfast avoidance of tough questions. Despite the selective use of the still-prestigious rhetoric of science, the world of theory makes only tangential contact with the social reality that it disdains. Politically, it is useless. It amounts to secession from the world where most people live.
so, and even if they are not, isnt it interesting to pretend? But
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ALT FAILS MCLEAN

Disengagement from traditional politics is the worst in cynical leftist garbage our hypothesizing about the complex inner-working of government is key to creating space for the critique David E. McClean, 2001, The Cultural Left and the Limits of Social Hope, Am. Phil. Conf., www.americanphilosophy.org/archives/past_conference_programs/pc2001/Discussion%20papers/david_mcclea n.htm
Yet for some reason, at least partially explicated in Richard Rorty's Achieving Our Country, a book that I think is long overdue, leftist critics continue to cite and refer to the eccentric and often a priori ruminations of people like those just mentioned, and a litany of others including Derrida, Deleuze, Lyotard, Jameson, and Lacan, who are to me hugely more irrelevant than Habermas in their narrative attempts to suggest policy prescriptions (when they actually do suggest them) aimed at curing the ills of homelessness, poverty, market greed, national belligerence and racism. I would like to suggest that it is time for American social critics who are enamored with this group, those who actually want to be relevant, to recognize that they have a disease, and a disease regarding which I myself must remember to stay faithful to my own twelve step program of recovery. The disease is the need for elaborate theoretical "remedies" wrapped in neological and
elaborate theoretical remedies are more "interesting," to be sure, than the pragmatically settled questions about what shape democracy should take in various contexts, or whether private property should be protected by the state, or regarding our basic human nature ( described, if not defined (heaven forbid!), in such statements as "We don't like to starve" and "We like to speak our minds without fear of death" and "We like to keep our children safe from poverty"). As Rorty puts it, "When one of today's academic leftists says that some
multi-syllabic jargon. These
topic has been 'inadequately theorized,' you can be pretty certain that he or she is going to drag in either philosophy of language, or Lacanian
These futile attempts to philosophize one's way into political relevance are a symptom of what happens when a Left retreats from activism and adopts a spectatorial approach to the problems of its country. Disengagement from practice produces theoretical hallucinations"(italics mine).(1) Or as John Dewey put it
psychoanalysis, or some neo-Marxist version of economic determinism. . . .
in his The Need for a Recovery of Philosophy, "I believe that philosophy in America will be lost between chewing a historical cud long since reduced to woody fiber, or an apologetics for lost causes, . . . . or a scholastic, schematic formalism, unless it can somehow bring to consciousness America's own needs and its own implicit principle of successful action." Those who suffer or have suffered from this disease Rorty refers to as the Cultural Left, which left is juxtaposed to the Political Left that Rorty prefers and prefers for good reason. Another attribute of the Cultural Left is that its members fancy themselves pure culture critics who view the successes of America and the West, rather than some of the barbarous methods for achieving those successes, as mostly evil, and who view anything
the Cultural Left, in this country, too often dismiss American society as beyond reform and redemption. And Rorty correctly argues that this is a disastrous conclusion, i.e. disastrous for the Cultural Left. I think it may also be disastrous for our social hopes, as I will explain. Leftist American culture critics might put their considerable talents to better use if they bury some of their cynicism about America's social and political prospects and help forge public and political possibilities in a spirit of determination to, indeed, achieve
like national pride as equally evil even when that pride is tempered with the knowledge and admission of the nation's shortcomings. In other words, our country - the country of Jefferson and King; the country of John Dewey and Malcom X; the country of Franklin Roosevelt and Bayard Rustin, and of the later George Wallace and the later Barry Goldwater. To invoke the words of King, and with reference to the American society, the time is always ripe to seize the opportunity to help create the "beloved community," one woven with the thread of agape into a conceptually single yet diverse tapestry that shoots for nothing less than a true intra-American cosmopolitan ethos, one wherein both same sex unions and faith-based initiatives will be able to be part of the same social reality, one wherein business interests and the university are not seen as belonging to two separate galaxies but as part of the same answer to the threat of social and
We who fancy ourselves philosophers would do well to create from within ourselves and from within our ranks a new kind of public intellectual who has both a hungry theoretical mind and who is yet capable of seeing the need to move past high theory to other important questions that are less bedazzling and "interesting" but more important to the prospect of our flourishing - questions such as "How is it possible to develop a citizenry that cherishes a certain hexis,
ethical nihilism.
one which prizes the character of the Samaritan on the road to Jericho almost more than any other?" or "How can we square the political dogma that undergirds the fantasy of a missile defense system with the need to treat America as but one member in a community of nations
The new public philosopher might seek to understand labor law and military and trade theory and doctrine as much as theories of surplus value; the logic of international markets and trade agreements as much as critiques of commodification, and the politics of complexity as much as the politics of power (all of which can still be done from our arm chairs.) This means going down deep into the guts of our quotidian social institutions, into the grimy pragmatic details where intellectuals are loathe to dwell but where the officers and bureaucrats of those institutions take difficult and often unpleasant, imperfect decisions that affect other peoples' lives, and it means making honest attempts
under a "law of peoples?"
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to truly understand how those institutions actually function in the actual world before howling for their overthrow commences. This might help keep us from being slapped down in debates by true policy pros who actually know what they are talking about but who lack awareness of the dogmatic assumptions from which they proceed, and who have not yet found a good reason to listen to jargon-riddled lectures from philosophers and culture critics with their snobish disrespect for the so-called "managerial class."
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Cap Good - Prevents War

Capitalism prevents war Bandow in 5 Doug Bandow, a senior fellow at the Cato Institute, REASON ONLINE, A Capitalist Peace?, October 26, 2005 (http://www.reason.com/news/show/32985.html accessed: June 26, 2009) There are a number of reasons why economics appears to trump politics. The shift from statist mercantilism to high-tech capitalism has transformed the economics behind war. Markets generate economic opportunities that make war less desirable. Territorial aggrandizement no longer provides the best path to riches. Free-flowing capital markets and other aspects of globalization simultaneously draw nations together and raise the economic price of military conflict, because the political destabilization resulting from war deters profitable investment and trade. Moreover, sanctions, which interfere with economic prosperity, provides a coercive step short of war to achieve foreign policy ends. Capitalism is key to peace. Bandow in 5 Doug Bandow, he is a senior fellow at the Cato Institute. He served as a special assistant to President Reagan, CATO.ORG, Spreading Capitalism is Good for Peace, 11-1205, http://www.cato.org/pub_display.php?pub_id=5193 That doesn't mean that nothing can be done. But promoting open international markets - that is, spreading capitalism - is the best means to encourage peace as well as prosperity. Notes Gartzke: "Warfare among developing nations will remain unaffected by the capitalist peace as long as the economies of many developing countries remain fettered by governmental control." Freeing those economies is critical. It's a particularly important lesson for the anticapitalist left. For the most part, the enemies of economic liberty also most stridently denounce war, often in near-pacifist terms. Yet they oppose the very economic policies most likely to encourage peace. If market critics don't realize the obvious economic and philosophical value of markets - prosperity and freedom - they should appreciate the unintended peace dividend. Trade encourages prosperity and stability; technological innovation reduces the financial value of conquest; globalization creates economic interdependence, increasing the cost of war. Nothing is certain in life, and people are motivated by far more than economics. But it turns out that peace is good business. And capitalism is good for peace. Economic liberty key to peace Bandow in 5 Doug Bandow, a senior fellow at the Cato Institute, REASON ONLINE, A Capitalist Peace?, October 26, 2005 (http://www.reason.com/news/show/32985.html accessed: June 26, 2009) In particular, poorer democracies perform like non-democracies. By his calculation, the correlation between economic liberty and peace is 50 times as great as that between democracy and peace. He explains: "Democracy does not have a measurable impact, while nations with very low levels of economic freedom are 14 times more prone to conflict than those with very high levels." Gartzke considers other variables, including alliance memberships, nuclear deterrence, and regional differences. Although the causes of conflict vary, the relationship between economic liberty and peace remains.
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Realism Good SOLVES WAR / ALT FAILS Only realism can address violence. Critical approaches promise abstractions but dont provide a concrete solution.
Alastair Murray, Politics Department, University of Wales Swansea, Reconstructing Realism, 1997, p. 185-186
Linklater seems to go some way towards acknowledging this in Beyond Realism and Marxism, recognising Morgenthau's commitment, in contrast to neorealism, to widening community beyond the nation-state. What he now suggests, however, is that `[w]hat realism offers is an account of historical circumstances which human subjects have yet to bring under their collective control. What it does not possess is an account of the modes of political intervention which would enable human beings to take control of their international history."' The issue becomes less a matter of what realism does, than what it does not do, less the way it constructs the problem, than its failure to solve it. Yet
Linklater concedes that `it is not at all clear that any strand of social and political thought provides a compelling account of "strategies of transition"'. Indeed, where he has attempted to engage with this issue himself, he has proved manifestly unable to provide such an account. Although he has put forward some ideas of what is needed - a fundamental reorganisation of political relations, establishing a global legal order to replace the sovereign state, and a fundamental rearrangement of economic relations, establishing an order in which all individuals have the means as well as the formal rights of freedom - his only suggestion as to how such objectives should be achieved seems to be that `[s]ocial development entails individuals placing themselves at odds with their societies as they begin to question conventional means of characterising outsiders and to criticise customary prohibitions upon individual relations with them'. His critical theoretical `transitional strategies' amount to little more than the suggestion that individuals must demand recognition for themselves as men as well as citizens, must demand the right to enter into complex interstate relations themselves, and must act in these relations as beings with fundamental obligations to all other members of the species." More recently, he has proposed a vision in which `subnational and
transnational citizenship are strengthened and in which mediating between the different loyalties and identities present within modem societies is one central purpose of the post-Westphalian state'. Such an objective is to be reached by a discourse ethics along the lines of that
such an ethics amounts to little more than the suggestion `that human beings need to be reflective about the ways in which they include and exclude others from dialogue', scarcely going beyond Linklater's earlier emphasis on individuals acting as men as well as citizens. Realism does at least propose tangible objectives which, whilst perhaps lacking the visionary appeal of Linklater's proposals, ultimately offer us a path to follow, and it does at least suggest a strategy of realisation, emphasising the necessity of a restrained, moderate diplomacy, which, if less daring than Linklater might wish, provides us with some guidance. It is this inability to articulate practical strategies which suggests the central difficulty with such critical theoretical approaches. The progressive urge moves a stage further here, leading them to abandon almost entirely the problem of
proposed by Habermas. Yet establishing some form of stable international order at this level in favour of a continuing revolution in search of a genuine cosmopolis. It
generates such an emphasis on the pursuit of distant, ultimate objectives that they prove incapable of furnishing us with anything but the most vague and elusive of strategies, such an emphasis on moving towards a post-Westphalian, boundary-less world that they are incapable of telling us anything about the problems facing us today. If, for theorists such as Linklater,
such a difficulty does not constitute a failure for critical theory within its own terms of reference, this position cannot be accepted uncritically. Without an ability to address contemporary problems, it is unable to provide strategies to overcome even the immediate obstacles in the way of its objective of a genuinely cosmopolitan society. And, without a guarantee that such a cosmopolitan society is even
a critical theoretical perspective simply offers us the perpetual redefinition of old problems in a new context and the persistent creation of new problems to replace old ones,
feasible, such without even the luxury of attempting to address them.
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A2: Spanos
Completely rejecting humanism is self-marginalizing and disabling to effective coalitional politics J. Russell Perkin, English @ St. Marys, 1993, Theorizing the Culture Wars, v. 3 n. 3, Muse My final criticism is that Spanos, by his attempt to put all humanists into the same category and to break totally with the tradition of humanism, isolates himself in a posture of ultraleftist purity that cuts him off from many potential political allies, especially when, as I will note in conclusion, his practical recommendations for the practical role of an adversarial intellectual seem similar to those of the liberal pluralists he attacks. He seems ill-informed about what goes on in the everyday work of the academy, for instance, in the field of composition studies. Spanos laments the "unwarranted neglect" (202) of the work of Paulo Freire, yet in reading composition and pedagogy journals over the last few years, I have noticed few thinkers who have been so consistently cited. Spanos refers several times to the fact that the discourse of the documents comprising The Pentagon Papers was linked to the kind of discourse that first-year composition courses produce (this was Richard Ohmann's argument); here again, however, Spanos is not up to date. For the last decade the field of composition studies has been the most vigorous site of the kind of oppositional practices The End of Education recommends. The academy, in short, is more diverse, more complex, more genuinely full of difference than Spanos allows, and it is precisely that difference that neoconservatives want to erase. By seeking to separate out only the pure (posthumanist) believers, Spanos seems to me to ensure his self-marginalization. For example, several times he includes pluralists like Wayne Booth and even Gerald Graff in lists of "humanists" that include William Bennett, Roger Kimball and Dinesh D'Souza. Of course, there is a polemical purpose to this, but it is one that is counterproductive. In fact, I would even question the validity of calling shoddy and often inaccurate journalists like Kimball and D'Souza with the title "humanist intellectuals." Henry Louis Gates's final chapter contains some cogent criticism of the kind of position which Spanos has taken. Gates argues that the "hard" left's opposition to liberalism is as mistaken as its opposition to conservatism, and refers to Cornel West's remarks about the field of critical legal studies, "If you don't build on liberalism, you build on air" (187). Building on air seems to me precisely what Spanos is recommending. Gates, on the other hand, criticizes "those massively totalizing theories that marginalize practical political action as a jejune indulgence" (192), and endorses a coalition of liberalism and the left.
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A2: ONTOLOGY FIRST

The popularization of more philosophical approaches to political discourse may be evident, but it is also undesirable- it prioritizes kritik over action and disavows any attempt to act to fix concrete problem and creates a vicious cycle whereby kritik overdetermines action entirely and paralyzes change. Owen 02, Reader in Political Theory at the University of Southampton (David, Reorienting
International Relations: On Pragmatism, Pluralism and Practical Reasoning, Millennium: Journal of International Studies, Vol. 31, No. 3, http://mil.sagepub.com/cgi/reprint/31/3/653)]AC Commenting on the philosophical turn in IR, Wver remarks that [a] frenzy for words like epistemology and ontology often signals this philosophical turn, although he goes on to comment that these terms are often used loosely.4 However, loosely deployed or not, it is clear that debates concerning ontology and epistemology play a central role in the contemporary IR theory wars. In one
respect, this is unsurprising since it is a characteristic feature of the social sciences that periods of disciplinary disorientation involve recourse to reflection on the philosophical commitments of different theoretical approaches, and there is no doubt that such reflection can play a valuable role in making explicit the commitments that characterise (and help individuate) diverse theoretical positions. Yet ,
such a
philosophical turn is not without its dangers and I will briefly mention three before turning to consider a confusion
the philosophical turn is that it has an inbuilt tendency to prioritise issues of ontology and epistemology over explanatory and/or interpretive power as if the latter two were merely a simple function of the former. But while the explanatory and/or interpretive power of a theoretical account is not wholly independent of its ontological and/or epistemological commitments (otherwise criticism of these features would not be a criticism that had any value), it is by no means clear that it is, in contrast, wholly dependent on these philosophical commitments. Thus, for example, one need not be sympathetic to rational choice theory to recognise that it can
that has, I will suggest, helped to promote the IR theory wars by motivating this philosophical turn. The first danger with provide powerful accounts of certain kinds of problems, such as the tragedy of the commons in which dilemmas of collective action are foregrounded. It may, of course, be the case that the advocates of rational choice theory cannot give a good account of why this type of theory is powerful in accounting for this class of problems (i.e., how it is that the relevant actors come to exhibit features in these circumstances that approximate the assumptions of rational choice theory) and, if this is the case, it is a philosophical weaknessbut this does not undermine the point that,
for a certain class of problems, rational choice theory may provide the best account available to us. In other words, while the critical judgement of theoretical accounts in terms of their ontological and/or epistemological sophistication is one kind of critical judgement, it is not the only or even necessarily the most important kind. The second danger run by the philosophical turn is that because prioritisation of ontology and epistemology promotes theory-construction from philosophical first principles, it cultivates a theory-driven rather than problem-driven approach to IR.
Paraphrasing Ian Shapiro, the point can be put like this: since it is the case that there is always a plurality of possible true descriptions of a given action, event or phenomenon,
the challenge is to decide which is the most apt in terms of getting a perspicuous grip on the action, event or phenomenon in question given the purposes of the inquiry; yet, from this standpoint, theory-driven work is part of a reductionist program in that it dictates always opting for the description that calls for the explanation that flows from the preferred model or theory.5 The
justification offered for this strategy rests on the mistaken belief that it is necessary for social science because general explanations are required to characterise the classes of phenomena studied in similar terms. However, as Shapiro points out, this is to misunderstand the enterprise of science since whether there are general explanations for classes of phenomena is a question for social-scientific inquiry, not to be prejudged before conducting that inquiry.6 Moreover,
this strategy easily slips into the promotion of the pursuit of generality over that of empirical validity. The third danger is that the preceding two
combine to encourage the formation of a particular image of disciplinary debate in IRwhat might be called (only slightly tongue in cheek) the Highlander viewnamely, an image of warring theoretical approaches with each, despite occasional temporary tactical alliances, dedicated to the strategic achievement of sovereignty over the disciplinary field. It encourages this view because the turn to, and
prioritisation of, ontology and epistemology stimulates the idea that there can only be one theoretical approach which gets things right, namely, the theoretical approach that gets its ontology and epistemology right. This image feeds back into IR exacerbating the first and second dangers, and so a potentially vicious circle arises.
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A2: ONTOLOGY FIRST

Your search for the ontological self is fruitless we all define ourselves through our unique circumstances claiming an ontological self to search for allows cooption leading to a new Hitler. Heideggers Nazism indefinitely affects the way that their alternative shapes ontology. This turns your value to life claims and makes the aff more important than ontology Graham 2000 [Phil, Graduate School of Management , University of Queensland Heideggers Hippies, __www.philgraham.net/HH_conf.pdf__ ]-AC Armed with a volume of Nietzsche, some considerable oratory skills, several Wagner records, and an existentialist University Rector in the form of Martin Heidegger, Hitler managed some truly astounding feats of strategic identity engineering (cf. Bullock, 1991). Upon being appointed to the
Freiberg University, Heidegger pronounced the end of thought, history, ideology, and civilisation: No dogmas and ideas will any longer be the laws of your being. The Fuhrer himself, and he alone, is the present and future reality for Germany (in Bullock 1991:345). Heidegger signed up to an ideology-free politics: Hitlers Third Way (Eatwell
1997).The idealised identity, the new symbol of mythological worship, Nietzsches European Superman, was to rule from that day hence. Hitler took control of the means of propaganda: the media; the means of mental production: the education system; the means of violence: the police, army, and prison
system; and pandered to the means of material production: industry and agriculture; and proclaimed a New beginning and a New world order. He ordered Germanyto look forward into the next thousand years and forget the past.
Heidegger and existentialism remain influential to this day, and history remains bunk (e.g. Giddens4, 1991, Chapt. 2). Giddenss claims that humans live in circumstances of existential contradiction, and thatsubjective death and biological death are somehow unrelated, is a an ultimately repressive abstraction: from that perspective, life is merely a series of subjective deaths, as if death were the ultimate motor of life itself (cf. Adorno 1964/1973). History is, in fact, the simple and straightforward answer to the problem of the subject. Theproblem is also a handy device for confusing, entertaining, and selling trash to the masses. By emphasising the problem of the ontological self (Giddens 1991: 49), informationalism andconsumerism confines the navel-gazing, narcissistic masses to a permanent present which they self-consciously sacrifice for a Utopian future (cf. Adorno 1973: 303; Hitchens 1999;Lasch 1984: 25-59). Meanwhile transnational businesses go about their work, raping the environment; swindling each other and whole nations; and inflicting populations with declining wages, declining working conditions, and declining social security. Slavery is once again on the increase (Castells, 1998; Graham, 1999; ILO, 1998). There is no problem of the subject, just as there is no global society; there is only the mass amnesia of utopian propaganda, the strains of which have historically accompanied revolutions in communication technologies. Each persons identity is, quite simply, their subjective account of a unique and objective history of interactions within the objective social and material environments they inhabit, create, and inherit. The identity of
each person is their most intimate historical information, and they are its material expression: each person is a record of their ownhistory at any given time. Thus, each person is a recognisably material, identifiable entity: an identity. This is their condition .
People are not theoretical entities; they are people. As such, they have an intrinsic identity with an intrinsic value. No amount of theory or propaganda will make it go away. The widespread multilateral attempts to prop up consumer society
and hypercapitalism as a valid and useful means of sustainable growth, indeed, as the path to an inevitable, international democratic
The problem of subjective death threatens to give way, once again, to unprecedented mass slaughter. The numbed condition of a narcissistic society, rooted in a permanent now, a blissful state of Heideggerian Dasein, threatens to wake up to a world in which subjective death and ontology are the least of all worries.
Utopia, are already showing their disatrous cracks.

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SPANOS 2000 [William, Americas Shadow, p 197-202]-AC

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UNIQUENESS OF THE EMPIRE U IMPERIALISM IS ADAPTED TO CAPITALISM

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U EMPIRE FRAGILE NOW

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LINKS LINK - GENERIC

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LINK THE STATE

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LINK THE STATE

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LINK BENIGN INTENTIONS

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LINK DEMOCRACY/HUMAN RIGHTS

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LINK REDUCE PRESENCE

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LINK REDUCE TROOPS

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LINK REDUCE TROOPS

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LINK REDUCE TROOPS

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LINK REDUCE TROOPS

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American imperialist strategy is to control the economies of Japan under capitalism

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the identity crisis-hell, overpower it, wave a lag."15

And these highly emotional attitudes were made

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Link - Soft Power

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IMPACTS IMPACT - BLOWBACK

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IMPACT MILLIONS OF DEATHS

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IMPACT NORTH/SOUTH GAP

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IMPACT TO TERRORISM NO V2L