Victor David Hanson and Arianna Huffington spent most of last night’s “War and American Empire” debate at the DeVos Place arguing about the Bush administration’s rationale for going to war in Iraq and the question of whether or not the United States should continue its occupation of Iraq.
Hanson, a senior fellow at the Hover Institution (a think-tank developing Republican Party ideas), opened the debate by arguing that the United States was not an empire. Hanson relied heavily on his own studies of the classics to explain how the United States does not fit the classical definition of empire as it does not have an imperial culture, does not exact tribute, and does not have a military system in the service of empire. Rather, Hanson argued that the United States is simply the “most powerful democratic nation” in history and has worked to share its culture and government, which he described as a multi-racial and egalitarian system, throughout the world. Hanson concluded with a brief tirade about how critics of the United States and those who would use the term empire are frequently ungrateful for all that the United States has done. He went on to cite the Middle East, Western Europe, and the “affluent class of leisure” in the United States who, according to Hanson, criticize the United States as empire in order to fill a psychological need.
Huffington followed up by describing Hanson as a brilliant mind with the wrong idea and described a September 10, 2001 interview in which Hanson described empire as the ability to “exercise power beyond one’s borders,” a definition that she argues fits the United States. She then dismissed Hanson’s talk of globalization and said that she was going to focus on Iraq and went into what was essentially a twenty minute speech describing a basic case against the war in Iraq. Huffington cited the lies used to justify the war, the fact that it has not made the United States safer, that the war is against some basic conservative tenets, and that even conservatives are turning against the war now that the majority of the US is against it. Huffington said the United States was “not an imperial nation in its DNA,” but had become one by the efforts of the Project for a New American Century and the other neocons.
For the remainder of the debate Hanson and Huffington rather selfishly argued about the nature of the Iraq war without mentioning the thousands of Iraqis that have been killed by the United States’ actions and the millions that continue to live under the United States’ occupation. As would be expected, Hanson defended the war by citing the usual Bush administration arguments and Huffington mounted a rather limited attack on it. While Huffington described the war as “having everything to do with American empire,” she made little effort to explain how the situation in Iraq was an example of imperial policy and as such the debate largely degenerated into to her describing Iraq as an “imperial adventure” and Hanson explaining that because, as Huffington stated, that Iraq was not in the United States self-interest, it proved that the US was not an empire on the basis of his definition. Whereas a skillful debater could have easily challenged Hanson on his initial definition of empire, would have brought up the United States’ conduct throughout history (for example, the genocide of the Native American population), and discussed the issue of both neo-liberal and cultural globalization, Huffington’s arguments about Iraq did little to address the question of US empire. The invasion of Iraq can certainly be seen as a manifestation of US empire, yet without providing the proper context, Huffington’s argument seemed vague and almost off-topic.
The audience, which numbered in the hundreds, clearly enjoyed the debate, with partisans of each side applauding when their respective favorite made a comment they agreed with or a joke that they found to be humorous. Regrettably, most attendees probably left with little new insight on the topic of US empire.
