Embracing the Dark Side for their Galactic Ambitions

Embracing the Dark Side for their Galactic Ambitions

By Dan Sanchez

October 28, 2015 "Information Clearing House" - When Bill Kristol watches Star Wars movies, he roots for the Galactic Empire. The leading neocon recently caused a social media disturbance in the Force when he tweeted this predilection for the Dark Side following the debut of the final trailer for Star Wars: The Force Awakens.

Kristol sees the Empire as basically a galaxy-wide extrapolation of what he has long wanted the US to have over the Earth: what he has termed “benevolent global hegemony.”

Kristol, founder and editor of neocon flagship magazine The Weekly Standard,responded to scandalized critics by linking to a 2002 essay from the Standard’s blog that justifies even the worst of Darth Vader’s atrocities. In “The Case for the Empire,” Jonathan V. Last made a Kristolian argument that you can’t make a “benevolent hegemony” omelet without breaking a few eggs.

And what if those broken eggs are civilians, like Luke Skywalker’s uncle and aunt who were gunned down by Imperial Stormtroopers in their home on the Middle Eastern-looking arid planet of Tatooine (filmed on location in Tunisia)? Well, as Last sincerely argued, Uncle Owen and Aunt Beru hid Luke and harbored the fugitive droids R2D2 and C3P0; so they were “traitors” who were aiding the rebellion and deserved to be field-executed.

A year after Kristol published Last’s essay, large numbers of civilians were killed by American Imperial Stormtroopers in their actual Middle Eastern arid homeland of Iraq, thanks largely in part to the direct influence of neocons like Kristol and Last.

That war was similarly justified in part by the false allegation that Iraq ruler Saddam Hussein was harboring and aiding terrorist enemies of the empire like Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. The civilian-slaughtering siege of Fallujah, one of the most brutal episodes of the war, was also specifically justified by the false allegation that the town was harboring Zarqawi.

In reality Hussein had put a death warrant out on Zarqawi, who was hiding from Iraq’s security forces under the protective aegis of the US Air Force in Iraq’s autonomous Kurdish region. It was only after the Empire precipitated the chaotic collapse of Iraq that Zarqawi’s outfit was able to thrive and evolve into Al Qaeda in Iraq (AQI). And after the Empire precipitated the chaotic collapse of Syria, AQI further mutated into Syrian al-Qaeda (which has conquered much of Syria) and ISIS (which has conquered much of Syria and Iraq).

And what if the “benevolent hegemony” omelet requires the breaking of “eggs” the size of whole worlds, like how high Imperial officer Wilhuff Tarkin used the Death Star to obliterate the planet Alderaan? Well, as Last sincerely argued, even Alderaan likely deserved its fate, since it may have been, “a front for Rebel activity or at least home to many more spies and insurgents…” Last contended that Princess Leia was probably lying when she told the Death Star’s commander that the planet had “no weapons.”

While Last was writing his apologia for global genocide, his fellow neocons were baselessly arguing that Saddam Hussein was similarly lying about Iraq not having a weapons of mass destruction (WMD) program. Primarily on that basis, the obliteration of an entire country began the following year.

And a year after that, President Bush performed a slapstick comedy act about his failure to find Iraqi WMDs for a black-tie dinner for radio and television correspondents. The media hacks in his audience, who had obsequiously helped the neocon-dominated Bush administration lie the country into war, rocked with laughter as thousands of corpses moldered in Iraq and Arlington. A more sickening display of imperial decadence and degradation has not been seen perhaps since the gladiatorial audiences of Imperial Rome. This is the hegemonic “benevolence” and “national greatness” that Kristol pines for.

“Benevolent global hegemony” was coined by Kristol and fellow neocon Robert Kaganand their 1996 Foreign Affairs article “Toward a Neo-Reaganite Foreign Policy.” In that essay, Kristol and Kagan sought to inoculate both the conservative movement and US foreign policy against the isolationism of Pat Buchanan.

The Soviet menace had recently disappeared, and the Cold War along with it. The neocons were terrified that the American public would therefore jump at the chance to lay their imperial burdens down. Kristol and Kagan urged their readers to resist that temptation, and to instead capitalize on America’s new peerless preeminence by making it a big-spending, hyper-active, busybody globo-cop. The newfound predominance must become dominance wherever and whenever possible. That way, any future near-peer competitors would be nipped in the bud, and the new “unipolar moment” would last forever.

What made this neocon dream seem within reach was the indifference of post-Soviet Russia. The year after the Berlin Wall fell, the Persian Gulf War against Iraq was the debut “police action” of unipolar “Team America, World Police.” Paul Wolfowitz, the neocon and Iraq War architect, considered it a successful trial run. As Wesley Clark, former Nato Supreme Allied Commander for Europe, recalled:

“In 1991, [Wolfowitz] was the Undersecretary of Defense for Policy — the number 3 position at the Pentagon. And I had gone to see him when I was a 1-Star General commanding the National Training Center. (…)

And I said, “Mr. Secretary, you must be pretty happy with the performance of the troops in Desert Storm.”

And he said: “Yeah, but not really, because the truth is we should have gotten rid of Saddam Hussein, and we didn’t … But one thing we did learn is that we can use our military in the region — in the Middle East — and the Soviets won’t stop us. And we’ve got about 5 or 10 years to clean up those old Soviet client regimes — Syria, Iran, Iraq — before the next great superpower comes on to challenge us.”

The 1996 “Neo-Reaganite” article was part of a surge of neocon literary activity in the mid-90s. It was in 1995 that Kristol and John Podhoretz founded The Weekly Standard with funding from right-wing media mogul Rupert Murdoch.

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