America's Kingdom of Heaven

Created by : Francis Goodwin View profile

by Adam Elkus -- AntiWar.com

Oct. 27, 2006 -- On Oct. 18, President George W. Bush signed an executive order creating a new national policy which loudly proclaims that the U.S. will brook no restraint of any kind on its "rights, capabilities, and freedom of action" in space, and that it has the right to deny space "access" to any power deemed hostile to U.S. "national interests.." The report did not elaborate on how the United States would restrict this access, but Air Force officers have written position papers calling for an "active military posture" in space that may include "deception, disruption, denial, degradation, and destruction" by "hunter-killer microsatellites" and "spaced-based weapons platform[s]." Essentially, Bush has declared outer space an American colony with the stroke of a pen.

In the increasingly delusional world of the president and his advisers, America is not just a superpower but an imperial state without precedent in history. Walter C. Opello and Stephen J. Rosow define a traditional empire as essentially borderless:

"A traditional empire was, theoretically, expandable to encompass the entire globe because empires did not have fixed borders. Imperial borders were merely frontiers that marked the empire's temporary outer limits where its army happens to have stopped and could be moved outward at will. In other words the boundaries of a traditional empire did not demarcate an area of exclusive territorial jurisdiction based on a shared national identity, but defined a flexible zone of military and economic contact between the empire and the peoples outside of it." (9)

The "zone of contact" provides a useful framework for evaluating a traditional empire, and America during the early years of the Bush administration fit such a paradigm. Bush gave himself the right to use unilateral and preemptive force to "pursue" nations that "harbor or support terrorism." Bush also committed to using force to spread "liberty and prosperity," i.e., capitalist democracy. Although those steps seemed radical at the time, they weren't.

The United States did not ask for the approval of anyone when it invaded Mexico to catch Pancho Villa, considered as much of a terrorist at the time as bin Laden and his cohorts are now. Subverting and directly overthrowing governments is a policy that dates back long before the Bush administration. The 700 bases the United States maintains in 130 countries were not all constructed after 2000. The real significance of Bush's space policy eludes a traditional classification. A traditional empire's reach is still limited by where its soldiers can march. Yet to the president and his advisers, the reach of the American empire is limitless. The 2001 invasion of Afghanistan was not originally called "Infinite Justice" for nothing. By declaring America will act without restraint in space and has the right to deny access to space, Bush claims custody of outer space itself. Thus, the United States claims custody of everything outside of the Earth.

This is a breathtaking act of delusion. In Bush's increasingly fanciful world, it is not enough for the United States to have the most powerful military force in the world, control the world economy through the IMF, World Bank, and WTO, and maintain a hegemony that rivals that of Rome and Victorian England. The soldiers of the empire must march across heaven itself. When a White House staffer declared that "We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality," he was not boasting but expressing an official administration position. When one believes that they control reality itself, there is not a big conceptual leap to believing that one's borders reach beyond the stars.