Jonathan Schell, who ended his Nation magazine column, "Letter from Ground Zero," last February, now takes up "The Crisis of the Republic" in what will be a series of periodic, longer essays appearing in the Nation under that rubric.

For all its wealth, its power, its dreams of military domination over the last half-century-plus, the United States, Schell argues in this introduction to his new series, has misunderstood the nature of power in our time and so has become "the fool of history." Our tale, as he tells it, is not one of imperial success followed by crisis, but of a deep and abiding kind of failure; nor is it a tale of a successful empire now in crisis, but of a failed empire now in a state of disarray.

In his seminal book, The Unconquerable World, he suggested just why this was so by tracing the way, from the late eighteenth century on, the globe experienced an ever-upward ratcheting of the means of destruction and of the imperial violence that went with it until, with the coming of nuclear weapons, we reached beyond the limits of power, even of the planet itself. At the same time, what also ratcheted ever upward was a kind of "people power," deeply connected to the idea of national sovereignty and independence, that simply would not (and still will not) give way. It is in this context that the United States is "too late for empire."

Too Late for Empire
By Jonathan Schell

[This article, which will appear in the August 14/21 issue of the Nation, is posted here with the kind permission of the editors of that magazine.]

Repetition

Anyone who wants to write about the constitutional crisis unfolding in the United States today faces a peculiar problem at the outset. There is a large body of observations that at one and the same time have been made too often and yet not often enough -- too often because they have been repeated to the point of tedium for a minority ready to listen but not often enough because the general public has yet to consider them seriously enough. The problem for a self-respecting writer is that the act of writing almost in its nature promises something new. Repetition is not really writing but propaganda -- not illumination for the mind but a mental beating. Here are some examples of the sort of observations I have in mind, at once over-familiar and unheard:

President George W. Bush sent American troops into Iraq to find weapons of mass destruction, but they weren't there.

He said that Saddam Hussein's regime had given help to Al Qaeda, but it had not.

He therefore took the nation to war on the basis of falsehoods.

His administration says that the torture at Abu Ghraib and elsewhere has been the work of a few bad apples in the military, whereas in fact abuses were sanctioned at the highest levels of the executive branch in secret memos.

His administration lambastes leakers, but its own officials illegally leaked the name of a CIA operative, Valerie Plame, in order to politically discredit her husband.

He flatly stated to the public that all wiretaps of Americans were ordered pursuant to court warrants, whereas in fact he was authorizing and repeatedly reauthorizing warrantless wiretaps.

These wiretaps violated a specific law of Congress forbidding them.

His administration has asserted a right to imprison Americans as well as foreigners indefinitely without the habeas corpus hearings required by law.

Wars of aggression, torture, domestic spying and arbitrary arrest are the hallmarks of dictatorship, yet Congress, run by the President's party, has refused to conduct full investigations into either the false WMD claims, or the abuses and torture, or the warrantless wiretaps, or the imprisonment without habeas corpus.

When Congress passed a bill forbidding torture and the President signed it, he added a "signing statement" implying a right to disregard its provisions when they conflicted with his interpretation of his powers.

The President's secret legal memos justifying the abuses and torture are based on a conception of the powers of the executive that gives him carte blanche to disregard specific statutes as well as international law in the exercise of self-granted powers to the Commander in Chief nowhere mentioned in the Constitution.

If accepted, these claims would fundamentally alter the structure of the American government, upsetting the system of checks and balances and nullifying fundamental liberties, including Fourth Amendment guarantees against unreasonable searches and seizures and guarantees of due process. As such, they embody apparent failures of the President to carry out his oath to "preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States."