I'M SPARTACUS! NO, WAIT, I'M GORE VIDAL!! posted by Richard Seymour

Those who look at life unsentimentally usually have to conclude with Schopenhauer that it really isn't worth all the fuss and it would be better to be dead. And they might also agree with Sophocles that it was probably better not to be born. In case you were wondering, that is my case for abortion and euthanasia. President George W. Bush is, of course, simultaneously against both and the biggest advertisement for them. If only his mother had known. Come to that, if only old Barbara had been a lesbian and George senior had gone in for locker room fun.

That said, the two elder Illuminati WASPs must be terribly proud of their Boy Emperor. Not since Alexander the Great has someone so emotionally young flattered his parents' vanity by winning the world for them. Beats any school report card in the book. Not for nothing did Caesar weep when he saw the statue of Alexander and considered the latter's astonishing conquests in early life, while he in his forties had yet to distinguish himself. Pascal, reflecting on this, sighed that it was perfectly understandable that Alexander wanted to conquer the world because of his hot-blooded youth, but Caesar, being older should have known better. Well, perhaps the anecdote isn't true. We get most of our Roman history from snobs, aristocrats and vile hypocrites. Cicero was all three.

Doubtless future historians of the American Empire will have to conclude that in many ways, its biggest countervailing power and therefore biggest enemy, was not the Official Enemy of the Month, but that other "superpower", as the New York Times felicitously called it, world public opinion. They too will have to peruse the history of snobs, bigots and self-serving bullshit merchants. But they will also have the benefit of counter-history, the permanent register of popular opposition, should they care to examine it. For my part, I offer future historians (should they unearth my website from the strata of the internet, where it will hopefully not fossilise into a 404) a few leads.

In looking at the causes of the Iraq war, gentlemen (you will probably be gentlemen), do not start with Iraq. This war, prepare yourselves, has absolutely nothing to do with Iraq. US weapons experts are now returning home empty-handed, nothing to offer the Thieftan of the tribe other than the assurance that there was "certainly evidence of a programme" . Alas, "no 'smoking gun'". The largest imperial power on earth has taken over a country that George Bush assures us is the size of France (it is not) and still cannot situate a few planted weapons. This is Rome during the fall.

To investigate this war, you better start with the structure of US power. Since Franklin Roosevelt deliberately undermined the Japanese peace camp (represented by Prince Koyone, who was willing to meet with Roosevelt and offer a route away from their disagreements over Manchuria and the South Pacific) and consciously provoked war with Japan, America has been the largest imperial power in the world. Two world wars destroyed the old European empires and ushered in a new champion, the upstart US, which had first attempted to exercise imperial power in a serious way by provoking a war with Mexico, then occupying the Phillipines. Luckily for the Filipinos, only 3 million of them are said to have been killed. As America emerged triumphant, having allowed Russia to bear most of the military cost of fighting Germany, Truman and his Secretary of State Dean Acheson got around the table and worked out a few plans.

First of all, no more New Deals. The New Deal had been tried and manifestly failed to save capitalism. All it did was allow the President to be slandered as a socialist and "that Jew, Rosenfeld" who had syphallus and practised Greek love. Harry Truman did go in for a little bit of rich-baiting in public, while making amends with them in private. To that end, he and Acheson realised that what HAD saved capitalism was the war. Yes, all that steel and rubber and oil and other stuff was being made productive again, because businesses were ready to socialise production, distribution and exchange in a situation of war. War was profitable - even more, it was a defense and enlargement of the American zone of profit. Measures which would have six months ago been denounced as movements toward communist tyranny were suddenly adopted with enormous relish the second Pearl Harbour was ingloriously struck. War production was good.

So, they institutionalised a permanent war economy, by making America a National Security state. NSC-68 transformed a "republic, not a democracy" as rightwingers used to say into an evolving empire. After the war, arms spending in America soared to great heights, varying for approximately 25 years between 11% and 16% of the total GDP. Before the war, arms production had composed 1% of the GDP. Don't take all this nonsense about Keynesian measures saving the US economy. The US economy started its long boom in 1940, and the first Keynesian measure introduced was the Kennedy-Johnson tax cut of 1964. It was simply a matter of creating jobs and injecting public money into industry in such a way that enabled America to be an aggressive world power and at the same time did not augment capital. In the short long run, this enabled a long period of nice, steady growth. By diverting such massive sums of productive investment into useless, unproductive weaponry, the US government ensured that their wonderful system of private enterprise wasn't digging itself into an early grave by becoming tumescent on productive capacity when there wasn't the public demand available. Returns on productive investment have a long term tendency to decline because while the initial investment is seen as a means to take a leap past the competition and win market share, when its advances have generalised across industry, the value of the investment falls. Goods have become cheaper to produce, because faster, because the machinery is better. But when that situation becomes the norm, the competitive advantage is lost and the goods are yielding lower returns. So, arms spending offset a fatal tendency of private enterprise.

In the long long run, the cost of arms spending acts as a drag, depriving industry of vital investment needed to win against international competitors. So, Japan, with a constitutional postwar requirement to spend no more than 1% of its GDP on military production was able to soar ahead of America with growth rates of 8%. It evolved a dynamic capitalist economy with heavy state investment and growth policies that favoured stability. It also sent Nemesis to Detroit in the form of rival car production. So, while the US was busy making fires in Vietnam, US industry was screaming for the war machine to be switched off, just for a little bit and for taxes on businesses to be cut. No more would they pay for wars that yielded so few returns. Nevertheless, while arms spending did decline after the 1973 recession and the "honourable withdrawal" (well, if that wasn't the phrase, it SHOULD have been) from Vietnam, it remained fairly high. In fact, in the 1980s, Reagan reflated it from approximately 5% of GDP to 7-8%, developing huge deficits but prompting short terms spurts in economic growth.

Economic restructuring and the hard won defeat of the labour movement ensured that America was able to emerge in the 1990s as a leaner capitalist power. Lower growth rates, but also low interest rates and low inflation. Wages were held down, thus facilitating the "goldilocks economy" - relatively high profit rates compared to the 1970s and 1980s, but without increasing consumer demand pushing up inflation. At the same time, the USSR disintegrated and gave up its empire with little resistance. Japan, in the mid-nineties, having survived the late eighties recession, went belly-up. All those years of splurging on productive capacity now caught up on the Japanese. They had a lot of machines, a lot of factories, but noone to make things for. The USA looked to be doing good. And so the myth of the "new economic paradigm" which had once been used by social democratic economists to account for the success of the Japanese economy was now subverted and used to explain the apparent American triumph. Free markets ruled, neoliberalism would break down all walls, Chinese walls included.

In 2000, Goldilocks left town and Little Orphan Annie became president. The economy experienced those jitters of old, and suddenly everyone realised that Alan Greenspan was not the Wizard of Oz. Bush made preparations to invade Afghanistan (long before 9/11 as we know thanks to a Pakistani minister). The military was to become a priority once more. Arms investment would increase. Following 9/11, the National Security state was given a new avatar in the form of the PATRIOT Act and the vast military budget, which has so far reached $359bn. As a result the economy has picked up a little . If this causes a major threat of terrorist attack to increase , who can complain. America is out of the closet. It is an Empire. And Empires know no tolerance, no boundaries, no accomodation but those which are imposed by countervailing force.

Historians in the future would do well to recall that the Roman Empire also fell because it went broke.