A surprising change in neoconservative assessment of America in light of the manifold disasters of the Iraq War.
Michael Vlahos, a prominent neoconservative thinker with the National Security Analysis Department of The Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory, has recently taken the measure of America's low estate in today's world and given reasons for this. Vlahos's explanatory analysis and description of America's standing is acute and accurate. It eschews the hand-wringing, apologetics, second thoughts and second guessing, accusations and recriminations adopted by the neoconservatives who in the early phase of the Iraq War postulated that America was an empire and put forward dreamy scenarios about democracy blossoming in the thorny soil of the Middle East. While Vlahos mentions neither of them in his article, his concepts and analytical tools and even his perspective are indebted to Karx Marx and Franz Fanon, two of democracy's most keen-minded, implacable, and influential critics.
Vlahos brings up the concept of "surplus humanity," echoing Marx's critiques of surplus value and surplus production. The contemporary concept of "surplus humanity" is similar to Marx's concept of "surplus value" in that both refer to excesses in a social system which are troublesome because of the system's inability to absorb them. Franz Fanon's influence is spread throughout Vlahos's article. Whereas Vlahos takes the measure of the state and position of America today as an insider and Fanon criticized Western colonialism as a outsider, their recognition of the limits of the powers of the stronger countries and the effects of these powers on the people of other countries subjected to them are similar. Writing from the standpoint of the oppressed outsiders--i. e., the colonized--Fanon explored the psychology of victimization and grievance as it welled within these as their traditions and cultures were marginalized within their own lands and they were exploited or oppressed by the colonizing powers. For Fanon, violence was the means by which the colonized peoples would throw off the colonizing powers and reestablishment themselves in their own countries.
Writing as an insider of American society, Vlahos sees the resistances generated by current American actions in Iraq and much of the rest of the world. The bombings of U. S. embassies in Africa in 1998 and the 9/11 attack on the trade towers can be seen as violence by a group seeing itself as victimized by U. S. presence in its region much as Fanon explained in his analyses and ideas. Vlahos too accepts that violence coupled with U. S. illusions and missteps connected mainly with misuse of its power are already resulting in a loss of influence and closing off of options in the Middle East which inevitably result in greater power and more autonomy for indigenous groups and leaders, just as Fanon envisioned. As Vlahos writes, the "shock and awe" inaugurating the Iraq War and the following exercises of virtually unchallenged U. S. military might and presence have formed "resistant communities" the way the London Blitz united and strengthened the British in World War II. Vlahos sees that the United States has "forced a fateful transformation of [its] sacred narrative" that it was a beacon, protector, and protagonist of universal ideals and human rights.
Vlahos denotes what Fanon theorized. Vlahos's article marks the latest evolution of neoconservative analysis in the circumstances of the Iraq War. He calls the country's continuing faith in the "narrative" that the values it embodies are universal and it is able to disseminate these at times and places of its own choosing "our defeat-dynamic." Neither Marx nor Fanon would disagree.
