Gonzaba Spanos File

MSD 2010-2011 Gonzaba
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Table of Contents
Spanos Shell 1/5.........................................................................................................................................................5
Spanos Shell 2/5.........................................................................................................................................................6
Spanos Shell 3/5.........................................................................................................................................................7
Spanos shell 4/5..........................................................................................................................................................8
Spanos Shell 5/5.........................................................................................................................................................9
Modules.......................................................................................................................................................10
Terrorism Module 1/2...............................................................................................................................................11
Terrorism Module 2/2...............................................................................................................................................12
2NC Terrorism Evidence............................................................................................................................................13
Terror causes Jeremiad Ext.......................................................................................................................................14
Terror is imperialist Ext 1/3.......................................................................................................................................15
Terror Is Imperialist Ext 2/3......................................................................................................................................16
Terror is imperialist Ext 3/3.......................................................................................................................................17
Biodiversity Module 1/2...........................................................................................................................................18
Biodiversity Module 2/2...........................................................................................................................................19
Bio-d Link Ext............................................................................................................................................................20
Bio-d Impact turn Ext................................................................................................................................................21
Bio-d impact turn Ext................................................................................................................................................22
Bio-d alt solves Ext....................................................................................................................................................23
Biodiversity epistemology link..................................................................................................................................24
Okinawa Module.......................................................................................................................................................25
Okinawa Sexual Abuse = Military Ext........................................................................................................................26
Okinawa Guam Shift Ext............................................................................................................................................27
China Module 1/2.....................................................................................................................................................28
China Module 2/2.....................................................................................................................................................29
China Constructions are imperialist Ext.....................................................................................................................30
Proliferation Module 1/2..........................................................................................................................................31
Proliferation Module 2/2..........................................................................................................................................32
Prolif Link Ext............................................................................................................................................................33
Prolif Link Ext............................................................................................................................................................34
Prolif Case Turn Ext...................................................................................................................................................35
Prolif: “Rogue” Rhetoric links 1/2.............................................................................................................................36
Prolif: “Rogue” Rhetoric links 2/2.............................................................................................................................37
Prolif: NPT Links 1/2..................................................................................................................................................38
Prolif: NPT Links 2/2..................................................................................................................................................39
LINKS: SOFT POWER..................................................................................................................................................40
Links............................................................................................................................................................41
Link- Hearts & Minds.................................................................................................................................................42
Link - International Relations....................................................................................................................................43
Link- IR 1/2................................................................................................................................................................44
Link- IR 2/2................................................................................................................................................................45
Link - International Relations....................................................................................................................................46
Turkey relationship ADVS links.................................................................................................................................47
generic All case Link..................................................................................................................................................48
TNWs Link.................................................................................................................................................................49
TNWs Link.................................................................................................................................................................50
DUBs Link..................................................................................................................................................................51
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DuBs EXT...................................................................................................................................................................52
Generic Japan Link....................................................................................................................................................53
Generic Turkey Link...................................................................................................................................................54
Generic South Korea Link 1/2....................................................................................................................................55
Generic south Korea Link 2/2....................................................................................................................................56
Generic Iraq Link.......................................................................................................................................................57
Generic Iraq Link.......................................................................................................................................................58
STABILIZING South Korea Link...................................................................................................................................59
Generic Afghan Link..................................................................................................................................................60
Afghan is Orientalist.................................................................................................................................................61
Afghani Women Link 1/2..........................................................................................................................................62
Afghani Women Link 2/2..........................................................................................................................................63
Saving Afghan Link....................................................................................................................................................64
Middle East Instability Link 1/2.................................................................................................................................65
Middle East instability Link 2/2.................................................................................................................................66
Iran Prolif Link...........................................................................................................................................................67
Nato Link 1/2............................................................................................................................................................68
Nato Link 2/2............................................................................................................................................................69
Russia link.................................................................................................................................................................70
Human Rights Link....................................................................................................................................................71
Human Rights Extension...........................................................................................................................................72
Democracy Promotion link 1/2.................................................................................................................................73
Democracy Promotion link 2/2.................................................................................................................................74
Demo Pomo EXT.......................................................................................................................................................75
North Korea Link.......................................................................................................................................................76
North Korea Link.......................................................................................................................................................77
North Korea Case Evidence.......................................................................................................................................78
Stability Link.............................................................................................................................................................79
OffShore Balancing Link............................................................................................................................................80
Offshore Balancing Ext..............................................................................................................................................81
Multilateralism Link..................................................................................................................................................82
War Planning Link.....................................................................................................................................................83
Moral Obligation Link................................................................................................................................................84
Impacts........................................................................................................................................................85
Impact -Oceans of Blood...........................................................................................................................................86
Impact -Violence.......................................................................................................................................................87
Impact -Totalitarianism.............................................................................................................................................88
Impact -Standing Reserve 1/2...................................................................................................................................89
Impact -Standing Reserve 2/2...................................................................................................................................90
Alternatives.................................................................................................................................................91
Alt Evidence..............................................................................................................................................................92
Alt evidence - remembering ‘nam vs. instrumental praxis........................................................................................93
Alt Solvency Evidence...............................................................................................................................................94
Alt Solves - Youth resistance.....................................................................................................................................95
Alternative Solves – Capitalism.................................................................................................................................96
Epistemology Portion...................................................................................................................................97
LINK- TRUTH CLAIMS/REALISM.................................................................................................................................98
North Korea link......................................................................................................................................................100
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IMPACT- JUSTIFICATION FOR WAR..........................................................................................................................101
LINK- ANXIETY.........................................................................................................................................................102
LINK- LEADERSHIP/HEG/DIPLOMACY/RIGHTS/DEMOPROMO................................................................................103
LINK- HEG................................................................................................................................................................104
LINK- HEARTS AND MINDS......................................................................................................................................106
Generic Link 1/2......................................................................................................................................................107
Generic Link 2/2......................................................................................................................................................108
Prolif Discourse Link................................................................................................................................................109
2NC Blocks.................................................................................................................................................110
AT: Perm- Do both 1/3............................................................................................................................................111
AT: Perm- Do both 2/3............................................................................................................................................112
AT: Perm- Do both 3/3............................................................................................................................................113
AT: Perm- Do the alt................................................................................................................................................114
AT: Perm- Do Plan and Alt in every other instance..................................................................................................115
AT: Perm- Do plan without representations............................................................................................................116
AT: Perm- Do alt then plan......................................................................................................................................117
AT: Perm- Do plan then alt......................................................................................................................................118
AT: Perm double bind.............................................................................................................................................119
AT: The Impact Turn 1/2.........................................................................................................................................120
AT: The Impact Turn 2/2.........................................................................................................................................121
AT: empire inevitable / empire is unstable 1/2.......................................................................................................122
AT: empire inevitable / empire is unstable 1/2.......................................................................................................123
AT: Empire Inevitable Ext 1/5..................................................................................................................................124
AT: Benevolent Heg.................................................................................................................................................129
AT: Ferguson 1/2.....................................................................................................................................................130
AT: Ferguson 2/2.....................................................................................................................................................131
AT: Ferguson Ext 1/2...............................................................................................................................................132
AT: Ferguson Ext 2/2...............................................................................................................................................133
Heg is bad / Impact Ext - Nuclear disaster...............................................................................................................134
Heg is bad / Impact Ext - conflict.............................................................................................................................135
imperialism is bad - violence / extinction / holocaust.............................................................................................136
AT: Link Turn 1/3.....................................................................................................................................................137
AT: Link Turn 2/3.....................................................................................................................................................138
AT: Link Turn 3/3.....................................................................................................................................................139
AT: Link Turn Ext 1/2...............................................................................................................................................140
AT: Link Turn Ext 2/2...............................................................................................................................................141
AT: You’re not instrumental / nihilist 1/2................................................................................................................142
AT: You’re not instrumental / nihilist 2/2................................................................................................................143
AT: You’re not instrumental / nihilist EXT...............................................................................................................144
AT: You’re not instrumental / nihilist Ext................................................................................................................145
Ontological Focus Good..........................................................................................................................................146
AT: Ethics vs Ontology 1/2......................................................................................................................................147
AT: Ethics vs Ontology 2/2......................................................................................................................................148
AT: Ontology Bad- Generic No link..........................................................................................................................149
AT: Ontology Bad - Graham ’99 “mass Murder”......................................................................................................150
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AT: Ontology Bad - Graham ’99 “hocus pocus”........................................................................................................151
Generic AT: args against the alternative..................................................................................................................152
Generic AT: Spanos = anti-humanist 1/2.................................................................................................................153
Generic AT: Spanos = anti-humanist 2/2.................................................................................................................154
Humanism Ext.........................................................................................................................................................155
Generic AT: vietnam Focus Bad...............................................................................................................................156
AT: Mendible - vietnam focus bad...........................................................................................................................157
AT: Weisbrot - vietnam focus bad...........................................................................................................................158
AT: Kane - Vietnam Focus Bad.................................................................................................................................159
AT: KirkPatrick - Vietnam Focus Bad........................................................................................................................160
AT: Empathy Turn...................................................................................................................................................161
AT: Heidegger justifies genocide 1/2.......................................................................................................................162
AT: Heidegger justifies genocide 2/2.......................................................................................................................163
AT: spanos is a nazi.................................................................................................................................................164
Spanos = Nazi Ext....................................................................................................................................................165
AT: Bryant...............................................................................................................................................................166
AT: Schmitt Counter K 1/3.......................................................................................................................................167
AT: Threats are Real Ext..........................................................................................................................................170
at: Predictability / INEVITABILITY............................................................................................................................173
AT: Role of Ballet / final Judgement........................................................................................................................174
AT: Utilitarianism....................................................................................................................................................175
Util Ext....................................................................................................................................................................176
AT: Realism 1/2.......................................................................................................................................................177
AT: Realism 2/2.......................................................................................................................................................178
AT: Predictions 1/2..................................................................................................................................................179
AT: Predictions 2/2..................................................................................................................................................180
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SPANOS SHELL 1/5
THE AMERICAN CENTURY HAS COME TO AN END, AND WITH IT ENDS THE UNIPOLAR
DOMINATION OF THE PLANET THAT THE UNITED STATES HAS CRUSADED FOR SINCE THE
END OF THE SECOND WORLD WAR. THE AFFIRMATIVE, IN POSITING LIBERAL CAPITALIST
DEMOCRACY AS THE LAST AND ONLY OPTION FOR “CIVILIZED” INDIVIDUALS TO RESIDE IN,
CONSTRUCTS THE WORLD IN A WAY THAT JUSTIFIES IMPERIAL DOMINATION. THE FALL OF
THE AMERICAN EMPIRE IS IMMENENT. WILLIAM V. SPANOS CALLS OUR CURRENT
SOCIOPOLITICAL OCCASION THE INTERREGNUM- THE TIME BETWEEN THE RISE AND FALL OF
EMPIRES. THE AFFIRMATIVE MERELY ATTEMPTS TO RESCUE IMPERIALISM FROM THE
THROES OF DEATH IT’S CURRENTLY NEARING.
SPANOS 2008 [William V, Professor at Binghamton, American Exceptionalism in the Age of Globalization: The Specter of Vietnam, SUNY Press 2008, 23-
24]
The urgency of the need to break the peace of the Pax Metaphysica—and the general direction that such a project is compelled
to take by the contemporary, post-Cold War occasion—is not only the symptomatic testimony of the present impasse of
traditional and vestigially traditional forms of emancipatory thought in the face of the planetary triumph
of technological reason and the new ("ameliorative") imperialism of the New World Order. It is also
suggested by the growing, if still unthought, awareness of a small but increasing number of advanced, but
otherwise heterogeneous intellectuals on the "Left"—Jacques Derrida, Jean-Francois Lyotard, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Fredric
Jameson, Paul Virilio, Rosi Braidotti, Giorgio Agamben, Bill Readings, Homi Bhabha, Gayatri Spivak, Enrique Dussel, Ranajit Guha, Edward Said, and Michael Hardt
and Antonio Negri, to name only a few of the most suggestive—that the impasse of emancipatory political practice in the post-Cold War period is in some significance
degree an impasse of thinking itself. Against the increasing pressure to "forget theory," emanating from spokespersons of the ostensibly practice-oriented new
historicism, cultural studies, neo-Marxism, feminism, postcolonialism, and so on, these radical thinkers, like a "certain spirit" of Heidegger before them (whatever their
interpretation of the political implications of his thought), recognize this impasse as a failure on the part of currently privileged oppositional discourses to perceive the
spread of (visual) technological thinking in the modern age as its global triumph. To put this recognition in Heidegger's resonantly inaugural terms, they
symptomatically understand this impasse as a failure to acknowledge the present occasion as "a destitute time"—a time that has totally circumscribed and banalized
thinking and thus, paradoxically, a time of renewed possibility insofar as its destitution activates this awareness of the total colonization and banalization of thinking
and its practical corollary. This is their symptomatic recognition of the need to rethink thinking from the perspective of its marginality, now understood as the
thinkers of the
delegitimizing contradiction precipitated by the imperial "triumph" of technological/calculative thinking. In other words, these
ontological difference that traditional thought has obliterated in the name of the "objective" truth of
empirical science are now beginning, however tentatively, to understand the present historical
conjuncture, the limit occasion that has enabled the deputies of the dominant mode of thought to name
the moment of its triumph "the end of history," as an "interregnum,"27 a time between the end—the closure
—of the reign of philosophy and the beginning of thinking, and the oppositional intellectual as the alienated
exile. In Heidegger's resonant term, this unhomed or migrant thinker is the Abgeschiedene, the One a-part„who, aware of the global colonization of originative
thinking by the total technologization and banalization of "enlightening" thought, has parted from, but is always already a part of, this solar "at-homeland." He is the
"ghostly" stranger,28 the specter, who wanders nomadically "at the fringe of the technically-economically oriented world of modern mass existence" (LP, 196). In
this "realm of Between," this "No-more of the gods that have fled and the Not-yet of the god that is
coming,"29 as Heidegger alternatively calls this state of a-partness (Abgeschiedenheit), the imperative for this
oppositional intellectual is precisely to think the excess that the globalization (the end) of technological
thinking cannot finally contain and to which it is blind. To underscore the presiding "white metaphor" that inhabits this truth discourse,
it is to think the shadow that technolog ical thinking's high noon sun cannot finally enlighten . In the interregnum,
the task of the thinker is to think the spectral "reality" that he or she, as Abgeschiedene—as the "errant" one, who is
"always under way" (LP, 163)—"is" as such.
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SPANOS SHELL 2/5
ALTHOUGH AN AMERICAN EXCEPTIONALIST ONTOLOGY CLAIMS TOTAL INVINCIBILITY,

VIETNAM RUPTURED THE AMERICAN NATIONAL IDENTITY – AMERICA’S MISSION IN THE
GLOBAL WILDERNESS SELF-DESTRUCTED AS WE OCCUPIED A WORLD THAT RESISTED
SPONTANEOUS CONSENT TO THE “TRUTH” OF LIBERAL/CAPITALST DEMOCRACY – SPANOS
DESCRIBES THE WAY FORGETTING BEING HAS LED US TO A POINT WHERE AMERICAN
EXCEPTIONALISM WILL DESTROY THE PLANET
SPANOS 2008 [William V, Professor at Binghamton, American Exceptionalism in the Age of Globalization: The Specter of Vietnam, SUNY Press 2008,]
the consequence of America's intervention and conduct of the war in Vietnam was the
In this book I contend that
self-destruction of the ontological, cultural, and political foundations on which America had perennially justi-
fied its "benign" self-image and global practice from the time of the Puritan "errand in the wilderness." In the aftermath of the
defeat of the American Goliath by a small insurgent army, the "specter" of Vietnam—by which I mean, among other things, the
violence, bordering on genocide, America perpetrated against an "Other" that refused to accommodate itself to
its mission in the wilderness of Vietnam—came to haunt America as a contradiction that menaced the
legitimacy of its perennial self-representation as the exceptionalist and "redeemer nation." In the aftermath of the
Vietnam War, the dominant culture in America (including the government, the media, Hollywood, and even educational institutions) mounted a
massive campaign to "forget Vietnam." This relentless recuperative momentum to lay the ghost of that particular war culminated in the
metamorphosis of an earlier general will to "heal the wound" inflicted on the American national psyche, into the "Vietnam syndrome"; that is, it
transformed a healthy debate over the idea of America into a national neurosis. This monumentalist initiative was aided by a series of historical events between 1989
and 1991 that deflected the American people's attention away from the divisive memory of the Vietnam War and were represented by the dominant culture as
manifestations of the global triumph of "America": Tiananmen Square, the implosion of the Soviet Union, and the first Gulf War. This "forgetting" of the
actual history of the Vietnam War, represented in this book by Graham Greene's The Quiet American, Philip Caputo's A Rumor of War, and Tim O'Brien's Going After
contributed to the rise of neoconservatism and the
Cacciato (and many other novels, memoirs, and films to which I refer parenthetically),
religious right to power in the United States. And it provided the context for the renewal of America's exceptionalist errand in the global
wilderness, now understood, as the conservative think tank the Project for the New American Century put it long before the invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq, as the
Whatever vestigial memory of the Vietnam War remained after this turn seemed to
preserving and perpetuation of the Pax Americana.
be decisively interred with Al Qaeda's attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on September 11, 2001. Completely immune to
dissent, the confident American government, under President George W. Bush and his neoconservative intellectual deputies— and with the virtually
total support of the America media—resumed its errand in the global wilderness that had been interrupted by the specter of Vietnam. Armed with a resurgence of self-
invaded
righteous indignation and exceptionalist pride, the American government, indifferent to the reservations of the "Old World," unilaterally
Afghanistan and, then, after falsifying intelligence reports about Saddam Hussein's nuclear capability, Iraq, with the intention, so reminiscent of its
(failed) attempts in Vietnam, of imposing American-style democracy on these alien cultures. The early representation by the media
of the immediately successful "shock and awe" acts of arrogant violence in the name of "civilization" was euphoric. They were, it was said, compelling evidence not
only of the recuperation of American consensus, but also of the rejuvenation of America's national identity. But as immediate "victory" turned into an occupation of a
world unwilling to be occupied, and the American peace into an insurgency that now verges on becoming a civil war, the specter of Vietnam, like the Hydra in the story
of Hercules, began to reassert itself: the unidentifiability or invisibility of the enemy, their refusal to be answerable to the American narrative, quagmire, military
victories that accomplished nothing, search and destroy missions, body counts, the alienation of allies, moral irresolution, and so on. It is the memory of this
"Vietnam"—this
specter that refuses to be accommodated to the imperial exceptionalist discourse of post-
Vietnam America—that my book is intended to bring back to presence. By retrieving a number of representative works that bore acute witness, even against
themselves, to the singularity of a war America waged against a people seeking liberation from colonial rule and by reconstellating them into the post-9/11 occasion,
such a project can contribute a new dimension not only to that shameful decade of American history, but also, and more important, to our understanding of the deeply
backgrounded origins of America's "war on terror" in the aftermath of the Al Qaeda attacks. Indeed, it is my ultimate purpose in this book to provide directives for
resisting an American momentum that threatens to destabilize the en¬tire planet, if not to annihilate the
human species itself, and also for rethinking the very idea of America.
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SPANOS SHELL 3/5
THE AFFIRMATIVE AS WELL AS THE RESOLUTION AT LARGE CALL FOR A GLORIFICATION OF

U.S. ACTION IN THE FACE OF UNENDING ATROCITY. THIS GLORIFICATION COMES IN THE
RHETORICAL FORM AS A JEREMIAD. JUST AS THE PURITANS RECORDED THEIR GRACIOUS
AND BENEVOLENT TREATMENT OF NATIVE PEOPLES ONLY TO JUSTIFY ANY ATROCITY
TOWARDS THOSE WHO RESIST THE ENLIGHTENMENT OF THE WEST, THE UNITED STATES
WILL USE THE PLAN AS JUSTIFICATION FOR FURTHER COLONIAL GAIN.
SPANOS 2008 [William V, Professor at Binghamton, American Exceptionalism in the Age of Globalization: The Specter of
Vietnam, SUNY Press 2008, 207-209]
Daniel Webster's Bunker Hill orations are, of course, an entirely different genre from Parkman's histories, and their mise-en-scene—the Battle of Bunker Hill and the
American Revolution in general—distant from the historian's.'" But his historical perspective is the same, a sameness that testifies to this textual attitude's pervasiveness
and its deeply backgrounded genealogy. Like Parkman's, it is an American exceptionalist problematic determined by his New England
heritage and [that] takes the rhetorical form of the jeremiad . If there is a difference, it lies in Webster's more immediate relationship to his
Puritan roots and to the jeremiad than Parkman's. But to identify Webster's problematic with American exceptionalism and its form of articulation with the jeremiad as
such is inadequate. No less than his Puritan predecessors (e.g., John Danforth and Increase and Cotton Mather) and, Cooper and Parkman, what is at stake for Webster
is the perennial New World/ Old World opposition, the anxiety that the
at each of the occasions of his Bunker Hill orations
New World is becoming old (effete and/or dispersed) like Europe, and the need to identify a threat to the well-being of the covenanted nation that
would both recuperate the failing consensus and renew the American peoples' productive energy. I quote from the representative last paragraph of the first of these com-
memorating orations, which Webster delivered at the laying of the cornerstone of the Bunker Hill Monument at the site of the battle on June 17, 1825, its fiftieth
anniversary. After
identifying himself and his audience as the belated filial offspring of those Puritan
founders, whose "patience and fortitude" and "daring enterprise" had "set the world an example of founding civil institutions on the great and united principles of
human freedom and human knowledge (the echo of Winthrop's sermon on board The Arabella is distinct)," 17 and, more immediately, of the great pioneers of the
American Revolution who died at Bunker Hill in their behalf, and the ground on which they stand to commemorate them, the site of "the sepulchers of our fathers,"
Webster concludes: And let the sacred obligations which have devolved on this generation, and on us, sink deep into our hearts. Those who established our
liberty and our government are daily dropping from among us. The great trust now descends to new hands. Let us apply ourselves to that which is presented to us, as
our appropriate object. We can win no laurels in a war for independence. Earlier and worthier hands have gathered them all. Nor are there places for us by the side of
Solon, and Alfred, and other founders of states. Our fathers have filled them. But there remains to us a great duty of defence and preservation, and there is opened to us,
Let our age be the age of
also, a noble pursuit, to which the spirit of the times strongly invites us. Our proper business is improvement.
improvement. In a day of peace, let us advance the arts of peace and the works of peace. Let us develop the
resources of our land, call forth its powers, build up its institutions, promote all its great interests, and see whether we also, in our day and generation, may not perform
something worthy to be remembered. Let us cultivate a true spirit of union and harmony. In pursuing the great objects which our condition points out to us, let us act
under a settled conviction, and an habitual feeling, that these twenty-four States are one country. Let our conceptions be enlarged to the circle of our duties. Let us
extend our ideas over the whole of the vast field in which we are called to act. Let
our object be, OUR COUNTRY, OUR WHOLE
COUNTRY, AND NOTHING BUT OUR COUNTRY. And, by the blessing of God, may that country
itself become a vast and splendid monument, not of oppression and terror, but of Wisdom, of Peace, and
of Liberty, upon which the world may gaze with admiration for ever! (WS, 253-254; my emphasis) In this conclusion, Webster highlights by underscoring the
ultimate raison d'etre of the occasion. The great, manly American heroes who inaugurated the American Revolution at the Battle of Bunker Hill are gradually "dropping
from among us," suggesting not simply this influential New England lawmaker's mourning over their demise, but also, and primarily, his anxiety over the belated
present generation of Americans, who, living a half- century after the vital heroic and patriotic fathers in a time he represents as one of peace and prosperity, are thus
susceptible to the enervating influences of the refinements of settled life.
Webster underscores this anxiety by pointing to the
absence (in the wake of the War of 1812) of an enemy that threatens the American way: "We can win no laurels in a war of independence. Earlier and worthier
hands have gathered them all." This, as we have seen since Mary Rowlandson's captivity narrative, is the necessary enemy that is God's or History's means of trying
and tempering the faith and confidence of Americans, the prerequisite of patriotism and rejuvenation of the covenantal people and their divinely ordained or destined
Thus he is compelled to turn precisely to that which threatens to enervate the will of his belated
errand.
generation: the "defense," "preservation," and, above all, "improvement" of what the pioneers of the Battle of Bunker Hill
accomplished.
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SPANOS SHELL 4/5
OUR ALTERNATIVE IS TO RECONSTELLATE VIETNAM INTO THE PRESENT SOCIOPOLITICAL

OCCASION – TO AFFIRM THE SPECTER OF VIETNAM AND THE NOTHING THAT HAUNTS THE
ONTOLOGY OF THE AFFIRMATIVE, AMERICAN EXCEPTIONALISM AND UNITED STATES
HEGEMONY. THIS RECONSTELLATION IS A REVERSAL OF STATUS QUO LOGIC WHICH
ATTEMPTS TO RELEGATE OUR LOSS TO VIETNAMESE INSURGENTS TO A MERE BAD DREAM.
Spanos 2000 (William, “ The Question of Philosophy and Poiesis in the Posthistorical Age: Thinking/ Imagining the Shadow of Metaphysics.” Found in
boundary 2, Volume 27, Number 1, Spring 2000, pp. 151-174)
What the presently privileged oppositional discourses are blinded by their binarist and exclusionary turn from theory to
to
praxis is, to put the Vietnam War, a war, not incidentally, that,
it bluntly, the relationship of this recuperative representation of the postcold war period to
as President John F. Kennedy’s equation of Southeast Asia as ‘‘the new frontier’ ’ suggests, was, from the beginning of the United States’
intervention, represented in the exceptionalist terms of the founding American myth of the frontier: the
providentially ordained ‘‘errand in the wilderness.’’ 7 Or, rather, it is the thisness—the historical specificity—of
the Vietnam War that needs to be put back into play by a discourse that would effectively resist the
polyvalent reactionary political implications of this global representation (and here I am referring specifically to the event of
Kosovo). The triumphalist end-of-history discourse is the precipitate of a massive mnemonic project of the custodians of the American cultural memory, not least the
media, to obliterate the memory of the decades-long event we call ‘‘Vietnam.’’ This project of forgetting, under taken by what Althusser calls the ideological state
apparatuses, or, alternatively, the liberal capitalist problematic, was a systematic one that began with the reduction of the thisness of the Vietnam War to war-in-general
and culminated in the obliteration of reference to it in post–cold war representations of American history. This eventuation is symptomatically suggested by the
(enforced) visible absence of significant reference to the Vietnam War in Fukuyama’s and other triumphalists’ accounts of Universal History’s dialectical fulfillment
of its destined end in the demise of Soviet communism and the global triumph of liberal capitalist democracy, its establishment, as it were, of its imperium sine fine.
But it is made resonantly clear by President George Bush’s announcement, following what his administration and the media that aped its representation of that global
occasion took to be the decisive American victory in the Persian Gulf, that ‘‘we’ve kicked the Vietnam syndrome at last.’’ 8 I cannot here fully articulate this integral
relationship between the end-of-history discourse (the announcement of the Pax Metaphysica, as it were) and the historical specificity of the Vietnam War. It will have
to suffice simply to invoke a summary account of the representation of this relationship since the real defeat of the United States in Vietnam. The actual history of what
I am calling the event of Vietnam begins, despite the consistently deliberate official misrepresentation to the American public of the raison d’être of U.S. involvement
in Vietnam and of its actual practice, with the activation of a healthy national self-questioning of the perennial myth of American exceptionalism. I mean the
consensual political, cultural, and even ontological assumptions—those that had their fictive origins in the founding of colonial America and that compelled the
American res publica not simply to interfere in a people’s war in Vietnam, a Third World country west of the ‘‘last American frontier,’’ but to under take something
like genocide in its arrogantly ethnocentric effort to ‘‘win the hearts and minds’’ of the Vietnamese people to the basic
(ontological) principles of American democracy, in an effort, as it were, to fulfill America’s ‘‘errand in the [Vietnamese] wilderness.’’ But
this destructive history was subjected to an ideologically motivated rewriting inaugurated by the dominant
culture around the time of the dedication of the Vietnam Veteran’s Memorial in 1982, a rewriting that was intended
to recuperate the national consensus by ‘‘healing the wound’’ inflicted on the American national identity by the persuasive force of the indissolubly related civil rights,
peace, and women’s movements in the Vietnam decade. Prepared for by the culture industry, most notably Hollywood’s incremental but inexorable transformation of
the originally defeated and vilified American soldier into the mythic Rambo figure, the cross between Leatherstocking and bionic man, whose defeat in Vietnam is
represented as a defeat not by the Vietnamese enemy but as one imposed on him by an American government corrupted by the un-American values of the protest
movement, this re-visionary representational narrative achieved closure with the end of the cold war. This was the moment when the healthy national self-questioning
precipitated by the self-destruction of the perennially benign American national identity, having passed through the recuperative ‘‘healing-the-wound’’ phase, came to
be represented retrospectively as a collective psychological sickness that prevented the American soldier from winning the
Spanos Neg -9-
SPANOS SHELL 5/5

war. To put it positively, this recuperative renarrativization of the actual history of the Vietnam War came to closure when the ‘‘triumph’’ of America in the cold war
and the apparently decisive defeat of Saddam Hussein enabled the dominant culture in America to declare, with a certainty that precluded serious response, that the
national consensus disintegrated by the demagoguery of a small fraction of heretics was reestablished when, in the powerful revisionary trope of that euphoric moment,
the suicidal national neurosis—‘‘the Vietnam syndrome,’’ or, more decisively, ‘‘the Vietnam psychosis’’—had been cured. In short, the history of the representation
of the Vietnam War has been an amnesiac and, insofar as this forgetting is a forgetting of the difference that makes a difference, a banalizing history. In obliterating the
radically contradictory memory of Vietnam, this forgetful remembering has enabled the dominant liberal democratic capitalist culture to represent the denouement of
this narrative as the fulfillment of an original promise: as the end of history and the advent of the Pax Americana. I am invoking this Latin term to recall the
promise/fulfillment structure of Virgil’s Aeneid, which America, like so many other imperial Western nations, appropriated, from the beginning, not simply to justify
its ontologically grounded errand in the Western wilderness but to represent its violent depredations beyond its frontiers and its imperium sine fine in the benign image
of universal peace. What, in other words, has haunted the dominant American culture throughout the thirty years since the American invasion of Vietnam, what it
would forget at all costs, is the decisively delegitimizing aporia precipitated by the fulfillment of the onto-logic of the truth discourse of America. I am referring to
the genocidal violence perpetrated by the United States against the Vietnamese people in the name of
‘‘saving Vietnam’’ for the ‘‘free world,’’ the violence synecdochically disclosed by the undeviatingly
banal problem-solving logic of the Pentagon Papers that killed, mutilated, and uprooted millions of
Vietnamese people—mostly innocent peasants— destroyed their land, and disintegrated their traditional
rice culture. The chilling indifference to human life, especially to Vietnamese life, of this utterly instrumentalist logic is epitomized in a memorandum
McGeorge Bundy, on his return from a ‘‘fact- finding’’ visit to Vietnam, wrote to President Johnson (7 February 1965), recommending the initiation of a full-scale
bombing campaign against North Vietnam: We believe that the best available way of increasing our chance of success in Vietnam is the development and execution
of a policy of sustained reprisal against North Vietnam—a policy in which air and naval action against the North is justified by and related to the whole Viet Cong
campaign of violence and terror in the South. While we believe that the risks of such a policy are acceptable, we emphasize that its costs are real. It implies significant
U.S. air losses even if no full air war is joined, and it seems likely that it would eventually require an extensive and costly effort against the whole air defense system
of North Vietnam. Yet measured against the costs of defeat in Vietnam, this program seems cheap. And even if it fails to turn the tide—as it may—the value of the
effort seems to us to exceed its cost. The sublime inhumanity of this mindless cost-efficiency logic—the ‘‘best and the brightest’’ in the Kennedy and Johnson
administrations called it ‘‘can-do’’ thinking 12—cannot help but recall Hannah Arendt’s resonant, but still to be understood, attribution of the horrifically murderous
role Adolph Eichmann, the Nazi functionary, played in the accomplishment of the Final Solution, not to evil as it has been traditionally understood in the West but to
the utter banalization of thinking incumbent on the triumph of instrumental thinking in the Third Reich: The immediate impulse [for my preoccupation with thinking in
The Life of the Mind ] came from my attending the Eichmann trial in Jerusalem. In my report of it I spoke of ‘‘the banality of evil.’’ . . . [W]hat I was confronted with
was utterly different [from what the traditional concept of evil led one to expect] and still undeniably factual. I was struck by a manifest shallowness in the doer that
made it impossible to trace the uncontestable evil of his deeds to any deeper level of roots or motives. The deeds were monstrous, but the doer . . . was quite ordinary,
commonplace, and neither demonic nor monstrous. There was no sign in him of firm ideological convictions or of specific evil motives, and the only notable
characteristic one could detect in his past behavior during the trial and througehout the pre-trial police examination was something entirely negative: it was not
stupidity but thoughtlessness. To reconstellate this epochal, yet still to be adequately thought, disclosure into the amnesiac, triumphalist post–cold war
context, what has menaced the discourse of America ever since the ‘‘benign’’ intervention of the United States in Vietnam began manifesting itself in the destruction
of the Vietnamese earth and its culture, and the indiscriminate—routinized—killing of Vietnamese people in order to ‘‘save Vietnam’’ is the specter of its
delegitimation, not simply (I want to emphasize) at the site of politics but all across the indissoluble continuum that comprises being as a whole, from the ontological
through the linguistic and cultural, to the political sites. In short, what haunts America is the specter of an epistemic break. I mean, more precisely, the specter
understood as that polyvalent differential ‘‘reality’’ that the constructed reality of empirical/technological thinking—Americanism, that is, metaphysics in its late,
The singular event of Vietnam—its recalcitrant
triumphant imperial mode—cannot finally accommodate to its instrumentalist ‘‘world picture.’’
refusal to be reduced to ‘‘war in general’’—would deconstruct the dominant American culture’s representation of world
history in the aftermath of the cold war as ‘‘the end of history.’’ That is why the intellectual deputies of this culture, like
Fukuyama and Haass, the culture industry and the information agencies that have made them international luminaries in the domain of thought, and the corporate
exponents of the ‘‘free’’ global market have been compelled at all cost to obliterate the event of Vietnam from their recuperative teleological historical narratives
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MODULES
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TERRORISM MODULE 1/2
THEIR USE OF TERRORISM IS A PART OF THE AMERICAN JEREMIAD BECAUSE IT ATTEMPTS

TO ROOT OUT INTERNAL ANXIETIES AND STRUCTURE OUTSIDE THREATS
SPANOS 2007 [WILLIAM V, American Exceptionalism, the Jeremiad, and the Frontier: From the Puritans to the Neo-Con-Men, boundary 2, 2007 ]
The attacks by al-Qaeda on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon not only brought America’s search for an enemy to a close; it produced, according
to Huntington, a civilizational, particularly religious, enemy that served the purpose of the jeremiad (WAW, 344). In establishing a permanent
threat to “homeland security,” this new religion-oriented civilizational enemy provided the impetus for the recuperation of a dispersing
national solidarity within the Anglo-Protestant hegemonic culture and the rejuvenation of an eroding
American civilization, the symptoms of which were not simply a diversity indifferent to the national ideal
but also a “moral decay” threatening its spiritual health (WAW, 343–44). With this bizarrely paradoxical affirmation of the benign
threat posed by militant Islam, Huntington’s post- 9/11 American jeremiad reaches its structural fulfillment. In affirming the threatening social, political, and moral
conditions that instigate a religiously oriented national anxiety over the fate of the American nation, it announces the advent of a fifth Anglo-Protestant “Great
Its
Awakening,” one that would be adequate to Huntington’s Manichaean “clash of civilizations”: “American identity began a new phase with the new century.
salience and substance in this phase are being shaped by America’s new vulnerability to external attack
and by a turn to religion, a Great Awakening in America that parallels the resurgence of religion in most of the world” (WAW, 336).
TERRORISM DISCOURSE CONSTRUCTS THE “TERRORIST” AS THE BARBARIC OTHER

JUSTIFYING MASSIVE RETALIATION ON THE FACELESS OTHER. THIS ONTOLOGY JUSTIFIED
THE EXTERMINATION OF NATIVE AMERICANS AND THE VIETNAMESE
SPANOS IN 2003 [William, prof at SUNY-Binghamton, A Rumor of War: 9/11 and the Forgetting of the Vietnam War, project muse]
What struck me, after the first shock of the attack on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on September 11 began to subside, was the way the American media's
coverage of this horrific event unfolded. In the early hours after the attack, the anchors of all the networks dutifully emphasized the "speculative" nature of their
suspicion that the perpetrators were Islamic terrorists, no doubt to compensate for the blunder they had made in the immediate aftermath of the Oklahoma City
bombing, when, unanimously and without reflection, they attributed that disaster to Middle Eastern terrorist organizations. Later, however, as the "pundits" they had
carefully selected to comment on and analyze this unprecedented event—former high-ranking military officers, former CIA, FBI, and government
officials, as well as Orientalists of Arabic descent, who were unlikely to introduce the question of the role the United States had played on a global scale in
producing this kind of hatred of America in the Third World and Islamic countries—began to refer to the attack in the ancient imperial
binaries, as a "war perpetrated by barbarism against civilization itself, the appearance of objectivity
faded quickly out of their representational discourse. Armed with the "authority" of these "reliable"
experts, these deputies of the dominant culture, as Antonio Gramsci would call them—I think of the grotesque example of Henry Kissinger,
who, according to the persuasive research of Christopher Hitchens, as the secretary of state in the Nixon administration, committed crimes against humanity (in Timor,
Vietnam, Chile, and Cyprus) on a scale equal to, if not greater than, those of General Augusto Pinochet in Chile 4 —these anchors of the media abandoned the pretense
of speculation [End Page 32] and began, instead, a process of "concentering" (Herman Melville's term, to which I will return) on the symbolic name "Osama bin Laden"
and the Taliban government of Afghanistan that harbored him. By the end of the day, the "faceless" and therefore bewilderingly indeterminate enemy had been
identified and made practically assailable. From that time until the present moment, which bears witness to the United States' massive and unrelenting retaliation, all
alternative interpretations of the complex global occasion that is the result of a long history of Western imperialism culminating in the United States' singular
domination of global affairs have been demonized and effectively silenced in favor of a relentlessly single-minded global policy intended to rid the world once and for
all of this seemingly malignant evil. As President George W. Bush put it that first day and repeatedly ever since, "Freedom itself was attacked this morning by a faceless
coward. And freedom will be defended. Make no mistake, the United States will hunt down those responsible for these cowardly acts." This
extraordinarily
reductive representation and self-righteous, inexorable, and unilateral practical response to the violence
committed against Americans, which in large part is the consequence of the
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TERRORISM MODULE 2/2
West's and, in recent times, of the United States' depredations in the East, is not, as I have suggested, unprecedented. On the contrary, it
is the predictable manifestation of a deeply inscribed and naturalized cultural belief in America's divinely or historically—that is to say, ontologically—ordained
exceptionalist mission in the world's "wilderness," one that, in fact, has informed the entire violent history of American expansionism. It informed the American
Puritans' identification of the Native Americans, who resisted their plantation of God's Word in the forests of New England, with the expendable agents of Satan; it
informed the period of westward expansionism, which, in the name of Manifest Destiny, justified, first, the
wholesale removal, and then the extermination, of the Native American population; and, most tellingly, it informed the
American representation and conduct of the Vietnam War, which, to repeat, bore witness to the destruction of a Southeast Asian country and the indiscriminate
slaughter of untold numbers of its population by the all but full force of the American military machine, which, we should not forget, included terror: the use of
psychological and chemical weapons (what, in referring to Middle Eastern states, American officialdom calls weapons of indiscriminate mass destruction) in the
insanely rational name of saving Vietnam for the free world. This, among other good reasons I cannot go into here, is why, it seems to me, it is worth retrieving the by
now [End Page 33] strategically buried history of the Vietnam War by way of the highly representative example of A Rumor of War 5 at this profoundly perilous
moment of world history when the dominant culture in the United States is once again concentering an extremely complex and volatile global condition, which it, and
the West over which it has unilaterally claimed leadership, has gone far to produce, in the figure of a single but symbolic person (and the Taliban government that
harbored him) for the purpose of decisive retaliation. For Caputo's memoir, perhaps more than any other book about the Vietnam War, bears powerful witness, if only
in a symptomatic way, to the dark underside of the American exceptionalism that justified not only the United States' intervention in Vietnam and its unerringly cold-
blooded and massively destructive conduct of the war but also, because its rhetoric betrays a deep historical sense, the violent American history of which the Vietnam
War was only one example.
TERROR RHETORIC INCREASES TERRORISM- 4 WARRANTS

Kapitan, professor of philosophy, 03 (Tomis Kapitan, Professor of Philosophy, Northern Illinois University, TERRORISM AND INTERNATIONAL JUSTICE,
2003, lexis)
More dramatically, the ‘terrorist’ rhetoric actually increases terrorism in four distinct ways. First, it magnifies the effect of terrorist
actions by heightening the fear among the target population. If we demonize the terrorists, if we portray them as
arbitrary and irrational beings with a “disposition toward unbridled violence,” then we are amplifying the fear and alarm generated by
terrorist incidents. Second, those who succumb to the rhetoric contribute to the cycle of revenge and
retaliation by endorsing terrorist actions of their own government, not only against those who commit terrorist actions, but also
against those populations from whose ranks the terrorists emerge, for the simple reason that terrorists are frequently themselves civilians, living amid other civilians not
short of genocide, a
so engaged. The consequence has been an increase in terrorist violence under the rubric of ‘retaliation’ or ‘counter-terrorism.’ Third,
violent response is likely to stiffen the resolve of those from whose ranks terrorists have emerged, leading
them to regard their foes as people who cannot be reasoned with, as people who, because they avail
themselves so readily of the ‘terrorist’ rhetoric, know only the language of force. As long as they perceive themselves to
be victims of intolerable injustices and view their oppressors as unwilling to arrive at an acceptable compromise, they are likely to answer violence with more violence.
those who employ the rhetoric of ‘terrorism’ for their own political ends, are
Fourth, and most insidiously,
encouraging actions that they understand will generate or sustain further violence directed against
civilians. Inasmuch as their verbal behavior is intended to secure political objectives through these
means, then it is an instance of terrorism just as much as any direct order to carry out a bombing of
civilian targets. In both cases, there is purposeful verbal action aimed at bringing about a particular result through violence against civilians.
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2NC TERRORISM EVIDENCE
THE AMERICAN WAR ON TERROR LEADS TO GLOBAL ECONOMIC CRISIS, TOTAL WAR,
GENOCIDE, TOTALITARIANISM, AND NUCLEAR ARSENALS CAPABLE OF DESTROYING
CIVILIZATION ITSELF.
Bacevich 2008- Former first lieutenant in the US army (Andrew bacevich, The limits of power: the End of American Exceptionalism, 2008, p: 4-7)
By and Large, Americans were slow to grasp the implications of a global war with no exist and no deadlines. To earlier
generations, place names like Iraq and Afghanistan had been synonymous with European rashness- the sort of obscure and unwelcoming jurisdictions to which overly
For the present generation, it has already become part of the
ambitious kinds and slightly mad adventurers might repair to squabble.
natural order of things that GIs should be exerting themselves at great cost to pacify such far-off domains. For
average american tuning in to the nightly news, reports of U.S. casualties incurred in distant lands now seem
hardly more out of the ordinary than reports of partisan shenanigans of capital hill or bush fires raging out of control in southern california. How
exactly did the end of the Long Peace so quickly yield the Long War? Seeing themselves as a peaceful people,
Americans remain wedded to the conviction that the conflicts in which they find themselves embroiled are not
of their own making. The global war on terror is no exception. Certain of our benign intentions, we reflexively
assign responsibility for war to others, typically malignant Hitler like figures inexplicably bent on denying us
the peace that is our fondest wish. This book challenges that supposition. It argues that the actions of Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden, however malevolent,
cannot explain why the United States today finds itself enmeshed in seemingly never-ending conflict. Although critics of U.S. foreign policy, and especially of the Iraq
war, have already advanced a variety of alternative explanations - variously fingering President Bush, members of his inner circle, jingoistic neoconservatives, greedy
oil executives, or even the israel lobby - it also finds those explanations inadequate. Certainly, the president and his advisers, along with neocons always looking for
opportunities to flex American military muscle, bear considerable culpability for our current predicament. Yet to charge them with primary responsibility to credit them
with undeserved historical significance. It's the equivalent of blaming Herbert Hoover for the Great Depression or of attributing McCarthyism entirely to the antics of
Senator Joseph McCarthy. The impulses that have landed us in a war of no exist and no deadlines come from within.
Foreign policy has, for decades, provided an outward manifestation of American domestic ambitions, urges, and
fears. In our own time, it has increasingly become an expression of domestic dysfunction- an attempt to manage or
defer coming to terms with contradictions besetting the American way of life. Those contradictions have found
their ultimate expression in the perpetual state of war afflicting the United States today. Gauging their
implications requires that we acknowledge their source: They reflect the accumulated detritus of freedom, the
by-products of our frantic pursuit of life, liberty, and happiness. Freedom is the alter at which Americans
worship, what even their nominal religious persuasion. " No one signs odes to liberty as the final end of life
with greater fervor than americans," the theologian Reinhold Niebuhr once observed. Yet even as they celebrate freedom, Americans exempt the
object of their veneration from critical examination. In our public discourse, freedom is not so much a word or even a value as an
incantation, its very mention enough to stifle doubt and terminate all debate. The Limits of Power will suggest
that this heedless worship of freedom has been a mixed blessing. In our pursuit of freedom, we have accrued
obligations and piled up debts that we are increasingly hard-pressed to meet. Especially since the 1960s, freedom itself has
undercut the nation's ability to fulfill its commitments. We teeter on the edge of insolvency, desperately trying to balance accounts
by relying on our presumably invincible armed forces. Yet there, too, having exaggerated our military might,
we court bankruptcy. The United States today finds itself threatened by three interlocking crises. The first of these crises is
economic and cultural, the second political, and their military. All three share this characteristic: They are of our own making. In assessing the predicament
that results from these crises, The Limits of Power employs what might be called a Niebuhrean perspective. Writing decades ago, Reinhold Niebuhr anticipated that
predicament with uncanny accuracy and astonishing prescience. As such, perhaps more than any other figure in our recent history, he might help us discern a way out.
As pastor, teacher, activist, theologian, and prolific author, Niebuhr was a towing presence in American intellectual life form the 1930s through the 1960s. Even today,
he deserves recognition as the most clear-eyed of American prophets. Niebuhr speaks to us from the past, offering truths of enormous relevance to the present. AS
prophet, he warned that what he called "our dreams of managing history" - born of a peculiar combination of arrogance and
narcissism- posed a potentially mortal threat to the United States. Today, we ignore that warning at our peril.
Niebuhr entertained few illusions about the nature of man, the possibilities of politics, or the pliability of history. Global economic crisis, total war,
genocide, otalitarianism, and nuclear arsenals capable of destroying civilization itself- he viewed all of thse with an
unblinking eye that allowed no room for hypocrisy, hokum, or self-deception. Realism and humility formed the core of his wordview, each infused with
a deeply felt Christian sensibility.
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TERROR CAUSES JEREMIAD EXT
THEIR ANTI-TERRORIST RHETORIC FUELS THE AMERICAN JEREMIAD – HIJACKING AMERICAN

OPTIMISM AND PRODUCING A CONFIDENT IDENTITY THAT ENFORCES ITS DICTATES UPON
THE WORLD
SPANOS 2007 [WILLIAM V, American Exceptionalism, the Jeremiad, and the Frontier: From the Puritans to the Neo-Con-Men, boundary 2, 2007 ]
The analogy between Melville’s diagnosis of American national identity in the antebellum period and the disclosures of contemporary American history, theorized by
the New Americanists, especially since the national disaster of the Vietnam War, is uncannily revelatory of the historical conditions that have produced the cultural
As Melville’s antijeremiad, The
discourse of the second Bush administration, and also of its new function as masquerade or confidence game.
Confidence-Man, testifies, American history has always been directed by confidence men. In the past, however,
the inhuman (teleo)logic of their metanarrative of confidence remained obscured by its undeveloped status.
Since Melville’s time, especially in the period between the Vietnam War and the second Bush administration’s response
to the attacks on 9/11, this “benign” logic has fulfilled its potential and theoretically come to its end, its own
demise. Like the carnivalesque strategy of Melville’s confidence-man vis-a-vis the paradoxical logic of American
optimism, the fulfilled “vision” of “the New American Century” has precipitated into visibility not only the
anachronistic indifference of this optimistic metanarrative to the contingency and plurality of the contemporary
human condition but also its cynical spuriousness, its status as a cold-blooded masquerade—a neocon game intended to
mobilize a differential American public in behalf of an aggressive and violent global “Project for the New
American Century” by appealing to its deeply inscribed paradoxical optimism, by reinventing the American frontier in the guise
of a permanent “war on terror” and the normalization of the anxiety-provoking state of exception.
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TERROR IS IMPERIALIST EXT 1/3
THE RHETORIC OF TERRORISM ENABLES US TO ESTABLISH THE UNITED STATES AS THE KEY
TO ALL LIFE ON EARTH - THIS ALLOWS THE GROUPING OF NATIONS WHO FIT OUTSIDE OUR
WORLD ORDER AND NECESSITATES THEIR VIOLENT EXTERMINATION. THIS ALSO ISSUES
MASS FEAR UPON THE WORLD SILENCING ALL DISSENT AND AGENCY OF THOSE WHO WISH
TO BE WITHIN THIS SOCIAL ORDER.
NOORANI IN 05 [ Yaseen, CR: The New Centennial Review 5.1 (2005) 13-41, rhetoric of security]
The Bush administration perpetually affirms that the war against terrorism declared in response to the attacks of September 2001 is
"different from any other war in our history" and will continue "for the foreseeable future."1 This affirmation,
and indeed the very declaration of such a war, belongs to a rhetoric of security that predates the Bush administration and which
this administration has intensified but not fundamentally altered. Rhetorically speaking, terrorism is the ideal enemy of the United
States, more so than any alien civilization and perhaps even more so than the tyrannies of communism and fascism, terrorism's defeated sisters. This is because
terrorism is depicted in U.S. rhetoric not as an immoral tactic employed in political struggle, but as an immoral
condition that extinguishes the possibility of peaceful political deliberation. This condition is the state of war, in
absolute moral opposition to the peaceful condition of civil society. As a state of war, terrorism portends the
dissolution of the civil relations obtaining within and among nations, particularly liberal nations, and thus
portends the dissolution of civilization itself. [End Page 13] Terrorism is therefore outside the world order, in the sense that it cannot be managed
within this order since it is the very absence of civil order. For there to be a world order at all, terrorism must be eradicated. In
prosecuting a world war against the state of war, the United States puts itself outside the world order as well. The Bush administration affirms, like the Clinton
administration before it, thatbecause the identity of the United States lies in the values that engender peace (freedom and
democracy), the national interests of the United States always coincide with the interests of the world order. The
United States is the animus of the world order and the power that sustains it. For this reason, any threat to the existence of the United States is
a threat to world peace itself, and anything that the United States does to secure its existence is justified as
necessary for the preservation of world peace. In this way, the existence of the United States stands at the center of
world peace and liberal values, yet remains outside the purview of these values, since when under threat it is
subject only to the extra-moral necessity of self-preservation. I will argue that the symmetrical externality of the United States and
terrorism to the world order lies at the foundation of the rhetoric of security by which the U.S. government justifies its hegemonic actions and policies. This
rhetoric depicts a world in which helpless, vulnerable citizens can achieve agency only through the U.S.
government, while terrorist individuals and organizations command magnitudes of destructive power previously
held only by states. The moral-psychological discourse of agency and fear, freedom and enslavement invoked
by this rhetoric is rooted in both classical liberalism and postwar U.S. foreign policy. The war of "freedom" against "fear" is a
psychic struggle with no specific military enemies or objectives. It arises from the portrayal of the United States as an autarkic, ideally impermeable collective agent
that reshapes the external world in its own image. The war of freedom against fear thereby justifies measures said to increase the defenses and internal security of the
United States as well as measures said to spread freedom and democracy over the world. Now that the destructive capacity of warlike individuals can threaten the world
order, the power of the United States must be deployed in equal measure to neutralize this threat throughout the world. The world as a [End Page 14] whole now comes
within the purview of U.S. disciplinary action. Any manifestation of the state of war, terrorist activity, anywhere in the world, is now a threat to the existence of the
United States and to world peace. There is no "clash of civilizations," but the Middle East, as the current site of the state of war, is the primary danger to the world and
The symmetrical externality of the United States and terrorism to the world order,
must be contained, controlled, and reshaped.
then, allows its rhetoric to envision a historic opportunity for mankind—the final elimination of the state of war
from human existence, and fear from the political psyche. This will be achieved, however, only by
incorporating the world order into the United States for the foreseeable future.
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THIS RHETORIC OF TERRORISM IS A DISCOURSE THAT JUSTIFIES EXTERMINATION AND

REDUCES THE VALUE OF ALL NON-AMERICANS TO NOTHING - ALL AGENCY OF EVERY
PERSON ON EARTH MUST BE SUSPENDED TO THE UNITED STATES SUPREMECY AND THE
GLORIOUS MISSION OF THE AFFIRMATIVE.
NOORANI IN 05 [ Yaseen, CR: The New Centennial Review 5.1 (2005) 13-41, rhetoric of security]
the rhetoric of security with its war on terrorism is not a program for action, but a
It is important to recognize that
discourse that justifies actions. The United States is not bound to take any specific action implied by its rhetoric. But this rhetoric gives the United States
the prerogative to take whatever actions it decides upon for whatever purpose as long as these actions come within the rhetoric's purview. Judged by its own standards,
the rhetoric of security is counterproductive. It increases fear while claiming that the goal is to eliminate fear. It
increases insecurity by pronouncing ever broader areas of life to be in need of security. It increases political
antagonism by justifying U.S. interests in a language of universalism. It increases enmity toward the United
States by according the United States a special status over and above all other nations. The war against terror itself is a
notional war that has no existence except as an umbrella term for various military and police actions. According to a report published by the Strategic Studies Institute
of the U.S. Army, "the global war on terrorism as currently defined and waged is dangerously indiscriminate and ambitious" (Record 2003, 41). This assessment
assumes that the actions comprehended under the rubric of the "war on terrorism" are designed to achieve a coherent military objective. The impossible "absolute
security," feared by the report's author to be the "hopeless quest" of current policy (46), may be useless as a strategic objective, but it is eminently effective in
organizing a rhetoric designed to justify an open-ended series of hegemonic actions. The rhetoric of security, then, provides the moral
framework for U.S. political hegemony through its grounding in the idea of national agency and in the absolute
opposition between the state of civility and the state of [End Page 37] war. Designating the United States as the
embodiment of the world order's underlying principle and the guarantor of the world order's existence, this
rhetoric places both the United States and terrorism outside the normative relations that should inhere within the
world order as a whole. The United States is the supreme agent of the world's war against war; other nations must simply choose sides. As long as war
threatens to dissolve the peaceful order of nations, these nations must submit to the politics of "the one, instead of the many." They must accept the
United States as "something godlike," in that in questions of its own security—which are questions of the world's security—they can have no
authority to influence or oppose its actions. These questions can be decided by the United States alone . Other nations must, for the foreseeable future,
suspend their agency when it comes to their existence. Therefore, the rhetoric of security allows the United
States to totalize world politics within itself in a manner that extends from the relations among states down to
the inner moral struggle experienced by every human being.
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TERRORISM IS A JUSTIFICATION FOR ENDLESS MILITARISM

Marzec 9 ( Robert P., Associate Professor of English literature and postcolonial studies at Purdue University. The Global South, volume 3, number 1,
“Militariality” Spring 2009, project muse)
Information in the post-9/11 state of constant "emergency" generated by

The consequences to be drawn from all of this are severe.
the government of the Bush administration and its war footing organizations must now be identified as organizing not only the
general political arrangement of life but the greater and more amorphous register of civil existence as well. It is in
this sense that we are witnessing the creation of a new World Stratocratic Picture, a new totality, one that has its telos in the
total control of the totality (the subtext of the above passage concerning diplomacy is its dependency on an actual engagement with an international
community, a dependency that violates the [End Page 145] unilateral orientation adhering to the decision-making process of the military polity). In the creation of a
and the civil changes dramatically. It can no
totality capable of being totally controlled the indissoluble connection between the political
longer be said that the civil is indirectly tied to the political. The line between the two may never have been
solid, but in the "state of exception," which installs a justification for acting "outside the normal order" of a
democratic polity, sites of human production, knowledge, information, media reports, entertainment, the Internet, defense,
militarization, representation, and human consciousness itself, all flow in and out of one another so as to
confuse any possibility of making clear distinctions between them. The political regime, progressively acting directly on the civil
register, diminishes the civil register to the point of its eventual erasure. With the erosion of the civil register it becomes clearer that
metamilitarization appears increasingly as an essential technique of the polity rather than an exceptional
measure. A war footing philosophy thus becomes the very constitutive paradigm of remaining popular civil institutions such as the media and film production.
Sound bite culture is only one sign of this.
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BIODIVERSITY MODULE 1/2
LINK - THE AFFIRMATIVE’S CLAIM TO SOLVE FOR THE ENVIRONMENT EXPAND THE STATES
CONCEPT OF SECURITY. THIS FRAMING OF THE ENVIRONMENT RAPIDLY EXPANDS
GOVERNMENT POWER AND FORCES IMPERIALIST RESPONSES TO ECOLOGICAL PROBLEMS.
Waever, Senior Researcher at the Center for Peace & Conflict Research, 1995 (Ole, On Security, p. 63-64)
Central to the arguments for the conceptual innovation of environmental or ecological security41 is its mobilization
potential. As Buzan points out, the concept of national security "has an enormous power as an instrument of social and political mobilization" and, therefore, "the
obvious reason for putting environmental issues into the security agenda is the possible magnitude of the threats posed, and the need to mobilize urgent and unprece-
dented responses to them. The security label is a useful way both of signalling danger and setting priority, and for this reason alone it is likely to persist in the
environmental debates."42 Several analysts have, however, warned against securitization of the environmental issue for
some of these very reasons, and some of the arguments I present here fit into the principled issue of securitization/desecuritization as discussed earlier in
this chapter. A first argument against the environment as a security issue, mentioned, for example, by Buzan, is that environmental threats are
generally unintentional.43 This, by itself, does not make the threats any less serious, although it does take
them out of the realm of will. As I pointed out earlier, the field of security is constituted around relationships
between wills: It has been, conventionally, about the efforts of one will to (allegedly) override the
sovereignty of another, forcing or tempting the latter not to assert its will in defense of its sovereignty. The contest of
concern, in other words, is among strategic actors imbued with intentionality, and this has been the logic around which the whole issue of security has been framed. In
light of my earlier discussion, in which I stressed that "security" is not a reflection of our everyday sense of the word but, rather, a specific field with traditions ,
the
jump to environmental security becomes much larger than might appear at first to be the case. I do not present this as an
argument against the concept but, rather, as a way of illuminating or even explaining the debate over it. Second in his critique of the notion of environmental security,
the concept of "security" tends to imply that defense from the problem is to be provided by
Richard Moss points out that
the state: The most serious consequence of thinking of global change and other environmental problems as
threats to security is that the sorts of centralized governmental responses by powerful and autonomous state
organizations that are appropriate for security threats are inappropriate for addressing most environmental
problems. When one is reacting to the threat of organized external violence, military and intelligence
institutions are empowered to take the measures required to repel the threat. By this same logic, when responding to
environmental threats, response by centralized regulatory agencies would seem to be logical. Unfortunately, in
most cases this sort of response is not the most efficient or effective way of addressing environmental problems,
particularly those that have a global character.44 Moss goes on to warn that "the instinct for centralized state responses to
security threats is highly inappropriate for responding effectively to global environmental problems."45 It
might, he points out, even lead to militarization of environmental problems .46 A third warning, not unrelated to the previous two, is the
tendency for the concept of security to produce thinking in terms of us-them, which could then be captured by the
logic of nationalism. Dan Deudney writes that "the 'nation' is not an empty vessel or blank slate waiting to be filled or
scripted, but is instead profoundly linked to war and 'us vs. them' thinking ( . . . ) Of course, taking the war and 'us vs. them'
thinking out of nationalism is a noble goal. But this may be like taking sex out of 'rock and roll,' a project whose feasibility declines when one remembers that
'rock and roll' was originally coined as a euphemism for sex."47 The
tendency toward "us vs. them" thinking, and the general
tradition of viewing threats as coming from outside a state's own borders, are, in this instance, also likely to
direct attention away from one's own contributions to environmental problems." Finally, there is the more political warning that
the concept of security is basically defensive in nature, a status quo concept defending that which is, even
though it does not necessarily deserve to be protected. In a paradoxical way, this politically conservative bias has also led to warnings by
some that the concept of environmental security could become a dangerous tool of the "totalitarian left," which might attempt to relaunch itself on the basis of envi-
ronmental collectivism." Certainly, there is some risk that the logic of ecology, with its religious potentials and references to holistic categories,
survival and the linked significance of everything, might easily lend itself to totalitarian projects, where also the science of ecology has
focused largely on how to constrain, limit, and control activities in the name of the environment.50
Spanos Neg - 20 -
BIODIVERSITY MODULE 2/2
TURNS CASE - ENVIRONMENTAL SECURITIZATION SUPPORTS THE STATUS QUO BECAUSE IT

OVER FOCUSES ON A SPECIFIC ENVIRONMENTAL HARM WHICH PREVENTS DISCUSSIONS
ABOUT LARGER CONSUMPTIVE HABITS.
Barnett, Fellow in the School of Social and Environmental Enquiry at University of Melbourne, 2001 (Jon, and a New Zealand Sci and Tech Postdoctoral
Fellow at the University of Canterbury and serves on the editorial boards of several scholarly journals, May 4, The Meaning of Environmental Security: Ecological
Politics and Policy in the New Security Era, pg. 89 p3 – pg. 90 p1)
Beneath current US initiatives 'and pronouncements on environmental security lies a resistance to meaningful
change and a defence of the status quo. As Dalby notes, 'in so far as security is premised on maintaining the status quo it
runs counter to the changes needed to alleviate many environmental and economic problems because it is
precisely the status quo that has produced the problems' (Dalby 1994: 33). The US government's response to
environmental security is not the new foreign and security policies we might have expected to flow from the concept; instead, it has responded with the
usual approach to foreign policy based on inside/outside rationality. For the US, environmental security is about securing the
very lifestyles and institutions that degrade the environment against the risks associated with this same
degradation. This is a paradox lost 'on most, and a dangerous and counterproductive outcome which cannot be
ignored by any proponent of environmental security. This President Bush's comment at Rio in 1,992 — that the lifestyle of the US negotiable
—still holds true. Thus far US environmental security policy has done little to help minimise the causes of
environmental insecurity, indeed it seems fundamentally implicated in their perpetuation. It does not recognise
that fundamental long-term changes in the structure of the global political economy are required; nor does it recognise
that, if any single country needs to implement this reform, it is the US itself Instead, it holds to a singular belief that the best way to
secure against threatening Others is to prepare for war; the irony in this strategy of securing against violence by
advocating violence is well known. But, as we shall see in the following chapter, preparing for war is a significant cause of the very environmental
degradation the US military finds so threatening, and so the outcome of these policies is a continued spiraling downwards of the
interrelated problems of direct violence, structural violence and environmental insecurity.
BY FRUSTRATING THE LOGIC OF IMPERIALISM, THE ALTERNATIVE FRUSTRATES THE

CHANCES FOR ENVIRONMENTAL COLLAPSE. THE IMPERIALIST DRIVE TO DOMINATE AND
BECOME WEALTHY CERTIFIES ENVIRONMENTAL DESTRUCTION TO THE POINT OF COMPLETE
COLLAPSE.
Gustave Speth interviewed by David Sandalow fellow senior, the Brookings Institute, "THE BRIDGE AT THE EDGE OF THE WORLD": A Discussion with
James Gustave Speth, April 16, 2008 THE BROOKINGS INSTITUTION Washington, D.C. 4-16-08
We've created a huge economic machine that is profoundly committed to profits and growth and profoundly
indifferent to nature and society. Left uncorrected it's an inherently ruthless and rapacious system and it's up to
us then acting mainly through government to inject and natural values into this system. But mainly we've failed
at this because our politics today are so enfeebled and the government is increasingly in the hands of powerful
economic interests and concentrations of great wealth. So where do those us who've worked in the
environmental area now for four decades, many of us, fit into this unfortunate picture? Mainstream environmentalism of the
type that I've participated in all my life concentrates on raising public awareness, making intelligent, plausible proposals for sensitive action, lobbying to get these
proposals adopted, litigating where necessary to get the laws enforced. And we've now ran a 40-year experiment on whether this mainstream environmentalism works,
The full burden of managing
and results are now in. I submit that it works based on the evidence poorly, selectively, and too slowly to keep up.
accumulating environmental threats and addressing the powerful forces of modern capitalism driving those
threats have fallen to the environmental community, those people in government and those outside, but that
burden is too great. The system as modern capitalism as it operates today will grow in size and complexity and
will generate ever larger environmental consequences, overwhelming and outstripping the efforts to cope with
them, and that I think indeed has been the dominant pattern.
Spanos Neg - 21 -
BIO-D LINK EXT
THE AFFIRMATIVE’S BIODIVERSITY ADVANTAGE IS FORMED ON THE UNDERSTANDING THAT

ENVIRONMENT IS EXTERNAL, THUS ABLE TO BE MANAGED AND CONTROLLED. THIS
JUSTIFIES FURTHER IMPERIALISM AND COLONIALISM
Dalby, professor of geography and political economy at Carleton University in Ottawa, 2002 (Simon, Environmental Security, p. 99-100)
The environmentalist arguments frequently focus on questions of the appropriate use of resources and the preservation of nature, species, and habitats. This native
activist understands that the construction of "environment" is a colonial understanding, one that operates on the urban
assumptions of an external nature whose resources are to be managed, rather than a context, place, or home that is to be
lived in. But the insight is especially telling in light of Richard Grove's extensive historical investigations into the origins of
contemporary environmentalism, which, as noted in chapter 4, are linked directly to matters of colonial administration
and anxieties about climate, deforestation, and much else.53 The cultural construction of nature as external is of
course an extension of the etiology of the term "environ," which literally refers to that which surrounds, and
historically to that which surrounds a town.54 As the scale of the global economy expands, and as the popu-
lation in cities makes ever larger demands on distant rural resources, the question of the appropriate designation
of these processes becomes ever more critical. In Arturo Escobar's terms this is so because they are incorporated into the
world capitalist economy, even the most remote communities of the Third World are torn from their local context,
redefined as 'resources' to be planned for, managed."55 In discussing environmental security, the expansion of urban
expropriation of rural resources has to be worked into the analysis if the appropriate geographical
understandings are to be made part of the discussion. As chapter 4 has made clear, getting the geography of environmental security wrong does not
help clarify matters. Geopolitical reasoning may be a powerful mode of raising political concern about security issues,
but as a mode of thinking intelligently about contemporary social and environmental processes, it leaves much
to be desired, precisely because it so frequently perpetuates the patterns of development thinking and the
geopolitical assumptions of separate competing polities that are the cause of so much difficulty in the first place.
Spanos Neg - 22 -
BIO-D IMPACT TURN EXT
THE DISCOURSE OF ENVIRONMENTAL SECURITY ALLOWS THE ELITES TO DUMP WASTE AND
WAGE WAR AGAINST THE FOURTH WORLD - THIS JUSTIFIES AN INFINITE REPLICATION OF
THE AFFIRMATIVE’S IMPACTS.
Dr. Simon Dalby ( professor carleton university, " Ecological metaphors of security: World politics in the biosphere." Alternatives:Global, local, political; Jul-Sep
1998, vol. 23 Issue 3)
Understanding world politics as municipal politics with clashing social movements not limited to operating in a single municipality also suggests analogies that might
be useful in thinking more intelligently about environmental politics. Talking Gabgil's discussion of the patterns of political power that
allow elites to distance themselves from the ecological consequences of their actions, both in terms of the
resource exploitation activities and their waste-disposal concerns, it is possible to read much of environmental
politics as matters of siting decisions and the politics of Not in My Back Yard (NIMBY). If we understand this on the
global scale, then it is possible to read environmental politics as the "sitting decisions" of global resource flows and industrial production. Note only are the
"dirtiest" of public facilities often sited outside of the North-West but those areas are also where unsafe
practices are used to produce minerals in ways that would be unacceptable in many North-West
"municipalities."The siting decisions and the fights by local communities to resist waste facilities are now also increasingly considered in terms of
environmental justice. Just as the politics of siting is also increasingly understood as a matter of social justice at an urban
scale, where the poor and marginalized usually end up with waste dumps and other noxious facilities in their
neighborhoods, so too at a larger scale there is, it seems, a similar pattern of sitting in the areas of least political
resistance. Nuclear weapons-testing ends up on the islands of the Pacific, and uranium mining digs into the
lands of the indigenous peoples of North America and elsewhere. Nuclear-waste repositories are not proposed
for affluent urban areas but for remote hinterlands, where the relatively politically powerless, who are often the
indigenous peoples of the "Fourth World," Live. Thus the struggles in the Fourth World are overlain with a
larger political economy of siting "dirty things."sometimes the dirtiest parts of the footprint of the NorthWest are at a great distance from where
the consequences of production and waste disposal are most acutely felt. The tragedy of the Aral Sea is perhaps only the worst example of these processes as millions of
people suffer the ecological consequences of industrial-scale cotton production, but the displacement of forest dwellers in numerous places in the South is directly
connected wit the export of resources to the North-West.
Spanos Neg - 23 -
BIO-D IMPACT TURN EXT
POLITICS OF SECURITIZATION ARE INSEPARABLE TO MASSIVE CONSUMPTION USE AS THEY
PROTECT THE CONSUMPTION OF HEGEMONIC COUNTRIES—SECURITIZATION MAKES
ENVIRONMENTAL DEGRADATION INEVITABLE—THE AFF CAN’T SOLVE
Simon Dalby 1997 Contesting an Essential Concept: Reading the Dilemmas in Contemporary Security Discourse. Chapter 1 of the book Critical Security Studies
by Kieth Krause and Michael Williams
Early advocates of linking problems of environmental degradation to traditional security discourses were hopeful that the rhetorical ploy would result in increased priority being given to
matters of environment in the policy-making circles in the U.S. and other Western states. Some writers explicitly argued that environmental degradation would trigger conflict." But despite
some early suggestions by Gro Harlem Brundtland and others, the term environmental security was apparently eclipsed by the discussions of other matters at the Earth Summit." Vice
President Al Gore's writings before the 1992 election included suggestions for a strategic environment initiative, but little was heard on these themes as a focus of policy action from the
Clinton administration until early 1994. Then Robert Kaplan's alarrni t article about the future of global politics in the Atlantic Monthly magazine, which predicted a "coming anarchy" because
of conflict caused by environmental degradation, generated considerable attention. Environmental security is a problematique that clearly reveals
the difficulties of thinking about security if the complex contexts of environmental politics and security policy
are critically examined. The conflation of the themes exposes a number of dilemmas that call into question either one or the other term's political efficacy.
Three dilemmas are fairly clear. First, the haste with which at least some parts of the u.s. military were willing
to adopt environmental themes in the immediate aftermath of the Cold War gives pause for thought. The military record on
environmental protection in many societies is much less than reassuring. The environmental legacy of Cold
War nuclear test ranges, weapons-making facilities, and abandoned toxic waste at military facilities in many
states is one aspect of the issue. 54 But beyond this is the parallel concern that institutions concerned with
secrecy and centralized control, not to mention frequently being exempt from environmental regulation under
some variation of doctrines of sovereign immunity, are simply not appropriate social organizations for dealing
with environmental issues." Second, conventional formulations of security that support maintaining the North's
political status quo implies maintaining consumer lifestyles, which in turn require protection of Northern access
to resources around the world. On this large scale the environmental security discourse raises once again the
simple but fundamental question of what exactly is being rendered secure. Whatever political arguments may have been made at the time,
the United States was in a war in the Persian Gulf in 1991 at least in part to ensure the maintenance of oil supplies to the industrialized world. The economic patterns of industrial production
in developed parts of the world depend to a large extent on oil. It is precisely this dependence that is the major contribution to the changing composition of the global atmosphere, with all the
possible consequences that flow from this in terms of climate change and environmental disruption. If environmental security is, at least in part, about protecting societies from disruptions
caused by anthropogenic climate change, then maintaining the American (and the rest of the developed world's) way of life based on the huge use of fossil fuels is obviously not contributing to
Third, the dilemmas of linking environment and security also refer to
environmental security in the sense of protecting environments.
enlarging the operation of the formal commercial sector in the South. Security based on modernization and the
promotion of economic growth often leads to environmental destruction. Forests are stripped and clear-cut in
the search for profits for development, while water supplies are contaminated and indigenous peoples deprived
of subsistence. Modernization is secured at the cost of disrupted ecologies and the denial of subsistence, as seen in
the recent political turmoil in Southern Mexico. The Chiapas revolt early in 1994 was at least in part about control over land. The link between the turmoil and the North American Free Trade
Agreement was made by a number of human-rights watchers. Commercial interests hoping to expand external markets are, so their reports say, enclosing and clearing land that traditionally
was used by indigenous and peasant peoples for their subsistence. This is a frequently heard theme in conflicts over resources and land in the underdeveloped world. 56 The desperation of the
dispossessed has, it seems, led to political unrest and widespread insecurity. But the reimposition of political order by the military reinforces the disruption of these people's lives, perpetuating
The politics of modernization often involve these conflicts; the
violence and encouraging migration to the cities of Latin and North America
political order protected by nationalsecurity policies in many underdeveloped states is related to the destruction
of ecosystems, most obviously of tropical rain forests. Once again, securing modernity seems to be antithetical
to environmental protection." On this point it is also worth remembering that the premise of the notion of sustainable development is precisely that conventional notions of
development are not sustainable. In terms of the debates in academic literature on these matters as they relate to security, the dilemma can be perhaps most clearly seen in Barry Buzan's
security is premised on much
discussions of the possibility of a mature anarchy's providing for international security on a global scale." His theory in part suggests that
of the world's becoming advanced industrialized democracies. If this is impossible because of ecological
limitations (rather than resource shortages, as earlier arguments suggested), then the prognosis for a global future of peace and
security, if security is understood as requiring conventional industrial development, is not good. Ecological limitations suggest that the industrial- democratic
assumptions present a dubious (ethnocentric?) premise on which to construct the edifice of a security order. These dilemmas lead to the argument that either security or
environment has to be rethought to allow for an easy conflation of the terms. Security understood as the
perpetuation of the modern order seems antithetical to the preservation of the environment. Preserving the
environment in turn seems antithetical to the preservation of the modern political economy that is, according to
conventional thinking, the referent that should be secured. The dilemma of environmental security is this simple, but none of the suggested
reformulations is easy.
Spanos Neg - 24 -
BIO-D ALT SOLVES EXT
IMPERIALISM WILL CONTINUE TO EXPAND WHICH CAUSES ENVIRONMENTS TO BE

DESTROYED. THE REMEMBERING OF VIETNAM FRUSTRATES THIS DOMINATION BY
QUESTIONING OUR PRAXIS IN THE WORLD
(Joel Kovel, author, 2007. “The Enemy of Nature: The End of Capitalism or the End of the World?” http://www.joelkovel.org/offthepress.html#enemy, Retrieved
7/3/09.)
Here, far from the pieties,

one encounters the effects of capital's ruthless pressure to expand. Imperialism was such a pattern, manifest
this selfsame ever-expanding capital was also the superintendant and regulator of the
politically and across nations. But
industrial system whose exhalations were trapping solar energy. What had proven true about capital in relation
to empire could be applied, therefore, to the realm of nature as well, bringing the human victims and the
destabilizations of ecology under the same sign. Climate change was, in effect, another kind of imperialism. Nor
was it the only noxious ecological effect of capital's relentless growth . There was also the sowing of the biosphere with
organochlorines and other toxins subtle as well as crude, the wasting of the soil as a result of the "green revolution," the prodigious species losses, the disintegration of
From this
Amazonia, and much more still--the spiraling, interpenetrating tentacles of a great crisis in the relationship between humanity and nature.
standpoint there appears a greater "ecological crisis," of which the particular insults to ecosystems are elements.
This has further implications. For human beings are part of nature, however ill-at-ease we may be with the role. There is therefore a human ecology as
well as an ecology of forests and lakes . It follows that the larger ecological crisis would be generated by, and extend deeply
into, an ecologically pathological society. Regarding the matter from this angle provided a more generous view. No longer trapped in a
narrow economic determinism, one could see capital as much more than a simple material arrangement, but as
something cancerous lodged in the human spirit, produced by, and producer of, the capitalist economy
Spanos Neg - 25 -
BIODIVERSITY EPISTEMOLOGY LINK
THE AFF’S RELIANCE ON EXPERT DISCOURSE IN THEIR CONSTRUCTION OF A BIODIVERSITY

ADVANTAGE IS A VEILED ATTEMPTED TO COVER UP THEIR ENVIRONMENTAL
SECURITIZATION.
Dalby, professor of geography and political economy at Carleton University in Ottawa, 2002 (Simon, Environmental Security, p. 156-159)
This relates to the politics of transstate movements and to global regimes where interstate treaties may provide at least some loose framework apt to constrain state
Claims to expertise in environmental disputes are mobilized by both environmentalists and policy
activities.45
makers during the political bargaining processes of international regime formation.46 State development experts, pollution
experts, medical science, and planning procedures are now all in doubt; the politics of technical expertise can no longer be obfuscated
under an unquestioned acceptance of the writ of science. "Security experts" are not immune to these
developments. The presentation of environment as a threat is a complex political process, not simply an issue
"security experts" can paraphrase to elicit a conveniently adequate policy response. But it is a political process
that in at least some ways gets well beyond the politics of sovereign states and the conventional assumptions of
territorial identities.
Spanos Neg - 26 -
OKINAWA MODULE
RAPE AND SEXUAL ABUSE ARE INHERENT TO THE MILITARY NOT OKINAWA, MILITARIZED
SOCIALIZATION EMPHASIZES AN AGGRESSIVE AND CONTROLLING BEHAVIOR WHICH
RESULTS IN SEXUAL VIOLENCE. THIS MEANS THE PLAN DOESN’T SOLVE ANYTHING, THEY
JUST MAKE THE UNITED STATES IMPERIALISM SEEM MORE BENIGN.
(Gwyn Kirk and Carolyn Francis, 2000 “Redefining Security: Women Challenge US military policy and Practice in East Asia” Found on June 27, 2010
from Berkeley women’s law journal 15:229 P 239-242)
Many of the problems created by U.S. military presence in East Asia stem from the sexist attitudes and hyper-
masculine culture that pervade the military. different branches of the U.S. Armed forces have developed this hyper-masculine culture to varying degrees,
with the Air force at the lower end of the spectrum and the Marines at the higher end. This phenomenon has had far reaching effects in places such as Okinawa, where
Marines account for sixty percent of the U.S. troops. Young
boys in the United States, as in many parts of the world, develop their
masculine identity during early childhood through a combination of adventure stories, comics, cartoons ,
competitive team sports, war toys, computer games, news reportings, ads, television shows, and films. This routine gender socialization is taken
further in basic military training where new recruits are pushed to the limits of their strength and stamina and are trained to follow orders without
questions, no matter how nonsensical or humiliating. As part of military training, servicemen learn how to use highly sophisticated weaponry and equipment; they are
socialized as warriors. A key aspect of this training and socialization process is the way recruits
are insulted and reviled by drill sergeants
as "women" and "queers" as part of the military promise "to make a man" of them. According to feminist scholars
of military systems and international relations, militarism depends on a clearly gendered division of labor and the maintenance of hierarchy, including sexism and
violence against women. Military socialization involves the construction of a militarized masculinity that emphasizes heroism, physical strength, emotional detachment,
the capacity for violence and killing, and an appearance of invulnerability. This view of masculinity involves the construction of male sexuality as assertive and
controlling, and results in three consequences: the need for the institutionalization of military prostitution, U.S. military abuse of women in host communities, and
sexual abuse of women in the military. In all three East Asian countries under discussion here, prostitution is officially forbidden but practiced under euphemisms as
the "hospitality industry" or "entertainment." The SOFAs do not refer to military prostitution even indirectly. However, its existence is an important element in the "GI
U.S. military commanders and administrators
Towns" that contributes to a general atmosphere of disrespect and objectification of women.
view sexual activity as one of their troops' basic needs. in "central america, Vietnam, the Philippines, South
Korea, Japan, Puerto Rico, the mainland United States, Germany, and Italy the Pentagon has operated as if prostitution were a necessary and integral part of
U.S. military operations," suggesting that militarized masculinity requires regular sexual release. Military prostitution is built into U.S. military operations- not as a
perk, but as a necessary component. Bases are refueling and repair depots for warships and planes; military personnel are also "refueled" by local women and girls. Host
governments have agreed to allow the establishment of "recreation zones" near military bases or at military ports to be used by U.S. troops for R & R, or as it is
sometimes jokingly called, I & I ( intoxication and intercourse).
THE AFFIRMATIVE STRENGTHENS THE JEREMIAD. ONCE TROOPS ARE REMOVED FROM
JAPAN, THEY ARE SENT TO GUAM, A COUNTRY THAT DOESN’T HAVE A POLITICAL OR
ECONOMIC STANDING LIKE JAPAN.
Yoshida 6-28-2010 Kensei, "Okinawa and Guam: In the Shadow of US and Japanese 'Global Defense Posture'", Retired U of Tokyo Professor in US Politics,
author of 'Democracy Betrayed, Okinawa Under US Occupation'. http://japanfocus.org/-Yoshida-Kensei/3378
To meet the “pressing need to reduce friction on Okinawa,” the U.S. consulted allies such as Korea, the
Philippines, Singapore, Thailand and Australia, but they were all “unwilling to allow permanent basing
of U.S. forces on their soil.” “The military’s goal,” the Draft EIS continued,“is to locate forces where those forces are wanted and welcomed by the host
country. Because these countries within the region have indicated their unwillingness and inability to host more U.S. forces on their lands,
the U.S. military has shifted its focus to basing on U.S. sovereign soil.”Guam was “the only location for the realignment of
forces” that met “all criteria”—freedom of action, response times to potential areas of conflict and U.S. security interests in the Asia-Pacific region.” It
was also considered “ideally” located. Says the Joint Guam Program Office in “Why Guam - guambuildupeis.us”: “Guam is a key piece of the strategic alignment
in the Pacific and is ideally suited to support stability in the region. It is positioned to defend other U.S. territories, the homeland,
and economic and political interests in the Pacific region.”
Spanos Neg - 27 -
OKINAWA SEXUAL ABUSE = MILITARY EXT
SEXUAL VIOLENCE HAS ALWAYS BEEN A PART OF MILITARY EXPANSION OVERSEAS. WHILE
THE AFFIRMATIVE MAY STOP THE PROBLEM IN OKINAWA, THEY DON’T ADDRESS THE FACT
THAT SEXUAL ABUSE IS OFTEN VIEWED AS A RIGHT OF PASSAGE INTO THE RANKS OF
MANHOOD.
Tessier 2003 ( Marie, March 30, 2003 “Sexual Assault Pervasive in Military, Experts Say” http://www.womensenews.org/story/rape/030330/sexual-assault-
pervasive-military-experts-say )
sexual assault remains a pervasive problem for women

(WOMENSENEWS)--Victim advocates and military health care leaders say that
serving in all branches of the military, including those deployed overseas. Their concern about the assaults on female
members of the military is especially high now, with the nation at war and the recent removal of four high-ranking officials from their posts at the U.S. Air
Force Academy following an investigation of sexual assaults there. "It's not just the academies. It's not just the Air Force. It's all the services and it's a pervasive part of
the culture," says Christine Hansen, executive director of The Miles Foundation, Inc., a victim service and advocacy agency for victims of sexual and domestic violence
in the military.
"Many women tell me that sexual assault is considered a rite of passage in the service, and they're
treated like the black sheep of the family when they ask for accountability." Military sexual trauma has been identified by
Pentagon health care experts as a major deployment and readiness issue. Rape victims often experience post-traumatic stress symptoms such as anxiety, depression and
intrusive thoughts, and are more likely to develop post-traumatic stress in other situations, according to military research. Sexual trauma is the subject of an increasing
number of studies about workplace safety in the armed forces, according to Pentagon's Web site and health care experts. Officials last week said they were not able to
discover how the issue is being handled in the Iraqi war theater and in and around Afghanistan. Similarly, they could not answer the question of how many assaults have
been reported to criminal investigators in recent years. Air Force legal affairs spokeswoman Valerie Burkes did say, "We do not have a problem with sexual offenses in
28 percent of female veterans reported sexual
the Air Force." A new assessment of risk factors for sexual assault in the military says that
assault during their careers, with consistent rates found across eras, according to a report in the American Journal of Industrial
Medicine. The study found that "officer leadership" played an important role in the military environment and safety of women and that an environment with unwanted
sexual behaviors increased the odds of rape--factors also cited by Pentagon study panels in recent years. Military sexual trauma even has its own acronym--MST--in the
Veterans Affairs offices. Veterans Affairs hospitals have been required for two years to have counseling services available for sexual trauma. Services are provided for
women and men.Military public affairs officials were unable last week to provide any numbers of reported rapes in
their ranks, though they say they are researching the question at Women's eNews' request. They also could not answer how many women
have been assaulted while deployed in the Middle East or Central Asia. Twenty-four cases of sexual assault were reported during
the first Persian Gulf War deployments in 1990 and 1991, according to the Department of Defense. Though reports to criminal investigation authorities are difficult to
find, a common estimate among advocates and health care experts is about one quarter of women in the military say they have been sexually assaulted during their
careers. In 1996, the Defense Department surveyed women in the military about their experiences in the previous 12 months, and found that 9 percent of women in the
Marines, 8 percent of women in the Army, 6 percent of women in the Navy and 4 percent of women in the Air Force had experienced a rape or an attempted rape that
more than 10,000 sexual assaults or attempted assaults each
year. About 200,000 women serve in the military, so these numbers represent
year. More than 67,000 women veterans, or as much as 29 percent of those served at Veterans Affairs clinics in recent years, say they
experienced sexual assault in the military, says Sherri Bauch, a deputy field director for the Women Veterans Health Program. And even those
numbers fall far short of a complete count, service providers say. The figures do not cover women veterans who do not use the clinics and would not reflect women who
left the service before their enlistment was complete. "Sexual trauma is something that has happened at all times in history," said
Faith Hoffman, the director of the women's center at the veterans hospital in Buffalo. She treats women for sexual trauma and post-traumatic stress. "It's not a new
problem, but it is something we can treat, whether the trauma happened yesterday or it happened during the Vietnam War or before. People do not have to live with this
secret."
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OKINAWA GUAM SHIFT EXT
WITHDRAWAL OF TROOPS FROM JAPAN LEADS TO MORE TROOPS IN GUAM

Gacho ‘10 (freelance writer, journalist and copy editor Francesca January 4, U.S. troop build-up on Guam faces opposition from locals
http://minoritydreams.com/2010/01/04/us-troop-build-up-on-guam-faces-opposition-from-natives/)
It has been ten months since Secretary

of State Hillary Clinton re-signed an agreement with Japan officials to relocate
Marine Corps Futenma air base. This agreement includes the relocation of 8,000 Marines from the U.S. military
base in Japan to the small island of Guam, a U.S. territory. The agreement was initially signed in 2006 to reduce
U.S. military presence in Japan and lighten the load in the airbase which currently holds more than half of the 47,000 troops in Japan,
according to news reports. In a few months, the Marines will be greeted “Hafa Adai” or “Welcome”, as they set foot on Guam. Recently, the Public Broadcasting
System (PBS) reported on the military build-up and the infrastructural stress such a high influx of people would put on the island’s already-stretched resources.
An estimated 18,000 troops and families are set to arrive by 2014, but with a population already exceeding 150,000 residents, Guam’s
212 square miles of land seems barely enough.
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CHINA MODULE 1/2
THEIR CLAIM THAT CHINA IS A THREAT OR PROBLEM ISN’T ‘TRUTH’ OR OBJECTIVE - - IT IS A

DISCURSIVE CREATION USED TO BOLSTER AMERICAN HEGEMONY AND DICHOTOMIZE THE
WEST FROM THE ‘OTHER’ (CHINA).
Pan, 04 (Chengxin Pan, Department of Political Science and International Relations, Faculty of Arts, Australian National University, Canberra, “The "China
Threat" in American Self-Imagination: The Discursive Construction of Other as Power Politics” Alternatives: Global, Local, Political, Jun/Jul2004, Vol. 29 Issue 3,
p503-331,. EBSCO-HALLI)
At this point, it seems there has been enough reason and empirical evidence for the United States to be vigilant about China's future ambition. While there are debates
over the extent to which the threat is imminent or to which approaches might best explain it, the "objective" quality of such a threat has been taken for granted. In the
words of Walter McDougall, the Pulitzer Prizewinning historian and strategic thinker at the University of Pennsylvania, recognizing the "China threat" is
"commonsense geopolitics." 23 For Huntington, the challenge of "Greater China" to the West is simply a rapidly growing cultural, economic, and political "reality. "24
they claim that "China can pose a grave problem," Betts and Christensen are convinced that they are
Similarly, when
merely referring to "the truth."25 In the following sections, I want to question this "truth," and, more generally, question the objective, self-
evidentiary attitudes that underpin it. In my view, the "China threat" literature is best understood as a particular kind of discursive practice that dichotomizes the West
and China as self and other. In this sense, the "truism"
that China presents a growing threat is not so much an objective
reflection of contemporary global reality, per se, as it is a discursive construction of otherness that acts to
bolster the hegemonic leadership of the United States in the post-Cold War world. Therefore, to have a better understanding of how the
discursive construction of China as a "threat" takes place, it is now necessary to turn attention to a particularly dominant way of U.S. self-imagination.
EVEN IF CHINA WERE TO GO ALONG WITH THE PLAN, THE RESULT WOULDN’T BE ‘PEACEFUL
RELATIONS’ BETWEEN THE U.S. AND CHINA. CONSTRUCTING CHINA AS A THREAT RESULTS
IN A FOREIGN POLICY WHERE NO AMOUNT OF CHINESE COOPERATION IS ENOUGH; THE U.S.
WILL CONTINUE TO DEMONIZE AND MANAGE CHINA REGARDLESS.
p503-331,. EBSCO)
In January 2002, China chose to play down an incident that a presidential jet outfitted in the United States had been
crammed with sophisticated satellite-operated bugs, a decision that, as the New York Times puts it, "illustrates the depth of
China's current commitment to cultivating better relations with the United States, "ô Also, over the years, China
has ratified a number of key nonproliferation treaties and pledged not to assist countries in developing missiles
with ranges that exceed the limits established under the Missile Technology Control Regime (MTCR). More recently , China has collaborated with the
United States in the war on terrorism, including issuing new regulations to restrict the export of missile technology
to countries usually accused by the United States of aiding terrorists. Indeed, as some have argued, by any reasonable measure China is now
more responsible in international affairs than at any time since 1949.9' And yet, the real problem is that, so long
as the United States continues to stake its self-identity on the realization of absolute security, no amount of
Chinese cooperation would be enough. For instance, Iain Johnston views the constructive development of China's arms-control policy as a kind of
"realpolitik adaptation," rather than "genuine learning."92 From this perspective, however China has changed, it would remain a
fundamentally threatening other, which the United States cannot live with but has to take full control of.
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CHINA MODULE 2/2
REPRESENTATIONS OF CHINA ARE INTRINSICALLY LINKED TO HOW WE SEE OURSELVES,

THIS JUSTIFIES CHINA BECOMING A THREAT MERELY BECAUSE WE REPRESENT THEMSELVES
AS A THREAT
Pan 04’ – PhD in Political Science and International Relations and member of the International Studies Association ISA (Chengxin Pan: “The "China threat" in
American self-imagination: the discursive construction of other as power politics”, Alternatives RC)
China and its relationship with the United States has long been a fascinating subject of study in the mainstream U.S. international relations
community. This is reflected, for example, in the current heated debates over whether China is primarily a strategic threat
to or a market bonanza for the United States and whether containment or engagement is the best way to deal
with it. (1) While U.S. China scholars argue fiercely over "what China precisely is," their debates have been underpinned by some common ground, especially in
terms of a positivist epistemology. Firstly, they believe that China is ultimately a knowable object, whose reality can be, and
ought to be, empirically revealed by scientific means. For example, after expressing his dissatisfaction with often conflicting Western
perceptions of China, David M. Lampton, former president of the National Committee on U.S.-China Relations, suggests that "it is time to step back and look at where
China is today, where it might be going, and what consequences that direction will hold for the rest of the world." (2) Like many other China scholars, Lampton views
his object of study as essentially "something we can stand back from and observe with clinical detachment." (3) Secondly, associated with the first assumption, it is
commonly believed that China scholars merely serve as "disinterested observers" and that their studies of China are neutral, passive descriptions of reality. And thirdly,
in pondering whether China poses a threat or offers an opportunity to the United States, they rarely raise the question of "what the United States is." That is, the
meaning of the United States is believed to be certain and beyond doubt. I do not dismiss altogether the conventional ways of debating China. It is not the purpose of
this article to venture my own "observation" of "where China is today," nor to join the "containment" versus "engagement" debate per se. Rather , I want to contribute to
a novel dimension of the China debate by questioning the seemingly unproblematic assumptions shared by most China scholars in the mainstream IR community in the
United States. To perform this task, I will focus attention on a particularly significant component of the China debate; namely, the "China threat" literature. More
specifically, I want to argue that
U.S. conceptions of China as a threatening other are always intrinsically linked to
how U.S. policymakers/mainstream China specialists see themselves (as representatives of the
indispensable, security-conscious nation, for example). As such, they are not value-free, objective descriptions of an
independent, preexisting Chinese reality out there, but are better understood as a kind of normative , meaning-giving
practice that often legitimates power politics in U.S.-China relations and helps transform the "China
threat" into social reality. In other words, it is self-fulfilling in practice, and is always part of the "China threat"
problem it purports merely to describe. In doing so, I seek to bring to the fore two interconnected themes of self/other constructions and of theory as
practice inherent in the "China threat" literature--themes that have been overridden and rendered largely invisible by those common positivist assumptions. These
themes are of course nothing new nor peculiar to the "China threat" literature. They have been identified elsewhere by critics of some conventional fields of study such
as ethnography, anthropology, oriental studies, political science, and international relations. (4) Yet, so far, the China field in the West in general and the
U.S.
"China threat" literature in particular have shown remarkable resistance to systematic critical reflection on both their
normative status as discursive practice and their enormous practical implications for international politics. (5) It is
in this context that this article seeks to make a contribution. I begin with a brief survey of the "China threat" argument in contemporary U.S. international relations
literature, followed by an investigation of how this particular argument about China is a discursive construction of other, which is predicated on the predominant way in
which the United States imagines itself as the universal, indispensable nation-state in constant need of absolute certainty and security. Finally, this article will illustrate
some of the dangerous practical consequences of the "China threat" discourse for contemporary U.S.-China relations, particularly with regard to the 1995-1996 Taiwan
Strait missile crisis and the 2001 spy-plane incident.
Spanos Neg - 31 -
CHINA CONSTRUCTIONS ARE IMPERIALIST EXT
THE AFFIRMATIVE’S CONSTRUCTION OF CHINA AS A THREAT IS DERIVED FROM THE

IMPERIAL UNDERSTANDING OF OTHER. THIS SETS UP THE MOST LIKELY SITUATION FOR
WAR.
p503-331,. EBSCO - HALLI)
I have argued above that the "China threat" argument in mainstream U.S. IR literature is derived, primarily, from a
discursive construction of otherness. This construction is predicated on a particular narcissistic understanding of
the U.S. self and on a positivist- based realism, concerned with absolute certainty and security, a concern central
to the dominant U.S. self-imaginary. Within these frameworks, it seems imperative that China be treated as a
threatening, absolute other since it is unable to fit neatly into the U.S.-led evolutionary scheme or guarantee absolute security for the United States, so
that U.S. power preponderance in the post-Cold War world can still be legitimated. Not only does this
reductionist representation come at the expense of understanding China as a dynamic, multifaceted country but
it leads inevitably to a policy of containment that, in turn, tends to enhance the influence of realpolitik thinking,
nationalist extremism, and hard-line stance in today's China. Even a small dose of the containment strategy is
likely to have a highly dramatic impact on U.S.-China relations, as the 1995-1996 missile crisis and the 2001 spy-plane incident have
vividly attested. In this respect, Chalmers Johnson is right when he suggests that "a policy of containment toward China implies the
possibility of war, just as it did during the Cold War vis-a-vis the former Soviet Union. The balance of terror prevented war
between the United States and the Soviet Union, but this may not work in the case of China."^^ For instance, as the United States presses ahead with a missile defence
shield to "guarantee" its invulnerability from rather unlikely sources of missile attacks, it
would be almost certain to intensify China's sense of
vulnerability and compel it to expand its current small nuclear arsenal so as to maintain the efficiency of its
limited deterrence. In consequence, it is not impossible that the two countries, and possibly the whole region,
might be dragged into an escalating arms race that would eventually make war more likely. Neither the United
States nor China is likely to be keen on fighting the other. But as has been demonstrated, the "China threat" argument, for
all its alleged desire for peace and security, tends to make war preparedness the most "realistic" option for both sides. At this
juncture, worthy of note is an interesting comment made by Charlie Neuhauser, a leading CIA China specialist, on the Vietnam War, a war fought by the United States
to contain the then-Communist "other." Neuhauser says, "Nobody wants it. We don't want it, Ho Chi Minh doesn't want it; it's simply a question of annoying the other
side."94 And, as we know, in an unwanted war some fifty-eight thousand young people from the United States and an estimated two million Vietnamese men, women,
and children lost their lives. Therefore, to
call for a halt to the vicious circle of theory as practice associated with the "China
threat" literature, tinkering with the current positivist-dominated U.S. IR scholarship on China is no longer
adequate. Rather, what is needed is to question this un-self-reflective scholarship itself, particularly its
connections with the dominant way in which the United States and the West in general represent themselves
and others via their positivist epistemology, so that alternative, more nuanced, and less dangerous ways of
interpreting and debating China might become possible.
PORTRAYING CHINA AS A THREAT IS SIMPLY A JUSTIFICATION FOR THE EXPANSION OF THE

AMERICAN IMPERIAL/MILITARY PROJECT.
p503-331,. EBSCO-HALLI)
In the same way,a multitude of other unpredictable factors (such as ethnic rivalry, local insurgencies, overpopulation, drug trafficking,
environmental degradation, rogue states, the spread of weapons of mass destruction, and international terrorism) have also been labeled as "threats" to
U.S. security. Yet, it seems that in the post-Cold War environment, China represents a kind of uncertainty par excellence.
"Whatever the prospects for a more peaceful, more democratic, and more just world order, nothing seems more uncertain today than the future of post-Deng China,"55
such an archetypical uncertainty is crucial to the enterprise of U.S. self-construction, because
argues Samuel Kim. And
it seems that only an uncertainty with potentially global consequences such as China could justify U.S.
indispensability or its continued world dominance. In this sense, Bruce Cumings aptly suggested in 1996 that China (as a threat)
Spanos Neg - 32 -
was basically "a metaphor for an enormously expensive Pentagon that has lost its bearings and that requires a
formidable 'renegade state' to define its mission (Islam is rather vague, and Iran lacks necessary weights)."56
Spanos Neg - 33 -
PROLIFERATION MODULE 1/2
FEAR OF THE SPREAD OF NUCLEAR WEAPONS IS BASED IN THE RACIST AND IMPERIALIST
IDEOLOGY. THEY VIEW THIRD-WORLD NATIONS AS THE CLEAR OPPOSITE OF THE “PERFECT”
WESTERN WORLD.
Gusterson 1999 (Hugh Massachusetts Institute of Technology “Nuclear Weapons and the Other in the Western Imagination” Cultural Anthropology
14(1):111-143. Copyright © 1999, American Anthropological Association.)
Thus in Western discourse nuclear weapons are represented so that "theirs" are a problem whereas "ours" are
not. During the Cold War the Western discourse on the dangers of "nuclear proliferation" defined the term in such a way as to sever
the two senses of the word proliferation. This usage split off the "vertical" proliferation of the superpower
arsenals (the development of new and improved weapons designs and the numerical expansion of the stockpiles) from the "horizontal"
proliferation of nuclear weapons to other countries, presenting only the latter as the "proliferation problem."
Following the end of the Cold War, the American and Russian arsenals are being cut to a few thousand weapons on each side.5 However , the United States
and Russia have turned back appeals from various nonaligned nations, especially India, for the nuclear powers to
open discussions on a global convention abolishing nuclear weapons. Article 6 of the Non-Proliferation Treaty notwithstanding, the
Clinton administration has declared that nuclear weapons will play a role in the defense of the United States for the indefinite future. Meanwhile, in a controversial
move, the Clinton administration has broken with the policy of previous administrations in basically formalizing a policy of using nuclear weapons against nonnuclear
states to deter chemical and biological weapons (Panofsky 1998; Sloyan 1998).The dominant discourse that stabilizes this system of
nuclear apartheid in Western ideology is a specialized variant within a broader system of colonial and
postcolonial discourse that takes as its essentialist premise a profound Otherness separating Third World from
Western countries.6 This inscription of Third World (especially Asian and Middle Eastern) nations as ineradicably different from our own has, in a different
context, been labeled "Orientalism" by Edward Said (1978). Said argues that orientalist discourse constructs the world in terms of a series
of binary oppositions that produce the Orient as the mirror image of the West: where "we" are rational and
disciplined, "they" are impulsive and emotional; where "we" are modern and flexible, "they" are slaves to
ancient passions and routines; where "we" are honest and compassionate, "they" are treacherous and
uncultivated. While the blatantly racist orientalism of the high colonial period has softened, more subtle orientalist ideologies endure in
contemporary politics. They can be found, as Akhil Gupta (1998) has argued, in discourses of economic development that
represent Third World nations as child nations lagging behind Western nations in a uniform cycle of
development or, as Lutz and Collins (1993) suggest, in the imagery of popular magazines, such as National Geographic. I want to suggest here that another
variant of contemporary orientalist ideology is also to be found in U.S. national security discourse. Following Anthony
Giddens (1979), I define ideology as a way of constructing political ideas, institutions, and behavior which (1) makes
the political structures and institutions created by dominant social groups, classes, and nations appear to be
naturally given and inescapable rather than socially constructed; (2) presents the interests of elites as if they
were universally shared; (3) obscures the connections between different social and political antagonisms so as to inhibit massive, binary confrontations
(i.e., revolutionary situations); and (4) legitimates domination. The Western discourse on nuclear proliferation is ideological
in all four of these senses: (1) it makes the simultaneous ownership of nuclear weapons by the major powers and the
absence of nuclear weapons in Third World countries seem natural and reasonable while problematizing
attempts by such countries as India, Pakistan, and Iraq to acquire these weapons; (2) it presents the security needs
of the established nuclear powers as if they were everybody's; (3) it effaces the continuity between Third World
countries' nuclear deprivation and other systematic patterns of deprivation in the underdeveloped world in order to
inhibit a massive north-south confrontation; and (4) it legitimates the nuclear monopoly of the recognized nuclear powers.
Spanos Neg - 34 -
PROLIFERATION MODULE 2/2
THE DISCOURSE OF PROLIFERATION REPRODUCES AND REINFORCES THE DISCURSIVE

CONSTRUCTION OF SOVEREIGNTY WHICH IN TURN INCENTIVIZES AND PRECIPITATES THE
SPREAD OF NUCLEAR TECHNOLOGIES
Mutimer 2000 [David, associate professor of political science at York University and Deputy Director of the Center for International and Security Studies, The
Weapons State, pg 140]
This connection between sovereignty-statehood and weaponry raises the greatest irony of the proliferation agenda. The
spread of military technology,
which is of such concern to states of the West, is driven largely by iterests found in the representations of state
and sovereignty that circulate throughout the contemporary international system. That circulation takes place
through the practices of states that reproduce the discourses out of which those representations flow. In other words,
when the United Kingdon: "ring-fences" the Trident program in its defense review, it is reproducing the nuclear
arsenal as a marker of status in the international system. Similarly, when the United States revises its military
posture in the aftermath of the Cold War on the basis of a need to maintain a fully functional, high-technology military
capable of fighting two or more wars simultaneously, it strongly reinforces the relationship among statehood,
status, and that particular form of military organization and equipment. To produce that military posture in the
post--Cold War world, the United States played a central role in building proliferation as a primary international
security threat and the rogue state as its central villain. In other words, the very process of developing and responding
to a "proliferation" agenda in the past few years has reproduced and reinforced the discursive construction
of what it means to be a sovereign state in the contemporary world, which, in turn, is central to the spread of
advanced weaponry and related military technologies.
Spanos Neg - 35 -
PROLIF LINK EXT
CURBING PROLIFERATION IS DONE ONLY IN AN ATTEMPT TO CREATE “STABILITY” WHICH IS

JUSTIFICATION FOR MILITARY INTERVENTION. LOOK AT ALL THEIR EVIDENCE WITH
TERMINAL SKEPTICISM- INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS SCHOLARSHIP IS TAINTED BY
WESTERN BIAS
MUTIMER 00, David (prof of Poli Sci and Arts at York University) “The weapons state: proliferation and the framing of security” pg.89)
Foucault increasingly defines the way in which we think about the constitution of the subject in
The work of Michel
modern society. Throughout his work, Foucault examines ways in which discourses of normality establish the confines
in which the subject may operate. Normal behavior is defined largely through identification of the forms of
abnormality that constitute its limits, which, in turn, are rigidly policed. The proliferation discourse defines
normality in terms of regional and global stability, and hence abnormality (or behavior that causes serious concern) in terms of
threats to or disruptions of that stability. It is a constitution of the normal international subject policed by the
UN Security Council and by the advanced industrial states through their export control regimes.
One notable feature of Foucault's accounts of the constitution of the modern subject is the complicity of various academic disciplines in defining the contours of the
27 The idea of stability as the normal condition in international life also reveals academic complicity,
normal.
having been produced and reproduced by the discipline of international relations. As I argue in Chapter 3, a particular
characterization of balance has been defined in the practice of international relations scholarship largely with
reference to the relationship among the Soviet Union, the United States, and the world order during the Cold War. This
understanding of balance, particularly of balance of power, in turn, gives rise to stability as the normal condition
of international life. Balances need to be maintained; instabilities upset these balances and produce disorder. By
extension, those states that act to upset stable balances can be labeled in some way deviant.
THE IMAGE OF PROLIFERATION DOESN’T HOLD A PLACE IN POLITICS. INSTEAD IT IS USED TO

SUPPORT THE INTERESTS OF ELITES.
Mutimer in 1994 (David, Associate Professor, Political Science, Arts, Deputy Director, Centre for International and Security Studies, “Reimagining Security:
The Metaphors of Proliferation”, YCISS Occasional Paper Number 25, August 1994)
The image of PROLIFERATION knits together the metaphors of 'proliferation', 'stability' and 'balance' to shape
the policy responses of the international community. The metaphors have certain entailments, which serve to
highlight, downplay and hide aspects of the security environment. Thus, the policy responses which are being
developed address primarily those aspects highlighted, while ignoring those downplayed and hidden. The image is of
an autonomously driven process of spread, outward from a particular source or sources. It is an apolitical image, which strongly highlights
technology, capability and gross accounts of number. As such, it is an image that masks the political interests of those
supporting the present structure of proliferation control—a structure which strongly reflects this image and its entailments.
Spanos Neg - 36 -
PROLIF LINK EXT

THE PRIVILEGED NORTHERN PORTION OF THE GLOBE USES ITS POSITION OF HEGEMONY
OVER THE REST OF THE WORLD TO DISALLOW SHIFTS IN POWER RELATIONS. THE METHOD
BY WHICH THIS IS ACHIEVED IS OTHERIZATION AND DEMONIZING OF ROGUE NATIONS
LEADERSHIP
MUTIMER 00, David (prof of Poli Sci and Arts at York University) “The weapons state: proliferation and the framing of security” pg.98
In a sense, then, Iraq

did emerge suddenly as a rogue in August 1990. Suddenly there was a new way of categorizing
certain states' actions, so Iraqi behavior suddenly became that of the rogue. To show how great a threat was
rogue behavior, the United States mounted a massive response to the Iraqi invasion. Given the size of that response, the threat
must have been supreme; thus by mounting such a large response the United States warranted the practices that followed—signaling the severity of the issue through
the UN Security Council Summit in 1992. The “proliferation” image that was developed, and the practices that have
instantiated that image, fill in the context in which rogues become the threat. Rogues and outlaws serve as
markers of difference; they label the outsider against whom the insider is known. The insider is the state that
follows the rules, that runs with the herd and is law-abiding. If we combine this labeling with the construction
of identities in the practices of control and the identification of the security problems proliferation causes, we
get a clear picture of the set of identities constituted by the “proliferation” discourse. The central practices of
supplier groups and their attendant export controls construct a core set of inside states, those sufficiently
responsible and mature to take it upon themselves to judge the behavior of other states and sanction them for
troubling activities. That set overlaps notably with the club of advanced industrial states of the North. There is
also a clear move from within this privileged group to draw in the old East and to reconstruct (or rebuild, as efforts at
transition are often called) those countries as part of that inside. Outside this privileged core states are gathered into
regions, each of which is expected to remain stable through the balancing of power. Proliferation, that autonomous process the
image constructs, can upset these balances—nuclear weapons give certain states disproportionate power and thus destabilize
entire regions; even conventional arms can be acquired in sufficient quantities to be excessive and destabilizing. If states act in such a way that
they upset or threaten to upset these balances, they are rogues, outlaws, immature or backward states unwilling
to conform to the rules of civilized behavior. The proliferation image creates two clear lines of difference. The
first marks the distinction between those who can be trusted to make the rules—signaled by inclusion in the ranks of
suppliers—and those who must follow the rules—the recipients. The second line marks those who do follow the
rules from those who refuse—the rogues from the herd, the outlaws from the law-abiding. This second line marks the
emergence of an enemy in this discourse of military security, for it is rogue behavior that poses a threat, that causes
concern to those who make the rules. Thus the recipients are accepted as part of the community of the law-abiding and thus have access to prized
technology the suppliers can provide. The recipients, however, are also potential rogues. Their behavior must be policed through export control and compliance
monitoring to ensure that they conform to the rules and do not become rogues. This
policing gives in to the temptation of othering
difference Connolly discussed. Not only are those not included in the supplier groups to be marked as different, but
they are to be labeled as potential enemies and sanctioned as such. The proliferation image constructs states in the Third World as
outsiders. Even if they do not become rogues, they are not permitted inside the privileged Northern club; if they do behave in ways that cause concern to the privileged,
they are labeled enemy and heavily sanctioned. Not surprisingly, not all Third World states are entirely happy with the “proliferation” construction. Iran, for example,
finds itself abiding by the rules of NPT membership, rules that are supposed to guarantee its access to nuclear technology for peaceful purposes. Nevertheless, its
behavior—in this case, the domestic politics of government—causes concern among members of the supplier groups, and so it is sanctioned. India has established itself
as the preeminent critic of the proliferation discourse in the Third World. India does not accept the problem as it has been constructed by the insiders, and it does not
accept the practices to which the construction has given rise. In Chapter 6 I examine the alternative framings produced in this resistance and elsewhere to see the
possible objects and identities hidden by the “proliferation” image that could serve as a basis for political opposition to that image.
Spanos Neg - 37 -
PROLIF CASE TURN EXT
THE USE OF THE “PROLIFERATION” IMAGE MAKE THE SPREAD OF NUCLEAR WEAPONS MORE
LIKELY, WHICH TURNS CASE
Mutimer in 1994 (David, Associate Professor, Political Science, Arts, Deputy Director, Centre for International and Security Studies, “Reimagining Security:
The Metaphors of Proliferation”, YCISS Occasional Paper Number 25, August 1994)
There is a third, and rather ironic, entailment to the 'stability' and 'balance' metaphors—they can lead to the
promotion of the spread of nuclear weapons to a greater number of states. The logic of the 'balance' between the
superpowers, it has been argued, is that mutual assured destruction with nuclear weapons introduces a caution
conducive to 'stability'. If the metaphors of the Cold War are adopted to imagine the new international security
environment, there seems little way to escape the conclusions of this argument, that nuclear weapons can be
stabilisers. Indeed, it has led John Mearsheimer to argue: If complete Soviet withdrawal from Eastern Europe proves unavoidable, the West faces the question of
how to maintain peace in a multipolar Europe. Three policy prescriptions are in order. First, the United States should encourage the limited and carefully managed
proliferation of nuclear weapons in Europe. The best hope for avoiding war in post-Cold War Europe is nuclear deterrence; hence some nuclear proliferation is
necessary to compensate for the withdrawal of the Soviet and American nuclear arsenals from Central Europe. [Emphasis added.]62 As
part of the 'managed
proliferation' of nuclear weapons in Europe, Mearsheimer suggests provision of nuclear arms to Germany. On this
and on other points Mearsheimer's argument has been widely, and justifiably, attacked. But what is interesting about it is the way in which it
makes the entailments of the 'stability' and 'balance' metaphors so clear. What is important is to assure that the
numbers of weapons are distributed so that the balance among them is stable — regardless of who holds the
weapons. The problems of history and politics which would be raised by German nuclear weapons are blithely
ignored, because the metaphors informing Mearsheimer's conceptualisation hide them entirely. Most of us are
sufficiently sensitive to these problems that Mearsheimer's argument is jarringly uncomfortable. However, the problem persists in all uses of the
PROLIFERATION image, and yet it is only when the problems are as dramatic as in this case that the
implications of the image are widely rejected.
Spanos Neg - 38 -
PROLIF: “ROGUE” RHETORIC LINKS 1/2
LABELING STATES AS ROGUE IS BORN OF WESTERN EXCEPTIONALISM

Other Iraqs, rogues, and outlaws are now the currency of the international discourse of proliferation that grew
out of the Western response to the Gulf War. These are the labels, drawn from the debate in the United States,
applied to states whose behavior causes serious concern to the Western powers in their supplier groups. What
sort of labels are they? What lines of difference do these labels establish? To answer these questions, we can
look at rogues and outlaws as metaphors that link the proliferation image to other, more widespread discourses
and discover the entailments they draw from these discourses. Rogues and outlaws are used similarly in everyday language. A rogue
is defined by the Oxford English Dictionary as: “1. One belonging to a class of idle vagrants or vagabonds. … 2. A dishonest, unprincipled
person; a rascal. … 5. An elephant driven away, or living apart from, the herd and of a savage or destructive disposition. ” Similarly, an outlaw is “one put outside the
law and deprived of its benefits and protection. … More vaguely: One banished or proscribed; an exile, a fugitive. ”
ROGUE STATES ARE CONSTRUCTIONS OF NECESSITY. THE U.S. IS CONSTRAINED BY ITS

CONCEPTION OF RELATIONS AS PURELY DYADIC. OUR GOVERNMENT CREATES ITS OWN
PROBLEMS
To maintain a military force essentially equivalent to that of the Cold War in the face of budgetary pressures,
Powell needed to fill the threat blank. Essentially, the general's requirements were the same as Krauthammer's— find an enemy that will
justify superpower military status, understood as it was in the Cold War, without the Cold War enemy. The solution
he came to was the same as well. As Klare reports, “Out of this process came what might best be termed the Rogue Doctrine—
the characterization of hostile (or seemingly hostile) Third World states with large military forces and nascent
WMD capabilities as 'rogue states' or 'nuclear outlaws' bent on sabotaging the prevailing world order. ” 35
Conveniently, on the day U. S. President Bush announced the new posture based on the Rogue Doctrine, Iraq
invaded Kuwait. Iraq was thus established as the paradigm rogue. It was a sizable Third World state with a
substantial military. Iraq had long been on the short list of states thought to be seeking a nuclear capability, and
it was also thought to be producing chemical weapons to go with the ballistic missiles it was known to have. To
complete the picture, Iraq was clearly bent on regional destabilization, as it had enlarged itself militarily. The U.
S. military could point to Iraq to show that the threat against which it wished to maintain a readiness was “real. ”
As the U. S. secretary of defense told the House Armed Services Committee soon after the end of Desert Storm: “Iraq's forces were considerable, but
not entirely unique. There are other regional powers with modern armed forces, sophisticated attack aircraft and
integrated air defenses. ” 37 The watchword became preparation to defend against other Iraqs.
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PROLIF: “ROGUE” RHETORIC LINKS 2/2
THE NOTION OF THE ROGUE STATE IS ONE BASED ON WESTERNIST DOMINATION.

It would seem that the U. S. military's concern with defending its budget following the Cold War threw up a powerful new marker of identity/difference for the
contemporary practice of international security. The
idea of the rogue state has achieved wide currency in popular discussion of
international affairs. Klare cites a U. S. Congress study to the effect that in major newspapers and journals, the
use of rogue nation, rogue state, and rogue regime increased more than 1,500 percent between 1990 and 1993. 43
The label originally devised to categorize potential military opponents was quickly drawn into the construction of the new proliferation control agenda following the
Gulf War, as Iraq was identified as the first of the rogues. The
notion of the rogue state provides agency in an image of an
international security problem largely devoid of agency. The term is used to label states whose behavior causes
serious concern to the members of the supplier groups, identifying them as outsiders, immature states unable or
unwilling to follow the rules of civilized state action— rules policed by that same core of supplier states. Iraq is
presently singled out as the preeminent villain of the proliferation discourse, identified as the paradigmatic
rogue state. According to the conventional account, this rogue state sought the disproportionate power weapons of mass destruction provide to rogues. Iraq had
built an excessive and destabilizing arsenal of conventional weapons throughout the 1980s and was bent on using its conventional and unconventional arsenal to
establish itself as the preeminent power in its region. On
2 August 1990, this rogue showed its true colors by invading its southern
neighbor. This attempt to augment further its power, by capturing both Kuwait's oil reserves and its access to
the Gulf, was designed to upset the balance of power in the region in Iraq's favor. The response of the coalition
forces marked the strength of the international community's commitment to respond to states that placed
themselves outside that community in such a fashion—by acting as rogues. Iraq, however, did not “suddenly emerge” as a heavily
armed state; nor were its designs on regional hegemony any great secret. In 1980 it had invaded Iran and fought a long war that, in part, resulted in the arsenal it had
accumulated by 1990. In this instance those states that have subsequently gathered themselves into supplier groups to sit in judgment of others, ever alert for behavior
that causes them concern, without question acted as suppliers. These same states supplied Iraq with the military technology—and even nuclear technology—it needed to
build the arsenal that caused such concern. The invasion of Iran did not seem to mark Iraq for particular condemnation in 1980, and it seems the U. S. ambassador
suggested to the Iraqi leadership that neither would an invasion of Kuwait in 1990. The categories through which state action was interpreted, however, had changed by
2 August 1990. In the 1980s the Iraqi actions were interpreted within a Cold War frame that read regional conflicts as subordinate to the central confrontation and
identified regional powers as clients of one or the other superpower (or, for the skillful few like Iraq, of both). On 2 August 1990 U. S. President Bush announced a new
interpretive frame, one that defined what Iraq was in the process of doing as the action of a rogue—the new enemy of the post–Cold War world.
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PROLIF: NPT LINKS 1/2
THE NPT REQUIRES ROBUST INTERVENTION. STANDARDS FOR KEEPING STATES IN

COMPLIANCE FALL SHORT OF WHAT IS NECESSARY FOR DETERRENCE
The aftermath of the Gulf War demonstrated convincingly that the nonproliferation regime was not as robust as
had been believed. Iraq was an NNWS party to the NPT and had been a party since the treaty's entry into force
in 1970. The first phase of UNSCOM inspections that followed the end of the Gulf War included seven IAEA
inspections of Iraq, designed to assess that country's nuclear weapons capabilities. The first two reports revealed
evidence of uranium enrichment, and by the seventh “the existence of an Iraqi weaponization program [had]
been acknowledged and confirmed. ” 6 In other words, an extensive nuclear weapons program had been
uncovered in Iraq that included the development of technology to produce weapons-grade fissile material at one
end to the development of an actual weapon at the other. 7 All of this technology had been built while Iraq was subject to “full-
scope” IAEA safeguards. 8 Clearly, the nuclear nonproliferation regime needed to be strengthened if states were to
combat the threat posed by the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction. What is more, the nuclear regime
was the most fully developed of any technology now of proliferation concern. Appropriate action to prevent the spread of
military and related technology would therefore require not only the reinforcement of the nuclear nonproliferation regime but the creation of similar regimes for
chemical and biological weapons, for missile technologies, and perhaps even for conventional weapons.
CALLS TO STRENGTHEN THE NONPROLIFERATION REGIME ARE ROOTED IN AMERICAN

EXCEPTIONALISM, EVEN IF THE AFF SEEMS TO HAVE BENIGN MOTIVATIONS.
Muhula, 03 ( Raymond Muhula, PHD candidate in the department of political science, Howard University. “ Rogue Nations, States of Concern, and Axes of
Evil: Examining the politics of disarmament in a changing geopolitical context” Mediterranean Quarterly, Volume 14, Number 4, Fall 2003, Project Muse)
the United States, through a strategy of selective

While actively engaged in fostering the application of the provisions of the treaty elsewhere,
application of the nonproliferation regime, protected itself and its partners, both nation-states and businesses, from intrusive
verification procedures as required by various international conventions. This application of double standards has seen the
labeling of signatories to both BWC and CWC as proliferators, while a known proliferator such as Israel, which
is a signatory to neither convention, is held to a different standard. The geopolitical role that Israel plays in the Middle East is very
clear. U.S. interests in the region would not be adequately protected if Israel were not allowed a free hand to develop both chemical and biological weapons. Moreover,
the presence of Iraq and other Arab states deemed a threat to Israel and, by extension, U.S. interests in the region makes it imperative that Israel maintain its weapons
The same reasons of strategy and geopolitics explain
supremacy. It cannot destroy its WMD, and neither can it cease their development.
the ease with which South Africa agreed to destroy its weapons while Iraq had to be forced and North Korea
was approached diplomatically. Led by the United States and the United Kingdom, the international community has treated Iraq and
North Korea differently in spite of the fact that both failed to comply with the provisions of international treaties
on WMD. Iraq, for a long time under U.S.-led [End Page 83] military pressure to disarm, finally collapsed
following a military invasion by the United States, while the United States was prepared to solve the North
Korean debacle through diplomatic channels. This is a demonstration that concerns for disarmament and state
responses to them within the provision of international conventions are determined by political and strategic
factors and only secondarily by norms of international security, especially as conceived by major powers. For
WMD states, the response to the international normative framework, whether genuine or not, is still conditioned
by the three major variables mentioned earlier: the nature of the relationship with regional counterparts, the
presence or absence of a competing military hegemon, and the nature of the extant containment strategy. This
stimulus-response reaction is the discussion to which we now turn.
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PROLIF: NPT LINKS 2/2
THE NPT IS DESIGNED TO PRIVILEGE NUCLEAR WEAPONS STATES AND ENSURE THEY DON’T
HAVE TO GET RID OF THEIR WEAPONS, WHILE PUNISHING NUCLEAR HAVE-NOTS. THE
TREATY IS AN INSTRUMENT OF AMERICAN IMPERIALISM AND ENSURES THAT THE U.S. WILL
NEVER REALLY DISARM ITS NUCLEAR WEAPONS
Susan Watkins ( Editor of the new left) “ The Nuclear Non-Protestation Treaty” New Left Review, 54, November, 2008, Found on
http://www.newleftreview.org/?view=2749 )
If we are to go by the mathematical calculation of deterrence probabilities once computed by Jacob Viner and Bernard Brodie,
the greatest risk of nuclear mass devastation in the post-Cold War era must come from the sole superpower, which alone can risk large-scale
attacks in most quarters of the globe without its own destruction being thereby assured. Such logic needs qualification. Disarmament movements have played a part in
setting atomic warfare beyond the pale; strategic calculations (‘what do you do with the victory?’) have consistently ruled it out. The erosion of the once-primary
the American arsenal has been due as much to the slackening belief that they will, or can, be used as to the greater deadliness
position of nuclear arms within
of conventional weaponry. Nevertheless, by any objective measure it is this armoury—deployed today on six continents and seven seas—that constitutes the
world’s main nuclear-weapons threat. The acquisition of a minimal deterrent by Iran or North Korea would be a mere pinprick, less than half a
millionth of that—estimated at 3,405 equivalent megatonnage—available to the us. It is this deadly accumulation, sanctioned by the npt, which needs above all to be
confronted, along with the bloated military apparatus that surrounds it; for which the American people, 5 per cent of the world’s population, are obliged to contribute
nearly 50 per cent of the world’s military budget. The costless gestures of the npt’s Article vi—to ‘undertake to pursue negotiations
in good faith on effective measures relating to nuclear disarmament’—are designed to shelter these weapons,
not get rid of them. [24] The role of the Treaty is to insure the nuclear privileges of the haves against the have-
nots—to prevent the self-constitution of the latter as deterrent subjects. For the future, Washington policy-
makers aim to toughen up its regime, by instituting new punishments for any signatory state that attempts, as the
dprk once did, to withdraw from the npt, and by imposing an international monopoly on uranium enrichment that would
exclude it from the permitted civilian programme. [25] As such, the ruling nuclear order provides one of the most vivid illustrations
of the reality of ‘international law’: do as we say, not as we do. Extended deterrence and non-proliferation are two sides of the same
coin: the global expansion of us military force, and the surrender of the right to self-defence by any state it cares to name. The Treaty is not a
safeguard of global peace, but an instrument of the American imperium. Yes, it may be said; all true enough. But wouldn’t
the us and its allies act in the same way, pursuing the same ends with much the same means, even if there were no Treaty? American hegemony was a reality long
before the npt acquired its position. One pretext is usually as good as another, once a great power has decided on an economic blockade or a military intervention. What
difference has the npt made to the world? The answer to this takes us back to the debates of 1980 and 1960. Historically, the rise of the Treaty has
spelt the demise of disarmament movements. For the deep effect of the npt has been to kill off protest against
nuclear weapons themselves. Once the only danger becomes their acquisition by poor states, their mountainous
retention by rich ones can be forgotten. If there is no longer any popular movement for nuclear disarmament of significance in the world today, and
scarcely any dissent at the principle of targeting Iranian capability, a leading reason is not hard to seek. The title of the npt is a misnomer. It would
better be called the Treaty of Non-Protestation. The Treaty is a dummy, a pacifier in the mouth of public
opinion, so that it not cry out. Its function is not to awaken, but to lull, while violence is committed in its name.
If we are ever to move towards real nuclear disarmament, the npt will have to be scrapped.
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LINKS: SOFT POWER
SOFT POWER IS A SUBTLE FORM OF ECONOMIC IMPERIALISM (AND IT ISN’T SUCCESSFUL IN

PRACTICE)
O’toole, 08 [Gavin ( Latin American Editor) “The latin American review of Books” Empire and Dissent:The United States and Latin America
http://www.latamrob.com/?p=560 ]
NOT FOR THE first time, and clearly suffering from exaggerated over-enthusiasm for the Obama presidency, the British Broadcasting Corporation has led the
cheerleading outside the US about a coming era, under the highly-politicised UK state broadcaster’s favoured presidential choice, in which “soft power” will make
Washington everyone’s best friend. Writing for the BBC last month, for example, Henri Aster stated: “The Obama presidency could be a good test for the theory that
America’s power to attract goodwill - its ‘soft power’ - is a key element of its influence around the world.” Soft power – the ability to buy friendship
through aid and lead through culture and example as opposed to military or economic might which Obama, inexplicably, would seem to embody to the
BBC – has become the mantra of the moment, complementing the Global Trends 2025 assessment prepared for the president-elect by the US
National Intelligence Council (NIC) that envisages a future marked by diminishing US power. But the problem with soft power, as Alan Knight
points out in an eloquent overview of the “informal” imperialism of the US in Latin America, is that it is
difficult both to acquire and to deploy in a conscious, purposive way. He writes: “The Alliance for Progress was,
perhaps, the best example in Latin America of a bid for hearts and minds, but its success was both limited and
short-lived. A more pervasive and durable - but very ‘soft’ - soft power may involve American culture and
consumerism. But it is far from clear how very soft power - what one might call ‘mushy power’? - can be utilised by US
administrations.” [pp.29-30] Knight’s chapter sets the scene for the principal question begged by Fred Rosen’s collection, Empire and Dissent: what is the
future of US imperialism in that multipolar world outlined by the NIC of competing powers in which
Washington’s (relative) might has dwindled? Although this book does not provide answers, it gives some pithy clues to the likely reaction of the
US within Latin America to its declining global power as the emerging economies of Russia, China, India and Brazil begin to assert themselves. To Knight, the answer
in a globalised world, there is every reason to believe that it has been the
to this question almost certainly lies in the economy. He suggests that,
slow and subtle extension of US power in Latin America through economic mechanisms that is of more
enduring potency than past military or political incursions. He writes: “Economic penetration confers power and
may contribute to a kind of loose informal imperialism … Supposed soft power, derived from cultural
penetration, is too amorphous and uncontrollable to facilitate purposive action. Thus, to the central question - what is the basis
of US imperialism/hegemony in Latin America? - the principal answer must be the old and familiar one: ‘It’s the economy, stupid.’ And, pending a US economic
debacle and/or a sustained European or Chinese commercial challenge, it seems likely to stay that way for the foreseeable future.” [pp. 44-45]
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LINKS
Spanos Neg - 44 -
LINK- HEARTS & MINDS
THE BENIGN INTENT OF WINNING THE HEARTS AND MINDS OF THE PEOPLE MASKS THE
MALIGNANT PRAXIS OF INDISCRIMINATE IMPERIAL VIOLENCE
SPANOS 2008
[William V, Professor at Binghamton, American Exceptionalism in the Age of Globalization: The Specter of Vietnam, SUNY Press
2008, 13-14]
We must, that is, not be seduced by the emergent "larger pattern" of History into forgetting that America's
intervention in Southeast Asia was
undertaken in the name of "winning the hearts and minds" of the Vietnamese people to the fundamental
and historically realized ontological principles of "the free world" and that it eventually took the visibly
contradictory form of an all-out—undiscriminating—linguistic, ecological, cultural, economic, and
military violence. We must also not forget that this polyvalent violence was read by a significant portion of the people of the United States, of Europe, and of
the Third World, including responsible representative Western intellectuals such as Jean-Paul Sartre, Bertram Russell, Noam Chomsky, and Martin Luther King, as
the protestation of the war in the
genocidal in its intent and in its proportions. Nor must we forget that, however symptomatically enacted,
United States—its "refusal of spontaneous consent" to the truth discourse of lib eral capitalist democracy,
to invoke Antonio Gramsci18—brought the American government to a crisis that only the disruption of the Civil
War has surpassed in critical intensity. The examples (among many others) of President Lyndon Johnson's decision not to run for reelection and
the ensuing violence unleashed by Mayor Richard Daley at the Democratic national convention in Chicago and a little later by Governor James Rhodes at Kent State
University attest to this crisis of hegemony.
Spanos Neg - 45 -
LINK - INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS

THE AFFIRMATIVE’S RELATIONSHIP ADVANTAGE ENGAGES IN A METAPHYSICAL WAY OF
ENFRAMING THE WORLD. THEY UNDERSTAND RELATIONSHIPS AS SOMETHING THAT CAN BE
FIXED (AVOIDING THE IMPACT) BY REDUCING THE COMPLEXITY OF THE PROBLEM
(REMOVING ONE ASPECT OF OUR MILITARY MEANS OUR RELATIONS ARE AWESOME). THIS
JUSTIFIES PLACING HUMANS INTO THE STANDING RESERVE.
Spanos 00 ( William V., America’s Shadow. Page 19)
will to certainty in the face of alterity that informs the language of conceptualization explains the
This grave
inordinate degree to which the discourse of simplification — of clarity, of cogency, of economy (and manliness) —
is privileged in the discourses, the institutions of learning, and the information media of the Occident. Conversely, it also explains the utter
contempt for the complex, nuanced, and generative ambiguities of the originative thinking of a Heidegger or a Derrida23 or an Adorno, for example, the thinking —
represented by the dominant "realistic" culture as obscurity, errancy, exorbitance, obesity, and, not least, waste24 — that would respect the differential dynamics of
being. The reductive ontological drive to settle or fix by simplifying what in essence is unsettlable,
unfixable, and irreducible is, of course, the metaphysical prerequisite to transform that which defies
naming into manageable and exploitable objects. It is, as Heidegger puts the end of modern technological thinking, to reduce the
recalcitrant and threatening Other to "standing [disposable] reserve" (Bestand), or, as Foucault represents the effects of the great
disciplinary technology of the Enlightenment, to transform the force of alterity to "useful and docile body."25 This reduction and assignment of the
Other to its "proper place" — within the identical whole — this colonization of physis, in other words, could
be said to be "its" "destiny" under the regime of metaphysical truth. This complicity between knowledge and
power has its provenance far earlier than the period of the Enlightenment, where Foucault's or, rather, his
followers' genealogy locates it: namely, in late Greek (Hellenistic) and, above all, imperial Roman antiquity.
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LINK- IR 1/2
THE DRIVE TO MAKE CERTAIN AND STABLE THE WORLD OF INTERNATIONAL POLITICS BY
CALCULATION AND SCIENCE REPRESENTS AN ATTEMPT TO RECLAIM A PRE-FALL EDENIC
EXISTENCE BY REPOSITIONING US AS INNOCENT MASTER OF A GLOBAL EMPIRE. THIS DRIVES
COMES WITH THE COST OF PERPETUAL VIOLENCE AND DESTRUCTION.
Burke 07 (Anthony, “Ontologies of War: Violence, Existence and Reason” Theory & Event, 10:2)
we are witness to an enduring political

In this struggle with the lessons of Vietnam, revolutionary resistance, and rapid geopolitical transformation,
and cultural theme: of a craving for order, control and certainty in the face of continual uncertainty. Closely
related to this anxiety was the way that Kissinger's thinking -- and that of McNamara and earlier imperialists like the British Governor of Egypt
Cromer -- was embedded in instrumental images of technology and the machine: the machine as both a tool of power and an image of social and political order. In his
essay 'The Government of Subject Races' Cromer envisaged effective imperial rule -- over numerous societies and billions of human beings -- as best achieved by a
central authority working 'to ensure the harmonious working of the different parts of the machine'.60 Kissinger analogously invoked the virtues of 'equilibrium',
'manageability' and 'stability' yet, writing some six decades later, was anxious that technological progress no longer brought untroubled control: the Westernising 'spread
We sense the rational policymaker's
of technology and its associated rationality...does not inevitably produce a similar concept of reality'.61
frustrated desire: the world is supposed to work like a machine, ordered by a form of power and governmental
reason which deploys machines and whose desires and processes are meant to run along ordered, rational lines
like a machine. Kissinger's desire was little different from that of Cromer who, wrote Edward Said: ...envisions a seat of power in the West and radiating out
from it towards the East a great embracing machine, sustaining the central authority yet commanded by it. What the machine's branches feed into it from the East --
human material, material wealth, knowledge, what have you -- is processed by the machine, then converted into more power...the immediate translation of mere
Oriental matter into useful substance.62 This
desire for order in the shadow of chaos and uncertainty -- the constant war with
an intractable and volatile matter -- has deep roots in modern thought, and was a major impetus to the
development of technological reason and its supporting theories of knowledge. As Kissinger's claims about the West's
Newtonian desire for the 'accurate' gathering and classification of 'data' suggest, modern strategy, foreign policy
and Realpolitik have been thrust deep into the apparently stable soil of natural science, in the hope of finding
immovable and unchallengeable roots there. While this process has origins in ancient Judaic and Greek thought, it crystallised in philosophical
terms most powerfully during and after the Renaissance. The key figures in this process were Francis Bacon, Galileo, Isaac Newton, and René Descartes, who all
combined a hunger for political and ontological certainty, a positivist epistemology and a naïve faith in the goodness of invention. Bacon sought to create certainty and
order, and with it a new human power over the world, through a new empirical methodology based on a harmonious combination of experiment, the senses and the
understanding. With this method, he argued, we can 'derive hope from a purer alliance of the faculties (the experimental and rational) than has yet been attempted'.63 In
a similar move, Descartes sought to conjure certainty from uncertainty through the application of a new method that moved progressively out from a few basic
certainties (the existence of God, the certitude of individual consciousness and a divinely granted faculty of judgement) in a search for pure fixed truths. Mathematics
formed the ideal image of this method, with its strict logical reasoning, its quantifiable results and its uncanny insights into the hidden structure of the cosmos.64
Earlier, Galileo had argued that scientists should privilege 'objective', quantifiable qualities over 'merely perceptible' ones; that 'only by means of an exclusively
quantitative analysis could science attain certain knowledge of the world'.65 Such doctrines of mathematically verifiable truth were to
have powerful echoes in the 20th Century, in the ascendancy of systems analysis, game theory, cybernetics and computing in defense policy and
strategic decisions, and in the awesome scientific breakthroughs of nuclear physics, which unlocked the innermost secrets of matter and energy and applied the most
advanced applications of mathematics and computing to create the atomic bomb .
Yet this new scientific power was marked by a terrible
irony: as even Morgenthau understood, the control over matter afforded by the science could never be translated
into the control of the weapons themselves, into political utility and rational strategy.66 Bacon thought of the new scientific
method not merely as way of achieving a purer access to truth and epistemological certainty, but as liberating a new power that would enable the creation of a new kind
of Man. He opened the Novum Organum with the statement that 'knowledge and human power are synonymous', and later wrote of his 'determination...to lay a firmer
foundation, and extend to a greater distance the boundaries of human power and dignity'.67 In
a revealing and highly negative comparison
between 'men's lives in the most polished countries of Europe and in any wild and barbarous region of the new
Indies' -- one that echoes in advance Kissinger's distinction between post-and pre-Newtonian cultures -- Bacon
set out what was at stake in the advancement of empirical science: anyone making this comparison, he
remarked, 'will think it so great, that man may be said to be a god unto man'.68 We may be forgiven for blinking, but in
Bacon's thought 'man' was indeed in the process of stealing a new fire from the heavens and seizing God's
power over the world for itself. Not only would the new empirical science lead to 'an improvement of mankind's
estate, and an increase in their power over nature', but would reverse the primordial humiliation of the Fall of
Spanos Neg - 47 -
LINK- IR 2/2
Adam: For man, by the fall, lost at once his state of innocence, and his empire over creation, both of which can
be partially recovered even in this life, the first by religion and faith, the second by the arts and sciences. For
creation did not become entirely and utterly rebellious by the curse, but in consequence of the Divine decree, 'in
the sweat of thy brow thou shalt eat bread'; she is now compelled by our labours (not assuredly by our disputes or
magical ceremonies) at length to afford mankind in some degree his bread...69 There is a breathtaking, world-creating hubris
in this statement -- one that, in many ways, came to characterise western modernity itself, and which is easily
recognisable in a generation of modern technocrats like Kissinger. The Fall of Adam was the Judeo-Christian
West's primal creation myth, one that marked humankind as flawed and humbled before God, condemned to
hardship and ambivalence. Bacon forecast here a return to Eden, but one of man's own making. This truly was
the death of God, of putting man into God's place, and no pious appeals to the continuity or guidance of faith
could disguise the awesome epistemological violence which now subordinated creation to man. Bacon indeed
argued that inventions are 'new creations and imitations of divine works'. As such, there is nothing but good in
science: 'the introduction of great inventions is the most distinguished of human actions...inventions are a
blessing and a benefit without injuring or afflicting any'.70 And what would be mankind's 'bread', the rewards of
its new 'empire over creation'? If the new method and invention brought modern medicine, social welfare,
sanitation, communications, education and comfort, it also enabled the Armenian genocide, the Holocaust and
two world wars; napalm, the B52, the hydrogen bomb, the Kalashnikov rifle and military strategy. Indeed some
of the 20th Century's most far-reaching inventions -- radar, television, rocketry, computing, communications, jet
aircraft, the Internet -- would be the product of drives for national security and militarisation. Even the
inventions Bacon thought so marvellous and transformative -- printing, gunpowder and the compass -- brought
in their wake upheaval and tragedy: printing, dogma and bureaucracy; gunpowder, the rifle and the artillery
battery; navigation, slavery and the genocide of indigenous peoples. In short, the legacy of the new empirical
science would be ambivalence as much as certainty; degradation as much as enlightenment; the destruction of
nature as much as its utilisation.
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LINK - INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS
THE TECHNOLOGICAL BELIEF THAT INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS CAN BE PERFECTLY
CALCULATED WITH SCIENTIFIC KNOWLEDGE FAILS IN BOTH ITS ATTEMPT TO UNDERSTAND
THE WORLD AND TO SECURE IT. ONLY DEHUMANIZATION AND VIOLENCE RESULT.
If Bacon could not reasonably be expected to foresee many of these developments, the idea that scientific and technological progress could be destructive did occur to
him. However it was an anxiety he summarily dismissed: ...let none be alarmed at the objection of the arts and sciences becoming depraved to malevolent or luxurious
purposes and the like, for the same can be said of every worldly good; talent, courage, strength, beauty, riches, light itself...Only let mankind regain their rights over
nature, assigned to them by the gift of God, and obtain that power, whose exercise will be governed by right reason and true religion.71 By the mid-Twentieth
Century, after the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, such fears could no longer be so easily wished away, as the physicist and scientific
director of the Manhattan Project, J. Robert Oppenheimer recognised. He said in a 1947 lecture: We felt a particularly intimate responsibility for suggesting, for
supporting and in the end in large measure achieving the realization of atomic weapons...In some sort of crude sense which no vulgarity, no humor, no over-statement
can quite extinguish, the physicists have known sin, and this is a knowledge they cannot lose.72 Adam had fallen once more, but into a world which refused to
acknowledge its renewed intimacy with contingency and evil.
Man's empire over creation -- his discovery of the innermost secrets
of matter and energy, of the fires that fuelled the stars -- had not 'enhanced human power and dignity' as Bacon
claimed, but instead brought destruction and horror. Scientific powers that had been consciously applied in the
defence of life and in the hope of its betterment now threatened its total and absolute destruction. This would
not prevent a legion of scientists, soldiers and national security policymakers later attempting to apply Bacon's
faith in invention and Descartes' faith in mathematics to make of the Bomb a rational weapon. Oppenheimer
-- who resolutely opposed the development of the hydrogen bomb -- understood what the strategists could not:
that the weapons resisted control, resisted utility, that 'with the release of atomic energy quite revolutionary
changes had occurred in the techniques of warfare'.73 Yet Bacon's legacy, one deeply imprinted on the strategists, was his view that truth and
utility are 'perfectly identical'.74 In 1947 Oppenheimer had clung to the hope that 'knowledge is good...it seems hard to live any other way than thinking it was better to
know something than not to know it; and the more you know, the better'; by 1960 he felt that 'terror attaches to new knowledge. It has an unmooring quality; it finds
men unprepared to deal with it.'75 Martin Heidegger
questioned this mapping of natural science onto the social world in his
essays on technology -- which, as 'machine', has been so crucial to modern strategic and geopolitical thought as
an image of perfect function and order and a powerful tool of intervention. He commented that, given that
modern technology 'employs exact physical science...the deceptive illusion arises that modern technology is
applied physical science'.76 Yet as the essays and speeches of Oppenheimer attest, technology and its relation to
science, society and war cannot be reduced to a noiseless series of translations of science for politics,
knowledge for force, or force for good. Instead, Oppenheimer saw a process frustrated by roadblocks and
ruptured by irony; in his view there was no smooth, unproblematic translation of scientific truth into social
truth, and technology was not its vehicle. Rather his comments raise profound and painful ethical questions that resonate with terror and
uncertainty. Yet this has not prevented technology becoming a potent object of desire, not merely as an instrument
of power but as a promise and conduit of certainty itself. In the minds of too many rational soldiers, strategists
and policymakers, technology brings with it the truth of its enabling science and spreads it over the world. It
turns epistemological certainty into political certainty; it turns control over 'facts' into control over the earth.
Heidegger's insights into this phenomena I find especially telling and disturbing -- because they underline the ontological force of the instrumental view of politics. In
The Question Concerning Technology, Heidegger's striking argument was that in the modernising West technology is not merely a tool, a
'means to an end'. Rather technology has become a governing image of the modern universe, one that has come
to order, limit and define human existence as a 'calculable coherence of forces' and a 'standing reserve' of
energy. Heidegger wrote: 'the threat to man does not come in the first instance from the potentially lethal machines
and apparatus of technology. The actual threat has already affected man in his essence.'77 This process
Heidegger calls 'Enframing' and through it the scientific mind demands that 'nature reports itself in some way or
other that is identifiable through calculation and remains orderable as a system of information'. Man is not a being who
makes and uses machines as means, choosing and limiting their impact on the world for his ends; rather man has imagined the world as a machine
and humanity everywhere becomes trapped within its logic. Man, he writes, 'comes to the very brink of a precipitous fall...where he
himself will have to be taken as standing-reserve. Meanwhile Man, precisely as the one so threatened, exalts himself to the posture of lord of the earth.'78
Technological man not only becomes the name for a project of lordship and mastery over the earth, but
incorporates humanity within this project as a calculable resource. In strategy, warfare and geopolitics human
Spanos Neg - 49 -
bodies, actions and aspirations are caught, transformed and perverted by such calculating, enframing reason:
human lives are reduced to tools, obstacles, useful or obstinate matter.
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TURKEY RELATIONSHIP ADVS LINKS

“RELATIONS ADVANTAGES” ARE SIMPLY POLICY TOOLS TO KEEP TURKEY IN THE FOLD OF
WESTERN SECURITY INSTITUTIONS
Scheer ‘9 (Aaron, graduate candidate at the Naval College, “TURKEY AND EUROPEAN SECURITY INSTITUTIONS,” http://docs.google.com/viewer?
a=v&q=cache:vz7Bkc0LYNQJ:www.dtic.mil/cgibin/GetTRDoc%3FAD%3Dada497187%26Location%3DU2%26doc
%3DGetTRDoc.pdf+America+security+Turkey+critical+theory&hl=en&gl=us&pid=bl&srcid=A
DGEEShWDqpb3VI3qyN6PMATLs7PASAaoF9jQanfG6tlGuGmdaoS_jaj6g9uxdATbgtZBCpjXeam9M1d7gsTftepo_6sMmEkH2KCErTAvCAwNOoNZjTXMIcpDj
g-vQn3nNsQL_-h45fn&sig=AHIEtbSil6Se_oWcMPHSpZpJItqF7oxFcg)
Turkey’s relationships with the West, particularly its relationship with Western security institutions, are today
more important than ever. As the United States fights two wars in the region and attempts to rebuild its
reputation in Europe and the Middle East, Turkey is once again central to America’s plans. Yet, this crucial ally is little
understood by U.S. policy makers. Turkey has a long relationship with Euro-Atlantic security institutions, specifically
NATO and the precursors to the European Security and Defense Policy (ESDP). With the rise of the EU and Turkey’s painstaking attempts to integrate with Europe,
this relationship grew to include the ESDP. Turkey joined NATO together with Greece in 1952 and served as its southern flank against the Soviet Union throughout the
Cold War. The
transformation of the map of Europe only increased the importance of Turkey in the world that has
dawned. It continued its relationship with NATO after the Cold War and throughout NATO’s transformation of
the 1990s from Cold War defense to regional peace and stability force. Despite not being a member of the EU,
Turkey is an active participant in EU security operations and deployments.
PLACATING TURKEY IS NOT BENEVOLENT- WE MEET THEIR DEMANDS ONLY SO THAT WE

CAN CONTINUE TO IMPOSE OUR DOMINANCE ON THE REGION
Scheer ‘9 (Aaron, graduate candidate at the Naval College, “TURKEY AND EUROPEAN SECURITY INSTITUTIONS,” http://docs.google.com/viewer?
a=v&q=cache:vz7Bkc0LYNQJ:www.dtic.mil/cgi-bin/GetTRDoc%3FAD%3Dada497187%26Location%3DU2%26doc
%3DGetTRDoc.pdf+America+security+Turkey+critical+theory&hl=en&gl=us&pid=bl&srcid=ADGEEShWDqpb3VI3qyN6PMATLs7PASAaoF9jQanfG6tlGuGmdao
S_jaj6g9uxdATbgtZBCpjXeam9M1d7gsTftepo_6sMmEkH2KCErTAvCAwNOoNZjTXMIcpDjg-vQn3nNsQL_-
h45fn&sig=AHIEtbSil6Se_oWcMPHSpZpJItqF7oxFcg)
Turkey’s importance to U.S. strategic interests cannot be overstated. One need only look at Turkey’s refusal to
allow a Northern invasion route through Turkey during Operation IRAQI FREEDOM. Turkey’s refusal to allow
American troops to assault from the north forced an entire reworking of the invasion. According to former Secretary of
Defense Donald Rumsfeld, this was the source of much of the post-conflict chaos and difficulty in Iraq. A better understanding of
Turkey by American decision makers at that key decision point would have led to a better outcome and perhaps improved the strategic picture in Iraq. A better
understanding of Turkey can certainly improve future outcomes for United States diplomacy. Why is Turkey
important to the United States and the DoD is a question that reveals more about the person who asks it than
about the actual state of war and peace at the crossroads of Europe and Asia. Turkey is a nation, which many Americans
have simply taken for granted as an ally, and which now demands its tribute in terms of analytical energy and some degree of
effort to understand the world as seen by Turks themselves. Turkey fields the second largest military within
NATO and the largest in Europe. Turkey boasts a highly strategic location, astride Europe, the Caucasus, the Middle East, and the
Mediterranean. For the United States and specifically the DoD, Turkey is critical both for its location and its military capabilities, but the
nation is anything other than the pliant locale of U.S. bases as in the glory years of the 1960s. Currently, Turkey hosts the American military’s Iraq
Cargo Hub at Incirlik Air Base, responsible for the majority of all air delivered cargo in support of Operation IRAQI FREEDOM. In addition to
Incirlik, Turkey hosts Izmir Air Base, which provides logistical support to NATO Headquarters Izmir, a command
led by an American 3-star General. The city of Eskisehir is also home to a NATO Combined Air Operations Center. Konya
Range hosts joint air operations exercises that in the past included the air forces ofthe United States, Turkey, and Israel. While much lower than its Cold War footprint,
the home of Balgat Air Base that provides support to the American Embassy and the Office of Defense
Ankara is
Cooperation. Finally, there is an embedded presence at the NATO Rapid Deployment Cell in Istanbul. Additionally, Turkey allows the use of
its airspace and bases for the U.S. air bridge in support of Operation ENDURING FREEDOM.
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GENERIC ALL CASE LINK
DON’T BE FOOLED – THE AFFIRMATIVE’S WITHDRAWAL OF THE US MILITARY IS NOT THE

CONSTRICTION OF EMPIRE – IT IS RATHER THE AMERICAN WAY OF IMPERIALISM – TO
COLONIZE A COUNTRY, AND LEAVE AS SOON AS POSSIBLE WITHOUT TAKING
RESPONSIBILITY FOR GOVERNING. IN FACT, QUICK WITHDRAWAL IS THE MODUS OPERANDI
OF AMERICAN IMPERALISM LITE – THE ATTEMPT TO JUSTIFY IMPERIALISM BY INVOKING
THE OCCURRENCES OF FREQUENT ‘WITHDRAWALS’
Jackie Assayag ‘7 CNRS, Maison Frangaise, Oxford, etnografica . maio de 2007 . 11 (I): 253-269 (East and West. Orientalism, war and the colonial present)
Michael Ignatieff has described (in an uncritical manner) the North American project as an "imperialism lite", a hegemony
without colonies, a global sphere of influence relieved of the weight of direct administration and of the risks
entailed in the day to day management of politics.^" Thus the "burden" of Kipling would have become lighter in
passing from England to the United States, for it is true that the task and the message have in the meantime
changed. Today, it is a question of conducting a "war against terrorism". To declare war on individuals and forces liberated from existing legal institutions, or
eluding ethical control, proves to be an interminable task. The actors involved in this type of violence in fact freely determine the arms and the targets of their choice,
independently of state constraint. Contrary to war according to Clausewitz, the "crusade against terrorism" will not be able
to triumph, for it is "the continuation of political absence by other means".2' Because of this lack of global politics and because
of the deficiency of a world political authority, the multiplication of violent conflicts can be expected. De facto, one has fallen back on the war
against "rogue" or "delinquent" states. The declared imperial will is to destroy them with a view to reforming
them according to the advantages of liberal capitalism and of democracy for the benefit of the greatest number. The intention is even to impose the respect for human
rights and related cosmopolitan values in the ("foreign" and "hostile") populations, whose major concerns manifestly belong to another order. The concurrent state
establishment of the market economy and democratic ideals by means of military force should make nation-building possible and to pacify the "civil society" by
ensuring at the same time economic development and growth. Knowing, however, that the Star-Spangled Banner will wave only so long
as it is necessary to introduce a free market and the reign of liberty. The hyperpower thus allows itself but a
parenthetical empire. But, how to be a "minimum empire" when one maintains seven hundred and fifty
military bases in one hundred and thirty countries, besides numerous programmes of "secret intervention",
"silent operation" and "police protection", as well as plans for "virtual bases" that encircle the globe? The only
possibility is to temporarily and flexibly implement it, or to enunciate it through disavowal manoeuvres:
an empire denied or a denial of empire. Thus the United States sells the notion of empire by offering a cut-
price colonization: the responsible Americans now only plan interventions that are as brief as possible , in
other words, a "McOccupation". However, this furtive and hardly reliable concept of imperial authority will always
be perceived as an invasion and a predation by the "occupied", apart from the fact that such a volatile
colonization proves to be full of danger for the "occupiers" as well as the "occupied". The idea of a "lite" empire
also finds its bearings in the representation according to which such a regime would remove all contradictions,
would abolish the distinctions between "outer" and "inner", would efface the borders between "outside" and
"inside". "There is no longer an outside", write Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri. In their view, "The modern dialectic of internal and external has been replaced by
an interplay of degrees ans intensities, hybridities and artifice". Similarly, the sociologist Zygmunt Bauman contends that 9/11 September has made it clear that there is
no outside". Hence, the negative corollary posed by a number of observers: with European unification and the emergence of the new world "governance", guided by the
enlightened ideas of opening outwards and interdependence, the mutual vulnerability of all countries is growing, also on American territory Thus, we would have
entered into international relations of the "postmodern" type. But, who does not perceive that 9/11 "a deferred effect of the 'Cold War', the genealogy of which can be
traced back to the support of the mujahiddin by the United States against the intervention of the Soviet Union in Afghanistan" (Derrida, in Borradori 2003: 92)? And
who could contest that this event experienced as a cataclysm, followed by the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq,
apart from the interminable conflict in Palestine, has raised the veil of antagonism between the "colonizer" and
the "colonized", radicalized the political positions of each of the entrenched camps and, finally, has deepened
the Manichean geography between "us" and "them"?
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TNWS LINK
REDUCING TNWS WILL RESULT IN A SHIFT TO OTHER TYPES OF NUCLEAR WEAPONS, AND
INCREASES THE RISK OF ESCALATION IN A CRISIS.
Sokov, 09 (Dr. Nikolai N. Sokov is a Senior Research Associate at CNS. From 1987-92 he worked at the Ministry for Foreign Affairs of the Soviet Union and
later Russia, and participated in START I and START II negotiations. Dr. Sokov has a Ph.D. from the University of Michigan. in Four Emerging Issues in Arms
Control, Disarmament, and Nonproliferation: Opportunities for German Leadership, July 2009, ed. Center for Nonproliferation
Studies,http://cns.miis.edu/opapers/090717_german_leadership/german_leadership_full.pdf)

The only exception to the limitations inherent in TNW is for weapons deployed in Turkey, which are close to both potential theaters of operations. These weapons can
be used promptly and hold at risk a wide range of targets from their present deployment areas. Given their potential military utility, the withdrawal or retention of these
assets must be a matter of a political decision for NATO made in a broader context of alliance security policy . An
important factor in any decisions
with regard to the future of TNW in Europe is the availability of alternative options for the employment of the
threat of nuclear use. These alternative options may include, for example, pre-deployment of nuclear weapons to
address possible threats from the Middle East, which are less likely to be viewed by Russia as a threat (for example, on ships and aircraft carriers
in the Indian Ocean and the Persian Gulf, on Diego Garcia, etc.). Where Russia is concerned, long-range nuclear weapons based either in the
United States or pre-deployed to bases in and seas around Europe are also available. Emphasis on long-range assets in this
case will be a better fit for Russian deescalation strategy, which emphasizes reliance on long-range nuclear assets to deter U.S. and NATO conventional forces. (For a
description of this strategy see the previous section.) It
is also possible to retain, at least temporarily, the existing infrastructure
for NATO TNW (such as storage sites) that could support relocation of these weapons to Europe in a time of
crisis. This decision would carry both short- and longer-term political, military, and diplomatic implications. It could weaken the political
benefits that could be reaped from TNW withdrawal. Secondly, some in NATO warn that any attempt to return the
weapons could create an escalatory dynamic. It is recommended, therefore, that in case a decision is made to withdraw TNW from Europe,
retention of infrastructure should from the very beginning be declared an intermediate option and its dismantlement perhaps made contingent on a positive Russian
response to the withdrawal of weapons.
Spanos Neg - 53 -
TNWS LINK
NUCLEAR WEAPONS DON’T MATTER AND AREN’T EVEN A DETERRENT ANYMORE – REDUCED
RELIANCE ON THEM LEADS TO CONVENTIONAL WEAPONS THAT ARE JUST AS DEADLY AND
MORE LIKELY TO BE USED
BACEVICH 2009 [Andrew, Former Military, The Limits of Power: The End of American Exceptionalism, Holt Paperbacks 2009 pp. 179]
Nuclear weapons are unusable. Their employment in any conceivable scenario would be a political and
moral catastrophe. For the United States, they are becoming unnecessary, even as a deterrent. Certainly,
they are unlikely to dissuade the adversaries most likely to employ such weapons against us—Islamic
extremists intent on acquiring their own nuclear capability. If anything, the opposite is true. By retaining a
strategic arsenal in readiness (and by insisting without qualification that the dropping of atomic bombs on two Japanese cities in 1945 was justified),
the United States continues tacitly to sustain the view that nuclear weapons play a legitimate role in
international politics—this at a time when our own interests are best served by doing everything possible to reinforce the existing taboo against their further
use. Furthermore, the day is approaching when the United States will be able to deter other nuclear-armed
states, like Russia and China, without itself relying on nuclear weapons. Modern conventional weapons possess the
potential to provide a more effective foundation for deterrence. They offer highly lethal, accurate,
responsive second-strike (or even first-strike) capabilities. Precision conventional weapons also carry
fewer of the moral complications that make nuclear weapons so inherently problematic. Hence, they have
the added advantage.
Spanos Neg - 54 -
DUBS LINK
REMOVING DEPLETED URANIUM BULLETS REINFORCES IMPERIALISM BECAUSE THE

REPLACEMENT TO DUBS IS TUNGSTEN WHICH IS WORSE.
Schmidt, 05 – (Charles W. Schmidt, 6/01/05, Charles Schmidt is the winner of the 2002 National Association of Science Writer's Science-in-Society Journalism
Award, "No Magic Bullet: Tungsten Alloy Munitions Pose Unforseen Threat", http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1257635)
In response to concerns about the human and environmental health effects of materials used to produce
munitions, countries including the United States have begun replacing some lead- and depleted uranium–based
munitions with alternatives made of a tungsten alloy. But this solution may not be the “magic bullet” it was once envisioned to be.
Researchers from the Armed Forces Radiobiology Research Institute and the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research now report that weapons-grade tungsten alloy
These findings raise new questions
produces aggressive metastatic tumors when surgically implanted into the muscles of rats [EHP 113:729–734].
about the possible consequences of tungsten exposure, and undermine the view that tungsten alloy is a nontoxic
alternative to depleted uranium and lead. In the study, male F344 rats were implanted with pellets in each hind leg, an exposure protocol that
mimicked shrapnel wounds received in the field. The rats were split into four treatment groups: a negative control implanted with 10 pellets of tantalum (an inert metal),
a positive control implanted with 10 pellets of nickel (a known carcinogen), a high-dose group implanted with 10 pellets of tungsten alloy, and a low-dose group
implanted with 4 pellets of tungsten alloy and 16 pellets of tantalum. The alloy used in this research was the same as that used in weapons: 91.1% tungsten, 6.0% nickel,
and 2.9% cobalt. By 6 months after implantation all the rats in the high-dose, low-dose, and positive control groups had developed leg tumors. None of the rats in the
negative control developed tumors, and all survived beyond 12 months with no apparent health effects. All remaining rats were sacrificed at 24 months. At sacrifice,
blood samples were assessed for a range of hematologic parameters. The high-dose group exhibited statistically significant increases in levels of white blood cells, red
blood cells, hemoglobin, and hematocrit as compared to the low-dose and control groups. The rats also underwent a pathology exam, and tissues were collected for
histology. Whereas the tantalum pellets in the low-dose group were surrounded by normal tissue, all of the tungsten alloy and nickel pellets were surrounded by tumors.
Tumors in the tungsten alloy–treated animals metastasized to the lung. Histology further indicated that tungsten alloy pellets were surrounded by invasive neoplastic
cells that had infiltrated into skeletal muscle tissue. No metastasis was observed in the positive controls. Organ measurements identified significant increases in both
spleen and thymus body-to-weight ratios in the high-dose group only. Both these organs are components of the immune system, leading the authors to suggest that
embedded tungsten alloy may be immunotoxic at certain concentrations. The authors write that the amounts of cobalt (a suspected human carcinogen) and nickel in the
tungsten alloy material likely were too small to produce the effects seen in the two groups implanted with the alloy. However, they do cite recent evidence indicating
that the combination of these metals may produce synergistic effects. The biological mechanism by which embedded tungsten alloy
produces tumors is unclear, they add, and warrants further study.
TUNGSTEN IS JUST AS DANGEROUS AS DEPLETED URANIUM-CAUSES TUMORS

Hambling, 09 – (David Hambling, 4/21/09, Wired Contributor, "In the Military, Toxic Tungsten is Everywhere",
http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/author/david-hambling)
The Army has stopped producing so-called "green" training rounds, because of research showing that the bullets’ main ingredient may be more toxic than previously
thought. But that element, tungsten, is also in an array of other ammunition and munitions, as well. Which means all sorts of rockets, missiles, and anti-tank rounds
may present an environmental hazard and a health risk. Tungsten was
introduced to weaponry as an alternative to depleted uranium,
or DU — itself an alleged toxin. But scientists later learned that embedded tungsten alloy fragments can cause
tumors. A 2007 memorandum from the Under Secretary of Defense advises that "in light of our present
knowledge of the potential health risks associated with tungsten/nickel/cobalt alloys, please have your
acquisition managers and munitions developers and researchers consider alternative materials in developmental
munitions programs." The discovery that tungsten, by itself in the environment, is also hazardous may escalate things to a new level. Could it put tungsten on
a par with DU? Part of the problem is that so many types of weapon use tungsten: The GNU-44 Viper Strike missile, carried by armed drones, has a tungsten sleeve to
produce antipersonnel shrapnel. The 130-round-per-second Phalanx anti-missile Gatling gun, deployed on U.S. and Royal Navy ships, originally used DU rounds.
They were replaced with tungsten, for environmental reasons. 120mm anti-tank rounds, use tungsten as an alternative to DU in training. So do the 25mm anti-tank
rounds, on board the M2/M3 Bradley fighting vehicle. Armor-pirecing .308 M993 rifle rounds. The 120mm M1028 anti-personnel round, fired by the Abrams tank. It’s
basically a giant shotgun shell loaded with 1100 tungsten balls, each 3/8th of an inch big. Dense Inert Metal Explosives, the "focused lethality" munition used by the
U.S. and Israel. It contains micro-shrapnel made of tungsten powder. Some 70mm rockets fired by Apache helicopters release tungsten flechettes. … and so on. The
British Army is already looking into the tungsten problem. A study of possible implications found that there was tungsten in the ground water of at least one UK tank
firing range, and recommended that further studies be carried out. Meanwhile, the U.S. Army seems to be taking a schizophrenic approach –stopping
production of tungsten-based training ammo, while looking into using it as a DU-replacement in even more
rounds. Lead — the classic ammo ingredient — is firmly established. (Although some U.S. state laws make it illegal to use at firing ranges.) So is DU also
appears rooted in place. But the trend towards more environmental awareness is a continuing one and would be unwise to assume that anything defined as a
toxic health hazard is going to remain in the inventory indefinitely. This might exasperate those who accept that all weapons are dangerous… but it’s not going to get
them around the law. We
may end up in a situation where neither depleted uranium nor the only known alternative are
politically acceptable. Heavy metal penetrators are an essential tool of modern armored warfare. What is needed is a
Spanos Neg - 55 -
new material entirely, and that is going to be quite a challenge from a physics and engineering point of view. And then it will need to be proven safe, which may take
quite a while.
Spanos Neg - 56 -
DUBS EXT
THE ALTERNATIVE TO DEPLETED URANIUM IS WORSE- CAUSES A WORSE FORM OF CANCER

New Scientist, a peer reviewed scientific journal, 26 February 2005, http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg18524883.700-depleted-
uranium-ammo-may-be-replaced.html
AFTER years of controversy about the long-term health effects of depleted uranium weapons on soldiers and people living in areas where they have been used, the
Pentagon is considering replacing the uranium with tungsten alloy. The snag is that tungsten could be even
more dangerous. In a study designed to simulate shrapnel injuries, pellets of weapons-grade tungsten alloy were
implanted in 92 rats. Within five months all the animals developed a rare cancer called rhabdomyosarcoma,
according to John Kalinich's team at the Armed Forces Radiobiology Research Institute in Maryland. The study will appear in Environmental
Health Perspectives. The rats' tumours grew more quickly and spread more aggressively than tumours induced
by implanting nickel pellets in other rats. "The military needs to hold up on this conversion to tungsten alloy
weapons until more is known," says University of Arizona toxicologist Mark Witten, who is studying the role pollution from
tungsten mining might play in elevated rates of childhood cancers, including rhabdomyosarcoma, in several western US communities.
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GENERIC JAPAN LINK
THE U.S. WILL CONTINUE ITS IMPERIALISM IN JAPAN ECONOMICALLY. POST-WORLD WAR II
ECONOMIC RELATIONS HAVE ALTERED THE IMPERIAL STRATEGY OF THE U.S.
Callinicos 05 (Alex Callinicos, Trotskyist political theorist and Director of the Centre for European Studies at King's College London. ―Imperialism and
Global Political Economy‖, October 17, 2005, isj.org)
(3) The structure forged at the beginning of the 1980s holds good today, Panitch and Gindin argue. If anything it is stronger now
than it was then. Not only has the Soviet Union gone, but, while the earlier period was characterised by the relative economic
strength of Europe and Japan, the current moment underlines their relative weakness‘ (GCAE, p55). It is, moreover, quite
misleading to characterise economic competition within the advanced capitalist world as a case of ‗inter-
imperialist rivalries‘. Not simply does this overstate the extent of the competition, which unfolds within the
context of a global neo-liberal economic order dominated by the US, but the implication that these economic
tensions might be translated into geopolitical confrontations, even military rivalries, is entirely false. The European
Union‘s attempts to develop military capabilities are feeble and dependent on NATO, while Japan remains heavily reliant on America‘s
markets and security shield.
AMERICAN IMPERIALIST STRATEGY IS TO CONTROL THE ECONOMIES OF JAPAN UNDER

CAPITALISM
Callinicos 05 (Alex Callinicos, Trotskyist political theorist and Director of the Centre for European Studies at King's College London. ―Imperialism and Global
Political Economy‖, October 17, 2005, isj.org)
(1) Following Poulantzas, Panitch and Gindin claim that the post-war era was characterised by the internationalisation of the state, understood as a state‘s acceptance of
responsibility for managing its own domestic capitalist order in way [sic] that contributes to managing the international capitalist order‘ (GCAE, p42) . The US
used the Cold War system of alliances and the Bretton Woods international financial institutions to construct a
global capitalist order in which not simply were the economies of Western Europe and Japan laid open to
American capital, but the US state and transnational corporations were able systematically to penetrate and
reorganise under its leadership the ruling classes of these zones of advanced capitalism: With American capital a social
force within each European country, domestic capital tended to be ―dis-articulated‖ and no longer represented by a coherent and independent national bourgeoisie‘
(GCAE, p47).11
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GENERIC TURKEY LINK
THE WEST’S INTERACTIONS WITH TURKEY ARE MODELED ON THE MODEL/COPY IDENTITY
DICHOTOMY- THE VERY ROOT OF OUR INTERACTIONS WITH TURKEY ARE QUESTS TO MAKE
TURKEY LIKE “US”
Ahiska ‘3 (Meltem, PhD in sociology at Goldsmiths College, University of London, Occidentalism:
The Historical Fantasy of the Modern, MUSE)
24
The present is very much haunted by beginnings.The timeless fantasy of "the West" in contrast to "the East" is not a
construction in void. It has its dialogical references to the fantasy of "the East" produced in the historical
encounter of the West and East, as accounted by Edward Said's Orientalism. 25 The fantasy still informs the
present images of Turkey utilized by Westerners. It is not at all a coincidence that Western journalists also made
reference to the "beginnings" of Turkish national identity in their comments on Turkey's membership to the EU.
26
For example, their envisaging Turkey as the "sick man" of Europe implies a double meaning: While pointing to
the present—to the poor condition of health of Bülent Ecevit (then prime minister of Turkey)—it invigorates the late-nineteenth-century
phrase that the Europeans used to denigrate the Ottoman Empire. Another "classical" type of comment that
came from the Western journalists and infiltrated the Turkish media raises doubt about the authenticity of
Turkish modernity. It reads that Turkey, after the enactment of the reforms, is now like Europe. 27 Once again, this is not a new
perspective. The Western "model" and Turkish "copy" have been recurring themes not only in journalistic
representations but also in social theory for a long time. The distinction historically made between the model
and the copy lies at the heart of the hegemonic imaginary concerning the constructs of the East and the West.
The Turkish hegemonic imaginary has been structured within an encounter with the West, which imposed a
"model" for modernity in its colonialist and imperialistic history, and which has always reproduced itself through insufficient "copies."
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GENERIC SOUTH KOREA LINK 1/2

THE US HAS A DOMINATING MINDSET TOWARD SOUTH KOREA – THE PLAN IS FUSED WITH
THE IDEA THAT THE US MUST COME IN TO SAVE THE CRAZY KOREANS
Eunwoo ‘8, is Senior Researcher at the Institute for Gender Research, Seoul National University. He received his Ph.D. in Sociology from Seoul National
University, 2008 [Joo, October 6, “Under the Gaze of the American Other” www.ekoreajournal.net/upload/html/HTML4419.html, Download Date: July 31, 2010]
Dialectics between the ideal ego and the ego-ideal and between imaginary identification and symbolic identification are deployed under the domination of the former by
the latter. Therefore, the identity formation of the subject or identification is always carried out under the gaze of the Other.[3] Being subject to the gaze of the Other
means that an individual or group takes the point of view of the Other and then internalizes the way the Other looks at that individual or group. Thus, the way
Korea looks at the U.S. as a model country and the way the U.S. in reality looks at Korea are not symmetrical
by any means. Moreover, a gaze is not an ideal image, but only a small fragment of the Real, or a real void in the Symbolic, in the Lacanian sense. Gaze does
not respond to one's desire, and if confronted, threatens one's survival as a subject, because one is degraded and reduced to the object of the gaze. Said's
discussion of Orientalism has many implications in this regard. According to Said, Orientalism, the Western
European view of and discourse on the East, refers to the way European Christianity, for the purpose of setting up its own identity, created
the East as the other, imposed a rule upon the East, and took the control of the East. It is a long-established
system of accumulating and reproducing knowledge. In this system, the East cannot exist, nor can it speak for
itself; it only speaks from the perspective of the West. The U.S. has adopted this viewpoint with regard to
Islam and the rest of Asia. With its imperial hegemony in the twentieth century, the U.S. has created a similar kind of discipline in the name of regional
studies, while the United Kingdom and France did through bibliographical study during the nineteenth century.[4] This approach was vital to the U.S. because without a
feudal history and tradition it had to "confirm its identity by regarding the external world and its enemies as the other and negating it."[5] This tradition has been
stronger perhaps in the U.S. than in any other country.
The gaze of the Other that observes, examines, and imposes disciplines on
its others is cruel. It classifies and controls its objects of observation and forces them to internalize its
perspective. The subject, in relation to the Other, is the product of this process (subjectification as
subordination). Fanon, who has greatly influenced Said, argues that Africans are stripped of their individuality and fixed as a "fossilized" race of the Black
under the gaze of white people, which is "the only existing eyes looking at them in reality."[6] How different are Koreans from Africans in their relationship to the
U.S.? And what is nature of the national modernization for the sake of which Koreans have exerted such in the last thirty to forty years? Modernization theory takes the
U.S. as its model and believes that modernization, industrialization, and Westernization are one and the same. It regards the ambiguous concept of tradition as an
obstacle to development and something that must be overcome. So, modernization theory is nothing more than the will to power and truth that demands a thorough self-
denial.[7]
Korea has always hoped and believed that the U.S. would look upon it with a favorable eye, but
regretfully, this has not always been the case. The United States has only looked upon Korea as a less developed
country of a yellow race in Asia, at best as a docile client to buy U.S. products and weapons, and even so, the
gaze was not friendly. Contrary to Korean hopes, the negative gaze of the Other produces curious stereotypes that merge
with the Orientalist prism of the West. For example, Koreans are portrayed in Hollywood movies as dependent, childlike docile people, who need to
be protected and educated by whites (note the film M*A*S*H (1970) about a U.S. mobile army surgical hospital during the Korean War and the television comedy
series based upon it.), or as heartless money-mongering economic animals, and petty shopkeepers. These negative stereotypes persisted in the 1990s film Falling Down
(1993), in which Korean and various Third World characters are portrayed as enemies threatening the status of white middle-class fathers. III The gaze of the
American Other and the eyes of the admiring Korean can never meet because, Lacan says, the Other does not exist. The consistent, smoothly integrated symbolic order
does not exist. No organic, completely harmonious or agreeable relations can exist between Korea and the United States. On the same count, the U.S., as an ideal image
and model also does not exist in reality. In the two countries' intersubjective relations, America as the subject supposed to know the secret of Korean desires also does
not exist. Therefore, it is merely wishful thinking to hope that the U.S. will consider Korea's situation if Korea makes a concession to the U.S. first. This is similar to
Lacan's proposition that "There is no such a thing as sexual relationship." As long as the subjects with desire are at a face-off, communication is impossible. And yet
Korea's unrequited love affair with the U.S. continues. Just a few days after anti-U.S. "candlelight demonstration" were held to commemorate two middle school girls
killed by a U.S. armored vehicle in Uijeongbu (where a U.S. military base is located), another mass rally of a similar scale was held on the same spot shouting "We love
America." Korea's blind love of and trust in America has been led by the dominating class and elite for the last several decades. This community has learned by
experience that affinity with America helped them succeed in life and earn power and money since America's occupation of the peninsula in 1945. They studied in
America, and internalized the American worldview. Thus, they have gained benefits from maintaining a favorable relationship with the U.S. and enjoyed the ensuing
comfort. Because they are smart, they retort, "Do you think we are so naive? We know very well that international relations work based on specific interests, not on
unconditional friendship." But as 탐 i 탑 ek points out, that kind of cynicism is a very effective form of ideology that supports symbolic order: "I know very well . . . but
still . . ." Moreover, ideology is already at work in the very reference to the relationship with interests, whether it be a national interest, private, or collective. This is the
case because ideology is a matter of behavior before it is a matter of knowledge. This is a Pascalian problem: "If you do not believe, kneel down, act as if you believe,
and belief will come by itself." It is the same as the fact that people are aware bank notes are merely valueless paper, yet they still, even more effectively mediate
exchanges of goods and services. [8] The leaders of Korean society, although they themselves are illegitimate sons of the American father, send their pregnant wives
and daughters-in-law across the Pacific to deliver their babies in American hospitals to give their offspring the status of America's legitimate sons. Sensing such overt
secrets of the elite early on, the shrewd middle class, motivated by fear of downward mobility and desire for status upgrade, send their children abroad to study or
provide them expensive English lessons in Korea, stretching their means to catch up with the upper class. In
a sense, those who sincerely believe in
the ideal image of America or fear to discard this image are in fact ordinary Koreans who were taught to regard
Spanos Neg - 60 -
America as the savior who sacrificed its soldiers and saved Korea from hunger and poverty. But things have
since changed, most significantly, since the violent suppression of the Gwangju Uprising in 1980.
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GENERIC SOUTH KOREA LINK 2/2
Also, one must consider the U.S. involvement in the IMF bailout and doubt regarding the role of the U.S. in the
financial crisis which brought about bailout (and U.S. pressure on Korea to open up its market), as well as the killing of two middle-school girls in
Uijeongbu. In addition, the U.S. reaction to the North Korean nuclear crisis took the Korean peninsula to the brink
of war in 1996 and triggered a crisis of imminent war once again in the summer of 2003. Even today, the future
is unclear. And then there was the so-called Hollywood action by short-track speedskater Anton Ohno at the 2002 Salt Lake City Winter Olympic Games,
notorious for the U.S. team's unfair home ground advantage. The official history of the Korean peninsula has been written in a fashion to hide the traumatic facts that
the Republic of Korea was established with the sacrifice of many Korean lives, that much of the sacrifice was caused by a U.S. scheme to dominate the world order, and
that the U.S. directly led or intervened in the process. Or, this history sublimates those traumatic facts as much as possible so as to make them comprehensible within a
network of symbolic signification. Particularly, the killings of Korean civilians led by U.S. forces after liberation (e.g., the April 3 Uprising) were expelled to the realm
of the Real, which is not captured by the network of signification of "History," since they threaten the appearance of liberal democracy .
Thus the consistent
symbolic appearance of the Republic of Korea has been constructed at the diachronic level. In a synchronic
structural arrangement, the traumatic fact had to be covered up that the power of the U.S.--as epitomized by the
U.S. forces still stationed in Korea's territory--has played the role of the real core posing a threat to the
appearance of Korea as an independent nation, and at the same time contributing to repression of inner
antagonism in Korean society and helping Korea maintain its appearance of a nation system.[9] However, the massacre
in Gwangju and the ambiguous role of the U.S. in it disclosed these traumatic truths . Because of these experiences, the way Koreans view
the U.S. has changed fundamentally, as has the image of the U.S. While the U.S. may still be the Other, it now appears more like the
other side of the Other, or as the figure of the obscene superego. It is no longer the imaginary loving father, the object of identification, but the
father who enjoys jouissance, the obscene father or the real father who wields traumatic violence and monopolizes women,
like the Zeus's father, the titan Cronus, who devoured his sons. Lacan's theory presents three types of father or father figures. The symbolic father is a symbolic
instance who is defined by his place in the network of symbolic signification and governs intersubjective relations. He is the law, the father as name, noun, or the name
of the father, i.e., the signifier. The imaginary father is the object of identification, the ideal image, i.e., father as the Imago. In contrast, the real father is estranged from
the ideal image and cannot be subsumed into the web of symbolic signification, so this father becomes a traumatic experience. The real father or father figure cannot be
the object of identification, unlike the ideal father; he may take the appearance of a weak, incapable, impotent father or an obscene, violent father. The real father is the
Roughly speaking,
other side of the symbolic father as the other side of the Other is the obscene superego and the other side of law is violence.[10]
America as the symbolic father is defined by its status in the world system as the military and economic
hegemonic nation in the world order of the twentieth century. Based on this, the U.S. exercises certain
structural control over Korea from which Korea cannot easily escape. Meanwhile, America as the imaginary father appears as
the image of an ideal model nation and Korea's savior, benefactor, protector and as a bastion of liberal democracy . America as the real father
demands that its national interest become the absolute order. It is totally indifferent to the legitimate
demands Korea or other weak nations make based on universal human values or international law, and
exercise or threaten either bloody or bloodless violence for its goals. All of these facts shatter the illusion of
benevolent paternalism. In other words, America as the real father is the nation that is directly and indirectly involved in the killings of civilians on Jejudo
island and in Gwangju, but is hidden behind the scenes, and is the homeland of soldiers who brutally murdered Korean prostitutes in brothels serving U.S. soldiers.
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GENERIC IRAQ LINK
THE PROBLEM ISN’T TROOP NUMBERS, RATHER THE DISCOURSE ENDEMIC TO THE
DOMINATE CULTURE. SPECIFICALLY, THE US EFFORT AT PERPETUAL OCCUPATION OF THE
REGION. THUS EVEN IF THE AFFIRMATIVE REMOVES EVERY SINGLE TROOP, THEY JUST
FURTHER IMPERIALISM THROUGH TROOP SHIFTS
Salah Hassan, associate professor and director of the Honors Program in the Department of English at Michigan State University, Never Ending Occupations, New
Centennial Review, Spring 2008
In late 2006 and early 2007, following the November elections that brought Democrats to power in Congress on
a wave of popular discontent with the course of the war, the Bush administration had to acknowledge policy
failures in Iraq. An increasing number of politicians began to speak openly of the need to formulate a plan for a
U.S. withdrawal from Iraq. One of the fundamental critiques of the Bush invasion of Iraq had long been the
absence of a clear endgame or exit strategy. As the occupation approached its four-year anniversary, the White House appeared to accept the
prospect of a change in approach. The idea of a drawdown of troops had emerged already in summer 2006, but found formal expression in a December 2006 report
The
titled “The Way Forward: A New Approach” prepared by the Iraq Study Group, a Congressional appointed panel co-chaired by James Baker and Lee Hamilton.
Iraq Study Group document is an interesting and complicated effort to reconcile U.S. military and political
objectives in the broader Middle Eastern context. On the surface, the Iraq Study Group Report sees the U.S. position in Iraq as an opportunity
to address a number of outstanding conflicts by emphasizing diplomacy, security and economic development. The diplomatic component includes negotiations with
Iran and Syria, the security component entails a significant commitment to building the Iraqi Army, and the economic policy centers on privatization of the Iraqi oil
The Iraq Study Group seeks to leverage an Iraqi commitment to the
sector, including privatizing security of the wells and pipelines.
U.S. policy by setting specific milestones that must be met by the Nouri al-Maliki government in order to
maintain continued support. For instance, Recommendation 40 proposes: “The United States should not make
an open-ended commitment to keep large numbers of American troops deployed in Iraq” (51). This recommendation is
justified in part because “an open-ended commitment of American forces would not [End Page 5] provide the Iraqi government with incentive to take . . . political
action” (50).
Even though the report asserts the conditional nature of the U.S. commitment, it also makes the
following affirmation: “Even after the U.S. has moved all combat brigades out of Iraq, we would maintain
a considerable military presence in the region, with our significant force in Iraq and our powerful air, ground
and naval deployments in Kuwait, Bahrain and Qatar, as well as an increased presence in Afghanistan” (49).
This point leaves no doubt that the U.S. military occupation of Iraq and more broadly the strategic
region of the Persian Gulf has no geographical or temporal limit.
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GENERIC IRAQ LINK
OCCUPATION IS BUILT ON MORE THAN JUST TROOPS OR BASES. IT COMES FROM A

HISTORICAL CONTEXT THAT IS FOUNDED ON A SYNDROME OF PAST DEFEATS—WITHDRAWL
NEVER ACTUALLY HAPPENS BECAUSE, EVEN IF WE TAKE THE TROOPS OUT, WAR
INTENSIFIES ON THE PERIPHERY WHILE SIMULTANEOUSLY STIFLING AMERICAN DISSENT.
Salah Hassan, associate professor and director of the Honors Program in the Department of English at Michigan State University, Never Ending Occupations, New
Centennial Review, Spring 2008
Algeria and Vietnam represent those historic political defeats associated with military
According to Herman,
withdrawal from an occupied territory. Herman is not wrong to make this association. The problem is with the
ideological conclusion that he draws from these contexts. Rather than accepting the consequences of a wrong-
headed war, he wants to incite the U.S. public and administration to redouble the war, raising the specter of an
Iraq syndrome that would potentially produce a staggering effect on the United States. The U.S. debacle in
Vietnam confirms the general principle that retreat equals defeat and provides the political logic for the Bush
administration’s never-ending occupation of Iraq. From the very outset of the war in Iraq, commentators
connected this war to that other war, opponents of the war predicting that Iraq would become another quagmire,
like Vietnam, and proponents of the war arguing that the occupation of Iraq was a sign that the United States had finally
overcome the syndrome of past defeats. But the [End Page 9] effect of the U.S. withdrawal from Vietnam has not been a hesitation on the part of U.S. politicians to
undertake military deployments since the 1970s, which is the common understanding of the Vietnam syndrome;1 rather, since at least the 1980s, the United States has
been unrestrained in its willingness to maintain and multiply military occupations in the form of significant deployments, for example in Haiti, Grenada, Iraq, and
Yet as the prospect of
Afghanistan. For “stay the course” advocates of the war, Iraq 2007 is not Vietnam 1975; it is the Philippines 1898 or Germany 1945.
a U.S. exit strategy and possible withdrawal enters public discussion, Vietnam returns. For example, in a July
2007 article that exposes the myths about a possible withdrawal from Iraq in the context of a surge, Tom Engelhardt
comments that “Withdrawal, it turns out, is forever.” He later draws an astute parallel between Iraq and Vietnam: Similarly, in the Vietnam years, the
nonwithdrawal withdrawal was an endlessly played upon theme. The idea of “withdrawing” from Vietnam
arose almost with the war itself, though never as an actual plan to withdraw. All real options for ending the war
were invariably linked to phrases—some of which still ring bells—like “cutting and running,” or “dishonor,” or
“surrender,” or “humiliation,” and so were dismissed within the councils of government more or less before
being raised. . . . If anything, in the later years, “withdrawal” became—as it is now threatening to become in
Iraq—a way to maintain, or even intensify, the war while pacifying the American public.
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STABILIZING SOUTH KOREA LINK
US CREATION OF AND INVOLVEMENT WITH SOUTH KOREA IS ROOTED IN A STABILIZATION

OF THE LAND FOR WESTERN GAIN. REPRESENTATIONS OF THE REGION ENTRENCH
AMERICAN PURPOSE AND FURTHER UNNECESSARY DICHOTOMIES.
Wilson, 91. Rob (Professor of English at the University of Hawaii) Theory's Imaginal Other: American Encounters with South Korea and Japan in boundary
2, Vol. 18, No. 3, Japan in the World (Autumn, 1991), pp. 220-241
The larger question of textual misrepresentation, as I have outlined in several genres, still distorts, warps, and pressures the
cross-cultural interactions and political dynamics obtaining between America and South Korea. These allied
misrepresentations have taken place at least since the Korean War ended unresolved in 1953. As a function of Cold War
oppositionality, this language of bipolarity had to be invented, propagated, and maintained in a once-unified
country and culture. Whatever the rhetoric of liberty and populist pluralism that was used to disseminate and
liberally cloak its historical origin, the invention of "South Korea" by the United States in 1945 had much to do
with a right-wing stabilizing of land in the power elite (who had for the most part survived under Japanese colonization) and everything
to do with repressing the emergence of "people's collectives" seeking land reforms from Seoul, like those in the Communist North. In other words, with the
38th parallel and the DMZ, "Korea" was reinvented as a Cold War bastion of unresolved and belligerent polarities
between two powerful worldviews and alternative hegemonies, with America holding the economic cards and
calling the democratic shots in the South, despite long-standing claims from the grass-roots level for a
redistribution of land, power, wealth, and choice. These historical origins called for, and have resulted in, much American forgetting.
Can any seriously engaged writer or scholar, whether historian or poet, anthropologist or tourist, political strategist or
journalist, nowadays claim a stance of neutrality or objectivity, or assume some cloak of textual immunity
from distortion when treating ("representing") these Cold War materials of South Korea from the
perspective of the political and economic victor? In other words, confronting the return of the Cold War repressed to
a level of symbolic reengagement, by working "North/South Korea" up into language, can any writer do anything
but misrepresent, misrecognize, mystify, liberalize, and thereby further entrench the American presence and
purpose in inventing and differentiating the Republic of South Korea from its communist rival to the North? Despite
this once-hermit country's tormented engagement as a geographical bargaining chip in the Cold War struggle between America and the Soviet Union for
postwar hegemony, and even notwithstanding the spectacles of modernity of the 1988 Olympics held in Seoul, North/South "Korea" still
comprises for postmodern Americans a forbidding and forgotten landscape of belligerency wherein, as Cumings and John
Halliday now document, an "unknown war" once took place. (Indeed, the way Ameri- can discourse uses "Korea" to refer to
South Korea alone effectively elides the ongoing claims of the Democratic People's Republic of North Korea to be
known as "Korea" at all.)
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GENERIC AFGHAN LINK
AFGHANISTAN IS IRRELEVANT TO OUR IMPERIAL AMBITIONS. WITHDRAWAL DOESN‘T

AFFECT ANYTHING BUT AFGHANI CITIES. THE PLAN IS AN IDEOLOGICAL SERVICE TO
IMPERIAL STRATEGY.
Mann 2003 (Michael, professor of Sociology at the UCLA and Visiting Research Professor at Queen's University Belfast Incoherent Empire, isbn: 1859845827,
p154-155)
But what could we expect, given such a low commitment of resources? In contrast, the international community deployed 60,000 peacekeepers to Bosnia, a much
smaller country. Afghanistan was not even "nation-building lite." This would be very disappointing if the US had
intended nation-building or imperial pacification. Bush had initially promised "another Marshall Plan." He was lying. The US
would not commit such resources to such a peripheral country. There are shorter, less vulnerable routes to bring Central Asian oil to the
West. Afghanistan, with its history of failed states and warlordism is difficult to rule. But the US had no vital interest in Afghanistan beyond
the removal of terrorism. It used the Northern Alliance and Karzai to force al-Qaeda out of the country, just as in the 1980s it used bin Laden and other
Islamists to force out the Soviets. It then abandoned them. It now wants out again. The problem is how to get US troops
out without causing too obvious and immediate a collapse so that the world condemns American opportunism.
Only if this happened would the US have done better than the Soviets. In achieving battlefield victory and installing a client regime in Mghanistan, the Soviets took
even less time than the US did. In 1979 they airlifted troops straight into Kabul, seized power, brought in 115,000 troops to occupy all the cities, and installed a client
regime.
Since the US deployed far fewer US troops, it had to wait longer for the Northern Alliance warlords to
drive their pick-up trucks into the capital. But having conquered, the Soviets made their big mistake. They did not leave it to their client, but stayed
and attempted to impose order. Ten years later, after one million Mghan and 25,000 Soviet casualties, they retreated out of the country, leaving it to civil war. The
Soviets had also been too protective of their soldiers-too much armor, not enough light infantry. By the 1980s communism was also reluctant to make sacrifices in
It lacks the imperial will to consolidate victory and
imperial ventures. Has the US done any different? Not yet. Can it do more? Probably not.
pacify Afghanistan. If this was ever an attempt at Empire, it is ending pitifully. But in reality it was just a
punitive expedition. Over a century ago the British lost an expeditionary force in the Khyber Pass, and realized that they could not rule this country. Two
decades ago the Soviets came to the same realization after more protracted defeat. The US reached the same conclusion with almost no
losses. Al-Qaeda was kicked out of the country, which was the main 'point. But did Afghanistan benefit? I doubt it.
Spanos Neg - 66 -
AFGHAN IS ORIENTALIST
THE UNITED STATES HAS DEFINED ITS OWN IDENTITY IN RELATION TO AFGHANISTAN BY
DEMONIZING AFGHANISTAN ON THE BASIS OF PERCEIVED DANGER. THIS IDEOLOGY
DEVELOPS FROM AND CONTINUES IMPERIAL AGENDAS.
Crowe, 2007. L.A. Crowe, 2007, New York University. The “Fuzzy Dream”: Discourse, Historical myths, and Militarized (in)Security- Interrogating dangerous
myths of Afghanistan and the ‘West’ http://archive.sgir.eu/uploads/Crowe-loricrowe.pdf
Looking specifically at the relationship between the US and Afghanistan, the US has defined its own identity (as
good, modern, normal, etc.) in relation to its difference from the Afghan ‘Other’, cultivating its demonization on the
basis of perceived danger and moral valuations (superior/inferior) that are spatially constructed. Claims that the West is
constructing a peaceful, democratic, and liberal nation (values claimed to be at the core of “our civilization, freedom, democracy and ways of life”) are motivated by
the need to transform “their barbarism, inhumanity, low morality and style of life”.77 Eisenstein
explains that ‘Others’ are constructed or
fabricated in order to deal with the fear of not-knowing: “Creating the savage, or slave, or woman, or Arab allows made-up certainty rather
than honest complex variability and unknowability.”78 Unfortunately, this is not a novel phenomenon unique to the contemporary
situation in Afghanistan: articulations of security that rely on definitions of ‘otherness’ as threats to security,
argues Campbell, replicates the logic of Christendom’s ‘evengelism of fear’. Obstructions to security/order/God become defined as irrational, abnormal, mad, etc. in
need of rationalization, normalizations, punishment, moralization, etc.: “The
state project of security replicates the church project of
salvation”.79 As is commonly known, under Christendom it was such ‘discourses of danger’ that were
instrumental in establishing its own authority and disciplining its followers. Similarly, by relying on discourses of danger to
define who “we” are, who “we” are not, and who “they” are that we must fear, the state constructs enemies who’s elimination/domination is necessary to preserve the
states own identity (and security): “All
powers are geared against a single “alien.” And all the rationalizations are raging
against the advent of “Evil.”80 Thus, the “war on terror”, or Afghanistan, or Iraq, becomes, in the words of Baudrillard, an
endless war of prevention to “excorcise” “evil”; an ablation of a non-existant enemy masquarading as the
leitmotiv for universal safety.81 These elements of oppositional binaries is closely related to the second element: contemporary discourse
has developed from and further perpetuates a particular ideology that emmanates from a neo-liberal capitalist
and imperial agenda that is founded upon neo-colonialist attitudes and assumptions. “The US campaign to
‘fight terrorism’, initiated after September 11th” explains Nahla Abdo “has crystallized all the ideological underpinnings of
colonial and imperial policies towards the constructed ‘other’.” This emerges in the “heroism” myth mentioned above; for example,
Debrix explains how narratives around humanitarianism serve an ideological purpose in that it “contributes to the reinforcement of neoliberal policies in ‘pathological’
regions of the international landscape.83
It also emerges in the militarization myth, insofar as neoliberal globalisation relies
on the institutionalization of neo-colonialism and the commodification and (re)colonization of labor via
militarized strategies of imperial politics. That is, as Agathangelou and Ling point out, “Neoliberal economics enables globalized
militarization”.84 Embedded in this normalization of neo-colonial frames are the elements of linearity and thus assumed rationality of reasoning in the West. As
Canada stepped up its role in direct combat operations (which included an increase of combat troops, fighter jets, and tanks with long-range firing capacities85),
Stephen Harper appealed to troop morale on the ground in Afghanistan, stating: “Canada and the international community are determined to take a failed state and
create a "democratic, prosperous and modern country."86 (my italics) Proposed solutions to the conflict(s) in Afghanistan have been framed and justified not only as
‘saving backwards Afghanistan’ but also as generously bringing it into the modern, capitalist, neoliberal age. Moreover, this element represents an continuity of
Representations
colonial power, presenting the one correct truth or resolution, emmanating from the ‘objective gaze’ of the ‘problem-solving’ Western world.
of Afghanistan present Western voices as the authority and the potential progress such authority can bring to
the ‘East’ as naturally desirable. This ‘rationality’ also presumes an inherent value of Western methodology (including statistical analysis,
quantification of data, etc) and devalues alternative epistemologies including those of the Afghan people. This is problematic for several reasons: 1) It forecloses and
discourages thinking “outside the box” and instead relies upon the “master’s tools” which include violent military force, the installation of a democratic regime,
peacekeeping, and reconstruction and foreign aid – alternative strategies are deemed “radical”, “unworkable”, and “anti-American
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AFGHANI WOMEN LINK 1/2
THE US JUSTIFIED INVADING AFGHANISTAN TO LIBERATE WOMEN BUT NOW IGNORES THEIR
WORSENING CONDITION DUE TO AMERICAN IMPERIALISM
Stabile and Kumar ’05 (Carol A. and Deepa, professor of journalism and mass communication at UW-Milwaukee and professor of journalism and media
studies at Rutger University, “Unveiling imperialism: media, gender and the war on Afghanistan,” Media Culture & Society September 2005 vol. 27 no. 5 765-782)
we provide an overview of recent conflicts in Afghanistan,

In what follows, we offer a three-part analysis of our topic. In the first,
focusing in particular on the US’s economic and strategic interests in the region and its role in supporting and
funding Islamic fundamentalism. This context, absent almost entirely from media accounts of Afghan women, is crucial to understanding their plight in
all its material complexity. We then turn to news media frameworks and examine the ways in which Afghan women figure
in wider agendas, particularly the circumstances in which they become visible in a society as sexist as the US. The central framework
employed to justify the US war was thoroughly Orientalist; it constructed the West as the beacon of civilization
with an obligation to tame the Islamic world and liberate its women. This served to erase not only the political
struggles of women in Afghanistan against both the Northern Alliance and the Taliban, but those of women in the West as
well who, contrary to Orientalist claims about the eternal virtues of Western civilization, have had to organize and fight for what rights they enjoy today. We then turn
That they still endure terrible conditions bolsters our argument that
to the outcome of the war and situation of Afghan women today.
the issue of women’s liberation was used as a cover for US intervention – when we strip off this rhetorical veil,
we find the ugly face of US imperialism.
THE MENTION OF AFGHAN WOMEN WAS NOTHING OTHER THAN AN OPPORTUNISTIC USE OF
WOMEN FOR THE WAR
Stabile and Kumar ‘05
(Carol A. and Deepa, professor of journalism and mass communication at UW-Milwaukee and professor of journalism and media studies at Rutger University,
“Unveiling imperialism: media, gender and the war on Afghanistan,” Media Culture & Society September 2005 vol. 27 no. 5 765-782)
In retrospect,
the coverage of Afghan women that followed from 11 September 2001 can only be understood as a
cynical and opportunistic use of women. Few journalists and reporters could have believed that the sudden
interest in Afghan women was anything other than a cover for the Bush administration’s dreams of empire,
particularly given the absence of coverage of issues involving women and violence in the US media in general.
Additionally, had journalists had some memory of the 1980s media coverage of the Afghan–Soviet war and the mujahideen, out of which the Taliban emerged, they
would have remembered that it was positively glowing. As David Gibbs observes, there was ‘near unanimous agreement that the [mujahideen] guerillas were “heroic,”
“courageous” and above all “freedom fighters”’ (2002).
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AFGHANI WOMEN LINK 2/2
THE POLITICAL DISCOURSE OF AMERICAN POLITICIANS AND WARMAKERS FOR

AFGHANISTAN WOMEN DENIES THEM ANY AGENCY
Stabile and Kumar ‘05
(Carol A. and Deepa, professor of journalism and mass communication at UW-Milwaukee and professor of journalism and media studies at Rutger University,
“Unveiling imperialism: media, gender and the war on Afghanistan,” Media Culture & Society September 2005 vol. 27 no. 5 765-782)
In political discourses about Afghan women, two narrative traditions and practices converge: that of the
protection scenario and that of Orientalism. Both traditions draw much of their rhetorical force from discourses
of imperialism. The argument about protecting women, used as justification for the bombing of Afghanistan,
combines elements of both traditions. Orientalist discourses often employ protection scenarios as justification
for imperialist aggression, although Orientalism has a specific colonial history. According to the logic of the protection
scenario, women, like the penetrable, feminized territory of the nation-state, must be protected from the
predatory advances of some real or imaginary enemy. Susan Jeffords (1991), following Judith Hick Stiehm (1982), describes this as a
protection scenario that ‘is established through three categories that stand in unstable conjunction with one another: the protected or victim (the person violated by the
villain); the threat or villain (the person who attacks the victim); and the protector or hero (the person who protects or rescues the victim or promises such aid’ (Stabile,
1994: 107). Cynthia Enloe gives added depth to this analysis, describing it as the ‘womenandchildren-protected-bystatesmen’ scenario (Enloe, 1992: 96). Richard
Slotkin (1973) traces these ‘captivity scenarios’ back to 17thcentury American cases, in which Native Americans
were accused of kidnapping white women and these allegations were used as justification for genocide.3 Slotkin’s
historical approach underscores a point also made by Lila Abu-Lughod (2002): that the protection scenario is closely linked to the
justificatory narratives of colonialist projects, in which exotic brown women, to paraphrase Gayatri Spivak (1988), must be
saved by the civilized (white) hero from some barbaric villain. As Leila Ahmed (1992) similarly shows, one of the key reasons given to
justify British occupation of Egypt in the 1880s was that it was the role of the superior Christian race to rescue and liberate Muslim women from Muslim men. It is
map out the twisted and horrific ideological route this logic has taken in the US (from
beyond the scope of this article to
justification for lynchings of African-Americans in the late 19th and 20th centuries, to recruiting posters for the
Second World War that ironically reproduced fascist ideologies of white supremacy by featuring Japanese
soldiers as simians threatening white women). What we want to emphasize here is that this has never been an
innocent or progressive discourse aimed at improving the lot of women and children – as Enloe (1983, 1990, 1993, 2000;
Cohn and Enloe, 2003) has eloquently and repeatedly advised us, militarism by the world’s imperialist powers never improves the
lives of women and children. Instead, by rendering women the passive grounds for an argument aimed at
imperialist domination, the discourse of protection used by politicians and media alike – like the very fundamentalism it
purported to attack – denied women any agency in the decision-making processes that affected their everyday lives and
futures.
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SAVING AFGHAN LINK
THE AFFIRMATIVE CONTINUES THE DISCOURSE OF “SAVING” AFGHANISTAN, REINFORCING

THE PATERNALISM AND NEO-COLONIALISM BEHIND US ACTIONS
Crowe 7 (L. A. Crowe, Researcher, York Centre for International and Security Studies, York University, 2007, “The “Fuzzy Dream”: Discourse, Historical myths,
and Militarized (in)Security - Interrogating dangerous myths of Afghanistan and the ‘West’” http://archive.sgir.eu/uploads/Crowe-loricrowe.pdf)
The ‘heroism’ narrative can be called by several names: the ‘saviour syndrome’, “mediatically generated” or “hybrid techno-medical” humanitarianism58,
“foreign aid”, “humanitarian intervention”, etc. This narrative constructs foreign engagement in a region as spectacle and as prized
commodities to be admired and ‘sold’ to the public; it constructs the West as ‘saviours’ and the ‘Other’, in this case
Afghanistan, as the victim in need of saving, accomplished through images and tales of passion and fervour that often pathologize the other and
valorize the Western interveener. When the US, with the support of the UN, bombed Afghanistan in 2001in response to the events of September 11th, the mission was
entitled “Operation Enduring Freedom”. Today, as reconstruction and ‘peace-building’ efforts are underway in Afghanistan in
tandem with military operations, political conversations and media productions are saturated with calls to “win
the hearts and minds” of the people of Afghanistan and of the necessary and benevolent role the West must play in
instilling ‘freedom’, ‘justice’ and ‘democracy’ in the war-torn and poverty stricken region. Debrix, offers an analysis of what he calls “the
global humanitarian spectacle” to demonstrate how medical and humanitarian NGO’s simulate “heroism, sentiment, and compassion”; medical catastrophes and c ivil
conflicts, he explains, have indeed become prized commodities for globalizing neoliberal policies of Western states and
international organizations to sell to ‘myth readers’: “They give Western states and the UN the opportunity to
put their liberal humanistic policies into practice, while, for Western media, humanitarianism simply sells”.59 There are several repercusions of
this myth, explains Debrix. First, this has resulted in real humanitarian and moral issues being overlooked; Second, images
are being purged of their content. Myth has thus becoming the very real enemy of true humanitarianism; that is,
we’ve become so inundates with superhero mythologization of real world events that the embedded paternalism
and unrealistic goals go unnoticed.60 Additionally, this narrative reinforces a victimology of the ‘Other’ and in fact
capitalises on it, while simultaneously hiding the paternalistic and neo-colonialist ideologies in humanitarian
garb. The role of the media and consciously generated and disseminated images is particularly pronounced here, as passion and spectacle are valued in the
commodification of images over content and history. Jean Baudrillard states “There is no possible distinction, at the level of images and information, between the
spectacular and the symbolic, no possible distinction between the ‘crime’ and the crackdown”.61
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MIDDLE EAST INSTABILITY LINK 1/2
PREVENTING NUCLEAR WAR IN THE MIDDLE EAST IS AN IMPERIALIST ATTEMPT TO SECURE

THE REGION FOR OIL AND HEGEMONIC UTILITY. THE MIDDLE EAST REPRESENTS A SOFT
UNDERBELLY TO AMERICAN IMPERIAL POLITICS.
Amin 2004 (Samir, director of the Third World Forum in Dakar, Senegal, November, “U.S. Imperialism, Europe, and the Middle East”
https://www.monthlyreview.org/1104amin.htm)
The Middle East, henceforth to be considered together with the bordering areas of the Caucasus and ex-Soviet Central Asia, occupies a position of
particular importance in the geostrategy and geopolitics of imperialism, and particularly of the U.S. hegemonic
project. It owes this position to three factors: its oil wealth; its geographical position in the heart of the Old World; and the
fact that it constitutes the soft underbelly of the world system. The access to oil at a relatively cheap price is vital for the
economy of the dominant triad, and the best means of ensuring this guaranteed access consists in securing
political control of the area. But the region also holds its importance equally due to its geographical position, being
at the center of the Old World, at equal distance from Paris, Beijing, Singapore, and Johannesburg. In the olden times control over this inevitable crossing point gave the
Caliphate the privilege of drawing the chief benefits from that epoch’s long distance trade. After the Second World War the region, located on the southern side of the
Soviet Union, was crucial to the military strategy of encircling Soviet power. And the region did not lose its importance with the collapse of the Soviet adversary.
U.S. dominance in the region reduces Europe, dependent on the Middle East for its energy supply, to vassalage.
Once Russia was subdued, China and India were also subjected to permanent energy blackmail. Control over
the Middle East would thus allow an extension of the Monroe Doctrine to the Old World, the objective of the
hegemonist project of the United States. But the continuous and constant efforts made by Washington since 1945 to secure control over the region,
while excluding the British and French, has not been so far crowned with success. One recalls the failure of the attempt to attach the region to NATO through the
Baghdad Pact, and the fall of one of their most faithful allies, the Shah of Iran. The reason is quite simply that the project of Arab (and Iranian) nationalist populism
entered headlong into conflict with the objectives of American hegemonism. This Arab project hoped to force the Great Powers to recognize the independence of the
Arab world. The nonaligned movement formulated in 1955 at Bandung by the ensemble of liberation movements of Asian and African people was the strongest current
of the time. The Soviets quickly understood that by giving their support to this project they could set back the aggressive plans of Washington. This epoch came to an
end, in the first instance because the populist nationalist project of the Arab world quickly exhausted its potential for transformation, and the nationalist powers sank
into dictatorships empty of either hope or plans for change. The vacuum created by this drift opened the way for political Islam and the obscurantist autocracies of the
Persian Gulf, the preferred allies of Washington. The region has become one of the underbellies of the global system, vulnerable to external intervention (including
military) that the current regimes, for a lack of legitimacy, are incapable of containing or discouraging.
The region constituted, and continues to
constitute, a zone of the first priority (like the Caribbean) within the American geomilitary division of the entire planet
—a zone where the United States is granted the “right” of military intervention. Since 1990, they are not
deprived of anything! The United States operates in the Middle East in close cooperation with their two unconditional faithful allies—Turkey and Israel.
Europe is kept away from the region, forced to accept that the United States is defending the global vital interests of the triad, that is to say its oil supply. In spite of
signs of obvious irritation after the Iraq war, in this region the Europeans by and large continue to sail in Washington’s wake.
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MIDDLE EAST INSTABILITY LINK 2/2
THE 1AC’S CRY OF MIDDLE EAST INSTABILITY FORMS THEM INTO THE CRAZY OTHER. THIS
ORIENTALIST APPROACH JUSTIFIES A IMPERIAL CYCLE OF INTERVENTION.
Noorani, 2005. Yaseen Noorani is a Lecturer in Arabic Literature, Islamic and Middle East Studies, University of Edinburgh. “The Rhetoric of Security,” The
New Centennial Review 5.1, 2005.
Bush here invokes the recurrent American anxiety that Americans are too individualistic, too materialistic, and therefore lacking in solidarity and conviction. This is the
worry that America has become a collection of self-centered consumers motivated by private wants rather than real agency. The war on terror allows America to show
that this is not so, and to make it not so. Through the war on terror, Americans can manifest their agency and solidarity by
empowering the U.S. government to fulfill their agency and solidarity by leading the world to peace. To do this,
however, they must engage in the war themselves by recognizing the threat of terrorism and by feeling the fear for it,
deeply. Only in this way can they redeem themselves from this fear through the moral struggle waged on their behalf by the government. Conversely , it is no
accident that the Middle East is the source of the threat they must fear. Recall that Schmitt stipulates that the enemy is "the
other, the stranger . . . existentially something different and alien" [End Page 36] (1996, 27). This is the irreducible enemy, whom
one can only, if conflict arises, fight to the death. The Middle East can be cast as this sort of enemy because it can
be easily endowed with characteristics that make it the antipode of the United States, intrinsically violent and
irrational. But it is, at the same time, a region of peoples yearning for freedom who can be redeemed through their submission to moral order and brought into the
fold of civilization. So in order to redeem the Middle East and ourselves from fear and violence, we must confront the
Middle East for the foreseeable future with fear and violence. It is important to recognize that the rhetoric of
security with its war on terrorism is not a program for action, but a discourse that justifies actions. The United States is
not bound to take any specific action implied by its rhetoric. But this rhetoric gives the United States the prerogative to take whatever
actions it decides upon for whatever purpose as long as these actions come within the rhetoric's purview. Judged by
its own standards, the rhetoric of security is counterproductive. It increases fear while claiming that the goal is to
eliminate fear. It increases insecurity by pronouncing ever broader areas of life to be in need of security. It
increases political antagonism by justifying U.S. interests in a language of universalism. It increases enmity
toward the United States by according the United States a special status over and above all other nations. The
war against terror itself is a notional war that has no existence except as an umbrella term for various military
and police actions. According to a report published by the Strategic Studies Institute of the U.S. Army, "the global war on terrorism as currently defined and
waged is dangerously indiscriminate and ambitious" (Record 2003, 41). This assessment assumes that the actions comprehended under the rubric of the "war on
terrorism" are designed to achieve a coherent military objective. The impossible "absolute security," feared by the report's author to be the "hopeless quest" of current
policy (46), may be useless as a strategic objective, but it is eminently effective in organizing a rhetoric designed to justify an open-ended series of hegemonic actions.
The rhetoric of security, then, provides the moral framework for U.S. political hegemony through its grounding
in the idea of national agency and in the absolute opposition between the state of civility and the state of [End Page
37] war. Designating the United States as the embodiment of the world order's underlying principle and the guarantor of the world order's existence, this
rhetoric places both the United States and terrorism outside the normative relations that should inhere within the
world order as a whole. The United States is the supreme agent of the world's war against war; other nations
must simply choose sides. As long as war threatens to dissolve the peaceful order of nations, these nations must submit to the politics of "the one, instead
of the many." They must accept the United States as "something godlike," in that in questions of its own security—which are questions of the world's security—they
can have no authority to influence or oppose its actions. These questions can be decided by the United States alone. Other
nations must, for the foreseeable
future, suspend their agency when it comes to their existence. Therefore, the rhetoric of security allows the United
States to totalize world politics within itself in a manner that extends from the relations among states down to
the inner moral struggle experienced by every human being
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IRAN PROLIF LINK

DEPICTIONS OF IRAN AS A DANGEROUS PROLIFERATING CAUSES ANTI-AMERICAN
BACKLASH
Arshin Adib-Moghaddam, Prof. of Oriental and African Studies at the University of London, December 2009, “Discourse and Violence: The Friend-Enemy
Conjunction in Contemporary Iranian-American Relations,” Critical Studies on Terrorism, Vol. 2 No. 3, pp. 512-526
Let me return to the beginning of this essay and recapture the issue of trust now within such an untrustworthy discursive field. The
subject that emerges out of the turmoil of the revolution and the subsequent devastating war between Iran and Iraq (1980-88), does not speak to the American side in
order to mitigate conflict, but to accentuate difference. Revolutionary Iran was adamant to define the Islamic Republic in strict juxtaposition to the West in general and
the United States in particular. This
discourse has suggested, as I mentioned, a bifurcated syntactical order within which the
fundamental boundary between subject and object, self and other has been cemented with layers and layers of
narrated inventions, all of which were meant to solidify the fundamental difference between the two states. In other
words, the political independence of Iran has been achieved via a discursive dependency . By defining Iran's
new 'self' in relation to the American 'other', the discourse of the Islamic Republic has become entirely
dependent on invented images of the United States in particular and the concept of the 'West' more generally. Thus, an oppressive
syntactical dependency has been created which demands that Iran takes the US and the West permanently into
account at each and every twist and turn of the country's official political discourse: Marg bar Amrika (death to
America), marg bar engelis (death to England), marg bar Israel (death to Israel); calling for the 'death' of America, Israel and Britain guarantees their syntactical
existence in the here and now. So the 'West' has a rather pronounced presence in Islamic Iran indeed, particularly amongst the rightwing, the supporters of Ahmadinejad
who utter those slogans and whose iron fist is crushing Iranian pro-democracy activists at the very moment I am writing these lines. It
should not come as
a surprise that these young people are accused of colluding with the 'West': within contemporary Iran it is
inevitable that 'you' reappear as a major focal point of the political discourse. I am emphasising that a discursive field is
always social, but that sociality could be violent, neutral, intimate, or friendly; it could be charged with negative
or positive energy, but it always remains the loci within which shifts from enemy to friend or ally to foe can
be signified. Note that I am accentuating the effects of discourse, our language towards the other, as the main source of trust building measures. I am re-
emphasising this because Iran and the United States did occasionally reach out to each other out of expediency without
changing their language towards the other side. When the 'Great Satan' and the 'mad mullahs' colluded via
Israel in what became to be known as the Iran-Contra Affair in 1986, they remained just that: staunch antagonists
who made a deal not in order to engender trust, but as a means to achieve divergent strategic interests. In
the case of the Iranian leadership, the deal was necessary in order to secure the supply of arms and weaponry
during a period when the chemical weapons attacks by Saddam Hussein's troops were beginning to demoralise the
Iranian army. The Israeli government of Shimon Peres, on the other side, acted on the premise 'that moderate elements in Iran can come to power if these factions
demonstrate their credibility in defending Iran against Iraq and in deterring Soviet intervention. To achieve the strategic goal of a more moderate Iranian government', it
is stated in a White House Memorandum (1986, p. 1) authored by then US National Security Advisor John Poindexter, 'the Israelis are prepared to unilaterally
commence selling military material to Western-oriented Iranian factions… . It is their belief that by so doing they can achieve a heretofore unobtainable penetration of
the Iranian governing hierarchy'. In response to this memo, President Reagan (White House Memorandum 1986, p. 4) authorised assisting
individuals and groups 'sympathetic to U.S. Governments interests … for the purpose of: 1) establishing a more
moderate government in Iran, 2) obtaining from them significant intelligence … and 3) furthering the release of the American
hostages held in Beirut'. It should become clear that in this clandestine transaction none of the stakeholders were interested in
pursuing strategic trust-building measures, which would have involved, at minimum, the acknowledgement of
the 'trustworthiness' of the other side (Booth and Wheeler 2008, pp. 229ff.). The first major step towards that direction after the
revolution in Iran was made by former President Mohammad Khatami (1997-2005) via the 'dialogue amongst civilisation' initiative
which did not yield, however, the results he and his supporters envisaged. Rather the contrary, Iran was named a part of the 'axis of evil' and a
major target in the global 'war on terror' pronounced by the administration of George W. Bush in the aftermath of the terror attacks on the country in
September 2001 (Adib-Moghaddam 2008a, part 3). Thus far, this narrative-counternarrative dialectic has not delivered a
pacified discursive field in which a strategic leap towards trust could be signified.
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NATO LINK 1/2
NATO IS A TOOL OF US IMPERIALISM THAT FORCES MEMBERS TO MILITARIZE THEMSELVES

IN ORDER TO BE COMPONENTS OF THE AMERICAN MILITARY MACHINE. THIS CONTINUATION
OF IMPERIALISM LEADS TO THE END OF THE PLANET
Hassan 2008 (Ghali, independent writer living in Australia, 25 August, 2008, “NATO: A Tool Of U.S. Imperialism”
http://www.countercurrents.org/hassan250808.htm )
(NATO) has lost its purpose to continue as a defence alliance. However, its aggressive expansion is
The U.S.-controlled North Atlantic Treaty Organisation
endangering world peace and the survival of the planet. Despite its irrelevant role, NATO has become part of the U.S.
military. Instead of dismantling the once defence alliance, the U.S. pushed to enlarge NATO and expand its
boundaries. The U.S. has lured most European nations, including former Warsaw Pact members, the so-called “New Europe”, to join its military. Poland, Hungry
and the Czech Republic joined in 1999; Bulgaria, Latvia, Lithuanian, Estonia, Slovakia and Romania in 2004, others are waiting in line. Becoming a NATO member
proves to be a profit bonanza for U.S.-Israeli weapon industries and arm dealers.
All new recruits into NATO are obliged to increase their
“defence” budgets to modernise and enlarge their military arsenals at the expense of vital public services. It is
important to bear in mind that the U.S.-NATO demands for expansion have met with opposition from Russia, China – with a legitimate concern against unprovoked
threat – and nations such as Germany, the Netherlands and France. Almost all new mini-dictators supported the illegal U.S. aggression against the Iraqi people. They
are in complete complicity in the war crimes committed by the regime of George Bush despite overwhelming majority of their citizens’ opposition to U.S. aggression.
From the criminal U.S. aggression against the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia to the ongoing murderous occupation of Afghanistan and Iraq, the new
European armies have become U.S. foot soldiers serving U.S. imperialist interests. Engineering and using crisis in Europe and
elsewhere, the U.S. cancelled the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty (ABM) in order to locate ABMs and to lure more nations to sign up for the system, including Australia,
South Korea and Japan. Under the fraudulent pretext of defence against “rogue” states, the U.S. has just signed a “deal” with Poland to station on Polish soil U.S.
“interceptor missiles”. The provocative deal is seen by Russians as a dangerous opportunity for the U.S. to expand its military presence and threat across the world.
Poland hailed the deal as a counter to Russian “threat”. Of course Poland is fully aware that the missiles are against Russia not Iran, as the U.S. continues to mislead the
public. After Poland, the U.S. is planning to build a twin anti-missile radar system in the Czech Republic. Many Poles as well as Czechs are against the deals and rightly
believe their countries are becoming vassal states of a dangerous U.S. militarism. Since the end of the so-called “Cold War ”,
the U.S. aim has always
been a quest for imperialist domination of the globe through U.S. militarism, including the establishment of U.S. military
bases in strategic areas of the world. The U.S. policy of destabilising Russia and undermining Russia’s integration with
Europe is aimed at controlling Eurasia’s natural resources . The events of 9/11 provided the U.S. with a pretext to justify the U.S. war on
Islam and a global imperialist expansion. It is hard to believe that the recent unprovoked aggression by Georgia’s President Mikheil Saakashvili against the semi-
independent district of South Ossetia wasn’t engineered by the U.S. ruling class in Washington. The aggression came at the time when Russia’s Prime Minister
Georgian air force and heavy rocket
Vladimir Putin was at the Beijing Olympics Opening Ceremony and President Dmitry Medvedev on holiday.
and artillery indiscriminately attacked the town of Tskhinvali, the capital of South Ossetia at midnight
destroying schools, hospitals, homes, and even the University, leaving much of the city in ruins. Hundreds of
innocent civilians were killed in the first hours of the attack. Saakashvili’s U.S.-Israeli trained Special Forces shot 10 Russian
peacekeepers stationed there under an international peace agreement. Saakashvili’s aim was to take control of South Ossetia and ethnically cleanse it of its majority
Russian inhabitants.
Saakashvili thought that destroying Tskhinvali and terrorising the population may go well with
his plan to please Washington and joins NATO as a new U.S. proxy army. Meanwhile, the aggression provides the U.S. and its
vassals with a pretext to use “humanitarian aid” deliveries to Georgia as cover for a military build-up in the Black Sea. Whatever the outcome, Saakashvili (like Bush)
must be suffering from lack of rational thinking. Saakashvili’s aggression may have enhanced U.S. anti-Russian propaganda, it has encouraged a rethinking among
many European heavy weight nations (who rightly see Russia as an important part of Europe), that playing with fire close to Russia’s border is not a very good idea.
With several European countries – France, Germany, Netherlands, Belgium, Spain, Italy, Norway, Greece, Hungary, Luxembourg and Portugal – still have their doubts,
Georgia’s bid to join NATO may have suffered a terminal setback as a result of Saakashvili’s war crimes in
South Ossetia. Russia has a legitimate right to protect its citizens. Most Ossetians are Russian citizens and do not want to be dominated
by a racist Georgia. Russia’s response to Saakachvili’s aggression was swift and in full compliance with international
laws. Saakashvili’s army of mercenaries – trained and armed by the U.S. and Israel – has suffered a deserving humiliating
defeat that should be a lesson to all those “new” European vassals who think they can participate in U.S. war crimes and count on U.S. help. Yet despite
Georgia’s unprovoked aggression, Western-Zionist mainstream media led by the BBC, CNN, NBC, Fox News, New York Times and Washington Post
turned the aggressor into a victime. In a grotesque display of distortion and dishonesty, Western media lauded
Saakashvili as “democrat” defending democracy against the “Russian Bear”. Of course, forgotten are the U.S.-staged rigged
elections that brought Saakashvili to power, Saakashvili’s corrupt authoritarian rule, the banning of news broadcasts, mass arrests of dissidents and Georgian police and
masked thugs firing on peaceful demonstrators in Tbilisi and the imposition of marshal law. Playing on the prejudice and ignorance of their populations, Western media
is demonising Russia in order to create an enemy and divert the public from ongoing war crimes perpetuated by Western governments. The ongoing anti-Russian
propaganda is reminiscent of Nazis propaganda during World War II to manipulate the people and create an anti-Russian sentiment. All of this is in accord
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NATO LINK 2/2

with U.S. quest for an imperialist control of the planet and the application of Neocons-fascist ideology of global
hegemonic control. Meanwhile, George Bush (speaking on behalf of the “West”) unashamedly condemned Russia’s legitimate response to Georgia’s
unprovoked aggression as “disproportionate”, and added: “[It] is unacceptable in the 21st Century”. The hypocrisy and double standards continued: “This is not 1968
and the invasion of Czechoslovakia where Russia can threaten a neighbour, occupy a capital, overthrow a government and get away with it”, ranted Condoleezza Rice,
the tireless Secretary of Travelling. Did Bush and his Rice forget the U.S. premeditated and illegal invasion of and destruction of the Iraqi state, including the murder of
members of Iraq legitimate government? Before criticising Russia, the U.S. ruling class should take a hard look at U.S. history of massive atrocities and serious war
crimes committed around the world. Indeed, the U.S. government is the only government who get a way with any crime it commits. Hence, the U.S. ruling class and
their complicit media must be suffering from the contagious diseases of moral bankruptcy and classic hypocrisy. The U.S. ruling class, the Bush regime in particular,
has no moral standing whatsoever to criticize Russia for protecting Russian nationals and defending South Ossetia against unprovoked aggression. After more than five
years of murderous Occupation, the Bush regime is directly responsible for the premeditated killing of more than 1.3 million innocent Iraqi civilians. Hundreds of
thousands of Iraqi civilians are imprisoned and tortured on regular basis, and at leas 5 million Iraqis have been displaced as refugees living in appalling conditions. The
entire sovereign nation of Iraq is destroyed in a premeditated act of aggression justified by outright lies. Moreover, despite the overwhelming majority of the Iraqi
people’s opposition to the Occupation, the Bush regime refused to withdraw U.S. troops and mercenaries from Iraq and end the murderous Occupation of their nation.
Finally, it is obvious that Western governments and their mainstream media are demonising Russia even if Russia is not the aggressor. As Sergei Lavrov, Russia's
“NATO is trying to make a victim of an aggressor and whitewash a criminal regime - save
foreign minister told the media:
a collapsing regime - and is taking a path to the rearmament of the current leaders in Georgia”. Saakashvili as perpetrator
of war crimes has become the victime by embarking on an ill-advised act of aggression not dissimilar from U.S. recent acts of aggression. World peace is greatly
served by multilateralism and international institutions without an aggressive U.S. military expansion. The transformation of NATO into a tool of
U.S. imperialism is endangering the survival of the planet.
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RUSSIA LINK
RUSSIAN THREATS ARE CONSTRUCTED TO SECURE AMERICAN IMPERIALISM BECAUSE

RUSSIA HAS THE CAPABILITY TO CHALLENGE OUR WORLD POWER. THEIR RHETORIC OF
RUSSIA AS A THREAT JUSTIFIES RUSSIA BECOMING A THREAT.
Rumer and Sokolsky 01 (Eugene Rumer holds degrees from Boston University (BA), Georgetown (MA), and MIT (PhD). Richard Sokolsky has
published numerous articles on foreign and national security in leading journals. “Normalizing U.S.-Russian Relations” Published in Strategic Forum; Institute for
national strategic studies. National Defense university. April 2001.)
Ten years after the end of the Cold War, mutual hopes that a comprehensive partnership would replace
containment as the major organizing theme in U.S.-Russian relations have not been realized. The record of the 1990s has
left both Russia and the United States unsatisfied. Russia looks back at the decade with bitterness and a feeling of being marginalized and slighted by the world’s
sole remaining superpower. It is also disappointed by its experience with Western-style reforms and mistrustful of
American intentions. The United States is equally disappointed with Russia’s lack of focus, inability to engage
effectively abroad, and failure to implement major reforms at home. A comprehensive partnership is out of the question. Renewed
competition or active containment are also not credible as organizing principles. Russia’s economic, military and political/ideological weakness makes it an unlikely
target of either U.S. competition or containment. Not only is Russia no longer a superpower, but its status as a regional power is in doubt. Current thinking about Russia
is divided among four basic approaches: Forget Russia, Enfant Terrible Russia, Evil Russia, and Russia First. The Forget Russia view holds that
Russia is too weak, too corrupt, and too chaotic to matter. After 10 years of trying to help Russia, the United States should focus its
resources and attention on more deserving and important world issues. The Enfant Terrible view holds that, although Russia has been an irresponsible and irritating
partner, it is too weak to hurt the United States and therefore need not be feared in earnest. President Vladimir Putin’s visits to Cuba and North Korea, courtship of
Slobodan Milosevic, and welcoming of Iranian President Mohammad Khatami to Moscow are of little strategic consequence and thus not worth our attention. This view
presupposes the existence of an important U.S.-Russian bilateral agenda and the need to protect it from childish and irresponsible Russian grandstanding. The
Evil
Russia view holds that Russian courtship of Cuba, Iran, Iraq, and North Korea is a deliberate effort to
undermine U.S. influence in the world and recreate the Soviet empire. Analysts embracing this view take less
notice of Russia’s diminished capabilities than of ambitious rhetoric by Russian politicians. Given Russia’s evil purposes,
the United States is already on a collision course with it and might as well do everything it can to box Russia in. The Russia First view holds that Russia still is the most
important issue on the U.S. foreign policy agenda. It accepts the premise that the two sides have shared interests and that Russia, once reborn as a stable, prosperous
democracy, can be a U.S. partner and ally. Therefore, the United States should actively assist Russia in its transformation and engage it in a broad and intense
relationship with renewed vigor and creativity. There are shortcomings in all of these approaches. Notwithstanding its precipitous decline, to Forget Russia is clearly not
an option: the country’s geographic expanse, nuclear arsenal, and proliferation potential simply make it impossible for U.S. policymakers to ignore. The Enfant Terrible
The Evil Russia view risks inflating
view fails to take Russia seriously and ignores the very real problems that exist between the two countries.
the threat and making the myth of evil Russia a self-fulfilling prophecy. The Russia First view is not grounded in reality.
After a decade of failure, it should be clear that neither the specter of Russia’s past nor the promise of its future warrants a position near the top of the U.S. foreign
policy agenda. The Need for Normalcy Russia’s external weakness and internal problems have left the United States without an effective interlocutor, either as partner
or competitor. Thus, the United States should deal with Russia on a case-by-case basis to advance our interests, in much the same way we deal with most other
countries. This path will sometimes lead toward partnership with Rus- sia and at other times toward competition. It may even result in a situation where Russia and the
United States find themselves as partners and competitors simultaneously in different parts of the world or on different issues. Given its size, history, strategic nuclear
capabilities, and future potential, one is tempted to overstate the importance of relations with Russia and put them at the top of the U.S. national security agenda. Except
for geography and nuclear weapons, however, there is little at this stage to justify making relations with Russia a top priority. Undoubtedly,
Russia can
inflict unacceptable damage on the United States. But fear of Russian nuclear weapons should not be the driving
element of the relationship. The hostility and ideological differences that divided the superpowers during the
Cold War are gone. The prospect of Russia consolidating and rebuilding itself under a militant authoritarian,
nationalist regime is remote. Therefore, fears of a deliberate surprise (attack on the United States are unjustified.
Despite a number of bilateral undertakings outside the Cold War-style security agenda, ranging from regional diplomacy in the Balkans to investment, U.S.
engagement with Russia, with the notable exception of the Cooperative Threat Reduction (CTR) Initiative, is limited.
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HUMAN RIGHTS LINK
CLAIMING THAT WE HAVE TO UPHOLD HUMAN RIGHTS BEFORE ALL ELSE IS AN EXTENSION
OF IMPERIALIST DOMINATION THAT DEMONIZES THE NON-EUROPEAN OTHER
Makau Mutua, Prof. of Law & Director, Human Rights Center, State Univ. of NY at Buffalo School of Law, 2001 [ARTICLE: Savages, Victims, and Saviors:
The Metaphor of Human Rights, Harvard International Law Journal, Winter, 42 Harv. Int'l L.J. 201,]
Any valid critique must first acknowledge that the human rights movement, like earlier crusades, is a bundle of
contradictions. It does not have, therefore, a monopoly on virtue that its most vociferous advocates claim. This Article argues that human rights, and
the relentless campaign to universalize them, present a historical continuum in an unbroken chain of Western
conceptual and cultural dominance over the past several centuries. At the heart of this continuum is a seemingly incurable
virus: the impulse to universalize Eurocentric norms and values by repudiating, demonizing, and "othering" that
which is different and non-European. By this argument, the Article does not mean to suggest that human rights are bad per se or that the human rights
corpus is irredeemable. Rather, it suggests that the globalization of human rights fits a historical pattern in which all high
morality comes from the West as a civilizing agent against lower forms of civilization in the rest of the world.
n38
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HUMAN RIGHTS EXTENSION
THE AFFIRMATIVE’S CLAIM TO GIVE HUMAN RIGHTS IS PREDICATED ON A DISCOURSE OF

MODERNIZING THE OTHER. THIS RHETORIC GRANTS IMPERIALISTS THE POWER TO
DESTABILIZE REGIMES THAT THREATEN ITS INTERESTS
Makau Mutua, Prof. of Law & Director, Human Rights Center, State Univ. of NY at Buffalo School of Law, 2002 [Buffalo Human Rights Law Review, 8 Buff.
Hum. Rts. L. Rev. 1, ARTICLE: Terrorism and Human Rights: Power, Culture, and Subordination]
The United States has long history of endeavoring to enlighten, if not save, our brethren by exporting ideas and
institutions that we believe we have realized more fully. These include efforts to bring "civilization," principally in
the form of Christianity, to age-old civilizations in Asia, Africa, and elsewhere; to foster "modernization," especially as
manifested through economic development; and to expound a gospel of science and technology. With the ebbing of the
Cold War, democracy promotion -- a capacious term used to encompass efforts to nurture electoral processes, the rule of law, and civil society, all broadly defined --
has become a key organizing principle of American foreign policy, if not this nation's interface with the world.
Clearly, the United States will not export the pursuit of happiness at the cost of its strategic or vital interests, whether
short or long term, as has been demonstrated by its coddling of corrupt and undemocratic regimes which are deemed critical to it. But it is just as clear that
the United States will not hesitate to use the rhetoric and language of international human rights law or political
democracy to delegitimize a regime that it considers inimical to its vital interests. The Cold War was partly won on the rhetorical
front. Soviet-style regimes were demonized as ungodly, savage, evil, and brutal machines bent on the destruction of their populations. It is important to recall Ronald
Reagan's description of the Soviet Union as the "Evil Empire." But the attack on these regimes was not just a cultural one; it was also political, and was evidence of the
political and economic confrontation between the capitalist West and the communist states.
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DEMOCRACY PROMOTION LINK 1/2
THE US USES DEMOCRACY PROMOTION AS A FIG LEAF TO HIDE ANTIDEMOCRATIC POLICIES

AND ENSURE MILITARY-DRIVEN AUTHORITARIAN REGIMES
Peceny 99 (Mark, professor of Comparative Politics at the University of New Mexico, Democracy at the Point of Bayonents, 1999, pg 186)
scholars
Scholars who believe that U.S. military intervention does have a profound impact on target societies generally see that impact in negative terms. These
argue that the United States often does not attempt to promote democracy during its interventions and even when it
does adopt proliberalization policies, such policies are either a fig leaf covering antidemocratic policies or are
undermined by other elements of the intervention. Thus, Herman and Brodhead (1984), Karl (1986), Rueschemeyer, Stephens, and Stephens
(1992), and others posit that the principal impact of U.S. military intervention on target states has been to strengthen the
political power of military institutions relative to other political actors, which can seriously undermine the
prospects for democracy in target states. Military institutions almost always play a crucial role in autocratic regimes,
even if the military does not govern directly. As Stephen explains: [A] serious examination of the problem of how to manage the military
democratically…. Would seem to be fundamental to our analysis of the weakening of authoritarian regimes, of democratic transition, and democratic consolidation for
three reasons. First,
the military either heads or provides the core of the coercive state apparatus of most authoritarian
regimes. Second, most of the would-be “successor” democratic regimes are immediately faced with major problems as how to control and redirect the military and
intelligence systems they inherit. Third, the military often continues to represent a critical component in politics by offering, implicitly or otherwise, a threatening
alternative to democracy. (1988:xx) For these reasons,
scholars of democratization consistently point to the “reserve power” and
special prerogatives of military institutions as some of the most significant barriers to the consolidation of
democracy (O’Donnell, Schmitter, and Whitehead 1986; Stepan 1988; Stanley 1996).
DEMOCRATIZING OTHER NATIONS IS INTRINSICALLY LINKED TO IMPERIALISM. AS LONG AS

THE CURRENT WORLD ORDER IS IN RULE, THE REASONS WHY DEMOCRACY MAY BE GOOD
DON’T APPLY.
Alison J. Ayers, Department of Political Science - Simon Fraser University, “Imperial Liberties: Democratisation and Governance in the ‘New’ Imperial Order”
POLITICAL STUDIES: 2009 VOL 57, 1–27
Thus, far from non- or indeed anti-imperial, the current ‘global mission’ to ‘democratise’ the world is internal to
contemporary imperialism. For those who do constantly think within the horizons of the putatively non-imperial present, the internationalisation of
(neo)liberal democracy is presumed to be incompatible with imperialism, but this habitual and normative acceptance is highly problematic (Marks, 2000; Tully, 2008) .
Mainstream accounts of ‘democratisation’ presuppose what requires explanation, taking for granted the non-
imperial character of this global project, the hegemony of a specific and impoverished model of (neo)liberal
democracy, highly problematic, de-historicised notions of state, society and self and the categorical separation
of the ‘domestic’ and the ‘international’. The article seeks to address such lacunae through a critique of the project of ‘democratisation’. It provides
detailed empirical evidence from Africa. As such Africa is central while also curiously marginal to the general thesis . The article seeks to demonstrate
that far from an alternative to imperialism, the ‘democratisation project’ involves the imposition of aWestern
(neo)liberal procedural form of democracy on imperialised peoples. As such, ‘democracy promotion’ is concerned,
in part, with manufacturing mentalities and consent around the dominant (neo)liberal notion of democracy,
foreclosing attempts to understand or constitute democracy in any other terms. It should be noted, however, that this project is
executed somewhat inconsistently. Western powers have been selective in their approach to liberal-democratic reform
when countervailing strategic, economic or ‘ideological’ interests have prevailed. Thus Western governments
have eschewed aid restrictions despite gross and persistent violations of human rights or ‘good governance’ in
Indonesia, Sri Lanka, Algeria, Egypt, Colombia, Uzbekistan, Pakistan and Niger (Callinicos, 2003; Crawford, 2001; Olsen,
1998). As demonstrated by the situation in Uganda (detailed below) as well as Niger, in cases of violations of liberal democratic principles, official Western
agencies have routinely prioritised liberalisation over democratic principles. Likewise, in other instances, Western intervention
has terminated autonomous democratic processes, for example in Chile, Guatemala and Nicaragua (Slater, 2002). Selective adherence notwithstanding, the orthodox
(neo)liberal model of democracy claims universality.
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DEMOCRACY PROMOTION LINK 2/2

As Bhikhu Parekh notes in his account of the cultural particularity of liberal democracy, such claims have ‘aroused deep fears in the fragile and nervous societies of the
the democratisation
rest of the world’ (Parekh, 1992, p. 160). In seeking to constitute African (and other) social relations in its own particular image,
project reproduces internal tensions and antinomies within liberal thought. As such, a profound non-
correspondence exists, in Mahmood Mamdani’s (1992) terms, between ‘received’ (neo)liberal democratic theory and ‘living’ African realities. Resistance is
therefore widespread, with Western (neo)liberal democratic notions being ‘re-assessed in many places on the continent nowadays, often more censoriously than may be
heard above the clamor of Euro-American triumphalism’ (Comaroff and Comaroff, 1997, p. 141). As Michel Foucault argued in The Subject
and Power, ‘between a relationship of power and a strategy of struggle there is a reciprocal appeal, a perpetual
linking and a perpetual reversal’. The ensuing instability enables analysis ‘either from inside the history of struggle or from the standpoint of the power
relationships’ as well as interaction or ‘reference’ between the two (Foucault, 1994, p. 347) . Each approach is necessary but not possible
within the scope of the present article. The article seeks to provide analysis of the articulation of informal
imperialism, inter alia through ‘democracy’ and ‘governance’ interventions, as a necessary and prefigurative
‘mapping’ exercise (Peterson, 2003) to understanding social transformation, as well as the social conditions of possibility of alternative forms of relation and
engagement.5 The ‘mapping’ of this project is essential in illuminating relations of power. The current imperial
order is inimical to democracy but to ‘disrupt and redirect the particular orderings “at work” we must first be
able to see them clearly’ (Peterson, 2003, p. 173, emphasis in original). As such, analysis of how ‘post-colonial’ imperialism is articulated is a necessary
precondition of thinking in an informed manner about resistance and transformation.
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DEMO POMO EXT
THE US ENGAGES IN PRO DEMOCRACY POLICIES EVEN WHEN THEY KNOW THE PROJECT
WILL FAIL AND A HOSTILE GOVERNMENT WILL RESULT
Peceny 99 (Mark, professor of Comparative Politics at the University of New Mexico, Democracy at the Point of Bayonents, 1999, pg 1-2)
No state has more consistently proclaimed its adherence to this liberal vision of the international system than
the United States (Smith 1994). No state has worked harder to promote this vision by coercing others to adopt liberal
institutions “at the point of bayonets.” The United States concluded the nineteenth century with a war to “liberate” Cuban “freedom fighters ” from
Spanish “tyranny.” For the next two and a half decades, U.S. Marines tried to teach a variety of Caribbean Basin nations how to “elect good men.” In the
immediate aftermath of World War II, the United States mobilized extraordinary resources to transform
Germany and Japan into liberal democracies during its military occupations of the Axis powers. During the
Cold War, the United States promoted democracy during military interventions in Greece, South Korea, South
Vietnam, Lebanon, the Dominican Republic, El Salvador, and a variety of other nations. Thus, the Clinton
administration follows a century-long American tradition in its paradoxical practice of imposing self-
determination through military force. In 1993 Clinton tried to turn the Bush administration’s limited humanitarian intervention in Somalia into an
attempt to lift that country “from the category of a failed state into that of an emerging democracy” (Albright 1993a). In 1994 Clinton launched an invasion to depose
Haiti’s dictators and restore the democratically elected government of Jean Bertrand Aristride. In 1995 American troops embarked for Bosnia in support of a U.S.-
brokered accord that pinned its hopes for maintaining the single Bosnian state, in part, on the “free and fair” elections held in September 1996. In all ,
the United
States has attempted to implant liberal institutions in its target states during thirty-three of its ninety-three twentieth-
century military interventions. Indeed, policymakers have often pursued “proliberalization” policies even when
they expected that U.S. efforts “to impose liberalization and democratization on a government confronted with
violent internal opposition [would] not only fail, but actually assist in the coming to power of new
regimes….hostile to American interests and policies” (Kirkpatrick 1979:36).
THE US JUSTIFIES ITS ACTIONS BY PROMOTING DEMOCRACY ONE-THIRD OF THE TIME AND
OTHERWISE ALLIES WITH REPRESSIVE AUTHORITARIAN AND NON-DEMOCRATIC
GOVERNMENTS
Peceny 99 (Mark, professor of Comparative Politics at the University of New Mexico, Democracy at the Point of Bayonents, 1999, pg 2-3)
this commitment to the promotion of democracy during military intervention has been far
At the same time, however,
from absolute. The United States has failed to promote democracy during nearly two-thirds of its interventions. It
has often allied itself with brutally repressive authoritarian regimes rather than with the liberal opponents of such
regimes. The U.S. has often supported counterinsurgency policies that devastated democratic rights in partially
liberal allies. In perhaps half a dozen nations, most prominently in Guatemala in 1954 and Chile in 1973, the United States used covert measures
to help overthrow elected governments. The subsequent U.S.-backed governments were consistently less
democratic than the regimes they replaced (Forsythe 1992).
PRESIDENTS USE DEMOCRACY PROMOTION TO LEGITIMIZE THEIR POLICIES AFTER THEY’VE

ALREADY BEEN ENACTED
Peceny 99 (Mark, professor of Comparative Politics at the University of New Mexico, Democracy at the Point of Bayonents, 1999, pg 4)
When presidents fail to adopt proliberalization policies at the outset of an intervention, however, liberal
ideological attacks from the Congress often compel them to shift policies, despite the fact that they think that proliberalization
policies might harm U.S. security interests. Congressional pressure can also dissuade presidents from abandoning proliberalization policies in response to a changing
security environment.
Under these circumstances, presidents use the promotion of democracy to build domestic
political consensus and “policy legitimacy” for U.S. interventions (George 1980; Herman and Brodhead 1984; Melanson 1991).
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NORTH KOREA LINK
THE AFFIRMATIVE CRAFTS NORTH KOREA INTO A ROGUE STATE BY CONSTRUCTING THEM
AS A SOURCE OF INSTABILITY OR NUCLEAR WAR. THIS OVERSIMPLIFIES OUR
UNDERSTANDING OF THE SITUATION WHICH LEADS TO AN ENDLESS CYCLE OF
IMPERIALISTIC REACTIONS.
Bleiker 2003 (Roland, Ph.D. in International Relations from Canberra. “A rogue is a rogue is a rogue: US foreign policy and the Korean nuclear crisis” Found in
International Affairs 79, )
Dealing with communist North Korea has become one of the most difficult challenges in global politics today. Totalitarian and reclusive, ideologically isolated and
economically ruined, it is the inherent ‘other’ in a globalized and neoliberal world order. And yet North Korea goes on surviving, not least because its leaders
periodically rely on threats to gain concessions from the international community. The latest such attempt was signalled in the autumn of 2002, when Pyongyang
admitted to a secret nuclear weapons programme and subsequently withdrew from the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT). Thereafter the situation rapidly
deteriorated. By early 2003 both the US and North Korea were threatening each other with outright war. Even Japan, adopting its most militaristic posture in decades,
publicly contemplated the possibility of a pre-emptive strike against North Korea.3 Thedangers of North Korea’s nuclear brinkmanship are
evident. Miscalculation or a sudden escalation of tension could precipitate a human disaster at any moment. Equally dangerous, although much less
evident, are the confrontational and militaristic attitudes with which some of the key regional and global players, most notably the
United States, seek to contain the situation. The problems associated with these approaches have been largely obscured by
Washington’s apparent willingness to de-escalate the crisis through negotiations. ‘I believe this is not a military show-down,’
stressed President George W. Bush. ‘This is a diplomatic show down.’4 Much has been made of the difference between this tolerant approach and the far more
aggressive stance taken in respect of Iraq, where war was presented as the only possibility of preventing a dangerous escalation towards the use by the Baghdad regime
of weapons of mass destruction. The situation was particularly paradoxical since Pyongyang publicly admitted to its nuclear ambition and asked inspectors from the
International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) to leave the country. Baghdad, by contrast, denied possessing weapons of mass destruction and admitted inspectors for the
specific purpose of verifying its claims.5 The
reluctance to use force against North Korea obscures the fact that US foreign
policy is guided by a largely consistent approach towards the phenomenon of so-called ‘rogue’ states. That war was
not advocated in Korea is a reflection of diplomatic constraints and, above all, strategic limitations. South Korea’s then newly elected president, Roh Moo-hyun,
strongly opposed a military solution to the problem. Perhaps even more importantly, the consequences of an escalation in Korea would be hard to contain. One of the
world’s biggest cities, Seoul, is only 50 kilometres away from the heavily militarized ‘Demilitarized Zone’(DMZ) that separates North Korea from the South. Even if
pre-emptive strikes were to neutralize North Korea’s possible nuclear arsenal, they would not be able to destroy all its conventional weapons. The latter alone could
easily trigger a second Korean war, with disastrous consequences on all sides. The purpose of this article is to examine the role of the United States in the Korean
nuclear crisis, for no aspect of the past and present dilemmas on the peninsula can be addressed or even understood without recourse to the US. This is why China
repeatedly stressed that the latest nuclear crisis was primarily an issue between North Korea and the United States.6 Kim Dae-jung, in his final speech as South Korea’s
president, reiterated the same theme: ‘more than anything, dialogue between North Korea and the United States is the important key to a solution.’7 A solution is,
however, far from reach.
Both the US and North Korea see the other as a threat. And each has good reasons for doing
so. But each is also implicated in the production of this threat. The problem is that these interactive dynamics are hard to see, for the
West tends to project a very one-sided image of North Korea—one that sees it solely as a rogue outlaw, and
thus a source of danger and instability. Nicolas Eberstadt, for instance, stresses that ‘North Korean policies and practices have accounted for most of
the volatility within the Northeast Asian region since the end of the Cold War.’8 Very few policy-makers, security analysts and journalists ever make the effort to
imagine how threats are perceived from the North Korean perspective, or consider how these perceptions are part of an interactive security dilemma in which the West,
that the image of
and US foreign policy in particular, is implicated as deeply as the vilified regime in Pyongyang. The central argument of this article is
North Korea as a ‘rogue state’ severely hinders both an adequate understanding and a possible resolution of the
crisis. The rhetoric of rogue states is indicative of how US foreign policy continues to be driven by dualistic and
militaristic Cold War thinking patterns. The ‘Evil Empire’ may be gone; not so the underlying need to define safety and security with reference to
an external threat that must be warded off at any cost. Rogues are among the new threat-images that serve to demarcate the line
between good and evil. As during the Cold War, military means are considered the key tool with which this line
is to be defended. In the absence of a global power that matches the US, this militaristic attitude has, if anything, even intensified. Look at
Washington’s recent promulgation of a preemptive strike policy against rogue states. The consequences of this posture are particularly
fateful in Korea, for it reinforces half a century of explicit and repeated nuclear threats against the government
in Pyongyang. The impact of these threats has been largely obscured, not least because the highly technical and
specialized discourse of security analysis has enabled the US to present the strategic situation on the peninsula
in a manner that misleadingly attributes responsibility for the crisis solely to North Korea’s actions.
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NORTH KOREA LINK
THE CONSTRUCTION OF NORTH KOREA AS A ROGUE THREAT RENEWS THE WITH US OR

AGAINST US PROBLEMATIC INHERENT IN IMPERIALISM. THEIR RHETORIC THAT NORTH
KOREA IS ON THE VERGE OF NUCLEAR WARFARE WILL BE UNDERSTOOD AS A MEANS TO
JUSTIFY MILITARISTIC FORMS OF RETALIATION.
The conflict pattern had been set long before the latest crisis unfolded. Several scholars, most notably Bruce Cumings and Hazel Smith, have for years drawn attention
to Washington’s inability to see North Korea as anything but a dangerous and unpredictable rogue state.51 A look at the deeply embedded nature of this policy attitude
is thus in order, even if it entails a brief detour from the immediate issue of Korean security. Central here is the transition from the Cold War to a new world order.
While the global Cold War power structures collapsed like a house of cards, the mindsets that these structures
produced turned out to be far more resilient. Cold War thinking patterns remain deeply entrenched in US
foreign policy, not least because virtually all of its influential architects rose to power or passed their formative political years during the Cold War. As a result,
security has in essence remained a dualistic affair: an effort to protect a safe inside from a threatening outside . Once the danger of communism had
vanished, security had to be articulated with reference to a new Feindbild, a new threatening other that could provide a sense of
identity, order and safety at home. ‘I’m running out of demons. I’m running out of villains,’ said US general Colin Powell in 1991. ‘I’m down to Castro and Kim Il
Sung.’52 Rogue states were among the new threat images that rose to prominence when Cold War ideological schism gave way to a more blurred picture of global
politics.53 And North Korea became the rogue par excellence: the totalitarian state that disregards human rights and aspires to possess weapons
of mass destruction; the one that lies outside the sphere of good and is to be watched, contained and controlled. But there
is far more to this practice of ‘othering’ than meets the eye. Robert Dujarric hits the nail on the head when identifying why some of the key rogue states, such as North
Korea, Iraq, Iran or Libya, are constituted as ‘rogue’ by the US. It cannot be
their authoritarian nature and their human rights violations
alone, for many other states, including Saudi Arabia and Egypt, have an equally appalling record. Nor can it be that they possess
or aspire to possess weapons of mass destruction. Otherwise states like India, Pakistan or Israel would be constituted as
rogues too. Dujarric stresses that rogue states above all share one common characteristic: ‘they are small or medium nations
that have achieved some success in thwarting American policy.’54 The tendency to demonize rogue states
considerably intensified following the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington of 11 September 2001. For some policy-makers and
political commentators, the American reaction to these events signified a fundamentally new approach to foreign policy. US
Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld heralds the arrival of ‘new ways of thinking and new ways of fighting’.55 Stephen Walt, likewise, speaks of ‘the most rapid and
dramatic change in the history of US foreign policy’.56 Significant changes did, indeed, take place. The inclusion of a preventive first-strike option, for instance, is a
radical departure from previous approaches, which revolved around a more defence oriented military policy . But at a more fundamental, conceptual
level, there is far more continuity than change in the US position. Indeed, one can clearly detect a strong desire to return to the
reassuring familiarity of dualistic and militaristic thinking patterns that dominated foreign policy during the Cold War. The new US foreign policy re-
established the sense of order and certitude that had existed during the Cold War: an inside/outside world in which,
according to the words of President George W. Bush, ‘you are either with us or against us.’ 57 Once again, the world is divided into ‘good’ and ‘evil’;
once again, military means occupy a key, if not the only, role in protecting the former against the latter. ‘The opposition between good and evil is not negotiable,’ Allan
Bloom noted at the time of Ronald Reagan’s presidency. It is a question of principles, and thus ‘a cause of war’.58 Expressed in other words ,
the rhetoric of
evil moves the concept of rogue states into the realm of irrationality. ‘Evil’ is in essence a term of condemnation
for a phenomenon that can neither be fully comprehended nor addressed other than through militaristic forms of
dissuasion and retaliation. This is why various commentators believe that the rhetoric of evil is an ‘analytical cul de sac’ that prevents,
rather than encourages, understanding. Some go as far as arguing that a rhetoric of evil entails an ‘evasion of accountability’, for the normative
connotations of the term inevitably lead to policy positions that ‘deny negotiations and compromise’.59 How is it, indeed, possible to negotiate with evil without being
implicated in it? The contradictions between the rhetoric of evil and the requirements for dialogue have become particularly evident during the most recent nuclear
crisis in Korea. All top US officials publicly stressed one common theme: that ‘there is no reason why discussion about confidence-
building measures cannot take place with Pyongyang.’60 At the very same time, though, the projection of
threats towards North Korea was carefully maintained, even intensified. ‘All options are on the table,’ including military action,
stressed President Bush.61 Powell, likewise, underlined that ‘no military option’s been taken off the table.’62 The assumption behind this approach
is that including North Korea in an ‘axis of evil’ does not necessarily preclude the possibility of engaging it in
dialogue. Indeed, the assumption is that threats will induce dialogue. William Safire expresses this strategy in blunt but entirely appropriate words: ‘We make clear
to weapons traders in the North that their illicit nuclear production is vulnerable to air attack from a nation soon to show its disarmament bona fides in Baghdad … That
readiness will bring about what diplomats call “fruitful, regional, multilateral negotiation”.’63
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NORTH KOREA CASE EVIDENCE
NORTH KOREA’S MILITARY IS AN OVERHYPED THREAT. THEIR STATISTICS DON’T ACCOUNT

FOR THE QUALITY OF THE NORTH KOREAN MILITARY, WHICH IS LACKING.
Virtually all official defence statistics present a seemingly alarming North Korean presence. They juxtapose, for instance,
North Korea’s 1,170,000 standing forces against the 690,000 of the South, its 78 brigades against the 19, its 23,001 armoured vehicles against the 2,400, its 50
submarines against 6, etc., etc., etc.72 Articulated from the privileged vantage point of the state, the strategic studies discourse acquires a degree of political and moral
For years scholars have questioned the accuracy of the calculations
authority that goes far beyond its empirically sustainable claims.
and the political conclusions derived from them. Already in the 1980s, critics pointed out that the official statistics compare
quantity, not quality, and that in terms of the latter the South enjoys a clear strategic advantage over the North,
even without including American nuclear and other weapons stationed in or (possibly) directed towards the
Korean peninsula.73 These critiques have intensified in recent years. In a detailed study of the subject, Moon Chung-in argues that even without US nuclear
support, ‘South Korea is far superior to the North in military capacity’, citing major quality differences in such
realms as communication, intelligence, electronic warfare and cutting-edge offensive weapons systems.74
Sigal, likewise, points out that the much feared one million- man North Korean army is largely a fiction. About half of
them, he estimates, are either untrained or soldier-workers engaged in civil construction. Many of North Korea’s
tanks and aircraft are obsolescent, leaving its ‘ground forces and lines of supply vulnerable to attack from the
air’.75 Humanitarian workers, who have gained access to much of North Korea’s territory in recent years, paint a similar picture. They
stress, for instance, that ‘the few tanks seen on the road cannot get from one village to the next without breaking down or running out of fuel.’76 The political
manipulation of defence expenditure statistics perfectly illustrates how technical data are used to project threats in a particular manner. Policymakers and security
experts keep drawing attention to North Korea’s excessive military expenditures. And excessive they are indeed, averaging 27.5 per cent of GDP over the past few
years and reaching a staggering 37.9 per cent in 1998, at a time when the country was being devastated by famine.77 Seoul’s defence expenditure seems much more
modest in comparison, at a mere 3.5 per cent of GDP. But when one compares the respective expenditures in absolute terms, which is hardly ever done in official
statistics, then the picture all of a sudden looks very different. Given its superior economy, the 3.5 per cent of GDP that Seoul spends on its military amounts to more
than twice as much as the Northern Korean expenses, no matter how excessive the latter appear in terms of percentage of GDP.78 One does not need to be fluent in the
techno-strategic language of security analysis to realize that over the years this unequal pattern of defence spending has created a qualitative imbalance of military
capacities on the peninsula. And yet, the
myth of the strong North Korean army, of ‘the world’s third largest military
capability’, is as prevalent and as strongly hyped as ever.79
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STABILITY LINK
THE AFFIRMATIVE JUSTIFIES FURTHER IMPERIAL EXPANSION. REPRESENTATIONS OF THE

WORLD AS UNSTABLE OR DEREGULATED ARE BASED ON THE ASSUMPTION THAT THE
UNITED STATES CAN PLAY SHERIFF AND STABILIZE THE REGION.
Spanos 2000 (William, “ The Question of Philosophy and Poiesis in the Posthistorical Age: Thinking/ Imagining the Shadow of Metaphysics.” Found in
boundary 2, Volume 27, Number 1, Spring 2000, pp. 151-174)
This accommodational strategy of representation, for example, is epitomized by Richard Haass, a former official in the Bush administration and now director of
foreign policy studies at the Brookings Institute, in his recent book, The Reluctant Sheriff: The United States after the Cold War. 5 Eschewing Fukuyama’s vulnerable
Hegelian eschatological structure in favor of theorizing the actual practices of the United States in the international sphere, Haass frames the
post–cold war
occasion in the totalizing liberal capitalist image of a ‘‘deregulated world’’ (in contrast to the world
‘‘regulated’’ by the cold war scenario) and the role of the United States as that of a sheriff leading posses (the
appropriate members of the United Nations or the NATO alliance) to quell the threats to global stability and peace posed by this
international deregulation. Despite the acknowledgment that conflict is inevitable in the world ‘‘after the cold war’’ (an acknowledgment that, in fact,
echoes Fukuyama), the triumphant (ontological) idea of liberal capitalist democracy—its ontologically grounded commitment to the ‘‘laissez-faire’’ polity
(deregulation), which is to say, to the fictional concept of the sovereign subject—remains intact. Indeed, Haass gives this representational framework far more
representation of
historical power than Fukuyama’s disciplinary discourse of political science is able to muster. For, unlike the Fukuyamans, he informs his
the historically determined and determining exceptionalist mission of the United States in the globalized post–
cold war era with the teleological metaphorics that have been, from the beginning, fundamental to the constitution
and power of the American cultural identity. The metaphor of the sheriff/posse derives from the history of the American West and
constitutes a variation of the pacification processes of westward expansion. As such, it brings with it the entire ideological baggage of the
teleological myth of the American frontier, from the Puritans’ ‘‘errand in the [‘New World’] wilderness’’ to the
myth of Manifest Destiny. As the New Americanist countermemory has persuasively shown, this is the myth that has saturated the
cultural discourse of America, both high and low, since its origins: whether in the form of the American jeremiad, which,
from the Puritans through Daniel Webster to Ronald Reagan, has functioned perennially to maintain the national consensus vis-à-vis its providentially ordained
mission to domesticate (and dominate) what is beyond the frontier, or of the Hollywood western (including its military allotrope),
which has functioned to naturalize what one New Americanist has called the American ‘‘victory culture.’’ 6 The virtually unchallenged official and mediatic
representation of the self-righteous militaristic solution of the crisis in Kosovo—a representation that reiteratively justifies the devastation of Serbia and the terrible
‘‘collateral damage’’ this violence necessarily entails—as a ‘‘just, humanitarian’’ war under taken by the United States under the alias of NATO bears witness to the
historical reality of this myth, to its irresistible durability (despite its self-destruction in the 1960s), and to its inordinate power.
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OFFSHORE BALANCING LINK
THE US USES OFFSHORE-BALANCING TO STOP REGIONAL HEGEMON’S FROM CHALLENGING

US DOMINANCE AND ONLY SERVES TO FACILTATE IMPERIALISM
Gowan ’02 (Peter, professor of International Relations at the London Metropolitan University, “A Calculus of Power,” New Left Review, July-August 2002,
(http://newleftreview.org/A2399 ))
The reverse then follows. The

United States may possess an unrivalled ascendancy on the landmass from Alaska to Tierra del Fuego, but by the same token it
could never hope to acquire an equivalent dominion beyond the seas. Global hegemony has always been, and
remains, beyond its reach. Outside the Western hemisphere, the role of the US has therefore always been that of
an offshore balancer. So it is today, and will be in the future (save in the inconceivable circumstance of it acquiring a monopoly, rather than mere superiority,
of nuclear weapons). Coolly timing its interventions in the two World Wars unleashed in Europe to ensure maximum prior weakening of its rivals, and minimum cost to
itself, America twice helped to block the emergence of Germany as a continental hegemon, and then fought the Cold War to prevent Russia dominating one end of
Historically, however, it has become involved in great-power conflicts overseas only if it
Eurasia, and China the other.
feared the emergence of a regional hegemon there could not be contained by a local coalition of powers—its first
preference always being to ‘buck-pass’ to others, rather than taking on the arduous task of halting the danger itself. Now that the over-riding threat of the Soviet Union
has disappeared, Mearsheimer concludes, we can expect the US to revert to its traditional role, and withdraw its forces from Europe, allowing the variously weaker
local contenders—a newly reunified Germany, a humbled Russia, an apprehensive France or Britain—to check the rise of any new hegemon among them .
In East
Asia, on the other hand, the situation is undoubtedly less favourable, since the enormous demographic weight
and rapid economic growth of China threaten to produce in time a genuine regional hegemon, whose rise
America must seek to delay or foil. But in either of these key strategic theatres, the US will continue to play the
same basic role that it has in the past. ‘Only the threat of a peer competitor is likely to provide sufficient
incentive for the United States to risk involvement in a distant great-power war. The United States is an off-
shore balancer, not the world’s sheriff.’ [24]
THE AMERICAN MILITARY MACHINE USES OFFSHORE BALANCING TO HIDE ITS CONQUESTS
IN CENTRAL ASIA, EURASIA, AFRICA AND OCEANIA
Gowan ’02 (Peter, professor of International Relations at the London Metropolitan University, “A Calculus of Power,” New Left Review, July-August 2002,
(http://newleftreview.org/A2399 ))
For, as the record makes abundantly clear, from the time of its entry into the Second World War, the US has pursued not regional, but global
hegemony—which it has now finally achieved. The evidence of this ambition, exuberantly proclaimed by leading American spokesmen and policy-makers, is so
plain and plentiful that it would be supernumerary to rehearse it all here. It is sufficient, for the purpose, simply to point to Washington’s central strategic initiative of
the past decade—not the winding down of NATO after the end of the Cold War, as required by Mearsheimer’s logic, but its first deployment in action in the Balkans,
and then expansion full-steam ahead to the frontiers of Russia itself.
Since September 11, of course, the ‘revolution in military affairs’ has
carried the American war machine still further, into hitherto unimagined terrain, with bases in five or six Central
Asian states, and forward posts in the Caucasus, to add to the eighty countries in Eurasia, Africa and Oceania already in its keep.
The staggering scale of this armed girdling of the planet tells its own story, which is patently not Mearsheimer’s
offshore balancing.
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OFFSHORE BALANCING EXT
OFFSHORE BALANCING ISN’T A POLITICAL REALITY WHEN THE US ENDORSES PREVENTIVE

WAR, DEMOCRACY AS THE ONLY SOLUTION TO TERRISISM, PROLIFERATION AND
INSTABILITY AS WELL AS DEPLOYMENTS IN EUROPE AND EAST ASIA
Taliaferro ’07 (Jeffrey W., associate professor of political science at Tufts University, “Hegemonic Delusions Power, Liberal Imperialism, and the Bush
Doctrine,” The Fletcher Forum of World Affairs, vol. 31:2, Summer 2007)
Second, many of Layne’s arguments about the feasibility of an offshore balancing strategy today seem disconnected from
political reality. He devotes only five pages in a 290-page book to a discussion of how the United States ought to go about implementing his preferred strategy.
He never grapples with the tremendous sunk costs of U.S. forward deployment in Europe and East Asia, nor does
he consider the lack of support for such a radically different grand strategy among officials in Washington or the
American people. It is also difficult to imagine Washington’s allies in the Persian Gulf, East Asia, and even Western Europe openly advocating the withdrawal
of all U.S. forces in the near future, if for no other reason than that the American military presence dampens the security dilemma in those three regions. Third, Layne’s
extraregional hegemony theory does not appear to explain much of the variation between and across different administrations’ grand strategies during the Cold War and
afterward. In fairness, his book seeks to explain broad patterns in U.S. grand strategy over the course of six decades and to make recommendations for the future.
However, he does not address the fact that many aspects of the Bush Doctrine—its elevation of preventive war
(“preemption”) to the status of declared doctrine; its division of the world into “good” liberal democracies and “evil” outlaw
regimes; its ill-concealed contempt for international institutions and longstanding allies; and its bold assertion
that democratization is the only longterm solution to the threats of jihadist terrorism, WMD proliferation, and
regional instability—are radical departures in U.S. grand strategy.
Spanos Neg - 88 -
MULTILATERALISM LINK
ATTEMPTS TO REMOVE AMERICAN PRESENCE UNDER THE GUISE OF MULTI-LATERALISM IS

SIMPLY A TACTIC TO GIVE LEGITIMACY TO U.S. PRE-EMPTIVE ACTIONS
Edelstein ‘8 (David, Assistant Professor in the Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service and the Department of Government at Georgetown University
“Occupational Hazards: Why Military Operations Succeed or Fail,” International Security, vol. 29, no. 1, pg 49-91 MUSE)
Historian John Dower forwards this normative legitimacy argument by comparing the post-World War II
occupation of Japan with the current U.S. occupation of Iraq. Dower contends that other states in East Asia, the broader international
community, and the occupied population viewed the U.S. occupation of Japan as legitimate, easing the process of occupation. Although the occupation
50
of Japan was essentially unilateral, it was viewed as legitimate because Japan had clearly been the aggressor in
World War II and was in dire need of political, economic, and social reconstruction. In this context, few challenged
the legitimacy of the U.S. occupation, and the U.S. occupiers faced little resistance from other states or the
Japanese population. In contrast, Dower contends, the current U.S. occupation of Iraq is viewed by many as illegitimate.
To appear legitimate, Dower argues, the United States must pursue the occupation of Iraq more multilaterally.
The argument that the United States must act multilaterally in the Iraqi occupation to reclaim legitimacy is
widespread. British Prime Minister Tony Blair and French Foreign Minister Dominique de Villepin have both emphasized the need to
include the United Nations in operations in Iraq for reasons of legitimacy. New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman quotes
51
United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan as saying, "Other nations are prepared to help, but they do not want to join what is perceived as an American
'occupation.' If the forces in Iraq are put under a U.N. mandate, they can still be commanded by an American, like in Bosnia, but it will be perceived differently and
provide the legitimacy for others to join."52 Even U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell has acknowledged that UN involvement is needed in Iraq to
provide "international legitimacy."53
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WAR PLANNING LINK
WAR PLANNING JUSTIFIES VIOLENCE AND INDISCRIMINANT INHUMANITITY, ENABLING

GENOCIDAL LOGIC OF THE HOLOCAUST, EXEMPLIFIED BY THE CONCENTRATION CAMPS OF
VIETNAM .
Spanos 08. [Willaim V. “Global American: The Devastation of Language Under the Dictatorship of the Public Realm” symploke Volume 16, Numbers 1-2, 2008]
Seen from this angle,the mentality of the American bureaucrats that planned and conducted the war in Vietnam, in this
instance, the ones who devised the notorious “pacification” program (a euphemism for violence, probably deriving from the Pax
Romana via the British enclosure movement that annulled the “commons,” ), as the means of solving the “problem” of the invisible,
11
unpredictable, and nomadic tactics of the insurgent enemy—their molecularization and neutralization of the massive American war
machine —comes all to easily and [End Page 188] uncomfortably to be perceived as similar to that of this early,
12
“benign,” Eichmann. Civilian in origin, these various pacification strategies, rarely contested at the time for
their cruel and indiscriminate inhumanity, though often criticized for their failure to accomplish the
“pacification” of the countryside, involved the massive uprooting of the populations of noncombatant
Vietnamese peasantry from their ancestral rice paddies and often, as in its “Operation Phoenix” phase under the
management of “Ambassador” Komer, extreme forms of torture and assassination,13 and their relocation in
contained settlements that were, in actuality, nothing more than concentration camps.14 This forced emigration of a people
whose lives were deeply rooted in their rice culture, which was the means of “neutralizing” (Komer) or “excising” (Westmoreland) “the VC political infrastructure”
(Baritz 1985, 266), rendered the “cleared” space “free-fire zones” or, as all to many of the American soldiers put it, following the directives of the instrumentalist and
quantitative language of their military and civilian superiors in Saigon and the Pentagon, spaces in which “if he’s [sic] dead and a Vietnamese [man or woman, young or
old], he’s VC” (Caputo 1977, 69).
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MORAL OBLIGATION LINK
THE CREATION AND ENFORCEMENT OF MORAL OBLIGATIONS CREATES BORDERS THAT

ACCOMMODATE OR BANISH DISSENT. THESE BORDERS ARE TO BE CONTROLLED AND
ENFORCED BY POCKET NUKES CAPABLE OF DESTROYING EVERYONE THAT DISAGREES.
Codrescu in 09 (Andrei, The Posthuman Dada Guide: Tzara & Lenin Play Chess. Pp. 5-6)
Posthuman life is based on the alleged awareness of all living connections, unlike the irrepressible and murderous peaks and valleys of
human life in the past. The rational description of our posthumanity would have it that the societal mechanisms that were of
such great concern to thinkers have been automated. Political structures larger than the family are projections of automatic
economic systems. Borders are largely imaginary and will become wholly imaginary, soon to be replaced by
aesthetic differences. In other words, there will privately constructed borders created by everyone everywhere,
enforced by pocket nukes capable of eliminating entire cities or regions. Arbitrary moral systems will back up
private aesthetic borders, making it imperative for everyone to receive the correct medication. Unmedicated
people will not be allowed pocket nukes, which makes it necessary that they be naked and searched often by
local militias of art students. In this environment, which is almost completely current, the simulations of pleasure within zones of medicated liberty can
be literally life-saving. These simulations will be a new medium (using all the media) for plotting escape routes and egress points that may or may not lead out of Eden.
These potentially liberating simulations promise an escape into reality, but, beware, all realities adjoining present tightrope Eden may be virtual and not real at all. With
that proviso, an alternative escape project called Dada is being made available here. Dada is the viral option to the virtual certainty.
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IMPACTS
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IMPACT -OCEANS OF BLOOD
US IMPERIALISM CAUSES UNENDING VIOLENCE TILL THE POINT IN WHICH OCEANS WILL BE
FULL OF BLOOD FROM THE VICTIMS OF AMERICAN EXCEPTIONALISM. JUST TO BE CLEAR -
OCEANS OF BLOOD ARE BIGGER THEN ANY NUCLEAR WAR SCENARIO.
SPANOS 2008 [William V, “Global American: The Devastation of Language Under the Dictatorship of the Public Realm,” symploke Vol. 16 Nos 1-2, 2008
pp. 171-214]
If we are attuned to the relentless critique of representation that begins with Heidegger’s de-struction of das Man (the they-self, the one whose thinking is dictated by
the public realm) and culminates in Edward W. Said’s critique of the Orientalist mind, we perceive, rather, that the language of the authors of the Rand Report (and of
their sources), is the deeply inscribed instrumentalist and rigidly systematic language of a powerful guild of foreign policy “experts”—the, now, huge and formidable
constituency of the American community whose “expertise” determines foreign and domestic policy—a community, transcending the Republican and Democratic
parties, that might be called official America or, as one of them put it to the reporter Ron Suskind, who make “reality”: The aid [a “senior advisor in the George W.
as people who “believe that
Bush administration”] said that guys like me were “in what we call the reality-based community,” which he defined
solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.” I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles
and empiricism. He cut me off. “That’s not the way the world really works anymore,” he continued. “We’re an empire now, and when we act, we
create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality— judiciously, as you will—we’ll act again,
creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s
actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.” (Suskind 2004) And insofar as official America
relies on the inordinate successfulness of the “shaping operations” of Madison Avenue in behalf of global capitalism, it
is, one is compelled, however reluctantly, to conclude, the dehumanized language and thinking of a vast
majority of a ventriloquized American public. In putting this collusion between the state and capitalism in the
formation (“shaping”) of the collective identity of an indigenous people in terms of “making reality,” I am, of course,
invoking Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer’s now classic Dialectics of the Enlightenment. Originally published in 1947 , in the immediate wake of
the fall of Nazi Germany, this meditation on the re-enchantment of the world that the disenchanting
enlightenment backed into was intended as a warning to the victorious nations of the capitalist West, not least
the U.S., which they called the “administered world” (Adorno and Horkheimer 2002, xi), a prophesy that the enlightenment
under the aegis of positivist rationality, technology, and the calculative language of the “culture industry”
(including advertising) would end up reproducing the totalitarianism it had spilled oceans of blood to defeat: For
enlightenment, anything which does not conform to the standard of calculability and utility must be viewed with suspicion. Once the movement is able to develop
unhampered by external oppression, there is no holding it back. It s own ideas of human rights then fare no better than the older universals. Any intellectual resistance it
encounters merely increases its strength. The reason is that enlightenment also recognizes itself in the old myths. No matter which myths are invoked against it, by
being used as arguments they are
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IMPACT -VIOLENCE
THIS WESTERN ONTOLOGY OF EXCEPTIONALISM IS AT THE HEART OF ALL MASS, MILITARY

ATROCITIES AND JUSTIFIES KILLING IN THE NAME OF SAVING – MUST REMEMBER VIETNAM
AS AN EXAMPLE OF THIS
Spanos 3 (William V, Professor of English at Binghamton University, A Rumor of War: 9/11 and the Forgetting of the Vietnam War, p. 33-34)
This extraordinarily reductive representation and self-righteous, inexorable, and unilateral practical response to the violence
committed against Americans, which in large part is the consequence of the West’s and, in recent times, of the United States’ depredations in
the East, is not, as I have suggested, unprecedented. On the contrary, it is the predictable manifestation of a deeply inscribed and
naturalized cultural belief in America’s divinely or historically—that is to say, ontologically—ordained exceptionalist mission in
the world’s ‘‘wilderness,’’ one that, in fact, has informed the entire violent history of American expansionism. It
informed the American Puritans’ identification of the Native Americans, who resisted their plantation of God’sWord in the forests of New England, with the
expendable agents of Satan; it informed the period of westward expansionism, which, in the name of Manifest Destiny, justified, first, the wholesale removal, and then
the extermination, of the Native American population; and, most tellingly, it informed the American
representation and conduct of the Vietnam War,
which, to repeat, bore
witness to the destruction of a Southeast Asian country and the indiscriminate slaughter of untold
numbers of its population by the all but full force of the American military machine, which, we should not
forget, included terror: the use of psychological and chemical weapons (what, in referring to Middle Eastern states, American
officialdom calls weapons of indiscriminate mass destruction) in the insanely rational name of saving Vietnam for the free world. This, among other good reasons I
cannot go into here, is why, it seems to me, it is worth retrieving the by now strategically buried history of the Vietnam War by way of the highly representative
example of A Rumor ofWar 5 at this profoundly perilous moment of world history when the dominant culture in the United States is once again concentering an
extremely complex and volatile global condition, which it, and the West over which it has unilaterally claimed leadership, has gone far to produce, in the figure of a
single but symbolic person (and the Taliban government that harbored him) for the purpose of decisive retaliation. For Caputo’s memoir, perhaps more than any other
to the dark underside of the American exceptionalism
book about the Vietnam War, bears powerful witness, if only in a symptomatic way,
that justified not only the United States’ intervention in Vietnam and its unerringly cold-blooded and massively
destructive conduct of the war but also, because its rhetoric betrays a deep historical sense, the violent American
history of which the Vietnam War was only one example.
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IMPACT -TOTALITARIANISM
THE PRACTICE OF AMERICAN EXCEPTIONALISM JUSTIFIES TOTALITARIANISM. THE

GOVERNMENT JUSTIFIES ITSELF POLICING THE WORLD, TORTURING ‘TERRORISTS’, AND
PEACE BY VIOLENCE.
SPANOS 2008 [William V, “Global American: The Devastation of Language Under the Dictatorship of the Public Realm,” symploke Vol. 16 Nos 1-2, 2008
pp. 171-214]
As oppositional intellectuals have claimed from the days of the beginning of the George W. Bush presidency—and, with the deepening
of the quagmire in Iraq, the general American public has increasingly come to agree—this Republican
administration, more than any other administration in the history of the U.S. is one that has played havoc with
the constitutional checks and balances in its arrogant and selfrighteous effort to wrest the power to govern from
the U.S. Congress in behalf of conducting a global war against the Islamic world which it strategically has
called a “global war on terror.” Long before its invasion of Iraq, this Republican president and his neoconservative intellectual deputies, aided and
abetted by the fervor of the Evangelical Christian racist right, had produced an imperial scenario the end of which
was, from the beginning, the “Pax Americana,” the imposition of “peace” by violence—and American style
democracies—in those areas of the world, most notably, the Middle East—that constitute obstacles to America’s global hegemony. In the process—and taking
strategic advantage of the “terrorist” attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on 9/11 by al-Qaeda—this regime, armed by policy experts who represent the
complex dynamics of globalization in terms of the capitalist “deregulation” of the national economy (the free market)1 and supported by the obsequious media,
announced its policy of preemptive wars on “rogues states” and then invaded Afghanistan and, on the false pretext that Saddam Hussein was producing weapons of
mass destruction, Iraq: a “global war on terror,” that is, which has no borders and no foreseeable end. It thus established a global geopolitical crisis situation that has
has
rendered “homeland security” a major—and abiding—ideological priority. As a result of this strategic representation of the global occasion, the Bush presidency
tacitly established a permanent state of exception that has justified a unilateral policing of the world of nations,
the torture of suspected terrorists in defiance of international law, and produced the “Patriot Act,” a climate of
governmental secrecy, a national judicial system that is intent on annulling dissent, a timidity on the part of the Democratic Party in the face of the
administration’s imperial foreign policies: a political system, that is to say, the logic of which, if not (yet) the actual practice,
is unambiguously totalitarian.
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IMPACT -STANDING RESERVE 1/2
THE STANDING RESERVE DESTROYS OUR ONTOLOGICAL RELATIONSHIP IN SUCH A WAY

THAT THINGS CEASE TO BE THINGS. THEIR OBLITERATION OF BEING MAKES TOTAL
PLANETARY DESTRUCTION A LESS IMPORTANT ISSUE AND LIKELY INEVITABLE
CAPUTO 93 (JOHN, Demythologizing Heidegger, p. 136-41)

The essence of technology is nothing technological; the essence of language is nothing linguistic; the essence of starvation has
nothing to do with being hungry; the essence of homelessness has nothing to do with being out in the cold. Is this
not to repeat a most classical philosophical gesture, to submit to the oldest philosophical desire of all, the desire for the pure and uncontaminated, not to mention the safe and
secure? (2) In his essay "The Thing" Heidegger remarks upon the prospect of a nuclear conflagration which could extinguish
all human life: Man stares at what the explosion of the atom bomb could bring with it. He does not see that what
has long since taken place and has already happened expels from itself as its last emission the atom bomb and
its explosion—not to mention the single nuclear bomb, whose triggering, thought through to its utmost potential, might be enough to snuff out all life on earth. (VA,
165/PLT, 166). In a parallel passage, he remarks: ... [Man finds himself in a perilous situation. Why? Just because a third world war might break out
unexpectedly and bring about the complete annihilation of humanity and the destruction of the earth? No. In this dawning atomic age a far
greater danger threatens—precisely when the danger of a third world war has been removed. A strange
assertion! Strange indeed, but only as long as we do not meditate. (G, 27/DT, 56). The thinker is menaced by a more radical
threat, is endangered by a more radical explosiveness, let us say by a more essential bomb, capable of an emission (hinauswerfen) of such
primordiality that the explosion (Explosion) of the atom bomb would be but its last ejection. Indeed, the point is even stronger: even
a nuclear bomb, or a wholesale exchange of nuclear bombs between nuclear megapowers, which would put an end to
"all life on earth," which would annihilate every living being, human and nonhuman, is a derivative threat
compared to this more primordial destructiveness. There is a prospect that is more dangerous and uncanny—unheimhcher
—than the mere fact that everything could be blown apart (Auseinanderplatzen von allem). There is something that would bring
about more homelessness, more not-beingat-home (un-Heimlich) than the destruction of cities and towns and of their inhabitants. What is truly
unsettling, dis-placing (ent-setzen), the thing that is really terrifying (das Entsetzende), is not the prospect of the destruction of
human life on the planet, of annihilating its places and its settlers. Furthermore, this truly terrifying thing has already happened and has
actually been around for quite some time. This more essential explosive has already been set off; things have already been
destroyed, even though the nuclear holocaust has not yet happened. What then is the truly terrifying? The terrifying is that
which sets everything that is outside (heraussitzl) of its own essence (Wesen)'. What is this dis-placing [Entsetzendel? It shows itself
and conceals itself in the way in which everything presences (anwest), namely, in the fact that despite all conquest of
distances the nearness of things remains absent. (VA, 165/P1.T, 166) The truly terrifying explosion, the more essential destruction
is that which dis-places a thing front its Wesen, its essential nature, its ownmost coming to presence. The essential destruction
occurs in the Being of a thing, not in its entitative actuality; it is a disaster that befalls Being, not beings. The destructiveness of this more essential destruction is
aimed not directly at man but at "things" (Dirge), in the distinctively Heideggerian sense. The Wesen of things is their nearness, and it is nearness
which has been decimated by technological proximity and speed. Things have ceased to have true nearness and farness, have sunk into the
indifference of that which, being a great distance away, can be brought close in the flash of a technological instant. Thereby, things have ceased to be things,
have sunk into indifferent nothingness. Something profoundly disruptive has occurred on the level of the Being
of things that has already destroyed them, already cast them out of (herauswerfen¬) their Being. Beings have been brought close to Us technologically;
enormous distances are spanned in seconds. Satellite technology can make events occurring on the other side of the globe
present in a flash; supersonic jets cross the great oceans in a few hours. Yet, far from bringing things "near," this massive
technological removal of distance has actually abolished nearness, for nearness is precisely what withdraws in the
midst of such technological frenzy. Nearness is the nearing of earth and heavens, mortals and gods, in the handmade jug, or the old bridge at Heidelberg, and
it can be experienced only in the quiet meditativeness which renounces haste. Thus the real destruction of the
thing, the one that abolishes its most essential Being and Wesen, occurs when the scientific determination of things
prevails and compels our assent. The thingliness of the jug is to serve as the place which gathers together the
fruit of earth and sun in mortal offering to the gods above.
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IMPACT -STANDING RESERVE 2/2
But all that is destroyed when pouring this libation becomes instead the displacement of air by a liquid; at that
moment science has succeeded in reducing the jug-thing to a non-entity (Nichtige). Science, or rather the dominion
of scientific representation, the rule of science over what comes to presence, what is called the Wesen, which is
at work in science and technology, that is the truly explosive-destructive thing, the more essential dis-placing.
The gathering of earth and sky, mortals and gods, that holds sway in the thing—for "gathering" is what the Old High German thing means—is scattered to the four winds, and
that more essential annihilation occurs even if the bomb never goes off: Science's knowledge, which is
compelling within its own sphere, the sphere of objects, already had annihilated things long before the atom
bomb exploded. The bomb's explosion is only the grossest of all gross confirmations of the long-since
accomplished annihilation of the thing. (VA, 168/PLT, 170J When things have been annihilated in their thingness, the
mushroom clouds of the bomb cannot be far behind. So whether or not the bomb goes off is not essential, does
not penetrate to the essence of what comes to presence in the present age of technological proximities and reduced
distances. What is essential is the loss of genuine nearness, authentic and true nearness, following which the actual
physical annihilation of planetary life would be a "gross" confirmation, an unrefined, external, physical
destruction that would be but a follow-up, another afterthought, a less subtle counterpart to a more inward,
profound, essential, authentic, ontological destruction.
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ALTERNATIVES
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ALT EVIDENCE
OUR ALTERNATIVE IS A SHAKING OF THE EPISTEMIC FOUNDATION OF IMPERIALISM. THIS

CONTINUES AN UNAPPEASABLE ANXIETY THAT THE CULTURE INDUSTRY ATTEMPTS TO
FORCE FORGETTING. THE VIETNAM WAR CONTINUES THE ABILITY TO DECENTER THE
OPPRESSIVE IMPERIALIST IDEOLOGY
SPANOS 2008 [William V, Professor at Binghamton, American Exceptionalism in the Age of Globalization: The Specter of Vietnam, SUNY Press 2008, -14]
It is this decisive shaking of the epistemic foundation of liberal capitalist democracy that explains the
continuing unappeasable anxiety of the American people about a war that officially "ended" in 1975: its spectral
refusal to be deposited in the main—monumental—stream of American history. It is also this rupturing of the
sutured American discourse of hegemony that explains the continuing paranoidal and massively mobilized
representational effort of the culture industry—the news media, television, the film industry, mainstream publishing houses, and even
educational institutions—to "heal the wound" opened up in the collective American psyche by the United States' brutal and contradictory conduct of the war, the
wound, it should be marked, that, since the end of the Cold War and the first Gulf War, has tellingly been rerepresented negatively as " the
Vietnam
syndrome": that is, a national neurosis.19 In short, the decentering of the liberal democratic episteme also
explains the obsessive, but unrealizable, will to forget the haunting specter of Vietnam by remembering it re-
collectively: by reifying and accommodating its disruptive differential force to the American
(democratic/capitalist) cultural memory.
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ALT EVIDENCE - REMEMBERING ‘NAM VS. INSTRUMENTAL PRAXIS
WE MUST REMEMBER VIETNAM AGAINST THEIR INSTURMENTAL PRAXIS WHICH FORGETS

BEING – GUARANTEEING UNENDING WAR OR THE DESTRUCTION OF THE UNITED STATES
SPANOS 2003 [William V., A rumor of War: 9/11 and the Forgetting of the Vietnam War, boundary 2, Volume 30, number 3, Fall 2003]
The lesson the Vietnam War should have taught America, but apparently has not, is that in this globalized postcolonial
age, only a rethinking of America’s perennial exceptionalist mission in the world’s ‘‘wilderness’’— a
rethinking that must be genealogical, that must, in other words, understand America’s modern (instrumentalist)
foreign policy in the light of the very formation of the American national identity—will resolve the complex
global conditions that are the dark legacy of Western imperialism. Only such a radical genealogical rethinking
of America’s role in the world will be able to negate the present historical context, which promises not the Pax
Americana but, as even the Bush administration acknowledges when its deputies remind the American public that the war against terror does not have a
foreseeable end, an ongoing, undecidable war against an undecidable enemy— not to say the establishment of a perpetual national state of
emergency that will play havoc on the civil rights of the American people. To return, at the end of this end, to
Melville’s proleptic witness, we will recall that Captain Ahab’s fiery pursuit of the elusive white whale, like
America’s search-and-destroy mission in Vietnam, did not end in the decisive victory promised by its prophetic
narrative; it ended, rather, in the destruction of the Pequod, Melville’s symbol of the American ship of state.
Spanos Neg - 100 -
ALT SOLVENCY EVIDENCE
INTERROGATING VIETNAM REVEALS THE FLAWED LOGIC OF AMERICAN EXCEPTIONALISM.

William V. Spanos, Prof. of English and Comparative Literature @ SUNY Binghamton, “A Rumor of War: 9/11 and the Forgetting of the Vietnam War,”
boundary 2, Volume 30, Number 3, 2003
To reconstellate this epochal, yet still to be adequately thought, disclosure into the amnesiac, triumphalist post–cold war contex t,
what has menaced the
discourse of America ever since the “benign” intervention of the United States in Vietnam began manifesting
itself in the destruction of the Vietnamese earth and its culture, and the indiscriminate—routinized—killing of
Vietnamese people in order to “save Vietnam” is the specter [End Page 161] of its delegitimation, not simply (I want to
emphasize) at the site of politics but all across the indissoluble continuum that comprises being as a whole, from the
ontological through the linguistic and cultural, to the political sites. In short, what haunts America is the specter of an epistemic break.
I mean, more precisely, the specter understood as that polyvalent differential “reality” that the constructed reality of
empirical/technological thinking—Americanism, that is, metaphysics in its late, triumphant imperial mode—cannot finally
accommodate to its instrumentalist “world picture.” The singular event of Vietnam—its recalcitrant refusal to be reduced to
“war in general”—would deconstruct the dominant American culture’s representation of world history in the
aftermath of the cold war as “the end of history.” That is why the intellectual deputies of this culture, like Fukuyama and Haass, the culture
industry and the information agencies that have made them international luminaries in the domain of thought, and the corporate exponents of the “free” global market
have been compelled at all cost to obliterate the event of Vietnam from their recuperative teleological historical narratives.
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ALT SOLVES - YOUTH RESISTANCE
YOUTH HAVE UNIQUE AGENCY TO CHALLENGE IMPERIALISM AS A WAY OF THINKING AND

BEING IN THE WORLD. WE CAN AS A CATALYST FOR CHANGE BECAUSE WE CAN RESIST
SPONTANEOUS CONSENT TO SYSTEMS OF TRUTH AND CONTROL.
(Henry A. Giroux, "Channel surfing: racism, the media and the destruction of today's youth." 1998)
But in spite of such social and economic differences between generations, there is much to be leered from the sixties in addressing the "Crisis" of youth as it unfolds the
streets, neighborhoods, schools, media, and state apparatuses. The legacy of sixties activism provides a resource for understanding
how the language of critique and possibility opened up a new sense of agency for young people to enter into a
dialogue with power, history, and knowledge. Contradictory and multiple in both how they took hold of their sense of
purpose and meaning, sixties activists suggested a notion of youth linked not merely to an unbridled
narcissism, but to a redefinition of democracy as a vibrant and played a vital role in ending both
segregation and a morally dubious war and in promoting democratic social change. In the current climate,
childhood and youth are no longer treasured for their role in providing a prophetic vision, a multinarrated dream
in which hope becomes the bias for critical agency and civic courage. But history is open, and those adults who felt so
comfortable in the fifties also were unaware of the coming storm of the sixties. Youth are symbolically central to the reproduction of
society. But even where youth in the past were seen as both troubled and troubling, adults used the "crisis" of
youth to order, regulate, and appeal to future generations to take up the demands and relations of power of the
existing social order. Seen as the "other," adults expressed concern and alarm in their attempt to assimilate youth
to existing relations of power and dominant values. In this scenario, youth were in transit between being outside and coming inside.
Something has change in the last decade. Many youth not only are situated beyond the margins of acceptable
society, but also are seen as irrelevant to the way in which society unfolds. The "crisis" of youth is really about
the crisis of adult society and democracy in general. Fortunately, there is always an indeterminacy in youth,
a vibrancy that seems to exceed the limits adults place on them; this is what makes youth appear
dangerous and at the same time provides the ground for prophetic action. Maybe new storm clouds are
formulating so that the twenty-first century will awaken to a new generation of kids willing to put a stop
to the suffering and oppression that has become so endemic to American society, willing to challenge a
society that seems spiritually and ethically frozen with regard to its responsibilities to the present and its
vision of the future.
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ALTERNATIVE SOLVES – CAPITALISM
FORGETTING THE HISTORY OF VIETNAM ENABLES LIBERAL CAPITALISM AND PERPETUATES

INSTRUMENTALIST LOGIC THAT CULMINATED IN THE HOLOCAUST, AND ENSURES THE
CONTINUATION OF PAX AMERICANA – ONLY RETELLING THE HISTORY OF VIETNAM SOLVES
THE AFFIRMATIVE.
William V. Spanos, Prof. of English and Comparative Literature @ SUNY Binghamton, “A Rumor of War: 9/11 and the Forgetting of the Vietnam War,”
boundary 2, Volume 30, Number 3, 2003
In short, the history of the representation of the Vietnam War has been an amnesiac and, insofar as this forgetting
is a forgetting of the difference that makes a difference, a banalizing history. In obliterating the [End Page 159]
radically contradictory memory of Vietnam, this forgetful remembering has enabled the dominant liberal
democratic capitalist culture to represent the denouement of this narrative as the fulfillment of an original
promise: as the end of history and the advent of the Pax Americana. I am invoking this Latin term to recall the promise/fulfillment
structure of Virgil’s Aeneid, which America, like so many other imperial Western nations, appropriated, from the beginning, not simply to justify its ontologically
grounded errand in the Western wilderness but to represent its violent depredations beyond its frontiers and its imperium sine fine in the benign image of universal
peace.10 What, in other words, has haunted the dominant American culture throughout the thirty years since the
American invasion of Vietnam, what it would forget at all costs, is the decisively delegitimizing aporia precipitated by the
fulfillment of the onto-logic of the truth discourse of America. I am referring to the genocidal violence
perpetrated by the United States against the Vietnamese people in the name of “saving Vietnam” for the “free
world,” the violence synecdochically disclosed by the undeviatingly banal problem-solving logic of the
Pentagon Papers that killed, mutilated, and uprooted millions of Vietnamese people—mostly innocent peasants—destroyed
their land, and disintegrated their traditional rice culture. The chilling indifference to human life, especially to Vietnamese life, of
this utterly instrumentalist logic is epitomized in a memorandum McGeorge Bundy, on his return from a “fact-finding” visit
to Vietnam, wrote to President Johnson (7 February 1965), recommending the initiation of a full-scale bombing campaign against North Vietnam: We believe
that the best available way of increasing our chance of success in Vietnam is the development and execution of
a policy of sustained reprisal against North Vietnam—a policy in which air and naval action against the North is justified by and related to the
whole Viet Cong campaign of violence and terror in the South.While we believe that the risks of such a policy are acceptable, we
emphasize that its costs are real. It implies significant U.S. air losses even if no full air war is joined, and it seems likely that it would eventually require an extensive
Yet measured against the costs of defeat in Vietnam, this
and costly effort against the whole air defense system of North Vietnam.
program [End Page 160] seems cheap. And even if it fails to turn the tide—as it may—the value of the effort seems to us to exceed its cost.11 The
sublime inhumanity of this mindless cost-efficiency logic—the “best and the brightest” in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations called
it “can-do” thinking12—cannot help but recall Hannah Arendt’s resonant, but still to be understood, attribution of the
horrifically murderous role Adolph Eichmann, the Nazi functionary, played in the accomplishment of the Final Solution, not to evil as
it has been traditionally understood in the West but to the utter banalization of thinking incumbent on the triumph of instrumental
thinking in the Third Reich: The immediate impulse [for my preoccupation with thinking in The Life of the Mind] came from my attending the
Eichmann trial in Jerusalem. In my report of it I spoke of “the banality of evil.” . . . [W]hat I was confronted with was utterly different [from what the traditional
concept of evil led one to expect] and still undeniably factual. I was struck by a manifest shallowness in the doer that made it impossible to trace the uncontestable evil
The deeds were monstrous, but the doer . . . was quite ordinary,
of his deeds to any deeper level of roots or motives.
commonplace, and neither demonic nor monstrous. There was no sign in him of firm ideological convictions or of specific evil motives, and
the only notable characteristic one could detect in his past behavior during the trial and throughout the pre-trial police examination was something entirely negative: it
was not stupidity but thoughtlessness.13
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EPISTEMOLOGY PORTION
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LINK- TRUTH CLAIMS/REALISM
THE AFF’S ADVANTAGES ARE MERELY CONVOLUTED SCENARIOS BASED ON FALSE MEDIA
PURPOTION OF ABSOLUTE TRUTH. THE USE OF MEDIA’S TRUTH CLAIMS OBFUSCATES
MILITARY ACTION AND SEEKS ONLY TO ENTRENCH THE AMERICAN WILL TO DOMINATE THE
REST OF THE PLANET.
Spanos, 8 (William, V. Prof. of English @ Binghampton) “American Exceptionalism in the Age of Globalization.” P 58-60
As this brief summary suggests by way of stressing the various perspectives on the struggle over Indochina, Greene’s novel is fundamentally about representation or,
rather, the relationship between representation and power. More specifically—and this is what I wish to contribute, in the wake of 9/11 and the United States’ global
“war against terror,” to the prolific retrospective commentary on Greene’s novel and the Vietnam War—it is both a detective story and an allegory or, more precisely,
an antidetective story and an anti-allegory. It is, in other words, a narrative that begins with an assassination that provokes the question, “Who killed the quiet
American, Alden Pyle?,” and “ends” with an “answer” that subverts the expectation it conjures. Told from a perspective outside those of the French colonial, Soviet
communist, and especially American democratic problematics, it also deconstructs and thus estranges the rigid and reductive allegorical, indeed, Manichaean,
discourse of America: its representation of the Cold War between democracy and communism as a struggle between good and evil. And it does this in a way that is
remarkably proleptic not only of the historical future of America’s inexorably determined—we might say missionary— intervention in Vietnam, its mindlessly brutal
conduct of the war, and its humiliating defeat, but also of the poststructuralist and/or postcolonialist, and New Americanist, critical analyses of this shameful epochal
moment of Western, particularly American history. Further, dislocating Greene’s novel from the discursive matrix in which it has been embedded and reconstellating
it into the present post-9/11 historical conjuncture will go far to disclose the secret history that theGeorge W. Bush administration and the
media— the consciousness industry, as Adorno called it—have obfuscated by way of representing its “preemptive”
invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq and its missionary effort to impose American-style democracies in the
Middle East as its unilateral global responsibility. What Greene is suggesting by way of overdetermining representation
(knowledge production) and its relationship to power, to put it provisionally, is that this “quiet American’s” “objective” or
“universal” truth is a construction—a “truth discourse,” to appropriate the poststructuralist language he anticipates—that is grounded in an
imperial metaphysical interpretation of being (the perception of the being of being from after or above its temporal disseminations) that
coerces alterity, whether ontological or cultural or political, into a preconceived self-identical whole, or what is
the same thing, a structured totality. It is what Antonio Gramsci calls a “hegemonic” discourse, a discourse that
is understood by those who speak, write, and live it to be natural, the articulation of the way things really are,
but which, in fact, is a gradually evolved fabrication of the dominant culture, whose end is the disabling of
subaltern resistance and the maintenance and aggrandizement of its authority. It is also, therefore, a discourse that
represents itself as a progression from and opposition to the discourse and practice of the overt and direct use of power. Though it always
exudes the aura of benignity, it is, in fact, a discourse of domination. A hegemonic discourse, in other words, represents
itself in a binary opposition to indoctrination, the calculated, deliberate, and arbitrary imposition of its truth by
a dominant culture on a differential community. Thus, unlike those in a totalitarian society, who are consciously aware of the agents of their
oppression and therefore always constitute a potential force of resistance, in a society in which a hegemonic discourse obtains , those who are exploited
by the dominant culture—those, to underscore the effaced metaphorics of the term, who are marginalized—are silently compelled to represent
the disabling lack in their lives not as the fault of the system, but as their own fault, and thus to think that they can achieve
the full benefits of its truths if they abide by the prevailing (normative) “truth.” The majority of those who live within a society that is
determined by a hegemonic discourse see only the questions that are within, endemic to the inclusive
hegemonic discourse. Any question that is outside the parameters—the circle—of the hegemonic discourse are
thus not questions at all. They may become questions for those who are outside the circumference of the
hegemonic discourse, its Other, like Graham Greene’s exilic and nomadic Fowler, for example, but they cannot be questions for those, like Pyle, who live
entirely within it—give their spontaneous consent to its truth. This, to anticipate, explains why Fowler says that “there was a quality of the implacable in Pyle” (QA,
59) and why Pyle is constantly bewildered by the dislocating ironies of Fowler’s discourse and practice. Let me supplement this Gramscian cultural insight by putting
his definition of hegemony in terms of the metaphor of sight I analyzed in chapter 2, a metaphor that, in deepening Gramsci’s analysis of the cultural, economic, and
political imperialism of Western democracy to include the (onto)logical site, is more adequate than the general definition in determining the nature of Graham
Greene’s portrayal of the “quiet American” and of his contribution to our understanding of the essence of America’s intervention in Vietnam. In
a hegemonic
society, one can only see what the discourse of hegemony allows one to see. Anything other, anything that
contradicts the hegemonic discourse, is not visible to those who live within it. (This is one reason, not incidentally, why
contemporary “theory,” specifically poststructuralist thought, has been such a powerful agency of interrogating the discourse of the West and especially of America,
Having
and why traditionalists and the deputies of the dominant culture have mounted a massive campaign to delegitimize its fundamental counter- or “il-logic”).
its point of departure outside the parameters of the American hegemonic discourse, it is able to see that which
Spanos Neg - 105 -

is invisible to the eyes of those who think inside this discourse, just as Fowler sees what Pyle is blind to: not
least, the blood of the victims of his “innocent” and “benign” American perspective, the symbol, that is, of the
dark side of the myth of American exceptionalism.
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NORTH KOREA LINK
THE AUTHORS THAT THEIR EVIDENCE CITES ARE EXPERTS THAT HAVE PLAYED AN
ESSENTIAL ROLE IN CONSTRUCTING NORTH KOREA AS A THREAT. THEIR ANALYSIS AS BEEN
ESSENTIAL OF PLACING ISSUES BEYOND THE REACH OF INDIVIDUALS. THE IMPACT IS TO
REJECT THEIR EVIDENCE BECAUSE IT’S MORALLY BANKRUPT.
Consider a random example from one of many recent ‘expert’ treatises on North Korea’s missile programme: If North Korea launches a ballistic missile attack on South
Korean airfields and harbors, it could seriously impede Flexible Deterrence Options (FDO) operations by US forces. The argument has been made that even if the North
uses ballistic missiles, the accuracy or circular error probable (CEP) of the Rodong-1 (about 1 km) is such that it would not be able to undertake airstrike missions.66 A
0n the one hand, an array of abstract acronyms and metaphors has removed our
fundamental paradox emerges:
understanding of security issues further and further from the realities of conflict and war. On the other hand, we have
become used to these distorting metaphors to the point that the language of defence analysis has become the
most accepted—and by definition most credible and rational—way of assessing issues of security. The ensuing practices of
political legitimization provides experts—those fluent in the techno-strategic language of abstraction—not only
with the knowledge, but also with the moral authority to comment on issues of defence.67 Experts on military
technologies have played an essential role in constructing North Korea as a threat and in reducing or eliminating
from our purview the threat that emanates from the US and South Korea towards the North. The political debate over
each side’s weapons potential, for instance, is articulated in highly technical terms. Even if non-experts manage
to decipher the jargon packed language in which defence issues are presented, they often lack the technical
expertise to verify the claims thus advanced, even though those claims are used to legitimize important political
decisions. As a result, the technostrategic language of defence analysis has managed to place many important
security issues beyond the reach of political and moral discussions.
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IMPACT- JUSTIFICATION FOR WAR
THE MEDIA ACTS ONLY TO LEGITIMATE AMERICAN MILITARY INVESTMENT MEANING THE
AFF IMPACTS ARE ALL CONSTRUCTIONS OF AN EXCEPTIONALIST WORLD BENT ON SELF-
PRESERVATION. NOT ONLY ARE THE AFF’S ADVANTAGES CONVOLUTED, BUT THEY ARE THE
RESULT OF ATTEMPTS TO FALSELY JUSTIFY AMERICAN MILITARY INVESTMENT.
Spanos, 8 (William, V. Prof. of English @ Binghampton) “American Exceptionalism in the Age of Globalization.” P 89-91
Read in the context of this “changed terrain,” The Quiet American, long before the New Americanists, spoke the truth to the appalling reductiveness—and the
devastating banality—of the representations of Vietnam proliferated endlessly by the Pentagon planners, the military
strategists in Saigon, the media, Hollywood, and, as we shall see in the next two chapters, all too many of the American soldiers who fought the
war (during and after it), all of whom in some degree or other were blinded by the oversight of their textual attitude, that is, were
rendered, like York Harding and his enthusiastic ephebe, incapable of seeing—of bearing witness to—the carnage they wrought
and saw in Vietnam. But my intention in retrieving Graham Greene’s The Quiet American from its past has not simply been to demonstrate its
significance as a proleptic counter history of the period of the Vietnam War and its immediate aftermath. I have
also wanted to suggest its uncanny relevance to the contemporary American occasion: 9/11 and America’s global “war on terror.” As I have shown else where—and
will reiterate in the chapters that follow—the aftermath of the Vietnam War bore witness to the systematic forgetting of its
historical actualities by way of the combined efforts of the American government, the media, and Hollywood
(what Adorno called the culture industry) to recuperate the consensus, that is , the American national identity, that was shattered when
the inordinately violent sociopolitical and military practices of the United States in a small Third World country
delegitimized its theoretical justification of the war. I am not simply referring to the American cultural memory’s
airbrushing of the United States’ clandestine subversion of the Geneva Accords that had brought the long struggle between the
French colonial army and the Viet Minh to it end; its killing and maiming of untold numbers of Vietnamese civilians in its
unrelenting and undiscriminating war of attrition in the face of a strategically invisible enemy (its search and destroy
missions, scorched earth operations, and massive B–52 bombings); its devastation of the Vietnamese land (the defoliation of its forests and the use
of chemical herbicides like Agent Orange); and, not least, its mindlessly indifferent reduction of a traditional rice culture to a
deracinated society of refugees—all in the unrelenting name of saving Vietnam for the “free world.” I am also
referring to the cultural recuperation of the myth of American exceptionalism and the benign rhetoric, popular
and intellectual, circulating around the “divinely” or “historically” ordained mission (errand) in the world’s
wilderness. This willful national amnesia and reaffirmation of the American national identity—this “textual attitude”— (re)produced by the
narcotics of the culture industry and relegitimized by the intellectual deputies of the dominant culture—enabled the
first Bush administration to undertake the Gulf War of 1991 and that president’s declaration in its immediate aftermath that Americans had “kicked the Vietnam
syndrome at last.” Greatly aided by the Al Qaeda attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on 9/11/01, this amnesia also mobilized this negative into a
highly energized positive—a virtually hysterical patriotic—and religioracist—fervor that prompted the second Bush administration to undertake the enactment of the
global scenario its neoconservative intellectual deputies (PNAC), like York Harding in The Quiet American, had conceived long before 9/11: its announcement,
more or less unilaterally, to the world—and in defiance of international law—of a global “war on terrorism”; its unleashing of preemptive wars first against the
Taliban regime in Afghanistan and then against Saddam Hussein’s Iraq; and its installation of puppet regimes intended to impose American-style capitalist
democracies on these Islamic cultures (and any other that it deemed a threat to the Pax Americana), in the name of its rejuvenated exceptionalist global errand, now
represented by its policy experts as saving the world for “civilization.” In the process of achieving a “benign” end in the Middle East, America, like the fictional
America of The Quiet American—represented by the Pyle ventriloquized by the exceptionalist Cold War/Orientalist problematic of York Harding—has been
compelled to see in the Middle Eastern world only that which its renewed global vision allows it to see, a telling example of which is the Bush administration’s
undeviating assertion before and after the invasion of Iraq, against massive evidence to the contrary, that Saddam Hussein had and was intent on using weapons of
mass destruction. America, in other words, has been compelled by its exceptionalist problematic to reduce the differential dynamics of the complex and recalcitrant
past and present history of the Middle East, the legacy, ironically, in large part of the depredations of European and American imperialism, to a simple Manichaean
struggle between good and evil (West- ern, particularly American) civilization and (Islamic) barbarism. As in Greene’s novel, this violent
theoretical
reduction and simplification of the differential historicity of Middle Eastern history to fit the American
problematic has not only resulted in an implacably resolute military practice that has killed and maimed
thousands of innocent Iraqi civilians; it has also precipitated an unforeseen opposition, not only by the Iraqi
people, who were represented by the American army spokesmen (and the media) immediately after the defeat of Saddam Hussein’s army as jubilant over the
prospect of democracy, but also by a substantial and growing body of militant Iraqis who have inaugurated a guerrilla war whose hit-and-run, that is, invisible, tactics,
like those of the Viet Cong in the Vietnam War, has molecularized and rendered ineffective the formidable American occupation army and, therefore, is compelling it
to resort to indiscriminate killing, a practice that, in turn, promises to increase and diversify the opposition to America and its capitalist version of democracy.
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LINK- ANXIETY
THE AMERICAN MEDIA CONSTRUCTS FALSE THREATS BASED ON RACIALIZED MODELS OF
RATIONALITY THAT ALWAYS GUARANTEE VIOLENCE FROM THE RACIAL OTHER. THIS IS A
TACTIC EMPLOYED TO PROVOKE ANXIETY TO SPUR AMERICAN EXCEPTIONALIST ACTION.
YOUR ADVANTAGES ARE NOT TRUE.
Spanos, 8 (William, V. Prof. of English @ Binghampton) “American Exceptionalism in the Age of Globalization.” P 91- 93
In The Clash of Civilizations, for example, Huntington, responding to the rise of anti-American sentiment on a global scale in the wake of the fall and
disintegration of the Soviet Union and America’s assertion of global hegemony, modifies Francis Fukuyama’s “end-of-history” thesis. Taking the latter to be
premature, he substitutes a geopolitical paradigm that represents contemporary, post-Cold War history in terms of
the conflict between a Western civilization led by the United States and other hostile civilizations, above all,
Islamic and Confucian (Chinese) for the paradigm of the Cold War. Nevertheless, this American-centered global paradigm,
precisely like that of the Cold War, reduces history to an inclusive strategic spatial “scenario” that can be seen all at once,
thus mirroring the York Harding problematic that undeviatingly determines the quiet American’s innocently brutal practice in Southeast Asia. “The West [led by the
United States],” Huntington writes summarily, is and will remain for years to come the most powerful civilization. Yet its power relative to that of other
civilizations is declining. [This way of putting America’s power is not to be taken factually, but, as I will show in
chapter 6, as an American jeremiadic strategy intended to provoke the anxiety that is the necessary condition for
the mobilization of national consensus.] As the West attempts to assert its values and to protect its interests, non-
Western societies confront a choice. . . . A central axis of post-Cold War world politics is thus the interaction of Western power and culture with the power
and culture of non-Western civilizations. (CC, 29) Then, in a move reminiscent of York Harding’s problematic (his spatialization of time), Huntington goes on,
undeviatingly, to reassert the practical cultural and political value of this reductive metaphysical and cartographic
mode of inquiry that, in implicitly privileging (over)sight and thus transforming time into manageable(i.e.,
conquerable) space— a map, a tableaux vivante, or “world picture”—enables the inquirer, now understood, not as scholar,
but crisis-manager, to shape/predict the future. This integrally related metaphorics of vision and picturing, seeing and territorializing,
unconsciously pervades his discourse: Maps and Paradigms. This picture of post-Cold War world politics shaped by cultural factors
and involving interactions among states and groups from different civilizations is highly simplified. It omits
many things, distorts some things, and obscures others. Yet if we are to think seriously about the world, and act effectively in it, some sort
of simplified map of reality, some theory, concept, model, paradigm, is necessary. . . .“Finding one’s way through unfamiliar terrain,” John Lewis Gaddis also wisely
observed, “generally requires a map of some sort. Cartography, like cognition itself, is a necessary simplification that allows us to see where we are, and where we
may be going.” (CC, 30) Despite his token acknowledgment that this spatial paradigm “omits many things, distorts some things, and obscures others,”
Huntington’s “indispensable guide to international politics” (no less than Fukuyama’s) clearly, if implicitly, recalls York Harding’s
(and Pyle’s) panoptic Cold War problematic: above all, its tacit indifference to the radical difference that time
always already disseminates, more specifically, the cultural and sociopolitical difference that deconstructed the
American problematic, its geography of Vietnam, and its formidable forwarding war machine in the Vietnam
War. These differences, which are not only ontological but human—as the fourth of the five advantages of the paradigm asserts, it
enables us to “distinguish what is important from what is unimportant” (CC, 30)—are, like the blood on Pyle’s
shoe, irrelevant: “collateral damage.”
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LINK- LEADERSHIP/HEG/DIPLOMACY/RIGHTS/DEMOPROMO
THE AFF’S GLORIFICATION OF THE UNITED STATES AS A REDEEMER NATION AS PER

THEIR_______ADVANTAGE(S) ONLY SERVES TO JUSTIFY FURTHER U.S. INTERVENTION AND
WILL ONLY ELONGATE U.S. PRESENCE IN OTHER NATIONS.
Spanos, 8 (William, V. Prof. of English @ Binghampton) “American Exceptionalism in the Age of Globalization.” P X
In this book I contend that the consequence of America’s intervention and conduct of the war in Vietnam was the self-destruction of the ontological, cultural, and
political foundations on which America had perennially justified its “benign” self-image and global practice from the time of the Puritan “errand in the wilderness.”
In the aftermath of the defeat of the American Goliath by a small insurgent army, the “specter” of Vietnam—by which I mean, among other things, the violence,
bordering on genocide, America perpetrated against an “Other” that refused to accommodate itself to its mission in the wilderness of Vietnam—came to haunt
America as a contradiction that menaced the legitimacy of its perennial self-representation as the exceptionalist and “redeemer nation.” In the aftermath of the
Vietnam War, the dominant culture in America (including the government, the media, Hollywood, and even
educational institutions) mounted a massive campaign to “forget Vietnam.” This relentless recuperative
momentum to lay the ghost of that particular war culminated in the metamorphosis of an earlier general will
to “heal the wound” inflicted on the American national psyche, into the “Vietnam syndrome”; that is, it transformed a
healthy debate over the idea of America into a national neurosis. This monumentalist initiative was aided by a series of historical events between 1989 and 1991
that deflected the American people’s attention away from the divisive memory of the Vietnam War and were
represented by the dominant culture as manifestations of the global triumph of “America”: Tiananmen Square, the
implosion of the Soviet Union, and the first Gulf War. This “forgetting” of the actual history of the Vietnam War, represented in this
book by Graham Greene’s The Quiet American, Philip Caputo’s A Rumor of War, and Tim O’Brien’s Going After Cac- ciato(and many other novels, memoirs, and
contributed to the rise of neoconservatism and the religious right to power in the
films to which I refer parenthetically),
United States. And it provided the context for the renewal of America’s exceptionalist errand in the global
wilderness, now understood, as the conservative think tank the Project for the New American Century put it
long before the invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq, as the preserving and perpetuation of the Pax Americana.
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LINK- HEG
DISCOURSES OF HEGEMONY ARE CANCEROUS ATTEMPTS FOR THE CULTURE INDUSTRY AT
LARGE TO INDOCTRINATE AND CONDITION THE PUBLIC INTO BELIEVING THAT AMERICAN
MILITARY FORCE IS NECESSARY. THIS IS THE WORST FORM OF MILITARISM AND
GUARANTEES ATROCITY.
Spanos, 8 (William, V. Prof. of English @ Binghampton) “American Exceptionalism in the Age of Globalization.” P 178 - 181
This scene of persuasion, from which I have deliberately quoted amply, is a classic instance of the discourse of hegemony, the analysis of which, in its
differentiation between and yet identification of totalitarian and liberal democracy, constitutes, in my mind, the most important contribution of postmodern thought—
from Antonio Gramsci and Louis Althusser, to Raymond Williams, Michel Foucault, and Edward Said—to the analysis of modern (i.e, post-Enlightenment, especially
American) power relations. What is sadly obvious, however, is that neither this climactic scene from Going After Cacciato nor a multitude of analogous ones in the
literature of the Vietnam War has been addressed from the critical—Said calls it “contrapuntal”—perspective afforded by the analysis of the discourse of hegemony.
As a result, this inviolable space of the American soul, I submit, has not simply remained intact in the sense, as I have noted, that
its inviolability has
enabled Americans, both liberal and conservative, to represent the horrors perpetrated by America against Vietnam—its
land, its culture, and its people—as a “tragic mistake” or, at worst, a “betrayal” of the benign American
exceptionalist ethos. As the first Gulf War and, especially, as we shall see in chapter 6, the global “war against terrorism” in the aftermath of 9/11 bears
depressing and ominous witness, this failure of criticism has also enabled the dominant culture in America to “forget
Vietnam,” which is to say, to recuperate an even purer and more virulent form of the myth of American
exceptionalism, now dedicated to the global mission of eradicating “terrorism,” carrying out preemptive wars
against and imposing American-style democracies on “rogue states” that harbor its perpetrators. For these reasons, and
despite what might appear to some as the obvious, I want to invoke at some length, here at the site of the peace table that brings Paul Berlin’s imagined narrative—and
Going After Cacciato—to its “close,” the classic definition of hegemony that Raymond Williams derived from Gramsci’s distinction between political and civil
society and his interrogation of “the truth discourse” of the latter, the liberal discourse that is free from the violence of political society (the repressive states
apparatuses) only so long as it gives its “spontaneous consent” to the values of the dominant capitalist culture. This definition is crucial to an understanding of both
Paul Berlin’s speech and the power relations of the liberal capitalist society of which he is, in “Althusser’s” term, an “interpellated” citizen: The concept of hegemony
often, in practice, resembles these definitions of [“ideology”], but it is distinct in its refusal to equate consciousness with the articulate formal system which can be and
ordinarily is abstracted as “ideology”. It of course does not exclude the articulate meanings, values and beliefs which a dominant class develops and propagates. But it
does not equate these with consciousness, or rather it does not reduce consciousness to them. Instead it sees the relations of domination and subordination, in their
forms as practical consciousness, as in effect a saturation of the whole process of living—not only of political and economic activity, nor only of manifest social
activity, but of the whole substance of lived identities and relationships, to such a depth that the pressures and limits of what can ultimately be seen as a specific
economic, political, and cultural system seem to most of us the pressures and limits of simple experience and common sense. Hegemony
is then not only
the articulate upper level of “ideology,” nor are its forms of control only those ordinarily seen as
“manipulation” or “indoctrination.” It is the whole body of practices and expectations, over the whole of living: our senses
and assignments of energy, our shaping perceptions of ourselves and our world. It is a lived system of meanings and values—constitutive and constituting—which as
they are experienced as practices appear as reciprocally confirming. It thus constitutes a sense of reality for most people in the society, a sense of absolute because
experienced reality beyond which it is very difficult for most members of the society to move, in most areas of their lives. It is, that is to say, in the strongest sense a
“culture,” but a culture which has also to be seen as the lived dominance and sub-ordination of particular classes. What Williams fails to convey by privileging the
abstraction “domination” and its restriction of the interpellated victim to “particular classes” in this otherwise brilliant articulation of Gramsci’s concept of
hegemony is the violence, always at the service of the nation-state, that is latent in its appeal to liberal
democracy (a failure, I think, that accounts for the tepidness, if not the impotence, of the so-called cultural criticism that his work inspired first in England and
then in the United States). Nevertheless, it does convey with the force of illumination the insidious, but virtually irresistible
distinction strategically intrinsic to the discourse of capitalist democracy (what Foucault called “the repressive hypothesis”)54 that
always pits the latter’s “benign,” “ameliorative,” and “humane”— truth-oriented—inquiry and ethos against the (vulnerable) violence of totalitarian power relations to
obscure its complicity with totalitarianism. To put this in the terms of my reading of Berlin’s commonsense argument at the peace table, it discloses with the force of
authority that the
discourse of hegemony has as its fundamental purpose not only the production of the (collective)
soul—the “subjected subject”—which, in its assumed universality, is virtually invulnerable to the corrosiveness
of history—“politics, principles or matters of justice”—but equally important the fear of alienation—of being
exiled—from the collective national soul. As Berlin puts this ontological anxiety reiteratively—it is no accident that he does it in the language of
war and peace—“If inner peace is the true object, would I win in exile?”
Spanos Neg - 111 -

LINK- AMERICAN POWER/PRESTIGE
REPRESENTATION OF AN ALL POWERFUL AMERICAN EMPIRE CRUSHES DISSENT, MAKING IT

A TOOL OF AMERICAN EXCEPTIONALISM
Spanos 2k (William, V. prof. of English @ Binghampton) “Culture and Colonization” pg. 138
In the international sphere, this triumphalist

representation of the post-cold war occasion has enabled the recuperation of a
global discourse and practice that has disarmed the resistance of existing oppositional discourses (even "post-
Marxist" ones) to imperial hegemony. It has, that is, enabled the deputies of the dominant culture to locate the
essential agency of victory, not so much in the economic and/or political spheres-where Left oppositional discourses, in
their vestigial adherence to the baselsuper- structure model and their resistance to theories of decenteredness or undecidability, have heretofore intervened-as in the
the triumphalist representation of the
sphere of culture, as, more specifically, at the site of ontological representation. To put this turn positively,
contemporary global conjuncture has enabled the recuperation of a discourse of deliverance behind which is
concealed the imperial will to power-a neo-imperialism-that the Vietnam War had decisively delegitimated. It is,
for example, this initiative to recuperate the ontological foundation-to (re)legitimate the ontological principles of
liberal democracy-that lies behind the following provocative, but increasingly voiced, reactionary
recommendation of the popular historian, Paul Johnson. Amplifying on his proposal to rehabilitate the idea of territorial trusteeship,
founded on British "common law" and practiced by the "former" colonial powers in the aftermath of World War I, he writes: Their [the mature "civilized" powers']
mandate would usually be of limited duration-5,10,20 years, for example-and subject to super- vision by the Security Council and their ultimate object would be to
take constitutional measures to insure a return to effective self- government with all deliberate speed. I stress "effective" because we must not repeat the mistakes of
the 60s. The trustees would not plan to withdraw until they are reasonably certain that the return to independence will be successful this time. So the mandate may last
50 years, or 100. Reviving trusteeship means reversing the conventional wisdom of the last half-century, which laid down that all peoples are ready for independence
and that any difficulties they encounter are the results of distortions created by colonialism itself. But this philosophy is false, as painful events have repeatedly
demonstrated.
Spanos Neg - 112 -

LINK- HEARTS AND MINDS
JOURNALISTS CLAIMING THAT AMERICA CAN WIN THE HEARTS AND MINDS OF PEOPLE IN
OTHER NATIONS SERVE THE IMPERIAL TRADITION AND JUSTIFY MILITARY INTERVENTION
Spanos 2k (William, V. prof. of English @ Binghampton) “Culture and Colonization” pg. 142
Knowledge production-more specifically, the Occidental interpretation of being-informs, and is informed by,
an imperial will to power. Any failure to recognize this "ontological imperialism" renders postcolonial discourse and practice inadequate to its
emancipatory task. trangement effect of persuasive force. In overdetermining Western humanist scholarship and cultural production, he overlooks and
renders practically invisible, however, the inextricably connected and more fundamental question of the
specifically colonized "Others" allalong the continuum of being- a continuum we have seen Dussel to
acknowledge as well. Said too often minimizes, if he does not entirely efface, the role that ontology-the anthropologos and its
centering, accommodational force-plays in the ideological relay he thematizes. I want to recall that the
anthropological phase of the ontotheological tradition, significantly called "the Enlightenment," is the phase that
witnesses the (re)emergence of a Eurocentric imperialism that represents itself (as in the case of Hegel) as being founded on the "truth" of being or (as in the case of
the United States's intervention in Vietnam) as a project of "winning the hearts and minds" of extraterritorial others to the
essential principles informing its "way of life." Said claims that humanist culture is complicitous with imperialism; if this claim is to have any
validity, it behooves the genealogist of imperialism to look deeper into the historical and ideological origins of humanist culture than Said has done thus far.1° A
genealogy of imperialism must confront not simply humanist culture but humanism as such. It must view with
suspicion the assumption of virtually all modern theoreticians and practitioners of humanism that this
discourse derives a putatively disinterested and free inquiry from classical Greece." Reading the history of humanism against
the grain will show how crucial ontological representation-and its figuration-is in the relay of dominations that Said and others who follow him delimit to Western
cultural production and the imperial project.
Spanos Neg - 113 -
GENERIC LINK 1/2
MODERN POLICIES AND EXPLANATIONS OF INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS ARE FORMULATED

AROUND ONTOLOGY, BUT INTEGRATE A VIOLENT EPISTEMOLOGY OF WAR PLANNING
WHICH CLAIMS CERTAINY IN REGARD TO THE TECHNIQUE FOR ACTION TO ACHIEVE
CERTAIN ENDS. THESE ENDS, HOWEVER, ARE SUPPLIED BY THE ONTOLOGICAL
CONSTRUCTIONS OF SECURITY ALREADY PRESENT. THIS COMBINATION IS PARTICULARLY
NEFARIOUS AS THE ONTOLOGY BUILDS VIOLENCE INTO THE BEING OF NATION-STATE,
WHICH ALLOWS THEIR WAR PLANNING TO APPEAR TO BE AN ACCURATE CALCULATION, BUT
ONE THAT DEHUMANIZED AND DOMINATES AND THUS REDUCES THE ONTOLOGICAL
STANDING OF THE OTHER, AND SO ITSELF BECOMES A FORCE FOR ONTOLOGY. THIS SELF
REINFORCING SYSTEM NOT ONLY FORECLOSES INQUIRY INTO THEIR FLAWED ASSUMPTIONS
ABOUT THE SOURCE ON CONFLICT BUT LOCKS US INTO A SYSTEM OF AUTOMATIC AND
PERPETUAL VIOLENCE.
This essay develops a theory about the causes of war -- and thus aims to generate lines of action and critique for peace -- that cuts beneath analyses based either on a
given sequence of events, threats, insecurities and political manipulation, or the play of institutional, economic or
political interests (the 'military-industrial complex'). Such factors are important to be sure, and should not be discounted, but they flow over a deeper
bedrock of modern reason that has not only come to form a powerful structure of common sense but the
apparently solid ground of the real itself. In this light, the two 'existential' and 'rationalist' discourses of war-making
and justification mobilised in the Lebanon war are more than merely arguments, rhetorics or even discourses. Certainly they mobilise forms of
knowledge and power together; providing political leaderships, media, citizens, bureaucracies and military
forces with organising systems of belief, action, analysis and rationale. But they run deeper than that. They are
truth-systems of the most powerful and fundamental kind that we have in modernity: ontologies, statements about truth and being which claim a
rarefied privilege to state what is and how it must be maintained as it is. I am thinking of ontology in both its senses:
ontology as both a statement about the nature and ideality of being (in this case political being, that of the
nation-state), and as a statement of epistemological truth and certainty, of methods and processes of arriving at
certainty (in this case, the development and application of strategic knowledge for the use of armed force, and
the creation and maintenance of geopolitical order, security and national survival). These derive from the classical idea of
ontology as a speculative or positivistic inquiry into the fundamental nature of truth, of being, or of some phenomenon; the desire for a solid metaphysical account of
things inaugurated by Aristotle, an account of 'being qua being and its essential attributes'.17 In contrast, drawing on Foucauldian theorising about truth and power, I see
ontology as a particularly powerful claim to truth itself: a claim to the status of an underlying systemic foundation for truth, identity, existence and action; one that is
not essential or timeless, but is thoroughly historical and contingent, that is deployed and mobilised in a fraught and conflictual socio-political context of some kind. In
a drive for ontological certainty and completion as
short, ontology is the 'politics of truth'18 in its most sweeping and powerful form. I see such
when it takes the form of the existential and rationalist ontologies of war,
particularly problematic for a number of reasons. Firstly,
it amounts to a hard and exclusivist claim: a drive for ideational hegemony and closure that limits debate and
questioning, that confines it within the boundaries of a particular, closed system of logic, one that is grounded in
the truth of being, in the truth of truth as such. The second is its intimate relation with violence: the dual
ontologies represent a simultaneously social and conceptual structure that generates violence. Here we are
witness to an epistemology of violence (strategy) joined to an ontology of violence (the national security state).
When we consider their relation to war, the two ontologies are especially dangerous because each alone (and
doubly in combination) tends both to quicken the resort to war and to lead to its escalation either in scale and
duration, or in unintended effects. In such a context violence is not so much a tool that can be picked up and
used on occasion, at limited cost and with limited impact -- it permeates being. This essay describes firstly the
ontology of the national security state (by way of the political philosophy of Thomas Hobbes, Carl Schmitt and G. W. F. Hegel) and secondly the
rationalist ontology of strategy (by way of the geopolitical thought of Henry Kissinger), showing how they crystallise into a mutually
reinforcing system of support and justification, especially in the thought of Clausewitz. This creates both a profound ethical
Spanos Neg - 114 -

and pragmatic problem. The ethical problem arises because of their militaristic force -- they embody and
reinforce a norm of war -- and because they enact what Martin Heidegger calls
Spanos Neg - 115 -
GENERIC LINK 2/2
an 'enframing' image of technology and being in which humans are merely utilitarian instruments for use,
control and destruction, and force -- in the words of one famous Cold War strategist -- can be thought of as a 'power to hurt'.19 The
pragmatic problem arises because force so often produces neither the linear system of effects imagined in
strategic theory nor anything we could meaningfully call security, but rather turns in upon itself in a nihilistic spiral of
pain and destruction. In the era of a 'war on terror' dominantly conceived in Schmittian and Clausewitzian terms,20 the arguments of Hannah Arendt (that
violence collapses ends into means) and Emmanuel Levinas (that 'every war employs arms that turn against those that wield them') take on added significance. Neither,
however, explored what occurs when war and being are made to coincide, other than Levinas' intriguing comment that in war persons 'play roles in which they no
longer recognises themselves, making them betray not only commitments but their own substance'. 21 What I
am trying to describe in this essay is a
complex relation between, and interweaving of, epistemology and ontology. But it is not my view that these are
distinct modes of knowledge or levels of truth, because in the social field named by security, statecraft and violence they are
made to blur together, continually referring back on each other, like charges darting between electrodes. Rather they are related
systems of knowledge with particular systemic roles and intensities of claim about truth, political being and
political necessity. Positivistic or scientific claims to epistemological truth supply an air of predictability
and reliability to policy and political action, which in turn support larger ontological claims to national
being and purpose, drawing them into a common horizon of certainty that is one of the central features of past-Cartesian modernity. Here it may be useful to
see ontology as a more totalising and metaphysical set of claims about truth, and epistemology as more pragmatic and instrumental; but while a distinction between
The epistemology of
epistemology (knowledge as technique) and ontology (knowledge as being) has analytical value, it tends to break down in action.
violence I describe here (strategic science and foreign policy doctrine) claims positivistic clarity about techniques of
military and geopolitical action which use force and coercion to achieve a desired end, an end that is supplied
by the ontological claim to national existence, security, or order. However in practice, technique quickly passes
into ontology. This it does in two ways. First, instrumental violence is married to an ontology of insecure
national existence which itself admits no questioning. The nation and its identity are known and essential, prior to
any conflict, and the resort to violence becomes an equally essential predicate of its perpetuation. In this way
knowledge-as-strategy claims, in a positivistic fashion, to achieve a calculability of effects (power) for an ultimate
purpose (securing being) that it must always assume. Second, strategy as a technique not merely becomes an
instrument of state power but ontologises itself in a technological image of 'man' as a maker and user of things,
including other humans, which have no essence or integrity outside their value as objects. In Heidegger's terms,
technology becomes being; epistemology immediately becomes technique, immediately being. This
combination could be seen in the aftermath of the 2006 Lebanon war, whose obvious strategic failure for Israelis
generated fierce attacks on the army and political leadership and forced the resignation of the IDF chief of staff. Yet in its wake neither
ontology was rethought. Consider how a reserve soldier, while on brigade-sized manoeuvres in the Golan Heights in early 2007, was quoted
as saying: 'we are ready for the next war'. Uri Avnery quoted Israeli commentators explaining the rationale for such a war as being to 'eradicate the
shame and restore to the army the "deterrent power" that was lost on the battlefields of that unfortunate war'. In 'Israeli public discourse', he remarked, 'the next war is
these dual ontologies of war link being,
seen as a natural phenomenon, like tomorrow's sunrise.' 22 The danger obviously raised here is that
means, events and decisions into a single, unbroken chain whose very process of construction cannot be
examined. As is clear in the work of Carl Schmitt, being implies action, the action that is war. This chain is also obviously at work in the
U.S. neoconservative doctrine that argues, as Bush did in his 2002 West Point speech, that 'the only path to safety is the path of action', which
begs the question of whether strategic practice and theory can be detached from strong ontologies of the insecure nation-state.23 This is the direction taken by much
realist analysis critical of Israel and the Bush administration's 'war on terror'.24 Reframing such concerns in Foucauldian terms, we could argue that obsessive
such rationalist critiques rely on a one-sided
ontological commitments have led to especially disturbing 'problematizations' of truth.25 However
interpretation of Clausewitz that seeks to disentangle strategic from existential reason, and to open up choice in that
way. However without interrogating more deeply how they form a conceptual harmony in Clausewitz's thought -- and
thus in our dominant understandings of politics and war -- tragically violent 'choices' will continue to be made.
Spanos Neg - 116 -
PROLIF DISCOURSE LINK
THEIR ANALYSIS OF PROLIFERATION ENTRENCHES US THEM DICHOTOMIES THAT REINFORCE

A FLAWED FORM OF EPISTEMOLOGY
Hugh Gusterson, Professor of Anthropology and Science/Technology/Society at MIT, 1999 (“Nuclear Weapons and the Other in the Western Imagination,”
Cultural Anthropology, Volume 14, Issue 1, Available Online via Social Sciences Full Text)
These falsely obvious arguments about the political unreliability of Third World nuclear powers are, I have been
arguing, part of a broader orientalist rhetoric that seeks to bury disturbing similarities between "us" and "them" in a
discourse that systematically produces the Third World as Other. In the process of producing the Third World,
we also produce ourselves, for the Orient, one of the West's "deepest and most recurring images of the other," is
essential in defining the West "as its contrasting image, idea, personality, experience" (Said 1978:1-2). The particular
images and metaphors that recur in the discourse on proliferation represent Third World nations as criminals,
women, and children. But these recurrent images and metaphors, all of which pertain in some way to disorder,
can also be read as telling hints about the facets of our own psychology and culture which we find especially
troubling in regard to our custodianship over nuclear weapons. The metaphors and images are part of the
ideological armor the West wears in the nuclear age, but they are also clues that suggest buried, denied, and
troubling parts of ourselves that have mysteriously surfaced in our distorted representations of the Other. As Akhil
Gupta has argued in his analysis of a different orientalist discourse, the discourse on development, "within development discourse ... lies its
shadowy double ... a virtual presence, inappropriate objects that serve to open up the 'developed world' itself as
an inappropriate object" (1998:4).
Spanos Neg - 117 -
2NC BLOCKS
Spanos Neg - 118 -
AT: PERM- DO BOTH 1/3
1. IT’S ASSIMILATE OR BANISH – THEY ARE NOW SEEKING TO ACCOMMODATE US BY

MAKING THE NEG ANSWERABLE TO THEM BY PERMING – THE AFF BELIEVES THEY CAN
THROW AROUND A COUPLE OF WORDS AND CHANGE EVERYTHING AND THE NEGATIVE HAS
NO CHANCE TO WIN. THIS SHOWS HOW DEEP THEIR IMPERIAL MINDSET GOES.
UNFORTUNATELY FOR THEM, THE ALT SEEKS TO REFUSE THE IMPERIAL DOMINATION THEY
HOLD DEAR AND PROVES THE PERM IMPOSSIBLE
2. THE PERM TAKES THE ALT AND DETERMINES IT AS OTHER, THIS PROCEEDS TO FIT IT
INSIDE THE AFF’S TOTALITY WHICH SAPS THE ALT’S REVOLUTIONARY POTENTIAL AND
JUSTIFIES THE KILL TO SAVE MENTALITY. THE ALT IS REQUIRED TO BOTH LOOK AND ACT TO
THE AFFIRMATIVE’S SPECIFICATIONS TO BE PRODUCTIVE LEST IT PROVOKE THE REPRESSIVE
STATE
Spanos 00
(William V, professor at Bingham University, America’s Shadow, pg 50-51)
Unlike its predecessor in the ancien regime, metaphysical

inquiry at this advanced Enlightenment stage does not obliterate
the contradictory, amorphous, unimproved, and "ahistorical" Other from the vantage point of a visible "center
elsewhere." It "acknowledges" this Other's claims as contributive to (the knowledge of) the larger self-identical Whole. In other words, it "classifies" the amorphous
Others from the vantage point of an invisible "center elsewhere." It differentiates these Others into discrete phenomena — attributes distinguishing identities to them —
within and in behalf of a prior encompassing self-present total Identity. This individuation of the amorphous Other conveys a sense of the sovereign integrity of the
differentiated entities, but it obscures the fact that their uniqueness is entirely dependent on a dominant synchronic Totality, the always present and determining center
To acquire validity the differentiated entity must accommodate its differential
of which is always out of sight.
partiality to the prior Totality, must, that is, objectify and subordinate itself to — take its proper place
within — the gridded structure of the dominant Identity. To become a subject it must heed the call — the hailing —
of the Subject. As his invocation of the ontological metaphorics of the center and the circle should suggest, what the Lacanian
Marxist Louis Althusser says about "the interpellation of the individual as subject" — the (subjected) subject invented by the
bourgeois capitalist Enlightenment — applies by extension to the spatial economy of the (neo)imperial project as such: The
Absolute Subject occupies the unique place of the Centre, and interpellates around it the infinity of individuals into subjects in a
double mirror-connexion such that it subjects the subjects to the Subject, while giving them in the Subject in which each subject can
contemplate its own image (present and future) the guarantee that this really concerns them and Him.... The duplicate mirror-
structure of ideology ensures simultaneously: 1. the interpellation of 'individuals' as subjects; 2. their
subjection to the Subject; 3. the mutual recognition of subjects and Subject, the subjects' recognition of each other, and finally
the subject's recognition of himself; 4. the absolute guarantee that everything really is so, and that on condition that the subjects recognize what they are and
behave accordingly, everything will be all right: Amen — "So be it." Result: caught in this quadruple system of interpellation as subjects, of subjection to the Subject,
of universal recognition and of absolute guarantee, the subjects "work," they "work by them-selves" in the vast majority of cases, with the exception of the "bad
subjects" who on occasion provoke the intervention of one of the detachments of the (repressive) State apparatus .
But the vast majority of (good) subjects work all right "all by themselves," i.e. by ideology (whose concrete forms are realized in the
Ideological State Apparatuses).93 The fulfillment of this promissory accommodational project is called variously "beauty," "perfection," or, most tellingly,
"peace" (pax). In this reconstellated context the differential entity becomes, indeed, productive, but what it produces is a product of exchange value that benefits
the economy and increases the authority of the dominant structure projected by the "supervisory gaze" or,
alternatively, the invisible imperial "Subject" or "center elsewhere."
Spanos Neg - 119 -
3. IF WE WIN LINKS, THEY CAN’T JUST PERM US BECAUSE THE PERM WILL ALWAYS ENGAGE
IN THE IMPERIALISTIC MINDSET. IF THE ALT CAN NEVER QUESTION THE PLAN AND STOP IT,
THEN THE PERM WILL ALWAYS FAIL. EVERY LINK WE WIN IS ANOTHER REASON THE PERM
FAILS AND THE ACCOMMODATE/BANISH MINDSET IS ANOTHER REASON THEY SHOULD LOSE
4. CROSS APPLY THE SPANOS 00 EVIDENCE, HE INDICATES THAT WE MUST OVERDETERMINE

OUR ONTOLOGY SO AS TO NOT FORGET VIETNAM AND THAT IF WE JUST LEAP INTO ACTION,
WE WILL LOSE ALL KNOWLEDGE OF VIETNAM AND OUR TRUE EFFECT – THE PERM PUTS THE
PLAN INTO ACTION, THEY DON’T EVER ATTEMPT TO OVERDETERMINE ONTOLOGY FIRST,
WHICH MEANS THEY WILL FAIL AND ONLY CAUSE OUR IMPACTS YET AGAIN
5. IT’S IMPOSSIBLE TO JUST DO BOTH – THE PERM IS WORSE THAN THE PLAN ITSELF BECAUSE
IT ONLY PRETENDS TO DO THE ALT. IT ATTEMPTS TO ACCOMMODATE OUR ONTOLOGICAL
QUESTIONING INTO IMPERIAL PRACTICE MASKING THE IMPERIAL AGENDA. THIS IS PROVEN BY
THE PACIFICATION OF POST-VIETNAM PROTEST
SPANOS 2000
(William V, professor of Bingham University, America‘s Shadow p 175-176)
From the decentered perspective precipitated by what I have called the epistemic break that occurred in the 1960s, then, the "Jameson-ian"
representation of postmodernity seems to be blinded by its insight into the late capitalist
detemporalization of history to the amnesiac and banalizing strategy of accommodation. This is the strategy, most
subtly developed by the United States in the aftermath of the Vietnam War to pacify and domesticate the visible contradictions exposed by its virulent will to save
Vietnam for liberal democracy, that has increasingly become the essential technology of power of neocapitalist imperialism. A postmodernism that remembers its
historically specific origins as a discursive practice of resistance against a genocidal assault on a Third World people undertaken in the name of the ontological
principles of humanist freedom discloses a different understanding of the logic of late capitalism. Such a retrieval implies not only that this logic is "the spatial logic of
the simulacrum," of fragmentation, superficiality, depthlessness, pastiche, but that this totally disjunctive field of simulacra is a seductive appearance. As I have
suggested, the Vietnam War bore genealogical witness to the continuous complicity between the post-World War II American (neoimperial) capitalist initiative in the
"wilderness" of Vietnam and the rugged individualist entrepreneur of the late nineteenth century, the self-reliant "westering" frontiersman of the early nineteenth
century (Manifest Destiny), the colonial pioneer,and the Puritan planter, whose errand in the wilderness was providentially (ontologically) ordained. To remember this
epochal event — this first postmodern war, as Jameson has rightly identified it — is to estrange the "Jamesonian" representation of postmodernism. The fractured "field
of stylistic and discursive heterogeneity without a norm" becomes the "look" — the re-presentation — produced by a recuperative reorganization of the operative
functions of the American logos in the wake of its decentering in the 1960s. (This reorganization, it should be noted, is in the process of being reproduced in Europe as
the EC.) The
post–Vietnam War self-representation of "America" in the hegemonized terms of radical and
untethered diversity is precisely intended to make such "postmodern" cultural production appear to
correspond with the emancipatory imperatives of the decentering of the Vietnam era — that is, to mask
the imperial agenda of the recuperated accommodational center in the soft features of a tolerant and ameliorative benevolence, that is, in the rhetoric of
"development." This is tacitly the point Edward Said makes in recalling contemporary postcolonial criticism to the critical task demanded by the absolute affiliation
between culture and imperialism: One can recognize new patterns of dominance, to borrow from Fredric Jameson's description of post-modernism, in contemporary
culture. Jameson's argument is yoked to his description of consumer culture, whose central features are a new relationship with the past based on pastiche and nostalgia,
a new and eclectic randomness in the cultural artifact, a reorganization of space, and characteristics of multinational capitalism. To this we must add the
culture's
phenomenally incorporative capacity, which makes it possible for anyone in fact to say anything at all,
but everything is processed either toward the dominant mainstream or out to the margins.15
6. COUNTERPERM : RECONSTELLATE VIETNAM AND APPROACH THE PLAN WITHOUT THE

IMPERIAL MINDSET. THE COUNTERPERM IS MEANT TO PROVE THAT SEQUENCE OF EVENTS IS
IMPORTANT, AS THE AFF INTENDS ON JUST DOING THE PLAN AND RECONSTELLATING
VIETNAM, THEY DON’T’ REALIZE THAT THE PLAN IS STILL BASED ON VIOLENT
ASSUMPTIONS. IT IS ONLY BY DOING THE ALTERNATIVE FIRST THAT WE ESCAPE THE
IMPERIALIAL DOMINANT DISCOURSE]==
Spanos Neg - 120 -
7. THE AFF‘S FORM OF PROBLEM-SOLVING TAKES THE CURRENT UNDERSTANDING OF

WORLD POLITICS AND ONLY MOVES AROUND PIECES TO FIT THEM TOGETHER BETTER. THIS
CAN ONLY ENTRENCH CURRENT REALIST AND STATE-CENTRIC PRACTICES, GUARANTEEING
THE PLAN WON‘T SOLVE.
Bleiker 00
(Roland, professor of Communications, Popular Dissent, Human Agency, and Global Politics, 2000 pg 16-17)
Dissenting in global politics is precisely about redirecting this path. It is about interfering with the very manner in which international relations have been constituted,
perceived and entrenched. The point, then, is not to ‘rescue the exploration of identity postmodernists’, but to explore questions of agency and identity in the context of
an understanding of social dynamics that takes into account how ideas and practices mutually influence each other. This is to accept and deal with the recognition ‘that
our rationalization of the international is itself constitutive of that practice’. The purpose and potential of such an approach are well recognized at least since Robert Cox
problem-solving approaches to world politics, the latter, exemplified by
introduced a distinction between critical and
realist and positivist perceptions of the international, take the prevailing structure of the world as the given
framework for action. They study various aspects of the international system and address the problems that they create. The problem with such
approaches, according to Cox, is that they not only accept, explicitly or implicitly, the existing order as given, but also, intentionally or not, sustain it. Critical theories,
by contrast, problematise the existing power relations and try to understand how they have emerged and how they are undergoing transformation. They engage, rather
discourse, I shall demonstrate, is the most viable conceptual tool
than circumvent, the multi-layered dynamics that make up transversal struggles. The notion of
opens up possibilities to locate and
for such a task. It facilitates an exploration of the close linkages that exist between theory and practice. It
explore terrains of transversal dissent whose manifestations of agency are largely obscured, but nevertheless highly
significant in shaping the course of contemporary global politics.
Spanos Neg - 121 -
AT: PERM- DO THE ALT
1. THIS GOES NEG BECAUSE IT’S NOT A REAL PERM. THE AFF IS ESSENTIALLY SAYING THAT
THE ALT IS A GOOD IDEA – THIS MEANS THAT YOU MUST VOTE NEG!
2. THE AFF IS ATTEMPTING TO CLAIM THE ALT TO SAVE ITS BENIGN FACE. THE ONLY
PURPOSE THIS SERVES IS TO FURTHER PROVE THE AFF CAN’T BREAK AWAY FROM A
VIOLENT, IMPERIAL MINDSET WHICH SEEKS TO CONTINUE TO LIVE BY THE CORRUPTION OF
THE ALT. THEIR ACTION TO CALL THE ALT THEIR OWN IS A PERPETUATION OF VIOLENCE
AND A REASON THEY SHOULD LOSE.
3. EVERY LINK WE WIN TO THE AFF IS ANOTHER REASON THEY CAN’T JUST SEVER FROM
THEIR IMPERIALISTIC MINDSET AND A REASON THEY NEVER GET A PERM [INSERT LINK
STORY HERE].
4. THIS IS ANOTHER INSTANCE OF ACCOMMODATION AS THE AFF ATTEMPTS TO TAKE OVER

OUR ALT, THEY PERPETUATE IMPERIALISM AND CLAIM THAT THEY HAVE SOLVED FOR US
EVEN THOUGH THE PERM FAILS.
Spanos Neg - 122 -
AT: PERM- DO PLAN AND ALT IN EVERY OTHER INSTANCE
1. YOU CAN’T JUST DO THE ALT IN EVERY OTHER INSTANCE. THE POINT OF THE ALT IS TO
REJECT THE VIOLENCE THAT COMES FROM IMPERIAL DOMINATION AND THE MODE OF
THOUGHT IT HAS PROMOTED. TO DO THE PLAN AND THE ALT IN EVERY OTHER INSTANCE
MEANS THAT WE NEVER OVERDETERMINE ONTOLOGY, LEADING TO ALL THE VIOLENCE OF
STATUS QUO, NOW BEING REPLICATED IN THE MIDDLE EAST
2. THE ALT QUESTIONS THE NECESSITY AND REASONS FOR THE PLAN IN THE FIRST PLACE –
IF THEY JUST PASS THE PLAN WITHOUT RECONSTELLATING VIETNAM, THERE IS NEVER
CHANGE TO THE SYSTEM
3. THE ONLY REASON THE AFF EVEN BOTHERS WITH OUR ALT IS TO SHUT US UP AND SHOW
THEMSELVES AS BENEVOLENT INSTEAD OF TAKING RESPONSIBILITY FOR THEIR ACTIONS
Spanos Neg - 123 -
AT: PERM- DO PLAN WITHOUT REPRESENTATIONS
1. THE AFF CAN’T JUST SEVER THE REPRESENTATIONS BECAUSE THEIR ENTIRE PLAN WAS
BASED OFF OF THOSE REPS, WHICH MEANS THAT THEY DON’T JUST GO AWAY
2. PERM DOESN’T SOLVE THE ALT BECAUSE THE PLAN WITHOUT ITS REPRESENTATIONS
STILL DOESN’T RECONSTELLATE VIETNAM AND OVERDETERMINE ONTOLOGY, WHICH
MEANS THAT THEY NEVER CHANGE THE WAY THEY ACT IN THE WORLD
3. THIS PERM IS YET ANOTHER EXAMPLE OF ACCOMMODATION OR BANISHMENT AS THEY

HALF-ASS THEIR EFFORT TO ‘SOLVING’ THE ALT AND THEN CLAIM WE SHOULD LOSE WHEN
WE PROVE IT DOESN’T WORK
Spanos Neg - 124 -
AT: PERM- DO ALT THEN PLAN
1. THE COUNTERPERM IS PREFERABLE TO THE PERM IF WE WIN LINKS TO THEIR ACTION

BECAUSE IT DOES THE ALT THEN APPROACHES THEIR PLAN WITHOUT THE CORRUPTION OF
PREVIOUS IMPERIAL DOMINATION
2. IN THE WORLD OF THE ALT, WE WOULDN’T TALK, THINK OR ACT IN THE SAME WAY. THE
ALT RESOLVES ALL OF THOSE BY RECONSTELLATING VIETNAM INTO OUR THINKING AND
OVERDETERMINING ONTOLOGY. ANY CASE TURN WE WIN IS A DIDAD TO THE PERM AND
PROVES THEIR INCOMPATIBILITY
3. THE ALT ISN’T SOMETHING DONE ONCE AND MOVE ON, RATHER IT’S A CONSTANT
PROCESS BUT THEIR PERM ASSUMES THE PLAN IS STILL PASSED NO MATTER WHAT, WHICH
MEANS THEY NEVER ENGAGE IN THE ACTION OF THE ALT
4. FURTHER, ANY LINKS WE WIN ACT AS REASONS THE PERM FAILS BECAUSE IT PROVES
THAT THEY STILL FUNCTION IN THE WORLD OF THE JEREMIAD
Spanos Neg - 125 -
AT: PERM- DO PLAN THEN ALT
1. THE AFF MISSED THE POINT OF THE KRITIK – ALL OF THE VIOLENCE WE’VE SPREAD TO
OTHER PARTS OF THE WORLD HAVE BEEN BECAUSE WE PREFACE ACTION OVER ONTOLOGY
AND OUR FORGETTING OF VIETNAM – THAT MAKES ALL OF OUR ACTIONS SUSPECT. THE AFF
NEVER ACTUALLY ENGAGES IN THE ALTERNATIVE IF THEY SIMPLY PASS THEIR PLAN FIRST,
BECAUSE THEY’LL ALWAYS HAVE ANOTHER PLAN THAT THEY HAVE TO PASS AND WE
CONTINUE TO REPLICATE THE VIOLENCE SEEN IN VIETNAM
2. THE ALT QUESTIONS THE NECESSITY AND REASONS FOR THE PLAN IN THE FIRST PLACE –
IF THEY JUST PASS THE PLAN WITHOUT RECONSTELLATING VIETNAM, THERE IS NEVER
CHANGE TO THE SYSTEM
3. THE ONLY REASON THE AFF EVEN BOTHERS WITH OUR ALT IS TO SHUT US UP AND SHOW
THEMSELVES AS BENEVOLENT INSTEAD OF TAKING RESPONSIBILITY FOR THEIR ACTIONS
Spanos Neg - 126 -
AT: PERM DOUBLE BIND
1- ALT SOLVES STATUS QUO BY RECONSTELLATING VIETNAM – OUR SPANOS 08 EVIDENCE

INDICATES THAT OUR WAY OF THINKING INFORMS OUR ACTIONS. IF WE RECONSTELLATE
VIETNAM, THEN WE’LL BE ABLE TO CHANGE OUR FOREIGN POLICIES
2- THEY DON’T GET A PERM, WE’VE GIVEN MULTIPLE REASONS AS TO WHY EACH ONE
SPECIFICALLY IS BAD, AS WELL AS SHOWN THAT THE ACCOMMODATE OR BANISH
MENTALITY IS ONE THAT ONLY HARMS ANYTHING DIFFERENT, LIKE THE ALT, IN ORDER TO
SAVE FACE AS IMPERIALISTS
3- NO MATTER HOW MANY NUCLEAR WARS THEY CLAIM TO SOLVE, THE ALT IS ALWAYS
GOING TO BE PREFERABLE. WE HAVE IN ROUND SOLVENCY, WHICH IS US SOLVING FOR THE
STATUS QUO BTDUBS, AND WE ARE A CONSTANT MOVEMENT AGAINST IMPERIALISM. THEIR
CALLS FOR ACTION AND PLANS ARE ONES THAT WILL ALWAYS LINK TO THE KRITIK
Spanos Neg - 127 -
AT: THE IMPACT TURN 1/2
1. EXTEND SPANOS IN 08- AMERICA HAS ENTERED THE INTERREGNUM, OR THE POINT
BETWEEN THE FALL AND BIRTH OF EMPIRES. THE END OF HISTORY DISCOURSE THAT THE
AFFIRMATIVE AND NEOCONS SUBSCRIBE TO PREVENTS OUR POLITICAL ORDER FROM
ADAPTING WHICH GUARANTEES IT’S ONLY A MATTER OF TIME TIL WE FALL. THUS THEIR
IMPACT TURNS ARE INEVITABLE.
2. THE CONTRADICTIONS BETWEEN THE METAPHYSICS OF THE NATION-STATE AND THE

IMMATERIAL, TRANSNATIONAL NATURE OF MODERN CAPITAL HAVE LED US INTO THE
INTERREGNUM. THE AFFIRMATIVE ATTEMPTS TO DISTANCE ITSELF FROM
TOTALITARIANISM, BUT DOING SO ONLY ACCOMMODATES THE PERIPHERAL OTHER TO THE
POINT OF SELF DESTRUCTION.
William V. SPANOS 2008, American Exceptionalism in the age of Globalization. Pages: 258-9
Let me invoke the theory of globalization that this book has tacitly questioned in overdetermining the (exceptionalist) nationalism that has relentlessly determined
America’s national identity and sociopolitical practice from its origins in the Puritan errand in the New World “wilderness” to its post-9/11 errand in the global
however more complicated by the
“wilderness.” What the spectral witness of this literature of the Vietnam War also enables us to see is that,
dynamics of a globalizing process propelled by the computerization of information transmission that is rendering time and space
immediate, the rise of transnational capitalism and the globalization of the “free market,” and the burgeoning of a proletariat
of “immaterial labor,” the contemporary global occasion remains tethered to the nation-state or to the
metaphysics (and its panoptics) informing the idea of the nation-state as exemplified by the United States. It
therefore directs us, not (yet) to the spectacle of a transnational capital that is automatically precipitating the sovereignty of “the
multitude” as Negri and Hardt (and others) are alleging,23 but to a global condition we might call an interregnum, to a resistance
that, aware of the thinning out of the threads binding the periphery to the center endemic to the dynamics of
the logic of accommodation of Enlightenment modernity, nevertheless remains tethered to the power relations
of the center and periphery, or, rather, to the Achilles’ heel of this nation-state model. I mean that contradiction
in the logic of the nation-state which, at one extreme, manifests itself when the privileged center brutally
“reduces” the peripheral corporeal Other to a specter that then comes back to haunt its authority— this is the
way of nation-states that overdetermine totalitarian and overtly imperial ends. Or, antithetically, that
contradiction which, at the other extreme, manifests itself when, in the process of increasingly accommodating
its peripheral Other, the center self-destructs, when, to invoke my epigraph from Yeats, the widening gyre
makes it no longer possible for the center to hold and “things fall apart.” I have been arguing in this book that the United
States has always identified itself with the latter, claiming to benignly accommodate the Other to democratic
and anti-imperialist ends, while, in fact, its exceptionalist logic—and the perpetual frontier (or enemy) endemic
to it—has perennially operated out of a barely concealed but virulent imperialism. Donald Pease and Amy Kaplan, among
others, have led New Americanists in the exploration of American imperialism. Acutely aware of the reciprocality of the nationstate and imperialism, Kaplan, for
example, argues that public understanding of the American nation as a home became inextricable from the dynamics of empire: “Under the self-contained orderly home
lies the anarchy of imperial conquest. Not a retreat from the masculine sphere of empire building, domesticity both reenacts and conceal its origin in the violent
appropriation of foreign land. . . . ‘Manifest Domesticity’ turns an imperial nation into a home by producing and colonizing specters of the foreign that lurk inside and
outside its ever-shifting borders.”24
3. THEY CAN WIN EVERY IMPACT TURN THEY READ AND STILL LOSE THE DEBATE. EXTEND
SPANOS IN 08 - EVERY REASON THAT THEY WIN WHY AMERICAN DOMINANCE IS GOOD
FURTHER JUSTIFIES THE JEREMIAD WHICH COVERS UP THE MALIGNANT PRAXIS THAT
“BENIGN HEGEMONY” HAS USED. JUST ASK THE PEQUADS, VIETNAMESE, NATIVE
AMERICANS, OR FILIPINOS. OH WAIT- THEY’RE DEAD BECAUSE WE KILLED THEM.
Spanos Neg - 128 -
AT: THE IMPACT TURN 2/2

4. IMPERIALISM IS BAD:
A- EXTEND SPANOS IN 08 - AMERICAN EXCEPTIONALISM IS CONTINUING WITH A MOMENTUM
THAT THREATENS TO DESTROY THE ENTIRE PLANET ABSENT THE QUESTIONING PROPOSED
BY THE ALTERNATIVE. RIGHT NOW, THE DOMINANT ELITE HAVE VIEWED POPULATIONS AS
INFERIOR, AND THUS HAVE BEGUN EXTERMINATING THEM. THIS IS PROVEN IN SOMALIA
AND VIETNAM.
B- EVEN IF THEY WIN THAT WE DON’T CAUSE THE DESTRUCTION OF THE EARTH, EXTEND
SPANOS IN 2000- IMPERIALISM CAUSED THE DEATH OF 2 MILLION CITIZENS IN VIETNAM AND
THE DESTRUCTION OF THEIR TRADITIONAL RICE CULTURE. THAT OUTWEIGHS THE RISK OF A
SMALL SCALE REGIONAL WAR.
5. MAKE THEM PROVE THE REASONS WHY IMPERIALISM IS GOOD IN THE WORLD OF THE
ALTERNATIVE. IMPERIALISM HAS BEEN A REASON FOR EVERY WAR SINCE WORLD WAR 2.
THAT MEANS WE ALWAYS CONTROL THE TERMINAL UNIQUENESS TO THE IMPACT DEBATE.
6. THEIR EVIDENCE IS ONLY ASSUMING THE STATUS QUO, NOT A CHANGE TO IMPERIALISM.
THERE’S NO REASON WHY THEIR SCENARIOS CAN’T STILL HAPPEN IN A WORLD WHERE
AMERICA ISN’T A UNIPOLAR HEGEMON.
7- POLITICIANS ARE CAUGHT UP IN THE FACT THAT THE US IS AT THE CENTER OF THE
UNIVERSE. HOWEVER, ABSENT AMERICAN DOMINANCE, THE US WON’T FALL INTO A POWER
VACUUM WITH MASSIVE DEATH. THE US DOESN’T NEED TO PLAY THE ROLE OF THE GLOBAL
POLICEMAN ANYMORE.
Christopher Preble director of foreign policy studies at the Cato Institute. August 3, 2010 “U.S. Military Power: Preeminence for What Purpose?” Found at
http://www.cato-at-liberty.org/u-s-military-power-preeminence-for-what-purpose/.
Why do Americans spend so much more on our military than does any other country, or any other combination of countries? Goure and the Hadley-Perry
commissioners who produced the alternate QDR argue that the purpose of American military power is to provide global public goods, to defend other countries so that
they don’t have to defend themselves, and otherwise shape the international order to suit our ends. In other words, the same justifications offered for American military
dominance since the end of the Cold War. Most in Washington still embraces the notion that America is, and forever will be,
the world’s indispensable nation. Some scholars, however, questioned the logic of hegemonic stability theory from the very beginning. A number
continue to do so today. They advance arguments diametrically at odds with the primacist consensus. Trade routes need not be policed by a single
dominant power; the international economy is complex and resilient. Supply disruptions are likely to be temporary, and the costs
of mitigating their effects should be borne by those who stand to lose — or gain — the most. Islamic extremists are scary, but
hardly comparable to the threat posed by a globe-straddling Soviet Union armed with thousands of nuclear weapons. It is frankly absurd that we spend more today to
fight Osama bin Laden and his tiny band of murderous thugs than we spent to face down Joseph Stalin and Chairman Mao. Many factors have
contributed to the dramatic decline in the number of wars between nation-states; it is unrealistic to expect that a
new spasm of global conflict would erupt if the United States were to modestly refocus its efforts, draw down
its military power, and call on other countries to play a larger role in their own defense, and in the security of
their respective regions. But while there are credible alternatives to the United States serving in its current dual role
as world policeman / armed social worker, the foreign policy establishment in Washington has no interest in
exploring them. The people here have grown accustomed to living at the center of the earth, and indeed, of the
universe. The tangible benefits of all this military spending flow disproportionately to this tiny corner of the United States while the schlubs in fly-over country
pick up the tab. In short, we shouldn’t have expected that a group of Washington insiders would seek to overturn the
judgments of another group of Washington insiders. A genuinely independent assessment of U.S. military spending, and of the strategy the
military is designed to implement, must come from other quarters.
Spanos Neg - 129 -
AT: EMPIRE INEVITABLE / EMPIRE IS UNSTABLE 1/2
1. THIS JUST REPLICATES THE END OF HISTORY DISCOURSE THAT FUKIAMA PARTICIPATES IN.
THEIR BELIEF THAT WE ARE GOING TO BE UNIPOLAR FOREVER, IS THE DEFINITION OF
REACHING THE END OF HISTORY. THAT CLOSES OUR ABILITY TO EVER QUESTION OUR
PRAXIS AS WELL AS JUSTIFIED GENOCIDAL INTERVENTIONS IN OTHER NATIONS.
2. THE US EMPIRE CANNOT BE SUSTAINED, THE WORLD IS TOO COMPLEX AND THE UNITED
STATES LACKS POLITICAL AND ECONOMIC CAPABILITIES. EVEN IF THEY WIN WE HAVE A
STRONG MILITARY, THAT ONLY DEVOLVES INTO OVERCONFIDENT MILITARISM WHICH
SPURS MORE CONFLICTS.
Ikenberry 4 (G. John, Prof. of Politics and Intl. Affairs at Princeton University, Council on Foreign Relations, Illusions of Empire: Defining the New American
Order, http://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/59727/g-john-ikenberry/illusions-of-empire-defining-the-new-american-order?page=show)
Benjamin Barber's Fear's Empire presents a case against the recent unilateral impulses in U.S. foreign policy. According to Barber, empire is not inherent in U.S.
dominance but is, rather, a temptation -- one to which the Bush administration has increasingly succumbed. In confronting terrorism, Washington has vacillated
between appealing to law and undermining it. Barber's thesis is that by invoking a right to unilateral action, preventive war, and regime change, the United States has
undermined the very framework of cooperation and law that is necessary to fight terrorist anarchy. A foreign policy oriented around the use of military force against
Washington cannot
rogue states, Barber argues, reflects a misunderstanding of the consequences of global interdependence and the character of democracy.
run a global order driven by military action and the fear of terrorism. Simply put, American empire is not
sustainable. For Barber, the logic of globalization trumps the logic of empire: the spread of McWorld undermines imperial grand strategy. In most aspects of
economic and political life, the United States depends heavily on other states. The world is thus too complex and interdependent to be ruled
from an imperial center. In an empire of fear, the United States attempts to order the world through force of arms. But this strategy is self-defeating : it
creates hostile states bent on overturning the imperial order, not obedient junior partners. Barber proposes instead a
cosmopolitan order of universal law rooted in human community: "Lex humana works for global comity within the framework of universal rights and law, conferred by
multilateral political, economic, and cultural cooperation -- with only as much common military action as can be authorized by common legal authority; whether in the
Congress, in multilateral treaties, or through the United Nations." Terrorist threats, Barber concludes, are best confronted with a strategy of "preventive democracy" --
democratic states working together to strengthen and extend liberalism. Barber's overly idealized vision of cosmopolitan global governance is less convincing,
the two
however, than his warnings about unilateral military rule. Indeed, he provides a useful cautionary note for liberal empire enthusiasts in two respects. First,
objectives of liberal empire -- upholding the rules of the international system and unilaterally employing
military power against enemies of the American order -- often conflict. As Barber shows, zealous policymakers often invoke the fear
of terrorism to justify unilateral exercises of power that, in turn, undermine the rules and institutions they are meant to protect. Second, the threats posed by
terrorism and weapons of mass destruction are not enough to legitimate America's liberal empire. During the Cold War, the United States
articulated a vision of community and progress within a U.S.-led free world, infusing the exercise of U.S. power with legitimacy. It is doubtful, however, that the war
Mann
on terrorism, in which countries are either "with us or against us," has an appeal that can draw enough support to justify a U.S.-dominated order. Michael
also warns of a dangerous, and ultimately unsustainable, imperial turn in U.S. foreign policy. This "new
imperialism," he argues in Incoherent Empire, is driven by a radical vision in which unilateral military power enforces U.S. rule and overcomes
global disorder. Mann believes that this "imperial project" depends on a wildly inflated measure of American power; the
United States may have awesome military muscle, but its political and economic capabilities are less
overwhelming. This imbalance causes Washington to overemphasize the use of force, turns the quest for empire into
"overconfident and hyperactive militarism." Such militarism generates what Mann calls "incoherent empire," which undermines
U.S. leadership and creates more, not fewer, terrorists and rogue states. In his distinguished scholarly work on the history of social power,
Mann, a sociologist, has argued that four types of power drive the rise and fall of states, nations, empires, regions, and civilizations: military, political, economic, and
ideological. Applying these categories to the United States, Mann concludes that it is, in a jumble of metaphors, "a military giant, a back-seat economic driver, a
political schizophrenic, and an ideological phantom." Mann acknowledges that the United States is a central hub of the world economy and that the role of the dollar as
the primary reserve currency confers significant advantages in economic matters. But the actual ability of Washington to use trade and aid as political leverage, he
believes, is severely limited, as was evident in its failure to secure the support of countries such as Angola, Chile, Guinea, Mexico, and Pakistan in the Security Council
before the war in Iraq. Moreover, Washington's client states are increasingly unreliable, and the populations of erstwhile allies are inflamed with anti-Americanism.
Although the world still embraces the United States'
American culture and ideals, meanwhile, hold less appeal than they did in previous eras.
open society and basic freedoms, it increasingly complains about "cultural imperialism" and U.S. aggression. Nationalism
and religious fundamentalism have forged deep cultures of resistance to an American imperial project. Mann and Barber both make the important point that an empire
built on military domination alone will not succeed. In their characterization, the United States offers security -- acting as a global leviathan to control the problems of a
Hobbesian world -- in exchange for other countries' acquiescence. Washington, in this imperial vision, refuses to play by the same rules as other governments and
Spanos Neg - 130 -

maintains that this is the price the world must pay for security. But this U.S.-imposed order cannot last. Barber points out that the United States has so
much "business" with the rest of the world that it cannot rule the system without complex arrangements of cooperation.
Spanos Neg - 131 -
AT: EMPIRE INEVITABLE / EMPIRE IS UNSTABLE 1/2

Mann, for his part, argues that military "shock and awe" merely increases resistance; he cites the sociologist Talcott Parsons, who long ago noted that raw power,
unlike consensus authority, is "deflationary": the more it is used, the more rapidly it diminishes. The French essayist Emmanuel Todd believes that the long-term
decline predicted by Mann and Barber has already started. In a fit of French wishful thinking, he argues in After the Empire that the
United States'
geopolitical importance is shrinking fast. The world is exiting, not entering, an era of U.S. domination. Washington may
want to run a liberal empire, but the world is able and increasingly willing to turn its back on an ever less relevant United States. Todd's prediction derives from a
creative -- but ultimately suspect -- view of global socioeconomic transformation. He acknowledges that the United States played a critical role in constructing the
global economy in the decades after World War II. But in the process, Todd argues, new power centers with divergent interests and values emerged in Asia and Europe,
while the United States' own economy and society became weak and corrupt. The soft underbelly of U.S. power is its reluctance to take casualties and to pay the costs
of rebuilding societies that it invades. Meanwhile, as U.S. democracy weakens, the worldwide spread of democracy has bolstered resistance to Washington. As Todd
puts it, "At the very moment when the rest of the world -- now undergoing a process of stabilization thanks to improvements in education, demographics, and
democracy -- is on the verge of discovering that it can get along without America, America is realizing that it cannot get along without the rest of the world." Two
implications follow from the United States' strange condition as "economically dependent and politically useless." First, the United States is becoming a global
economic predator, sustaining itself through an increasingly fragile system of "tribute taking." It has lost the ability to couple its own economic gain with the economic
advancement of other societies. Second, a weakened United States will resort to more desperate and aggressive actions to retain its hegemonic position. Todd identifies
this impulse behind confrontations with Iraq, Iran, and North Korea. Indeed, in his most dubious claim, Todd argues that the corruption of U.S. democracy is giving rise
to a poorly supervised ruling class that will be less restrained in its use of military force against other democracies, those in Europe included. For Todd, all of this
points to the disintegration of the American empire. Todd is correct that the ability of any state to dominate the international system depends
on its economic strength. As economic dominance shifts, American unipolarity will eventually give way to a new distribution of
power. But, contrary to Todd's diagnosis, the United States retains formidable socioeconomic advantages. And his claim that a rapacious clique of frightened
oligarchs has taken over U.S. democracy is simply bizarre. Most important, Todd's assertion that Russia and other great powers are preparing to counterbalance U.S.
power misses the larger patterns of geopolitics. Europe, Japan, Russia, and China have sought to engage the United States strategically, not simply to resist it. They are
pursuing influence and accommodation within the existing order, not trying to overturn it. In fact, the great powers worry more about a detached, isolationist United
States than they do about a United States bent on global rule. Indeed, much of the pointed criticism of U.S. unilateralism reflects a concern that the United States will
stop providing security and stability, not a hope that it will decline and disappear.
3. AMERICAN IMPERIALISM IS ON ITS WAY OUT. POWER RELATIONS ARE NOT STATIC WHICH
MEANS NO POWER CAN PERMANENTLY BE AHEAD OF ALL OTHERS, IT’S JUST A MATTER OF
TIME.
Christopher Layne, Associate Professor in the Bush School of Government and Public Service at Texas A&M University and Research Fellow with the Center on
Peace and Liberty at The Independent Institute, 2007 ["The Case Against the American Empire," American Empire: A Debate, Published by Routledge, ISBN
0415952034, p. 64-65]
Can the United States Be Caught? Up to a point, the primacists are correct. In terms of hard power, there is a yawning gap between the United States and the next-
at some point within
ranking powers. It will take some time before any other state emerges as a true “peer competitor” of the United States. Nevertheless,
the next decade or two, new great power rivals to the United States will emerge. To put it slightly differently, American
primacy cannot be sustained indefinitely. The relative power position of great powers is dynamic, not static,
which means that at any point in time some states are gaining in relative power while others are losing it. Thus,
as Paul Kennedy has observed, no great power ever has been able “to remain permanently ahead of all others, because that
would imply a freezing of the differentiated pattern of growth rates, technological advance, and military
developments which has existed since time immemorial.” Even the most ardent primacists know this to be true,
which is why they concede that American primacy won’t last forever. Indeed, the leading primacists
acknowledge, that—at best—the United States will not be able to hold onto its primacy much beyond 2030.
There are indications, however, that American primacy could end much sooner than that. Already there is
evidence suggesting that new great powers are in the process of emerging. This is what the current debate in the United States
about the implications of China’s rise is all about. But China isn’t the only factor in play, and transition from U.S. primacy to multipolarity may be much closer than
primacists want to admit. For example, in its survey of likely international developments up until 2020, the CIA’s National Intelligence Council’s report Mapping the
Global Future notes: The likely emergence of China and India as new major global players—similar to the rise of Germany in the 19th century and the United States in
the early 20th century—will transform the geopolitical landscape, with impacts potentially as dramatic as those of the previous two. In the same way that commentators
refer to the 1900s as the American Century, the early 21st century may be seen as the time when some in the developing world led by China and India came into their
Own. In a similar vein, a recent study by the CIA’s Strategic Assessment Group projects that by 2020 both China (which
Mapping the Global Future pegs as “by any measure a first-rate military power” around 2020) and the European Union will come close to
matching the United States in terms of their respective shares of world power. For sure, there are always potential pitfalls in
projecting current trends several decades into the future (not least is that it is not easy to convert economic power into effective military power). But if the
ongoing shift in the distribution of relative power continues, new poles of power in the international system are
Spanos Neg - 132 -

likely to emerge during the next decade or two. The real issue is not if American primacy will end, but how
soon it will end.
Spanos Neg - 133 -
AT: EMPIRE INEVITABLE EXT 1/5
THE US EMPIRE IS ON ITS WAY TO COLLAPSE. THE ROMAN EMPIRE AND USSR PROVE.
Johnson 3 (Chalmers, President of Japan Policy Research Institute, The American Empire Project, Interview with Chalmers Johnson,
http://www.americanempireproject.com/johnson/johnson_interview.htm)
The United States is embarked on a path not so dissimilar from that of the former Soviet Union a little more than a
decade ago. The Soviet Union collapsed for three reasons -- internal economic contradictions, imperial overstretch, and an inability
to reform. In every sense, we are by far the wealthier of the two Cold War superpowers, so it will certainly take longer for similar afflictions to do their work. But
the equivalent of the economic sclerosis of the former USSR is to be found in our corrupt corporations, the regular looting by insiders of workers' pension funds, the
Imperial
revelations that not a single financial institution on Wall Street can be trusted, and the massive drain of manufacturing jobs to other countries.
overstretch is implicit in our empire of 725 military bases abroad, in addition to the 969 separate bases in the fifty states. Mikhail
Gorbachev tried to reform the Soviet system before it collapsed but he was stopped by entrenched interests in the Cold War system. The United States is
not even trying to reform, but it is certain that vested interests here would be as great or greater an obstacle. It is
nowhere written that the United States, in its guise as an empire dominating the world, must go on forever. The
blowback from the second half of the twentieth century has only just begun. The few optimistic trends in the U.S. include the development of the powerful anti-
globalization coalition that came into being in Seattle in November 1999 and that has subsequently evolved into an anti-war movement. The percentage of the public
that does not get its information from network television but from the Internet and foreign newspapers is growing. Our wholly volunteer armed forces are composed of
people who see the military as an opportunity, but they do not expect to be shot at. Now
that the president and his advisers are ordering
them into savagely dangerous situations, it is likely that many soldiers will not reenlist. And civil society in the United States
remains strong and influential. Nonetheless, it is only prudent to estimate that these trends may not be sufficient to counter the
forces of militarism and imperialism in the country. The main prospect for the future of the world is that perpetual war
waged by the United States against small countries it declares to be "rogue states" will lead to the slow growth of a coalition of
enemies of the United States who will seek to weaken it and hasten its inevitable bankruptcy. This is the way
the Roman Empire ended. The chief problem is that the only way an adversary of the United States can even hope to balance or deter the enormous
American concentration of military power is through what the Pentagon calls asymmetric warfare ("terrorism") and nuclear weapons. American belligerence has deeply
undercut international efforts to control the nuclear weapons that already exist and has rendered the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty more or less moot (the U.S., in
particular, has failed to take any actions it contracted to do under article 6, the reduction of stockpiles by the nuclear armed nations). The only hope for the planet is the
isolation and neutralization of the United States by the international community. Policies to do so are underway in every democratic country on earth in quiet,
unobtrusive ways. If the United States is not checkmated and nuclear war ensues, civilization as we know it will disappear and the United States will go into the history
books along with the Huns and the Nazis as a scourge of human life itself.
UNIPOLAR HEGEMONY IS UNSUSTAINABLE BECAUSE OUR MILITARY CAN’T ADAPT AWAY

FROM LARGE SCALE WARFARE.
David P. Calleo, September 2007, Survival, p. 73-8 (David Calleo, Dean Acheson Professor; Director of the European Studies Program; University Professor of
The Johns Hopkins University)
Given our future's high potential for discord and destruction, having a hegemonic superpower already installed might seem a great good fortune. Yet,
recent
experience also reveals that America's global predominance has been seriously overestimated. Put to the test,
American power counts for less than expected. While the United States is lavishly outfitted for high-technology
warfare, pursuing a hegemonic agenda in today's world requires different capabilities for more primitive forms
of combat, like countering guerrilla warfare and suicidal terrorism. The American military loathes this kind of
fighting and, to date, has not been very good at it Greater success would seem to require a different sort of military - with more and cheaper
troops, trained for intimate contact with the enemy, and prepared for high casualties. Controlling hostile populations will demand extensive linguistic and policing
skills. The
United States is now spending heavily to compensate for its deficiencies, but is still far short of the
resources needed to prevail. This current shortage of means is a further blow to America's hegemonic
expectations. Financial experience during the Cold War accustomed the United States to abundant credit from the world economy, with a good part of the
exchange costs of America's world role eventually covered by others who accumulated the surplus dollars. During the Cold War, however, these others were allies
dependent on American military protection. Today, while the United States' external deficit is bigger than ever, credit to finance it no longer
depends on allies in urgent need of protection. Instead, credit comes increasingly from states whose indefinite accumulation of dollars seems contrary to their own long-
term interests. China, for example, by continuing to add to its already immense reserves of surplus dollars, subsidises its own imports, together with American
consumption and investment, but at the expense of its own more balanced internal development. Given
the growing protectionism against its
exports, it seems unreasonable to expect China to continue this practice indefinitely. If credit from China is
restricted, the United States will face the tougher choices between guns and butter it has long been able to
avoid. In the face of this unaccustomed constraint, how long will America's enthusiasm for hegemony endure?
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HEG WILL INEVITABLY COLLAPSE – ATTEMPTING TO HOLD ON MAKES THE DECLINE WORSE
Pape 9 (Robert A. Pape, Professor of Political Science at the University of Chicago, “The Empire Falls”, The National Interest, June 28,
http://www.nationalinterest.org/Article.aspx?id=20484)
Clearly, major shifts in the balance of power in the international system often lead to instability and conflict. And America’s current predicament is far more severe.
our relative decline of 32 percent is accompanied, not by an even-steeper decline of our near-peer competitor, but rather by a
This time,
144 percent increase in China’s relative position. Further, the rapid spread of technology and technological
breakthroughs means that one great discovery does not buoy an already-strong state to decades-long
predominance. And with a rising China—with raw resources of population, landmass and increasing adoption
of leading technology—a true peer competitor is looming. America’s current, rapid domestic economic decline
is merely accelerating our own downfall. The distinct quality of a system with only one superpower is that no other single state is powerful enough
to balance against it. A true global hegemon is more powerful still—stronger than all second-ranked powers acting as members of a counterbalancing coalition seeking
to contain the unipolar leader. By these standards, America’s relative decline is fundamentally changing international politics, and is fundamentally different from
Russia circa 1850 and Great Britain circa 1910. In current-U.S.-dollar terms—the preferred measure of the unipolar-dominance school— the
United States has
already fallen far from being a global hegemon and unipolarity itself is waning, since China will soon have as
much economic potential to balance the United States as did the Soviet Union during the cold war. At the
beginning of the 1990s, the United States was indeed not only stronger than any other state individually, but its power relative to even the collective power of all other
major states combined grew from 1990 to 2000. Although the growth was small, America almost reached the crucial threshold of 50 percent of major-power product
necessary to become a true global hegemon. So it is understandable that we were lulled into a sense of security, believing we could do as we wished, whenever and
Near the time of the Iraq War, it would have
wherever we wished. The instability and danger of the cold war quickly became a distant memory.
required virtually every major power to actively oppose the United States in order to assemble a
counterbalancing coalition that could approximate America’s potential power. Under the circumstances, hard, military
balancing against the United States was not a serious possibility. So, it is not surprising that major powers opted for soft-balancing
measures—relying on institutional, economic and diplomatic tools to oppose American military power. And yet we are beginning to see “the conflict of history” repeat
itself. Even with less relative power, in the run-up to the Iraq War, people grossly underrated the ability of Germany, France, Russia and China,
along with important regional powers like Turkey, to soft balance against the United States; for instance, to use the United Nations to delay,
complicate and ultimately deny the use of one-third of U.S. combat power (the Fourth Infantry Division) in the opening months of the Iraq War. This is not
yet great-power war of the kind seen in centuries past, but it harkens the instability that future unilateral efforts may trigger . The balance of world power
circa 2008 and 2013 shows a disturbing trend. True, the United States remains stronger than any other state
individually, but its power to stand up to the collective opposition of other major powers is falling precipitously. Though
these worlds depict potential power, not active counterbalancing coalitions, and this type of alliance may never form, nonetheless, American relative power
is declining to the point where even subsets of major powers acting in concert could produce sufficient military
power to stand a reasonable chance of successfully opposing American military policies. Indeed, if present trends
continue to 2013 and beyond, China and Russia, along with any one of the other major powers, would have
sufficient economic capacity to mount military opposition at least as serious as did the Soviet Union during the
cold war. And it is worth remembering that the Soviet Union never had more than about half the world product of the
United States, which China alone is likely to reach in the coming decade. The faults in the arguments of the unipolar-
dominance school are being brought into sharp relief. The world is slowly coming into balance. Whether or not this will be another period of great-power transition
coupled with an increasing risk of war will largely depend on how America can navigate its decline. Policy makers must act responsibly in this new era or risk
international opposition that poses far greater costs and far greater dangers. A COHERENT grand strategy seeks to balance a state’s economic resources and its
foreign-policy commitments and to sustain that balance over time. For America, a coherent grand strategy also calls for rectifying the current imbalance between our
means and our ends, adopting policies that enhance the former and modify the latter. Clearly, the United States is not the first great power to suffer long-term decline—
we should learn from history. Great powers in decline seem to almost instinctively spend more on military forces in order to shore up their disintegrating strategic
positions, and some like Germany go even further, shoring up their security by adopting preventive military strategies, beyond defensive alliances, to actively stop a
rising competitor from becoming dominant. For declining great powers, the allure of preventive war—or lesser measures to “merely” firmly contain a rising power—
has a more compelling logic than many might assume. Since Thucydides, scholars of international politics have famously argued that a declining hegemon and rising
challenger must necessarily face such intense security competition that hegemonic war to retain dominance over the international system is almost a foregone
conclusion. Robert Gilpin, one of the deans of realism who taught for decades at Princeton, believed that “the first and most attractive response to a society’s decline is
to eliminate the source of the problem . . . [by] what we shall call a hegemonic war.” Yet, waging war just to keep another state down has turned out to be one of the
great losing strategies in history. The Napoleonic Wars, the Austro-Prussian War, the Franco-Prussian War, German aggression in World War I, and German and
Japanese aggression in World War II were all driven by declining powers seeking to use war to improve their future security. All lost control of events they thought
they could control. All suffered ugly defeats. All were worse-off than had they not attacked. As China rises, America must avoid this great-power trap. It would be easy
to think that greater American military efforts could offset the consequences of China’s increasing power and possibly even lead to the formation of a multilateral
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strategy to contain China in the future. Indeed, when China’s economic star began to rise in the 1990s, numerous voices called for precisely this, noting that on current
trajectories China would overtake the United States as the world’s leading economic power by 2050.8 Now, as that date draws nearer—
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indeed, current-dollar calculations put the crossover point closer to 2040—and with Beijing evermore dependent on imported oil for continued economic growth, one
might think the case for actively containing China is all the stronger. Absent provocative military adventures by Beijing, however, U.S. military efforts to contain the
rising power are most likely doomed to failure. China’s growth turns mainly on domestic issues—such as shifting the workforce from rural to urban areas—that are
beyond the ability of outside powers to significantly influence. Although China’s growth also depends on external sources of oil, there is no way to exploit this
vulnerability short of obviously hostile alliances (with India, Indonesia, Taiwan and Japan) and clearly aggressive military measures (controlling the sea-lanes from the
Persian Gulf to Asia) that together could deny oil to China. Any efforts along these lines would likely backfire—and only exacerbate America’s problems, increasing
the risk of counterbalancing. Even more insidious is the risk of overstretch.
This self-reinforcing spiral escalates current spending to
maintain increasingly costly military commitments, crowding out productive investment for future growth. Today,
the cold-war framework of significant troop deployments to Europe, Asia and the Persian Gulf is coming unglued . We cannot afford to keep our
previous promises. With American forces bogged down in Iraq and
THE US EMPIRE WILL COLLAPSE DUE TO ECONOMIC WEAKNESS.

Ismi 5 (Asad, Contributor to Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives Monitor, Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives Monitor, Is the U.S. Empire Collapsing?,
http://www.asadismi.ws/usempire.html)
Empires collapse usually due to a combination of military overreach and economic weakness, and, judged by these
criteria, the U.S. imperial order seems headed for an imminent fall. Washington's occupation of Iraq has been a disaster. Even after two
years, the U.S. military has failed to subdue the Iraqi resistance. A recent report by Knight Ridder Newspapers declared the war "unwinnable." Developments on the
economic front are even more dangerous for the U.S. Its
power rests on two main buttresses: 1) military superiority, and 2) the
role of the dollar as the world's reserve currency. Iraq is making a mockery out of the first, and the second is in jeopardy. The U.S. massive trade and budget
deficits ($630 billion and $500 billion, respectively) are driving down the dollar to such an extent that its status as the global reserve currency is imperilled. Since world trade is largely
conducted in U.S. currency, most countries have to export goods and services in order to earn these dollars, but all the U.S. has to do is print more dollars. As economist James K. Galbraith
explains: "[The U.S. gets] real goods and services, the product of hard labour by people much poorer than ourselves, in return for chits that require no effort to produce." The purchase of
massive amounts of dollars by the rest of the world allows Washington to borrow cheaply, keep interest rates low, and run up a trade deficit that no other country could get away with. The
world thus pays for U.S. overconsumption and underproduction. This arrangement, as economist Andre Gunder Frank puts it, is "a global
confidence racket" -- a racket that can continue as long as other countries keep on buying dollar assets such as U.S. Treasury bills, thus financing Washington's enormous deficits. But , if
the value of the dollar keeps going down, why should anyone continue to invest in it? The dollar has dropped by 47% against
the euro since 2001, and by 24% against the yen. The greenback hit a record low of $1.37 against the euro in December 2004. There is no end in sight to
the dollar's fall, since the Bush administration is content to let it drop (in the hope of reducing the trade deficit) and has shown no inclination to rein in overall spending. The dollar is
expected to shrink by another 30% during the second Bush term, which, according to one observer, "will wipe out anyone holding dollar assets and bury the dollar as a global reserve
currency." With these dire prospects, surely anyone in possession of a lot of dollars would be inclined to sell. As U.S. Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan warned in November 2004,
"foreigners may tire of financing the record U.S. current account deficit and diversify into other currencies or demand higher U.S. interest rates." He repeated this warning last March.
Currently, Washington needs to borrow $2.6 billion a day -- 90% of it from foreigners -- to finance its trade deficit and to prevent a dollar collapse. The main lenders are Japan and China,
If these countries
whose central banks hold the largest amount of U.S. dollars ($720 billion and $600 billion, respectively). Taiwan owns $235 billion and South Korea $200 billion.
were to move away from the dollar, the U.S., with its immense borrowing needs, would face bankruptcy. Yet
this is precisely what is happening. On January 26, 2005, prominent Chinese economist Fan Gang announced at the World Economic Forum that China had lost faith
in the U.S. dollar. "The U.S. dollar is no longer in our opinion...(seen) as a stable currency, and is devaluating all the time, and that's creating trouble all the time," Fan said. He added: "So the
real issue is how to change the regime from a U.S. dollar pegging... to a more manageable reference, say euros, yen -- those kinds of more diversified systems... If you do this, in the beginning
you will have some kind of initial shock, you have to deal with some devaluation pressures... Now people understand the dollar will not stop devaluating." Fan is director of the state-run
National Economic Research Institute in Beijing. He is not a government official, but for traders the connection was close enough and they found "great relevance" in his statement. As Paul
Donovan, senior global economist at UBS AG, said, "This in fact is a scenario we consider to be highly likely." And the dollar promptly dropped. Japan's Prime Minister, Junichiro Koizumi,
also made clear in March that "diversification is necessary" when a parliamentary committee questioned him about the dangers of holding too much of one currency. China and Japan have lost
hundreds of billions of dollars during the past two years because of the greenback's decline. According to the Financial Times, "Central banks are shifting reserves away from the U.S. and
towards the Eurozone in a move that looks set to deepen the Bush administration's difficulties in financing its ballooning current account deficit." The Asia Times (Hong Kong) confirms that
Asian central banks have been replacing their dollar reserves with regional currencies for the past three years. A report by the Bank of International Settlements states that the ratio of dollar
reserves held in Asia declined from 81% in the third quarter of 2001 to 67% in September 2004. China reduced its dollar holdings from 83% to 68%, India from 68% to 43%, and Thailand
from 80% to 50%. A January 2005 report sponsored by the Royal Bank of Scotland states that 39 nations out of 65 interviewed were increasing their euro holdings, while 29 were reducing the
amount of dollars they owned. Significantly, the move from the dollar to the euro has spread to the central banks of OPEC countries, which own the most valuable traded resource: oil. The
Bank for International Settlements reported in December 2004 that OPEC members' dollar-denominated deposits fell to 61.5% of their total deposits in the second quarter of 2004, from 75% in
2001. During the same period, euro deposits increased from 12% to 20%. Russia, the biggest non-OPEC oil producer, has switched 25% to 30% of its currency reserves from dollars to euros.
At the end of February, comments by South Korea's central bank sparked another round of dollar declines. The bank announced its intention to move away from the U.S. dollar and increase
holdings of Canadian and Australian dollars. The New York Times described the impact of this "innocuous" statement: "As the Korean comment ping-ponged around the world, all hell broke
loose, with currency traders selling dollars for fear that the central banks of Japan and China, which hold immense dollar reserves... might follow suit. That would be the United States' worst
economic nightmare. If it appeared that the flow of investment from abroad was not enough to cover the nation's gargantuan deficits, interest rates would soar, the dollar would plunge, and the
economy would stall." The global move away from the dollar portends economic devastation for the U.S. Stephen Roach, chief economist at Morgan Stanley, one of the world's leading
that the $2.6 billion the U.S. has
investor firms, has told clients that the U.S. does not have more than a 10% chance of avoiding "economic Armageddon." He points out
to import every day to finance its trade deficit constitutes an incredible 80% of the world's net savings.
Obviously it's an unsustainable situation. According to Roach, the dollar will keep falling due to the U.S.'s record trade deficit. To attract foreign capital and check
inflation, the Federal Reserve's Greenspan will be forced "to raise interest rates further and faster than he wants." U.S. consumers, already deep in debt, "will get pounded." The record U.S.
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household debt is now equal to 85% of the economy [the U.S. national debt is $7.7 trillion, while total U.S. debt is an unfathomable $43 trillion]. Americans already spend a record proportion
of their income on interest payments, and interest rates have not even substantially increased yet. Thus the stage appears set for massive national bankruptcy.
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According to the Los Angeles Times, higher interest rates "would be disastrous for a country weaned on cheap credit." A rise in interest rates would particularly affect a real estate market built
on low interest and mortgage rates. This market is now the main engine of U.S. consumption. Millions of Americans have taken out loans against the rising value of their homes and use them
(in Roach's words) as "massive ATM machines." As Andre´ Gunder Frank explains, higher interest rates threaten "a collapse of the housing price bubble [which] with increased interest and
mortgage rates would drastically undercut house prices, thereby having a domino effect on their owners' enormous second and third re-mortgages and credit-card and other debt, their
consumption, corporate debt and profit, and investment." Echoing Roach, Former Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker puts the likelihood of a financial disaster at 75%, while the U.S.
Comptroller-General (head auditor), David Walker, "makes no bones about the fact that the situation is dire." For Martin Wolf, associate editor of the Financial Times (U.K.), "The U.S. is now
on the comfortable path to ruin. It is being driven along a road of ever-rising deficits and debt... that risk destroying the country's credit and the global role of its currency." Paul Krugman,
economics professor at Princeton University who writes a column for the New York Times, told Reuters in January: "We've become a banana republic... If you ask the question, do we look like
Argentina, the answer is a whole lot more than anyone is willing to admit at this point." Argentina defaulted on a $100 billion in debt in 2001, with catastrophic effects: its currency plunged
and the economy collapsed, bankrupting thousands of businesses within weeks. National income plummeted by 67%, pushing half the population below the poverty line. Professor Laurence
Kotlikoff, chairman of the economics department at Boston University, agrees with Krugman, saying: "This administration [Bush] and previous administrations have set us up for a major
financial crisis on the order of what Argentina experienced a couple of years ago." Former U.S. Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin similarly warns that "the traditional immunity of advanced
countries like America to the Third World-style crisis is not a birthright," and that the U.S. faces "a day of serious reckoning." Peter Schiff, CEO of Euro Pacific Capital, also thinks that the
This looming dollar crisis cannot be prevented, only delayed, and only
falling dollar could mean major financial disaster. According to him, "
at the expense of exacerbating the collapse." Schiff told Forbes magazine" in January that he expects the dollar to drop by 50% against the Chinese and Japanese
currencies. This will wreck U.S. consumption. As Schiff states: "Spending on cars, clothing, and electronics will all drop dramatically -- perhaps right out of the economy." An abrupt drop in
everything will change
the dollar could cause a stock market crash and make the real estate market dive. "When the dollar collapses," says Professor Immanuel Wallerstein, "
geopolitically... it will be a vastly different U.S--no longer able to live far beyond its means, to consume at the
rest of the world's expense. Americans may begin to feel what countries in the Third World feel when faced with IMF-imposed structural readjustment: a sharp downward
thrust of their standard of living." The weakness of the dollar and the huge deficits are symptoms of the decline of U.S. manufacturing. "Americans don't produce enough and don't save
enough," says Schiff. U.S. manufacturing is only 13% of GDP and, according to Roach, "Manufacturing employment currently stands at only about 13% of the U.S.' private non-farm
workforce--down sharply from 23%...in the mid-1980s." Since 2000, the U.S. has lost close to three million manufacturing jobs. Between 1989 and 2004, the U.S. savings rate fell from 6% to
1%. Foreigners now produce most of the goods Americans are consuming and lend Washington the money to buy these goods, leading to skyrocketing deficits. An important factor behind the
manufacturing decline is the abandonment of the U.S. by its own corporations, many of which have relocated operations to Asia from where they export to the U.S. John Chambers, Chairman
of Cisco, said recently: "What we're trying to do is outline an entire strategy of becoming a Chinese company." Cisco is the leading U.S. supplier of networking equipment for the Internet. The
company manufactures $5 billion worth of products in China, where it employs 10,000 people. In fact, the U.S. economy has been in decline for more than three decades, accounting for a
plummeting share of world economic output. The first dollar crisis occurred at the end of the 1960s when U.S. President Lyndon Johnson's escalation of the Vietnam war led to increasing
public deficits. This coincided with the rise of Western Europe and Asia as strong exporters, to whom Washington lost its manufacturing lead. To retain its global
domination, the U.S. then depended on its military superiority and the dollar's role as the world's reserve currency. As the U.S. deficits
rose due to the Vietnam war, France demanded gold in exchange for the dollars it held, since at the time the greenback was backed by Washington's gold reserves.
Other countries followed suit and, as U.S. gold reserves were drained, President Richard Nixon delinked the dollar from gold and floated it against other currencies.
This coincided with the oil crisis of the 1970s, when crude prices shot up 400%. Suddenly, oil became the most important traded resource, and Nixon linked the dollar
to it. In June 1974, U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger made a deal with Saudi Arabia (the biggest OPEC oil producer) stipulating that oil could only be bought in
dollars. In return, the U.S. agreed to militarily protect the Saudi regime. In 1975, OPEC (following the Saudi lead) officially agreed to sell oil only in dollars. The age of
the petrodollar was thus born. As long as oil was traded in dollars, so would other goods, and the dollar would remain the world's reserve currency. This arrangement
allowed the U.S. to continue its dominant imperial role despite its crucial economic weakness: the inability to compete with the European and Asian countries in
manufacturing and export capacity. But now
the U.S. position became highly vulnerable to the whims of the oil-producing
countries and to the fate of the resource itself. The first challenge to the petrodollar system came with the Third World debt crisis. Awash in
petrodollars, Western banks loaned hundreds of billions of these to developing countries, which could not repay the loans when Washington raised interest rates to
nearly 20% in 1979 to save the falling dollar. It was crucial for the future of the petrodollar system that this money be recycled back to the West, and so the U.S. used
the World Bank and IMF to ensure this would happen. The loans were repaid several times over (the payments continue), and the petrodollar system was saved -- but at
the cost of decimating Third World economies with structural adjustment programs that devastated their industry, employment, and health and education sectors. As F.
William Engdahl perceptively points out, the U.S.'s petrodollar hegemony "was based on ever-worsening economic decline in living standards across the world as IMF
policies destroyed national economic growth." The second challenge to the petrodollar system came from Iraq when it started trading oil in euros in November 2000. If
other OPEC countries followed suit, that would be the end of the reserve role of the dollar. The 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq was partly aimed at staving off this
possibility by forcibly returning Iraq to the dollar, warning other OPEC members not to switch to the euro, and starting the process of physically controlling Iraqi and
Middle Eastern oil in order to gain leverage over European countries. This strategy has clearly failed, and it now appears that in the military arena, too, the U.S. cannot
prevail, not even against lightly armed Iraqis. The petrodollar system is falling apart as the world rejects a U.S. imperialism in
which it expects other countries to not only supply it with a massive amount of consumer goods in exchange for increasingly worthless bits of paper, but also
wants them to pay for its gigantic military machine with which it attacks or threatens them. As American journalist
Seymour Hersh said in a recent interview: "The minute the rest of the world gets tired of our belligerence, they can turn us off economically as easily as flicking a light
switch." The collapse of the dollar and that of the U.S. economy will end American superpower status as
Washington becomes incapable of financing a colossal military machine that currently occupies 725 bases
around the world with 446,000 troops. Economic power will centre around the European Union, China and India, which are already creating new global
structures that exclude the U.S. These endeavors show that the U.S. is already , to some extent, a "has-been" global power whose
desperate military aggression only makes it weaker on the world stage. The Financial Times explains: "A new world order is indeed
emerging -- but its architecture is being drafted in Asia and Europe at meetings to which the Americans have not been invited." In contrast to Washington's endless
military ventures, Europe and China emphasize economic might as the main instrument of foreign policy. As Newsweek points out, "the strongest tool for both is access
to huge markets." In April 2004, 10 new countries joined the European Union and six more are expected to in the near future. Newsweek lauded this development by
emphasizing that "no single policy has contributed as much to Western peace and security." This is a highly important statement. It recognizes that Europe has changed
the very definition of security. After two world wars, the Europeans appear to have realized that the best guarantor of security is economic inclusion, not mass murder.
And now the EU is considering Turkey's membership, which would actually make Europe part of the Middle East, and vice versa. According to Newsweek, "When
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historians look back, they may see this policy as being the truly epochal event of our time, dwarfing in effectiveness the crude power of America." Similarly, China and
the Association of South East Asian Nations (ASEAN) are creating an Asian trade bloc to rival the EU.
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The ASEAN Plus Three (China, Japan, and South Korea) summit meeting in December 2004 laid the groundwork for an East Asian Community (EAC) that "should
build a free trade area, cooperate on finance ,and sign a security pact... that will transform East Asia into a cohesive economic block." This is a significant defeat for the
U.S., which scuttled a similar intiative in 1990. The Asian agreement creates a market zone of two billion people, the largest global trading bloc "dwarfing the EU and
No single country has
NAFTA." India has also become an ASEAN summit partner and wants an economic zone stretching from its borders to Japan.
posed more of a challenge to Washington than China, which recently replaced the U.S. as the leading consumer market in the world.
Beijing has economically displaced the U.S. all over Asia and is now doing so in the latter's so-called back-yard, Latin America. China is
now Chile's largest export market and Brazil's second biggest trading partner. In November 2004, Chinese President Hu Jintao went on a tour of Latin America and
agreed to invest $30 billion in the region. Most importantly, China and Venezuela signed a bilateral energy pact in December 2004, under which the latter agreed to
supply Beijing with 120,000 barrels of fuel oil a month. China pledged to invest in 15 Venezuelan oil-fields. China has become the world's second largest importer of
oil after the U.S. Venezuela is the U.S.'s fourth largest oil supplier, and the deal with China cuts into one of Washington's "few remaining relatively stable sources of
crude." China intends to make a similar move towards Canada, the U.S.'s biggest oil supplier. What can Washington do about such incursions
into its "vital interests"? Not much, since Beijing could cripple the U.S. economy simply by stopping its purchase of American Treasury bills. The
demise of the United States as a superpower will be particularly beneficial for the Third World -- the 80% of humanity that has suffered most under Washington's
economic and military heel. Since 1945, the U.S. has unleashed a reign of death, destruction and plunder on developing countries, killing more than 20 million people
through wars, coups, bombings, assassinations, massacres, embargoes, and economic destabilization. The purpose was to ensure that 80% of the world's wealth was
owned by 20% of its people. Third World countries have fought back, inflicting significant defeats on Washington. It was the Vietnam war that started the U.S.'s
Third World resistance has made it impossible for
economic downslide, and today Iraq is an important nail in Washington's financial coffin.
the U.S. to continue dominating the world economically and militarily. Without U.S. muscle behind them,
Washington's client states all over the South will have to give way to nationalist regimes that want to use their countries'
resources for the benefit of their own people: A wave of Venezuelas is likely, leading to a redistribution of global wealth in the developing world's favour. The
European Union will have to come to a new arrangement with a resurgent South, and the result could lay the basis for an egalitarian world.
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AT: BENEVOLENT HEG
1. THE “BENEVOLENT HEGEMON” ARGUMENT IS WRONG – U.S. POWER IS UP-CLOSE-AND-

PERSONAL, OVER-CONCENTRATION OF POWER MAKES RESENTMENT INEVITABLE, AND
REASSURANCES FAIL – THERE’S SIMPLY NO SUCH THING AS A BENEVOLENT HEGEMON.
Christopher Layne, Associate Professor in the Bush School of Government and Public Service at Texas A&M University and Research Fellow with the Center on
Peace and Liberty at The Independent Institute, 2007
["The Case Against the American Empire," American Empire: A Debate, Published by Routledge, ISBN 0415952034, p. 68 // BATMAN]
For sure, many states do benefit both economically and in terms of security from American primacy. And it also is true that not all other states will feel threatened by
U.S. hard power. Eventually, however, some
of the other states in the international political system are going to believe
that they are menaced by American primacy. For example, far from being “off-shore” as the primacists claim,
U.S. power is very much on shore—or lurking just beyond the coastline—and very much in the faces of China,
Russia, and the Islamic world. And, in this sense, international politics is not a lot different than basketball:
players who push others around and get in their faces are likely to be the targets of a self-defensive punch in the
nose. Doubtless, American primacy has its dimension of benevolence, but a state as powerful as the United
States can never be benevolent enough to offset the fear that other states have of its unchecked power. In
international politics, benevolent hegemons are like unicorns—there is no such animal. Hegemons love
themselves, but others mistrust and fear them—and for good reason. In today’s world, others dread both the
overconcentration of geopolitical weight in America’s favor and the purposes for which it may be used. After
all, “No great power has a monopoly on virtue and, although some may have a great deal more virtue than
others, virtue imposed on others is not seen as such by them. All great powers are capable of exercising a
measure of self-restraint, but they are tempted not to and the choice to practice restraint is made easier by the
existence of countervailing power and the possibility of it being exercised." While Washington’s self-
proclaimed benevolence is inherently ephemeral, the hard fist of American power is tangible. Others must
worry constantly that if U.S. intentions change, bad things may happen to them. In a one-superpower world, the
overconcentration of power in America’s hands is an omnipresent challenge to other states’ security, and
Washington’s ability to reassure others of its benevolence is limited by the very enormity of its power.
2. EVEN BENEVOLENT EMPIRE FAILS – LEGITIMIZES VIOLENCE

John Brady Kiesling, State Department Diplomat who resigned over 2003 Iraq War, 2006, Diplomacy Lessons: realism for an unloved superpower, p. 45
The nation-state may turn out to have been a passing fad, to be replaced by some more efficient and humane way of mobilizing people and
their resources around the collective long-term goal of human survival. If so, the change will not be made during this generation, nor
will America lead the process. Our own politicians are too insular, too content to make cheap use of Americans’ own powerful nationalist instincts. Nor
is restored imperialism an option. Americans are correctly skeptical of using military might to maintain an empire, even
the benevolent one proposed by imperial dreamers such as Max Boot and Niall Ferguson. The intervention of
foreigners in the inner workings of a struggling state hands the most violent faction in that state, Hamas for example, a
source of legitimacy – violent resistance to outsiders – more powerful than any its more humane competitors
can generate to compete with it. The superpower soon discovers that in resisting such violence it has forfeited any
credibility of its aspirations to impose government by the consent of the governed. Benevolent empire becomes
a prohibitively expensive exercise in national vanity.
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AT: FERGUSON 1/2
1. NO INTERNAL LINK - THERE’S NO REASON THAT ABSENT AN APOLAR WORLD WE WOULD

LOSE ALL PROGRESSION AS A SOCIETY.
2. FERGUSON DOESN’T APPLY BECAUSE HE DOESN’T ACCOUNT FOR THE INTERREGNUM -

EXTEND SPANOS IN 08 - THE INTERREGNUM PROVIDES THE CONTEXT FOR US TO REMEMBER
VIETNAM BECAUSE WE’RE IN THE PERIOD BETWEEN EMPIRES. THAT MEANS THERE’S NO
REASON WE HAVE TO BE A UNIPOLAR HEGEMON ANYMORE.
3. FERGUSON’S THESIS DOESN’T HAVE MUCH MERIT BECAUSE HE IGNORES THE HISTORY OF
AMERICAN IMPERIALISM. HE INSTEAD CREATES A SPEECH VACUUM WHERE VIOLENCE IS
USED INSTEAD OF DIALOGUE.
Preston, 2005 [Scott B.A. Honours, Communications, University of Regina, Regina, Saskatchewan, Canada. Dark Age Blog 2-22,
http://www.darkage.ca/blog/_archives/2005/2/22/363696.html]
The recent history of American interventions around the globe doesn't suggest that Mr. Ferguson's thesis has much merit.
Central America, America's erstwhile neglected "backyard" and the site of much US military and political
meddling, still lies outside the umbrella of American benevolence, languishing in the Hobbesian gloom of that
dark age that Mr. Ferguson's thesis suggests should not exist under the hegemony of the tutelary power. Nor
does the history of US military intervention in Southeast Asia inspire much confidence in the thesis, designed as it was to
bomb North Vietnam "back into the stone age", as one ferocious military planner put it -- an objective almost realised. American government efforts to
roll back or preclude social revolution and the struggle against history in some of the darkest areas of the world
seems to fly directly counter to Ferguson's (mis)representation of affairs.What bothers me about Ferguson's damn
fool either/or treatment of the situation is that all-too-typical tendency of the modern mentality to aspire to grand
abstractions of history in the famous "25 words or less". "We tend to assume that power, like nature, abhors a vacuum"
and therefore "the struggle for mastery is both perennial and universal". That human beings might be something
more than Newtonian forces of nature living on the brink of a Hobbesian condition of "the war of all against all"
just never seems to cross their minds. They call this their "realism" and they are proud of their little realities. Mr. Ferguson relies on the
precedents of history to support his contention that "a world with no hegemon at all.... could turn out to mean a new Dark Age of waning empires and religious
fanaticism; of endemic rapine in the world's no-go zones; of economic stagnation and a retreat by civilisation into a few fortified enclaves" (presumably something like
"Fortress America" and the gated communities of entrenched mentality in North American suburbia, paranoiac
survivalist refuges from the largely fantasised gathering Hobbesian gloom of the surrounding world and
society). However, the precedents of history offer no guide to the unprecedented condition in which we find ourselves today, and therefore the past is no certain
guide to the present or the future (thank God). We now live in an interconnected world. This is unprecedented. Our perceptions
of reality are (at least in part) no longer guided by official gatekeepers and authorised guardians of conscience
keeping watch at the portals of the mind, despite the considerable barrage of propaganda we are daily subjected
to designed to counteract this emergent globalism of one world and one humanity (like the whole "clash of civilisations"
creed). In some ways, it truly is a Global Village, even if from inside the walls of Fortress America it might look like the proverbial "jungle out there" (while to those of
us on the outside of Fortress America peering in, it's beginning to look virtually medieval inside those walls). Human
beings are not, after all, forces of nature --
speak, and speech is super-natural. Speech is already effective power and the organisation
or at least, not entirely so. They
of power, amongst other things. Into the "vacuum of power" may global dialogue flow! Human beings may have different interests, but
they are also creatures with identical interests too, and those identical interests are what makes dialogue possible at all. It always strikes me as suspicious how the
speech as if it just wasn't there. It seems to offend their "realism". Yet it is speech, and not
modern "mentality" simply overlooks human
power relations, that defines us as human beings. Where speech does not exist, in fact, only violence can restore
order amongst human beings, and a truly Hobbesian state of nature would indeed prevail. Violence is a disease
of speech. Mr. Ferguson's "power vacuum" is actually a "speech vacuum".But the real mendacity of Ferguson's
either/or proposition is the way he overlooks the situation in the US itself. The notion that American imperialism
Spanos Neg - 144 -

might itself precipitate the Dark Age, which he presupposes is already lurking beyond the walls of Fortress America, never intrudes to stain
the spotlessness of his cogitations.
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AT: FERGUSON 2/2

What he has described as the Hobbesian condition in the absence of a hegemon is really a condition of speechlessness -- the absence of dialogue. Yet, in the US today,
the Bush Administration's emphasis on unilateralism, pre-emption, rejection of dialogue, contempt for dissenting views, the
cooking of intelligence, resort to propaganda, dismissal of scientific evidence not in conformity with policy,
subordination of the universities to political objectives, the Inquisitions of the Patriot Act, and intimidation of the press all conspire to
produce the very conditions of darkness and speechlessness and atrophy of dialogue that Ferguson claims belong only to the Hobbesian darkness "outside"! Like
Robert Kaplan, who warns of The Coming Anarchy and prescribes US imperialism, "warrior politics" and a return to the good old "pagan ethos" of the Roman emperor
Tiberius, the proposed solution conspires to produce the very barbarism and Dark Age it is alleged to ameliorate.
It's a self-devouring logic and a tautology. What lunacy! It's like the Dance of St. Vitus (and in that sense Ferguson is right. History can indeed be
a guide to the present, at least in terms of the universal madness of groupthink). The cookie-cutter minds of the modern mentality seem to
have no inkling and no self-consciousness at all of their self-devouring tautological mentations and ruminations.
They all possess in common what I call a "mentality" -- the gated community of the contemporary mind. They
have become an obsolete type. Neoliberal, neoconservative, and neosocialist are virtually indistinguishable.
They look alike. They sound alike. Ferguson and Fukuyama, Messrs. Roberts Cooper, Kaplan, Kagan, and
Michael Ignatieff, or Blair and Bush themselves, seem to have been cast from a single mould, oblivious to their
own petty tyrannies and hypocrisies and duplicities and the deep nihilism they seem determined to pin and
blame on others. I once thought this duplicity, hypocrisy, and nihilism was the result of a deliberate
propaganda of obfuscation. I have since come to see it as the pathological condition of the late modern
"mentality" itself. The modern mentality has become self-devouring, and these men don't have the slightest
consciousness of their condition.
4. FERGUSON IGNORES THE FACT THAT IMPERIALISM PROMOTED HOLOCAUSTS AND

FAMINES
Chalmers Johnson, author and professor emeritus of the University of California, San Diego, NEMESIS: THE LAST DAYS OF THE AMERICAN REPUBLIC,
2006, p. 84
After all their arguments have been deployed, how do analysts like Ferguson and Friedman explain the
nineteenth-century poverty of India and China, the several dozen Holocaust-sized famines in both countries
while food sat on the docks waiting to be exported, and their current status as "late developers"? Students of
communism will not be surprised by the answer. In India, Ferguson argues, the British did not go far enough in
enforcing their ideas. "If one leaves aside their fundamentally different resource endowments, the explanation
for India's underperformance compared with, say, Canada lies not in British exploitation but rather in the
insufficient scale of British interference in the Indian economy." When Mao Zedong introduced Soviet-style
collective farms into China and did not get satisfactory results, he did not abandon them but turned instead to
truly gigantic collectives called "communes." This Great Leap Forward of the late 1950s produced a famine that
took some thirty million Chinese lives, a monument to communist extremism similar to the extremes of laissez-
faire that the British dogmatically imposed on their conquered territories—and that Ferguson would have
preferred to be yet more extreme. The historical evidence suggests a strong correlation exists between being on
the receiving end of imperialism and immisseration. The nations that avoided the fates of India, China, Mexico,
and the Philippines did so by throwing off foreign rule early—as did the United States—or by modernizing
militarily in order to hold off the imperialists (and ultimately join them)—as did Japan.
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AT: FERGUSON EXT 1/2
1. FERGUSON WHITEWASHES THE BLOODY HISTORY OF IMPERIALISM. U.S. HEGEMONIC

IMPERIALISM THREATENS THE WORLD WITH VIOLENT DESTRUCTION.
Foster and Clark 2004 (John Bellamy and Brett, Monthly Review, December, Vol. 56, Iss. 7, “Empire of Barbarism”)
Today the world is facing what de Suva feared-a barbarism emanating from a single powerful country, the United
States, which has adopted a doctrine of preemptive (or preventative) war, and is threatening to destabilize the
entire globe. In the late twentieth century the further growth of monopoly capital (as explained most cogently in Paul Baran and
Paul Sweezy's Monopoly Capital and Harry Magdoff's Age of Imperialism) led to a heavy reliance, particularly for the United States as
the hegemonic state of the world system, on military spending and imperialist intervention. With the waning of the Cold
War this dependence of the imperial superpower on the most barbaric means of advancing its interests and controlling the system has only increased. The
continuing decline of U.S. economic hegemony, occurring alongside deepening economic stagnation in
capitalism as a whole, has led the United States to turn increasingly to extraeconomic means of maintaining its
position: putting its huge war machine in motion in order to prop up its faltering hegemony over the world
economy. The "Global War on Terror" is a manifestation of this latest lethal phase of U.S. imperialism, which
began with the 1991 Gulf War made possible by the breaking up of the Soviet bloc and the emergence of the
United States as the sole superpower. After the terrorist attack on September 11, 2001, the empire could present itself as at war with barbarism and in
defense of civilization. "The barbarians have already knocked at the gates," declares Niall Ferguson, Herzog Professor of History at
the Stern School of Business, NYU and a principal advocate of U.S. and British imperialism. But today's barbarians, he
charges, are Islamic fundamentalists, and liberal imperialism becomes a way of inoculating the world against
such Islamic terrorism. While the knock on the gates represents a clear danger to the U.S.-dominated imperial order, these external terrorist groups,
Ferguson contends, will not bring about the decline of the American imperium directly. Instead, the principal threat to the position of the United States in the global
Ferguson,
economy is internal. It is rooted in an unwillingness on the part of the U.S. state to make a full claim to its position at the head of the global empire.
who believes that the British Empire of old should be emulated-albeit in a form worthy of the twenty-first
century-argues in his latest book Colossus and his earlier Empire that the world needs an empire . Many nations would
be better off dominated by the United States than having full independence. The United States, he claims, "is a guns and butter empire"-one that represents not just the
rule of force but the advance of the principles of liberal empire and liberal bounty, thus yielding a more democratic and prosperous world order .
It is no mere
coincidence that Ferguson, one of the most influential establishment historians today, explicitly calls for an updating of the old "White
Man's Burden" (to be replaced by a new ideology of "functional" empire) while whitewashing one of the most barbaric wars of
modern imperialism: the Philippine-American War at the beginning of the twentieth century-the very same imperial war that
Kipling had urged on the United States in his poem "The White Man's Burden" (Colossus, pp. 48-52, 267, 301-02; Empire, pp.
369-70). Ferguson's "guns and butter empire" is now a transparent objective of U.S. policy. With the fall of the Soviet Union,
as István Mészáros explained in Socialism or Barbarism, the United States began to assume "the role of the state of the capital system as such, subsuming under itself
With its immense military power and its willingness to use force, the United
by all means at its disposal all rival powers" (p. 29).
States is now leading the world into what Mészáros has called "the potentially deadliest phase of imperialism."
In attempting to prevent revolution (or indeed any way out for populations in the periphery), the United States is seeking to transcend the only certain law of the
universe: change.
In the process, it has given birth to dictators, supported terrorists, and threatened the world with
violent destruction. In the Middle East the United States has nurtured a regressive, fundamentalist political Islam (useful in the CIA-directed war against the
Soviets in Afghanistan and in closing off all progressive options in the Middle East) that insofar as it turns back and bites the hand that fed it-the United States and its
allies-is branded as a "new barbarism."
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AT: FERGUSON EXT 2/2
2. FERGUSON IGNORES THE EXPERIENCES OF THE COLONIZED

Chalmers Johnson, author and professor emeritus of the University of California, San Diego, NEMESIS: THE LAST DAYS OF THE AMERICAN REPUBLIC,
2006, p. 74-5
Apologists for imperialism like Ferguson never consult the victims of the allegedly benificient conquerors. As
the American historian Kevin Baker points out, “The idea of Rome or the British empire as liberal institutions
of any sort would have come as a surprise to, say, the Guals or the Carthaginians, or the Jews of Masada; or,
respectively, the Zulus or the Boers or the North American Indians or the Maoris of New Zealand." Eric Foner,
the historian of American race relations, similarly reminds us that "the benevolence of benevolent imperialism
lies in the eye of the beholder." What can be said, however, is that the British were exceptionally susceptible to
believing in the "goodness" of their empire and, in this, the United States has indeed proved a worthy imperial
successor. In his analysis of Jane Austen's 1814 novel Mansfield Park, which depicted a wealthy English family
whose comforts derived from a sugar plantation in Antigua built on slave labor, Edward Said observed,
"European culture often, if not always, characterized itself in such a way as simultaneously to validate its own
preferences while also advocating those preferences in conjunction with distant imperial rule
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HEG IS BAD / IMPACT EXT - NUCLEAR DISASTER
US HEGEMONIC IMPERIALISM HAS BROUGHT US TO THE BRINK OF NUCLEAR DISASTER- WE

CAN NOT CONTAIN THIS DANGER THROUGH CURRENTLY EXISTING POLITICAL
INSTITUTIONS, THE US ACTS AS IT PLEASES IN THE INTERESTS OF CAPITAL.
MÉSZÁROS 2006 (ISTVÁN, Monthly Review, September, “The Structural Crisis of Politics)
Let us consider a few striking examples which clearly demonstrate not only that there is something dangerously affecting the way in which we regulate our societal
interchanges, but worse, the observable trend is the intensification of the dangers toward the point of no return. I wrote six
years ago, for a public lecture delivered in Athens in October 1999, that “In all probability the ultimate form of threatening the adversary in the future— the new
‘gunboat diplomacy,’ exercised from the ‘patented air’—will be nuclear blackmail. But its objective would be analogous to those of the past,
while its envisaged modality could only underline the absurd untenability of trying to impose capi-tal’s ultimate rationality on the recalcitrant parts of the world in that
way.”1 In these six years such
potentially lethal policy-making practices of global hegemonic imperialism have become
not only a general possi-bility but also an integral part of the openly admitted neoconservative “strategic conception”
of the U.S. government. And the situation is even worse today. In the last few weeks, in relation to Iran, we have
entered the actual planning stage of a course of action which could threaten not only Iran itself but the whole of
humanity with a nuclear disaster.2 The customary cynical device employed in making public such threats is “neither to confirm, nor to deny them.”
But no one should be fooled by that kind of ploy. In fact this recently materialized very real danger of nuclear disaster is what induced a group of distinguished
American physicists, among them five Nobel Laureates, to write an open letter of protest to President Bush in which they stated that: “It is gravely irre-sponsible for the
US as the greatest superpower to consider courses of action that could eventually lead to the widespread destruction of life on the planet. We urge the administration to
announce publicly that it is taking the nuclear option off the table in the case of all non-nuclear adversaries, present or future, and we urge the American people to make
Are the legitimate political institutions of our societies in a position to redress even the
their voices heard on this matter.”3
most perilous situations by democratic intervention in the process of actual decision making, as traditional
political dis-course keeps reassuring us, despite all evidence to the contrary? Only the most optimistic—and
rather naïve—could assert and sincerely believe that such a happy state of affairs happens to be the case. For the
principal Western powers have, quite unimpeded, embarked in the last few years on devastating wars using
authoritarian devices—like the “executive prerogative” and the “Royal Prerogative”—without consult-ing their peoples on
such grave matters, and ruthlessly brushing aside the framework of international law and the appropriate decision making
organs of the United Nations.4 The United States arrogates to itself as its moral right to act as it pleases, whenever it
pleases, even to the point of using nuclear weapons—not only preemptively but even preventively— against whichever
country it pleases, whenever its claimed “strategic interests” so decree. And all this is done by the United States as the pre-tended champion and guardian of
“democracy and liberty,” slavishly fol-lowed and supported in its unlawful actions by our “great democracies.” Once upon a time the acronym MAD —mutually
assured destruc-tion—was used to describe the existing state of nuclear confrontation. Now that the “neoconservatives” can no longer pretend that the United
States (and the West in general) are threatened by nuclear annihilation, the acronym has been turned into literal madness, as the “legitimate
pol-icy orientation” of institutionalized military/political insanity. This is in part the consequence of neoconservative disappointments
about the Iraq war. For “American neo-cons had hoped the invasion of Iraq would set in train a domino effect across the region, with the people of Iran and other oil-
it is much worse than
rich states rising up to demand western-style freedoms and democracy. Unfortunately the reverse has been true, in Iran at least.”5 But
that, because a whole system of institutionally entrenched and secured “strategic thinking,” centered on the
Pentagon itself, lurks behind it. This is what makes the new MADNESS so dangerous for the entire world,
including the United States whose worst enemies are precisely such “strategic thinkers.
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HEG IS BAD / IMPACT EXT - CONFLICT
US DOMINANCE CREATES AN ENDLESS CYCLE OF VIOLENCE AND WAR BECAUSE WAR

BECOMES THE MEANS BY WHICH AMERICAN IMPERIALISM CREATES PEACE.
Anthony Burke, Senior Lecturer @ School of Politics & IR @ Univ. of New South Wales, 2007 [Beyond Security, Ethics and Violence, p. 231-2]
Yet the first act in

America's 'forward strategy of freedom' was to invade and attempt to subjugate Iraq, suggesting that, if 'peace' is
its object, its means is war: the engine of history is violence, on an enormous and tragic scale, and violence is ultimately its only meaning.
This we can glimpse in 'Toward a Pacific Union', a deeply disingenuous chapter of Fukuyama's The End of History and the Last Man. This text divides the
earth between a 'post-historical' world of affluent developed democracies where 'the old rules of power-politics have decreasing relevance', and a world
still 'stuck in history' and 'riven with a variety of religious, national and ideological conflicts'. The two worlds will maintain 'parallel but separate
existences' and interact only along axes of threat, disturbance and crucial strategic interest: oil, immigration, terrorism and the proliferation of weapons of
mass destruction. Because 'the relationship between democracies and nondemocracies will still be characterised by mutual distrust and fear', writes
force will still be the ultima ratio
Fukuyama, the 'post-historical half must still make use of realist methods when dealing with the part still in history ...
in their relations'. For all the book's Kantian pretensions, Fukuyama naturalises war and coercion as the dominant mode of
dealing with billions of people defined only through their lack of 'development' and 'freedom'. Furthermore, in his advocacy of the
'traditional moralism of American foreign policy' and his dismissal of the United Nations in favour of a NATO-style 'league of truly free states ... capable
of much more forceful action to protect its collective security against threats arising from the non-democratic part of the world' we can see an early
we can see the invasion of Iraq as continuing a long
premonition of the historicist unilateralism of the Bush administration. 72 In this light,
process of 'world-historical' violence that stretches back to Columbus' discovery of the Americas, and the subsequent
politics of genocide, warfare and dispossession through which the modem United States was created
and then expanded - initially with the colonisation of the Philippines and coercive trade relationships with China and Japan, and eventually to
the self-declared role Luce had argued so forcefully for: guarantor of global economic and strategic order after 1945. This role
involved the hideous destruction of Vietnam and Cambodia, 'interventions' in Chile, El Salvador,
Panama, Nicaragua and Afghanistan (or an ever more destructive 'strategic' involvement in the Persian Gulf that saw the United States
first building up Iraq as a formidable regional military power, and then punishing its people with a 14-year sanctions regime that caused the deaths of at
which we are meant to accept as proof of America's benign intentions, of America
least 200,000 people), all of
putting its 'power at the service of principle'. They are merely history working itself out, the 'design of nature' writing its bliss on the
world.73 The bliss 'freedom' offers us, however, is the bliss of the graveyard, stretching endlessly into a
world marked not by historical perfection or democratic peace, but by the eternal recurrence of
tragedy, as ends endlessly disappear in the means of permanent war and permanent terror. This is how we
must understand both the prolonged trauma visited on the people of Iraq since 1990, and the inflammatory impact the US invasion will have on the new
phenomenon of global antiWestern terrorism. American exceptionalism has deluded US policymakers into believing that they are the only actors who
write history, who know where it is heading, and how it will play out, and that in its service it is they (and no-one else) who assume an unlimited freedom
to act. As a senior adviser to Bush told a journalist in 2002: 'We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality . . We're history's actors."
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IMPERIALISM IS BAD - VIOLENCE / EXTINCTION / HOLOCAUST
IMPERIALISM LEADS TO UNENDING VIOLENCE AND EXTINCTION

Eckhardt 1990 (William, Lentz Peace Research Laboratory of St. Louis, JOURNAL OF PEACE RESEARCH, February 1990, p. 15-16)
Modern Western Civilization used war as well as peace to gain the whole world as a domain to benefit itself at the
expense of others: The expansion of the culture and institutions of modern civilization from its centers in
Europe was made possible by imperialistic war… It is true missionaries and traders had their share in the work of expanding world
civilization, but always with the support, immediate or in the background, of armies and navies (pp. 251-252). The importance of dominance as a primary motive in
civilized war in general was also emphasized for modern war in particular: '[Dominance] is probably the most important single element
in the causation of major modern wars' (p. 85). European empires were thrown up all over the world in this
process of benefiting some at the expense of others, which was characterized by armed violence contributing to structural violence: 'World-empire is
built by conquest and maintained by force… Empires are primarily organizations of violence' (pp. 965, 969). 'The
struggle for empire has greatly increased the disparity between states with respect to the political control of resources, since there can never be enough
imperial territory to provide for all' (p. 1190). This 'disparity between states', not to mention the disparity within states, both of which take the form of racial differences
killed 15-20 times as many people in the 20th century as have wars and revolutions (Eckhardt &
in life expectancies, has
Kohler, 1980; Eckhardt, 1983c). When this structural violence of 'disparity between states' created by civilization is taken into account, then the violent
nature of civilization becomes much more apparent. Wright concluded that 'Probably at least 10 per cent of deaths in modern civilization can
be attributed directly or indirectly to war… The trend of war has been toward greater cost, both absolutely and relative to population… The proportion of the population
dying as a direct consequence of battle has tended to increase' (pp. 246, 247). So far as structural violence has constituted about one-third of
all deaths in the 20th century (Eckhardt & Kohler, 1980; Eckhardt, 1983c), and so far as structural violence was a function of armed violence, past and
present, then Wright's estimate was very conservative indeed. Assuming that war is some function of civilization, then civilization is responsible for
one-third of 20th century deaths. This is surely self-destruction carried to a high level of efficiency. The structural
situation has been improving throughout the 20th century, however, so that structural violence caused 'only' 20% of all deaths in 1980 (Eckhardt, 1983c). There is
obviously room for more improvement. To be sure, armed violence in the form of revolution has been directed toward the reduction of structural violence, even as
armed violence in the form of imperialism has been directed toward its maintenance. But imperial violence came first, in the sense of creating structural
violence, before revolutionary violence emerged to reduce it . It is in this sense that structural violence was basically, fundamentally,
and primarily a function of armed violence in its imperial form. The atomic age has ushered in the possibility,
and some would say the probability, of killing not only some of us for the benefit of others, nor even of killing
all of us to no one's benefit, but of putting an end to life itself! This is surely carrying self-destruction to some
infinite power beyond all human comprehension. It's too much, or superfluous, as the Existentialists might say. Why we should care is a mystery. But, if we do,
then the need for civilized peoples to respond to the ethical challenge is very urgent indeed. Life itself may depend upon our choice.
U.S. IMPERIALISM WILL CAUSE BACKLASH AND ASSYMETRIC WARFARE, UNLEASHING NEW
GLOBAL HOLOCAUSTS.
Foster 2003 (John Bellamy, Monthly Review, July/August, “The new age of imperialism”)
This new age of U.S. imperialism will generate its own contradictions, amongst them attempts by other
major powers to assert their influence, resorting to similar belligerent means, and all sorts of strategies
by weaker states and non-state actors to engage in "asymmetric" forms of warfare. Given the
unprecedented destructiveness of contemporary weapons, which are diffused ever more widely, the
consequences for the population of the world could well be devastating beyond anything ever before
witnessed. Rather than generating a new "Pax Americana" the United States may be paving the way to
new global holocausts. The greatest hope in these dire circumstances lies in a rising tide of revolt from below,
both in the United States and globally. The growth of the antiglobalization movement, which dominated the world stage for nearly two
years following the events in Seattle in November 1999, was succeeded in February 2003 by the largest global wave of antiwar protests in human history.
Never before has the world's population risen up so quickly and in such massive numbers in the attempt to stop an imperialist war. The new age of
imperialism is also a new age of revolt. The Vietnam Syndrome, which has so worried the strategic planners of the imperial order for decades, now seems
not only to have left a deep legacy within the United States but also to have been coupled this time around with an Empire Syndrome on a much more
global scale-something that no one really expected. This more than anything else makes it clear that the strategy of the American ruling class to expand the
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American Empire cannot possibly succeed in the long run, and will prove to be its own-we hope not the world's-undoing.
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AT: LINK TURN 1/3

1.WE ARE IN THE INTERREGNUM RIGHT NOW – THE AMERICAN EMPIRE IS ON THE DECLINE,
WHICH MEANS THERE IS NO IMPACT TO THE CLAIM THEY DECREASE IMPERIALISM.
UNFORTUNATELY, THE ONLY ACTION THE AFF TAKES IS ONE THAT SEEKS TO PERPETUATE
THE EMPIRE FOR A LITTLE WHILE LONGER. INSTEAD, THE NEG HELPS IT COLLAPSE BY
TAKING AN ACTION THAT ISN’T INTEGRATED BECAUSE IT QUESTIONS THE MIGHT OF THE
EMPIRE AS A WHOLE INSTEAD OF TRYING TO FIT IN.
2. THE AFF HAS MISSED THE POINT OF OUR KRITIK – WE TALK ABOUT REDUCING THE
IMPERIALIST MINDSET, NOT STOPPING A SINGLE IMPERIAL ACTION. THEIR CLAIMS OF
REMOVING [TROOPS OR MACHINES] IS JUST ANOTHER MASKING OF IMPERIALIST ACTIONS.
THEIR ADVANTAGES ARE PREDICATED OFF OF THE GOOD THE US WILL DO AS THEY REMOVE
TROOPS – BUT IT FAILS TO MENTION THAT MOST OF THOSE TROOPS WILL BE REDEPLOYED
OR THAT SOMETHING WORSE WILL REPLACE THEM. THIS IS THE JEREMIAD THAT WE
REFERENCE IN THE 1NC IN HOW THEY SAY GAINING SOFT POWER OR HEGEMONY IS GOOD
FOR SPREADING AMERICAN IDEALS OR GENERAL DOMINATION OF THE GLOBE.
3. LIBERAL REFORMS TO THE SYSTEM THAT FAIL TO FUNDAMENTALLY QUESTION THE
VIOLENCE OF THEIR WESTERN ONTOLOGY WILL ULTIMATELY FAIL AND RESULT IN MORE
VIOLENCE BECAUSE ONTOLOGY DIRECTS POLICY INSTITUTIONS AND OUTCOMES.
I was motivated to begin the larger project from which this essay derives by a number of concerns. I felt that the available critical, interpretive or performative
languages of war --
realist and liberal international relations theories, just war theories, and various Clausewitzian
derivations of strategy -- failed us, because they either perform or refuse to place under suspicion the underlying
political ontologies that I have sought to unmask and question here. Many realists have quite nuanced and
critical attitudes to the use of force, but ultimately affirm strategic thought and remain embedded within the
existential framework of the nation-state. Both liberal internationalist and just war doctrines seek mainly to
improve the accountability of decision-making in security affairs and to limit some of the worst moral
enormities of war, but (apart from the more radical versions of cosmopolitanism) they fail to question the ontological claims of
political community or strategic theory. In the case of a theorist like Jean Bethke Elshtain, just war doctrine is in fact allied to a softer, liberalised
form of the Hegelian-Schmittian ontology. She dismisses Kant's Perpetual Peace as 'a fantasy of at-oneness...a world in which differences have all been rubbed off' and
in which 'politics, which is the way human beings have devised for dealing with their differences, gets eliminated.'83 She remains a committed liberal democrat and
espouses a moral community that stretches beyond the nation-state, which strongly contrasts with Schmitt's hostility to liberalism and his claustrophobic distinction
between friend and enemy. However her image of politics -- which at its limits, she implies, requires the resort to war as the only existentially satisfying way of
resolving deep-seated conflicts -- reflects much of Schmitt's idea of the political and Hegel's ontology of a fundamentally alienated world of nation-states, in which war
is a performance of being. She categorically states that any effort to dismantle security dilemmas 'also requires the dismantling of human beings as we know them'.84
Whilst this would not be true of all just war advocates, I suspect that even as they are so concerned with the ought, moral theories of violence grant too much
unquestioned power to the is. The problem here lies with the confidence in being -- of 'human beings as we know them' -- which ultimately fails to escape a Schmittian
architecture and thus eternally exacerbates (indeed reifies) antagonisms. Yet we know from the work of Deleuze and especially William Connolly that exchanging an
ontology of being for one of becoming, where the boundaries and nature of the self contain new possibilities through agonistic relation to others, provides a less
destructive and violent way of acknowledging and dealing with conflict and difference. My argument here, whilst normatively sympathetic to Kant's moral demand for
the eventual abolition of war, militates against excessive optimism.86 Even as I am arguing that war is not an enduring historical or anthropological feature, or a neutral
and rational instrument of policy -- that it is rather the product of hegemonic forms of knowledge about political action and community -- my analysis does suggest
some sobering conclusions about its power as an idea and formation. Neither the progressive flow of history nor the pacific tendencies of an international society of
republican states will save us.
The violent ontologies I have described here in fact dominate the conceptual and policy
frameworks of modern republican states and have come, against everything Kant hoped for, to stand in for progress, modernity and
reason. Indeed what Heidegger argues, I think with some credibility, is that the enframing world view has come to stand in for being
itself. Enframing, argues Heidegger, 'does not simply endanger man in his relationship to himself and to everything
that is...it drives out every other possibility of revealing...the rule of Enframing threatens man with the possibility that it could be denied to
him to enter into a more original revealing and hence to experience the call of a more primal truth.' What I take from Heidegger's argument -- one that I have sought to
is a view that the challenge is posed not
extend by analysing the militaristic power of modern ontologies of political existence and security --
merely by a few varieties of weapon, government, technology or policy, but by an overarching system of
Spanos Neg - 153 -

thinking and understanding that lays claim to our entire space of truth and existence. Many of the most
destructive features of contemporary modernity
Spanos Neg - 154 -
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-- militarism, repression, coercive diplomacy, covert intervention, geopolitics, economic exploitation and
ecological destruction -- derive not merely from particular choices by policymakers based on their particular
interests, but from calculative, 'empirical' discourses of scientific and political truth rooted in powerful
enlightenment images of being. Confined within such an epistemological and cultural universe, policymakers'
choices become necessities, their actions become inevitabilities, and humans suffer and die. Viewed in this
light, 'rationality' is the name we give the chain of reasoning which builds one structure of truth on another until
a course of action, however violent or dangerous, becomes preordained through that reasoning's very operation
and existence. It creates both discursive constraints -- available choices may simply not be seen as credible or
legitimate -- and material constraints that derive from the mutually reinforcing cascade of discourses and events
which then preordain militarism and violence as necessary policy responses, however ineffective, dysfunctional
or chaotic. The force of my own and Heidegger's analysis does, admittedly, tend towards a deterministic fatalism. On my part this is quite deliberate; it is
important to allow this possible conclusion to weigh on us. Large sections of modern societies -- especially parts of the media,
political leaderships and national security institutions -- are utterly trapped within the Clausewitzian paradigm,
within the instrumental utilitarianism of 'enframing' and the stark ontology of the friend and enemy. They are
certainly tremendously aggressive and energetic in continually stating and reinstating its force. But is there a way out? Is
there no possibility of agency and choice? Is this not the key normative problem I raised at the outset, of how the modern ontologies of war efface agency, causality and
responsibility from decision making; the responsibility that comes with having choices and making decisions, with exercising power? (In this I am much closer to
Connolly than Foucault, in Connolly's insistence that, even in the face of the anonymous power of discourse to produce and limit subjects, selves remain capable of
agency and thus incur responsibilities.88) There seems no point in following Heidegger in seeking a more 'primal truth' of being -- that is to reinstate ontology and
obscure its worldly manifestations and consequences from critique. However we can, while refusing Heidegger's unworldly89 nostalgia, appreciate that he was
searching for a way out of the modern system of calculation; that he was searching for a 'questioning', 'free relationship' to technology that would not be immediately
recaptured by the strategic, calculating vision of enframing. Yet his path out is somewhat chimerical -- his faith in 'art' and the older Greek attitudes of 'responsibility
When we consider the problem of policy, the force
and indebtedness' offer us valuable clues to the kind of sensibility needed, but little more.
of this analysis suggests that choice and agency can be all too often limited; they can remain confined
(sometimes quite wilfully) within the overarching strategic and security paradigms. Or, more hopefully, policy
choices could aim to bring into being a more enduringly inclusive, cosmopolitan and peaceful logic of the
political. But this cannot be done without seizing alternatives from outside the space of enframing and
utilitarian strategic thought, by being aware of its presence and weight and activating a very different concept of
existence, security and action.90 This would seem to hinge upon 'questioning' as such -- on the questions we put
to the real and our efforts to create and act into it. Do security and strategic policies seek to exploit and direct humans as material, as energy, or
do they seek to protect and enlarge human dignity and autonomy? Do they seek to impose by force an unjust status quo (as in Palestine), or to remove one injustice only
to replace it with others (the U.S. in Iraq or Afghanistan), or do so at an unacceptable human, economic, and environmental price? Do we see our actions within an
instrumental, amoral framework (of 'interests') and a linear chain of causes and effects (the idea of force), or do we see them as folding into a complex interplay of
languages, norms, events and consequences which are less predictable and controllable?91 And most fundamentally: Are we seeking to coerce or persuade? Are less
violent and more sustainable choices available? Will our actions perpetuate or help to end the global rule of insecurity and violence? Will our thought?
4. EMPIRICALLY TROOP REDUCTIONS HAVE HELPED TO SUSTAIN IMPERIALISM ACROSS THE

GLOBE. SURVEILLANCE, AUTHORITARIANISM, AND MANIPULATION HAVE BEEN THE RESULT
BOGGS 2005 [Carl, Professor of Social Sciences at National University in Los Angeles, Adjunct Professor at Antioch University in Los Angeles, Imperial
Delusions: American Militarism and Endless War, isbn: 0742527727, p 81-82]
Despite troop and base reductions here and there over the past few decades, the U.S. military has steadily
extended its power across both the international and domestic terrain. As we have seen, the Pentagon system
functions to protect Empire, which, since the fall of the USSR and end of the cold war, has risen to
unchallenged hegemony. The military and security network presided over by the United States requires patriotic
mobilization that in turn depends on an efficient propaganda system operating largely in the service of
government agendas. Where such mobilization is highly effective, as in the case of the two Gulf Wars, the result is a strong
authoritarianism marked by ideological conformism, institutional narrowing, a regime of surveillance, media
manipulation, secrecy in government decision making, the growing concentration of power in a few hands.
Spanos Neg - 155 -
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If Empire signifies an increasingly militarized politics and society, where "national security" priorities shape elite agendas, then
democracy winds up as something of a charade where lies, myths, distortions, and cover-ups that shape public
life are embraced and passed on by Republican and Democratic politicians alike. This is probably more true of international
affairs than of any other realm. The maintenance of Empire, always costly and destructive, requires ongoing legitimation, which it receives from politicians, officials,
the media, and intellectuals who exercise their influence within reputedly free and open public forums. With the disappearance of any semblance of a Soviet challenge
by the early 1990s, global terrorism soon furnished the perfect demonized enemy, joined by a few "rogue states" led by modernday Hitlers. Public support for
U.S. militarism was of course much easier to galvanize after 9/11, patriotism reaching its highest point since World War II as the fear
of new terrorist episodes lent a sense 'of national urgency to crucial state functions: surveillance, intelligence, law enforcement, military preparedness. In such a setting,
new weapons systems were much easier to justify and sell. In his 2002 State of the Union address Bush argued for a military budget reaching nearly $400 billion,
including new requests for high-tech weaponry, mobile anti terror units, space militarization, nuclear modernization, and expanded worldwide military deployments .
Spanos Neg - 156 -
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THE DISCOURSE OF HEGEMONY IS ALL CONSUMING. IF WE WIN A LINK, THEN THE LINK TURN
STILL REMAINS ANSWERABLE TO THE AMERICAN EXCEPTIONALIST PROBLEMATIC WHICH
KILLS IT’S REVOLUTIONARY POTENTIAL. OUR ALTERNATIVE IS ABLE TO CHALLENGE
IMPERIALISM BY REMAINING UNANSWERABLE LIKE THE VIETNAMESE.
Spanos 2008 ( William V. American Exceptionalism in the Age of Globalization. P 181- 183)
As I have shown by way of reconstellating Berlin’s past into his imagined future, everything
this young, “innocent” American has
experienced in the military, politic, cultural, and ontological miasma of Vietnam would seem inexorably to point to his taking a
different course from the one he does in this final scene of persuasion. He has, on the one hand, witnessed the disintegration of the
plenary American war machine, the plenary politics of American political democracy, the plenary American
representation of the Vietnamese earth, the plenary myth of American exceptionalism, and, on the other, the sudden
irruption of another reality out of this self-destruction of the logical economy of America theory and practice (what I have been calling, after Heidegger, the
unpresentable nothingness that the hegemonic discourse and practice of America “will have nothing to do with”). Despite
his unhoming—his being
precipitated into the realm of the uncanny (die Un- heimlichkeit)—he has been so deeply inscribed by the discourse of hegemony and
its binary logic that it utterly precludes the possibility of thinking the radically alternative reality of this
“changed terrain” positively, which is to say, of perceiving the exilic condition—and its “nomadic” practical imperatives—as the essential lesson of his
disillusioning experience in Vietnam. What Paul Berlin sees symptomatically in the shatter of a Vietnam hither to totally charted by the exceptionalist
metaphysical/imperial gaze of America, but is incapable of registering consciously is proleptic of what Edward Said has articulated, especially in the eloquent
conclusion of Culture and Imperialism, as the inevitable and fundamental project of the organic intellectual in the aftermath of the “end”—the fulfillment and demise
—of the Western imperial narrative. I quote at some length to suggest not only why in O’Brien’s “resolution” of the contradictions he exposes in Going After
Cacciato is symptomatic of the disabling limitations of the oppositional literature of the Vietnam War and of the commentaries on this massive body of writing right up
oppositional criticism of
to the present moment, but also in what sense the novel is a “threshold text” that anticipates a yet to be realized future
American imperialism. I mean a criticism that both understands the end, the disclosure of the closure, of imperialism as a continuum
that includes the ontological and epistemological, as well as the economic, social, and the political sites, and as
an imperative to think the pervasive condition of exile, however fraught with pain and suffering for the victims, as other than the
deprivation of the self-identical community envisaged by the binarist logic of the Western discourse of hegemony, indeed, as its spectral Other. Surely it is one of the
unhappiest characteristics of the age to have produced more refugees, migrants, displaced persons, and exiles than ever before in history, most of them as an
accompaniment to and, ironically enough, as afterthoughts of great postcolonial and imperial conflicts. As the struggle for independence produced new states and new
boundaries, it also produced homeless wanderers, nomads, and vagrants, unassimilated to the emerging structures of institutional power, rejected by the established
order for their intransigence and obdurate rebelliousness. And insofar as these people exist between the old and the new, between the old empire and the new state,
their condition articulates the tensions, irresolutions, and contradictions in the overlapping territories shown on the cultural map of imperialism. There is a great
difference, however, between the optimistic mobility, the intellectual liveliness, and “the logic of daring” described by the various theoreticians [Deleuze and Guatarri,
Virilio, Adorno] on whose work I have drawn, and the massive dislocations, waste, misery, and horrors endured in our century’s migrations and mutilated lives. Yet it
liberation as an intellectual mission, born in the resistance and opposition to the confinements and ravages of imperialism, has
is no exaggeration to say that
now shifted from the settled, established, and domesticated dynamics of culture to its unhoused, decentered, and
exilic energies, energies whose incarnation today is the migrant, and whose consciousness is that of the
intellectual and artist in exile, the political figure between domains, between forms, between homes, and between languages. From this perspective then
all things are indeed counter, original, spare, strange. From this perspective also, one can see “the complete consort dancing together,” contrapuntally. And while it
would be the rankest Panglossian dishonesty to say that the bravura performances of the intellectual exile and the miseries of the displaced person or refugee are the
same, it is possible, I think, to regard the intellectual as first distilling then articulating the predicaments that disfigure modernity—mass deportations, imprisonment,
population transfer, collective dispossession, and forced immigrations. But Said does not end on this purely diagnostic note. Invoking another prominent modern
intellectual exile, he goes on in a rhetoric that uncannily recalls Paul Berlin’s intuition into the unaccountability of the spectral strategy of the Vietnamese insurgents
that, like the many-headed hydra of antiquity, molecularized, stalled, and eventually defeated the American Ahabian juggernaut: “The past life of emigrés is, as we
know, annulled,” says Adorno in Minima Moralia (subtitled Reflections from a Damaged Life . . . Why? “Because any thing that is not reified, cannot be counted and
measured, ceases to exist” or, as he says later, is consigned to mere “background.” . . . Thus the
emigré consciousness—a mind of winter, in Wallace
Stevens’s phrase—discovers
in its marginality that “a gaze averted from the beaten track, a hatred of brutality, a
search for fresh concepts not yet encompassed by the general pattern, is the last hope for thought.” Adorno’s general
pattern is what in another place he calls the “administered world” or, insofar as the irresistible dominants in culture are concerned, “the consciousness industry.” There
is then not just the negative advantage of refuge in the emigré’s eccentricity ;
there is also the positive benefit of challenging the system,
describing it in language unavailable to those it has already subdued: In an intellectual hierarchy which constantly makes everyone
answerable, unanswerability alone can call the hierarchy directly by its name. Haunted though he is by the inexorable presence of
the nothing (in all its manifestations), Paul Berlin’s metonymic American soul, in its programmed need to be answerable to the
Spanos Neg - 157 -

narrative of exceptionalist America, remains intact in the end. Although his corrosive experience in Vietnam has
compelled him into awareness of the imperatives of the nothing—
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of being “in between,” of a decentered condition that affirms questioning over the answer, exile over belonging to the homeland, unanswerability over answerability,
the polemos of deviant or rhizomatic intellectual and practical struggle over the decisive dedifferentiating peace that has been the brutal end of the Western war
machine since the Romans’ invocation of the Pax Romama—he
shrinks back from these difficult choices. He opts, instead, for the
integrity of his “American” soul, hopelessly blinded by a national/imperial history that has had as its raison d’être the
production of this type of interpellated and accountable citizen soldier to its constructedness—and, like virtually all of
the liberal intellectuals and artists that protested and still protest the war, to the positive ontological, cultural, and political possibilities Said envisages in the
multitudinous lives damaged by the binarist nationalist/imperial truth and practice of the Western nation-states. Sadly, this
blindness, aided and
abetted by the servile American media, has been and continues to be everywhere evident in America in the
wake the inauguration of the symptomatically misnamed global “war on terror” on 9/11.
Spanos Neg - 159 -
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1- AMERICAN EXCEPTIONALISM HAS BECOME AND WILL BE RUTHLESSLY VIOLENT.

HOWEVER, SPANOS IN 2008 ALSO INDICATES THAT THE PERIOD IN BETWEEN THE EMPIRES
OPENS UP A SPACE FOR US TO THINK ONTOLOGY AND REMEMBER VIETNAM. THAT MEANS
EVEN IF THEY WIN THAT WE’RE NOT INSTRUMENTAL, OUR ENTIRE CRITIQUE FUNCTIONS AS
OFFENSE.
2. OUR ALTERNATIVE IS A PRAXIS (OR AT LEAST NOT NIHILIST) BECAUSE WE READ

ONTOLOGY INTO THE PRESENT SOCIO-POLITICAL OCCASION
Spanos in 90 (William V., “A conversation with William V. Spanos,” conversation with bove, Boundary 2, Volume 17, issue 2, summer 1990, Prof. At
binghamton, pp. 32-3, )
Spanos: 1976. Between 1975 and 1976, that was the beginning of a turning in my thinking that lessened the
emphasis on the existential, the authentic self, towards a much more socio-political orientation and also a more
ambiguous and a more... flexible, collective sense of the self. And ever since then, what I've been trying to do is to
reconcile the existential—by which I mean the principle of agency, which I cannot and will not drop—and the political subject—as
that is constructed, in part, by the determinant force of writing, of discourse I'm trying to work out the relation between the ontological
and the ontic in a way of pursuing knowledge that is simultaneously a praxis.
3. NO LINK - JUST BECAUSE WE DON’T TAKE AN INSTITUTIONAL ACTION DOESN’T MEAN

THAT WE THINK ALL INSTITUTIONAL ACTIONS ARE BAD OR THAT WE CAN NEVER TAKE AN
INSTITUTIONAL ACTION.
4. THE POLITICAL SYSTEM HAS BECOME INSULATED FROM CRITIQUE AND THUS
REMEMBERING ONTOLOGY. THE POLITICS THEY DEFEND HAVE BECOME TOTALITARIAN -
STRIVING FOR TOTAL DOMINATION AND CONTROL.
Beistegui 2007 (Miguel de Beistegui, Professor of Philosophy University of Warwick, Coventry. Questioning Politics, or Beyond Power. European Journal of
Political Theory 2007; 6; 87. Sage Publications)
Let me now turn to the more political effects of power, and by that I mean the various regimes that follow from the
metaphysics of subjectivity underlying modern politics. All regimes, on Heidegger’s reading, are regimes, or
modalities, of power. ‘One day’, he writes, ‘the common sense of democracies and the rational method and
planning of the “total authority” will be discovered and recognized in their identity.’12 This, Heidegger
believes, can be achieved only by looking at the structure they have in common, and that is the State. The State,
on Heidegger’s reading, turns out to be the mode of political organization best equipped to maximize and
rationalize the imperatives of power, and it is characterized primarily by its inability to call itself into
question as an institution, that is, to bring into question its own metaphysical principles and imperatives of
organization, domination and control. It is characterized by what Heidegger calls its Fraglosigkeit. It is fraglosig in connection with the nature of
the relation to beings that characterizes it: The fundamental modern form in which the specifically modern, self-framing self-
consciousness of human beings orders all beings is the state. For this reason, the ‘political’ becomes the
definitive self-certainty of historiographical consciousness. The political is determined in terms of history
grasped according to consciousness, that is, experienced in a ‘technical’ manner. The ‘political’ is the way in
which history is accomplished. Because the political is thus the technical and historiographical fundamental
certainty of all action, the ‘political’ is marked by an unconditional failure to question itself [Fraglosigkeit]. The
failure to question the ‘political’ belongs together with its totality. This means that the political in modernity is
essentially totalitarian, that is, driven by a logic and a demand of total power over which it itself has no
power, a drive it itself cannot call into question. ‘Totalitarianism’ is a direct consequence of the lack of
questioning, that is, of thought in the most fundamental sense, which characterizes the logic of the will-to-
Spanos Neg - 160 -

power.
Spanos Neg - 161 -
AT: YOU’RE NOT INSTRUMENTAL / NIHILIST 2/2
5. RETHINKING THE IMPERIAL WAY OF BEING IS AN ACTION BECAUSE IT CHANGES THE WAY
WE THINK AND THE WAY USE LANGUAGE. THIS IS IN AND OF ITSELF RADICALLY
TRANSFORMATIVE
Stenstad 2006 (Gail, professor in the Department of Philosophy and Humanities at East Tennessee State University, associate editor of Heidegger Studies, and a
member of the board of directors of the International Association for Environmental Philosophy. “Transformations Thinking After Heidegger” University of Wisconsin
Press. Page(s)8-9)
What does this mean? Why is it significant? Heidegger’s “one question”has many facets. In a way, that comment seems almost trivial. We take“being” to refer to
anything that exists in any way at all. So, of course, thatincludes everything! That seemingly trivial obviousness, however, only coversover what is really going on here .
Because being “includes everything,” a transformation in the way we think “being” is going to bring a change
in, at the very least, thinking and language (the “is”). But thinking and language shape our understanding of
time, space, things, and ourselves. In the contemporary world our understanding of all of these things is also
shaped by science and technology. So it is not just the fact that Heideggerquestions the meaning of being that results in his ongoing concern with
allthese other areas but that his way of thinking and questioning concerning being is already in and of itself radically
transformative. One of the ways it transforms thinking is in the direction of a much clearer idea of the dynamic
relationality of everything that is. At the moment, this early on, I can onlyassert this: change one key thing, and everything else
changes, too. For Western philosophy the “meaning of being” is the keystone. Move it, change it, and
everything else changes; remove it, and the whole metaphysical edifice falls. And, as will gradually become more and more clear,
all these crucial matters (being, time, space, language, thinking, mind, technology’s dominance, things, earth,
world, us) resonate and dance with one another in a complex and dynamic intertwining. Again: change one
thing, change everything. Not, however, in the way we usually think of change, in termsof linear cause and effect. How, then? This must emerge as we go
on.
6. OUR ALTERNATIVE IS A FORM OF POLITICS - EXTEND SPANOS IN 2000 - WE THINK

REMEMBERING BEING IS AN ACTION BECAUSE BEING HAS BEEN FORGOTTEN IN POLITICS
OVER THE PAST 20 YEARS IN THE ATTEMPT TO CURE THE VIETNAM SYNDROME AND ADVENT
OF THE END OF HISTORY DISCOURSE.
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THEORY AND PRAXIS AREN’T SEPARATE. THEIR ATTEMPT TO SEPARATE REMEMBERING

VIETNAM, RETHINKING ONTOLOGY, FROM THE POLITICAL IS THE REASON THAT BEING HAS
BEEN FORGOTTEN IN THE FIRST PLACE. THIS MEANS OUR ALTERNATIVE IS IMPORTANT TO
CHALLENGING THE METAPHYSICAL TRADITIONALISTS THAT JUSTIFY TOTALITARIANISM.
Spanos 2008 ( William, V. “American Exceptionalism in the Age of Globalization” p.2 )
The years following Heidegger’s announcement have borne witness to the emergence of a number of postmodern or post-ontotheological
discourses—deconstruction, genealogy, neo-Marxism, feminism, gay criticism, new historicism, cultural criticism, postcolonialism, global criticism, New
Americanist studies, and so on—that, despite crucial resistances, have assimilated Heidegger’s fundamental transformative
disclosures in some degree or other into their particular perspectives. These “new” discourses, in turn, have been (unevenly)
assimilated into most of the traditional disciplines of knowledge production. But have the implications for both critique and emancipation
of this potentially polyvalent revolution in thinking been fully realized? My answer is an emphatic negative. And
the reason for this failure is that the project of thinking or rethinking the Seinsfrage has come to a premature closure. This is
not simply because of the widespread and ideologically driven identification of Heidegger’s thought with Nazism in the wake of Victor Farias’s Heidegger et le
nazisme (1987). It is also because
of the growing sense on the part of the current Left, especially in the context of the
reemergence of praxis to privileged status over “theory,” that ontology or rather ontological representation is
so rarefied a category of thought that it is virtually empty of, if not hostile to, politics. In other words, the rethinking
of thinking Heidegger’s interrogation of the ontotheological tradition enabled has come to its end because the
emancipatory “postmodern” discourses that his thought catalyzed have, in putting ontological inquiry
(“theory”) in a disabling binary opposition with cultural and “worldly” political praxis, again forgotten the
question of being. In so doing, they have forfeited the advance in thinking enabled by the Seinsfrage to those
metaphysical traditionalists it was intended to disarm.
Spanos Neg - 163 -
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STRICT POLICYMAKING FAILS TO CHANGE THE STATUS QUO. THROUGH REMEMBERING AND
RETHINKING ONTOLOGY WE CAN SHAPE AND INFLUENCE POLICY
Edkins and Zehfuss 2005 [Jenny and Maja, Generalizing the International, Review of International Studies (32, 451-472) ]
What we are attempting in this article is an intervention that demonstrates how the illusion of the sovereign state in an insecure and
anarchic international systemis sustained and how it might be challenged. It seems to us that this has become important in the present
circumstances. The focus on security and the dilemma of security versus freedom that is set out in debates immediately after September
11th presents an apparent choice as the focus for dissent, while concealing the extent to which thinking is thereby confined to a specific agenda. Our
argument will be that this approach relies on a particular picture of the political world that has been reflected within the discipline of international relations, a picture of
a world of sovereign states. We have a responsibility as scholars; we are not insulated from the policy world. What
we discuss may not, and indeed does
not, have a direct impact on what happens in the policy world, this is clear, but our writings and our teaching do
have an input in terms of the creation and reproduction of pictures of the world that inform policy and set the
contours of policy debates.21 Moreover, the discipline within which we are situated is one which depends itself on a
particular view of the world - a view that sees the international as a realm of politics distinct from the domestic - the same view of the world as the one
that underpins thinking on security and defence in the US administration.22 In this article then we develop an analysis of
the ways in which thinking in terms of international relations and a system of states forecloses certain
possibilities from the start, and how it might look to think about politics and the international differently. Our
chosen point of intervention is to examine how IR thinking works; by showing how this thinking operates, and how it relies
on certain analytical moves and particular categorisations and dichotomies, we hope to demonstrate that it is not the only way that world politics could be
thought through. Identifying the underpinnings of existing frameworks is an important preliminary before new
thinking can be fully effective and is itself a first move in dislodging these underpinnings.
Spanos Neg - 164 -
ONTOLOGICAL FOCUS GOOD
ONTOLOGICAL QUESTIONS NEED TO COME FIRST BECAUSE ONTOLOGY IS FUNDAMENTAL TO

ALL OTHER MODES OF QUESTIONING AND ACTING IN THE WORLD. IF WE WIN THAT THEIR
ONTOLOGY IS FLAWED, THEN THEIR ACTIONS WILL ALSO RESULT IN FAILURE.
Dillon, ’99 (Lancaster Politics Lecturer, Moral Spaces, pp. 97-8)
Heirs to all this, we find ourselves in the turbulent and now globalized wake of its confluence. As Heidegger-himself an especially revealing figure of the deep and
the relevance of ontology to all other kinds of thinking
mutual implication of the philosophical and the political4-never tired of pointing out,
is fundamental and inescapable. For one cannot say anything about anything that is, without always already
having made assumptions about the is as such. Any mode of thought, in short, always already carries an ontology
sequestered within it. What this ontological turn does to other-regional-modes of thought is to challenge the
ontology within which they operate. The implications of that review reverberate throughout the entire mode of thought, demanding a reappraisal as
fundamental as the reappraisal ontology has demanded of philosophy. With ontology at issue, the entire foundations or underpinnings
of any mode of thought are rendered problematic. This applies as much to any modern discipline of thought as it does to the question of
modernity as such, with the exception, it seems, of science, which, having long ago given up the ontological questioning of when it called itself natural philosophy,
With its foundations at issue, the very
appears now, in its industrialized and corporatized form, to be invulnerable to ontological perturbation .
authority of a mode of thought and the ways in which it characterizes the critical issues of freedom and judgment (of what
kind of universe human beings inhabit, how they inhabit it, and what counts as reliable knowledge for them in it) is also put in question. The very ways in
which Nietzsche, Heidegger, and other continental philosophers challenged Western ontology, simultaneously, therefore reposed the fundamental and inescapable
difficulty, or aporia, for human being of decision and judgment. In other words, whatever
ontology you subscribe to, knowingly or
unknowingly, as a human being you still have to act. Whether or not you know or acknowledge it, the ontology you subscribe to will con-
strue the problem of action for you in one way rather than another. You may think ontology is some arcane
question of philosophy, but Nietzsche and Heidegger showed that it intimately shapes not only a way of thinking, but a way
of being, a form of life. Decision, a fortiori political decision, in short, is no mere technique. It is instead a way of being that
bears an understanding of Being, and of the fundaments of the human way of being within it. This applies,
indeed applies most, to those mock innocent political slaves who claim only to be technocrats of decision
making.
Spanos Neg - 165 -
AT: ETHICS VS ONTOLOGY 1/2
ETHICS ARE ROOTED WITHIN A FRAMEWORK OF METAPHYSICS, MANDATING WE ACT AS

“SUBJECTS” OVER “OBJECTS” IN THE WORLD
Press. Page(s) 183-186)
In the first place, the thinking of the first and other beginning, if it is to persist in thinking be-ing and in opening up
our situation in timingspacing- thinging, cannot be reduced to any kind of dogma or doctrine. Heidegger is quite
clear on why he rejects that. “When thinking comes to an end by slipping out of its element it replaces this loss
by procuring a validity for itself as techne-. . . . Philosophy becomes a technique for explaining from the highest
causes[,] . . . [and] in competition with one another [philosophies] publicly offer themselves as ‘isms’ and try to
offer more than the others” ( : / ; see also  : , / , ). Philosophical theorizing, including the production of
ethical theory, is rooted in the presuppositions of metaphysics. Ethics is rooted in metaphysics and its
epistemology, and even thinking in terms of values and value judgments is rooted in subject-object dualism.
“Precisely through the characterization of something as a ‘value’ what is so valued is robbed of its worth . . . admitted only as an object for man’s estimation . . . a
subjectivizing. . . . The bizarre effort to probe the objectivity of values does not know what it is doing” ( : / ). The very act of making value
judgments is rooted in the notion of our acting as subjects in relation to objects that, in and of themselves,
have no “say” in the matter. So even assigning a very high value to something is an assumption that it has its
value in relation to us. The fact that environmental ethicists, for example, think that they must offer a justification and argue on behalf of the notion of the
intrinsic value of other kinds of beings or species or ecosystems is itself a tacit admission that, within the realm of ethical theory, traditional metaphysical and
epistemological presuppositions hold sway. We,
the human subjects, will decide whether or not to grant value to the objects
with which ethics is attempting to concern itself. The very notion of “intrinsic value,” in that framework, is rather perplexing, to say the least.
No matter how convinced we are that the notion of human superiority is wrong-headed and destructive, until we can release our attachment to the underlying dualistic
presuppositions, “value” can only be an admission of “no intrinsic value.” Until we can let go of dualistically fixating on ourselves as subjects over against objects, as
minds in charge of bodies (ours or others’), and as selves in relation to others, “ethics” will be both necessary and ineffective. It will seem necessary because of the
requirement that harmful or offensive behavior be restrained. It will be ineffective because it does too little to actually change anything, fostering our sense of
superiority along with the notion that if we can only figure things out well enough and exercise enough control over ourselves and others, we can solve the problems
that confront us. But the very assumptions and attitudes that ethics and values thinking fosters are in large measure at the root of many of those problems.
Spanos Neg - 166 -
AT: ETHICS VS ONTOLOGY 2/2
ETHICS ARE A PRODUCT OF METAPHYSICS, WHICH ATTEMPTS TO LOCATE “PROBLEMS” IN

WHICH WE MUST FIND “SOLUTIONS.” THE ATTEMPT TO EMBRACE “ETHICS” IS USELESS AND
DENIES THE RADICALLY TRANSFORMATIVE POTENTIAL OF OUR ALTERNATIVE
Press. Page(s) 183-186)
to try to derive “an ethics” from the thinking of be-ing would be to expect both too much and
So the bottom line is that
too little. It would expect too much in looking for a way to solve problems and to expect this solution to
come by way of the usual mechanics of theory production: concepts, principles, argumentation. The
thinking of be-ing is, for this purpose, useless ( : / ). But the demand for an ethics also expects too little.
The kind of transformation that becomes possible here runs much deeper than a willed change of attitude, a new
set of values, or a different kind of ethics ever could. “With all the good intentions and all the ceaseless effort,
these attempts are no more than makeshift patchwork, expedients for the moment. And why? Because the ideas
of aims, purposes, and means, of effects and causes, from which all these attempts arise—because these ideas
are from the start incapable of holding themselves open to what is” and thus fall far short of the kind of
radical transformation opened up in the thinking of be-ing, the possibility of dwelling with things in
mindfulness of our interrelationality in timing-spacing-thinging ( – / ;  : , –/ –, ). Furthermore, the
very basis of ethical theory, its grounding on some definite idea of the nature of beings, is thoroughly shaken
in the thinking of be-ing. “All calculating according to ‘purposes’ and ‘values’ stems from an entirely definite
interpretation of beings. . . . [H]ereby the question of be-ing is not even intimated, let alone asked[,] . . .
[resulting in] all noisy talk . . . without foundation and empty” ( : / ). The thinking of be-ing and its
opening toward dwelling is not an attempt to solve our problems and aim at utopia through some kind of
ethical-political planning. It is also not subject to the kinds of limits that pertain to such attempts, attempts that limit transformation to incremental
change within predetermined bounds. We cannot predict what may come, but one thing is clear: a way of thinking that alters all our deepest presuppositions about
ourselves and the nature of the world is going to have unimaginably far-reaching ramifications, if it can be thought and imagined and lived. I said earlier in this book, as
the all-pervasive nature of dynamic relationality began to come to the fore, “Change one thing, and everything changes.” If that “one thing” is the thought of be-ing, and
the next thing is our understanding of ourselves, then everything else begins to follow. I hope it is clear that I do not mean “follow” here in the sense in which each
premise in an argument follows from another. What follows from (and accompanies) the thinking of be-ing is a multifaceted shifting in which “all relationship to a
being is transformed.” Here the imagery of Indra’s net is again helpful. I brought it into play at first to help explain the way that the joinings of guidewords work. Those
guidewords, however, say and show something of the dynamic of the turnings in enowning, of timing-spacing-thinging. One way that Heidegger gives us to think the
possibility of transformation is of turning with the turnings in enowning ( : / ). This transforming will not be subject to planning and prediction. On the
contrary, it depends on being attuned to the dynamic of timing-spacing-thinging, being attuned to the reservedness that echoes being’s withdrawal from any grasping
attempt.We might well wonder, then, what comes next. We proceed by once again gathering ourselves to releasement toward things and openness to mystery.
Spanos Neg - 167 -
AT: ONTOLOGY BAD- GENERIC NO LINK
WE DO NOT PRIVELEGE ONTOLOGY FOR ALL TIME BUT OUR AFF IS UNIQUELY NECESSARY
RIGHT NOW – THE WEST HAS FORGOTTEN THE QUESTION OF ONTOLOGY WHICH MUST BE
PUT BACK INTO PLAY AGAINST THE IMPERIAL PROJECT
William V. SPANOS 2000 (AMERICA’S SHADOW PP. 3-4)
Such an undertaking does not presume to provide a completely adequate answer to the vexing question of imperialism. Nor, despite my reservations about their focus, is
it intended to proffer an alternative to existing poststructural or postcolonial or post-Marxist or postfeminist discourses of resistance. It is, rather, meant to be an
Auseinandersetzung — an antagonistic dialogue with them,2 one that would disclose crucial aspects of actually existing imperialism that these allegedly more historical
and more practical critical discourses are blind to. By retrieving the question of being (die Seinsfrage), in other words, I am not implying the recuperation of the
Summum Ens (Being) that is endemic to the ontotheological tradition, the disciplinary category that has contributed fundamentally to the colonizing operations of its
discourses and practices. My intention is to bring into focus the indissoluble lateral continuum that includes being as such, the subject, the ecos, gender, culture, race,
the relay of sites that is always uneven because it al-ways
economy, and the national and international socius. I mean, more specifically,
undergoes asymmetrical transformation in history. This is what is crucial. A particular historical conjuncture will
overdetermine one or more "domains" of this relay over the others. Given the depth to which the arbitrary
compartmentalization of being is inscribed in the Occidental consciousness — of even those who would resist
its disciplinary/classificatory imperatives — the historically produced imbalance in the relay evokes the
disabling illusion that the overdetermined site (or sites) is separate from and constitutes a universal and
determining base to the other (epiphenomenal) superstructural sites. This seductive characteristic of the historical "destiny" of being,
for example, explains Marx and Engels's tendency to represent the means of production as a foundational category in the middle of the nineteenth century, which bore
It also, in a far more vulgar and misleading way, explains Fukuyama's representation of
witness to the rise and overdetermination of capital.
the underlying ontological principle of liberal capitalist democracy as a determining base at the end of the
twentieth century. In the years following the advent of "theory," the prevailing, praxis- oriented oppositional discourses have become indifferent or even
hostile to the question of being. And this indifference or hostility is, admittedly, understandable, given the political
impotence of the discourses of such "early" theorists as Heidegger, Derrida, and Lyotard, which have privileged
ontological questions. Nevertheless, the abandonment of the question of being by recent oppositional
discourses, I submit, has been disabling for criticism. In thinking the question of the imperial, I will therefore
overdetermine the site of ontology. But this is not to imply that I am attributing this site with privileged
ontological status. Rather, I want to compensatorily put back into play a crucial category of the imperial project.
But it should be remembered, in keeping with what I have called the indissoluble continuum of being, that the ontological representation of being is polyvalent in
essence. When, that is, I am referring to ontological categories such as Identity and difference, I am implicitly, however asymmetrically, referring to all the other sites
on this continuous lateral relay.
Spanos Neg - 168 -
AT: ONTOLOGY BAD - GRAHAM ’99 “MASS MURDER”
1. THIS DOESN’T MAKE SENSE AGAINST OUR CRITICISM- RECONSTELLATING VIETNAM IS

NOT SITUATING THE SUBJECT ALONE, BUT IN IT’S PLACE IN HISTORY.
2. NO LINK- SPANOS COMBINED HEIDEGGER WITH FOUCAULT IN ORDER TO ADDRESS BOTH

THE ONTOLOGICAL AND THE POLITICAL REALM TO STOP DISINTERESTED INQUIRY AND
AMERICAN EXCEPTIONALISM.
Pease ’93 (Donald E., Ph.D and Director of The Futures of American Studies Institute, Heidegger and Criticism: Retrieving the Cultural Politics of Destruction, pg
xiv-xv)
Throughout the Vietnam era Spanos appropriated the Heideggerian inquiry into the question of Being to
undermine the privileged status of such masterful academic practices as the New Criticism, structuralism,
phenomenological analysis, and literary modernism. All of these efforts, Spanos argued, were grounded in the same
unexamined assumptions, namely, that identity is ontologically prior to difference, that the end of time is antecedent to temporal
process. These assumptions in turn justified, in the name of disinterested inquiry and American exceptionalism,
masterful interpretive as well as dominative militaristic practices, with the result that the temporality of the text was reduced to a spatial
form and Vietnam to a U.S. military colony. In his interpretive strategy, Spanos never tired of breaking these metaphysical enclosures, retrieving the temporality of
being against the tradition's forgetting, and reassigning the interpreter to historical Dasein—that is, to temporal being in the world. The
difference between
Spanos's "destructions" of the late 1960s and those of the 1990s entailed his belated recognition (in the wake of the
Heidegger controversy) that this retrieval was not enough; that it required for its historical efficacy a correlation of
Heidegger's ontological critique with Foucault's genealogical method. Without "completion" by the other's
method, both Heidegger and Foucault failed to realize their critique. Heidegger emphasized the site of ontology but minimized the
historically specific sociopolitical site. On the other hand, Foucault emphasized sociopolitical concerns but minimized the ontological question, with the potentially
disastrous result that his counter-memory to the disciplinary society became particularly vulnerable to amnesia in the 1990s .
In combining Heidegger's
destructive hermeneutics with Foucault's genealogical method, Spanos undermined any possible reconciliation
of be-ing with Being. As a result of this conjuncture, Spanos now understood the temporality of being in the world as not
confined to one site but as an always changing, unevenly developed lateral field of already constituted forces,
encompassing all the regions between ontology and sociopolitics. These observations require a redescription of Davidson's efforts as a
reappropriation of the Heidegger question. In the 1960s Spanos deployed Heidegger as a means of recovering an originary Greek
thinking against the grain of a U.S. foreign policy intent on "Romanizing" the globe. He further understood himself as a figure
whose experience during the Dresden firebombing had resulted in an existential experience of Dread before the annihilation of being at this site.
3. THIS EVIDENCE DOESN’T APPLY TO US, THE EVIDENCE IS TALKING ABOUT NIETZSCHE AND
EXISTENTIALISM. NOT ABOUT SPANOS OR VIETNAM.
4. NO INTERNAL LINK - THE INTERNAL LINK IS SOMETHING ABOUT HOW SUBJECTIVE DEATH
AND BIOLOGICAL DEATH ARE UNRELATED. THAT DOESN’T APPLY TO US OR DOESN’T
REALLY MAKE SENSE.
Spanos Neg - 169 -
AT: ONTOLOGY BAD - GRAHAM ’99 “HOCUS POCUS”
1. THERE’S NO LINK - THIS EVIDENCE SEEMS TO BE ABOUT HERACLITUS A GREEK DUDE, NOT
SPANOS.
2. NO LINK AND LINK TURN - THIS PIECE OF EVIDENCE INDICATES THAT IDENTITY POLITICS,
NOT OUR ALTERNATIVE, LEADS TO AUTHORITARIANISM. OUR CRITICISM ACTS TO BREAK
DOWN IDENTITY POLITICS BY UNDERSTANDING THE WORLD AS DIFFERENCE WHICH LEADS
TO IDENTITY INSTEAD OF IDENTITY LEADING TO DIFFERENCE. THAT MEANS THEIR
EVIDENCE DOESN’T APPLY BECAUSE WE NEVER DEVOLVE TO QUESTIONS OF THE
THINGLINESS OF PEOPLE. QUESTIONS BASED ON “THINGLINESS” ARE ASSUMPTIONS OF
IDENTITY NOT OF DIFFERENCE.
3. THEY HAVE TO WIN THAT ONTOLOGY IS BAD IN THE STATUS QUO. OUR CRITICISM IS TO
REMEMBER ONTOLOGY IN THE INTERREGNUM OR BETWEEN THE FALL AND RISE OF
EMPIRES. SPANOS IN 2008 INDICATES THAT ABSENT ONTOLOGICAL QUESTIONS THE WORLD
BECOMES CONSUMED AND DESTROYED BY AN AMERICAN EMPIRE BENT ON OBLITERATING
ANYTHING THAT STANDS IN IT’S PATH.
Spanos Neg - 170 -
GENERIC AT: ARGS AGAINST THE ALTERNATIVE
THEIR CLAIMS THAT THE ALTERNATIVE DOES NOTHING ARE A MECHANISM FOR SILENCING
DISSENT AT AMERICAN EXCEPTIONALISM. COLONIALISM, AND GENOCIDE – CRITIQUE IS THE
ONLY OPTION.
William V. Spanos, Prof. of English and Comparative Literature @ SUNY Binghamton, “Global American,” symploke, Volume 16, Number 1, 2008
Nor am I suggesting that the analogy I am proposing is utterly foreign to the oppositional intellectual milieu in
America. Though the relay between the instrumentalist official and public discourse and the dehumanized
political practices of violence have been fundamental to oppositional discourses, especially since the Vietnam
War, it has nevertheless been by and large symptomatic. This was not only the case during the Vietnam War, when the oppositional
constituencies focused their critique on the dehumanized public language of the “body count” (or on the official language of the “war of attrition”). It has also
been the case throughout the long and continuing aftermath of the Vietnam War under the impetus of the
various perspectives of poststructuralist theory. [End Page 179] (For convenience, I will distinguish broadly and, I admit, reductively between
those who have followed the directives of de-struction [Martin Heidegger], deconstruction [Jacques Derrida, Paul de Man, Jean-François Lyotard], and psychoanalytic
criticism [Jacques Lacan], which over-determine the sites of ontology [being], epistemology [the subject], and language [representation], on the one hand, and those
following the directives of genealogical or New Historicist criticism [Michel Foucault], Neo-Marxism [Antonio Gramsci, Theodor Adorno, Fredric Jameson, Terry
Eagleton], cultural criticism [Raymond Williams, Stuart Hall] postcolonialism [Frantz Fanon, C. L. R. James, Edward W. Said, Ranajit Guha], feminism [Simone de
Beauvoir, Luce Irigaray, Gayatri Spivak, who over-determine the sites of sociopolitics], and the more hybrid New Americanist criticism [Sacvan Bercovitch, Donald
Pease, John Carlos Rowe, Russ Castronuovo, Amy Kaplan].) Throughout the Cold War era, especially since the Vietnam War,
these American oppositional discourses have intuited this complicity between the deeply backgrounded,
privileged instrumentalist language (thinking) of “America” and the dehumanized violence the U.S. has
perpetrated in the name of its deeply backgrounded exceptionalist mission in the “wilderness” of the modern
world. But they have not, I submit, overtly called this complicity by its right name. This is, no doubt, partly because of a failure of nerve—a shrinking back from
that to which their disclosive discourses have brought them face to face.5 But this failure is also partly because these oppositional discourses have tended to remain
disciplinary—some focused on language and the others, in an antithetical way, on politics—and thus have failed to [End Page 180] perceive the indissoluble relay
My argument in this essay, to repeat, is that the official and public American
between the two in the very process of making it.
discourse to which I have been referring is precariously similar to that of Arendt’s representative German
functionary, Adolph Eichmann, in its deadly instrumentalist superficiality—its blindness and indifference to the
sociopolitical violence against other humans (the German people’s Others) which it enables and justifies, that is to say,
the banality of the evil it perpetrates. I cannot, of course, invoke in this limited space the history of this American discourse that would validate and
authorize this argument. Following Arendt’s directive—her representation of Eichmann as the type of the German everyman of the Nazi era—I will, instead, retrieve
and reconstellate into the present a few synecdochical instances of this discursive history. Previously symptomatically analyzed by others in terms of the dehumanized
and dehumanizing tenor of their language, these instances, typical of the fate of unaccommodatable contradictions to the official discourse, have by now been
obliterated from the American historical memory. They will, I hope, at a least suggest the viability of my argument.
Spanos Neg - 171 -
GENERIC AT: SPANOS = ANTI-HUMANIST 1/2
1- CLASSICAL HUMANIST THINKING IS ROOTED IN IMPERIALISM. OUR ALTERNATIVE TO THIS,

ISN’T ANTI-HUMANISTS – BUT POST-HUMANIST.
SPANOS 2006 William V, Interview with Jeffery J. Williams, The Minnesota Review, ns67, fall 2006,
http://www.theminnesotareview.org/journal/ns67/interview_spanos.shtml]
Spanos: Yes. I go back to Heidegger's great essay "Letter on Humanism," which is his answer to Jean Beaufret's question; is there any way of recovering the word
"humanism" in a useful way? Heidegger's response to this is a very complicated response. He begins the whole "antihumanist" momentum that was picked up by
I detect not a rejection of humanism by Heidegger in that essay, but a rethinking of
Derrida, Foucault, Lacan, Althusser. But
the human, which is to say a rethinking of the entire Western tradition's understanding of the human. According to Heidegger,
humanism begins with the Roman translation of what I would call an originative Greek thinking, which is always already on the way, to a derivative form of thinking
the idea of humanism that is precipitated by this
which can be characterized by calculativity, knowing what you want from the end. So
translation of Greek thinking, originative thinking, to derivative thinking by the Romans, was intended, according
to Heidegger, to give man a metaphysical identity that was universal, unchanging, and therefore, a concept of man
which involved predictability, because the primary concern was the production of good citizens. How did Heidegger
put this? "Eruditio et institutio in bonas artes"—scholarship and education in good conduct. And that was necessary because their primary concern was the conquest
and subordination of the world outside the Roman metropolis. In other words, what the Roman tradition does is to create a concept of man in which man is the
measure of all things.Man is the determinant of all the differential aspects of Being, from the ontological all the way through to the
humanity outside of the Western world which privileges Man with a capital letter. So this humanism— this humanist thinking—is profoundly
imperial from its ontological roots, and this concept of Man as the measure, as the master, the overlord of
Being, becomes fundamental, especially in the period of the Enlightenment—the so-called anthropological era, when the
anthropologos has taken the place of the theologos. Although Heidegger doesn't do a good job of articulating his new
humanism, he does offer directives that I follow. That's why I use the word "posthuman," not "antihuman," in the
book on education. It's a humanity that is demoted from the status of overlord of Being. That is the corrupt use of
humanism, Man as the conqueror, Man as conquering force against the world or even against Being. That is
opposed to the more positive force, the existential category of care.
2. TURN - TRADITIONAL HUMANISM IS DEPENDENT ON A UNIFIED AND HOMOGENOUS

IDENTITY. THIS REINFORCES ELITISM, EUROCENTRISM AND IMPERIALISM.
Spanos 2005 ( William, V. “Humanism and the Studia Humanitatis after 9/11/01: Rethinking the Anthropologos” Found in symploke, Volume 13, Numbers 1-2,
2005, pp. 219-262 symploke, )
traditional humanists (and the studia humanitatis they sponsored and institutionalized) were committed
In the process, Said shows quite rightly that
to a humanism “that is often associated with very selective elites, be they religious, aristocratic, or educational, on the one hand, and,
on the other, with an attitude of stern opposition, sometimes stated, sometimes not, to the idea that humanism might or could be a democratic process producing a
critical and progressively freer mind” (HDC 16). He argues, second, that this
humanism assumed a “supposed opposition between what
is designated as traditional and canonical” against “the unwelcome interventions of the new and the
intellectually representative of the age we live in” (HDC 23) and thus depended on “the notion of a unified,
coherent, homogenous national identity (HDC 24). Third, he shows that it “interpreted the past as an essentially
complete history” against a perspective that “sees history, even the past, itself, as still open to the presence and
the challenges of the emergent, the insurgent, the unrequited, and the unexplored” (HDC 26). In short, Said persuasively
demonstrates that this classical humanism is ontologically essentialist (metaphysical), epistemologically identitarian, and politically
nationalist, racist, elitist, patriarchal, undemocratic, Eurocentric, and imperial.
Spanos Neg - 172 -
GENERIC AT: SPANOS = ANTI-HUMANIST 2/2
3- OUR ALTERNATIVE RE-APPROPRIATES CLASSICAL HUMANISM. WE EMBRACE A WORLD

WHERE THE TASK OF THE HUMANIST IS TO BE BOTH AN INSIDER AND OUTSIDER TO OUR
CULTURE. THIS DISTINGUISHES THE ALTERNATIVE FROM ANTI HUMANISM IN 3 DIFFERENT
WAYS.
2005, pp. 219-262 symploke, )
What, therefore, he posits as an alternative to this distanced oppressive or accommodational and dehumanizing humanism is one that is
“worldly,” by which he means anti-essentialist, anti-identitarian, anti-nationalist, anti-patriarchal, anti-racist, anti-elitist, anti-Eurocentric, and anti-imperial. It is, I
want to emphasize, a way of perceiving being in all its indissolubly related worldly manifestations (i.e., the linguistic
representations of being’s polyvalent reality) that privileges the question over the answer and, thus, in opposition to classical humanism, a
careful way of comporting oneself to and acting in the finite world of representation that is simultaneously in-
and outside it—a-part, as it were—receptive to and critical of the texts one encounters, or, as Said puts it elsewhere, “contrapuntal.” This
careful “exilic” comportment towards the represented world (which is a world characterized by inordinate imbalances of power) is
what Said calls “philology,” “the abiding basis for all humanistic practice.”Following Vico’s revolutionary secular humanist
assertion in New Science that “the historical world is made by men and women, and not by God, and that it can be understood rationally according to the principle . . .
that we can really know only what we make” (HDC 11), Said writes: [W]e need to keep coming back to the words and structures in the books we read [this is the
receptive gesture of the philologist, who submits him/herself “knowledgeably to texts and treating them provisionally at first as discrete objects . . . moving then, by
dint of expanding and elucidating the often obscure or invisible framework in which they exist, to their historical situations and the way in which certain structures of
attitude, feeling, and rhetoric get entangled with some currents, some historical and social formulations of their context” (HDC 61)], but, just as these words were
themselves taken by the poet from the world and evoked from out of silence in forceful ways without which no creation is possible, readers must also extend their
readings out into the various worlds each one of us resides in. It is especially appropriate for the contemporary humanist to cultivate that sense of multiple worlds and
The task of the humanist is not
complex interacting traditions, that inevitable combination . . . of belonging and detachment, reception and resistance.
just to occupy a position or place, not simply to belong somewhere, but rather to be both insider and outsider
to the circulating ideas and values that are at issue in our society or someone else’s society or the society of the
other. (HDC 76; my emphasis) What, then, distinguishes Said’s philologically-oriented humanism from the anti-or
post-humanism of the post-structuralists he criticizes? According to him, there are at least three fundamental and related
differences, one explicit and the others implicit: 1) The post-structuralists simply substitute one form of totalizing
essentialism for that of the humanists they are attacking and thus, like them, annul the possibility of the
human agency Said aims to retrieve: “This group of pioneers [he names Levi-Strauss, Roland Barthes, and, above all, Michel Foucault] showed, in effect, that
the existence of systems of thinking and perceiving transcended the powers of individual subjects, individual humans who were inside those systems (systems such as
Freud’s unconscious or Marx’s capital) and therefore had no power over them, only the choice either to use or be used by them. This of course flatly contradicts the
core of humanistic thought, and hence the individual cogito was displaced, or demoted, to the status of illusory autonomy or fiction” (HDC 9-10). 2) Insofar as
their interpretive/critical focus was restricted to the site of textuality, the post-structuralists not only remained caught
in the disciplinary net (epitomized by the depart- mental structure of knowledge production in the university) that is fundamental to the power relations of
modernity, but also as ahistorical and unworldly as the traditional humanists whose “disinterested” mode of inquiry Said’s humanism calls into question . 3) In
insisting on the fundamental undecidability of all (worldly) texts, poststructuralist interpretation, especially its
deconstructive allotrope, ended in paralyzing practice; i.e. in political quietism.
Spanos Neg - 173 -
HUMANISM EXT
NO LINK - CRITIQUING DOESN’T MEAN DESTROYING. WE DON’T MOVE AWAY FROM

HUMANISM
2005, pp. 219-262 symploke, )
Fully aware of its now deeply problematic status, Said nevertheless claims that the word “humanism”
is salvageable, indeed, urgently needed after
9/11, when America has arrogantly assumed unilateral responsibility for keeping order in the world, and he goes on
to undertake an eloquent and passionate defense of his claim. In this book, Said attempts to re-appropriate the term from the “classic”
humanists’ long abuse of it: “But it is worth insisting in this as well [the emergence of widespread anti-humanist “revulsion with the Vietnam War,”
racism, imperialism, “and the dry-as-dust academic humanities that had for years represented an unpolitical, unworldly, and oblivious (sometimes even manipulative)
attacking the abuses of something is not the same thing as dismissing or entirely
attitude to the present”] that
destroying that thing. So, in my opinion, it has been the abuses of humanism that discredited some of
humanism’s practitioners without discrediting humanism itself” (HDC 13).
Spanos Neg - 174 -
GENERIC AT: VIETNAM FOCUS BAD
1. THE IMPACT TO NOT REMEMBERING VIETNAM IS PLANETARY ANNIHILATION. EXTEND

SPANOS IN 8 - VIETNAM REPRESENTS A CONTRADICTION TO AMERICAN LEGITIMACY THAT
DISRUPTED AMERICAN’S ONTOLOGICAL FOUNDATIONS. AT THE POINT IN WHICH WE FORGET
VIETNAM, WE JUSTIFY FALSIFYING DOCUMENTS TO FULFILL OUR KILL TO SAVE MENTALITY.
THIS MENTALITY PLACES THE PLANET ON THE BRINK OF EXTINCTION AS WE ATTEMPT TO
SPREAD OUR TRUTHS. IF WE WIN AN IMPACT THEN THEY HAVE TO WIN FOCUSING ON
VIETNAM IN THIS INSTANCE IS BAD.
2. THE REMEMBERING OF VIETNAM CHALLENGES IMPERIALIST ONTOLOGICAL

FOUNDATIONS BECAUSE OF THE SINGULARITY THE WAR HOLDS. EXTEND OUR SPANOS IN
2000 EVIDENCE - VIETNAM WAS THE FIRST WAR WHERE WE COULD SEE VISUAL
CONTRADICTIONS BETWEEN HOW WE ACTED AND HOW WE SAID WE ACTED. VIETNAM WAS
ALSO THE FIRST POSTMODERN WAR, OR A WAR IN WHICH THEIR WASN’T DIRECT
CONFRONTATION BETWEEN TWO SIDES.
3. THERE’S NO CASE TURN - THE INTERVENTIONS THEY CLAIM WE INCREASE ARE NOT
CAUSED BY REMEMBERING VIETNAM, BUT BY MODERN IMPERIALIST ATTEMPTING TO
SPREAD TRUTH. KOSOVO, VIETNAM, FALLUJAH AND GROZNY ARE ALL EXAMPLES OF THIS.
4- EXTEND SPANOS 2000- IN THE 1980’S THE MEDIA AND THE GOVERNMENT BEGAN A
PROCESS TO KICK THE VIETNAM SYNDROME. A MASSIVE CAMPAIGN OF BOOKS AND VIDEOS
ATTEMPTED TO REWRITE THE HISTORY TO MAKE THE WAR SEEM NORMAL INSTEAD OF
SINGULAR. THIS EVIDENCE JUST CONTINUES THAT PROJECT WHICH MEANS THEIR EVIDENCE
FUNCTIONS NO MORE THEN A REASON WHY OUR ALTERNATIVE HAS UNIQUENESS.
Spanos Neg - 175 -
AT: MENDIBLE - VIETNAM FOCUS BAD
1. MENDIBLE AGREES WITH US, THIS ARTICLE INDICATES THAT ASSUMPTIONS BASED ON
NEWS MEDIA CREATE CYCLES OF VIOLENCE THAT FUEL THE MILITARY, NOT FOCUSING ON
THE ONTOLOGICAL ASSUMPTIONS OF THE MILITARY
Mendible 7 (Myra, Florida Gulf Coast U., Radical Pyschology, vol 7, http://www.radicalpsychology.org/vol7-1/mendible.html)
There are several problems, of course, with this version of history and with the ways that the “we” is constituted in its narrative. This essay is concerned with the extent
to which Vietnam consistently plays out in popular memory as a psychodrama of humiliation, casting America in the role of victim and producing certain alignments
and associations in the citizenry. Bush’s speech capitalized on a set of assumptions that have long dominated public discourse about the
war. News pundits, filmmakers, and political leaders alike have exploited the evocative power of this humiliation tale, invoking its stock
characters and compensatory themes to elicit predictable responses in target audiences. This affective logic binds subjects to cycles of
compensatory violence, fueling militaristic strains in America’s political culture and setting the stage for a series of wars
and interventions. I hope to show how this humiliation dynamic structures conflicts in ways that short-circuit the consideration of peaceful options.
2. VIETNAM ONLY CAUSES HUMILIATION BECAUSE OF THE ACTIONS THAT WE TOOK IN THAT
WAR. THE FACT THAT IT CAUSED US TO FEEL HUMILIATED SHOULD BE INTERPRETED AS A
REASON WHY WE NEED TO REEXAMINE THE WAY THAT WE ACTED IN THE WAR. NOT FORGET
THE WAR IN TOTAL.
Spanos Neg - 176 -
AT: WEISBROT - VIETNAM FOCUS BAD
1. NO INTERNAL LINK - THIS EVIDENCE INDICATES THAT VIETNAM SHOOK OUR

ONTOLOGICAL FOUNDATIONS - THEN INDICATES THAT WARS SINCE THE VIETNAM WAR
HAVE GONE UNDERGROUND. NO WHERE IN THE ARTICLE DOES HE CONNECT THOSE TWO
CLAIMS TOGETHER.
2. THE BOTTOM PART OF THE ARTICLE SAYS “[government officials] cannot allow the US casualty
count to rise very high before people begin to question their motives.” THIS MEANS REMEMBERING
THE VIETNAM WAR ALLOWS US TO QUESTION OUR PRAXIS BECAUSE THE ALT REMEMBERS
THE FACT THAT WE KILLED 2 MILLION VIETNAMESE AND DESTROYED THEIR CULTURE.
Spanos Neg - 177 -
AT: KANE - VIETNAM FOCUS BAD
1. THIS PIECE OF EVIDENCE IS JUST A DESCRIPTION OF THE VIETNAM SYNDROME. THIS

EVIDENCE UNDERSTANDS REMEMBERING VIETNAM IN THE SENSE THAT WE HAVE TO KICK
THAT PROBLEM. THAT’S THE MINDSET THAT WE ATTEMPT TO CHANGE IN THE
ALTERNATIVE.
2. NO LINK - THEIR RESPONSE TO REMEMBERING VIETNAM IS TO BECOME NIHILIST. THAT’S

NOT WHAT OUR ALTERNATIVE DOES, WE UNDERSTAND THE VIETNAM AS A DESTRUCTIVE
GENEOLOGY, WHICH FOSTERS A SENSE OF RETHINKING, ALL OF THAT IS AN ACTION
COMPARED TO THEIR NIHILISM.
Spanos Neg - 178 -
AT: KIRKPATRICK - VIETNAM FOCUS BAD
1. NO LINK - OUR ALTERNATIVE DOESN’T ATTEMPT DOESN’T ATTEMPT TO GROUP WARS

TOGETHER AS THE SAME … WE MAY ARGUE THAT THERE ARE SIMILARITIES BETWEEN THE
CONDITIONS THAT LEAD UP TO BOTH WARS. BUT THAT DOESN’T MEAN THEY ARE
MIRRORED.
EITHER: (READ THE EVIDENCE IF THE AFFIRMATIVE IS AN AFGHAN/ IRAQ AFF. READ
THE ANALYTICAL IF IT’S NOT ONE OF THOSE AFFIRMATIVES )
2. YOUR AUTHOR DOESN’T AGREE WITH YOUR AFF

Kirkpatrick (the article this evidence came from) 9 (Jeanne, CFR, 10-14, The incurable Vietnam syndrome
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2009/10/14/opinion/main5383848.shtml.)
Another crucial point to take away from Vietnam is the importance of willpower in warfare. North Vietnam was much smaller than the United States, but its desire to
prevail was much greater. If it is parallels to Vietnam that you seek, look at the wavering in the White House today. In some respects it is reminiscent of the Johnson
and Nixon administrations, which showed themselves more interested in ending than in winning the war. If
President Obama ultimately decides
not to make a serious and prolonged commitment to Afghanistan, he will be making the same mistake so
many Democrats did in the early 1970s when they claimed that we could get out of Vietnam with no damage to our country or the region
OR
2. NO LINK - THE LINKS TO THE AFFIRMATIVE ARE SPECIFIC TO THE AFFIRMATIVE NOT TO
IRAQ OR AFGHANISTAN. THAT’S ELSEWHERE ON THE FLOW.
Spanos Neg - 179 -
AT: EMPATHY TURN
1. READ THE AT: SPANOS = ANTI HUMANIST.
2. EMPATHY IS IMPOSSIBLE WITHOUT THE ALTERNATIVE. AS LONG AS IMPERIALISTS USE

THE KILL TO SAVE MINDSET, THEN THE CHANCES THAT SOMEONE ELSE’S VOICE IS GOING TO
BE HEARD IS NONEXISTENT.
3. NO CASE TURN - WE CAN STILL WIN THAT REMEMBERING VIETNAM ALLOWS US TO

CHALLENGE IMPERIALISM EVEN IF WE DON’T USE EMPATHY. OUR SPANOS IN 2000 EVIDENCE
IS REALLY GOOD ON THAT QUESTION.
Spanos Neg - 180 -
AT: HEIDEGGER JUSTIFIES GENOCIDE 1/2
1. NO LINK- SPANOS COMBINED HEIDEGGER WITH FOUCAULT IN ORDER TO ADDRESS BOTH

THE ONTOLOGICAL AND THE POLITICAL REALM TO STOP DISINTERESTED INQUIRY AND
AMERICAN EXCEPTIONALISM.
xiv-xv)
Throughout the Vietnam era Spanos appropriated the Heideggerian inquiry into the question of Being to
undermine the privileged status of such masterful academic practices as the New Criticism, structuralism,
phenomenological analysis, and literary modernism. All of these efforts, Spanos argued, were grounded in the same
unexamined assumptions, namely, that identity is ontologically prior to difference, that the end of time is antecedent to temporal
process. These assumptions in turn justified, in the name of disinterested inquiry and American exceptionalism,
masterful interpretive as well as dominative militaristic practices, with the result that the temporality of the text was reduced to a spatial
form and Vietnam to a U.S. military colony. In his interpretive strategy, Spanos never tired of breaking these metaphysical enclosures, retrieving the temporality of
being against the tradition's forgetting, and reassigning the interpreter to historical Dasein—that is, to temporal being in the world. The
difference between
Spanos's "destructions" of the late 1960s and those of the 1990s entailed his belated recognition (in the wake of the
Heidegger controversy) that this retrieval was not enough; that it required for its historical efficacy a correlation of
Heidegger's ontological critique with Foucault's genealogical method. Without "completion" by the other's
method, both Heidegger and Foucault failed to realize their critique. Heidegger emphasized the site of ontology but minimized the
historically specific sociopolitical site. On the other hand, Foucault emphasized sociopolitical concerns but minimized the ontological question, with the potentially
disastrous result that his counter-memory to the disciplinary society became particularly vulnerable to amnesia in the 1990s .
In combining Heidegger's
destructive hermeneutics with Foucault's genealogical method, Spanos undermined any possible reconciliation
of be-ing with Being. As a result of this conjuncture, Spanos now understood the temporality of being in the world as not
confined to one site but as an always changing, unevenly developed lateral field of already constituted forces,
encompassing all the regions between ontology and sociopolitics. These observations require a redescription of Davidson's efforts as a
reappropriation of the Heidegger question. In the 1960s Spanos deployed Heidegger as a means of recovering an originary Greek
thinking against the grain of a U.S. foreign policy intent on "Romanizing" the globe. He further understood himself as a figure
whose experience during the Dresden firebombing had resulted in an existential experience of Dread before the annihilation of being at this site.
2- NO LINK - WE’RE NOT HEIDEGGER
3- NO LINK - OUR LINKS TO THE AFFIRMATIVE ARE INSTANCES OF STRUCTURAL CONDITIONS

THAT OUR ALTERNATIVE CRITIQUES. THIS MEANS OUR ALTERNATIVE DOESN’T FORGO
STRUCTURAL CONDITIONS.
Spanos Neg - 181 -
AT: HEIDEGGER JUSTIFIES GENOCIDE 2/2
4- IMPERIALISM CULMINATES IN A GENOCIDAL EXTREME. THIS MEANS OUR ALTERNATIVE

TAKES A STEP TOWARDS ALLEVIATING THE CHANCES FOR GENOCIDE INSTEAD OF CAUSING
IT.
Spanos 2k (William V, Professor of English at Binghamton University, America’s Shadow, p. 194)
The incommensurability between the United States's justification for its intervention in Vietnam and its totally
instrumentalist planning and conduct of the war exposed the irreconcilable contradiction inhering in the liberal
democratic/humanist discourse of "the free world." In Nietzsche's and Foucault's ironic terms, the Vietnam War
revealed its "benignity" — the "sweetness and light" ostensibly deriving from classical Greece — to be an "Egyptianism," a comportment toward
being that has as its fundamental purpose the pacification of any resistance to its truth discourse. It revealed that the real project of the
anthropological discourse inherited by America from the European Enlightenment is the reification of the nothing that belongs to being for
the purpose not simply of "comprehending" its ineffable and elusive errancy, but of rendering its various
manifestations "practically assailable." This first postmodern war, in short, showed decisively that the benign
discourse of Enlightenment Man must end in violence against the recalcitrant Other that does not answer
to the dictates of its plenary anthropo-logic —sometimes, as in the case of America's intervention in Vietnam, taken to a
genocidal extreme.
Spanos Neg - 182 -
AT: SPANOS IS A NAZI
1. NO LINK - EVEN IF THEY WIN THAT HEIDEGGER OR SPANOS IS A NAZI, THEY HAVE TO WIN
THAT OUR ALTERNATIVE CAUSES NAZISM. AND THAT’S NOT TRUE - REMEMBERING
VIETNAM DOESN’T JUSTIFY NAZISM THAT’S EXPLAINED ELSEWHERE.
2- EVEN IF THEY WIN HEIDEGGER IS A NAZI, HIS CRITIQUE OF TECHNOLOGY WHEN APPLIED
TO THE SITUATION OF THE HOLOCAUST RESOLVES THE REASONS FOR IT'S BEGINNINGS.
xiii)
At issue in Spanos's countercharge is Arnold Davidson's representative humanist reaction to Heidegger's notorious 1949 pronouncement: "Agriculture is now a
mechanized food industry. As for its essence, it is the same thing as the manufacture of corpses in the gas chambers, the same thing as the blockade and reduction of
countries to famine, the same thing as the manufacture of hydrogen bombs."5 After citing this passage, Davidson
writes: "When one encounters
Heidegger's 1949 pronouncement, one cannot but be staggered by his inability—call it metaphysical inability—
to acknowledge the everyday fate of bodies and souls, as if the bureaucratized burning of selected human beings
were not all that different from the threat to humanity posed in the organization of the food industry by the
forces of technology." In his own response to this passage, Spanos, unlike Davidson and the Europeans he cites in Critical Inquiry, does not
confine himself to remarks about Heidegger's insensitivity but provides the passage with a gloss: "For
Heidegger the essence of the West, i.e., that which increasingly determines its self-representation and historical
practices (including the Nazis' manufacture of corpses in gas chambers and death camps), is the logic of
technology." According to Spanos, the forces of technology (rather than Heidegger) do indeed regard the
bureaucratized burning of human bodies and the organization of the food industry to be essentially the same and
he cites the complicity between U.S. agricultural and military technologies in Vietnam as evidence confirming
this claim. Then he meets Davidson's charge that Heidegger cannot pronounce the name of the Jews with a
countercharge of his own: that Davidson is unable to pronounce the name Vietnam.
3- SPANOS USES HEIDEGGER TO GET AWAY FROM GERMAN AND AMERICAN NATIONALISM,
ALWAYS ACTING AGAINST THAT ASPECT, MAKING HIM NEVER FORGET THE NOTHING
xxi)
Spanos reactivates against Heidegger's detractors the critique he had previously directed
In place of this calumny,
against the war powers. As the only Greek Heideggerian on the American literary scene, Spanos never read Heidegger as
corroborative of either German or American nationalism, but as a means of recovering originary Greek thinking
against the accretions of Empire. Moreover, because his reading of Heidegger always reactivated in Spanos the dread
he experienced at Dresden, his interpretive project cannot forget the "otherwise than Being" recorded at this
site.
Spanos Neg - 183 -
SPANOS = NAZI EXT
SPANOS TAKES HEIDEGGARIAN THOUGHT AND APPLIES IT TO THE POLITICAL REALM,

DISCOING OUT ANY TIES TO NAZISM
xviii)
Spanos's intervention disclosed the political consequences of the Europeans' appropriation to be twofold: they authorized their belated American followers to
understand Heidegger's texts as "superfluous" and to institutionalize a representation of temporal difference as Derridean "textuality." In essence ,
Spanos
rediscovers in these post-Heideggerians the fault that originated with Heidegger; that is, the failure to theorize
the political implication of a historically polyvalent logocenter, which restricts their critical discourse to the
generalized site of ontology at the expense of sociopolitical critique. Having thereby "retrieved" a second Heideggerianism as the
European post-Heideggerians' failure to theorize the lateral continuum of Being, Spanos exports this new post-Heideggerian tradition to
the site of the American appropriation, where it counters Davidson's recuperative "retrieval" of liberal humanism. That Spanos finds the entire lateral
continuum itself in danger of disappearing at the site of the American appropriation of the Heidegger question discloses the stakes of Spanos's project. In
"retrieving" Heidegger's destructive hermeneutics in a site missing from Heidegger's own project, Spanos quite
literally produces, as an after-the-fact extenuating circumstance, the sociopolitical critique that, had it been
available at the time of Heidegger's wartime writings, would have rendered him immune to Nazism.
SPANOS USES HEIDEGGARIAN THOUGHT TO CONTINUE TO QUESTION THE VIOLENT ACTIONS

OF THE WEST, REFUSING TO POSIT NAZISM AS THE SCAPEGOAT FOR OCCIDENTAL
HUMANISM WHICH FORGETS THE MASSIVE VIOLENCE OF VIETNAM, DRESDEN AND
HIROSHIMA
xii-xiii)
The Critical Inquiry symposium included position papers by such post- Heideggerian European philosophers as Jacques Derrida, Emmanuel
Levinas, Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, Hans-Georg Gadamer, and Jean- Frangois Lyotard,as well as the anti-Heideggerian Jiirgen Habermas, each of
whom (with the possible exception of Habermas, who understood Nazism as the sole sociopolitical referent for Heidegger's thought), with varying degrees of success ,
struggled to analyze nonreductively Heidegger's involvement with Nazism. Instead of constructing causal
paradigms able to assimilate Nazism to his thinking or derive the one category from the other, these
philosophers attempted to read Heidegger under a double obligation: to acknowledge the seriousness of his
political involvement with Nazism as well as the complexity of his thought. Spanos does not excuse Heidegger
against these criticisms, but emphasizes what Davidson left unmentioned about the European critique, namely, its
indebtedness to Heidegger's philosophical practice for its efficacy. In calling attention to the Europeans' ambivalent response, their
continued dependence upon Heidegger's philosophical thought for the dismantling of his politics, Spanos
isolated, as what might be termed the political unconscious of the American appropriation, Davidson's will to make
Nazism the absolute scapegoat for occidental humanism and thereby to forget the mass destruction of civilian
populations in Vietnam, Dresden, and Hiroshima.
Spanos Neg - 184 -
AT: BRYANT
1. SPANOS USES HIS WORDS AS A WEAPON, THEY ACT TO BE RADICALLY UNANSWERABLE TO

THE REST OF THE WORLD AND EXPECTATIONS FOR HOW HE SHOULD WRITE
2. BRYANT THINKS OUR INVOCATION OF HEIDEGGER AND ERRANCY IS A NECESSARY

DESTRUCTIVE PRAXIS
BRYANT ’97 (John, “democracy, being, and the art of becoming America,” Review of Spanos’ Errant Art of Moby Dick)
Melville wrestled with ontology, and his art prolonged the match. Spanos is right to bring Heidegger into the ring. "Being" is a formless concept we
can know only through its spatialized manifestations or "differentiations" in time. We can achieve higher awareness of Being's "world
elsewhere" (to borrow from Richard Poirier) by increasing our consciousness of our relation to time and difference, in this
world. A whale may be white or black, dead or omnipotent: 'Each is only a version of Whale in Itself. To know this ultimate sense of being, we
must not merely (pluralistically) know all versions of it, we must experience the variance between these antic
particulars and the ineluctable ontological One, recognizing that no one particular can be central. The trick in
optimizing ones ontological relationship to difference is' to sustain an identity that is itself "de-centered,"
marginal, and not only deconstructive but artfully "de-structive." This means going beyond the romantic notion of "negative capability"
or living productively in a world of doubt, a concept Spanos dispatches in one of his more cogent sections. In Heideggerian terms, this means one must be
"errant" like Being itself.
Spanos Neg - 185 -
AT: SCHMITT COUNTER K 1/3
1. NO LINK - WE’VE CONSTRUCTED AN ENEMY, AND THAT’S AMERICAN IMPERIALISM. WE

DON’T CLAIM THAT IMPERIALISM CAUSES ALL VIOLENCE IN THE WORLD AND THUS WE
DON’T ATTEMPT TO CREATE A PEACEFUL UTOPIAN IN THE WORLD OF THE ALTERNATIVE.
2. OUR ENTIRE CRITIQUE ACTS AS OFFENSE. THE CONSTRUCTION OF AN ENEMY IGNORES

WHETHER THE NATION CONSTRUCTING THE ENEMY IS GOOD OR BAD. THUS THEIR
CRITICISM IGNORES THE ENTIRETY OF OUR CRITICISM OF AMERICAN EXCEPTIONALISM.
3. THEIR CRITICISM DOESN’T REFLECT THE UNANSWERABILITY OF MODERN WARFARE.

SCHMITT’S ORIGINAL DISCUSSION WAS OF WESTERN NATIONS VS. WESTERN NATIONS.
WHAT HAPPENS WHEN THE WORLD RESISTS BEING CONSTRUCTED AS AN ENEMY. IE: WHAT
HAPPENS WHEN THE VIETCONG DRESS UP AS FARMERS DURING THE DAY BUT ATTACK
TROOPS AT NIGHT. THE IMPACT IS WE CREATE ARTIFICIAL NOTIONS OF WHAT AN ENEMY IS
AND WHAT AN ENEMY IS NOT. WHICH JUSTIFIES DESTROYING CIVILIAN ESTABLISHMENTS
LIKE CHURCHES, SCHOOLS, AND HOMES.
4. AND EVEN IF THEY WIN THAT THE WORLD IS COMPLETELY ANSWERABLE. THE NEXT STEP
IN THEIR PROJECT IS TO DESTROY THE ENEMY. WHICH IS A REASON THAT YOU VOTE FOR US
NOT THEM. JUST TO BE CLEAR, THEY JUSTIFY GENOCIDAL ACTIONS. JUST CONSIDER THE
MOTIVATIONS OF THE PEOPLE WHO INITIATED THEIR PHILOSOPHY, THEY WERE
ATTEMPTING TO ERADICATE THE JEWISH POPULATION.
5. THEY DON’T GET AN IMPACT TO ESCALATION - THE ONLY REASON THERE ISN’T
ESCALATION IS BECAUSE WE’VE KILLED EVERYONE ELSE. THAT’S A BAD THING, NOT A
GOOD THING.
6- AT THE END OF THE DEBATE, IF THIS FLOW SEEMS CLOSE, OR IF YOU WANT AN EASY WAY
OUT. THE TIEBREAKER GOES US BECAUSE THEIR AUTHOR’S THEORIES ARE DIRECTLY TIED
TO THE RISE OF THE NATIONAL SOCIALIST PARTY.
Gross 0 (Oren , Assistant Professor, Tel Aviv University, Faculty of Law, May 2000, Cardozo Law Review, 21 Cardozo L. Rev. 1825, p. 1867-1868 Lexis)
For Carl Schmitt, normalcy is of little, if any, interest; the exception - emergency and crisis - is what consumes his entire attention. Schmitt has been described as: The
outstanding legal theorist of the notion of exception, hence much less a thinker of the norms reflecting normalcy - that is to say laws - than the outspoken legitimizer of
the form and practice of measure: acts unilaterally taken by the executive in a state of political despair, as stipulated in a separate legal tradition of martial law, of etat de
Schmitt's theory revolves entirely around pathological cases of legal and political
siege, and of Ausnahmezustand. n190
orders. His worldview is apocalyptic, inasmuch as he identifies politics with permanent crisis and conflict. n191 Schmitt
is confronted with a grave situation in his own country in the early 1920s. His initial attempt to offer one constitutional solution to Germany's troubles takes him in the
direction of adopting the model of the commissarial dictatorship. Yet, within a short time, he changes his earlier position and, in [*1867] 1922, he formulates his
radical theory of the exception, which is so succinctly summed up by the opening statement in Political Theology: "Sovereign is he who decides on the exception." n192
Political Theology was originally published in March, 1922. Its second edition, published twelve years later, in 1934, remained, according to the author's own
testimony, "unchanged." n193 In fact, in the preface to the second edition, Schmitt
invites his readers to "judge to what extent this short
publication... has withstood the test of time." n194 When viewed against the history of the Weimar Republic, this
lack of change is significant in itself. Schmitt obviously finds no reason to rethink his theory, despite the rise to
power of the National Socialist Party and the nomination of Adolf Hitler as chancellor some ten months before Schmitt extends this "invitation to
judge" to his readers. Even those who may wish to argue that Schmitt was not fully aware of the dangerous
implications of his own theory in 1922, will be hard pressed to argue the same with respect to his clear
statements twelve years later. Schmitt's exceptionalism is indefensible as a normative project. His challenge to liberalism's perceived inadequacy in
dealing with the state of exception leads him to set his sights solely on the exception to the utter disregard of the normal - the rule. However, Schmitt's attack on
Spanos Neg - 186 -

liberalism does seem to have a point, insofar as real world practice is concerned. It is this aspect of Schmitt's writing which ought to interest us and which is still
significant today.
Spanos Neg - 187 -
7. NO LINK- OUR ALTERNATIVE IS THE INEVITABILITY OF VIOLENCE. THEY

MISCHARACTERIZE US AS AN ATTEMPT TO END VIOLENCE, THAT’S NOT OUR ALT. WE
EMBRACE VIETCONG TACTICS OF SETTING TRAPS, HIDING IN TREES, AND BEING MOBILE
WHICH IN SOME INSTANCES INVOLVE USING VIOLENCE.
8- NO IMPACT IN THE WORLD OF THE ALTERNATIVE- THEIR LINK ARGUMENTS ARE JUST
PROJECTIONS OF IMPERIALISM MAKING ITSELF SEEM MORE BENEVOLENT. THUS IN THE
WORLD IN WHICH WE GET RID OF AMERICAN IMPERIALISM, THEIR INTERNAL LINK
SCENARIOS DON’T MAKE SENSE.
9- SCHMITT’S THEORIES DIRECTLY INFLUENCED THE NEOCONSERVATIVE IMPERIALISTS OF

TODAY. BUSH AND HIS PALS JUSTIFIED THE INVASION OF IRAQ BY TOTALIZING THE ENEMY
AND PROCEEDING TO ANNIHILATE THEM. THIS IS A DIRECT DISAD TO THEIR CONCEPTION OF
ENEMY CONSTRUCTION.
Specter 4 (Matthew, Ph.D candidate in modern European history, 4/26, http://www.politicaltheory.info/essays/specter.htm)
The Bush administration was born under a Schmittian star. The Supreme Court's judgment in Bush v Gore (2000) delivered the presidency to Bush
through one of the most indefensible readings of constitutional law in American history. So bald was this political instrumentalisation of constitutional law, that it would have made Carl
their decision to define
Schmitt blush. Aside from the circumstances of its birth, three features of Bush Administration policy make the label Schmittian seem a good fit. First,
the attacks of September 11 as acts of war reflects an understanding of Schmitt´s belief that politics requires an
enemy, preferably a state. Second is their strategy towards international law: formally reject it, or find a way to interpret it in your
favor. Third is their use of what Schmitt called the state of exception, or state of emergency to suspend normal constitutional
protections. In this category one can put the attacks on civil liberties represented by the so-called Patriot Act, and the illegal detention
of terrorist suspects in Guantanamo Bay. Critics of US foreign policy since WWII have long understood the mobilising function of the Communist
threat. With the collapse of the USSR, the global military presence of the US required a new justification . Popular
culture and intellectuals alike struggled to fill the void that had been filled by the "evil empire." Political scientist Francis Fukuyama eulogised this condition in his 1989 work, arguing that the
apparent triumph of liberal democracy and capitalism marked the "end of history." The next major intellectual effort to orient the U.S. in the post-Cold War world was political scientist Samuel
Huntington's The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (1996), which has obtained a renewed audience after 9-11. Huntington and Fukuyama's works both contain a
Schmittian accent: Fukuyama's is in the characterisation of the triumphant liberal bourgeois order as a world without meaningful politics, political causes for which one would be prepared to
die. This pathos of conflict is Schmittian. The same pathos of conflict can be found in Huntington's vision of an inevitable clash between regional power-blocs aligned on cultural lines.
Before 9-11, the Bush administration had been casting about for an enemy, and seemed to have settled on China.The advantage of formulating the enemy as
"terrorists and the states that support them," was that it gave the administration more discretion to choose whom
to attack. Schmitt's treatise on The Concept of the Political was a deep and unsparing critique of liberalism. Schmitt believed that liberalism was not a political theory because it had no
"positive" theory of the state. In constitutionalism, he saw only "negative" mechanisms for controlling or separating power. As he writes, liberalism "in a very systematic fashion negates or
According to Schmitt, all states have internal and
evades the political…there exists no liberal politics, only a liberal critique of politics." (CP, 70)
external enemies. Being political means being able to recognise threats to the existence of the state. Since in the
extreme case, the defense of the state involves physical killing, Schmitt makes of this extremity the defining criterion of "the" political. As he has famously written:
"The specific…distinction to which political actions and motives can be reduced is that between friend and enemy… The
friend, enemy and combat
concepts receive their real meaning precisely because they refer to the real possibility of physical killing." (CP, 33)
The problem with liberalism, argues Schmitt, is that liberalism denies the existence of true, mortal enemies .
"Liberalism…has attempted to transform the enemy into a competitor from the viewpoint of economics into a competitor and from the intellectual point of view into a debating adversary."
(CP, 28) Schmitt emphasizes the concreteness of political judgment, repudiating the idea that neutral or disinterested parties can or should make political decisions. "Only the actual
participants can correctly recognize, understand and judge…whether the adversary intends to negate his opponent’s way of life and therefore must be repulsed or fought in order to preserve
the Administration picked up on the
one’s own form of existence." (CP, 27) In formulating its propaganda selling the wars on Iraq and Afghanistan,
essentially Schmittian insight that an enemy is not someone you negotiate with; an enemy must be totally
annihilated. Al Qaeda was said to want to "destroy our whole way of life". Saddam Hussein's alleged weapons of mass
destruction were represented as a "grave and gathering threat." In his book An End to EviLink - How to Win the War on Terror (2003),
Richard Perle, one of the neoconservatives making policy in the White House, alleges that the US faces "intolerable threats"
from the states who "sponsor" terrorism, and/or are seeking nuclear weapons: Iran, North Korea, Syria, Libya, and Saudi Arabia.
Spanos Neg - 188 -

The Bush Administration's most
notorious tag-lines also have a Schmittian flavor: the "axis of evil," and the "you're
either with us or against us" speeches.
9- SCHMITTIAN CRITICISM COLLAPSES INTO TOTAL WAR WHEN APPLIED TO MODERN

WARFARE TACTICS. THE ADVANCEMENT OF TECHNOLOGY AND THE RISE OF FIGHTING FOR
HUMANITY CAUSES ENEMIES TO BE CONSTRUCTED WRONG.
Scheuerman 6 (William E, Professor of Political Science at Indiana University, Constellations, Vol. 13, No. 1, EBSCO)
To be sure, this empirical claim derives in part from Schmitt’s odd postwar theses about the theoretical centrality of concrete space and territoriality. Yet it is also easy
to see why Schmitt believed that the historical experience of partisan or guerrilla warfare corroborated his theoretical expectations. In Schmitt’s historical narrative,
partisans can be found throughout history. They only take on real significance in the Napoleonic Wars, however, when guerrilla forces posed a deadly challenge to
French armies in Spain, Tyrol, and Russia. For Schmitt, these early localized “national” fighters represent a pristine example of partisan warfare, and he delights in
recalling the fact that substantial segments of Napoleon’s armies were bogged down in skirmishes with untrained Spanish country yokels, who waged a brutal irregular
war that substantially raised the costs of the French occupation. They are paradigmatic for another reason as well: their telluric character stands in stark contrast to the
universalizing impulses of the Napoleonic project, which Schmitt interprets as having inherited core features of the Enlightenment legacy of the French Revolution. In
his view, the fundamental flaw plaguing recent left-wing guerrilla movements is that they risk abandoning the telluric attributes of their historical predecessors.
Although they rest on deep ties to the agrarian population and exploit “the geographical specificity of the country,” and ideological appeal is defensive
and particularistic (e.g., their opposition to US imperialism and its globalizing aspirations), modern guerrilla movements are probably destined to shed their
telluric roots (50).8 First, their Marxist orientation exists in deep tension with any serious political or theoretical emphasis on the significance of concrete space or
territory. Like its liberal Enlightenment cousin, Marxism ultimately leaves no room for this approach. Lenin is thus a more authentic Marxist than Mao, Schmitt
suggests, but his inconsistencies as a Marxist simultaneously made Mao better able to appreciate the political and military opportunities of partisan warfare (40–41).
Second, modern technology works to counteract an authentically telluric brand of partisan warfare. Mobility in contemporary military affairs rests on advanced
technology which clashes badly with the deeply rooted localism of the classical partisan fighter, the original backwoods Spanish guerrillero: even the autochthonous
is so enhanced by motorization that
partisan of agrarian origin is drawn into the force-field of irresistible technical-industrial progress. His mobility
he runs the risk of complete dislocation. (14) When successful guerrilla warfare relies on forms of technology which
dramatically compress space and time, his intimate relationship to a concrete locality is lost (48–50). He no longer fights
with the farmer’s pitch fork and butcher’s knife; now he needs machine guns and advanced explosives. Dependent on complex technology, and
tied to global movements having their own universalistic aspirations (e.g., world revolution), the modern-day
partisan fighter losses his telluric character and becomes “a transportable, replaceable cog in the wheel of a powerful world-
political machine” (14). Why is this trend so threatening to the identity of the partisan? It renders him indistinguishable from his foes,
whose universalistic aspirations he increasingly mirrors: both American liberals and their revolutionary guerrilla
opponents claim to speak in the name of a (mythical) unified humanity. In this way, partisans abandon the
special connection to concrete territoriality which Schmitt considers essential to their political intensity, jettisoning
their healthy political instincts for the fictional normative or moral ideal of the “community of humankind.” Unlike the anti-Napoleonic freedom fighters of Spain or
Tyrol, they
now disingenuously and self-righteously wage wars “in the name of humanity,” and thus are likely to
reproduce the terrible ills of Enlightenmentbased political worldviews which, in Schmitt’s account, engender the horrors of modern total war.9 For this reason,
The Partisan, no less than Schmitt’s other works after 1945, ultimately remains a deeply nostalgic book. Even though postwar guerrilla movements initially provide
some reason to hope that an authentic mode of politics is alive and well, his study ends on a cautious note, strongly suggesting that the most sophisticated mode of
guerrilla warfare in modern times was found among the telluric peasants of early nineteenth century counterrevolutionary Spain, but hardly among the revolutionary
movements of 1960s Southeast Asia or Latin and South America.
Spanos Neg - 189 -
AT: THREATS ARE REAL EXT
EVEN IF THEIR THREATS ARE REAL, THE LOGIC OF THE AFF REDUCES HUMAN LIFE TO THE
STANDING RESERVE WHICH REINFORCES IMPERIAL WAYS OF ACTING IN THE WORLD.
Burke 7 (Anthony, Senior Lecturer in International Relations at the University of New South Wales, Sydney, June 2007, What security makes possible: Some
thoughts on critical security studies)
Even if threats are credible and existential, I do not believe that they warrant invoking the ‘state of exception’,
which has in our time been more commonly enacted in the detention and rendition of terrorism suspects,
immigration detention centres and the use of arbitrary arrest and deportation powers. The ‘state of exception’
also haunts much legal innovation in counter-terrorism policy.33 And, as Agamben, Judith Butler and Arendt have argued, such
approaches have their roots in processes (namely colonialism and the Holocaust) that systematically dehumanised their victims
producing lives that were ‘bare’, ‘ungrievable’, ‘unliveable’ and ‘superfluous’.34 If nothing else, it ought to raise
serious doubts as to how securitisation theory can be helpful in resignifying security as emancipation. It also
precludes the ability to speak of human or environmental security in terms consistent with democratic political processes in a state of normalcy . The existential
threat to human beings may be real enough, but it should generate a very different policy logic than outlined by the
Copenhagen School. As Roxanne Lynn Doty and Karin Fierke have argued, the Copenhagen School’s conceptualisation blocks the path to human security.35 This
would seem to be implicit in the way Wæver, in his 1995 article, attempts to provide security with an ontological grounding . There he states that ‘as
concepts, neither individual nor international security exist’: National security, that is the security of a state, is
the name of an ongoing debate, a tradition, an established set of practices … there is no literature, no
philosophy, no tradition of security in non-state terms ... the concept of security refers to the state.36 This is a
powerful act of analytical closure, which is not softened by his use of an hourglass figure, with a ‘conceptual focus on state sovereignty’ at its centre,
to which international and individual level ‘dynamics’ refer. As he states, ‘“security” has to be read through the lens of national
security’.37 He in turn argues that it the survival of the unit as a basic political unit—the sovereign state—that is the key. Those issues with this undercutting
potential must be addressed prior to all others because, if they are not, the state will cease to exist as a sovereign unit and all other questions will become irrelevant.
This, then, provides us with a test point, and shows us what is lost if we ‘de-compose’ the state by
individualising security … even if the challenges can operate on the different components of the state they must still pass through one focus: Do the
challenges determine whether the state is to be or not to be?38 This formulation is consistent with the argument I make that security historically has taken
‘the form and promise of a metaphysical discourse: an overarching political goal and practice that guarantees
existence itself, that makes the possibility of the world possible’.39 What seems especially clear in Wæver’s work is that such a space
of possibility is limited to the nationstate, precluding the emergence of alternative conceptualisations of political community and existence such as cosmopolitanism or
what we might call ‘non-ontologies’ of primally interconnected being, such as can be found in the philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas and Martin Buber.40
Spanos Neg - 190 -
THEIR IDENTIFICATION OF GLOBAL THREATS IS PART OF THE AMNESIA THAT SPANOS

IDENTIFIES – THREAT CONSTRUCTION SYSTEMATICALLY DENIES THE HISTORY OF
ATROCITIES SUCH AS VIETNAM AND JUSTIFIES NEVER ENDING INTERVENTIONISM AND
IMPERIALISM.
Howard Zinn, Boston Review, Summer 2005, http://www.bostonreview.net/BR30.3/zinn.php
The existence of the Soviet Union, even with its acquisition of nuclear weapons, did not block this expansion.
In fact, the exaggerated threat of “world communism” gave the United States a powerful justification for
expanding all over the globe, and soon it had military bases in a hundred countries. Presumably, only the United States stood
in the way of the Soviet conquest of the world. Can we believe that it was the existence of the Soviet Union that brought about the aggressive militarism of the United
States? If so, how do we explain all the violent expansion before 1917? A hundred years before the Bolshevik Revolution, American armies were annihilating Indian
tribes, clearing the great expanse of the West in an early example of what we now call “ethnic cleansing.” And with the continent conquered, the nation began to look
overseas. On the eve of the 20th century, as American armies moved into Cuba and the Philippines, American exceptionalism did not always mean that the United
States wanted to go it alone. The nation was willing—indeed, eager—to join the small group of Western imperial powers that it would one day supersede. Senator
HenryCabot Lodge wrote at the time, “The great nations are rapidly absorbing for their future expansion, and
their present defense all the waste places of the earth. . . . As one of the great nations of the world the United
States must not fall out of the line of march.” Surely, the nationalistic spirit in other countries has often led them to see their expansion as
uniquely moral, but this country has carried the claim farthest. American exceptionalism was never more clearly expressed than by Secretary of War Elihu Root, who
in 1899 declared, “The American soldier is different from all other soldiers of all other countries since the world began. He is the advance guard of liberty and justice,
of law and order, and of peace and happiness.” At the time he was saying this, American soldiers in the Philippines were starting a bloodbath which would take the lives
The idea that America is different because its military actions are for the benefit of others
of 600,000 Filipinos.
becomes particularly persuasive when it is put forth by leaders presumed to be liberals, orprogressives. For instance,
Woodrow Wilson, always high on the list of “liberal” presidents, labeled both by scholars and the popular culture as an “idealist,” was ruthless in his use of military
power against weaker nations. He sent the navy to bombard and occupy the Mexican port of Vera Cruz in 1914 because the Mexicans had arrested some American
sailors. He sent the marines into Haiti in 1915, and when the Haitians resisted, thousands were killed. The following year American marines occupied the Dominican
Republic. The occupations of Haiti and the Dominican Republic lasted many years. And Wilson, who had been elected in 1916 saying, “There is such a thing as a
Roosevelt was considered a
nation being too proud to fight,” soon sent young Americans into the slaughterhouse of the European war. Theodore
“progressive” and indeed ran for president on the Progressive Party ticket in 1912. But he was a lover of war
and a supporter of the conquest of the Philippines—he had congratulated the general who wiped out a Filipino village of 600 people in 1906.
He had promulgated the 1904 “Roosevelt Corollary” to the Monroe Doctrine, which justified the occupation of
small countries in the Caribbean as bringing them “stability.” During the Cold War, many American “liberals”
became caught up in a kind of hysteria about the Soviet expansion, which was certainly real in Eastern Europe
but was greatly exaggerated as a threat to western Europe and the United States. During the period of
McCarthyism the Senate’s quintessential liberal, Hubert Humphrey, proposed detention camps for suspected
subversives who in times of “national emergency” could be held without trial.
Spanos Neg - 191 -
THE SYSTEM OF KNOWLEDGE PRODUCTION USED BY THE AFF IS SLANTED TO PRODUCE

FALSE THREATS
Mustapha 9 (Jennifer, Department of Political Science McMaster University
An Analytical Survey of Critical Security Studies: Making the Case for a (Modified) Post-structuralist Approach)
This sort of critique makes the useful observation that these types of expert
discourses “inevitably draw boundaries around themselves
by celebrating certain kinds of statements while excommunicating others, which then take on the status of
‘subjugated knowledges’” (ibid. p. 326). Debates within the strategic studies community did occur, but they were
ultimately channelled and contained so as not to challenge the larger context of the hegemonic Cold War
narrative in which strategic discourse occurred. This is similar to the point that Cohn makes regarding the “sealing off of discourse,” and the
exclusion of individuals and ideas that do not fit into the expert language of strategic studies. Gusterson
concludes that, in line with realism’s strong ontology, many strategic theorists at the time were presupposing the endurance of
US-Soviet bipolarity to the point that they were simply unable to consider any of the scenarios where this could no longer be the case, short of mutual nuclear
destruction. These themes of critique all highlight the larger problem of theory as practice, i.e. of whether or not
discourse on security plays a role in actually constructing the security environment, rather than merely
describing and managing it as strategic studies claims to do. The above interventions into strategic studies have all, in one way or other,
revealed that its discourse has constructive properties that simultaneously reinforce and re-create the presuppositions
of the defense establishment. As David Campbell asserts in Writing Security (1998), state identity and perceived threats to that
identity do not exist independently of the ways in which we “talk” about them. Campbell reminds us that the “texts” of foreign
policy are where threats are construed and located, and these texts are related to what he calls “the scripting of identity” (Campbell 1998, p. 31). Furthermore, this
scripting of identity suggests that theory and discourse are to be understood as 7 Not to be confused with Wendtian Constructivism, with a capital C. 11 practice (ibid. p.
17). As such, understanding discourse helps us to see foreign policy (and by extension, policy related to security) as “all those practices of differentiation implicated in
the confrontation between self and other, and their modes of figuration (which is often negative)” (Campbell, p. 88). What, then, is security?
If our
understanding of security is a discursive construction, does that mean that there are no tangible threats to the
state or to individual human life? 6How can these tensions be reconciled with the fact that there are millions that
face dangers to their corporal survival every day, be it from disease, famine, environmental catastrophe,
domestic violence or war? Since we have established that orthodox strategic studies does not adequately
account for these questions, it is the challenge of novel critical approaches to address them and to move forward
from simply deconstructing the orthodoxy toward reconstructing more appropriate conceptions of security. This
further highlights the importance of ontology in understanding security studies.
Spanos Neg - 192 -
AT: PREDICTABILITY / INEVITABILITY
WE NEED TO RECLAIM THE FUTURE AS A BLANK SLATE—THEIR DETERMINISTIC

PROJECTIONS OF WHAT THE FUTURE “WILL BE” ANNIHILATE AGENCY AND MAKE IT
IMPOSSIBLE TO ARTICULATE A FUTURE WITHOUT DOMINATION
Dunmire in 2005 (Patricia, Kent State University, Discourse & Society 16 (4)481-513)
‘to know the future is to deny it as future, to

In Becomings: Explorations in Memory, Time and Futures Elizabeth Grosz (1999) posits that
place it as given, as past’ (p. 6). I find this statement compelling because it articulates what is at stake in dominant political
discourses and the futures they project. By reminding us of the opposition between ‘knowing’ and ‘futurity’
Grosz reminds us of the intrinsic potentiality of the future and the political importance of understanding the
future not as the inevitable progression of the past and present but as a real site of change and possibility.
Moreover, Grosz contends that claims to knowledge of the future produced through dominant political discourses need to
be understood in terms of their ideological function of denying our agency with respect to the future while, at
the same time, implicating us in futures not of our making. That is, political discourses in which the future is
represented as already known, as predetermined, can function to ‘paralyze political action’ by undermining the
future as a conceptual space for imagining and working for political and social change (Levitas, 1993). As Grosz (1999)
explains, such determinism ‘annihilates any future uncontained in the past and present’ (p. 4). An important task for
critical discourse analysis is to reclaim the agency and potentialities that the future offers for social and political
transformation. This task should focus in part on demonstrating the linguistic and discursive means by which
the future is claimed and appropriated by dominant groups and institutions. In addition, analyses should work to
disrupt and challenge these dominant futures with representations and conceptions of ‘antithetical futures . . .
waiting for syntactic articulation’ and material realization’ (Hebdige, 1993: 275). In short, we need to reclaim the
future ‘as a virtual space – blank, colourless, shapeless, a space to be made over, a space where everything is
still to be won’
DOMINANT DISCOURSES SUPPLANT THE IDEA OF FUTURE AS THE SITE OF THE POSSIBLE
WITH FUTURE AS AN INEVITABLE PRODUCT OF PRESENT NECESSITY—THIS PRODUCES A
SELF-FULFILLING PROPHECY THAT SHUTS OUT RADICAL CHANGE.
Dunmire in 2005 (Patricia, Kent State University, Discourse & Society 16 (4)481-513)
I mention Orwell because I think his account of the ideological processes of history and memory, however fantastic, has a parallel in the ideological processes and
practices through which the future is represented and imagined. Specifically, I am concerned with the efforts of dominant political actors
and institutions to project their assumptions and visions of the future as universal and as grounded in common
sense. Moreover, I am interested in the ways in which ‘the public’ is implicated in these projections of the future and in the discursive and material processes by
which they are realized. Just as Winston Smith’s historical consciousness was corrupted by The Party’s control of history, I am concerned that through their
ideological function, dominant political discourses supplant the notion of the future as the site of the possible
with a conception of the future as inevitable and, thereby, undermine the future as a site through which political
change can be imagined and, ultimately, realized. At a general level, I am interested in the ways various social practices embed
and project particular visions and conceptions of the future and implicate their participants in the discursive and
material processes by which those futures are realized. Gillian Rose (1993) articulates this problem in her critique of the disciplinary
practices of geography and her attempts to resist those practices: while I feel it’s vitally necessary to imagine a different geography of the
future, to imagine spaces of which women can claim knowledge . . . I also feel too complicit with my discipline’s forms of and claims to knowledge to map any such
new spaces.
Spanos Neg - 193 -
AT: ROLE OF BALLET / FINAL JUDGEMENT
THE VISION OF A FINAL VICTORY IN THE WORLD OF DEBATE IS A FLAWED NOTION. THE
SIGNING OF THE BALLOT AS A WIN OR A LOSS IS NOT THE END OF THE DISCUSSION. THE
ILLUSION OF A FINAL VICTORY ONLY LEADS TO AN ESCALATING ABSURDITY WHERE WE
INVENT THE POWER TO DESTROY OURSELVES ONLY TO SAVE OURSELVES AGAIN.
William S. Burroughs. 1998. “Immortality.” Word Virus: The William S. Burroughs Reader. Edited by James Grauerholz and Ira Silverberg. Pp. 313
I have described here a number of weapons and tactics in the war game. Weapons that change consciousness
could call the war game in question. All games are hostile. Basically there is only one game and that game is
war. It’s the old army game from here to eternity. Mr. Hubbard says that Scientology is a game where
everybody wins. There are no games where everybody wins. That is what games are all about, winning and
losing…The Versailles Treaty…Hitler dances the Occupation Jig…War criminals hang at Nuremberg…It is a
rule of this game that there can be no final victory since this would mean the end of the war game. Yet every
player must believe in final victory and strive for it with all his power. Faced by the nightmare of final defeat
he has no alternative. So all existing technologies with escalating efficiency produce more and more total
weapons until we have the atom bomb which could end the game by destroying all players. Now mock up a
miracle. The so stupid players decide to save the game. They sit down and around a big table and draw up a
plan for the immediate deactivation and eventual destruction of all atomic weapons. Why stop there?
Conventional bombs are unnecessarily destructive if nobody else has them hein? Let’s turn the war clock back to 1917:
Keep the home fires burning
Though the hearts are yearning
There’s a long, long trail a-winding…
Back to the American Civil War…
“He has loosed the fatal lightning of his terrible swift sword.” His fatal lightning didn’t cost as much in those days. Save a lot on
the defense budget this way on back to flintlocks, matchlocks, swords, armor, lances, bows and arrows, spears,
stone axes and clubs. Why stop there? Why not grow teeth and claws, poison fangs, stingers, spines, quills,
beaks and suckers and stink glands and fight it out in the muck hein? That is what this revolution is about. End
of game. New games? There are no new games from here to eternity. END OF THE WAR GAME.
Spanos Neg - 194 -
AT: UTILITARIANISM
1. EVEN IF THEY WIN UTILITARIANISM GOOD, YOU STILL VOTE NEGATIVE - EXTEND OUR
SPANOS IN 2008 EVIDENCE. THE IMPACT TO IMPERIALISM IS THE UNITED STATES
DESTROYING THE ENTIRE GLOBE. OUR EVIDENCE INDICATES THAT THE IMPERIAL DRIVE TO
POWER FORGETS BEING WHICH ALLOWS FOR VIOLENCE AGAINST THE PEOPLE THAT WE’RE
FORGOTTEN.
2. THEIR ARGUMENT IS JUST ANOTHER KILL TO SAVE MENTALITY WHICH IS A LINK, THEY
CLAIM THAT WE SHOULD QUANTIFY THE NUMBER OF LIVES SAVED VS. THE NUMBER OF
LIVES KILLED. IN VIETNAM WHEN WE DESTROYED A CITY, WE DID IT BECAUSE IT WOULD
“SAVE” MORE LIVES.
3. CALLS FOR UTILITARIANISM DISSOLVES INDIVIDUALITY IN FAVOR OF A UNIFIED IDENTITY

FOR THE NATION. THIS CONVERGENCE OF THE SOCIAL CONTRACT AND SECURITY DESTROYS
ALL THE THINGS THAT MAKE US INDIVIDUAL HUMAN BEINGS.
'sacrifice on behalf of the individuality of the state is a substantial tie between the state and all
Hegel indeed argues that
its members and so is a universal duty...if the state as such, if its autonomy, is in jeopardy, all its citizens are
duty bound to answer the summons to its defence'.51 Furthermore, this is not simply a duty, but a form of self-
realisation in which the individual dissolves into the higher unity of the state: The intrinsic worth of courage as
a disposition of mind is to be found in the genuine, absolute, final end, the sovereignty of the state. The work of
courage is to actualise this end, and the means to this end is the sacrifice of personal actuality. This form of experience thus contains the harshness of extreme
a self-sacrifice which yet is the real existence of one's freedom; the maximum self-subsistence of
contradictions:
individuality, yet only a cog playing its part in the mechanism of an external organisation; absolute obedience,
renunciation of personal opinions and reasonings, in fact complete absence of mind, coupled with the most
intense and comprehensive presence of mind and decision in the moment of acting; the most hostile and so most
personal action against individuals, coupled with an attitude of complete indifference or even liking towards
them as individuals. A more frank statement of the potentially lethal consequences of patriotism -- and its
simultaneously physical and conceptual annihilation of the individual human being -- is rarely to be found, one
that is repeated today in countless national discourses and the strategic world-view in general. (In contrast, one of Kant's
fundamental objections to war was that it involved using men 'as mere machines or instruments'.53) Yet however bizarre and contradictory Hegel's argument, it
constitutes a powerful social ontology: an apparently irrefutable discourse of being. It actualises the
convergence of war and the social contract in the form of the national security state.
Spanos Neg - 195 -
UTIL EXT
EXISTENTIAL THREAT DISCOURSE/BODY COUNT IMPACT CALC IS ROOTED IN

UNDERSTANDINGS OF WAR THAT PRIORITIZE STRATEGY AND COLLAPSE THE DISCTINCTION
BETWEEN CIVILIAN AND COMBATANT, JUSTIFYING MASS ATTROCITY.
Once you are attacked...and if that attack is in the context of a 50-year rejection of your right to exist, which is the situation in relation to Iran -- and bear in mind the
link between Iran and Hezbollah; bear in mind the exhortations from the Iranian President that Israel should be destroyed and wiped off the map -- you can understand
the tenacity with which the Israelis have responded.7 He was echoed by a former head of the Australian Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, who sought to
refute arguments that the real source of the conflict lay with Israel's colonial policies in Gaza and the West Bank. His view was that 'the Palestinian issue cannot be
resolved because a significant part of the Arab and Muslim world still do not accept Israel's right to exist...Until this changes, Israel will remain as it has for 60 years:
under siege.'8 The darker edge to such viewpoints was added by an Israeli Air Force Colonel taking journalists on a tour of Hatzor airbase, who stated that: 'My mother
is a survivor of the Holocaust...I know that at other times in our history, when we did not have a state, or any force to defend ourselves, things happened in a different
way.'9 Thus
war and existence are intertwined. However within such existential imperatives to war lies a more
technical, performative (and thus rationalistic) discourse: that once it is deemed necessary to use force in
defence of one's right to exist it is possible to do so, to translate military means into political ends in a
controlled and rational way. This is the second, rationalist form of state reason that most commonly takes the
name of 'strategy'. Its fundamental tenet was most famously expressed in Carl Von Clausewitz's argument that
war 'is a mere continuation of policy by other means...a pulsation of violent force...subject to the will of a
guiding intelligence'. That this is a textbook model of instrumental reason, one that imports Newtonian physics
into human relations, is clear in Clausewitz's influential definition: 'War is an act of force to compel our enemy
to do our will'. This purposive rationality is expressed by the Israeli war plan for Lebanon, long in preparation, to which
we are not privy. We can however deduce from the IDF's campaign that it had the objective of confronting Hezbollah: degrading their ability to operate, coercing them
to hand over the two captured Israeli soldiers and, indirectly, coercing the Lebanese government into disarming Hezbollah and removing them from southern Lebanon.
Other officials stated that the complete destruction of Hezbollah was their objective. It is telling that at the cessation of hostilities none of these objectives had been fully
achieved.12
The IDF's chosen weapons, until the last few days when a limited ground operation was conducted, were F-16s and artillery
strikes deployed against Hezbollah offices and facilities along with crucial infrastructure, and against civilians
in their homes and vehicles. The doctrinal influences appeared to be Clausewitz and the generation of twentieth century airpower theorists
such as Guilio Douhet. Douhet believed that command of the air would ensure victory 'all down the line'; he
argued that 'modern warfare allows for no distinction between combatants and noncombatants' and, in one analyst's
paraphrase, that nations must 'at the outset be prepared to launch massive bombing attacks against the enemy centres of population, government and industry -- hit first
and hit hard to shatter enemy civilian morale, leaving the enemy government no option but to sue for peace'. 13 The
mechanistic quality of their
thinking was captured in the statements of Israeli officials that they have struck '1,000 targets in the last eight
days, 20 per cent missile launching sites, control and command centers, missiles and so forth'14 and that 'we are
still working through our original targeting menus'.15 An International Institute of Strategic Studies'
commentary, working again from within the Clausewitzian frame, suggested that 'Israel will acquire gains well
worth the price'16 -- but that crude calculus of costs and benefits must be set against the enormous loss of
civilian life in Lebanon, the hundreds of thousands of refugees, the billions in property and environmental
damage, and the inspiration to a new wave of international terrorism. Both the Israeli government and the
Hezbollah leadership claimed victory, but the dead may disagree.
Spanos Neg - 196 -
AT: REALISM 1/2

1. REALISM ASSUMES THAT HUMAN SOCIAL NATURE CAN’T BE CHANGED EVEN IF IT’S
ETHICALLY DEPLORABLE, WHICH ALLOWS FOR LEADERS TO NOT TAKE ETHICAL
RESPONSIBILITY FOR THEIR ACTIONS AND RATIONALIZES HUMAN SUFFERING AS
INEVITABLE
Kraig 02
(Robert Alexander, professor in the Communication Department at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, “The Tragic Science: The Uses of Jimmy Carter in Foreign
Policy Realism,” Rhetoric & Public Affairs, 5.1, Project Muse)
In its orthodox form political realism assumes that international politics are and must be dominated by the will to
power. Moral aspirations in the international arena are merely protective coloration and propaganda or the illusions that move hopeless idealists. What is most
revealing about this assessment of human nature is not its negativity but its fatalism. There is little if any place for human moral evolution or
perfectibility. Like environmental determinism—most notably the social darwinism of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries— political realism
presumes that human social nature, even if ethically deplorable, cannot be significantly improved upon. From the
stationary perspective of social scientific realism in its pure form, the fatal environment of human social interaction can be navigated
but not conquered. Description, in other words, is fate. All who dare to challenge the order—Carter’s transgression—will do much more damage than good.
The idealist makes a bad situation much worse by imagining a better world in the face of immutable realities. As one popular saying among foreign policy practitioners
goes: “Without vision, men die. With it, more men die.”70 The implications of this social philosophy are stark. Tremendous human
suffering can be rationalized away as the inevitable product of the impersonal international system of power
relations. World leaders are actively encouraged by the realists to put aside moral pangs of doubt and play the
game of international politics according to the established rules of political engagement. This deliberate
limitation of interest excuses leaders from making hard moral choices. While a moralist Protestant like Jimmy Carter sees history as
a progressive moral struggle to realize abstract ideals in the world, the realist believes that it is dangerous to struggle against the
inexorable. The moral ambiguities of political and social ethics that have dogged philosophy and statesmanship time out of mind are simply written out of the
equation. Since ideals cannot be valid in a social scientific sense, they cannot be objectively true. The greatest barrier to engaging the realists in
serious dialogue about their premises is that they deny that these questions can be seriously debated. First, realists
teach a moral philosophy that denies itself. There is exceedingly narrow ground, particularly in the technical vocabulary of the
social sciences, for discussing the moral potential of humanity or the limitations of human action. Yet, as we have seen in the
tragedy of Jimmy Carter, a philosophical perspective on these very questions is imparted through the back door. It is very hard to argue with prescription under the
guise of description. The purveyors of this philosophical outlook will not admit this to themselves, let alone to potential interlocutors. Second, and most importantly,
alternative perspectives are not admitted as possibilities— realism is a perspective that as a matter of first
principles denies all others. There is, as we have seen in the Carter narrative, alleged to be an immutable reality that we must accept to avoid disastrous
consequences. Those who do not see this underlying order of things are idealists or amateurs. Such people have no standing in debate because they do not see the
intractable scene that dominates human action. Dialogue is permissible within the parameters of the presumed order, but those who question the existence or
universality of this controlling scene are beyond debate.
2. REALISM ISN’T A REASON TO VOTE AGAINST US. EVEN IF THEY WIN THAT REALISM IS
INEVITABLE, A REALIST ACTOR WOULD REJECT THE PLAN IF WE WIN AN IMPACT OR CASE
TURN
Spanos Neg - 197 -
AT: REALISM 2/2
3. THE IDEA THAT REALISM IS INEVITABLE, THAT STATE ACTIONS ARE INEVITABLE, IS
EXACTLY WHAT MAKES THEM THAT WAY – ONLY BY BREAKING AWAY CAN WE CHANGE
OUR BEHAVIOR
Kim ‘84
(Samuel S, Dept of Poli Sci Monmouth College, Global Violence and a Just World Order, Journal of Peace Research, no 2, 1984 p 187)
This pacified and disarmed consciousness - or alienation in Marxian terms - has allowed the managers of the national security
superstate to shift both their military doctrine and hard-ware toward making nuclear war more think-able, more fightable,
and more 'winnable'. The resultant expectations of nuclear war do not augur well, for, as social psychologist Gordon Allport put it: 'The greatest
menace to the world today are leaders in office who regard war as inevitable and thus prepare their people for armed
conflict. For by regarding war as ine-vitable, it becomes inevitable. Expectations determine behavior' (Allport 1968, p.
11).
4. OUR ALT CALLS FOR US TO RECONSTELLATE VIETNAM – IN OTHER WORDS, REMEMBER

VIETNAM AND ITS IMPORTANCE IN OUR FOREIGN POLICY AND THE WAY WE VIEW/ACT UPON
THE WORLD. WE ARE OUTSIDE OF THEIR ‘REALIST’ CLAIMS, AND IN FACT PRESENT THE
OPPORTUNITY TO BREAK AWAY FROM THEIR SAME OLD, INEFFECTIVE ‘REALIST’ POLICIES.
5. REALISM ISN’T INEVITABLE – THERE HAVE BEEN LOTS OF PEOPLE THAT WORKED OUTSIDE
OF REALISM – PEOPLE LIKE MARTIN LUTHER KING, JR, PROTESTORS OF VIETNAM ITSELF,
THERE IS NO REASON THAT OTHER PEOPLE COULDN’T ALSO WORK OUTSIDE THE NORM,
INCLUDING IN THE GOVERNMENT TO CREATE GREAT CHANGE.
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AT: PREDICTIONS 1/2
THEIR PREDICTIONS ARE INACCURATE SCARE TACTICS. THEIR APOCALYPTIC

REPRESENTATIONS REINFORCE STATUS QUO INSTITUTIONS RESULTING IN CULTURE OF FEAR
AND MAKES PUBLIC SPHERE DELIBERATION AND CULTURAL CHANGE IMPOSSIBLE
Kurasawa 04,
(Fuyuki, Assistant Prof. of Sociology at York University, Cautionary Tales, Constellations Vol. 11, No. 4, Blackwell Synergy)
In a word, then, procrastination makes little sense for three principal reasons: it exponentially raises the costs of eventual future action; it reduces preventive options;
and it erodes their effectiveness. With the foreclosing of long-range alternatives, later generations may be left with a single course of action, namely, that of merely
reacting to large-scale emergencies as they arise. We need only think of how it gradually becomes more difficult to control climate change, let alone reverse it, or to halt
mass atrocities once they are underway. Preventive
foresight is grounded in the opposite logic, whereby the decision to work
through perils today greatly enhances both the subsequent room for maneuver and the chances of success.
Humanitarian, environmental, and techno-scientific activists have convincingly shown that we cannot afford not to engage in preventive labor. Moreover, I would
contend that farsighted cosmopolitanism is not as remote or idealistic a prospect as it appears to some, for as Falk writes, ―[g]lobal justice between temporal
communities, however, actually seems to be increasing, as evidenced by various expressions of greater sensitivity to past injustices and future dangers.‖36 Global
civil society may well be helping a new generational self-conception take root, according to which we view
ourselves as the provisional caretakers of our planetary commons. Out of our sense of responsibility for the well-being of those who
will follow us, we come to be more concerned about the here and now. IV. Towards an Autonomous Future Up to this point, I have tried to demonstrate that
transnational socio-political relations are nurturing a thriving culture and infrastructure of prevention from
below, which challenges presumptions about the inscrutability of the future (II) and a stance of indifference toward it (III).
Nonetheless, unless and until it is substantively ‗filled in,‘ the argument is vulnerable to misappropriation since farsightedness does not in and of itself ensure
emancipatory outcomes. Therefore, this section proposes to specify normative criteria and participatory procedures through which citizens can determine the
among the
‗reasonableness,‘ legitimacy, and effectiveness of competing dystopian visions in order to arrive at a socially self-instituting future. Foremost
possible distortions of farsightedness is alarmism, the manufacturing of unwarranted and unfounded doomsday
scenarios. State and market institutions may seek to produce a culture of fear by deliberately stretching
interpretations of reality beyond the limits of the plausible so as to exaggerate the prospects of impending
catastrophes, or yet again, by intentionally promoting certain prognoses over others for instrumental purposes.
Accordingly, regressive dystopias can operate as Trojan horses advancing political agendas or commercial interests
that would otherwise be susceptible to public scrutiny and opposition. Instances of this kind of manipulation of
the dystopian imaginary are plentiful: the invasion of Iraq in the name of fighting terrorism and an imminent
threat of use of ‗weapons of mass destruction‘; the severe curtailing of American civil liberties amidst fears of a collapse of ‗homeland
security‘; the neoliberal dismantling of the welfare state as the only remedy for an ideologically constructed fiscal
crisis; the conservative expansion of policing and incarceration due to supposedly spiraling crime waves; and so forth. Alarmism constructs and
codes the future in particular ways, producing or reinforcing certain crisis narratives, belief structures, and
rhetorical conventions. As much as alarmist ideas beget a culture of fear, the reverse is no less true. If fear-mongering is a misappropriation of preventive
foresight, resignation about the future represents a problematic outgrowth of the popular acknowledgment of global perils. Some believe that the world to come is so
uncertain and dangerous that we should not attempt to modify the course of history; the future will look after itself for better or worse, regardless of what we do or wish.
One version of this argument consists in a complacent optimism perceiving the future as fated to be better than either the past or the present. Frequently accompanying
it is a self-deluding denial of what is plausible (‗the world will not be so bad after all‘), or a naively Panglossian pragmatism (‗things will work themselves out in spite
of everything, because humankind always finds ways to survive‘).37 Much more common, however, is the opposite reaction, a fatalistic pessimism reconciled to the
idea that the future will be necessarily worse than what preceded it. This is sustained by a tragic chronological framework according to which humanity is doomed to
alarmism and
decay, or a cyclical one of the endless repetition of the mistakes of the past. On top of their dubious assessments of what is to come,
resignation would, if widely accepted, undermine a viable practice of farsightedness. Indeed, both of them encourage public
disengagement from deliberation about scenarios for the future, a process that appears to be dangerous, pointless, or unnecessary. The resulting
‗depublicization‘ of debate leaves dominant groups and institutions (the state, the market, techno-science) in
charge of sorting out the future for the rest of us, thus effectively producing a heteronomous social order. How,
then, can we support a democratic process of prevention from below? The answer, I think, lies in cultivating the public capacity for critical judgment and deliberation,
so that participants in global civil society subject all claims about potential catastrophes to examination, evaluation, and contestation. Two normative concepts are
particularly well suited to grounding these tasks: the precautionary principle and global justice.
Spanos Neg - 199 -
AT: PREDICTIONS 2/2
2. THE AFF CREATES PREDICTIONS AND THREATS ONLY SO THEY CAN JUSTIFY THEIR PLAN OVER AND
OVER AGAIN – THIS LINKS DIRECTLY INTO THE JEREMIAD AS THEY FIND REASONS TO SEND THE
SOLDIERS TO ANOTHER COUNTRY OR TO JUSTIFY SOME ACTION SO THE US CAN CONTINUE TO BE A
DOMINATE GLOBAL FIGURE
3. THEIR PREDICTION ARGUMENTS ARE NONSENSE. THEY ANNIHILATE HUMAN AGENCY

WHILE SIMULTANEOUSLY CREATING A SELF-FULFILLING PROPHECY OF THEIR IMPACTS
BLEIKER 00
(Roland, Cambridge University Press, Popular Dissent, Human Agency and Global Politic, p48-49 2000. )
The very notion of prediction does, by its own logic, annihilate human agency. To assert that international relations is a
domain of political dynamics whose future should be predictable through a convincing set of theoretical
propositions is to assume that the course of global politics is to a certain extent predetermined. From such a vantage-
point there is no more room for interference and human agency, no more possibility for politics to overtake
theory. A predictive approach thus runs the risk of ending up in a form of inquiry that imposes a static image
upon a far more complex set of transversal political practices. The point of a theoretical inquiry, however, is not to ignore the constantly
changing domain of international relations. Rather, the main objective must consist of facilitating an understanding of transversal struggles that can grapple with those
Prediction is a problematic assessment tool even if a
moments when people walk through walls precisely when nobody expects them to do so.
theory is able to anticipate future events. Important theories, such as realist interpretations of international politics, may well
predict certain events only because their theoretical premises have become so objectivised that they have started
to shape decision makers and political dynamics. Dissent, in this case, is the process that reshapes these entrenched
perceptions and the ensuing political practices.
4. THEIR PREDICTIONS ARE BASED OFF OF AN UNLIKELY NUMBER OF EVENTS OCCURRING
AND SETTING EACH OTHER EVENT OFF PERFECTLY. THE AFF IS LITERALLY JUST GIVING AN
INCOHERENT STORY SO THE US CAN FEEL JUSTIFIED IN ITS ETERNAL QUEST FOR SECURITY
AND GLOBAL DOMINANCE

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ALTHOUGH AN AMERICAN EXCEPTIONALIST ONTOLOGY CLAIMS TOTAL INVINCIBILITY,

Spanos Neg -7-

THE AFFIRMATIVE AS WELL AS THE RESOLUTION AT LARGE CALL FOR A GLORIFICATION OF

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OUR ALTERNATIVE IS TO RECONSTELLATE VIETNAM INTO THE PRESENT SOCIOPOLITICAL

Spanos Neg -9-

SPANOS SHELL 5/5

THEIR USE OF TERRORISM IS A PART OF THE AMERICAN JEREMIAD BECAUSE IT ATTEMPTS

TERRORISM DISCOURSE CONSTRUCTS THE “TERRORIST” AS THE BARBARIC OTHER

TERROR RHETORIC INCREASES TERRORISM- 4 WARRANTS

2NC TERRORISM EVIDENCE

THEIR ANTI-TERRORIST RHETORIC FUELS THE AMERICAN JEREMIAD – HIJACKING AMERICAN

TERROR IS IMPERIALIST EXT 2/3

THIS RHETORIC OF TERRORISM IS A DISCOURSE THAT JUSTIFIES EXTERMINATION AND

TERROR IS IMPERIALIST EXT 3/3

TERRORISM IS A JUSTIFICATION FOR ENDLESS MILITARISM

Information in the post-9/11 state of constant "emergency" generated by

TURNS CASE - ENVIRONMENTAL SECURITIZATION SUPPORTS THE STATUS QUO BECAUSE IT

BY FRUSTRATING THE LOGIC OF IMPERIALISM, THE ALTERNATIVE FRUSTRATES THE

THE AFFIRMATIVE’S BIODIVERSITY ADVANTAGE IS FORMED ON THE UNDERSTANDING THAT

IMPERIALISM WILL CONTINUE TO EXPAND WHICH CAUSES ENVIRONMENTS TO BE

Here, far from the pieties,

THE AFF’S RELIANCE ON EXPERT DISCOURSE IN THEIR CONSTRUCTION OF A BIODIVERSITY

sexual assault remains a pervasive problem for women

OKINAWA GUAM SHIFT EXT

WITHDRAWAL OF TROOPS FROM JAPAN LEADS TO MORE TROOPS IN GUAM

It has been ten months since Secretary

CHINA MODULE 1/2

THEIR CLAIM THAT CHINA IS A THREAT OR PROBLEM ISN’T ‘TRUTH’ OR OBJECTIVE - - IT IS A

CHINA MODULE 2/2

REPRESENTATIONS OF CHINA ARE INTRINSICALLY LINKED TO HOW WE SEE OURSELVES,

THE AFFIRMATIVE’S CONSTRUCTION OF CHINA AS A THREAT IS DERIVED FROM THE

PORTRAYING CHINA AS A THREAT IS SIMPLY A JUSTIFICATION FOR THE EXPANSION OF THE

PROLIFERATION MODULE 1/2

THE DISCOURSE OF PROLIFERATION REPRODUCES AND REINFORCES THE DISCURSIVE

PROLIF LINK EXT

CURBING PROLIFERATION IS DONE ONLY IN AN ATTEMPT TO CREATE “STABILITY” WHICH IS

THE IMAGE OF PROLIFERATION DOESN’T HOLD A PLACE IN POLITICS. INSTEAD IT IS USED TO

PROLIF LINK EXT

In a sense, then, Iraq

PROLIF CASE TURN EXT

LABELING STATES AS ROGUE IS BORN OF WESTERN EXCEPTIONALISM

ROGUE STATES ARE CONSTRUCTIONS OF NECESSITY. THE U.S. IS CONSTRAINED BY ITS

THE NOTION OF THE ROGUE STATE IS ONE BASED ON WESTERNIST DOMINATION.

THE NPT REQUIRES ROBUST INTERVENTION. STANDARDS FOR KEEPING STATES IN

CALLS TO STRENGTHEN THE NONPROLIFERATION REGIME ARE ROOTED IN AMERICAN

the United States, through a strategy of selective

PROLIF: NPT LINKS 2/2

SOFT POWER IS A SUBTLE FORM OF ECONOMIC IMPERIALISM (AND IT ISN’T SUCCESSFUL IN

LINK - INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS

we are witness to an enduring political

TURKEY RELATIONSHIP ADVS LINKS

PLACATING TURKEY IS NOT BENEVOLENT- WE MEET THEIR DEMANDS ONLY SO THAT WE

GENERIC ALL CASE LINK

DON’T BE FOOLED – THE AFFIRMATIVE’S WITHDRAWAL OF THE US MILITARY IS NOT THE

REMOVING DEPLETED URANIUM BULLETS REINFORCES IMPERIALISM BECAUSE THE

TUNGSTEN IS JUST AS DANGEROUS AS DEPLETED URANIUM-CAUSES TUMORS