The Crime of Empire: Rogue Superpower & World Domination (Carl Boggs)

Successive governments of the United States of America like to designate other countries, whose leaders they do not like, "rogue states.“ Noam Chomsky showed in „Rogue States“ that this designation does not apply to countries such as Iraq but to the United States itself. According to him, the American superpower fulfills all the characteristics of such an entity. The U. S. and its "junior partner“, the United Kingdom, made Iraq a cartoon of an "outlaw nation“ that threatens the entire world, and Saddam Hussein the reincarnation of Adolf Hitler.

If that would have been true, they should have turned to the U. N. Security Council. Instead they started an act of aggression against Iraq, thereby showing contempt for international law and the U. N. Charter, which would have provided a legal base to handle this crisis peacefully. Chomsky mentions that Libya, Cuba, and North Korea were also designated as "rogue states“, and the ´boy emperor from Crawford, Texas` named Iran, Iraq and North Korea the "axis of evil“. U. S. President Ronald Reagan had already termed the Soviet Union an "evil empire“. Having red Carl Boggs book, one can doubt whether the right countries were stigmatized "rogue states” because "The Crime of Empire“ is the criminal history of U. S. behavior in international relations.

The central thesis of Carl Boggs`book may be summarized in the following statement: "The U. S. stands today as the most fearsome outlaw nation in the world, its leaders having contributed to a steady descent into global lawlessness.“ The author explores the rise of the U. S. from its foundation in 1776 as it rose against old European colonialism to the status of an empire, which dominates the world. Boggs follows an interesting approach. Over a period of more than 200 years the development of U. S. policy is described as a history of "military criminality and outlawry.“ Boggs links global and domestic (political, economic and cultural) elements of a power structure that is addicted to militarism and war. The present U. S. neo-colonialist policies of aggression cannot be understood apart from this historical legacy. According to the author, the legacy of U. S. outlawry has its origins in the earliest days of the Republic beginning with the extermination of the Native American.

This book is the third part of a trilogy on U. S. imperial power which started with "Imperial Delusions“ in 2004 and was followed by "The Hollywood War Machine“ in 2006, the last one written with Tom Pollard. Without the support of the film industry, the corporate media and the military-industrial complex the American public could not have been so easily manipulated into supporting the illegal wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Carl Boggs teaches Social Science at the National University in Los Angeles. In 2007 he has received the Charles McCoy Career Achievement Award from the American Political Science Association. In seven chapters of his book, the author succeeds to convince readers about the criminal nature of the U.S. superpower.