The Spectacle of Empire

Abstract

of Baghdad on April 9, 2003, was widely heralded in the U.S. press as vindication of the Bush administration's Operation Iraqi Freedom. The U.S. army was not an army of conquest, but one of liberation. The Iraqi people in turn welcomed their liberators in no uncertain terms by toppling the statue of their former tyrant. Almost instantaneously, however, the architectonics of American freedom shifted, revealing flimsy foundations and unstable grounds. As John Burns wrote in the New York Times, the city of Baghdad immediately descended into an anarchy of looting and civil strife. Meanwhile, Reuters reported that the United States planned to run the Iraqi oil industry for an indefinite period and was considering withdrawing Iraq from the OPEC cartel. Finally, it seemed that those monstrous weapons that only days earlier were menacing the planet were nowhere to be found.1 Against the backdrop of the current U.S. war, its fluctuating rationalizations, and the growing Iraqi resistance to U.S. occupation, Amy Kaplan's Anarchy of Empire in the Making of U.S. Culture makes for uncanny reading. For all the treatises now appearing that purport to explore the political and economic histories of U.S. imperialism, virtually none considers its subjective and narrative logic, how empire