The Accouterments of Imperial Leadership

Even though the American Empire differs enormously from its imperial predecessors, one ubiquitous attribute of empire is the perceived need to vest imperial leaders with accouterments that set them apart from mere mortals. One of the ways this is achieved is in the ways leaders travel, and in this respect the President of the United States has means of transportation at his disposal that would have made the emperors, czars and pharaohs of the past green with envy.

Visits abroad by the President are constructed as photo-ops for the White House media corps. The panoply of an American presidential visit enhances these results. The choreography of these visits is designed to enhance the imperial stature of the President while sheltering him almost completely from foreigners or foreign ways of doing things. Imperial leaders have always traveled in ways that enhance their image of potency, an image designed to fill the populace with awe. Alexander the Great rode Bucephalus, a great black stallion with a white star on his forehead. Bucephalus lived to the age of thirty, dying at the end of one of Alexander’s battles. The stallion was buried with full military honours. In the nineteenth century, Queen Victoria traveled in her own carriage accompanied by footmen in full regalia. The royal crest emblazoned the door of her carriage.

What is new is the unequalled splendour of the transportation arrangements of the President of the United States who flies in one of two specially remodeled Boeing 747-200B aircraft. When the president is on board the aircraft is known by its radio call sign, Air Force One. The aircraft is outfitted with more than 238 miles of electrical wiring, more than twice that found on a normal 747. The more than 4000 square feet of floor space inside the aircraft harbours a presidential stateroom. The president also has a bedroom and a full bath. There is a presidential office, a conference/dining room, two fully equipped kitchens, a medical treatment room, and secretarial offices. Up to seventy people can fly on the aircraft so that the President can transport cabinet secretaries, top aides, security personnel and favoured media people. On board there are six lavatories and eighty-four telephones. The Presidential jets, which can fly half way around the world without refueling can be refueled by military aircraft while in the air. The two aircraft, whose combined price tag was $650 million, are outfitted with a classified, anti-missile defence system, as well as having a protective shield against the energy waves emitted by a nuclear blast. The shield is in place to protect computers and other electronics gear, including a communications system that boasts secure voice terminals and cryptographic equipment for sending, receiving and deciphering classified messages.

Another aircraft accompanies the Chief Executive on these trips, a C-5 Galaxy heavy transport aircraft that flies to the destination in advance of Air Force One. The cargo plane delivers the President’s bullet proof limousine, a stand by limousine, a fully equipped ambulance, and in some cases, an armoured helicopter, which when the Preisent is aboard is called Marine One. The limousine, Cadillac One, is a specially designed and equipped version of the Cadillac deVille, whose exact dimensions are a state secret. The automobile’s five inch thick armour is able to withstand an attack by rocket propelled grenades. The vehicle, which has an armour-plated underside, is able to keep passengers safe in the event of a biological or chemical attack.

When the President lands at the airport in a foreign country, his advance security team has already been long on the ground, informing the locals about what will and will not be tolerated. For instance, in London, one of only fifteen cities outside the U.S. where there is a permanent U.S. Secret Service Office, a Presidential visit is planned by American operatives who have an intimate knowledge of the setting. As soon as a visit by the President is announced, the Secret Service team begins its muscular negotiations with local authorities, deciding which sites the President will visit and laying down requirements for his protection. No other leaders’ functionaries are allowed to take such an active part in laying on security on foreign soil in the way the Americans do. A trip abroad by President George W. Bush, such as the President’s visit to England in November 2003, is classified in the U.S. as a “national special security event.”

When Bush traveled to London, although the exact details were kept secret, it was revealed that the Americans brought about two hundred and fifty armed agents to the British capital to provide protection for their leader. While the Americans worked with their British hosts a gray area of uncertainty was created, as with all Presidential visits abroad, about who was ultimately in control of the deployment of force. Even though the British Commander in charge of providing security in London deployed a force of 14,000 police, he had to cope with the potent fact that the President would be surrounded by his own armed guards. To try to clarify this murky issue, the British Home Secretary stated that although the American agents could be armed that they would enjoy no immunity from prosecution in the U.K. if they used their weapons. Trying to exercise control over armed American agents whose internal rules of engagement are not disclosed to them is one of the conundrums with which foreign authorities must wrestle in age of the American Empire.

The Bush visit to London took place in the aftermath of the Anglo-American invasion of Iraq in the spring of 2003, and tension surrounding the visit was extremely high. On this occasion, in addition to normal security for the President, additional hardware was deployed. Twenty armoured vehicles and a specially converted Black Hawk helicopter were laid on to get the President to Buckingham Palace where he and his wife Laura were staying and to Number 10 Downing Street for a meeting at the residence of Prime Minister Tony Blair.

Adding to the standoff that was expected between British protesters and the American President was the fact that the Mayor of London, Ken Livingstone, saw the visit to his city as a virtual invasion. He was on record as saying that George W. Bush was “the greatest threat to life on this planet.” The highlight of the peaceful demonstration involving tens of thousands of people in the streets of London was the pulling down of a statue-effigy of George W. Bush, modeled after the pulling down of a statue of Saddam Hussein in Baghdad the previous spring.

When the President visits a foreign city, the right of way on the thoroughfares he traverses is commandeered so that all means of entry onto the routes used are blocked off. Domestic air travel in the affected areas is banned in the airspace surrounding the President. When the President reaches a point where he must emerge from his limousine, the surrounding area is completely blocked off and barricaded and local police and military are beefed up with the presence of American agents and sharpshooters who are fully armed and ready to take action should they feel it necessary. If the visit is to proceed, the host country has no choice but to accept these unique impositions, which include violations of the country’s sovereignty which normally includes control of security on its own soil.

On foreign soil, when George W. Bush travels, his exposure to the host country’s people, media, and political leaders is very carefully controlled. Protesters are held at a distance so that they are rarely seen or heard by the U.S. President. The foreign media is kept at bay so that only a few questions are permitted at very brief press conferences when the President appears in tandem with the leader of the host country. Guests who are to attend dinners with the President are subjected to a lengthy process that is designed to protect the imperial visitor. Guests are required to assemble at a facility several hours ahead of the dinner. They are searched and then directed to waiting buses that take them to the site of the dinner. Roads and bridges surrounding the site of the dinner are closed down. Only after everyone has been scrutinized and transported to the location with massive security surrounding the building does the President’s motorcade arrive, driven as always through empty streets. The time of the President during such visits is rationed to the minute. The leader of the host country and a few of his top officials are granted the greatest access and time is usually provided for the leader of the major opposition party. Heads of other levels of government, leaders of other political parties and other figures are granted “face time”, a few minutes with the President at a reception or in the lead up to dinner.

When the President makes a major address on foreign soil, as George W. Bush did in Halifax, during his two day visit to Canada four weeks after his re-election in November 2004, the address was carried live on CNN. Meanwhile, the Prime Minister’s speech introducing Bush was not carried by the network. What Americans saw on their television screens, as is typical, was their President speaking to them with a foreign backdrop. In the case of the Halifax speech, Bush’s advance team even picked out the backdrop itself with pictures on it of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Prime Minister William Lyon Mackenzie King, an image designed to evoke memories of the close alliance between the United States and Canada during the Second World War. The communications generated by the foreign visits of the President are designed as self contained feed back loops in which Americans see and hear from their leader, through the medium of a crew of media people to whom they are habituated.

The American leader goes forth from the heart of the Empire, but he never really leaves the American heartland. This style of communications is as old as empire itself and is one of the ways in which empires inflict damage on themselves, damage that can ultimately lead to their demise. Vibrant and rising political entities are alive to the changes taking place in the world, and they ride the wave of those changes. They imbibe the knowledge and insights of others, making use of them to pursue their goals, whether those goals are ultimately judged to have been for good or ill.

Imperial rulers, however, are typically surrounded by those who tell them what they want to hear. And in some cases, where the leader is mentally lazy or not particularly well informed and thoughtful, they are surrounded by people who guide them and who shelter them from other influences. George W. Bush is that curious case---a ruler who is surrounded by those who tell him what he wants to hear, but also those on whom he relies to tell him what he ought to think and do. The President is the point man in an administration which is unusually ideological and non-pragmatic in its approach. The neo-conservatism that is the dominant mode of thought of the key members of the administration makes a virtue of not listening too much to others.

Washington’s office-holding neo-conservatives are a self-referential coterie, much as were the gang that surrounded Stalin, Hitler’s intimates, or those who are in daily contact with the Pope in the Vatican. Not only do members of such groups take pride in not paying serious attention to those outside the circle, to sustain their own positions within the fold they must not be seen to be open to the opinions of those on the outside. In the manner of fervent ideologues, the members of the Bush inner circle believe that they are in possession of truths that have escaped others and that only by holding firmly to the tenets of their faith can they achieve the radical transformation they seek. In fact, evidence of widespread external disagreement with what the group thinks has the effect of reinforcing the intensity of its members’ convictions. Self-appointed vanguards, champions of a “master race”, those who are divinely inspired and super-individualists in the Ayn Rand mold anticipate that their success must be achieved at the expense of lesser thinkers.

There is one crucial difference between the Bush crowd and the members of the other groups mentioned above. In each of the other cases, the leaders have been self-made men who have had to display ruthlessness and courage in their ascents to supreme power. In sharp contrast, George W. Bush came to power as the heir to his father’s amply connected friends with their access to large pools of capital. In this way, Bush is rather typical of other emperors or kings who inherited their positions. Lazy self-satisfied, self-made leaders may be rare, although Ronald Reagan may have been one, but these qualities are commonly encountered among emperors and kings.

A disease which afflicts emperors and those in their immediate entourage is their incapacity to see the external world in a reasonably objective way. The old axiom can be reworked in the following way: All power distorts and absolute power distorts absolutely. The Chinese rulers in the fifteenth century who ordered that the great ships the Chinese had constructed never be sent on another voyage of discovery and that the fleet be destroyed because as the Middle Kingdom, China had no need for the outer world, were applying the dictum with a terrifying literalism. Their arrogance was so great that they felt no need to know about the rest of the world, which in any case would never affect them in any important way. Similarly, when the German army was thrown back from the gates of Moscow on December 6, 1941, and Adolf Hitler was informed that the Soviets were deploying whole new units whose existence had hitherto escaped the notice of German intelligence, the Fuhrer flew into a foam flecked rage. And when to this report, came another that the Soviets were deploying thousands of new tanks, some of types not seen before, the German leader simply refused to accept the information as fact. Information that did not fit within the confines of his weltanschauung was no information at all. It could be discarded.

The American imperial mindset, despite the billions of dollars spent of collecting and sifting intelligence annually, is equally blinkered. Consider a few palpable examples. During the Vietnam War in the 1960s, it was inconceivable to U.S. Defense Secretary Robert McNamara and President Lyndon Johnson that the armed forces of North Vietnam and of those of the National Liberation Front could long resist the mightiest, most technologically advanced power on earth. It would be decades before McNamara, the former Ford executive, who was a devout technocrat, would begin to understand how wrong his calculations had been and how powerful a mobilizing force Vietnamese nationalism was, even in the face of the armed forces of the United States. Similarly, the intelligence that contributed to the Bush administration’s invasion of Iraq in 2003 was extravagantly in error. Here, I am not referring to the commonplace observation that Saddam Hussein’s regime possessed no weapons of mass destruction and had no links to Al Quaeda. At least as important, and highly revealing of the blinkered vision that is characteristic of imperial regimes, was the assumption that the U.S. forces would be welcomed by the Iraqi people as liberators. Even those in the U.S. intelligence community who were not as sure that flowers would be strewn in the path of the advancing U.S. military, did not conceive of the possibility of a sustained insurgency on the part of those who were opposed to the occupation. What the Pentagon and the CIA and the White House could not contemplate was that occupation by a foreign power itself would become a deeply mobilizing fact for tens of thousands of Iraqis.