EMPIRE of the MIND There seems to be an increasingly thoughtless tendency to critically portray American foreign policy as " Imperial " or as an already existing " Empire ". Granted, tossing around this epithet to describe any vaguely non-socialist country has been a favorite pastime of Marxists and academics since Hobson and Lenin's day but the practice is reaching absurd proportions. Set aside that the scale and intentions of the Bush administration toward Iraq pale beside the efforts America made in Vietnam to say nothing of WWII, to call America an " empire " is make that word utterly meaningless. Iraq, dominated as it is by a Sunni minority is closer to being a mini-empire in practice than the United States will ever be. Here is one of the more cogent " empire " arguments made by conservative critic Paul Schroeder  ¶ 10:17 AM