Blah, blah, blah.
The hard facts are that nobody is really in denial. Nobody talks a lot about it, but there is a sizable segment of the population that truly believes it is up to the US to put the world in order (I'm not saying I'm a member of that segment).
The Cold War was easy -- You were with us or you were with the Soviet bloc. Then the USSR fell and everything got compliclated. You had a multipolar world with various groups vying for multiple interests beyond the simplicity of communism vs capitalist-democracy. And all these groups were rapidly gaining the ability to have far-reaching effects due to WMD and increased economic integration.
Various extremist factions have flourished in the vacuum left by the end of the Cold War and, even before 9/11, some quarters of American political culture were calling for a hard-nosed approach to addressing the nascent threats of the world. 9/11 just served as an example of why they believe we need to do so.
So rather than trotting out the idea that the US is an empire, as though this is some revelation, why doesn't the anti-imperialist movement address two things:
1- Why shouldn't the US be an empire?
2- Who is going to shape the post Cold War world.
If they answered those questions rather than acting like they are Woodward and Bernstein when they announce that the US is using its role as the world's sole superpower to push its own agenda (SHOCKING!!!!), they might get a bit farther than they've gotten in fighting American imperialism.
