- Recently the novelist John le Carré wrote in the
Times of London that the United States has entered a "period of madness"
that dwarfs McCarthyism or the Vietnam intervention in intensity. One generally
would not pay much attention to the cynical British spy-tale weaver, never
especially friendly to America. But concern about America's mental health
is more broadly in the air, spreading well beyond the usual professional
anti-Americans. It is now pervasive in Europe, and growing in Asia, and
when Matt Drudge posted le Carré's piece prominently on his website,
it got passed around and talked about here in ways it never would have
five years ago.
-
- The proximate cause of le Carré's diagnosis is
Washington's plan for a pre-emptive war against Iraq, a nation whose weapons
pose no threat to the United States and that has no substantial links to
al-Qaeda or 9/11. The U.S. would fight this war virtually without allies,
though a few countries might be dragged into the fray against the will
of their populations. But mad or not, this drive toward war is not mania
of sudden onset but ratification of a neo-imperialist strategy that has
been germinating in neoconservative circles since the end of the Cold War.
-
- A new war against Iraq was a gleam in the eye of a small
but influential group long before 9/11. In 1998, the newly established
Project for a New American Century (PNAC), an advocacy group chaired by
Weekly Standard editor Bill Kristol, began sending open letters from prominent
foreign policy hawks. First, it wrote to the Clinton administration calling
upon the United States to "remove Saddam's regime." When its
advice was ignored, PNAC asked Republican Congressional leaders to push
for war. The signatories included Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz (now
number two at the Pentagon), Elliott Abrams (recently appointed to the
National Security Council as a director of Mid-East policy), William Bennett,
John Bolton (now Undersecretary of State), and the ubiquitous Richard Perle,
chairman of the Defense Policy Board and often considered the central figure
the interlocking web of neoconservative think tanks.
-
- PNAC's ambitions go well beyond Saddam's overthrow. Immediately
after 9/11, the group began pushing to expand the war against other Muslim
states, calling for the U.S. to target Hezbollah and its sponsors, Iran
and Syria. PNAC also wants the U.S. to stop trying to foster a peace between
Israel and the Palestinians, advocating withdrawal of the small amount
of aid the U.S. gives the Palestinian Authority and granting full support
to Israel's right wing Likud government.
-
- These tactical measures are elements within a broader
vision of a more militarized U.S. foreign policy, carried out without allies
if necessary. In the final year of the first Bush administration, Paul
Wolfowitz penned a memo under the aegis of then Secretary of Defense Cheney,
calling for the United States to ramp up its defense spending in order
to deter any other country from "even aspiring to a larger regional
or global role." China, Russia, Germany, and Japan were to be intimidated
from seeking more power in their own regions. After the Wolfowitz draft
was leaked to the press, it received widespread ridicule, and the Bush
I diplomats rushed to reassure allies that Wolfowitz's views did not truly
reflect American foreign policy.
-
- But during the 1990s they did become the views of the
neoconservatives, packaged under the slogan "benevolent global hegemony"
touted by Kristol and Robert Kagan. The positions of the neoconservative
foreign policy team in exile (a sort of shadow subcabinet during the Clinton
years) were fleshed out in a PNAC book, Present Dangers, which called for
the U.S. to "shape the international environment to its own advantage"
by being "at once a European power, an Asian power, a Middle Eastern
power, and of course a Western Hemisphere power" and to "act
as if instability in important regions of the world ... affect[s] us with
almost the same immediacy as if [it] was occurring on our own doorstep."
In practice this meant assertive risk-taking virtually everywhere. Jonathan
Clarke, reviewing the volume in the National Interest, wrote, "If
the book's recommendations were implemented all at once, the U.S. would
risk unilaterally fighting a five-front war, while simultaneously urging
Israel to abandon the peace process in favor of a new no-holds-barred confrontation
with the Palestinians." This book has become the blueprint for the
foreign policy of George W. Bush.
-
- Only recently has it become commonplace (outside of the
Marxist Left) to call this new policy imperialist. President Bush himself
still shuns the word, telling a Veterans Day audience, "We have no
territorial ambitions. We don't seek an empire." But a surprising
number of foreign policy analysts, in the neocon orbit and beyond, have
picked up the "I" word and run with it. Max Boot, a former Wall
Street Journal editor who wrote a book about America's splendid little
wars writes in the Weekly Standard about "troubled lands [that] cry
out for the sort of enlightened foreign administration once provided by
self-confident Englishmen in jodhpurs and pith helmets." Kristol co-author
Robert Kagan prefers the term "hegenomy" to empire, and many
neoconservatives stress that the new American imperialism will differ from
the bad old European sort because it will be welcomed by its subjects.
The American Enterprise Institute's Joshua Muravchik has written a primer
on "exporting democracy" whose phrases now pop up regularly in
Bushite rhetoric.
-
- The war for democracy is meant to bring about eternal
peace. A television sound-bite of the neo-imperialists is "democracies
don't fight one another," though the generalization seems to ignore
the bloodiest war in the 19th century (America's Civil War) and arguably
the one that brought about the end of Europe's global pre-eminence (World
War I). Never mind. The coda is always Wilsonian, a claim that pre-emptive
war will bring forth a springtime of power to the people of the politically
stagnant region.
-
- None of this is entirely new of course: America's previous
burst of imperial expansion at the turn of the 20th century was accompanied
by plenty of talk about liberating our "brown brothers" from
Spain's evil dominion and, later, teaching Latin Americans to hold clean
elections and "elect good men." The phrases have come down to
us through history class, but we do not remember the elections because,
by and large, they never took place.
-
- Nor, it should be remembered, did the older European
imperialists consider themselves exploiters. The rulers and rhetoricians
of France's and Britain's empires were quite confident that they were bringing
the benefits of science, law, and rationality to poorer and backward peoples.
Such claims were self-serving but not entirely fanciful. Contrary to the
standard Leninist critique, imperialism was not a one-way transfer of wealth
from colony to metropole: Britain and France made large investments in
capital and education in their empires, in part producing the educated
modernizing nationalist class that eventually threw them out. Though some
American hawks have let on that establishing military bases astride the
world's major oil arteries would not be a distasteful burden, in today's
Washington the war against Iraq is not spoken of as an opportunity for
plundering the region's vital resources. The war will be fought to liberate
the Iraqi people: never before in the annals of neoconservative rhetoric
have Arabs been talked about so solicitously. (Cynics might note that Commentary
and the Weekly Standard showed little prior interest in bringing the benefits
of democracy to the three million Palestinians under Israeli occupation,
where American influence could have been brought to bear readily at almost
any point in the past thirty-five years.)
-
- The prospects of this new militarized imperialism ought
to be gauged by how well it might succeed. Would it make Americans more
secure? What are its chances of democratizing the Middle East?
-
- The strongest neo-imperialist case study is Japan, re-fashioned
under American military occupation from a semi-feudal militaristic dictatorship
that waged aggressive war into a semi-capitalist, reasonably democratic,
and very peaceable ally and trading partner of the United States. But the
differences between Japan and the Islamic nations our present-day imperialists
want to occupy are stark. Appreciation for the West and democratic ideas
was well rooted in Japan. The Japanese began to borrow furiously from the
West once Commodore Perry landed in 1853, in science and military technology
of course, but also in the world of ideas. Reading the Western philosophes
became a fad during the Meiji Restoration, which initiated voting for Parliament
in 1889 and had universal male suffrage by the 1920s. Pushing the process
along was an indigenous "liberty and popular rights movement,"
which spawned dozens of autonomous political groups. "Loyal opposition"
was not an alien idea. Moreover, Japan's bureaucracy-a samurai-based elite
class that pre-dated the Meiji Restoration-was ready to implement democratic
reforms and put its own stamp on the new regime. General MacArthur had
much on which to build. Moreover, every country in Asia wanted Japan transformed.
The imposition of an entirely new order from outside-MacArthur and his
crew ended up writing the internal laws, redistributing property, re-shaping
the economy, and imposing a constitution-was considered legitimate throughout
the region. The circumstances in the Mid-East, where American invasion
is opposed vigorously in the region and by three of the five permanent
members of the UN Security Council, could not be more different.
-
- If prior conditions made Japan receptive to the imposition
of democracy from without, the general success rate of imperial powers
in molding occupations to their liking is poor. Both Britain and France
tried mightily to form a suitable "indigenous" elite in their
colonies, neither with much success. The ascending middle classes demanded
access to education, but British and French administrators quickly learned
the more natives were educated, the more colonial rule angered them. Britain
gave up its empire without too much strife, but France was driven out of
Indochina by a bloody guerilla war and from an Algerian colony (bound to
the mother country with "indissoluble links" according to the
language of the time) by a fierce campaign of terror. One hears echoes
of the arguments made by colonialist Frenchmen in the mouths of America's
neo-imperialists: if the Algerian nationalists prevailed, they would subject
the Algerians to all the horrors of autocratic, quasi-fascist domination.
Such arguments were, as Raymond Aron wrote at the time, true but irrelevant:
colonized people rated national independence more highly than they did
the rights of the individual.
-
- This is especially true in the Islamic world. Roger Scruton
in The West and the Rest comes to this conclusion on the deeper divergences
in political culture that seem to flow from Islam and Christianity respectively:
"The virtues of Western political systems are, to a certain kind of
Islamic mind, imperceptible-or perceptible, as they were to Qutb and Atta,
only as hideous moral failings. Even while enjoying the peace, prosperity,
and freedom that issue from a secular rule of law, a person who regards
the shari'a as the unique path to salvation may see these things only as
signs of spiritual emptiness or corruption." Perhaps skeptical thinkers
like Aron and Scruton are wrong and the neocon cheerleaders for imperialistic
democracy-imposition are right, but one would not want to bet America's
future on it.
-
- Then there is the reaction of the world to consider,
after the United States rains cruise missiles on Baghdad, seizes the Iraqi
oil fields and "the next day" (as Ariel Sharon urges) prepares
for war against Iran. One can imagine that the Saudis will fall into a
political panic, that Europe will be enraged, that Russia and China will
be cooly hostile and begin to make plans. What impact would the Iraq invasion
have on the international system?
-
- During the Clinton years, quite a few international affairs
specialists wondered why American pre-eminence had not given rise to the
kind of counterbalancing and ganging up against the leading power that
classic international relations theory and diplomatic history would lead
one to expect. Russia and China briefly eyed one another as allies, the
Europeans griped, but nowhere did major countries come close to forming
real military alliances to counter America's strength. Why not?
-
- The most persuasive answer came from Joseph Joffe, a
conservative pro-Atlanticist German. He wrote that while there was plenty
of smoldering resentment of American power, no one felt it necessary to
ally against it. The United States was a hegemon "different from all
its predecessors. America annoys and antagonizes, but it does not conquer.
... This is a critical departure from the traditional ways of the high
and mighty. For the balance of power machinery to crank up, it makes a
difference whether the rest of the world faces a huge but unusually placid
elephant or a caniverous tyrannosaurus rex." America is an elephant
that lumbers but does not crush and that uses its hegemony to create "public
goods"-institutions that the rest needs for security and economic
growth.
-
- If America invades Iraq, the bottom will fall out of
this argument. The first consequence would probably be sharp drop in international
co-operation against terrorism, especially terrorism directed against the
United States. After that, we can contemplate new alliances: Russia and
China, Europe and the (unoccupied) Middle East, an international system
in rapid flux but increasingly focused on restraining American power. Of
course, the United States will always have Israel as its friend.
-
- Consider America's international situation: a country
rich and technologicially advanced, blessed with unusually stable political
system, separated from hostile countries by huge oceans, and still retaining
durable long term friendships with the world's most powerful and successful
democratic states, and requiring serious international police and intelligence
cooperation to deal with its most pressing enemy, al-Qaeda. For such a
nation suddenly to decide that its best and only option to "save itself"
is to embark on a course of imperial expansion, one that will be opposed
vigorously by the rest of the world, seems almost a form of madness.
-
- Hopefully the British Parliamentary debate about Iraq
will be carried on C-SPAN tomorrow or at some point in the future...
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- http://www.amconmag.com/02_24_03/cover.html
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