Theme : Politics
Beginning of the End
The US is Ignoring an Important Lesson from History - That an Empire
Cannot Survive on Brute Force Alone
by Madeleine Bunting
There are plenty of things to keep Tony Blair awake at night these days,
as his gray, haggard features after last week's diplo-marathon indicated.
In his nightmares of the Pentagon cooking up new hare-brained schemes
and dirty bombs on the underground, a new anxiety must have begun to niggle
- those domestic commentators who have started being so horribly nice
to him. He's a "great statesman" now, one of the "greatest
prime ministers"; it's when things are getting really bad - you're
dying, for instance - that people start being this nice.
People are beginning to feel sorry for Blair - they don't buy his arguments
on the necessity of war with Iraq, but they increasingly appreciate the
enormous difficulty of his position. A pivotal moment in post-second world
war British foreign policy has fallen to his watch. He has a fiendishly
tricky hand to play in the global bid to contain two erratic, angry men,
both of whom control quantities of lethal weapons and both of whom are
making a mockery of the UN and any concept of international law - the
one by flouting its repeated injunctions, and the other by bullying it
with bribes and threats.
But even allowing for Blair having a terrible hand, is he playing it
well? The fallout from Blair's high-stakes backing of Bush is apparent
on every side: internationally, we've lost weight as the fully paid-up
US sergeant incapable of independent action; domestically, Blair's personal
ratings fall as the delicate compromises which hitched the Labour movement
to the Third Way disintegrate (why are some unpopular measures, such as
going to war with Iraq, undertaken in the teeth of domestic opposition,
and not others, such as higher taxation, ask the Labour faithful?).
It seemed like it couldn't get worse - and then it did with last week's
billet-doux to Uncle Sam. There is no fatted calf Blair won't sacrifice
for Bush - not even European unity. He opted for the petty snub to France
and Germany rather than the one chance of effectively containing George
Bush through a strong unified Europe: that was the only hope, and Blair's
blown it in the company of dodgy cronies such as Silvio Berlusconi. Now
America can smugly sit back while "American Europe" and "Old
Europe" bicker: what kind of achievement is that for Blair, the European?
Set against these failures, all that Blair has to show for his pains is
a pitiful exercise of UN window-dressing to decorate American belligerence
with claimed international legitimacy.
It is easy to criticize Blair's foreign policy. It's very easy to see
that going to war with Iraq is at best unwise, at worst crazily dangerous;
it has little justification, it sets a dangerous precedent and has no
clear objective. What is far less easy and a deeply dispiriting task is
to consider how the European center-left responds to the new world order
that this crisis starkly reveals. American imperialism used to be a fiction
of the far-left imagination, now it is an uncomfortable fact of life.
How is the center-left to accommodate the US's newly aggressive imperialist
mission emboldened by a 9/11 licence from its electorate? Afghanistan
was simply the starter, Iraq an antipasto in what could turn out to be
one of those interminable feasts - course after course until a pot-bellied
US reels punch drunk from the table.
With US imperialism openly discussed on both sides of the Atlantic, the
debate centers on three critical questions: will the empire corrupt and/or
bankrupt the republic; by what administrative techniques should it exercise
power; and is it basically benign? The first prompts one of those defining
moments in a nation's understanding of itself - what is the US will for
imperial power, and what price is it prepared to pay in living standards
and civil liberties? Guantanamo Bay, the debate over the use of torture,
and growing government spending deficits are a foretaste of what lies
ahead. But the key unknown is, can a consumer culture support empire?
The second question is about whether the empire is one of vassal states,
propped up with subsidies and American arms (as in Saudi Arabia), or one
of invasion and colonization masquerading under nation-building (as in
Afghanistan).
But it is the third question on which the debate hinges. This is where
the gulf between the US and the European center-left yawns widest. American
faith in its good intentions remains remarkably undented by a half century
of evidence that such simplicity is absurdly naïve (here's hoping
the timely remake of The Quiet American will help jolt some strands of
American public opinion). Beholden to some shadow of its puritan past,
America earnestly hopes to woo the world with the promise of democracy
in Baghdad, drinking water in Saddam city.
But such rhetoric has little traction on world opinion because the track
record is execrable. As Michael Ignatieff points out in this month's Prospect,
US spending on non-military means of promoting its influence overseas
(foreign aid, etc) has shrunk to a pitiful 0.2% of GDP. In Pakistan or
the Yemen, the US presence is soldiers fortified in compounds bristling
with weaponry, rather than engineers building roads and water supplies.
Furthermore, many question whether the US really has either the skill,
determination or the patience to sustain its good intentions beyond a
few euphoric days of Baghdad crowds staged for the TV cameras. It has
shown none of these qualities in the Palestinian/Israeli conflict, the
issue that now defines the nature of US imperial ambition in the Middle
East - and makes a mockery of its supposed benignity.
The European left is lumbered with a debilitating fatalism. The benign
imperium is only a set of US interests cobbled together, and what Old
Europe - the rightful place of Britain - knows intimately from bitter
recent experience is how empires are lost: how they overstretch themselves
and collapse under the weight of their own illegitimacy. Ironically, it
was America that proved the most adept at exploiting this in the course
of the 20th century by championing the self-determination of nations.
How has the US lost that wisdom? How does it overlook the fact that imperial
longevity is determined not by demonstrations of brute force, but by securing
minds and hearts?
A pyrotechnic display of military force in Iraq might assuage the national
humiliation of 9/11, but it will ill serve American interests. This is
the beginning of the end of the American empire: it has failed to focus
on its true enemy, terrorism; failed to grasp how asymmetric terror transforms
the power relationships of the globe; and is choosing instead to indulge
itself in an old-fashioned war between nation states - an irrelevant,
costly and dangerous sideshow.
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