Much has been said about American Imperialism – those two words will give you 986,000 Google hits – and you really don’t want to read all of it. The concept of an American Empire was first popularized in the aftermath of the Spanish-American War of 1898 – it was a Teddy Roosevelt thing. But then, you see, classical Marxist theorists of imperialism say America becoming an empire was just the logical end-product of capitalism – Teddy wasn’t that odd. Modern liberal theorists, opposed to what they take to be aggressive American policy, say our imperialism, as we practice it, is a kind of madness, or sort of a character defect. What sort of people want to shove everyone around, take what they want and grin derisively?
Historians Archibald Paton Thorton and Stuart Creighton Miller argue the whole concept is crap – Miller argues that the overuse and abuse of the term “imperialism” makes it nearly meaningless. Thorton says that “imperialism is more often the name of the emotion that reacts to a series of events than a definition of the events themselves.” Political theorist Michael Walzer argues that the term “hegemony” is better than “empire” to describe our role in the world. You could look it all up, or not. If you do you’ll find the historian Sidney Lens arguing that “the United States, from the time it gained its own independence, has used every available means - political, economic, and military - to dominate other nations.” Hey, it’s what we do. If the Canadians do no such thing then that’s their problem. And you can call it what you like.
Is Sidney Lens right? You can see his point. From the Manifest Destiny – everything west of the Mississippi had to be ours not for any reason other than Destiny said so, whoever she was – to the Monroe Doctrine – we reserve the right to have the last say about anything that happens in our hemisphere – to the current administration’s view that since God wants people to be free we really ought to do the right thing, what God wants, and find a way, by threat or force, to do what He requires, making all nations free-market, secular (to a degree), Jeffersonian democracies – we will dominate, benignly, as we see it. People will do things our way. Is that what we signed up for? Is that our role, or burden, or noble task?
Donald Rumsfeld once said this – “We don’t seek empires. We’re not imperialistic. We never have been.” That was in 2003. But Ron Suskind, the next year, writing about the Bush administration, with his great access and all sorts of insiders willing to talk to him, reported this:
The aide said that guys like me were “in what we call the reality-based community,” which he defined as people who “believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.” I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. “That’s not the way the world really works anymore,” he continued. “We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality - judiciously, as you will - we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors… and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.”
Many were appalled by the bravado of saying reality didn’t matter – we’ll make our own. That was throwing expertise and logic and all we have learned so painfully from history out the window. It seemed like madness. You almost didn’t notice the assumption in there – we are now an empire and everyone knows it. That was hardly worth noting, it seemed so obvious.
Still, the idea that we are an empire makes people queasy. You can blame George Lucas. In his Star Wars films the Empire was the bad guys, Darth Vader and all the rest, and the Rebel Alliance – Luke and his sister, the little green guy, Alec Guinness and the big furry fellow – were the good guys. And when people see our troops in the streets of Baghdad, in battle gear with the mirrored sunglasses, they do look like those Imperial Strom Troopers. Well, the necessary body armor can’t end up looking like much else. But it makes you think, or at least have an emotional reaction. Many call Dick Cheney the Dark Lord, Darth Vader. Lucas has caused no end of trouble. And much ink has been spilt trying to resolve the unease – we’re not at all an empire, like the British long ago, nobly bearing the White Man’s Burden to civilize the dark and benighted folks of the world, or we are an empire, sort of, only we’re doing good – the democracy thing – and not being so condescending, or we have to act like an empire out of necessity, even if we aren’t one, just to keep us all safe. And then there’s Ann Coulter and the like – we are an empire and can do what we damned well please, and the rest of the world, if they don’t like it, can stuff it. There are all sorts of ways to resolve one’s ambiguous feelings.
Be that as it may, the question might be one of how it’s all going, whatever it is. We’re coming up on five years of occupying Iraq, stuck there just like the British in the early twentieth century. See T. E. Lawrence ["Lawrence of Arabia"], August 22, 1920, in the Sunday Times (UK), with this:
The people of England have been led in Mesopotamia into a trap from which it will be hard to escape with dignity and honour. They have been tricked into it by a steady withholding of information. The Baghdad communiqués are belated, insincere, incomplete. Things have been far worse than we have been told, our administration more bloody and inefficient than the public knows. It is a disgrace to our imperial record, and may soon be too inflamed for any ordinary cure. We are today not far from a disaster.
… We said we went to Mesopotamia to defeat Turkey. We said we stayed to deliver the Arabs from the oppression of the Turkish Government, and to make available for the world its resources of corn and oil. We spent nearly a million men and nearly a thousand million of money to these ends. This year we are spending ninety-two thousand men and fifty millions of money on the same objects.
Our government is worse than the old Turkish system. They kept fourteen thousand local conscripts embodied, and killed a yearly average of two hundred Arabs in maintaining peace. We keep ninety thousand men, with aeroplanes, armoured cars, gunboats, and armoured trains. We have killed about ten thousand Arabs in this rising this summer.
… We have not reached the limit of our military commitments. Four weeks ago the staff in Mesopotamia drew up a memorandum asking for four more divisions. I believe it was forwarded to the War Office, which has now sent three brigades from India. If the North-West Frontier cannot be further denuded, where is the balance to come from?
… The Government in Baghdad have been hanging Arabs in that town for political offences, which they call rebellion. The Arabs are not at war with us. Are these illegal executions to provoke the Arabs to reprisals on the three hundred British prisoners they hold? And, if so, is it that their punishment may be more severe, or is it to persuade our other troops to fight to the last?
… We say we are in Mesopotamia to develop it for the benefit of the world. All experts say that the labour supply is the ruling factor in its development. How far will the killing of ten thousand villagers and townspeople this summer hinder the production of wheat, cotton, and oil? How long will we permit millions of pounds, thousands of Imperial troops, and tens of thousands of Arabs to be sacrificed on behalf of colonial administration which can benefit nobody but its administrators?
It wasn’t going well, and sounds a tad familiar. Fast-forward to now:
BAGHDAD, March 13 - Iraqi leaders have failed to take advantage of a reduction in violence to make adequate progress toward resolving their political differences, Gen. David H. Petraeus, the top U.S. commander in Iraq, said Thursday.
Petraeus, who is preparing to testify to Congress next month on the Iraq war, said in an interview that “no one” in the U.S. and Iraqi governments “feels that there has been sufficient progress by any means in the area of national reconciliation,” or in the provision of basic public services.
The general’s comments appeared to be his sternest to date on Iraqis’ failure to achieve political reconciliation. In February, following the passage of laws on the budget, provincial elections and an amnesty for certain detainees, Petraeus was more encouraging. “The passage of the three laws today showed that the Iraqi leaders are now taking advantage of the opportunity that coalition and Iraqi troopers fought so hard to provide,” he said at the time.
Duncan Black here quotes the 2007 Bush State of the Union:
The people of Iraq want to live in peace, and now it’s time for their government to act. Iraq’s leaders know that our commitment is not open-ended. They have promised to deploy more of their own troops to secure Baghdad - and they must do so. They pledged that they will confront violent radicals of any faction or political party - and they need to follow through, and lift needless restrictions on Iraqi and coalition forces, so these troops can achieve their mission of bringing security to all of the people of Baghdad. Iraq’s leaders have committed themselves to a series of benchmarks - to achieve reconciliation, to share oil revenues among all of Iraq’s citizens, to put the wealth of Iraq into the rebuilding of Iraq, to allow more Iraqis to re-enter their nation’s civic life, to hold local elections, and to take responsibility for security in every Iraqi province. But for all of this to happen, Baghdad must be secure. And our plan will help the Iraqi government take back its capital and make good on its commitments.
So now “no one” in our government or theirs “feels that there has been sufficient progress by any means in the area of national reconciliation,” or in the provision of basic public services.
See Matthew Yglesias:
I dunno about that, certainly it seems to me that a lot of the current U.S. government’s allies have been arguing, falsely, that there has been adequate progress toward reconciliation. Either way, I think the point is clear enough - Petraeus is right that if you’re willing to expend an infinite quantity of American lives, American money, and American resources of diplomacy and attention on Iraq, things might kinda sorta turn out okay at some point depending on what happens. I would only caution that if we cut and run it’s also possible that some sunny scenario will emerge. But in terms of the goals actually set for the surge, i.e. reconciliation, it hasn’t happened.
It seems, as imperialists, we’re not much better at this the Brits were at this sort of thing, or worse in some ways.
Maybe it doesn’t matter. Eric Martin explains the worldview of the Iraq hawk:
If things in Iraq are chaotic and violent, well, we just can’t leave can we - I mean, what about the oil (which was so totally not a reason for this invasion at all, in any way, whatsoever, I mean, who even knew Iraq had the second largest reserve oil supply in the world)? On the other hand, if things in Iraq are quieting down, we can’t leave lest we disturb the peace. Especially because once we leave, the various factions will have at it. Even Petraeus said so.
As Kevin Drum puts it:
Heads they win. Tails they win. We stay in Iraq no matter what. Capiche?
No wonder T. E. went mad.
But just who is mad? Sheryl Gay Stolberg in the New York Times reports this:
But Mr. Bush, most experts agree, has taken the American freedom agenda to an entirely new level, by trying to foster democracy in nations that have not known it before, like Iraq and Afghanistan. Some historians have called it folly, and Mr. Bush conceded in an interview with conservative commentators last year that his critics believe he is “hopelessly idealistic.”
Be he likes being hopelessly idealistic, or so it would seem. That would mean he thinks people will find such hopeless idealism inspiring, or at least charming, and he strolls the halls of the White House humming that Impossible Dream song from the Man of La Mancha – it’s the romantic in him – the only battles worth fighting are losing battles and all that. Or else, humming Broadway show tunes, he’s quite gay, just like T. E. Lawrence – but without the realism.
Yglesias, with his new book, Heads in the Sand, says this is nuts (but he says it nicely):
One point I really try hard to make in Heads in the Sand is that it’s incredibly foolish to view the Bush foreign policy primarily through this democracy lens. For one thing, Bush’s record as a democratizer doesn’t stand up to the most cursory scrutiny. There’s been no consistency of application (Egypt? Saudi Arabia?), and no record of successes - look it up and you’ll see much more democracy on the march during the 1990s.
But even criticizing Bush’s record on this score is almost beside the point - an emphasis on democracy simply isn’t what’s noteworthy about Bush’s policymaking. What’s noteworthy about Bush is his effort to completely cast aside notions of institutional, legal, or even practical restraint in American conduct abroad. He wants to reorder international relations around a highly asymmetrical bargain where we simultaneously flout all kinds of multilateral processes while also engaging in an unprecedentedly high level of meddling in other countries’ affairs. Iran can’t go anywhere near uranium enrichment, but we won’t sign the Comprehensive Test Ban and won’t stop building a new generation of nuclear weapons. Rather than anything resembling a practical approach to helping democratic political movements, we threaten to decapitate any regime we don’t like (while, yes, shouting “democracy!”) and then act baffled and outraged when other countries try to acquire weapons capable of deterring us.
It’s pretty much amateur hour – doing what the British did, but in a random sort of way, without thinking. As Yglesias says:
This is what it’s all about and this is what it’s always been about. Fostering democracy in new places isn’t especially novel, and isn’t something Bush has particularly emphasized in actual policymaking. What’s more, at this point in time it’s just ludicrous - completely detached from what even the surge’s advocates say they’re doing - to see the mission in Iraq as having anything at all to do with democracy. What we’re doing over there is taking what was once known as “failure” (creating a new post-Saddam despotism) and relabeling it “success.”
Elsewhere Yglesias argues that “wrapping a foreign policy of aggressive militarism in the rhetoric of idealism isn’t some awesome innovation of George W. Bush or Bill Kristol or Dick Cheney or anyone else.” That’s just what political leaders who want a foreign policy of aggressive militarism do:
Back during the days of Victorian imperialism, policies of conquest and subjugation were always justified in very high-minded terms. What Bush is doing is no different from that. Lately, some advocates of an imperial foreign policy for the United States have taken to admitting as much, writing admiringly about the high ideals and humanitarian aims of, e.g., the British Empire. I think all that’s wrong as far as both the U.S. in Iraq and the British in India (or, back in the day, the U.S. in the Philippines) are concerned, but there’s barely even any reason to doubt that it is or was insincere. It takes a certain kind of nationalistic hubris to think that a policy of domination is being undertaken for the good of the dominated, but hubris and egomania are hardly unknown traits in human psychology. Besides which, I think the evidence indicates that the kind of domination-oriented policies Bush is pursuing aren’t even good for the would-be dominators. It’s a huge screw-up.
What it’s not, however, is a triumph of a new form of dreamy idealism - “I should use my army to rule the world through fear and intimidation” is the oldest idea in the history of statecraft, it’s just not a very good one.
But George W. Bush is a romantic:
“I must say, I’m a little envious,” Bush said. “If I were slightly younger and not employed here, I think it would be a fantastic experience to be on the front lines of helping this young democracy succeed.”
“It must be exciting for you … in some ways romantic, in some ways, you know, confronting danger. You’re really making history, and thanks,” Bush said.
Bush had his opportunity. It was the late sixties:
I was not prepared to shoot my eardrum out with a shotgun in order to get a deferment, nor was I willing to go to Canada, so I chose to better myself by learning to fly airplanes.
And then he chose to remain stateside, and then he didn’t show up much.
And Yglesias is not impressed with this return of Victorian imperialism – “shot through with daffy romanticism about dashing off to exotic lands to take up the white man’s burden.” The concept is wrong:
The idea isn’t to identify policies that are effective at boosting the prospects for democratic reform; instead, the idea is to identify policies that are pleasurable to the egos of the politicians and opinion-leaders who frame them.
Ah heck – we’re used to such people out here in Hollywood. This town is full of dreamers, incompetent amateurs, like the young guy next door forever singing his scales, first in line at every American Idol audition, knowing things will change for him. He’s harmless – and quite pleasant actually. But some of these romantic dreamers, these charming incompetent amateurs, are dangerous. They probably shouldn’t be running things.
