This war is un-American. That’s an unlikely word to use, I know: It has an unhappy provenance, associated forever with the McCarthyite hunt for reds under the beds, purging anyone suspected of “un-American activities”. Besides, for many outside the US, the problem with this war is that it’s not un-American but all too American.
But that does an injustice to the US and its history. It assumes that the Bush administration represents all America, at all times, when in fact the opposite is true. For this administration, and this war, are not typical of the US. On the contrary, on almost every measure, they are exceptions to the American rule.
The US was, after all, a country founded in a rebellion against imperialism. Born in a war against a hated colonial oppressor — in the form of the British King George III — it sees itself still as the instinctive friend of all those struggling to kick out a foreign occupier and the last nation on earth to play the role of outside ruler.
Not for it the Greek, Roman or British path. Even as its power grew over the last century, it steered well clear of the institutions of formal empire. Responsibility was thrust upon it after 1945 in Germany and Japan. But as a matter of deliberate intent, America sought neither viceroys ruling over faraway lands nor a world map colored with the stars and stripes.
Influence, yes; puppets and proxies, yes. But formal imperial rule, never.Until now. George Bush has cast off the restraint which held back America’s 43 previous presidents — including his father. Now he is seeking, as an unashamed objective, to get into the empire business, aiming to rule a post-Saddam Iraq directly through an American governor-general, the retired soldier Jay Garner.
As the London-based Guardian newspaper reported, Washington’s plan for Baghdad consists of 23 ministries — each one to be headed by an American. This is a form of foreign rule so direct we have not seen its like since the last days of the British Empire. It represents a break with everything America has believed in for more than two centuries.
This is not to pretend that there is a single American ideal, still less a single US foreign policy, maintained unbroken since 1776. There are, instead, competing traditions, each able to trace its lineage to the founding of the republic. But what’s striking is that George Bush’s war on Iraq is at odds with every single one of them. Perhaps best known is Thomas Jefferson’s call for an America which would not only refuse to rule over other nations, it would avoid meddling in their affairs altogether. He wanted no “entangling alliances”.
If America wished to export its brand of liberty, it should do it not through force but by the simple power of its own example. John Quincy Adams (before Bush, the only son of a president to become president), put it best when he declared, that America “goes not abroad in search of monsters to destroy”. Could there be a better description of Washington’s pre-emptive pursuit of Saddam Hussein?
The Jeffersonian tradition is not the only one to be broken by Operation Iraqi Freedom. The historian Walter Russell Mead identifies three other schools of US foreign policy — and all of them are equally incompatible with this war.
Those Mead calls Hamiltonians are keen on maintaining an international system and preserving a balance of power — that means acknowledging equals in the world, rather than seeking solo, hegemonic domination. So Bush, whose national security strategy last year explicitly ruled out the emergence of an equal to the US, is no follower of Alexander Hamilton. Jacksonians, meanwhile, have always defined America’s interests narrowly: They would see no logic in traveling halfway across the world to invade a country that poses no immediate, direct threat to the US. So Bush has defied Andrew Jackson. Woodrow Wilson liked the idea of the US spreading democracy and rights across the globe; banishing Saddam and freeing the people of Iraq might have appealed to him. But he was the father of the League of Nations and would have been distressed by Washington’s disregard for the UN and its lack of international backing for this war.
Which brings us to a key un-American activity by this Bush administration. Today’s Washington has not only broken from the different strands of wisdom which guided the US since its birth, but also from the model that shaped American foreign policy since 1945.
It’s easy to forget this now, when US politicians and commentators queue up to denounce international institutions as French-dominated, limp-wristed, euro-faggot bodies barely worth the candle, but those bodies were almost all American inventions.
Whether it was NATO, the global financial architecture designed at Bretton Woods or the UN itself, multilateralism was America’s gift to the world. Every president from Roosevelt to Bush Senior honored those creations and saw them as intrinsic to America’s place in the world.
Seeking to change them in order to adapt to the 21st century is wholly legitimate; but drowning them in derision is to trash an American idea.
The very notion of invasion is pretty un-American, too. The US is a firm believer in state sovereignty, refusing any innovation which might curb its jurisdiction over its own affairs.
Hence its opposition to the new international criminal court or indeed any international treaties which might clip its wings. Yet the sovereignty of the state of Iraq has been cheerfully violated by the US invasion.
