Two years after 9/11, American imperialism has been trapped by American confusion. Part of the confusion arises from a noble source, American idealism. That does not make it any less confusing. America was the first colony that won freedom from an imperial power; India was the second. A total of 171 years of British glory separated the two revolutions, but it is no accident that the Constitution of India is wrought in the same spirit as the American one. Freedom at home, and equality abroad.
Imperialism cannot be reconciled with such idealism, and Americans have always felt compelled to dress up their intervention, or conquest, in liberal hues. Woodrow Wilson entered World War I to liberate nations with his 14 points, and Franklin Roosevelt promised his four freedoms to the “United Nations” — his term for the anti-Axis alliance. Neither succeeded after victory; to be fair to Roosevelt, he did not get the chance, since he passed away before the war ended. The price of failure was expensive. Germany believed in Wilson, and took revenge for its betrayal through Adolf Hitler. After World War II, Ho Chi Minh, who believed Roosevelt’s anti-colonial promise, waited for American assistance in his war of liberation against France. The betrayal of Vietnam began the worst chapter in American history.
Today, a self-serving argument compares the fall of Saddam Hussein to the defeat of Adolf Hitler. The analogy misses a vital truth.
The 20th century was consumed by two kinds of wars. The great wars were fought by the great powers. They were world wars, not because of the geographical spread of battlefields but because the outcome, in both 1918 and 1946, would determine who would control the world. The combatants were either empire-preservers or empire-seekers. Hitler spoke in such a sense when he offered a peaceful division of spoils to Britain on July 19, 1940: Britain could keep its possessions if Iraq (for its oil) and Egypt (for its canal) were offered to Germany.
Then there were the 20th century wars of liberation, as yoked nations sought their independence from European powers. Only one of them, the Indian, was nonviolent.
America was the only power left standing after the collapse of the Soviets. In an international order designed by Washington, America would be a patriarch rather than King-Emperor, benevolent toward both the dutiful and prodigal, helpful to poor cousins: More Abraham than Joshua. In harsher circumstances, America expects world affairs to be conducted along a variation of the Stockholm Syndrome. Nations who have been taken hostage by America must fall in love with their captor, because the reasons for capture are so palpably noble.
Traditional imperialists sniff at such naiveté. Their power was sustained by self-interest, and neither ruler nor victim was permitted the luxury of illusion. In 1757 Robert Clive, noting with wonder that Murshidabad was as rich as London, pointed out that India could pay off the British debt many times over.
In 1918, Arthur Balfour justified the British occupation of Iraq with the pithy comment that he did not care under what system Iraq was ruled, as long as Britain got the oil. An empire lasts till it can get away with it. It may survive centuries, or only a lifetime. But no empire can survive ambiguity. “Compassionate-conservative imperialism” is a bit of a humbug. And this much is certain; power sits ill with uncertainty. America chose to conquer Iraq against the advice, either measured or instinctive, of most of the world. It must now either rule Iraq, or get out. Even a weak opponent stops being timid against uncertainty. If America decides to rule, the price will be heavy.
George Bush began his presidency as an isolationist. That ended on 9/11. American troops are now stationed in 137 countries. Bush has begun two wars that could last longer than his term in office, even if he is re-elected. Washington bargained for a war against regimes. It is astonished and embarrassed by the fact that removing Saddam was the easy part. Here is where the oft-repeated analogy with World War II collapses. The German and Japanese populations were docile after surrender because the people identified with their regimes. The Japanese and the Germans gloried in the conquests of their armies, and were defeated along with their governments. In Iraq, only Saddam was defeated. The people have continued to fight.
Saddam Hussein was a tyrant who subverted Iraqi nationalism by occupying its space. It is virtually impossible for a tyrant to be a nationalist; he can only use patriotism as a last refuge. By removing Saddam, Bush released Iraqi nationalism from the avaricious grip of a despot. The paradox is obvious, or should be: Iraqi nationalism will not exchange a brutal Saddam for a colonist Bush.
Who confirmed to the Iraqi people that America had come to colonize? The Bush administration. In the latest of many revealing statements from American hawks, Paul Wolfowitz has explained that the so-called weapons of mass destruction argument was a bureaucratic fudge, and that the real reason for America’s occupation of Iraq was to find a new home for American military bases. We have been here before. The British were less explicit in 1918, but had the same reasons: Guns and oil — the black gold of the Euphrates.
America relied too heavily on divide-and-rule. Someone forgot to do his homework. Shiites and Sunnis may have had much to divide them over 1,400 years, but a new ideology has been developed since the 19th century, when the empires of Islam began to cave in before European imperialism. The principal architect of the intellectual response to the “Christian” advance was a maverick Iranian Shiite, Jamaluddin, who called himself an Afghani because he did not want his world-view to get subverted by the Shiite-Sunni conflict. His disciples — Sayyid Qutb, among them, being justly famous — carried the argument into the next century.
Despite the irrational violence of Sunni fundamentalists in Pakistan, traditional Shiite-Sunni differences have blurred in the political cauldrons of the Middle East. The zeal of the Shiites in Hezbollah, for instance, is not diminished by the fact that the Palestinians are mostly Sunnis.
Hence America confronts an overlapping alliance in Iraq. The crisis on the frontline is a test of America’s will to rule. Does George Bush have the will, and America the ability, to be what they want to be? The intense, bloody and fervent chaos in Iraq would worry a more determined imperialist than Bush in pre-election year. Iraq’s fighters are bolstered by the seeping spirit of Jihad. They also have the implicit sympathy of non-Jihadis who do not want American imperialism to become the central fact of their times.
Two years ago, the answer sounded like yes, looked like yes, and was yes. In the 18 weeks between 4/9 and 9/11 of this year, the wobble is evident. On April 9, America declared victory when Saddam’s statue was brought down. Vice President Dick Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, who had sneered at France and Germany as “chocolate-making countries” had a beam as large as the Pentagon budget. George Bush tried to look serious in victory and fixed a route to peace in the Middle East. Today, America stands on the doorstep of the once “wimpish” United Nations, begging for troops so that others can die instead of Americans. Making chocolates is so much wiser than making war.
If self-interest has taken Bush to the door of the UN, then the self-interest of other nations will keep that door shut until America understands that it cannot live by the principles of George Washington at home, and the rules of Rudyard Kipling abroad. Nor can America privatize or sub-contract its wars. India, for instance, will not police an American colony; there is no price that will purchase the Indian voter, even if its government is tempted by the false lure of realpolitik. The Soviet Union took a decade to understand that imperialism does not work, even in an underdeveloped nation like Afghanistan. America expounds the fiction that it occupied Iraq for high moral purpose. Kipling’s phrase for similar nobility used to be “white man’s burden”. That burden proved too heavy for the old empires; it has not become lighter with time.
Today, America is only the most powerful nation in the world. It will become the leader of a free world only when it accepts that freedom is incomplete without equality. America needs another Franklin, not Theodore, Roosevelt.
- Arab News Featurs 7 September 2003
