The patina of overconfidence, overreach and override, defining its unilateralist action in Iraq, has not dulled the luster of the United States.
The buttes and mesas of its cultural expanse, its art, technology, music, fashion, cuisine, film, literature, and the ideological values that underwrote its birth (that “all men are created equal” and that they have inalienable rights to “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness,” guaranteeing citizens, as it were, the privilege to party and have a good time) have insinuated themselves, by authority of imagination, into the lives of countless societies and individuals around the planet.
Not in recent years, though — not since an undermining, unilateralist puritanism began to nag at its character. The US has become, if you wish, a humorless neoconservative archetype: America the whiner, snarling at the heels of those nations that will not do what they are told, thus making the term “American power” around the world an equivalent for dead weight.
And what a dead weight the US has become in its adventurist foray into Iraq.
Almost two years after its military forces slouched into Iraqis’ lives, 2004 ended with everything going horribly awry for everyone, except for the insurgents — many of whom, by all accounts, a bunch of reactionary, often brutal kooks — for whom the year ended quite well. Nor does 2005 hold out much hope for a felicitous improvement in the situation, either for the coalition forces or for the Iraqi government, an interim body that has failed to develop popularity and legitimacy among ordinary Iraqis.
Many, many American commentators, possessed of theoretical sophistication, impressive research credentials in their discipline of Middle Eastern studies, and great stature as established scholars at well-known think-tanks, are now convinced that the war in Iraq is unwinnable, and that the invasion of the country a mistake in the first place — senseless, unnecessary and lawless.
It is not news that there is an abundance of critics of the war floating around, what is news is that many of these critics were former supporters of the invasion but have now retrenched.
No doubt about it, the US has gotten itself into a mess, otherwise known as, in a sense evocative of Vietnam, a quagmire.
And 2005, the national elections slated for January notwithstanding, does not look less bleak for the Iraqi people and for the American military.
Now in the cold light of hindsight, it becomes
Apparent why the US went into Iraq. The call for “regime change” or “democratization” had been a cover all along for a more sinister plan by Washington to use the land between the Tigris and the Euphrates as a stepping stone to control and regroup the political destiny of the entire Middle East, to dominate that land’s oil resources and, of course, high on the list, to protect Israeli interests. (We all recall, during the presidential debates between John Kerry and George Bush, how the two candidates pulled rank on each other, using almost identical words, to assert that a “free Iraq means a secure Israel.”)
To Arabs, not least of all Iraqi Arabs, that kind of “democratization” effort by not altogether well meaning outsiders was interpreted as no less than imperialist aggression, a project aimed at subjugating, not liberating Iraq.
There were some Arab commentators, including yours truly, who were naive enough to believe that, regardless of its costs, the war in Iraq at the least would topple the tyrannical regime of Saddam Hussein, and free Iraqis to choose their own political system.
The degree of that regime’s tyranny could have been measured, among other things, by the roughly 300 mass graves containing the bodies of its opponents. The fact that these Iraqis had no tradition of responsible government, and their national identity appeared too weak to overcome ethnic, sectarian and regional loyalties, that should not have been an impediment by itself. Surely no people need social, political, economic and cultural preconditions — other than a commitment by their political elite — to achieve a democratic form of government.
In other words, we opted for a Faustian bargain: In return for our support of an imperial venture, a venture that went against the grain of one’s ideological values, we would see an Iraq liberated from the stranglehold of its totalitarian, brutal and repressive leadership.
In a way we were like the benign NGO organizations that lent their support alongside the US military in Iraq, liberal schmucks who meant well, “reminiscent of those priests who accompanied the Spanish takeover of Latin America in the sixteenth century,” Tony Smith, Jackson Professor of Political Science at Tufts University, opined recently. “To be sure, these padres sincerely desired to save the natives’ souls by spreading the Word of the Lord, but in the process they knowingly served the domineering interests of the Spanish state as well.”
To have been a well-meaning supporter of the war in Iraq, it now transpires, was to have been either a tool or a fool, tilting at windmills. The whole project was a dead loss.
And come to think of it, even if America’s goals in the land between the Tigris and the Euphrates had been benign all along, that the US’ effort to see a “free Iraq” was not intended to insure, under the table, the emergence of a “secure Israel,” who the devil said that it is acceptable for one country to invade another in order to turn it into a democracy?
Should a country arrogate itself the legitimacy of going to war against another that fails to meet the litmus test of what constitutes democracy, democracy as defined, in this case, by Washington?
In the 19 months since the US launched its second war in Iraq, its approval ratings, and confidence in the propriety of its foreign policy, have dropped dramatically, especially in Europe and the Muslim world.
As Robert Tucker and David Hendrickson, two distinguished scholars, wrote in the current issue of Foreign Affairs, “The precipitous collapse of support of US aims under George W. Bush demonstrates that the nation’s allies, indeed most of the world, believe that something fundamental in the US global posture has changed — to the worse.”
Things are not rosy for Iraqis either.
The way they see it, as the New Year moves right along, the upcoming January elections, like the June 28 “handover” of political power to an interim government, are another date on the calendar, to mark down then forget. The suicide bombings, beheadings, kidnappings and assassinations, that at times claimed more than a hundred lives at a time, will go on.
Meanwhile, ask an ordinary Iraqi what it’s like to go through the day, any day, standing in a two-mile-long line for five hours to buy gasoline, and then get home, before curfew, to find that the electrical power had been turned off.
Jacki Spinner, Washington Post correspondent, quotes one one of these folkls, at a gas station, as saying plaintively: “We don’t know what 2005 holds for us.” Neither do we.
Perhaps the neocons, who started this war, do -a war that has cost close to 1,400 American fatalities and over 5000 wounded, as well as, at minimum count, 15,000 Iraqi lives. American popular culture may continue to appeal to millions of people around the world. American big power adventurism, however, will continue to leave a great deal to be desired.
