Colossus (2 page)

Yet the very act of imposing “freedom” simultaneously subverts it. Just as the Victorians seemed hypocrites when they spread “civilization” with the Maxim gun, so there is something fishy about those who would democratize Fallujah with the Abrams tank. President Bush’s distinction between conquest and liberation would have been entirely familiar to the liberal imperialists of the early 1900s, who likewise saw Britain’s far-flung legions as agents of emancipation (not least in the Middle East during and after World War I). Equally familiar to that earlier generation would have been the impatience of American officials to hand over sovereignty to an Iraqi government sooner rather than later. Indirect rule—which installed nominally independent native rulers while leaving British civilian administrators and military forces in practical control of financial matters and military security—was the preferred model for British colonial expansion in many parts of Asia, Africa, and the Middle East. Iraq itself was an example
of indirect rule after the Hashemite dynasty was established there in the 1920s. The crucial question today is whether or not the United States has the capabilities, both material and moral, to make a success of its version of indirect rule. The danger lies in the inclination of American politicians, eager to live up to their own emancipatory rhetoric as well as to “bring the boys back home,” to unwind their overseas commitments prematurely—in short, to opt for premature decolonization rather than sustained indirect rule. Unfortunately, history shows that the most violent time in the history of an empire often comes at the moment of its dissolution, precisely because—as soon as it has been announced—the withdrawl of imperial troops unleashes a struggle between rival local elites for control of the indigenous armed forces.

But is the very concept of empire itself an anachronism? A number of critics have objected that imperialism was a discreet historical phenomenon which reached its apogee in the late nineteenth century and has been defunct since the 1950s. “The Age of Empire is passed,” declared the
New York Times
as L. Paul Bremer III left Baghdad in June 2004:

The experience of Iraq has demonstrated … that when America does not disguise its imperial force, when a proconsul leads an “occupying power,” it is liable to find itself in an untenable position quickly enough. There are three reasons: the people being governed do not accept such a form of rule, the rest of the world does not accept it, and Americans themselves do not accept it.
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As one reviewer of
Colossus
put it, “nationalism is a much more powerful force now than it was during the heyday of the Victorian era.”
¹³
According to another, the book failed “to come to terms with the tectonic changes wrought by independence movements and ethnic and religious politics in the years since the end of World War II.”
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A favorite argument of journalists is—perhaps not surprisingly—that the power of the modern media makes it impossible for empires to operate as they did in the past, because their misdeeds are so quickly broadcast to an indignant world.

Such arguments betray a touching naïveté about both the past and the
present. First, as I try to argue in the introduction, empire was no temporary condition of the Victorian age. Empires, by contrast, can be traced back as far as recorded history goes; indeed, most history is in fact the history of empires, precisely because empires are so good at recording, replicating, and transmitting their own words and deeds. It is the nation state—an essentially nineteenth-century ideal type which is the historical novelty, and which may yet prove to be the more ephemeral entity. Given the ethnic heterogeneity and restless mobility of mankind, that is scarcely surprising. In fact, many of the most successful nation states of the present started life as empires; what is the modern United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland if not the legatee of an earlier English imperialism? Secondly, it is a Rooseveltian fantasy that in 1945 the age of empire came to an end amid a global springtime of the peoples. On the contrary, the Second World War merely saw the defeat of three would-beempires—German, Japanese, and Italian by an alliance between the old West European empires (principally the British, since the others were so swiftly beaten) and two newer empires—that of the Soviet Union and that of the United States. The Cold War also had the character of a clash of empires. Although the United States ran, for the most part, an “empire by invitation” where its troops were deployed and was elsewhere more of a hegemon (in the sense of an alliance leader) than an empire, the Soviet Union was and remained, until its precipitous decline and fall, a true empire. Moreover, the other great Communist power to emerge from the 1940s, the People’s Republic of China, remains in many respects an empire to this day. Its three most extensive provinces—Inner Mongolia, Xinjiang, and Tibet—were all acquired as a result of Chinese imperial expansion, and China continues to lay claim to Taiwan as well as numerous smaller islands, to say nothing of some territories in Russian Siberia and Kazakhstan.

Empires, in short, are always with us. Nor is it immediately obvious why the modern media should reduce the capacity of an empire to sustain itself. The growth of the popular press did nothing to weaken the British Empire in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century; on the contrary, the mass-circulation newspapers tended to enhance the popular legitimacy of the empire. Anyone who watched how American television networks covered the invasion of Iraq ought to understand that the mass media are
not necessarily solvents of imperial power. As for nationalism, it is something of a myth that this was what brought down the old empires of Western Europe. Far more lethal to their longevity were the costs of fighting rival empires—empires that were still more contemptuous of the principle of self-determination.
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Another common misconception is that there will always be less violence in the absence of an empire than in its presence, and that the United States would therefore make the world a safer place if it brought its troops home from the Middle East. One way to test such arguments is to ask the counterfactual question: Would American foreign policy have been more effective in the past four years—or, if you prefer, would the world be a safer place today—if Afghanistan and Iraq had not been invaded? In the case of Afghanistan, there is little question that what Joseph Nye has called “soft power” would not have sufficed to oust the sponsors of al Qa’eda from their stronghold in Kabul. There would have been no elections in Afghanistan in 2004 had it not been for the hard power of the U.S. military. In the case of Iraq, it is surely better that Saddam Hussein is the prisoner of an interim Iraqi government than still reigning in Baghdad. Open-ended “containment”—which was effectively what the French government argued for in 2003—would, on balance, have been a worse policy. Policing Iraq from the air while periodically firing missiles at suspect installations was costing money without solving the problem posed by Saddam. Keeping U.S. troops in Saudi Arabia indefinitely was not an option. Sanctions may have disarmed Saddam (at the time, of course, we could not be sure) but they were also depriving ordinary Iraqis. In any case, the sanctions regime was on the point of collapse thanks to a systematic campaign by Saddam’s regime to buy votes in the United Nations Security Council—a campaign of systematic corruption that was made easy by the United Nations’ oil-for-food program. In short, the policy of regime change was right; arguably, the principal defect of American policy toward Iraq was that the task had been left undone for twelve years. Those who fret about the doctrine of pre-emption enunciated in President Bush’s National Security Strategy should bear in mind that the overthrow of Saddam was as much post-emption as pre-emption, since Saddam had done nearly all the mischief of which he was capable some time before March 2003.

Yet it would be absurd to deny that much of what has happened in the
past year—to say nothing of what has been revealed about earlier events—has tended to undermine the legitimacy of the Bush administration’s policy. To put it bluntly: What went wrong? And have failures of execution fatally discredited the very notion of an American imperial strategy?

The first seed of future troubles was the administration’s decision to treat suspected al Qa’eda personnel captured in Afghanistan and elsewhere as “unlawful enemy combatants,” beyond both American and international law. Prisoners were held incommunicado and indefinitely at Guantánamo Bay in Cuba. As the rules governing interrogation were chopped and changed, many of these prisoners were subjected to forms of mental and physical intimidation that in some cases amounted to torture.
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Indeed, Justice Department memoranda were written to rationalize the use of torture as a matter for presidential discretion in time of war. Evidently, some members of the administration felt that extreme measures were at once justified by the shadowy nature of the foe they faced, and at the same time legitimized by the public appetite for retribution after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. All of this the Supreme Court rightly denounced in its stinging judgment, delivered in June of last year [2004]. As the justices put it, not even the imperatives of resisting “an assault by the forces of tyranny” could justify the use by an American president of “the tools of tyrants.” Yet power corrupts, and even small amounts of power can corrupt a very great deal. It may not have been official policy to flout the Geneva Conventions in Iraq, but not enough was done by senior officers to protect prisoners held at Abu Ghraib from gratuitous abuse—what the inquiry chaired by James Schlesinger called “freelance activities on the part of the night shift.”
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The photographic evidence of these “activities” has done more than anything else to discredit the claim of the United States and its allies to stand not merely for an abstract liberty but also for the effective rule of law.

Second, it was more than mere exaggeration on the part of Vice President Cheney, the former CIA chief George Tenet, and, ultimately, President Bush himself—to say nothing of Prime Minister Tony Blair—to claim they knew
for certain
that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction. This was, we now know, a downright lie that went far beyond what the available intelligence indicated. What they could legitimately have said was this: “After all his evasions, we simply can’t be sure whether
or not Saddam Hussein has any weapons of mass destruction. So, on the precautionary principle, we just can’t leave him in power indefinitely. Better safe than sorry” But that was not enough for Dick Cheney, who felt compelled to make the bald assertion: “Saddam Hussein possesses weapons of mass destruction.” Bush himself had his doubts, but was reassured by Tenet that it was a “slam-dunk case.”
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Other doubters soon fell into line. Still more misleading was the administration’s allegation that Saddam was “teaming up with al Qa’eda.” Sketchy evidence of contacts between the two was used to insinuate Iraqi complicity in the 9/11 attacks, for which not a shred of proof has been found.

Third, it was a near disaster that responsibility for the postwar occupation of Iraq was seized by the Defense Department, intoxicated as its principals became in the heat of their
blitzkrieg
. The State Department had spent long hours preparing a plan for the aftermath of a successful invasion. That plan was simply junked by Secretary Rumsfeld and his close advisors, who were convinced that once Saddam had gone, Iraq would magically reconstruct itself (after a period of suitably ecstatic celebration at the advent of freedom). As one official told the
Financial Times
last year, Undersecretary Douglas Feith led

a group in the Pentagon who all along felt that this was going to be not just a cakewalk, it was going to be 60–90 days, a flip-over and hand-off, a lateral or whatever to … the INC [Iraqi National Congress]. The DoD [Department of Defense] could then wash its hands of the whole affair and depart quickly, smoothly and swiftly. And there would be a democratic Iraq that was amendable to our wishes and desires left in its wake. And that’s all there was to it.
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When General Eric Shinseki, the army chief of staff, stated in late February 2003 that “something of the order of several hundred thousand soldiers” would be required to stabilize postwar Iraq, he was brusquely put down by Deputy Secretary Wolfowitz as “wildly off the mark.” Wolfowitz professed himself “reasonably certain” that the Iraqi people would “greet us as liberators.” Such illusions were not, it should be remembered, confined to neoconservatives in the Pentagon. Even General Tommy Franks was under the impression that it would be possible to reduce troop levels
to just 50,000 after eighteen months. It was left to Colin Powell to point out to the president that “regime change” had serious—not to say imperial— implications. The “Pottery Barn rule,” he suggested to Bush, was bound to be applicable to Iraq: “You break it, you own it.”
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Fourth: American diplomacy in 2003 was like the two-headed Push-mepullyou in Dr. Doolittle—it faced in opposite directions. On one side was Cheney, dismissing the United Nations as a negligible factor. On the other was Powell, insisting that any action would require some form of UN authorization to be legitimate. It is possible that one of these approaches might have worked. It was, however, a mistake to try both at once. Europe was in fact coming around as a consequence of some fairly successful diplomatic browbeating. No fewer than eighteen European governments signed letters expressing support of the impending war against Saddam. Yet the decision to seek a second UN resolution—on the grounds that the language of Resolution 1441 was not strong enough to justify all-out war—was a blunder that allowed the French government, by virtue of its permanent seat on the UN Security Council, to regain the diplomatic initiative. Despite the fact that more than forty countries declared their support for the invasion of Iraq and three (Britain, Australia, and Poland) sent significant numbers of troops, the threat of a French veto, delivered with a Gallic flourish, created the indelible impression that the United States was acting unilaterally—perhaps even illegally.
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