Wages of Empire
WASHINGTON — To the acolytes of American empire, the invasion of Iraq is but Act I in the exhilarating unfolding drama of the 21st century. All the "Islamo-fascist" regimes of the Middle East and northern Africa -- Iran, Syria, Sudan, Saudi Arabia, Libya -- are to follow Saddam Hussein's onto the landfill of history. As democracy was imposed on Japan by Gen. Douglas MacArthur, so shall it be imposed upon them all.
That is the vision of the neoconservatives to whom George W. Bush incarnates their Woodrow Wilson, FDR and Winston Churchill. Yet, their disillusionment is certain, for they misread the man and the times.
True, the relative power of the United States exceeds Britain's at the height of its empire. But this war to "liberate" Iraq and reshape it in our own image has already called into existence countervailing forces that stand athwart our path to empire.
The first is the force of world opinion. To protest a U.S. war on Iraq without U.N. Security Council sanction, there were million-person marches last week in the streets of the capitals of our staunchest allies, Spain, Italy, Britain. Polls show that huge majorities of Europeans oppose a U.S. war without U.N. sanction. Among Arabs and Turks, the opposition is visceral and well-nigh universal. We are as isolated as the Brits at the time of the Boer War. It is the height of hubris to believe America can indefinitely defy the whole world.
Even if Iraqis initially welcome U.S. soldiers as liberators, within months there will be Islamic bombers willing to die to drive us out, as they drove the French out of Algeria, the Israelis out of Lebanon, the Marines out of Beirut. While the Arab and Islamic worlds did not succeed in many endeavors in the 20th century, they did excel in terrorizing and expelling all the old imperial powers. Our turn is next.
Neoconservatives came to their editors' cubicles a century too late. Peoples everywhere have internalized Thomas Jefferson's dictum that all governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed, and Wilson's gospel about all peoples being entitled to self-determination. This idea has taken root in the hearts of men: better to fight than be ruled by foreigners.
We may see American hegemony as benevolent. Is it not clear the world does not?
Already, Cold War friends and allies are revisiting the issue of whether the protection afforded by the presence of U.S. troops on their national soil is worth the price paid in alienation from their own peoples.
