Fwd: hubris kills.

[telebob x]

Published on Monday, February 3, 2003 by the Guardian/UK

Beginning of the End
The US is Ignoring an Important Lesson from History - That an Empire
Cannot Survive on Brute Force Alone


by Madeleine Bunting


There are plenty of things to keep Tony Blair awake at night these
days, as his gray, haggard features after last week's diplo-marathon
indicated. In his nightmares of the Pentagon cooking up new
hare-brained schemes and dirty bombs on the underground, a new
anxiety must have begun to niggle - those domestic commentators who
have started being so horribly nice to him. He's a "great statesman"
now, one of the "greatest prime ministers"; it's when things are
getting really bad - you're dying, for instance - that people start
being this nice.

People are beginning to feel sorry for Blair - they don't buy his
arguments on the necessity of war with Iraq, but they increasingly
appreciate the enormous difficulty of his position. A pivotal moment
in post-second world war British foreign policy has fallen to his
watch. He has a fiendishly tricky hand to play in the global bid to
contain two erratic, angry men, both of whom control quantities of
lethal weapons and both of whom are making a mockery of the UN and
any concept of international law - the one by flouting its repeated
injunctions, and the other by bullying it with bribes and threats.

But even allowing for Blair having a terrible hand, is he playing it
well? The fallout from Blair's high-stakes backing of Bush is
apparent on every side: internationally, we've lost weight as the
fully paid-up US sergeant incapable of independent action;
domestically, Blair's personal ratings fall as the delicate
compromises which hitched the Labour movement to the Third Way
disintegrate (why are some unpopular measures, such as going to war
with Iraq, undertaken in the teeth of domestic opposition, and not
others, such as higher taxation, ask the Labour faithful?).

It seemed like it couldn't get worse - and then it did with last
week's billet-doux to Uncle Sam. There is no fatted calf Blair won't
sacrifice for Bush - not even European unity. He opted for the petty
snub to France and Germany rather than the one chance of effectively
containing George Bush through a strong unified Europe: that was the
only hope, and Blair's blown it in the company of dodgy cronies such
as Silvio Berlusconi. Now America can smugly sit back while "American
Europe" and "Old Europe" bicker: what kind of achievement is that for
Blair, the European? Set against these failures, all that Blair has
to show for his pains is a pitiful exercise of UN window-dressing to
decorate American belligerence with claimed international legitimacy.

It is easy to criticize Blair's foreign policy. It's very easy to see
that going to war with Iraq is at best unwise, at worst crazily
dangerous; it has little justification, it sets a dangerous precedent
and has no clear objective. What is far less easy and a deeply
dispiriting task is to consider how the European center-left responds
to the new world order that this crisis starkly reveals. American
imperialism used to be a fiction of the far-left imagination, now it
is an uncomfortable fact of life.

How is the center-left to accommodate the US's newly aggressive
imperialist mission emboldened by a 9/11 licence from its electorate?
Afghanistan was simply the starter, Iraq an antipasto in what could
turn out to be one of those interminable feasts - course after course
until a pot-bellied US reels punch drunk from the table.

With US imperialism openly discussed on both sides of the Atlantic,
the debate centers on three critical questions: will the empire
corrupt and/or bankrupt the republic; by what administrative
techniques should it exercise power; and is it basically benign? The
first prompts one of those defining moments in a nation's
understanding of itself - what is the US will for imperial power, and
what price is it prepared to pay in living standards and civil
liberties? Guantanamo Bay, the debate over the use of torture, and
growing government spending deficits are a foretaste of what lies
ahead. But the key unknown is, can a consumer culture support empire?

The second question is about whether the empire is one of vassal
states, propped up with subsidies and American arms (as in Saudi
Arabia), or one of invasion and colonization masquerading under
nation-building (as in Afghanistan).

But it is the third question on which the debate hinges. This is
where the gulf between the US and the European center-left yawns
widest. American faith in its good intentions remains remarkably
undented by a half century of evidence that such simplicity is
absurdly naïve (here's hoping the timely remake of The Quiet American
will help jolt some strands of American public opinion). Beholden to
some shadow of its puritan past, America earnestly hopes to woo the
world with the promise of democracy in Baghdad, drinking water in
Saddam city.

But such rhetoric has little traction on world opinion because the
track record is execrable. As Michael Ignatieff points out in this
month's Prospect, US spending on non-military means of promoting its
influence overseas (foreign aid, etc) has shrunk to a pitiful 0.2% of
GDP. In Pakistan or the Yemen, the US presence is soldiers fortified
in compounds bristling with weaponry, rather than engineers building
roads and water supplies.

Furthermore, many question whether the US really has either the
skill, determination or the patience to sustain its good intentions
beyond a few euphoric days of Baghdad crowds staged for the TV
cameras. It has shown none of these qualities in the
Palestinian/Israeli conflict, the issue that now defines the nature
of US imperial ambition in the Middle East - and makes a mockery of
its supposed benignity.

The European left is lumbered with a debilitating fatalism. The
benign imperium is only a set of US interests cobbled together, and
what Old Europe - the rightful place of Britain - knows intimately
from bitter recent experience is how empires are lost: how they
overstretch themselves and collapse under the weight of their own
illegitimacy. Ironically, it was America that proved the most adept
at exploiting this in the course of the 20th century by championing
the self-determination of nations.

How has the US lost that wisdom? How does it overlook the fact that
imperial longevity is determined not by demonstrations of brute
force, but by securing minds and hearts?

A pyrotechnic display of military force in Iraq might assuage the
national humiliation of 9/11, but it will ill serve American
interests. This is the beginning of the end of the American empire:
it has failed to focus on its true enemy, terrorism; failed to grasp
how asymmetric terror transforms the power relationships of the
globe; and is choosing instead to indulge itself in an old-fashioned
war between nation states - an irrelevant, costly and dangerous
sideshow.

© Guardian Newspapers Limited 2003


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