Lyons: Age of empire building is over
By Gene Lyons/Syndicated columnist
Sunday, January 28, 2007
For several reasons, the most salient historical fact of the 20th century has been lost on most Americans. Oddly, it's one our Revolutionary forbears would have been quicker to recognize: The age of colonial empires is over. Short of a willingness to massacre hundreds of thousands of defenseless civilians from the air, better armed and technologically superior foreign powers can no longer dictate terms to any but the most obscure and impoverished Third World countries.
It's no accident that the beginning of the end of European gunboat diplomacy coincided with the invention of radio, spreading news and nationalist propaganda cheaply and fast. Satellite TV and the Internet have made communication universal, instantaneous and interactive, enabling leaders as different as Nelson Mandela and Osama bin Laden to influence millions. The advantages of the Internet for fomenting and coordinating rebellions and conspiracies are obvious.
The techniques of guerilla warfare, perfected in nationalistic uprisings from Dublin in 1916 to Baghdad in 2007, pushed the French out of Algeria and Vietnam, the United States out of Vietnam, and the Russians out of Afghanistan. Cheap, portable easily-concealed weapons like the AK-47, rocket-propelled grenades and shoulder-fired anti-tank and surface-to-air missiles, not to mention remote-controlled IEDs (improvised explosive devices), have made controlling subject populations too brutal and costly for advanced democracies to tolerate.
The methods used by bloody-minded conquerors such as the ancient Romans, the Ottoman Turks and the Nazis - decimating whole villages anywhere the occupiers encountered resistance - are simply not acceptable to contemporary democracies, thank heaven. Local rebellions were met with what we'd now call "genocide." "They make a wasteland and call it peace," Tacitus reported a Scottish clan chieftain bitterly observing on the Roman Empire's farthest frontier.
Once subdued and secure, subject populations could be seduced by innovations like sanitary water systems and dependable roads, luxuries the United States has yet to provide throughout much of Iraq. If American soldiers speaking no Arabic and practicing non-Islamic religions ever had any chance to win over the "hearts and minds" of Iraqis, that chance was lost in the stupefying chaos following the fall of Baghdad. The time for a troop "surge," not of 20,000 but 10 times that number, at minimum, would have been four years ago, in early 2003. Bush's escalation is too little, too late.
By now, polls show huge majorities of Iraqis siding with their own sect and clan and against all others - particularly the American conquerors. (If anything, the reluctance of Iraqis to confess their loyalties to strangers amid a sectarian civil war probably understates that hatred.) Those majorities certainly include Iraqi soldiers and policemen, outwardly loyal to the government by day, covertly devoted to sectarian militias by night. Pretty much as most Americans would be in the unimaginable circumstance of the United States being occupied by an army of Arabic-speaking Muslims.
Asked by CBS's Scott Pelley on "60 Minutes" if he thought he owed the Iraqi people an apology for failing to provide security after the invasion, President Bush was characteristically defiant. "Not at all. I am proud of the efforts we did," he said. "We liberated that country from a tyrant. I think the Iraqi people owe the American people a huge debt of gratitude. ... I mean the people understand that we've endured great sacrifice to help them. That's the problem here in America. They wonder whether or not there is a gratitude level that's significant enough in Iraq."
To anybody but a Bush True Believer, it's a statement astonishing in its moral blindness. Yet Bush does know his "base." Partly because the U.S. rise to "hyperpower" status, to use the French term, coincided with the collapse of European empires in Asia and Africa, followed by the long twilight struggle against the Soviet Union (itself an overextended empire), many Americans see themselves as an exception to history. We make a wasteland and call it "democracy."
But here's Bush's problem: Most of those same Americans never wanted an empire to begin with. Most can no more distinguish between Eye-raq and Eye-ran than Tweedledee and Tweedledum. Until quite recently, most never heard of Sunnis and Shiites. They're instinctive isolationists, who'd agree with President John Quincy Adams advice that that the United States "not go abroad in search of monsters to slay."
Only Sept. 11, and the Bush administration's stunningly dishonest campaign blaming Saddam Hussein while conjuring imaginary mushroom clouds, convinced them to back "nation-building" in the Middle East. Only an equally hysterical propaganda campaign could convince even Bush's dwindling base to back the neoconservatives' mad imperialist fantasy of decimating Iran with bombs - no army presently being available to conquer Persia.
There are signs of such a campaign getting under way in the usual places, but active resistance in Congress and not much indication the public's listening.
So has the Iraq debacle taught this president anything at all? That could be the determining question.
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Gene Lyons can be reached by e-mail at genelyons@sbcglobal.net. |
