God Save the Iraqis From the American God
May 29, 2003
What would you do if you had absolute power? If you were God? That's a question that comes up all the time - in myth, literature, movies and, ominously, politics.
It's too soon to know how America's "liberation" of Iraq is going to work out, but warning signs - signs of rejection and resistance - abound. And yet we've been warned by our own cultural tradition of cautionary tales, tales recounting the hubris of the Tower of Babel or Icarus' doomed flight to heaven. The latest of these stories is the new film, "Bruce Almighty," in which Jim Carrey, playing a down-on-his-luck TV reporter, gets to play God for a time.
"Bruce" has been a huge hit, box-office-ing $86 million over the Memorial Day holiday. But alas, good entertainment that ends after two hours is not the same as a bad war, which can have reverberations for decades. In the meantime, Americans are stuck playing God in Iraq.
Once upon a time, conservatives opposed God-playing hubris. The Austrian-born economist Friedrich Hayek, for example, wrote a book titled "The Fatal Conceit." And what was that "fatal conceit"? It was the idea that "man is able to shape the world around him according to his wishes." Hayek was no enemy of progress - which is achieved, he argued, through the trial-and-error experiments of the marketplace. His criticism was aimed at central planning, which sought progress instead by overturning the hard-learned lessons of human nature.
To Hayek, the idea that experts in a marbled ministry could gather the information necessary to make good decisions was the most lethal of follies. And the same centralization that strangles economic growth, he maintained, also strangles free expression, eventually turning technocrats into tyrants.
Hayek's conservatism was based on caution and prudence. The new conservatism, often called "neoconservatism," is radically different; it should be called pseudo-conservatism. It's based on the profoundly hubristic unconservative idea of creating heaven on earth, of playing God. To be sure, the pseudocons proclaim the purest of motives, but they should be judged on their results, not their rhetoric.
The pseudocons went in to Iraq - or, more precisely, watched from their armchairs as others went in - with vaultingly high hopes of a new world order based on American values, enforced by power. That left little room for anyone else. Ahmed Chalabi, for instance - groomed for years to be the Pentagon's man in Baghdad - feels betrayed by his bosses. He complained in yesterday's Philadelphia Inquirer, "They told us, 'Liberation now,' and they made it an occupation." Promises of participatory democracy, in other words, are now on indefinite hold.
The Washington Post recently profiled one of those occupiers, Maj. Gen. David Petraeus, the overseer of Mosul. Petraeus' duties are a parody of the overloaded central planner; the general sets taxi cab fares, monitors the local media, snoops in on the mosques. As he describes his job, "It's a combination of being the president and the pope."
To past conservatives, Americans playing Caesar was cause for concern, but to today's pseudocons, American dictatorship in Iraq is cause for imperialist celebration. But old-fashioned conservatives might pause over the strangers who are now climbing onto the Big Government bandwagon being built in Iraq. One such is author Barbara Ehrenreich. In a Los Angeles Times oped (titled "Socialism Lives!") Ehrenreich cheered , the Bush occupiers' pledges of a better life for Iraqis: "A universal health program, of the kind that has eluded Americans for at least half a century, will be created with a snap of the imperial fingers in Iraq."
Of course, national health insurance may fizzle in Iraq, just as it has in America. Which was Hayek's point - central planning is a bad idea because it doesn't work. But such is the seductive lure of the "fatal conceit" that people recurrently fall for it.
The ending of "Bruce Almighty" is bittersweet, as Carrey learns painful lessons about the limits of even God-like power. But the ending for Operation Iraqi Freedom is likely to be just bitter. And conservatives will be reminded, once again, that true conservatism means learning from the mistakes of the past, not repeating them.
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