"The New Republic" has an online debate going between Judis and Kaplan on the subject of "Iraq, what next? Here is part four, by Kaplan. The rest can be read at the site.
Lawrence F. Kaplan
08.31.03, 1:00 p.m.
John,
In our last exchange, I noted that our disagreement pits two liberal ideals against one another. The tension between the two seems to manifest itself every time America goes to war, with some arguing that we have no right to violate the sovereignty of a Yugoslavia or an Iraq, while others argue that to do otherwise would amount to a betrayal of liberalism. Your latest note puts you firmly in the anti-imperialist camp. For my part, I can think of far greater sins on the world scene than imperialism--which, in any case, I do not think the Bush team is guilty of practicing in Iraq.
As for the Arab side of the equation, I do not doubt that the memory of imperialism still looms large in the Arab imagination--though polls of Iraqis show that majorities want the United States to stay rather than leave. But I have seen no evidence whatsoever that America has "healed the division between secular and Islamic nationalism." I have not seen it heal in the Arab world at large, where, from Egypt to Algeria, the two creeds collide on a regular basis. Nor have I seen it in Iraq, where the two creeds clash on a daily basis. As to the history and substance of American imperialism, I disagree with your idiosyncratic reading of both. You cite our conquest of the Philippines as a useful precedent. But the avowed purpose of that war, and indeed that era in U.S. foreign policy, was imperialistic, and no one is denying the fact that the United States had an imperial past. The question is whether it still does, and whether Iraq proves the point.
You clearly believe the answer is yes and, accordingly, you lump America in with the Britain, France, and Germany as a power that colonized the Middle East in the early twentieth century so it could "dominate the growing oil economy." But the United States did not "move decisively into the region," as you put it, until the British and the French pulled out in the aftermath of World War II. Since then, it has wielded its power in the Middle East not through imperial domination (recall Eisenhower's condemnation of the Suez Operation, in which Washington abandoned France and Britain precisely because of their imperial designs), but rather through the relatively straightforward political and economic levers that the United States possesses as a superpower. The need to recruit Arab states to the anti-Soviet cause and later to make peace with Israel and still later to contain Iraq--and the inducements and blandishments that America offered in return--created a dynamic very different from the one you describe. So different that when it comes to a country like Saudi Arabia, it's no longer clear whether Riyadh is Washington's client or the other way around. You say that trying to understand this dynamic absent an understanding of our imperial past is like trying to understand the American South of the 1880s without reference to the civil war. But viewing U.S.-Arab relations exclusively through the prism of imperialism is the equivalent of understanding the American South of the 1880s by reference to the Revolutionary War.
If it is the motives behind America's conduct in the Middle East that you're after, I would take a much closer look at recent history. You contend the Bush team's "actions have belied its words" about Iraq not being a war of imperial conquest. As proof that this is precisely what it was, you cite among other things the fact that America "invaded and then occupied Iraq, and it continues to occupy it even after having failed to find any weapons of mass destruction ... it has retained firm political control over the country ... it has killed off, imprisoned or chased away the country's secondary or tertiary leadership, which might have assumed control of the country after Saddam had been ousted." Is rebuilding a country that we bombed, stepping into a vacuum that we created, and imprisoning the leaders of a murderous regime really evidence of imperialism? Or is it merely evidence of being responsible? From Germany and Japan through Bosnia and Kosovo, the United States boasts a long and admirable history of post-war "nation-building." Far from being worried that the Bush administration would uphold this tradition, I feared that that the war's architects would simply abandon Iraq in the war's aftermath--which, before the country began to come apart at the seams, is exactly what they were poised to do. Again, I think many of the problems of the occupation derive precisely from the Bush team's insistence that America should not behave as an imperial power, rather than vice-versa.
As for the motives behind the war, you scoff at the notion that the invasion might have been about "eliminating Saddam's tyranny and installing a Western-style democracy in its place," or about something other than "undermining OPEC." You adduce evidence for this assertion in the fact "in reporting on the administration's foreign policy, I have yet to encounter" administration officials "obsessed with eliminating Saddam's tyranny." We must be talking to very different administration officials. The war's architects were "obsessed with eliminating Saddam's tyranny" long before September 11, and, if I recall correctly, that is one of the charges that war critics liked to level against them. It happens to be true. The "neoconservatives" whose history we both know very well have been lobbying for over a decade to overthrow Saddam, and for reasons that have much more to do with the moral abdication of the first Bush administration than with illusory obsessions about oil and geopolitical advantage. Your doubts about the wisdom of democratizing an ethnically divided Iraq, your advice that we encourage Iraq's "neighbors" (presumably including Saudi Arabia and Iran) to have a greater say in the country's future, and your calculation that the dangers of imperialism outweigh the benefits of political freedom in Iraq--all these things leave the impression that you, rather than the Bush team, are the one with little use for a democratic Iraq.
Which brings me back to the source of our disagreement. I do not think the cause of anti-imperialism trumps the cause of democracy and human rights--in Iraq or anywhere else. By the end of the 1990's, no less an upholder of the principle of sovereignty than the Secretary General of the United Nations was applauding an evolving norm in favor of intervention to halt the depredations of brutal regimes--which is what the Clinton team ended up doing in Yugoslavia. Complaints about that war prompted liberal writer David Rieff to denounce "the utopian nihilism of a left that would prefer to see genocide in Bosnia and the mass deportation of the Kosovars rather than strengthen, however marginally, the hegemony of the United States." I do not believe that you belong to this group. But I do think that you should carefully consider the question of who else besides the United States can be relied on to enforce universal norms, and whether that aim may occasionally justify impinging on the sovereignty of others. The alternative to U.S. leadership, it seems to me, is a chaotic, Hobbesian world in which regimes like Saddam's go unchecked. If being the lynchpin of a decent world order creates the mistaken impression of an imperial America, that is indeed unfortunate. But it hardly justifies turning a blind eye to inhumanity.
Lawrence
tnr.com |
