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ANALYSIS
Gimme that old-time
imperialism
By Jim Lobe
WASHINGTON - "Aggressive fighting for the right
is the noblest sport the world affords."
So
reads a bronze plaque that sits on Pentagon chief Donald
Rumsfeld's massive desk in his office across the Potomac
River from Washington. It encapsulates much of the
spirit that animates the hawks in the administration of
President George W Bush, and their supporters.
The quotation is by former president Theodore
Roosevelt, Bush's favorite president, who led the charge
on San Juan Hill in Cuba in the supposedly decisive
battle of the 1898 Spanish-American War that, with the
defeat of the Spanish navy in Manila Bay half a world
away, established the United States as an imperial power
with global reach.
Of course, the current
president's reading of "TR" is rather selective. A
passionate environmentalist and social progressive who
built up big government to protect the public against
the depredations of private capital, Roosevelt would no
doubt find much to vigorously protest in Bush's
policies.
But now, more than a century after his
presidency, TR's fighting and imperial spirit is being
aggressively promoted as a model for US policies
overseas in the 21st century, by both the civilian
policymakers in the Pentagon and their neo-conservative
and rightwing allies.
Their basic assumptions
are quite consistent with those of the imperialists of
the late 19th century: the conviction of cultural
superiority; the view that the world is a place of
merciless, Darwinian competition where force is the only
language that lesser peoples understand; and the belief
that the US and the larger Western world have a duty to
civilize the rest. All these - the basic ideological
tenets for imperialism - are now openly championed in
public debate.
Even before the September 11
attacks, these hawks argued that much of the world was
essentially in chaos and should be actively policed by
the preeminent powers of the day, of which the US was by
far the most important. "The great work of disarming
tribes, sects, warlords and criminals - a principal
achievement of monarchs of ... empires in the 19th
[century] - threatens to need doing all over again,"
wrote the much-quoted British military historian John
Keegan.
"Because so many states in the
developing world have flimsy institutions, the paramount
question in world politics in the early 21st century
will be the re-establishment of order," predicted Robert
Kaplan, an influential political writer, in his 2002
Warrior Politics, a book dedicated to the
eminently Rooseveltian notion that "without struggle -
and the sense of insecurity that motivates it - there is
decadence".
But according to the hawks, US
responsibility does not end with simply policing unruled
peoples, either alone or with like-minded powers.
Washington also has a duty to "uplift and civilize" the
natives as Roosevelt's predecessor, William McKinley,
claimed he learned from praying to "Almighty God" about
what to do with the Philippines after the Spanish
defeat.
"Afghanistan and other troubled lands
today cry out for the sort of enlightened foreign
administration once provided by self-confident
Englishmen in jodhpurs and pith helmets," wrote Max
Boot, a former Wall Street Journal editorial writer now
at the Council on Foreign Relations, last year.
Boot has become perhaps the leading exponent of
a revival of the imperialist spirit since the
publication last year of his The Savage Wars of
Peace: Small Wars and the Rise of American Power, a
book that takes Roosevelt as a model and argues that,
after World War II and Vietnam, Washington had forgotten
its talents - acquired in the Indian Wars, the
Philippines, and throughout Central America and the
Caribbean - for bringing the blessings of liberty to the
less fortunate.
"America should not be afraid to
fight 'the savage wars of peace' if necessary to enlarge
'the empire of liberty'," he wrote. "It has been done
before."
Since the ouster of the Taliban, the
benighted to be redeemed by US force of arms, in this
view, are the Muslims of the Middle East, beginning with
Iraq now that Afghanistan has been restored to the path
of civilization.
"We need an Islamic
reformation," deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz
told a Washington Post columnist. "I think there is real
hope for one," he added, saying that was a powerful
intellectual rationale for ousting the Baghdad
government.
Like their 19th century forebears,
the neo-imperialists also see the Islamic Middle East as
offering a particular challenge, presumably because of
its inherent violence and cultural, if not racial,
inferiority.
"This is a region characterized by
paranoia, apocalypticism, tyranny and violence, a region
where differences are settled by the sword," according
to Joshua Muravchik, an analyst at the American
Enterprise Institute whose thinkers are particularly
close to Wolfowitz and Rumsfeld.
"In centuries
past, the wild and unruly passions of the Islamic world
were kept within tight confines by firm, often ruthless
imperial authority," added Boot, who praises the British
and French who assumed control of the region beginning
in the late 19th century. "These distant masters did not
always rule wisely or well, but they generally prevented
the region from menacing the security of the outside
world."
Washington should learn from them, Boot
advises, arguing that US efforts after 1945 "to carve
out a different style of leadership, one that was meant
to distinguish the virtuous Americans from the grasping,
greedy imperialists who had come before", only made the
country appear weak. "The record shows precious little
bullying" by Washington in the Mideast, he adds, "indeed
not enough."
"The elementary truth that seems to
elude the experts again and again - Gulf War, Afghan
war, next war - is that power is its own reward," wrote
Charles Krauthammer, a Post columnist close to
Wolfowitz, after the Taliban's defeat. "Victory changes
everything, psychology above all. The psychology in the
region is now one of fear and deep respect for American
power."
The way to bring the blessings of
enlightenment - and democracy - to Muslims, according to
this view, is through the use of fear-inspiring force.
Indeed, if Washington does not go through with an
invasion at this point, Boot argued last week, "it would
earn the contempt of the Muslim world for its weakness".
As for those Europeans and anti-war
demonstrators who argue for resort to war only after all
peaceful efforts to resolve the Iraq crisis have been
exhausted, the hawks express their contempt by once
again citing TR: "Weasel words from mollycoddles will
never do when the day demands prophetic clarity from
great hearts."
(Inter Press Service)
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