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08-30-2010, 02:03
Critics of ‘Imperial America’ had reason for their silence
Michael Young
Last Updated: August 25. 2010 7:26PM UAE / August 25. 2010 3:26PM GMT
The withdrawal of American combat forces from Iraq last week brought muted reactions from those who had opposed the invasion of the country in 2003. This was partly understandable, since the United States will continue to exert considerable influence in Baghdad. But there was also discernible bad faith in the critics’ refusal to acknowledge that Iraq had entered a fundamentally new phase.
Perhaps that was because the template of disapproval when it comes to American behaviour in Iraq has for so long been framed in the narrowest of terms: that George W Bush’s administration organised an imperial war on Iraq (not “with” Iraq or “over” Iraq, or heaven forbid “for” Iraq), and this war had as its overriding objective the imposition of American domination of the Middle East – with Iraq and its natural resources as the cornerstone of the grand scheme.
This outlook was repeatedly expressed in the run-up to the war, and long afterward. It is what compelled demonstrators in Halifax, Canada, to hold up a banner in 2003 reading, “The imperial United States of America”, below an American flag with the stars replaced by a skull and crossbones, and the stripes surrounding a swastika. It is what led Spanish protesters, at around the same time, to cry out, “No to the imperialist aggression in Iraq!” It is what pushed a group of historians known as Historians Against War to sign a petition in 2009 against the American presence in Iraq and Afghanistan, declaring their opposition “to wars of aggression, military occupations of foreign lands, and imperial efforts by the United States and other powerful nations to dominate the internal life of other countries”.
And it is what led a prominent Palestinian-American academic, Rashid Khalidi, to publish a book in 2004 titled, you guessed it, Resurrecting Empire, about western (mainly American) interventions in the Middle East. In that book, Mr Khalidi, who happens to be a friend of the US president Barack Obama from Chicago, lamented the unwillingness of the United States to accept that it was replicating past imperial powers, and that “this cannot under any circumstances be a good thing and cannot possibly be ‘done right’”.
No one can doubt that the US is an empire, the most powerful one ever. Therefore, to explain its actions from an “imperial” perspective is legitimate. However, this can also be limiting. That’s because if there is one message from the American encounter with Iraq worth remembering, it is that Washington’s difficulties there have come from its unwillingness to practise an exclusivist form of imperial rule. The Bush administration failed to send enough soldiers early on, while the downgrading of its military commitment today would have been unthinkable to a classic imperial power seeking to control the region – particularly at a time of rivalry with Iran, whose own hegemonic ambitions were born of Persian imperialisms past.
The US is not out of Iraq. Some 50,000 troops remain in the country, which will be dependent on American military hardware, and more, for years to come. However, the dispatch with which Mr Obama implemented disengagement suggests that his deadline for removing all US forces by the end of 2011 is a serious one. If Iraq was an imperial venture, it was one only dubiously received by many Americans, above all by the current president.
Taking the argument further, I draw your attention to a telling cartoon a few days ago in the pan-Arab daily Al-Hayat. It shows Uncle Sam exiting Iraq from one door, his arm in a sling, and Iran, hooded and dressed like death, entering through another. That’s precisely how the latest American departure is perceived by many Sunni-dominated Arab regimes: as a move leaving behind a political vacuum, a destabilising one for allegedly benefiting Tehran.
Amid the loose talk of American imperialism, it’s usually missed that Washington is hardly the only purveyor of imperialist impulses in the Middle East, nor even the most determined one. Iran’s nuclear programme is a crucial step in imposing Tehran’s supremacy in the Gulf and beyond, including the Levant. Saddam Hussein, when in power, provoked two regional conflicts to satisfy his territorial appetites. That’s not mentioning Israel’s annexation of East Jerusalem and the Golan Heights, and its efforts to incorporate large swathes of the West Bank into Israel proper; Syria’s 29-year military presence in Lebanon; Egypt’s war in Yemen in the early 1960s; the stifling of Kurdish nationalism in Iraq, Iran, Syria, and Turkey; and so on.
Will we hear a mea culpa from all those who denounced American imperialism in Iraq – at least affirming that things are not as simple as they once insisted? Maybe a word admitting that a hasty American pullout might be as dangerous for Iraqis as was the invasion? Not likely, because the Iraqis themselves were never important to those who relished condemning Mr Bush. How do we know? Few of the critics ever denounced Saddam Hussein’s decades-long brutalisation of his own people, nor did they much concern themselves with the barbaric suicide attacks against Iraqi civilians after 2003. After all, this was the work of a so-called “resistance”, and resistance against imperialism, or its objective collaborators, is sacrosanct.
Mr Obama knows well the limitations of America’s empire. He can read the balance books, and may well lose the congressional elections next November on his nation’s financial vulnerabilities. There was good and bad in America’s Iraq invasion, but a great deal has changed since 2003, particularly in Washington. Yet the stony silence of Washington’s critics last week, at so potentially promising a moment for Iraqi sovereignty, showed how little they were willing to change.
Michael Young is opinion editor of the Daily Star newspaper in Beirut and author of the recent The Ghosts of Martyrs Square: An Eyewitness Account of Lebanon’s Life Struggle (Simon & Schuster)
http://www.thenational.ae/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20100826/OPINION/708259940/1006/
Michael Young
Last Updated: August 25. 2010 7:26PM UAE / August 25. 2010 3:26PM GMT
The withdrawal of American combat forces from Iraq last week brought muted reactions from those who had opposed the invasion of the country in 2003. This was partly understandable, since the United States will continue to exert considerable influence in Baghdad. But there was also discernible bad faith in the critics’ refusal to acknowledge that Iraq had entered a fundamentally new phase.
Perhaps that was because the template of disapproval when it comes to American behaviour in Iraq has for so long been framed in the narrowest of terms: that George W Bush’s administration organised an imperial war on Iraq (not “with” Iraq or “over” Iraq, or heaven forbid “for” Iraq), and this war had as its overriding objective the imposition of American domination of the Middle East – with Iraq and its natural resources as the cornerstone of the grand scheme.
This outlook was repeatedly expressed in the run-up to the war, and long afterward. It is what compelled demonstrators in Halifax, Canada, to hold up a banner in 2003 reading, “The imperial United States of America”, below an American flag with the stars replaced by a skull and crossbones, and the stripes surrounding a swastika. It is what led Spanish protesters, at around the same time, to cry out, “No to the imperialist aggression in Iraq!” It is what pushed a group of historians known as Historians Against War to sign a petition in 2009 against the American presence in Iraq and Afghanistan, declaring their opposition “to wars of aggression, military occupations of foreign lands, and imperial efforts by the United States and other powerful nations to dominate the internal life of other countries”.
And it is what led a prominent Palestinian-American academic, Rashid Khalidi, to publish a book in 2004 titled, you guessed it, Resurrecting Empire, about western (mainly American) interventions in the Middle East. In that book, Mr Khalidi, who happens to be a friend of the US president Barack Obama from Chicago, lamented the unwillingness of the United States to accept that it was replicating past imperial powers, and that “this cannot under any circumstances be a good thing and cannot possibly be ‘done right’”.
No one can doubt that the US is an empire, the most powerful one ever. Therefore, to explain its actions from an “imperial” perspective is legitimate. However, this can also be limiting. That’s because if there is one message from the American encounter with Iraq worth remembering, it is that Washington’s difficulties there have come from its unwillingness to practise an exclusivist form of imperial rule. The Bush administration failed to send enough soldiers early on, while the downgrading of its military commitment today would have been unthinkable to a classic imperial power seeking to control the region – particularly at a time of rivalry with Iran, whose own hegemonic ambitions were born of Persian imperialisms past.
The US is not out of Iraq. Some 50,000 troops remain in the country, which will be dependent on American military hardware, and more, for years to come. However, the dispatch with which Mr Obama implemented disengagement suggests that his deadline for removing all US forces by the end of 2011 is a serious one. If Iraq was an imperial venture, it was one only dubiously received by many Americans, above all by the current president.
Taking the argument further, I draw your attention to a telling cartoon a few days ago in the pan-Arab daily Al-Hayat. It shows Uncle Sam exiting Iraq from one door, his arm in a sling, and Iran, hooded and dressed like death, entering through another. That’s precisely how the latest American departure is perceived by many Sunni-dominated Arab regimes: as a move leaving behind a political vacuum, a destabilising one for allegedly benefiting Tehran.
Amid the loose talk of American imperialism, it’s usually missed that Washington is hardly the only purveyor of imperialist impulses in the Middle East, nor even the most determined one. Iran’s nuclear programme is a crucial step in imposing Tehran’s supremacy in the Gulf and beyond, including the Levant. Saddam Hussein, when in power, provoked two regional conflicts to satisfy his territorial appetites. That’s not mentioning Israel’s annexation of East Jerusalem and the Golan Heights, and its efforts to incorporate large swathes of the West Bank into Israel proper; Syria’s 29-year military presence in Lebanon; Egypt’s war in Yemen in the early 1960s; the stifling of Kurdish nationalism in Iraq, Iran, Syria, and Turkey; and so on.
Will we hear a mea culpa from all those who denounced American imperialism in Iraq – at least affirming that things are not as simple as they once insisted? Maybe a word admitting that a hasty American pullout might be as dangerous for Iraqis as was the invasion? Not likely, because the Iraqis themselves were never important to those who relished condemning Mr Bush. How do we know? Few of the critics ever denounced Saddam Hussein’s decades-long brutalisation of his own people, nor did they much concern themselves with the barbaric suicide attacks against Iraqi civilians after 2003. After all, this was the work of a so-called “resistance”, and resistance against imperialism, or its objective collaborators, is sacrosanct.
Mr Obama knows well the limitations of America’s empire. He can read the balance books, and may well lose the congressional elections next November on his nation’s financial vulnerabilities. There was good and bad in America’s Iraq invasion, but a great deal has changed since 2003, particularly in Washington. Yet the stony silence of Washington’s critics last week, at so potentially promising a moment for Iraqi sovereignty, showed how little they were willing to change.
Michael Young is opinion editor of the Daily Star newspaper in Beirut and author of the recent The Ghosts of Martyrs Square: An Eyewitness Account of Lebanon’s Life Struggle (Simon & Schuster)
http://www.thenational.ae/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20100826/OPINION/708259940/1006/