Mass myopia: United States is in colossal denial The WE News Archives

The news from the Middle East is grim. After the confident morning of President George W. Bush’s visit to the region and the unfolding of the “road map” for peace, it is back to bloody business as usual. Israeli hit squads go gunning for Hamas top brass. Suicide bombers claim more lives in Jerusalem. Fighting continues in Iraq.

You could be forgiven for shrugging your shoulders and concluding that peace in the Middle East is a contradiction in terms. You might even be tempted to agree with those of Bush’s critics who believe that his decision to overthrow Saddam Hussein has made matters worse, not better stirring up a hornets’ nest of terrorism.

Yet you would be wrong. For although it is not yet detectable, future historians may well look back on the year 2003 as a turning point in the troubled politics of the region. And they will give much of the credit for that transformation to the courageous and undoubtedly risky strategy that Bush has adopted. It is a strategy that is imperial in all but name. And if it ultimately fails it will not be because the Middle East’s problems are insoluble. It will be because the United States lacks the stamina needed to run a successful empire.

First, the up-side. This month has seen the biggest step forward in the Arab-Israeli conflict since the Palestinian leader, Yasser Arafat, recklessly spurned the deal he was offered by then-US President Bill Clinton in December 2000. It might even prove to be the biggest step forward since Israel occupied the West Bank and Gaza in 1967. Indeed, we may be witnessing the most radical reshaping of the region since it acquired its modern form (and many of its modern problems) after World War I. What the British Empire began, the American Empire may be about to finish.

Why be optimistic when so many previous Middle Eastern “road maps” led not to peace but back to violence? Because the Anglo-American overthrow of Saddam Hussein has been the mother of all wake-up calls for the Muslim states of the Middle East. By showing them how easily Saddam’s vicious little tyranny could be overthrown, Bush has made it clear to the leaders of Iran, Syria and Saudi Arabia that he is in deadly earnest. If their countries continue to sponsor terrorism as all three are accused of doing then Saddam’s fate could befall them too.

Such saber-rattling evidently works. When five key Arab leaders met with Bush at Sharm el-Sheikh on June 3, it was to pledge, with apparently sincere penitence, that they would henceforth actively fight “the culture of extremism and violence.” To be meaningful, this must signify an end to the funding not just of Al-Qaeda but also those terrorist groups, like Hamas and Islamic Jihad, which have murdered hundreds of Israelis in the last two and a half years.

Will it happen? Ariel Sharon clearly thinks it is possible. There is no other way to explain his willingness to acknowledge that the West Bank and Gaza have been, in his words, under Israeli “occupation” since 1967; to pledge to “evacuate unauthorized outposts” in the Occupied Territories; and to agree to the creation of an independent Palestinian state.

None of this would be happening if Bush had not resoundingly established his credibility in the Middle East by force. For this reason, the renewed violence of the past weeks should be interpreted not as proof that peace is impossible, but as evidence that terrorists are on the defensive. The American road map leads to compromise and conciliation, a nightmare destination for the extremists, explaining why they have repeatedly refused to accept a cease fire. Their only hope of staying in the business of bloodshed is to derail the peace process.

Let us not overestimate the power of the terrorists. Although the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, were the most lethal and spectacular in history (and the first major terrorist assaults on the United States), the reality is that the number of such operations has been declining since their peak in the mid-1980s. Last year, according to the US State Department, there were a total of just under 200 cross-border terrorist actions, compared with 665 in 1987. True, today’s mainly Islamic fundamentalist terrorists kill and wound more people per attack than their Marxist and nationalist predecessors did some 20 years ago suicide bombing is much deadlier than old-style hijacking. But even the 2,940 deaths in the attack on the World Trade Center need to be put in some kind of perspective.

Compared with the existential threats posed to the West by Nazism and Communism in the mid-20th century, Islamic fundamentalism has so far achieved little. On average, Hitler and his allies killed roughly 3,500 West Europeans and North Americans every week of World War II that’s one Sept. 11, 2001 a week for almost six years. Bin Laden is no Hitler. The threat he and his confederates pose can be contained by a combination of American pressure on the regimes that sponsor terror and cooperation between the world’s intelligence agencies.

Even the terrorism that has raged in Israel and the Occupied Territories since the “second intifada” was proclaimed in September 2000 should be seen for what it is: something smaller than a real war. The number of Israelis killed in the past three years has been around 720; the number of Palestinians 2,220. Substantially more people (2,680 Israelis and around 14,800 Egyptians and Syrians) were killed in the October 1973 Arab-Israeli war, which lasted just over two weeks.

Terrorism can be defeated. But its defeat hinges on the willingness of the United States to sustain the war against the terrorists and their backers. That the United States has the means to do so no one can

doubt. Even before the deployment of troops for the invasion of Iraq, the American military already had around 752 military installations located in more than 130 countries two-thirds of all the sovereign states in the world. The unrivaled logistical capability of the US military means that within days of an overseas crisis it can deploy large numbers of its home-based forces literally wherever in the world they are needed. And, of course, these troops are by far the best-equipped in the world.

On land, the US has 9,000 M1 Abrams tanks. The rest of the world has nothing that can compete. At sea, the US possesses nine “supercarrier” battle groups. The rest of the world has none. And in the air, the US has three different kinds of undetectable “stealth” aircraft. The rest of the world has none. The US is also miles ahead in the production of “smart” missiles and high-altitude pilotless drones. Pentagon specialists call this “full-spectrum dominance.”

There is an obvious irony here. As a presidential candidate, George W. Bush spoke as if he actually wanted to diminish America’s military presence overseas. Immediately after his election, the talk was of bringing US troops home and leaving the world’s trouble spots to their own devices. Europeans worried about a new era of American isolationism.

But the calamity of Sept. 11, 2001, led to a 180-degree turn in Bush’s thinking. Within a year, the administration had produced a new National Security Strategy that explicitly stated America’s intention “to extend the benefits of freedom … to every corner of the world.” (For “freedom,” needless to say, read American economic and political institutions.) It also asserted that the United States reserved the right, if the president deemed it necessary, to take preemptive action against any state perceived as a threat to America’s security.

Many critics have seized upon this “Bush Doctrine” as a dangerous, even revolutionary departure from post-1945 American practice. I’m not so sure. For one thing, it is eminently desirable that free markets, the rule of law, and democracy should be introduced in “failed states” or countries languishing under “rogue regimes.” For another, regime changes of the sort we have seen in Afghanistan and Iraq are a necessary, indeed indispensable element of the “war on terror.”

Although they are capable of infiltrating open societies like the United States, terrorist organizations could not function without the support of dictatorships and can train their recruits most easily in conditions of anarchy. Containment of the terrorist threat will never be achieved if the US does not eradicate the breeding grounds of terror. And a strategy of global containment is not really a major departure in American policy, having been employed for a half-century against the late USSR a point well made at an Oxford lecture last month by American historian Melvyn Leffler.

The radical aspect of the Bush Doctrine is not the theory but the practice. The point is simply that when Bush says he is prepared to fight for freedom and against terror in “every corner of the world” he really can. And he really does.

But it’s not just that the American military has achieved full-spectrum dominance. It’s also the fact that America can so easily afford its daunting firepower. The Pentagon’s budget is equal to the combined defense budgets of the next dozen or so countries. Indeed, according to one calculation, the United States accounts for 4045 per cent of all defense spending in the world. Yet total American military spending this year will amount to less than 4 per cent of America’s GDP, for the simple reason that its economy is so huge. And at present, America’s GDP amounts to a staggering 31 per cent of world output.

If this combination of military and economic dominance is not imperial power, then what is? But here is the paradox: Vast though America’s military power has become, the idea that the US is now an authentic empire remains entirely foreign to a majority of Americans, who uncritically accept what has long been the official line: that the United States just doesn’t “do empire.”

“America has never been an empire,” Bush declared during the 2000 election campaign. “We may be the only great power in history that had the chance, and refused.” Speaking on board the carrier USS Abraham Lincoln on May 1, he echoed the sentiment: “Other nations in history have fought in foreign lands and remained to occupy and exploit. Americans, following a battle, want nothing more than to return home.”

A few days before, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld was asked by a journalist from Al-Jazeera if the US was engaged in “empire-building” in Iraq. “We don’t seek empires,” shot back Rumsfeld. “We’re not imperialistic. We never have been.” Nor are such views limited to the political elite. Most ordinary Americans become indignant when told their country has become an empire.

The Victorian historian J. R. Seeley famously joked that the British had “conquered and peopled half the world in a fit of absence of mind.” But the Americans have gone one better. The greatest empire of modern times has come into existence without the great majority of the American people even noticing. This is not a fit of absence of mind. This is mass myopia.

It’s not hard to explain such attitudes, given the anti-imperial origins of the United States. But just because you were once a colony doesn’t mean you can’t become an empire. England was once a Roman colony, after all. Americans like to point out that they don’t formally rule over much foreign land. In total, American dependencies (such as Puerto Rico) amount to just over 10,000 square kilometers. But nowadays, thanks to air power, a network of strategically situated military bases is no longer needed to control vast amounts of territory. As for the claim that Americans come not to subjugate but to emancipate when they invade countries, the British said exactly the same thing when they occupied Baghdad in March 1917: “Our armies do not come into your cities and lands as conquerors, but as liberators,” were General F. S. Maude’s words to the people of Mesopotamia.

Unfortunately, the American refusal to recognize the reality of their own imperial role in the world is one of the things making their empire very different from, and less effective than, the last great English-speaking empire. For a start, Americans feel no qualms about sending their servicemen to fight wars in faraway countries. But they expect those wars to be short and the casualty lists to be even shorter. Since the war against Iraq officially ended, more than 40 US servicemen have lost their lives, some as a result of terrorist attacks and guerrilla warfare. Already one can sense a growing queasiness at home about this. The refrain is constantly heard in the American media: When can our boys come home?

The realistic answer to this question is: not for at least five years the minimum duration of occupation that will be needed to stabilize post-Saddam Iraq. Indeed, if the British experience of first governing and then strongly influencing Iraq after World War I is anything to go by, 40 years might be a more realistic time frame. Alas, literally nobody I have met in the United States is willing to contemplate a military presence on anything like that time scale. And as minds begin to turn to the next presidential election, American impatience to clear out of Iraq will grow. Since the end of the war, almost as much space in the American press has been devoted to Bush’s tax cut as to Iraq’s reconstruction. As for Afghanistan, it is all but forgotten.

In short, America may be a “hyperpower” the most militarily powerful empire in all history. But it is an empire in denial, a colossus with an attention deficit disorder. And that is potentially very dangerous.

I began this essay by pointing out just how much has been achieved by the war in Iraq. If the overthrow of Saddam Hussein marks the beginning of a sustained attempt to stamp out terrorism and build peace, prosperity and, ultimately, democracy in the Middle East, we will have cause to celebrate the advent of this new American empire.

But if, instead, the war in Iraq is just another ephemeral military adventure, then I am filled with foreboding. For the moment America loses interest in what it has initiated, the much-vaunted road map will be crumpled up and forgotten. And the cycle of terror will never end.

Niall Ferguson, a professor of history at New York and Oxford universities, is the author of Empire: How Britain Made the Modern World. He wrote this article for The DAILY STAR