The fact that as I write, the American intervention in Liberia is already being wound up brings us to the next—and in many ways the paramount—question: Is the United States capable of the kind of long-term engagement without which the liberal imperial project, by whatever euphemistic name it goes, is bound to fail?
Chapter 6
Going Home or Organizing Hypocrisy
Our armies do not come into your cities and lands as conquerors or enemies, but as liberators…. It is [not] the wish of [our] government to impose upon you alien institutions…. [It is our wish] that you should prosper even as in the past, when your lands were fertile, when your ancestors gave to the world literature, science and art and when Baghdad city was one of the wonders of the world…. It is [our] hope that the aspirations of your philosophers and writers shall be realized and that once again the people of Baghdad shall flourish, enjoying their wealth and substance under institutions which are in consonance with their sacred laws and their racial ideals.
GENERAL F. S. MAUDE to the people of Mesopotamia, March 19, 1917
The government of Iraq, and the future of your country, will soon belong to you…. We will end a brutal regime … so that Iraqis can live in security. We will respect your great religious traditions, whose principles of equality and compassion are essential to Iraq’s future. We will help you build a peaceful and representative government that protects the rights of all citizens. And then our military forces will leave. Iraq will go forward as a unified, independent and sovereign nation that has regained a respected place in the world. You are a good and gifted people—the heirs of a great civilization that contributes to all humanity.
PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH to the people of Iraq, April 4, 2003
Wheresoever the Roman conquers, he inhabits.
SENECA
MESOPOTAMIA REVISITED
Anyone who doubts that there are at least some resemblances between the liberal empire of the United States today and that of the United Kingdom roughly a century ago should consider the epigraphs to this chapter. The very rhetoric used by the British commander who occupied Baghdad in 1917 was unmistakably, though doubtless unconsciously, echoed by President Bush in his television address to the Iraqi people shortly after the American occupation of Baghdad began. In both cases, Anglophone troops had been able to sweep from the south of the country to the capital in a matter of weeks. In both cases, their governments disclaimed any desire to rule Iraq directly and proceeded, after some prevarication, to install Iraqi governments with at least the appearance of popular legitimacy. In both cases, imposing law and order proved much harder than achieving the initial military victory: British troops were being picked off by gunmen throughout 1919, and massive airpower had to be used to quell a major insurrection in the summer of 1920, which left 450 British personnel dead.
1
In both cases, there were times when it was tempting to pull out altogether rather than incur further costs.
2
Finally, in both cases, the presence of substantial oil reserves— confirmed by the Anglo-Persian Oil Company in 1927—was not a wholly irrelevant factor, though it was not the main reason for the occupation.
3
Yet there are differences. One of these is the tension that has arisen between the United States and the United Nations over the future of Iraq. Britain did not have such difficulties after the First World War, when the League of Nations, the UN’s forerunner, more or less unquestioningly legitimized British rule in Mesopotamia by designating Iraq as one of its “mandates.”
4
It is impossible to imagine Winston Churchill, as colonial secretary, appealing to the League of Nations for reinforcements in 1921 in the way that President George W. Bush was forced to appeal to the United Nations for assistance in September 2003. Nor is that the only difference between the British and American experience in Iraq. In two fundamental respects, British rule was based on a long-term commitment. Whatever the formal arrangements—and the British conceded in 1923 that their mandate would run for just four years rather than the twenty originally envisaged—their intention was to stay in control of Iraq for the
foreseeable future. Secondly, there were enough Britons willing to spend substantial portions of their lives in Baghdad to make British influence an enduring reality there for forty years. The British and American occupiers both promised they would soon hand over power to Iraqis and leave. The difference is that the Americans
mean
it. They sincerely want to go home.
“Don’t even go there!” is one of those catchphrases heard on a daily basis in New York. It sums up the problem exactly. Despite their country’s vast wealth and lethal weaponry, Americans have little interest in the one basic activity without which a true empire cannot enduringly be established. They are reluctant to “go there”—and if they must go, then they count the days until they can come home. They eschew the periphery. They cling to the metropolis.
DISPOSABLE EMPIRE
The world did not have to wait long for a perfect symbol of the transience of American rule in Iraq. On April 9, 2003, the day Baghdad fell, Marine Corporal Edward Chin draped an American flag over the head of the statue of Saddam Hussein in al-Firdos (Paradise) Square. Seconds later, however, Chin removed the Stars and Stripes and replaced it with a pre—Gulf War Iraqi flag.
5
The quick change was presumably intended to reassure watching Iraqis that they were indeed experiencing liberation rather than conquest. As President Bush put it in his television address to Iraq aired shortly after the fall of their capital city, “The government of Iraq, and the future of your country, will soon belong to you…. We will help you build a peaceful and representative government that protects the rights of all citizens.
And then our military forces will leave
.”
6
But when exactly? In the last letter that Corporal Kemaphoom Chanawongse sent home before he and his unit entered Iraq, the young soldier joked that his camp in Kuwait reminded him of the television series
M
*
A
*
S
*
H
—except that the acronym in this case would need to be M*A*H*T*S*F: “Marines Are Here to Stay Forever.” Corporal Chanawongse was killed a week later, when his amphibious assault vehicle was blown up in Nasiriya. The implication of his poignant final joke was that he and his comrades could not wait to get their mission over and come
home. It was a desire to which President Bush directly alluded in his somewhat premature victory speech on board the
Abraham Lincoln
aircraft carrier on May 1: “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.”
7
The duration of an American occupation of Iraq remains, at the time of writing, clear in only one respect: it will be short. In a prewar speech to the American Enterprise Institute, President Bush kept his options open: “We will remain in Iraq as long as necessary and not a day more.”
8
It was striking, however, that the unit he used was a “day.” Speaking a few days before the fall of Baghdad, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz suggested that General Jay Garner, the first American put in charge of the country, would run his Office of Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance for at least six months; Garner himself talked of ninety days.
9
Since then the time frame has varied from week to week. The outgoing commander of the U.S. Central Command, General Tommy Franks, seemed to suggest an occupation of between two and four years. In July, however, the new “occupation administrator,” L. Paul Bremer, told reporters: “The timing of how long the coalition stays here is effectively now in the hands of the Iraqi people,” adding, “We have no desire to stay a day longer than necessary.”
10
Later that same month he predicted that elections would take place by the middle of 2004, followed by a handover of power from Bremer’s Coalition Provisional Authority to an elected government, after which, as he put it, “my job here will be over.”
11
On September 26 Secretary of State Colin Powell told the
New York Times
that the American-appointed Iraqi Governing Council would be given six months to draw up a new constitution for the country; after that, elections would be held and power handed over to the winners.
12
Bremer reiterated on November 1 that it was his aim “to turn sovereignty to the Iraqi people as quickly as practicable.”
13
Later the same month he was summoned back to Washington to discuss how the transfer of power might be expedited. On November 15 it was announced that an Iraqi provisional government—to be nominated rather than elected—would take over this July, leaving elections and the constitution for next year.
In short, when the Americans say they come as liberators, not conquerors, they seem to mean it. If, as so many commentators claim, Amer
ica is embarking on a new age of empire, it is shaping up to be the most ephemeral empire in all history. Other empire builders have fantasized about ruling subject peoples for a thousand years. This would seem to be history’s first thousand-day empire. It is not so much “lite” as disposable.
Besides the obvious constraint imposed on American administrations by the electoral system, which requires that overseas interventions show positive results within two or at most four years, an important explanation for this chronic short-windedness is the difficulty the American empire finds in recruiting the right sort of people to
run
it. America’s higher educational institutions excel at producing very capable young men and women. Indeed, there is little question that the best American universities are now the best in the world. But few, if any, of the graduates of Harvard, Stanford, Yale or Princeton aspire to spend their lives trying to turn a sun-scorched sandpit like Iraq into the prosperous capitalist democracy of Paul Wolfowitz’s imaginings. America’s brightest and best aspire not to govern Mesopotamia but to manage MTV; not to rule the Hejaz but to run a hedge fund. Unlike their British counterparts of a century ago, who left the elite British universities with an overtly imperial ethos, the letters ambitious young Americans would like to see after their names are CEO, not CBE.
*
Like the United States today, the British after the First World War felt compelled by both domestic and Iraqi opinion to hand over power to an Iraqi government. But they did it slowly and incompletely. In the first three years of their occupation, the country was run by a civil commissioner, Sir Arnold Wilson.
14
He and his assistant, Gertrude Bell, were skeptical about the viability of Mesopotamian self-rule. They drew up a scheme for a unitary Iraqi state with almost no local consultation, simply ignoring those who advised against yoking together Assyria and Babylonia, Sunni and Shia. “There was no real desire in Mesopotamia for an Arab government,” Wilson confidently assured the British cabinet in 1920. “The Arabs would appreciate British rule.”
15
Only after the insurrection of 1920 and a fierce public denunciation of official policy by T. E. Lawrence, the hero of the Arabian campaign, did policy change. At a conference held
in Cairo in March 1921, it was decided to offer Lawrence’s friend and wartime ally the Hashemite Prince Faisal the throne of the country, which would be transformed into a British-style constitutional monarchy.
16
A tame Council of Ministers presided over by the Naqib of Baghdad invited Faisal to Baghdad as a “guest” of the nation and on July 11 unanimously adopted a resolution declaring him king. Sayyid Talib of Basra, the most dangerous of the rival contenders, was arrested and deported to Ceylon for daring to use the slogan “Iraq for the Iraqis.”
17
A plebiscite was duly held that endorsed Faisal’s elevation and on August 23 he was crowned. Thus did the British create the country henceforth known as Iraq, which means, ironically, “well-rooted country.”
18
Faisal was no mere puppet. It was he who insisted that the British mandate be reduced from twenty to just four years. But even after the Anglo-Iraqi Treaty of 1922, there was no doubt who was really running the place. Controlling Iraq was strategically vital. It gave Britain a position of unrivaled dominance in the Middle East. It was also economically attractive. When two geologists from the American Standard Oil Company entered Iraq on a prospecting expedition, the British civil commissioner handed them over to the chief of police of Baghdad.
19
In 1927 the British takeover paid a handsome dividend when oil was struck at Baba Gurgur. Although they formally relinquished all power to the ruling dynasty, the British remained more than merely influential in Iraq throughout the 1930s. In April 1941 they had little difficulty in sending an expeditionary force from Amman to reverse a pro-Axis coup in Baghdad. Indeed, they only really lost their grip on the country with the assassination of their clients Faisal II and his prime minister Nuri es-Said in the revolution of 1958. In short, there were British government representatives, military and civilian, in Baghdad uninterruptedly for almost exactly forty years. When the British went into Iraq, they stayed.