Colossus (40 page)

It may be that the bolder products of Harvard’s Kennedy School are eager to advise the Iraqi Governing Council on its constitutional options. And a few of the country’s star economists may yearn to do for Iraq what they did for post–Soviet Russia back in the early 1990s. But we may be fairly certain that their engagement will take the form of a series of weeklong trips rather than long-term residence: consultancy, not colonization. As far as the Ivy League nation builders are concerned, you can set up an independent central bank, reform the tax code, liberalize prices and privatize the major utilities—and be home in time for your first class reunion.

It can of course be argued that the American tendency to pay flying visits to their putative
imperium
—rather than settle there—is just a function of technology. Back in the 1870s, by which time the British had largely completed their global network of railways and steamships, it still took a minimum of eighty days to circumnavigate the world, as Jules Verne celebrated in the story of Phileas Fogg. Today it can be done in less than three. The problem is that along with the undoubted advantages of modern technology comes the disadvantage of disconnection. During the diplomatic crisis over Iraq in early 2003, Secretary of State Colin Powell was criticized for conducting his foreign policy by telephone. Powell retorted that he had traveled abroad twice that year already, but the destinations and durations of these trips were revealing: one was to Davos, Switzerland, for the World
Economic Forum (January 25–26) and the other was to the Far East (February 21–25).
⁴³
We can only guess at what these trips achieved—and what Secretary Powell might have achieved if instead he had paid visits to Paris and Ankara.

It is not just the most senior American officials who prefer the comforts of sweet home. Shortly before the terrorist attacks of September 2001, a former CIA man admitted that the agency “probably doesn’t have a single truly qualified Arabic-speaking officer of Middle Eastern background who can play a believable Muslim fundamentalist who would volunteer to spend years of his life with shitty food and no women in the mountains of Afghanistan.” “For Christ’s sake,” he went on, “most case officers live in the suburbs of Virginia. We don’t do that kind of thing.” In the immortal words of one such case officer, “Operations that include diarrhea as a way of life don’t happen.”
⁴⁴
This was precisely the attitude that another CIA officer sought to counter in the wake of the terrorist attacks when he hung a sign outside his office that read as follows: “Officers wanted for hazardous journey. Small wages. Bitter cold. Long months of complete darkness. Constant danger. Safe return doubtful. Honour and recognition in case of success.” Significantly, this was the recruiting poster used by the British explorer Ernest Shackleton before his 1914 expedition to the Antarctic.
⁴⁵
At the time of the invasion of Iraq, the short-lived Office for Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance also sought British imperial inspiration: it relied on retired British army Gurkhas from Nepal to provide the security around its Kuwait base.
⁴⁶

What, then, about the much-vaunted role of the voluntary sector, the governmental and nongovernmental aid agencies? Might they provide the Americans on the ground who are so conspicuously hard to find in government service? The institution that, since the 1960s, has done most to channel the idealism of young Americans into what we now call nation building is of course the Peace Corps. Since 1961 more than 168,000 Americans have joined it, serving in a variety of civilian capacities in no fewer than 136 countries. Today there are some 6,678 Peace Corps volunteers, an improvement on the low point of 5,380 in 1982, and they can be found in 69 countries.
⁴⁷
The Peace Corps certainly attracts the right type of person: among the universities that have sent the most volunteers are Berkeley and Harvard;
disproportionate numbers also come from the exclusive liberal arts colleges like Dartmouth, Tufts and Middlebury.
⁴⁸
Yet the total number of volunteers remains just two-thirds of the target of 10,000 set by Congress in 1985, a target that was supposed to be attained by 1992.

We should not, in any case, pin too much hope on agencies like the Peace Corps. Civilian aid agencies can, like the missionaries of old, be as much an irritant as a help to those trying to run a country like Iraq. It is one of the unspoken truths of the new “imperialism of human rights” that around every international crisis there soon swarms a cloud of aid workers, whose efforts are not always entirely complementary. If the United States successfully imposes law and order in Iraq, economic life will swiftly revive and much aid will simply be superfluous. If it fails to impose order, on the other hand, aid workers will simply get themselves killed.

After Kipling, John Buchan was perhaps the most readable writer produced by British imperialism. In his thriller
Greenmantle
(1916) he memorably personifies imperial Britain in the person of Sandy Arbuthnot, an Orien-talist so wily that he can pass for a Moroccan in Mecca or a Pathan in Peshawar. Arbuthnot’s antithesis is the dyspeptic American millionaire John Scantlebury Blenkiron, “a big fellow with a fat, sallow, clean-shaven face [with] a pair of fully sleepy eyes, like a ruminating ox.” “These eyes have seen nothing gorier than a Presidential election,” he tells Buchan’s hero, Richard Hannay. The symbolism is a little crude, but it has something to it.

Since September 2001 the Blenkirons have certainly been seeing something gorier than an election. But will it whet their appetites for an empire in the British mode? Only, it would seem, if Americans radically rethink their attitude to the world beyond their borders. Until there are more U.S. citizens not just willing but eager to shoulder the “nation builder’s burden,” ventures like the occupation of Iraq will lack a vital ingredient. For the lesson of Britain’s imperial experience is clear: you simply cannot have an empire without imperialists—out there, on the spot—to run it.

Could Blenkiron somehow mutate into Arbuthnot? Could the United States work out how to produce men like John Buchan himself, whose career led him from the obscurity of a Scottish manse, by way of Oxford, to
the post of Governor-General of Canada? Perhaps. After all, it has happened before. In the years after the Second World War the generation that had just missed out on fighting left Harvard and Yale with something like Buchan’s zeal for global rule. Many of them joined the Central Intelligence Agency and devoted their lives to fighting communism in far-flung lands from Cuba to Cambodia. Yet as Graham Greene foresaw in
The Quiet American
, their efforts at what the British would have called indirect rule were vitiated by the low quality of the local potentates they backed and constrained by the need to shore them up more or less covertly. Today the same fiction that underpinned American strategy in Vietnam—that America was not attempting to resurrect French colonial rule in Indochina—is being peddled in Washington to rationalize what is going on in Iraq. It may look like the resurrection of British colonial rule. But all Americans want to do is give the Iraqi people democracy and then go home.

THE INCENTIVE TO COLLABORATE

It is perhaps inherent in the nature of a democratic empire that it should operate with a short time horizon. The constraints imposed on the executive by the election cycle are tight, and there is strong evidence from previous conflicts—not only Korea but Vietnam—of a negative correlation between the level of American casualties and the popularity of an executive at war. There are those who insist that the Vietnam syndrome was finally “kicked” in the 1990s. In reality, however, the sensitivity of the American electorate to casualties seems to have grown more acute since the cold war. Between April and October 2003, there was a 29 percent drop in the popularity of the war in Iraq, yet only a little over 350 U.S. service personnel lost their lives in that period, only two-thirds of whom were killed as a result of hostile action (see
figure 11
). Compare that with Vietnam, where it took around three years and more than thirty thousand “killed in action” to reduce popular support for the war by a comparable amount. Small wonder American politicians have a tendency to start looking for an exit some time before the drama has been concluded.

Unfortunately, there is a fatal flaw to the project of short-term nation
building, and that is the extreme difficulty of securing local support when an American pledge to depart imminently has been announced and—more important—is believed by the inhabitants of the occupied country in question. Perhaps more than anything else, the British Empire was an empire based on local collaboration; how else could fewer than a thousand ICS men have governed a population of four hundred million Indians? But why should any Iraqi have risked collaborating with a fly-by-night occupier like L. Paul Bremer? No sooner had he created a Governing Council for Iraq than he began talking of packing his bags. What is especially striking is that this desire for an American withdrawal was not at first shared by a majority of the Iraqi population. In a poll conducted in Baghdad in July 2003, people were asked: “Right now, would you prefer to see the U.S. (and Britain) stay in Iraq or pull out?” Only 13 percent favored immediate withdrawal. Nearly a third—31 percent—answered that the coalition “should stay for a few years”; a further 25 percent said “for about a year.”
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FIGURE
11
The War Against Iraq, 2003: Casualties and Popularity

Source: Poll data from the Gallup Organization; casualty data from
http://lunaville.org/warcasualties/Summary.aspx.

This brings us to a critical point. It is simply that the time frame is the key to successful nation building.
⁵⁰
It is no coincidence that the countries where American military intervention has been most successful have been those in which the United States has maintained a prolonged military presence. As we have seen, President Bush is fond of citing Japan and West Germany after 1945 as examples of what successful American intervention can achieve. “America has made and kept this kind of commitment before,” he argued in February 2003, drawing an implicit parallel with 1945. “After defeating enemies we did not leave behind occupying armies, we left constitutions and parliaments.”
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This overlooks the awkward fact that the formal occupation regimes lasted seven years in the Japanese case and ten in the West German, and that—even to this day—the deployments of American troops in those two countries remain among the largest anywhere in the world. It is also worth remembering a third success story, South Korea, which took until the late 1980s to become a genuine democracy, after nearly forty years of an American military presence.
⁵²
By contrast, relatively little good, and probably a good deal of ill, came of the numerous short-term American interventions in Central America and the Caribbean, which began in 1898. Unfortunately, the time frames contemplated for Iraq (not to mention Afghanistan) are closer to these dismal episodes than to the post-1945 success stories. Baghdad simply cannot be turned into the capital of a Western-style democracy in the space of two years. The goal in itself is not wholly unrealistic, despite the very obvious social and cultural differences between Iraq in 2003 and West Germany in 1945.
*
In September 2003 nearly two-fifths (39 percent) of those polled by Gallup in Baghdad picked multiparty parliamentary democracy as the form of government they would most like to see established in Iraq. Slightly more—42 percent—thought this was the system their country was most likely to have in five years’ time. However, more than half—51 percent—
believed the outcome would be the result of direct American influence.
⁵³
That seems to suggest that many Iraqis expected the Americans to stay longer than the Americans themselves were planning to and that they anticipated political benefits from an ongoing American presence. Unfortunately, if the United States does walk away from Iraq in the course of 2005, those Iraqi hopes will almost certainly be dashed. Premature elections, held before order has been restored and economic life resumed, would almost certainly fail to produce a stable government. They would be much more likely to accentuate the ethnic and religious divisions within Iraqi society.
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Is there any way to reconcile the American impulse to get home fast and the manifest need for long-term commitment in Iraq if nation building is to work? Again, there is something to be learned in this regard from the British experience, though the place to look for a lesson is not Iraq but Egypt. Iraq was, after all, a relatively late addition to the British Empire, more or less run on a shoestring. The British never quite had their hearts in the matter, and financial constraints would have checked them even if they had. Egypt was another story. It was acquired in the 1880s at the very height of Britain’s economic and strategic power. It was run until the Second World War as the very model of what a liberal empire could do. Yet from the outset the British publicly insisted that Egypt was being run not by them but by the Egyptians.