The rule of empires : those who built them, those who endured them, and why they always fall (83 page)

that there are some occasions—and Iraq may be one of them—when

war is the only remedy for regimes that live by terror.”10 He cited

declarations by Iraqi exiles that Iraqis would accept civilian casualties

as the price of overthrowing Saddam, thereby leaving unspoken the

question of why these American allies had the privilege of determining who would actually make such a sacrifi ce. Moreover, Ignatieff’s

indictment of the Iraqi regime for warmongering and human rights

violations raises questions as to whether a western power such as

the United States should have to answer for the decimation of New

World peoples, slavery, the Mexican-American War, and the monopolization of global resources. Imperial balance sheets are inevitably

subjective and selective in deciding what constitutes the greater good

and what does not.

The critics of Operation Iraqi Freedom often overlooked these

realities. To be sure, scholars of empire such as Nicholas Dirks did

their part by linking the theorists, politicians, and military contractors that profi ted from the invasion of Iraqi with the conquistadors,

nabobs, and other specialist groups behind earlier imperial projects. In

chronicling the scandals of British East India Company rule, he found

himself “writing the history not just of the eighteenth century, but of

the present as well.”11 However, most opponents of President Bush’s

preemptive war made the mistake of equating empire and imperialism solely with the unjust use of hard power. In doing so, they failed

Conclusion 427

to point out that it is simply no longer feasible to reorder another

society through military force alone. Empires are indeed immoral,

but it would have been more convincing to argue against the Iraq

invasion by using historical precedents to show why it was doomed

to fail. Instead, the Bush administration’s leftist critics assumed that

empire was still practical; they just differed from the neoconservatives and imperial apologists in branding it a sin.

Some well-meaning scholars and policy makers were also ensnared

by the temptation to leverage military power for philanthropic purposes. Noah Feldman, a Harvard law professor who helped the American-appointed Iraqi Governing Council draft an interim constitution,

assured himself that the invasion of Iraq was an act of “trusteeship”

rather than empire building. Acknowledging that this notion of paternalistic stewardship had imperial origins, he nonetheless argued that

it was moral to deprive a defeated people of their sovereignty temporarily if the “trustee” abandoned its assumption of moral superiority

and governed as an “ordinary” democratically elected government.12

In other words, the American occupiers knew what was best for the

Iraqis. Left unsaid was the reality that common Iraqis never asked to

be a ward of a victorious power, even if that power promised to rule

humanely and altruistically. Like all forms of imperial rule, trusteeship ultimately springs from the barrel of a gun, not the consent of

the conquered.

The central mistake running through much of the debate over the

Iraqi occupation was the assumption that imperial methods were still

effective and could be put to legitimate uses. The Bush administration’s adventure in Iraq was actually doomed from the outset because

its planners made the fundamental mistake of believing their own

legitimizing rhetoric. Most common Iraqis were happy to be rid of

Saddam Hussein, but this did not mean that they wanted to be ruled

by well-intentioned foreigners. In the immediate aftermath of the

invasion, a Sunni Imam sermonized: “Do you know of anyone who

can accept this humiliation? Do you just let them occupy your land

while you sit and do nothing?” A university student turned insurgent echoed this anger by asking: “How would you feel if French

soldiers or Arab soldiers invaded your city and killed your friends,

your family?”13 President Bush’s promises that the United States had

no imperial ambitions in Iraq carried little weight, and most Iraqis

believed he wanted their oil and to defend Israel, stage attacks on Iran

428 THE RULE OF EMPIRES

and Syria, and create opportunities for American businessmen. True

or not, the Iraqis’ nearly universal rejection of subjecthood taught

the Americans a painful lesson in the limits of empire.

Operation Iraqi Freedom was an attempt to use imperial methods in an age when formal empires are no longer practical, viable, or

defensible. By the 1970s, there were no major powers left in the world

that admitted to being empires. Imperial nomenclature occasionally

crops up in Britain, but as Doris Lessing put it in turning down the

invitation to become a dame of the British Empire: “Well, fi rst of all

there is no British empire, no one seems to notice this.”14 Certainly

Basques, Northern Irish, Kurds, Tamils, East Timorese, Tibetans, and

many other peoples seeking national homelands continue to endure

a form of subjecthood. However, their struggles are with nations, not

self-described empires.

Over the past half century, the emergence of former African

and Asian imperial territories as independent nation-states holding

a commanding presence in the United Nations General Assembly,

coupled with the excesses of the Nazis, rendered empire illegitimate

in the court of world opinion. Conservatives and western chauvinists never ceased to imagine the empires of the new imperial era as

humane and civilizing, but former subject peoples held them in contempt. Consequently, imperialism became a synonym for aggression

and exploitation that the United States and the Soviet Union both

used in Cold War propaganda. Each cast itself as the champion of

oppressed peoples while depicting its rival as an imperial power. But

of course this did not prevent them from occasionally giving in to the

temptation to use imperial methods in seeking to dominate strategic

territories and secure resources.

Of the two Cold War powers, the Soviet Union certainly came

closest to the conventional defi nition of an empire. It was heir to

tsarist Russia, which had so many non-Russian subjects under the

Romanovs that nationalists referred to it as “the prison of peoples.”

The Soviet Union never called itself an empire and condemned the

western excesses of the new imperialism, but in reality Lenin’s regime

ruled millions of unwilling and disenfranchised subject peoples. This

made the USSR a de facto empire. Ever the pragmatist, Joseph Stalin reacquired the last missing pieces of the Romanovs’ empire by

annexing eastern Poland and the Baltic states under the terms of

the Nazi-Soviet Pact. In the 1950s, Nikita Khrushchev sponsored a

Conclusion 429

colonial endeavor to settle hundreds of thousands of Russians and

Ukrainians on untilled “virgin lands” in Central Asia.

As in the western empires, this oppression and extraction eventually provoked an anti-imperial backlash. The resistance began in the

Ukraine in the 1960s, but over the next two decades it spread to most of

the Soviet republics. Seeking relief from Russian settlers, limits on central demands for resources, and greater autonomy, subject elites, who

were mostly products of the Soviet system, mobilized their communities along ethnic lines. In time, they demanded their own nation-states,

particularly after the Soviet Union gave its eastern European satellites greater independence in the 1970s. Ideologies of Marxist-Leninist

brotherhood were poor fi rebreaks against this spreading nationalism.

Matters came to a head in the late 1980s when the disastrous

Afghan War, the Polish Solidarity movement, and Mikhail Gorbachev’s glasnost reforms weakened the Soviet Union’s hold on its

imperial periphery. But as was the case in most empires, subject

rebellions did not bring down the Soviet Union. Instead, the Russians themselves decided that it was no longer worthwhile to hold the

Soviet empire together by force. Taking a page from the nationalists’

book, Boris Yeltsin destroyed the USSR in 1991 by declaring that

the Russian Soviet Federated Socialist Republic was a nation-state.

He did this to strengthen Russia by jettisoning imperial territories

that stood in the way of its development as a liberal democratic society. Having survived an attempted coup by Soviet hard-liners, Yeltsin

concluded treaties with the other Soviet republics acknowledging

them as sovereign independent nations. Thus, the last true empire in

the world dissolved into fi fteen independent successor states.

By comparison, if the USSR was an old-style empire in denial,

the United States was a hegemonic global power that its friends and

critics frequently mistook for an empire. To be sure, Americans often

resorted to colonial and imperial methods in pursuing personal and

national goals. The founding fathers framed the War of Independence

as a just revolution against the tyrannical British Empire, but this did

not prevent the new nation from acquiring enormous swaths of additional territory by either purchase or conquest. The 1846 MexicanAmerican War, for example, was a largely imperial enterprise that

brought the United States most of its southwestern states.

More signifi cant, America’s westward expansion entailed the defeat

and near total destruction of New World peoples. In this sense it was

430 THE RULE OF EMPIRES

more colonial than imperial. In pursuing its “Manifest Destiny,” the

United States did not seek to turn Amerindians into tribute-paying

subjects; it wanted their land. This did not mean that the settlers had

a specifi c genocidal agenda in the west. Rather, most nineteenth-century Americans believed that the Amerindians were a lower order of

humanity who were dying out because they could not survive in the

modern world. Thomas Hart Benton put these sentiments into words

on the Senate fl oor in 1846 when he said, “Civilization or extinction

has been the fate of all people who have found themselves in the track

of the advancing Whites.”15 Americans thus assured themselves that

the United States’ transformation into a continental nation was neither imperial nor immoral.

Modern debates over whether the United States was an empire

or not overlook the fact that successive administrations in the nineteenth century followed an inherently nonimperial assimilationist policy in gradually recognizing surviving Native Americans as

citizens, albeit inferior ones. Similarly, emancipation turned former

slaves into Americans of African descent rather than imperial subjects. Alaskans and Hawaiians eventually won the same status, but

these concessions were not particularly grand or magnanimous. Nevertheless, America’s treatment of nonwestern peoples living within

its borders was not, by strict defi nition, imperial. Although they suffered institutionalized racism and discrimination, by the twentieth

century Native Americans, indigenous Hawaiians and Alaskans, and

African Americans were citizens, not subjects. This reality stands in

contrast to the national minorities in the Soviet Union who acquired

their own separate nation-states when the Soviet empire collapsed.

The United States’ assimilationist policies reinforced its egalitarian self-image, but the ingrained American antipathy toward empire

did not prevent the nation from falling victim to the new imperial

mania of the late nineteenth century. Although the United States did

not take part in the scramble for Africa, President William McKinley’s administration could not resist the temptation to take over most

of Spain’s remaining empire after its victory in the 1898 SpanishAmerican War. An unabashedly proimperial lobby failed to secure

the annexation of Cuba, but McKinley obligingly claimed Guam,

Puerto Rico, and the Philippines.

The United States proved a surprisingly ambivalent imperial master. Struggling to reconcile their democratic values with the realities

Conclusion 431

of ruling millions of unwilling and seemingly inassimilable subjects, Americans questioned the price of empire. The Supreme Court

ruled that the Bill of Rights applied to the former Spanish territories,

and the United States governed the Philippines through an elected

national assembly and senate that was largely free to legislate as it

saw fi t, subject to the veto of an American governor general. In the

1930s, Franklin Roosevelt sought to shed an expensive imperial white

elephant by setting the Filipinos on the path to formal independence.

Acting over the objections of some Filipino elites who did not want to

lose access to American markets, he declared that the territory would

become independent after a ten-year transitional period of internal

self-government. The Second World War interrupted these plans, but

on July 4, 1946, Harry Truman held to Roosevelt’s original timetable

and transferred power to the Filipinos.

After the Allied victory, the United States also refused to bankroll

the resuscitation of the British Empire, but Cold War pragmatism led

Truman to underwrite France’s return to Indochina. For the most part,

the Truman and Eisenhower administrations tolerated the tottering

postwar European empires as long as they did not become a liability

in the struggle with the Soviet Union for infl uence in Africa and Asia.