The rule of empires : those who built them, those who endured them, and why they always fall (84 page)

It took the British, French, and Israeli invasion of the Suez Canal Zone

in 1956 for the United States to formally denounce imperialism. This

public break with the British and the French over empire allowed the

Americans to reconcile with the growing caucus of nonaligned nations

at the United Nations, most of whom were former imperial subjects.

Although they depicted the United States as an anti-imperial

power, American policy makers still naively believed that they could

use imperial methods without incurring the political and fi scal costs

of formal empire building. Their paramount goal was to create an

informal network of infl uence and free market capitalism to contain

communist subversion in the “Third World.” Continuing to operate under the assumption that nonwestern peoples were inherently

backward, they aimed to keep African and Asian nations within the

western sphere of infl uence. Where the western European nations

had pursued this goal through empire, the United States would set

developing nations on the path to “modernity” through economic

aid, political patronage, and military assistance.

The practitioners of modernization theory thus fought the Cold

War not through formal empire building but by trying to make

432 THE RULE OF EMPIRES

the United States into a liberal global hegemon. Although Charles

de Gaulle grumbled that western Europe had become an American

economic protectorate, the Soviet threat and the centrality of the

dollar in the postwar economy forced most nations to acknowledge

America’s global leadership. Certain in their moral superiority, postwar Americans were confi dent that the United States used its hard

power benevolently to provide developing nations with the security

to embrace the American brand of liberal capitalism. As in earlier

imperial eras, they never imagined that other people might have their

own defi nition of freedom or prefer an alternative path of development.

This conceit prevented American strategists from realizing that

the short-term military interventionist strategy that was so effective

in Latin America during the fi rst half of the twentieth century was

no longer feasible in the postimperial era. President John Kennedy

certainly had no intention of establishing a formal empire in Vietnam

when he tried to prop up the government of Ngo Dinh Diem. Failing

to recognize that Diem had little legitimacy as an American client in

what most Vietnamese viewed as a struggle for national liberation,

Kennedy’s advisors made the mistake of believing that they could use

imperial methods compassionately and creatively. Their central aim

was to encourage Diem to keep the nation within the western camp

by winning the struggle for infl uence with the North Vietnamese

communists through modernization, capitalism, and representative

government.

The central fl aw in this unrealistic strategy was that nearly a century of French and Japanese imperial rule had left the majority of

Vietnamese unwilling to tolerate any form of foreign dominance,

no matter how benign or indirect. The Vietnam War was a test of

wills in which the United States broke fi rst. Although they could not

counter the United States’ overwhelming military supremacy, the

Vietnamese communists were ultimately victorious because they

accepted enormous casualties as the price of sovereignty. As General

Vo Nguyen Giap told Stanley Karnow in 1990: “Despite its military power, America misgauged the limits of its power. In war there

are two factors—human beings and weapons. Ultimately, though,

human beings are the decisive factor. Human beings! Human

beings!”16 All told, the Vietnam War cost the United States 120 billion dollars and fi fty-eight thousand of its soldiers. Approximately

Conclusion 433

four million Vietnamese soldiers and civilians died in the confl ict,

which amounted to 10 percent of their population.17

At fi rst, it appeared that American strategists and public intellectuals learned the right lessons from the Vietnam disaster. The confl ict

appeared to demonstrate the limits of brute force conclusively, and

succeeding administrations became far more cautious in trying to use

hard power to achieve nonmilitary ends. Colin Powell, an infantry

offi cer in Vietnam who became the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of

Staff during the fi rst Gulf War, argued convincingly that America

should resort to military action only when its national security was

clearly threatened, it committed overwhelming force, there was a

clear exit strategy, and there was conclusive public support for the

enterprise.

Hard power partisans disagreed, but they had little actual infl uence on American foreign and military policy until George W. Bush’s

victory in the 2000 election brought hawks such as Richard Cheney,

Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, Lewis Libby, Douglas Feith, and

many other less well-known advocates of imperial methods into

government. Nonetheless, it took the widespread fear and paranoia

following the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, to give their

doctrines credibility. Thus the Bush Doctrine replaced the Powell

Doctrine.

Looking beyond the immediate “liberation” of Iraq, the president’s

advisors gave in to even grander imperial ambitions. In overthrowing Saddam Hussein, they sought to change the balance of power

in the Middle East by creating a liberal, democratic, and prowestern Arab nation that would make peace with Israel, embrace free

market capitalism, and offer the United States access to its oil and

military bases. Giving free rein to these neoconservative fantasies,

Max Boot, a journalist and fellow at the Council of Foreign Relations,

declared confi dently: “Once we have deposed Saddam, we can impose

an American-led international regency in Baghdad, to go along with

the one in Kabul. With American seriousness and credibility thus

restored, we will enjoy fruitful cooperation from the region’s many

opportunists, who will show a newfound eagerness to be helpful in

our larger task of rolling up the international terror network that

threatens us.”18

Although the Bush administration never intended to occupy Iraq

permanently, the planners of Operation Iraqi Freedom expected to

434 THE RULE OF EMPIRES

use imperial methods to create this post-Saddam utopia. Their academic and media allies cheered them on by providing skewed historical precedents from the defunct formal empires to prove that it

was possible to use military force to restructure a conquered society.

These imperial experts proved remarkably inept in understanding

the true lessons of empire. Failing to recognize that conquerors need

allies from the subject population to govern effectively, they made

the fundamental mistake of believing their own rhetoric. The scholars and theorists who provided the moral and practical backing for

the Iraq invasion similarly endorsed unequivocally President Bush’s

assertion that western values and culture constituted the “single surviving model of human progress” in the post–Cold War era. They

thus joined Bush strategists in assuming that common Iraqis would

welcome the opportunity to become more western under a period of

benevolent foreign rule.

At fi rst, Operation Iraqi Freedom resembled the lightning conquests

that established so many earlier formal empires. As promised, the conventional Iraqi military collapsed as General Tommy Franks’s invasion

force raced northward. Saddam Hussein was a poor military strategist

and his troops had little reason to stand and fi ght. But virtually by

accident Saddam laid the groundwork for an effective anti-American

insurgency by positioning plainclothes members of the Fedayeen

Saddam (Saddam’s Martyrs) and hidden arms caches in the cities and

towns of southern Iraq. Their primary mission was not to fi ght the

Americans but to keep an eye on the restive Shi’a population.

The Iraqi leader stiffened his irregular forces by enlisting thousands of foreign fi ghters to defend his country from western aggression. Some of these men belonged to terrorist groups that had trained

in Iraq in the 1990s, but others were civilians motivated by pan-Arabism. As an Egyptian volunteer explained: “Look, Saddam is not an

angel from Allah, we know that. But if they take Tikrit, then is Cairo

next?”19 Few of these foreigners were formal members of al-Qaeda,

but captured passports with visas listing “jihad” as the purpose of

visiting Iraq indicated that a signifi cant number of Saddam’s foreign

forces were Islamicists. All told, American intelligence experts estimated, there were roughly forty thousand non-Iraqis resisting the

invasion force in March 2003.20

Working in cooperation with the Fedayeen Saddam, these foreigners accomplished what the Iraqi army could not. Operating in small

Conclusion 435

bands, they delayed the advance by ambushing American troops who

expected anyone in civilian clothing to welcome them as liberators.

In cities such as Samawah and Nasiriyah, the irregulars’ hit-and-run

tactics threatened Franks’s supply lines, and for a time it appeared

that Operation Iraqi Freedom might fl ounder in the face of protracted

guerrilla resistance. The Americans’ enormous advantage eventually

won out, but the surviving fi ghters formed the nucleus of the insurgency.

Bush administration strategists paid the insurgents little attention

as U.S. forces surrounded Baghdad in early April. Prodded by “thunder runs” that pierced the city’s defenses and produced extensive civilian casualties, Saddam’s Baathist regime collapsed. In the American

media, the victory seemed relatively clean and tidy. President Bush

fl ew to the aircraft carrier USS
Abraham Lincoln
to declare an end

to major combat operations in a sovereign nation that was now an

American protectorate. Under a banner declaring “Mission Accomplished,” the president proclaimed: “The transition from dictatorship

to democracy will take time, but it is worth every effort. Our coalition

will stay until our work is done. Then we will leave, and we will leave

behind a free Iraq.”21

Bush’s speech implicitly spelled out America’s new global agenda.

The president renounced formal empire, but he declared that the

United States would use imperial methods to protect its interests by

overthrowing unfriendly regimes and bestowing the American gift of

“freedom” on liberated populations. The actual opinions and desires

of conquered peoples did not matter. This imperial reasoning doomed

the ensuing American occupation of Iraq.

Predictably, law and order broke down in Baghdad within a month

of the president’s “mission accomplished” speech. The Offi ce of Rehabilitation and Humanitarian Assistance (ORHA, which critics dubbed

the Offi ce of Really Helpless Americans) had no forces directly at its

disposal and was powerless to intervene. This was due in part to meddling by Vice President Dick Cheney and the Defense Department’s

Douglas Feith. Aiming to ensure a quick handoff of power to Ahmed

Chalabi and their Iraqi exile clients, Cheney and Feith blocked Jay

Garner from appointing a provisional Iraqi government with authority over the remnants of the Iraqi military. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld seemed remarkably unconcerned as looters emptied

the city’s banks, museums, and government ministries. Cavalierly

436 THE RULE OF EMPIRES

dismissing the gravity of the situation by declaring that “freedom’s

untidy,” he only ordered his commanders to defend the Ministry of

Oil. It never occurred to the Bush administration and its top generals that their failure to fi ll the power vacuum created by the Baathist

collapse would create an opening for the very terrorists they were

certain they had just defeated.

While there is no question that the offi cials responsible for running Iraq after Saddam’s downfall were guilty of gross incompetence,

many of the critics of the Iraq war made the fundamental mistake of

assuming that the right combination of nation-building strategies and

troop deployments would have produced the prowestern Iraqi regime

that the Bush administration had promised. Comparatively speaking,

the new imperialists who conquered much of Africa and Asia in the

preceding century were far more undermanned and underfi nanced

than Garner and the ORHA. But they never had to deal with the

level of resistance that the United States faced in Iraq because their

subjects’ identities were largely still local. This made it comparatively easy to recruit allies from the subject population by exploiting

local rivalries. In the late nineteenth century, there were no powerful

transnational sources of aid to help defeated peoples such as Koitalel

arap Samloei’s Nandi in Kenya resist the British Empire.

The Bush administration and its academic allies assumed that they

could still use imperial tactics to govern Iraq, but divide-and-rule

strategies were less feasible in an era when a foreign invasion inspired

nationalist resistance and drew enemy combatants and weapons from

abroad. Consequently, the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA),

which replaced Garner’s ORHA in early May 2003, never actually