NYTimes.com Article: The Empire Slinks Back

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The Empire Slinks Back

April 27, 2003
By NIALL FERGUSON 




 

Wheresoever the Roman conquers, he inhabits. - Seneca 

Iraq has fallen. Saddam's statues are face down in the
dust. His evil tyranny is at an end. 

So -- can we, like, go home now? 

You didn't have to wait
long for a perfect symbol of the fundamental weakness at
the heart of the new American imperialism -- sorry,
humanitarianism. I'm talking about its chronically short
time frame. I wasn't counting, but the Stars and Stripes
must have been up there on the head of that statue of
Saddam for less than a minute. You have to wonder what his
commanding officer said to the marine responsible, Cpl.
Edward Chin, when he saw Old Glory up there. ''Son, get
that thing down on the double, or we'll have every TV
station from here to Bangladesh denouncing us as Yankee
imperialists!'' 

An echo of Corporal Chin's imperial impulse can be heard in
the last letter Cpl. Kemaphoom Chanawongse sent home before
he and his Marine unit entered Iraq. Chanawongse joked that
his camp in Kuwait was like something out of ''M*A*S*H'' --
except that it would need to be called ''M*A*H*T*S*F'':
''marines are here to stay forever.'' 

But the question raised by Corporal Chanawongse's poignant
final joke -- he was killed a week later, when his
amphibious assault vehicle was blown up in Nasiriya -- is,
Are the marines in Iraq ''to stay forever''? No doubt it is
true, as President Bush said, that the America will ''honor
forever'' Corporal Chanawongse and the more than 120 other
service personnel so far killed in the conflict. Honored
forever, yes. But there forever? In many ways the biggest
mystery about the American occupation of Iraq is its
probable duration. Recent statements by members of the Bush
administration bespeak a time frame a lot closer to
ephemeral than eternal. As the president himself told the
Iraqi people in a television broadcast shortly after the
fall of Baghdad: ''The government of Iraq and the future of
your country will soon belong to you. . . . 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.'' 

What the president didn't make entirely clear was whether
the departing troops would be accompanied by the retired
Lt. Gen. Jay Garner and his ''Office of Reconstruction and
Humanitarian Assistance,'' newspeak for what would once
have been called Omgus -- the Office of Military Government
(United States). Nor was he very specific about when
exactly he expected to see the handover of power to the
''peaceful and representative government'' of Iraqis. 

But we know the kind of time frame the president has in
mind. In a prewar speech to the American Enterprise
Institute, Bush declared, ''We will remain in Iraq as long
as necessary and not a day more.'' It is striking that the
unit of measure he used was days. Speaking less than a week
before the fall of Baghdad, Paul Wolfowitz, the deputy
secretary of defense, suggested that Garner would be
running Iraq for at least six months. Other administration
spokesmen have mentioned two years as the maximum
transition period. When Garner himself was asked how long
he expected to be in charge, he talked about just three
months. 

If -- as more and more commentators claim -- America has
embarked on a new age of empire, it may turn out to be the
most evanescent empire in all history. Other empire
builders have fantasized about ruling subject peoples for a
thousand years. This is shaping up to be history's first
thousand-day empire. Make that a thousand hours. 

Let me come clean. I am a fully paid-up member of the
neoimperialist gang. Twelve years ago -- when it was not at
all fashionable to say so -- I was already arguing that it
would be ''desirable for the United States to depose''
tyrants like Saddam Hussein. ''Capitalism and democracy,''
I wrote, ''are not naturally occurring, but require strong
institutional foundations of law and order. The proper role
of an imperial America is to establish these institutions
where they are lacking, if necessary . . . by military
force.'' Today this argument is in danger of becoming
commonplace, at least among the set who read The National
Interest, the latest issue of which is practically an
American Empire Special Edition. Elsewhere, writers as
diverse as Max Boot, Andrew Bacevich and Thomas Donnelly
have drawn explicit (and in Boot's case, approving)
comparisons between the pax Britannica of Queen Victoria's
reign and the pax Americana they envisage in the reign of
George II. Boot has gone so far as to say that the United
States should provide places like Afghanistan and other
troubled countries with ''the sort of enlightened foreign
administration once provided by self-confident Englishmen
in jodhpurs and pith helmets.'' 

I agree. The British Empire has had a pretty lousy press
from a generation of ''postcolonial'' historians
anachronistically affronted by its racism. But the reality
is that the British were significantly more successful at
establishing market economies, the rule of law and the
transition to representative government than the majority
of postcolonial governments have been. The policy ''mix''
favored by Victorian imperialists reads like something just
published by the International Monetary Fund, if not the
World Bank: free trade, balanced budgets, sound money, the
common law, incorrupt administration and investment in
infrastructure financed by international loans. These are
precisely the things Iraq needs right now. If the
scary-sounding ''American empire'' can deliver them, then I
am all for it. The catch is whether or not America has the
one crucial character trait without which the whole
imperial project is doomed: stamina. The more time I spend
here in the United States, the more doubtful I become about
this. 

The United States unquestionably has the raw economic power
to build an empire -- more, indeed, than the United Kingdom
ever had at its disposal. In 1913, for example, Britain's
share of total world output was 8 percent, while the
equivalent figure for the United States in 1998 was 22
percent. There's ''soft'' power too -- the endlessly
innovative consumer culture that Joseph Nye argues is an
essential component of American power -- but at its core,
as we have seen in Afghanistan and now in Iraq, American
power is far from soft. It can be very, very hard. The
trouble is that it is ephemeral. It is not so much Power
Lite as Flash Power -- here today, with a spectacular bang,
but gone tomorrow. 

Besides the presidential time frame -- which is limited by
the four-year election cycle -- the most obvious symptom of
its short-windedness is the difficulty the American empire
finds in recruiting the right sort of people to run it.
America's educational institutions excel at producing young
men and women who are both academically and professionally
very well trained. It's just that the young elites have no
desire whatsoever to spend their lives running a
screwed-up, sun-scorched sandpit like Iraq. America's
brightest and best aspire not to govern Mesopotamia, but to
manage MTV; not to rule Hejaz, but to run a hedge fund; not
to be a C.B.E., or Commander of the British Empire, but to
be a C.E.O. And that, of course, is one reason so many of
the Americans currently in Iraq are first-generation
immigrants to the United States -- men like Cpl. Kemaphoom
Chanawongse. 


America's British allies have been here before. Having
defeated the previous Ottoman rulers in the First World
War, Britain ran Iraq as a ''mandate'' between 1920 and
1932. For the sake of form, the British installed one of
their Arab clients, the Hashemite prince Faisal, as king.
But there was no doubt who was really running the place.
Nor did the British make any bones about why they were
there. When two Standard Oil geologists entered Iraq on a
prospecting mission, the British civil commissioner handed
them over to the chief of police of Baghdad; in 1927 the
British takeover paid a handsome dividend when oil was
struck at Baba Gurgur, in the northern part of Iraq.
Although they formally relinquished power to the ruling
dynasty in 1932, the British remained informally in control
of Iraq throughout the 1930's. Indeed, they only really
lost their grip on Baghdad with the assassination of their
clients Faisal II and his prime minister, Nuri es-Said, in
the revolution of 1958. 

The crucial point is this: when the British went into Iraq,
they stuck around. To be precise, there were British
government representatives, military and civilian, in
Baghdad uninterruptedly for almost exactly 40 years. 

And that brings up a simple question: Who in today's United
States would like to be based in Baghdad as long as the
British were -- which would be from now until 2043? 

''Don't even go there!'' is one of those catch phrases you
hear every day in New York. Somehow it sums up exactly what
is flawed about the whole post-9/11 crypto-imperial
project. Despite their vast wealth and devastating
weaponry, Americans have no interest in the one crucial
activity without which a true empire cannot enduringly be
established. They won't actually go there. 


A British counterexample. Gertrude Bell was the first woman
to graduate from Oxford with a First Class degree. She
learned to speak Arabic during an archaeological visit to
Jerusalem in 1899 and, like T.E. Lawrence, became involved
in British military intelligence. In 1920, she was
appointed Oriental Secretary to the British High Commission
in Baghdad. She died there in 1926, having scarcely visited
England in the interim. ''I don't care to be in London
much,'' she wrote. ''I like Baghdad, and I like Iraq. It's
the real East, and it is stirring; things are happening
here, and the romance of it all touches me and absorbs
me.'' 

Dotted all over the British Empire were thousands of
''Orientalists'' like Gertrude Bell -- simultaneously
enamored of the exotic ''Other'' and yet dominant over it.
Her account of Faisal I's coronation in 1921 perfectly
illustrates their mode of operation: ''Then Saiyid Husain
stood up and read Sir Percy's proclamation in which he
announced that Faisal had been elected king by 96 percent
of the people in Mesopotamia, long live the King! with that
we stood up and saluted him, the national flag was broken
on the flagstaff by his side and the band played 'God Save
the King' -- they have no national anthem yet.'' 

The British regarded long-term occupation as an inherent
part of their self-appointed ''civilizing mission.'' This
did not mean forever. The assumption was that British rule
would end once a country had been sufficiently
''civilized'' -- read: anglicized -- to ensure the
continued rule of law and operation of free markets (not to
mention the playing of cricket). But that clearly meant
decades, not days; when the British intervened in a country
like Iraq, they simply didn't have an exit strategy. The
only issue was whether to rule directly -- installing a
British governor -- or indirectly, with a British
''secretary'' offering ''advice'' to a local puppet like
Faisal. 

In other words, the British did go there. Between 1900 and
1914, 2.6 million Britons left the United Kingdom for
imperial destinations (by 1957 the total had reached nearly
6 million). Admittedly, most of them preferred to migrate
to the temperate regions of a select few colonies --
Canada, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa -- that
soon became semiautonomous ''dominions.'' Nevertheless, a
significant number went to the much less hospitable climes
of Asia and Africa. At the end of the 1930's, for example,
the official Colonial Service in Africa was staffed by more
than 7,500 expat Brits. The substantial expatriate
communities they established were crucial to the operation
of the British Empire. They provided the indispensable
''men on the spot'' who learned the local languages,
perhaps adopted some local customs -- though not usually to
the fatal extent of ''going native'' -- and acted as the
intermediaries between a remote imperial authority and the
indigenous elites upon whose willing collaboration the
empire depended. 

Expat life was not all tiffin and gin. As Rudyard Kipling
saw it, governing India was a hard slog: ''Year by year
England sends out fresh drafts for the first fighting-line,
which is officially called the Indian Civil Service. These
die, or kill themselves by overwork, or are worried to
death or broken in health and hope.'' Yet this was a
service that could confidently expect to attract the very
brightest and best products of the elite British
universities. Of 927 recruits to the Colonial Service
between 1927 and 1929, nearly half had been to Oxford or
Cambridge. The proportion in the Indian Civil Service was
even higher. 

Why were so many products of Britain's top universities
willing to spend their entire working lives so far from the
land of their birth, running infernally hot, disease-ridden
countries? Why, to pick a typical example, did one Evan
Machonochie, an Oxford graduate who passed the grueling
Indian Civil Service exam, set off for Bengal in 1887 and
spend the next 40 years in India? One clue lies in his
Celtic surname. The Scots were heavily overrepresented not
just in the colonies of white settlement, but also in the
commercial and professional elites of cities like Calcutta
and Hong Kong and Cape Town. The Irish too played a
disproportionate role in enforcing British rule, supplying
a huge proportion of the officers and men of the British
army. Not for nothing is Kipling's representative Indian
Army N.C.O. named Mulvaney. For young men growing up on the
rainy, barren and poorer fringes of the United Kingdom, the
empire offered opportunities. 

Yet economics alone cannot explain what motivated
Machonochie or Bell. The imperial impulse arose from a
complex of emotions: racial superiority, yes, but also
evangelical zeal; profit, perhaps, but also a sincere
belief that spreading ''commerce, Christianity and
civilization'' was not just in Britain's interest but in
the interests of her colonial subjects too. 


The contrast with today's ''wannabe'' imperialists in the
United States -- call them ''nation-builders'' if you
prefer euphemism -- could scarcely be more stark. Five
points stand out. 

First, not only do the overwhelming majority of Americans
have no desire to leave the United States; millions of
non-Americans are also eager to join them here. Unlike the
United Kingdom a century ago, the United States is an
importer of people, with a net immigration rate of 3.5 per
1,000 and a total foreign-born population of 32.5 million
(more than 1 in 10 residents of the United States). 

Second, when Americans do opt to reside abroad, they tend
to stick to the developed world. As of 1999, there were an
estimated 3.8 million Americans living abroad. That sounds
like a lot. But it is a little more than a tenth the number
of the foreign-born population in the United States. And of
these expat Americans, almost three-quarters were living in
the two other Nafta countries (more than one million in
Mexico, 687,700 in Canada) or in Europe (just over a
million). Of the 294,000 living in the Middle East, nearly
two-thirds were in Israel. A mere 37,500 were in Africa. 

Third, whereas British imperial forces were mostly based
abroad, most of the American military is normally stationed
at home. Even the B-2 Stealth bombers that pounded Serbia
into quitting Kosovo in 1999 were flying out of Knob
Noster, Mo. And it's worth remembering that 40 percent of
American overseas military personnel are located in Western
Europe, no fewer than 71,000 of them in Germany. Thus,
whereas the British delighted in building barracks in
hostile territories precisely in order to subjugate them,
Americans today locate a quarter of their overseas troops
in what is arguably the world's most pacifist country. 

Fourth, when Americans do live abroad they generally don't
stay long and don't integrate much, preferring to inhabit
Mini Me versions of America, ranging from military bases to
five-star ''international'' (read: American) hotels. When I
visited Lakenheath air base last year, one minute I was in
the middle of rural Cambridgeshire, flat and ineffably
English, the next minute, as I passed through the main
gate, everything -- right down to the absurdly large
soft-drink dispensers -- was unmistakably American. 

The fifth and final contrast with the British experience is
perhaps the most telling. It is the fact that the products
of America's elite educational institutions are the people
least likely to head overseas, other than on flying visits
and holidays. The Americans who serve the longest tours of
duty are the volunteer soldiers, a substantial proportion
of whom are African-Americans (12.9 per cent of the
population, 25.4 per cent of the Army Reserve). It's just
possible that African-Americans will turn out to be the
Celts of the American empire, driven overseas by the
comparatively poor opportunities at home. Indeed, if the
occupation of Iraq is to be run by the military, then it
can hardly fail to create career opportunities for the
growing number of African-American officers in the Army.
The military's most effective press spokesman during the
war, Brig. Gen. Vincent K. Brooks, exemplifies the type. 

The British, however, were always wary about giving the
military too much power in their imperial administration.
Their parliamentarians had read enough Roman history to
want to keep generals subordinate to civilian governors.
The ''brass hats'' were there to inflict the Victorian
equivalent of ''shock and awe'' whenever the ''natives''
grew restive. Otherwise, colonial government was a matter
for Oxbridge-educated, frock-coated mandarins. 

Now, ask yourself in light of this: how many members of
Harvard's or Yale's class of 2003 are seriously considering
a career in the postwar administration of Iraq? The number
is unlikely to be very high. In 1998/99 there were 47,689
undergraduate course registrations at Yale, of which just
335 (less than 1 percent) were for courses in Near Eastern
languages and civilizations. There was just one, lone
undergraduate senior majoring in the subject (compared with
17 doing film studies). If Samuel Huntington is right and
we are witnessing a ''clash of civilizations,'' America's
brightest students show remarkably little interest in the
civilization of the other side. 

After graduation, too, the members of America's academic
elite generally subscribe to the ''Wizard of Oz''
principle: ''There's no place like home.'' According to a
1998 survey, there were 134,798 registered Yale alumni. Of
these, little more than 5 percent lived outside the United
States. A mere handful -- roughly 70 -- lived in Arab
countries. 

Sure, the bolder products of the Kennedy School may be
eager for ''tours of duty'' in postwar Baghdad. And a few
of the star Harvard economists may want to do for Iraq what
a couple of their professors did for post-Soviet Russia
back in the early 90's. But what that means is flying back
and forth, writing a bunch of papers on ''transition
economics,'' pocketing some fat consultancy fees and then
heading for home. 

As far as America's 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 the first
reunion. 


It can of course be argued that Americans' tendency to pay
flying visits to their putative imperium -- rather than
settling there -- is 

just a function of technology. Back in the 1870's, by which
time the British had largely completed their global network
of railways and steamships, it still took a minimum of 80
days to go around the world, as Jules Verne celebrated in
the story of Phileas Fogg. Today it can be done in a day. 

The problem is that with the undoubted advantages of modern
technology comes the disadvantage of disconnection. For
example, Secretary of State Colin Powell was criticized
earlier this year for conducting his foreign policy by
telephone. It was noted that Powell had traveled abroad
twice in 2003 already, but one trip was to Davos,
Switzerland (Jan. 25-26), and the other was to the Far East
(Feb. 21-25). We can only guess at how much more Secretary
Powell might have achieved if he had paid a visit to Paris
-- or Ankara -- last month. And it is not just the big guns
who seem happiest close to the Beltway. Recall, too, how
after 9/11 the C.I.A. had to scour American colleges to
find anyone capable of speaking fluent Pashto. It turned
out that most C.I.A. officers preferred life in Virginia to
what the British once called the North-West Frontier. (Have
you seen the state of the restrooms up the Khyber Pass?) 

One of this month's most disturbing pieces of news was that
Garner's team at the Office of Reconstruction and
Humanitarian Assistance would include people from the State
Department and the U.S. Agency for International
Development ''who have worked in a similar capacity in the
former Yugoslavia, in Haiti and in Somalia.'' Considering
the pitifully short duration of American interventions in
those countries, their dismal failure in two of three cases
and the vast differences between Iraq and all three, this
is scarcely encouraging. Even more surreal was the
disclosure that the Office of Reconstruction and
Humanitarian Assistance has been hiring British Gurkhas to
provide security around their Kuwait base. A nice imperial
touch, granted, but a bunch of Gurkhas are hardly going to
blend in discreetly in downtown Baghdad. 

What, then, about the much-vaunted role of nongovernmental
organizations? Might they provide the men and women on the
ground who are so conspicuously hard to find in government
service? 

It is true that a substantial number of Americans are
currently working overseas for NGO's. An American friend of
mine recently startled his friends -- not to mention his
wife -- by quitting his artist's studio and his teaching
job in London, where he has spent much of the last 20
years, to take a position with a French-run aid agency in
one of the most dysfunctional of Central Africa's wretched
republics. Perhaps he will find the new life he seeks
there. But most Americans who do this kind of thing start
younger and spend little more than a year overseas. For
many it is not much more than a politically correct ''gap
year'' before starting at graduate school. 

Nor should we pin too much hope on the aid agencies that,
like the missionaries of old, can 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 that
around every international crisis swarms a cloud of aid
workers, whose efforts are seldom entirely complementary.
If Garner's team successfully imposes law and order in
Iraq, economic life will swiftly pick up and much aid will
be superfluous. If it fails to impose order, aid workers
will get themselves killed -- as they frequently do in
lawless Chechnya. 


The dilemma is perhaps insoluble. Americans yearn for the
quiet life at home. But since 9/11 they have felt impelled
to grapple with rogue regimes in the hope that their
overthrow will do something to reduce the threat of future
terrorist attacks. The trouble is that if they do not
undertake these interventions with conviction and
commitment, they are unlikely to achieve their stated
goals. Anyone who thinks Iraq can become a stable democracy
in a matter of months -- whether 3, 6 or 24 -- is simply
fantasizing. 

Where, then, is the new imperial elite to come from? Not, I
hope, exclusively from the reserve army of unemployed
generals with good Pentagon connections. The work needs to
begin, and swiftly, to encourage American students at the
country's leading universities to think more seriously
about careers overseas -- and by overseas I do not mean in
London. Are there, for example, enough good scholarships to
attract undergraduates and graduates to study Arabic? How
many young men and women currently graduate with a
functioning grasp of Chinese? That, after all, is the
language of this country's nearest imperial rival, and the
power President Bush urgently needs to woo if he is to deal
effectively with North Korea. 

After Kipling, John Buchan was perhaps the most readable
writer produced by British imperialism. In his 1916
thriller ''Greenmantle,'' he memorably personifies imperial
Britain in the person of Sandy Arbuthnot -- an Orientalist
so talented 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'' and ''a pair
of full 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. 

Well, now the Blenkirons have seen something gorier than an
election. But will it whet their appetites for an empire in
the British mode? Only, I think, if Americans radically
rethink their attitude to the world beyond their borders.
Until there are more Americans not just willing but eager
to shoulder the ''nation-builder's burden,'' adventures
like the current 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 transform into Arbuthnot? Perhaps.
After all, in the years after the Second World War, the
generation that had just missed the 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
constrained by the need to shore up the local potentates
more or less covertly. (The low quality of the locals
backed by the United States didn't help, either.) Today,
the same fiction that underpinned American strategy in
Vietnam -- that the United States was not trying to
resurrect French colonial rule in Indochina -- is peddled
in Washington to rationalize what is going on in Iraq.
Sure, it may look like the resurrection of British colonial
rule in Iraq, but honestly, all we want to do is give the
Iraqi people democracy and then go home. 

So long as the American empire dare not speak its own name
-- so long as it continues this tradition of organized
hypocrisy -- today's ambitious young men and women will
take one look at the prospects for postwar Iraq and say
with one voice, ''Don't even go there.'' 

Americans need to go there. If the best and brightest
insist on staying home, today's unspoken imperial project
may end -- unspeakably -- tomorrow. 




Niall Ferguson is Herzog professor of financial history at
the Stern School of Business, New York University, and a
senior research fellow of Jesus College, Oxford. He is the
author of ''Empire: The Rise and Demise of the British
World Order and the Lessons for Global Power.''

http://www.nytimes.com/2003/04/27/magazine/27EMPIRE.html?ex=1052437130&ei=1&en=84e2ac3595454265



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