Posted on 09/14/2007 10:53:26 AM PDT by neverdem
The ethnic origins of General David Petraeus are apparently Dutch, which is a shame because there’s something sonorously classical about the family name of the commander of the US forces in Iraq. When you discover that his father was christened Sixtus, the fantasy really takes flight. Somewhere in the recesses of the brain, where memory mingles hazily with imagination, I fancy I can recall toiling through a schoolboy Latin textbook that documented the progress of one Petraeus Sixtus as he triumphantly extended the imperium romanum across some dusty plain in Asia Minor.
The fantasy is not wholly inapt, of course. General Petraeus was the star turn in Washington this week, testifying before Congress about the progress of the surge by US forces in Iraq. Some evidently see America’s wearying detention in the quagmire of Mesopotamia as a classic example of imperial overreach of the kind that is thought to have doomed Rome. Who knows? Perhaps 1,500 years ago one of the forebears of General Petraeus was hauled before the Senate to explain the progress of some surge of Roman forces to defeat the insurgents in Germania.
The US is indeed in the middle of another gloomy ride around the “America as Rome” theme park of half-understood history lessons. The pessimists, equipped with their Fodor’s guidebooks, their summer school diplomas, and their DVD collection of Cecil B. DeMille movies, are convinced it’s all up for the people who march today under the standard of the eagle, just as it was for their predecessors. They see military defeat abroad and political decay at home; they watch as far-flung peoples chafe at the dictates of imperial rule and as the plebs at home grow metaphorically hungry from misgovernment. The only real uncertainty in their minds is who will play the Vandals and lay waste to Washington?
It’s a familiar and very tired analogy, of course. From the moment that America became top nation in the middle of the last century, people have been racing to be contemporary Gibbons, chronicling the decline and fall even as it was supposedly happening. Not the least of the objections to their efforts is that Rome’s domination of the known world lasted about 500 years, and survived more than the odd thrashing or two at the hands of barbarian tribes. In modern America, it’s always the same. Every lost battle or turbulent day on the foreign exchanges and the obituary writers are sharpening their pencils.
The bigger objection is that America is not much of an empire after all. No one pays tribute, no one declares allegiance to Caesar, and what kind of empire is it that owes its foreign subjects a couple of trillion dollars? Still, as Gibbon himself noted in The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire: “There exists in human nature a strong propensity to depreciate the advantages, and to magnify the evils, of the present times.” Which brings us back neatly to General Petraeus and the Iraq war.
The antiwar crowd’s efforts to depreciate America’s efforts in the Middle East hit a new low on the first day of the long-awaited congressional testimony, when MoveOn.org, the self-appointed leftwing base of the Democratic Party, took out a full-page advertisement in The New York Times that called the commander “General Betray Us” and accused him of lying about the progress of the surge. As stunts go, it was as startlingly offensive as it was politically self-defeating.
Not many Americans – not even those who oppose the war – like the idea of calling their generals traitors. They have a vaguely disconcerting sense that they know where that leads – and it’s not Rome but a rather shorter-lived empire of the 20th century that springs to mind. And so it had the signal effect this week of forcing Democrats to distance themselves from the antiwar movement. Most of them – especially those who harbour presidential ambitions – had to go out of their way during the hearings to emphasise their admiration for the general and his soldiers.
This is good. You can argue about the surge. The evidence is encouraging that the increased US military effort, together with a change in tactics, has reduced the violence in Iraq. On the other hand there are legitimate questions about the long-term viability of the strategy. But if America is to emerge from Iraq with a renewed sense of its global role, you shouldn’t really debase the motives of those who lead US forces there. Because in the end what they are doing is deeply honourable – fighting to destroy an enemy that delights in killing women and children; rebuilding a nation ruined by rapine and savagery; trying to bridge sectarian divides that have caused more misery in the world than the US could manage if it lasted a thousand years.
It is helpful to think about Iraq this way. Imagine if the US had never been there; and that this sectarian strife had broken out in any case – as, one day it surely would, given the hatreds engendered by a thousand years of Muslim history and the efforts of Saddam Hussein.
What would we in the West think about it? What would we think of as our responsibilities? There would be some who would want to wash their hands of it. There would be others who would think that UN resolutions and diplomatic initiatives would be enough to salve our consciences if not to stop the slaughter.
But many of us surely would think we should do something about it – as we did in the Balkans more than a decade ago – and as, infamously, we failed to do in Africa at the same time. And we would know that, for all our high ideals and our soaring rhetoric, there would be only one country with the historical commitment to make massive sacrifices in the defence of the lives and liberty of others, the leadership to mobilise efforts to relieve the suffering and, above all, the economic and military wherewithal to make it happen.
That’s the only really workable analogy between the US and Rome. When Rome fell, the world went dark for the best part of a millennium. America may not be an empire. But whatever it is, for the sake of humanity, pray it lasts at least as long as Rome.
I have never doubted President Bush's decision to invade Iraq for a second.
To think what our world would be like now if we had NOT invaded Iraq and taken down Saddam....
Now THAT would be a mess.
Thank God for President Bush.
Agree that popular theories and analogies to Rome are almost always simplistic BUT
There are great lessons about history, war, leadership, morality, and human nature to be learned from Gibbons (The great historian, not the monkeys).
Cindy Sheehan: wakeup call. Cindy Sheehan ...
It is helpful to think about Iraq this way. Imagine if the US had never been there; and that this sectarian strife had broken out in any case – as, one day it surely would, given the hatreds engendered by a thousand years of Muslim history and the efforts of Saddam Hussein.
What would we in the West think about it? What would we think of as our responsibilities? There would be some who would want to wash their hands of it. There would be others who would think that UN resolutions and diplomatic initiatives would be enough to salve our consciences if not to stop the slaughter.
There are ALREADY those among us, who, either by virtue of utter cowardice, or outright self-loathing, or at best, well-intentioned naivete, would accommodate such horrors.
And we would know that, for all our high ideals and our soaring rhetoric, there would be only one country with the historical commitment to make massive sacrifices in the defence of the lives and liberty of others, the leadership to mobilise efforts to relieve the suffering and, above all, the economic and military wherewithal to make it happen.
And THAT is why America, naysayers notwithstanding, IS an empire after all.
for the sake of humanity, pray [America] lasts at least as long as Rome.
For the sake of HUMANITY, not for the sake of America.
Compared to the height of Roman civilization, the world did really ‘go dark’ for quite some time, as de-facto warlords ruled small patches of territorry constantly warring amongst each other. It was not until the reneissance that the light of civilization truly emerged agian.
"Show me just what Mohammed brought that was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached." - Manuel II Palelologus
Sadly, there are no shortage of FReepers who understand history so poorly that they constantly analogize the US to Rome.
This is simplistic.
There was a Carolingian Renaissance in the IXth century which united vast swaths of Europe under a single government.
Italy in the 1100s and 1200s enjoyed a standard of living far above that of the average Italian of the Roman period.
The "light of civilization" was doing quite well long before the Renaissance.
Surely you are familiar with Anselm? Or Dante? Or Cimabue? Or Giotto? Or Machaut?
Long before the Renaissance, medieval Europeans had created complex financial and legal systems, composed breathtaking polyphonic music and engaged in philosophical speculation far above the accomplishments of the late Roman period.
To generally analogize the two is far too simplistic. That is not to say there aren’t things to be learned from the fall of the worlds first real attempt at some form of democracy on a large scale.
There are plenty of analogies between Rome and the United States. They are just not the ones people usually try to make, basically what goldstategop points out. The similarities between the two are far to granular to simply say “The US is like Rome” without getting pretty specific and excluding the whole “empire” notion. That was the rise of Rome. I would submit that what similarities there are would mostly be found in the fall of Rome and deal mostly with it’s society than its government or military.
Tell that to our Congressional Democrats.
Most analogizers on this front love to equate Rome's political authority over foreign nations as somehow equivalent to America's alliances with foreign nations - which makes no sense.
Most analogizers on this front also like to equate Rome's exaction of tribute from subject peoples to the free commerce we enjoy with other sovereign nations - also preposterous.
One can point to the decline of Rome's moral fiber in its decadence and the moral issues the US deals with in our prosperity, but this is endemic to human nature.
A lot of the civilized world did, however, go quite dark -
I found this fascinating -
http://www.amazon.com/Fall-Rome-End-Civilization/dp/0192807285
“The “light of civilization” was doing quite well long before the Renaissance.”
Certainly. A millenium is stretching things, 500-700 years is more probably correct as a period of recovery to conditions more or less matching those of late antiquity. But it is certainly true that in terms of population, economy and general culture the decline was profound.
I found this very interesting -
http://www.amazon.com/Fall-Rome-End-Civilization/dp/0192807285
Not to mention those masterpieces of Gothic architecture, bestriding the landscape of the Middle ages like armies armed with a thousand spears, the Cathedrals.
The climate collapse from 1350 until the 1600's, not to mention the Black Death - now there was something like a dark age, a double whammy that few civilisations could have survived. Civilisation did seem to go a little dim right about then. But no civilisation until the Renaissance? Hardly.
The United States kills off more than a million of its own children every year, while at the same time we allow a million foreign invaders to cross our borders every year.
I don't know if there's anything "Roman" or "declining" about that, but it sure as hell is symptomatic of a deranged social order. I suspect the modern age has brought about a social/political climate where the process of a collapsing empire will occur at a far more rapid pace today than it did 1500 years ago.
Too bad that dumb ass Buchanan and his ilk and their constant blather about American Empire don’t realize that
The analogy isn’t based on foreign military exploits, but on the fall of a decadent empire.
Well there sure wasn’t a lot of progress technically medically infrastructure wise given it was almost 800 years
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