Posted on 03/20/2003 7:27:41 AM PST by SJackson
America on the Decline Fawaz Turki disinherited@yahoo.com
President George Bush and his principal allies — the whole three of them, Britain, Spain and Portugal — arranged an emergency weekend summit in the Azores to discuss their failure to achieve United Nations approval authorizing war, in effect a summit designed to set a course toward imminent military action, since it was now “too late for Iraq to disarm, too late for further weapons inspections and too late for more diplomacy.” And in a poll released last Friday by Fox News, 71 percent of Americans agreed with the statement.
What Bush’s administration needs at this time is a Copernicus, so to speak, to tell it that the United States is not really at the center of the universe. And what those Americans who just want to “get it over and done with” need to do is re-read Paul Kennedy’s “The Rise and Fall of Great Powers” (1987).
You would not have imagined a seemingly obtuse work like that to head the best-seller lists and to enjoy critical success as well, becoming the talk of editorialists, columnists and critics everywhere.
To resurrect these declinists’ thesis in context of impending war in the Middle East and America’s isolation in the world today is to rescue America, as it were, from its illusion of omnipotence.
If those 71 percent of Americans, who believe that their leaders should get this war over and done with already, are convinced that their troops could effortlessly invade Iraq, get Saddam Hussein, impose regime change, “export democracy” to the entire region, and be back home in a jiffy, then they ought to think again.
The case of “rebuilding” Iraq under American occupation, benign and well-intentioned though it may be, will not be like that of rebuilding, say, a prostrate Japan and a devastated Europe in the wake of World War II. American occupiers of Japan wielded absolute power, and Gen. MacArthur could do there what he wished, expecting a defeated, isolated nation to go through the motions of what was demanded of it. And the transformation of Europe, including Germany, under the Marshall Plan, was even less remarkable in the sense that the population of the continent, who shared with the United States its intellectual and political tradition, welcomed American occupation as an instrument of change and postwar prosperity.
The case of Iraq, and the Middle East in general, however, is entirely different. The US will not succeed there in effecting, or imposing, regime changes on a region with an overwhelmingly hostile tradition of opposition to outside colonial interference, a region already smarting under the humiliation of American blatant support of Israeli designs on it.
America, in short, will not find easy to create by fiat a “free, democratic Iraq,” and to regroup the cultural, political and social values of a part of the world vehemently opposed to coercion and military force by outsiders aimed at reshaping its destiny at this late date in the postcolonial era. This is not the early 1950s, when the US, through its great wealth and military prowess, towered over the world like a colossus.
Thus for leaders in Washington today to continue acting as if the world has not changed, and the trust in them by the international community has not dried up, is to invite catastrophe — and to accelerate that process of descent that the declinists have predicted for it. It is folly for the US, in other words, not to recognize the finite nature of the power it can wield, and the limitations it should place on its ambitions to spur on a worldwide “democratic revolution.” It was imperial overstretch, the declinists continue to assert, that was behind the long saga of the rise and fall of empires, from ancient Egypt to colonial Britain.
To these astute scholars, including Walter Meade, who in an interview with the Washington Post last Sunday compared this moment in American history to the birth of the Cold War era around 1948, the exercise of American power today could be leading America to wanton arrogance, or hubris, hubris to overreaching, and overreaching to collapse. To a world, including our part of it, that considers the US a country unilaterally taking upon itself the task of subduing other countries to forcibly “democratize” them, there is confirmation of the declinists’ convictions about the inevitable fate of the American polity.
As Walter Meade put it, in his seminal work, “Mortal Splendor (1987): “The tides of history created the American empire ... Once tides begin to flow against the empire, no president and no congress could stop them.”
And, trust me on this one, neither could the name change that frivolous legislators give fried potatoes.
Arab News Opinion 20 March 2003
That's right, Mecca is the center.
I think he meant to write "abstruse"...But perhaps he was right the first time.
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