Dumb Americana (Puke Alert)

Nothing could be more indicative of America’s innocence abroad than the outraged statement by one of the officers in Operation Iraqi Freedom.

“We were attacked by militias who were not even wearing uniform!” he complained, “they were in civilian clothes!” Really? Civilian clothes? Shock and horror! Did the Iraqis forget to do their laundry during the bombings? Did they forget to polish their boots before strolling out to face the B-52s?

After all, when the forces of “good” are trying hard to defeat the forces of “evil”, the least the forces of “evil” can do is be well-dressed! American naivete would be funny if it weren’t so worrying.

If America wants to be a good imperialist, perhaps it might turn its attention to the lives and careers of the Great Gamers of the British empire, who, exploitative colonialists as they were, still brought detailed knowledge and human engagement to the imperialist project. “The Great Game” is the name given to the period of intense competition between Britain and Russia in the 19th and early 20th centuries, for control of the interiors of Asia.

Charles Napier, Francis Younghusband, Charles “Chinese” Gordon among others were all imperialist adventurers of the time of the Great Game. And how different they were were from the hard-faced techno-warriors of the US! For the Great Gamers foreign adventures became journeys of personal transformation.

Sir Charles Napier conquered the tribes of Sindh but he laid down formidable systems of civic administration and produced a voluminous collection of personal letters giving insights into the lives of the emirs. Durand, British agent at Gilgit in 1889-94, set out in the quest for a “natural border” for India and established the Durand Line. Durand has left a painstaking memoir where he has described the horses, wild flowers, rope bridges, polo matches and hunting dogs of the area.

By contrast Tommy Franks can barely pronounce Umm Qasar, CNN anchors often say “Kuwait” instead of Baghdad and have only recently discovered the phenomenon of the suicide bomber.

The commissioner sahibs of the British civil service were also imperialists. They quelled riots with a glare and silenced subordinates with a word and held down an empire for 200 years. The collective works of India’s British officers are, as Clive Dewey has written, “monuments more lasting than brass.”

The sahibs measured the mountains, carried out linguistic surveys, wrote directories of castes and tribes and produced gazettes and censuses. By contrast, what do the Americans have? A robot-like Donald Rumsfeld who utters the word “Iraqi” as if it means an alien species. Colin Powell who promises to “travel more” to find out about the world. Bush, who has travelled out of America only twice in his entire life.

In fact, the wealth of American intellectual life in its universities stands in sharp contrast to the provincial insularity of its leadership. Morris Berman, professor at MIT, writes in Twilight of American Culture that America has fallen into an irretrievable “dark age”. The “dumbest” president in the history of the US presides over a society where the number of people reading a daily newspaper has halved since 1965. In Berman’s survey, 40 per cent Americans couldn’t name the US’s World War II enemies and 120 million Americans had the cognition of an 11-year old.

In the massively popular television series Cheers, all those who have any intellectual interests are seen as pompous and pretentious, “while folk who don’t know their ass from their elbow are seen as warm, authentic, the real grit of America,” Berman writes. America is in the grip of the dumbing down epidemic and can’t produce any scholar-adventurers.

The 19th century imperialists were rapacious but they fostered some understanding between wildly divergent cultures. Philip Mason echoes the thoughts of British ICS officers in India in The Men Who Ruled India: “Impossible, once the smell of canvas and smoky fires was in your nostrils, a horse between your knees on a dewy morning, impossible to think of Muhammad Khan or Sohan Singh as ‘a native’. No, he was just a man... a man far more real than the shadowy abstraction known as the government.”

Of course, Victoria’s loyal officers ruled a formal empire and the sahibs sat in seats of administrative power for three and a half centuries. American dominance is hardly direct or formal. Yet inbuilt in the British imperial project was a broadening of the mind for the imperialists, an exploration of new vistas. By contrast, the Americans seem only interested in imposing the ‘Middle America mentality’ on the world. Listen to the expressionless assistant secretary of defense, Victoria Clarke, with her sterile phrases like “models” of “upscaling” and “downscaling” and her “flow of force” and “area denials” and it doesn’t seem as if there are human beings involved in this war, only an avalanche of strategic-speak and a chilling disinterest in “other cultures”.

No wonder Americans have only been raiders of other countries. The transformation of Saigon into a giant R&R zone for American GIs was about the only positive US legacy of the Vietnam war.

Compare Colin Powell to Francis Younghusband. The latter was an agent of empire who travelled to Lhasa to force the treaty of Tibet on the ruler and weld Tibet to British dominions.

Yet Younghusband underwent a religious transformation and also became a supporter of Indian independence. T.E. Lawrence or “Lawrence of Arabia” also served British expansion, but ended up becoming deeply emotionally attached to prince Faisal. Although Lawrence is today criticised for his paternalistic “civilising mission” he immersed himself in Arab culture and thought. Can you imagine Powell ever admitting that he is drawn to any part of the world other than the US?

The obvious difference between the Great Gamers of the 19th century and the Americans today is of course the explosion of technology and information. But it seems that excessive information has torn people further apart than bring them closer. The American ‘foreign’ project is imprisoned in antiseptic strategic-speak and think-tank theorising.

The Great Gamers, by contrast, were grassroots travellers who tried to learn as many languages as they could. Perhaps Gen. Tommy Franks might learn a bit of Arabic and Rumsfeld could cast off his grey suit and try on a jalabeya.

Gosh, where to start! It looks like the whining scum bags have stopped blaming "colonalism"(Ms Ghose even praises Great Britain for bringing the wealth of knowledge and the game plan), and have now found the new enemy, the Grea... no, the Dumb Satan.

wow somebody needs to take this stupid wench aside and explained to her that the coaltion forces are kicking butt and taking names over there! what a moron.

Yeah. For goodness sake; when you kick ass, break things and waste bad guys, at least know how to pronounce the names of the people and places you are hammering.

Great Gamers of the British empire, who, exploitative colonialists as they were, still brought detailed knowledge and human engagement to the imperialist project

So her basic complaint is we should understand them a bit better before we kick their ass?

How long does it take to understand a culture that does this:

Although these are Palestinians, don't think that similar or worse things have not happened in Baghdad

I had to stop every now and then while reading this crap to control my laughter. This moron lives in a country that if not for colonization by England would still be living in the Dark Ages. When India arrives at one one-hundredth of the contributions America has made to the world in medicine, technology, nutrition, and defense of freedom, I'll start taking comments by supreme morons like this writer seriously. These idiots are gnats buzzing around the eagle. They can't do much harm, but they sure can be irritating.

The point everyone seems to be missing here is that Bush and his trigger-happy team are hypocrites when they claim that they are waging war for the benefit of the Iraqis. The comparisons with British colonialists were meant to contrast the two approaches . They took pains to immerse themselves in the cultures of the lands they were trying to colonize/"liberate" and eventually became sensitive to the locals. Contrast this with Bush and his marauding band of mercenaries sweeping through a land as old as mankind itself without any knowledge of its terrain, history or customs and proudly proclaiming themselves to be liberators when they can't even pronounce the names of the places they "liberate"/destroy.

Did you ever consider the fact that "Bush and his Mercenaries" are not trying to CONQUER these lands but make them democratic. Now try reading the article with that thought and see how dumb it is..

There need to be more speakers of Arabic in the US Military. That is the only good thing to take away from this stupid rant.

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