The new American era of peace through power

National Post columnist Robert Fulford explains how the war in Iraq marks a turning point in world history.

A monstrous bronze version of Saddam Hussein, its elephantine arm outstretched, towered above Paradise Square in the core of Baghdad, one of the hundreds of self-glorifying symbols that he installed in his capital and across the country to tell the world that he was omnipresent as well as all-powerful, the only man of consequence in the Republic of Iraq. It stood there until late yesterday. Then, with Saddam himself still nowhere in sight, the citizens and their liberators, the U.S. Marines, brought it crashing down, creating an image that will go into TV documentaries and history books as the public emblem of the downfall that has so quickly overtaken Saddam and all his friends and acolytes and sympathizers.

The jubilant Iraqis who quickly climbed onto the fallen monument, then severed the head and dragged it through the streets, knew they were celebrating a great moment in their history. Surely they also knew they owed it to the Americans, without whom they would have suffered indefinitely under Saddam and his offspring, with 24 years of wretched servitude under the Baath Party stretching as far into the future as Saddam's bronze arm was pointing. Had the Americans and the British waited for the French, the Russians and the rest, Saddam would have maintained his power while his terrified people starved and he played infinite variations on the game of UN arms inspection.

But did the icon-smashers in Paradise Square also understand that their moment of salvation was a turning point in world history? Did they imagine that it predicted a new era for all of us?

Baghdad has often made history. In the 8th century, Caliph al-Mansour chose it as his capital, and Harun ar-Rashid ruled the Arabian empire from Baghdad until 809, compiling the wealth described in the Thousand and One Nights. Rulers and their soldiers have marched through it ever since -- Süleyman the Magnificent took it from the Persians in the 1530s. But its capture by the United States may well turn out to be the most momentous chapter in its spectacular story.

It was a bracing moment of reality, one of those abrupt breaks in time that signal change and revelation, like the tearing down of the Berlin Wall in 1989. This time, the revelation concerned American power, America's international leadership, and a reality that most of the world -- including much of America -- has been trying for more than a decade to ignore. We have done everything that we could to avoid understanding the real nature of global politics as it now exists. After Baghdad, however, self-delusion will have to fade.

The truth now stares us in the face: The Americans are the only world power, they can and will act alone when they consider it necessary, and they will likely hold that position and maintain that stance for many years to come. In fact, what once seemed impossible now seems quite conceivable -- that in world politics the 21st century, just like the 20th, will be led by America.

Last summer, a Saudi Arabian mass-circulation daily, Okaz, said that the United States was seeking hegemony -- that is, dominance -- over the whole Middle East, not just the toppling of the Iraq regime. That statement was framed as an accusation, but in fact it was no more than the truth. By the middle of 2002, the United States was developing a global strategy unlike any in its history, a strategy reflecting the new American consciousness that emerged after Sept. 11, 2001. That event made Americans think in a fresh way about the dangers facing them and about the uses of American power. It has now led them toward a revised understanding of their place in history.

Much as many Americans dislike it and some may hate it bitterly, they have now assumed responsibility for global security. Their enemies will now find new reasons to call them imperialists, and much of what they do will parallel the actions of empires in the past. But an American empire will radically differ from such past empires as Rome's or Britain's or Spain's. The Americans will demand dominance but shy away from the responsibilities of ownership and political control that the Romans, the British and the Spaniards took for granted.

The Americans have never been natural imperialists and show no signs of changing. Creation of an imperial caste of administrators and soldiers remains, so far, beyond their desires and capabilities. For 150 years or more, the British spoke of their empire as a place to live and flourish, and rear their children -- in 1927, Virginia Woolf wrote of a woman who "dreams of living in India, married to ... some empire builder," a typical figure in middle-class English life.

The Americans have no such tradition. They are unwilling and perhaps unable to make their foreign dependencies into homes. Notoriously, Americans who are sent abroad immediately want to know when they can go home. Natural imperialists, on the other hand, enjoy the foreign lands that they exploit or civilize, or both.

Understandably, Americans want peace and security, at low cost and little danger, which is just what Canadians want. The difference is that, because the Americans exist, we Canadians can have this free blessing and take it as only our due, a certainty we have happily expressed through most of our foreign-policy decisions since 1968, the start of the Trudeau era. The Americans, however, have learned from their teacher Osama bin Laden that they can't have the security they want without great cost, in money and sometimes in blood.

They are still recovering from the surprise they felt as this fact struck home, still having trouble coming to terms with the demands that this era has placed upon them. In the Cold War they saw their immense military establishment as essentially defensive, and necessary. With the collapse of the Soviets, Americans began to speak longingly of a "peace dividend." Surely, they reasoned, they were safe now, and could spend their money on more agreeable objects than tanks and missiles. But they were not safe, and apparently they never will be.

Their mistake arose from Utopian ideas that everyone would like to believe in and most of us would in fact embrace if they were not so foolish. One of these ideals is that somehow the dictators who still run most of the world can be persuaded to see the light. Another is that, if we believe hard enough, the lion will lie down with the lamb. In those circumstances, who would need power?

But in a dangerous world (there has never been any other kind) only power can provide a measure of peace. The Iraq war brings home the truth that the United States has become the only nation with sufficient power to do what must be done -- curb or destroy dictators, encourage democracy, make terrorism unbearably hard for terrorists and their managers. Anti-American bigots will consider the new American style an abomination and call them bullies. The rest of us will be glad that the world's greatest and longest-lived democracy has for now been placed in charge, that it operates on a set of brilliantly articulated ideals, and that it has an institutionalized opposition to restrain and discipline it, as well as free media and courts to set examples for the whole world.

Not many years ago, it was fashionable to speak of America in decline -- the title of Denys Arcand's The Decline of the American Empire, an internationally successful Canadian film, automatically assumed that was true. Some dreaded this prospect, some were delighted by it, but in any case the idea went as far back as the defeat in the Vietnam war.

In 1988 Paul Kennedy of Yale wrote a best-seller, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers, which warned Americans that they were over stretching their resources. He argued that their eroding homeland (with its rotten inner cities, public debt, wretched education, etc.) would not long support their foreign commitments; apparently they were in danger of collapsing for the same economic reasons that doomed earlier empires, from Rome to Britain.

But Kennedy, as his critics were able to point out later, was precisely describing not the United States, as he claimed, but the U.S.S.R., which, fatally strained, imploded within three years, losing first its empire and then most of its provinces. Meanwhile, the United States maintained and expanded its leadership in science and industry, set the pace (with, of course, occasional stumbles) in the march toward free trade, and surprised everyone with its astonishing flexibility. In defeating Iraq, it used precisely the speed and surprise and ingenuity that have recreated its economy again and again. In Iraq during the last three weeks, the Americans fought a very American sort of war.

Clearly, the United States has made a major decision about its world-historical task. This began with the realization (articulated by the most impressive figure in the present government, Donald Rumsfeld) that the way to fight terrorists is to follow them home and destroy them -- as well as those who support them. But what if terrorists come from places where the governments are "friends" of the Americans, and have been supported by the Americans for years? In Rumsfeld's view, the rule still applies.

This means the United States must give up its old habit of supporting friendly dictators for the sake of convenience (a policy partly abandoned already, notably in Latin America) and relinquish every professional diplomat's favourite goal, "stability." Diplomats want a predictable world, and as a result have learned to tolerate every kind of despot in every corner of the underdeveloped world. The Americans now realize that some of these despotic regimes see nothing wrong with sponsoring terrorism and others plot to invade or terrify their neighbours.

So the Americans, as they use their power abroad, will use it on the side of democracy. That policy carries great risks and endless possibilities for failure. Stanley Kurtz, a research fellow at the Hoover Institution, in a recent paper on what he calls "the imperial question," notes that American policy makers (he mentions Paul Wolfowitz and Richard Perle), as well as leading scholars (such as Bernard Lewis), argue that only a democratic transformation of Iraq, and eventually of the larger Arab world, will provide long-term security against terrorism and nuclear attack. Kurtz asks: "Could such a venture in democratic imperialism be harmonized with our liberal principles? ... would it work? Is it possible to bring liberalism to a society so long at odds with the values of the West?" Which Iraqi citizens will lead the country to democracy? Will those who have lived abroad, beyond Saddam's murderous reach, provide enough democratic experience to get the process going?

Encouraging democracy will lead to ticklish questions. At the moment the Bush administration encourages the growth of democracy among the Palestinians but at the same time says that it won't deal with Yasser Arafat even if he gets 100% of the votes in an election. What happens if the first popular election in Iraq produces a bellicose and extremist government that wants to make war on the infidels?

There seems no doubt that this sort of question will be on the American agenda in the near future -- and on the UN agenda, too, if the UN finds a way to assist the coalition powers in administering a new Iraq. George W. Bush (whose determination may never again be underestimated by anyone) made his large ambitions clear in a speech he gave at the end of February. "The world has a clear interest in the spread of democratic values," he said, "because stable and free nations do not breed the ideologies of murder. They encourage the peaceful pursuit of a better life."

But how can he hope to introduce democratic values to Arab nations, which have lived for years with either very little freedom (Egypt, Jordan) or none at all (Syria, Iraq). Can Islam, with its tendency toward religion-dominated government, produce societies grounded in freedom? That's a question that's been answered for generations with a resounding "no" by diplomats, bureaucrats and politicians all over the West. Bush's answer is a surprising "yes."

"It is presumptuous and insulting," he said in the February speech, "to suggest that a whole region of the world -- or the one-fifth of humanity that is Muslim -- is somehow untouched by the most basic aspirations of life. Human cultures can be vastly different. Yet the human heart desires the same good things, everywhere on Earth. In our desire to be safe from brutal and bullying oppression, human beings are the same. In our desire to care for our children and give them a better life, we are the same."

He recalled that in the 1940s some believed neither Japan nor Germany could sustain democratic values, but both of them did. "The nation of Iraq -- with its proud heritage, abundant resources and skilled and educated people -- is fully capable of moving toward democracy and living in freedom." Apparently this will require a delicate balance, part hegemonic, part permissive. He promised that the United States won't determine precisely what kind of government Iraq gets. The Iraqis will have to do that. "Yet, we will ensure that one brutal dictator is not replaced by another."

That, clearly, is the Bush Doctrine, and the core of the U.S. government's thinking about its new role in the world. It sounds wildly ambitious and magnificently revolutionary. It might well work. Considering the alternatives, we can only hope it does.

"Had the Americans and the British waited for the French, the Russians and the rest, Saddam would have maintained his power while his terrified people starved and he played infinite variations on the game of UN arms inspection."

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2 posted on 04/11/2003 3:35:02 PM PDT by Support Free Republic (Your support keeps Free Republic going strong!)

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