[Ethnicstudies] Fwd: The Right Quagmire Searching History for an Imperial Alibi

[Gilbert G. Gonzalez]

>
>
>The Right Quagmire -- Review of Niall Ferguson
>
>The Right Quagmire Searching History for an Imperial
>Alibi
>
>By Greg Grandin
>
>Harper's Magazine December 2004
>http://www.harpers.org/Newsstand200412.html
>
>Discussed in this essay:
>
>Colossus: The Price of America's Empire, by Niall
>Ferguson. Penguin, 2004. 366 pages. $25.95.
>
>Empire: The Rise and Demise of the British World Order
>and the Lessons for Global Power, by Niall Ferguson.
>Basic Books, 2003. 352 pages. $35.
>
>The Savage Wars of Peace: Small Wars and the Rise of
>American Power, by Max Boot. Basic Books, 2002. 428
>pages. $16.
>
>Historical analogies tend to be as fickle as flattery,
>as Washington has recently learned. The more the United
>States strives to attain the glories promised by its
>enthusiasts, the more it disappoints. Think of recent
>comparisons to World War II. In the yearlong buildup to
>the U.S. invasion of Iraq, no analogy was more favored
>by the Bush Administration and its neoconservative
>advisers than the liberation of Western Europe six
>decades earlier. Like their grandfathers in Paris and
>Rome, American G.I.'s in Baghdad would be graciously
>received as freedom's foot soldiers. In the same way
>that the United States brought liberal democracy to
>Nazi Germany, so would it make the political desert
>bloom in the Middle East.
>
>Behind such boosterism, however, neocons can barely
>conceal their contempt for a decadent American culture.
>When our politicians and opinion makers reacted to last
>spring's Abu Ghraib scandal and Fallujah uprising with
>the telltale signs of fear and self-doubt, the neocons
>answered with reproach. Fretting that America has
>become, as historian Max Boot put it in the Los Angeles
>Times, 'spoiled' by recent 'bloodless victories,' they
>again evoked World War II, but now to scold the
>American public for its lack of resolve. The 'Royal Air
>Force alone killed 80,000 children in German cities,'
>the Weekly Standard's Christopher Caldwell told
>readers, with much of the bombing taking place after it
>was clear that the Allies had won. The problem in Iraq,
>then, is not that the United States is too brutal but
>that it isn't brutal enough. Washington's
>humanitarianism, complained Caldwell, prevents it from
>taking actions that would 'make Iraqis more receptive
>to the invasion.'
>
>Just as comparisons to World War II are sounding
>strained-either too vain or too gruesome-along comes
>Niall Ferguson, armed with his latest book, Colossus:
>The Price of America's Empire. Never mind the
>liberation of Europe, Ferguson tells us: the real
>analogy to America's current mission in the world is
>the British Empire.
>
>Ferguson's argument in Colossus is clear enough:
>Empires, not sovereign nation-states, have been the
>executors of human progress, providing the steadiness
>and resolve needed to ensure that civilizations can
>take root and flourish. Ferguson admits that most
>empires are built upon plunder and butchery, but he
>contends that the liberal British Empire is history's
>exception (an argument he explored at greater length in
>last year's Empire, which now reads as a kind of
>prelude to Colossus). From the 1850s to the 1930s,
>London presided over an extraordinary integration of
>the world's capital, labor, and commodities; by
>imposing its rule of law, budgetary policies, currency,
>and 'honest' administrative practices, Britain
>stimulated economic growth in its colonies. But after
>World War II, the stock of empire collapsed, devalued
>by a spreading faith in national sovereignty and
>universal democracy. The world, writes Ferguson,
>'embarked on an epochal experiment' and tested the
>'hypothesis that it was imperialism that caused both
>poverty and wars and that self-determination would
>ultimately pave the way to prosperity and peace.' That
>experiment failed, according to Ferguson, as is
>revealed by the violence and destitution of so many
>formerly colonized nations.
>
>The world today, Ferguson concludes, threatened as it
>is by pandemics, terrorists, and tyrants, needs a
>liberal empire to enforce stability, and the only
>candidate available is the United States. Washington
>can impose 'democracy on rogue states" without
>resulting in what Paul Kennedy famously described as
>'imperial overstretch,' a condition that occurs when an
>empire devotes too much of its finances to military
>objectives. Ferguson envisions a more harmonious
>imperial posture, whereby the United States agrees to
>oversee the creation of an integrated global market
>because it would profit from such a market; local
>elites submit to an American empire in exchange for the
>institutional steadiness needed to generate growth.
>Everybody wins.
>
>As to what this benevolent empire would look like,
>apart from scattered references to the wonders of free
>trade, Colossus provides little insight. Although many
>of our new imperialists conjure up visions of a world
>made prosperous and free by the twin blessings of open
>markets and democratic ideals, about this latter topic
>Ferguson is mostly silent. On the pages of Colossus
>indexed under the subject heading
>'democratization/democracy,' one is likely to find a
>discussion of 'law and order,' 'military force,' and
>'security.' Ferguson, in fact, is fairly dismissive of
>democracy, fearing that it could unleash popular
>demands for a more equitable distribution of a nation's
>wealth. Conditions for economic growth, he maintains,
>are created not by universal suffrage but by secure
>governments, property rights, and free markets.
>Ferguson calls himself a liberal, but his is more a
>Napoleonic liberalism than the political or even the
>economic sort. He prescribes a heavy dose of imperial
>command to make sure that governments remain orderly
>and obliging.
>
>An 'avid admirer of the United States who wants it to
>succeed in its imperial undertakings,' Ferguson is too
>coy a flatterer to offer only compliments. America may
>surpass the military might of the British Empire at its
>apex, but an 'absence of a will to power' could prevent
>Washington from living up to the example set by its
>predecessor. As a Scot, Ferguson critiques America's
>political culture with an air of detachment, avoiding
>the shrillness that often overcomes our homegrown
>imperialists. The content of his criticism, however, is
>hardly new. Instead of a buff Nietzschean bermensch-
>captured by Ferguson with a loving description of
>Arnold Schwarzenegger's physique-America is an immobile
>colossus, decadently obese, 'consuming on credit,
>reluctant to go to the front line, inclined to lose
>interest in protracted undertakings.' The 'white man's
>burden,' Ferguson says of the average American, 'is
>around his waist.'
>
>This debt-laden, dangerously soft America, according to
>Ferguson, certainly lacks the willingness to stay in a
>country such as Iraq for the time needed to turn it
>into a 'prosperous capitalist democracy.' England's
>Oxbridge- educated mandarins dedicated their lives to
>'running infernally hot, disease-ridden countries';
>America's 'brightest and best aspire not to govern
>Mesopotamia but to manage MTV; not to rule the Hejaz
>but to run a hedge fund.' Indecisive political
>leadership reinforces the native flaccidness. Were it
>not for Truman's dithering during the Korean War,
>Colossus relates, America might have crossed the
>Rubicon-perhaps nuking China, as MacArthur recommended-
>and thereby claimed its imperial mantle. Similarly,
>Ferguson reasons that the 'growing power of liberalism'
>checked the United States in Vietnam, preventing it
>from fighting with the kind of unfailing ruthlessness
>needed to achieve victory.
>
>Ferguson holds out hope that determined American
>leaders willing to ignore opinion polls can overcome
>these many obstacles. The first step, he says, would be
>to rein in America's deficit by reducing spending on
>Social Security and Medicare. Although it is doubtful
>that such cuts would pry Yale and Harvard graduates
>away from the spoils of Wall Street, they would make
>the less privileged leaner and meaner, more willing to
>shoulder the burdens of empire. Just as poverty drove
>the Irish and Scots into Britain's colonial army,
>'illegal immigrants, the jobless,' and 'convicts' could
>help fill the ranks of Washington's imperial legion.
>Ferguson is especially enthusiastic about the
>possibility that African Americans might become 'the
>Celts of the American empire.' And once he dispenses
>with what here passes for social democracy, he sets his
>sights on political democracy. Successful empires,
>Ferguson writes, require 'the resolve of the masters
>and the consent of the subjects.'
>
>An Oxford historian recently snatched up by Harvard
>after a brief stint at New York University, Ferguson
>has become the darling of the American media (Time
>magazine even designated him one of the world's most
>influential people). Ferguson is able to spin the
>minutia of financial stats into colorful lay prose, and
>he seems to enjoy an open invitation from the op-ed
>pages of major newspapers. Like his contemporary Damian
>Hirst, the enfant terrible of the British art world,
>Ferguson has smartly built his career on
>sensationalism, abandoning the mundane methods of his
>early scholarship-which focused on correspondingly dull
>topics such as Hamburg monetary policy-to trade in
>speculative counterfactuals. His best-selling Virtual
>History invited historians to answer a series of
>mischievous 'what if' questions: What if there had been
>no American Revolution? What if Nazi Germany had
>defeated the Soviet Union? Ferguson followed with the
>equally popular The Pity of War, arguing that had
>Britain stayed out of WWI not only would it have held
>on to its empire, but Nazism, Bolshevism and WWII all
>would have been averted. In Colossus, he supplements
>his guesswork with questionable assertions based on
>contrived comparisons. When the book was published last
>spring, reviewers tended to excuse these distortions as
>the workings of a 'brilliant' and 'impish' provocateur
>(Yale historian John Lewis Gaddis, writing in the New
>York Times, forgave Ferguson for his numerous factual
>errors, pronouncing him an 'imaginative scholar' whose
>ideas deserve 'careful consideration').
>
>Even when honestly played, historical reasoning by
>analogy is a mug's game. In Ferguson's hands the sport
>is more like three-card monty. First we are told that
>Washington's mission in Iraq resembles nothing so much
>as the British occupation of Mesopotamia in the early
>twentieth century. But that experiment, Ferguson
>grudgingly admits, didn't turn out so well: the British
>never 'had their hearts in the matter.' So we're off to
>Egypt, which offers a better example of 'what a liberal
>empire [can] do.' Yet Egypt was no success either.
>Between 1913 and 1950, acknowledges Ferguson, 'Egypt
>got richer as a country' but 'the average Egyptian did
>not'; public health remained 'shockingly poor,' while
>infant mortality rose. Then there's India, another
>exception to the purported benefits of colonial rule.
>Ferguson reveals that India under the Empire suffered
>from 'deindustrialization and economic stagnation';
>massive famines afflicted its peoples, who were already
>burdened with sustaining 'one of the world's largest
>standing armies.'
>
>Ferguson plays the counterfactual card to explain the
>sad state of affairs in colonial India. The real
>problem, he posits, was not too much imperialism but
>too little. If the British committed any sins, they
>were 'of omission,' for India (along with Egypt and
>even China) would have benefited from tighter colonial
>control. Here Ferguson commits his own omissions. He
>writes that greater market integration could have
>prevented famines yet disregards scholarship that
>blames starvation on that very integration. Indeed, one
>of Ferguson's new colleagues at Harvard, the Nobel
>laureate economist Amartya Sen, has shown that
>independence from colonial rule brought India's
>recurrent famines to an end, as politicians were now
>forced to base their actions on public opinion and not
>on global markets. And when it comes to British policy
>in Sub-Saharan Africa, where misery was high,
>investment low, and imperial rule anything but liberal,
>Ferguson simply removes that card from the deck:
>Colossus all but omits Britain's abysmal record in
>Africa.
>
>For Ferguson, as well as for our domestic neocons,
>cherry-picking through the past to justify a renewed
>imperialism is a form of self-absolution. It allows
>them to celebrate the splendor of empire while
>disavowing its legacy, to blame the planet's ills on
>those who most suffer them rather than on those who
>hold a disproportionate share of the planet's power. In
>trying to understand why our world has gone so awry, it
>would perhaps be more useful to think about history not
>as analogy but as process-e.g., how imperial politics
>bred violence or created Third World economies that are
>highly susceptible to the vicissitudes of the global
>market. But one would search in vain through Colossus
>for, say, a consideration of the repercussions of
>Washington's support of the mujahedeen in Afghanistan
>during the 1980s, or of the disastrous effects radical
>free-market policies have had on the economies of the
>most vulnerable nations of Southeast Asia and Latin
>America. In Empire, Ferguson at times provided a sober
>assessment of the consequences of colonial rule,
>dealing more honestly both with the evils it created
>(the Atlantic slave trade, for instance) and with the
>inevitable suffering that accompanied the economic
>reforms he champions. In Colossus, though, such empathy
>is a casualty of progress, lost in the sweeping arc of
>history.
>
>Last spring, as the war in Iraq escalated, Ferguson
>cautioned against viewing the current crisis through
>the lens of failure in Vietnam. Instead, Ferguson
>argued in the New York Times, the United States needed
>to confront the Iraqi insurgency with the same
>'severity,' including 'punitive village-burning
>expeditions,' used by the British there in 1920. 'Fear
>of the wrong quagmire,' he wrote, could result in a
>'terrible hell.'
>
>Wondering what insights the 'right quagmire' would
>provide, I asked Ferguson at a recent public forum
>whether Washington's track record in Latin America
>should give pause to those who advocate for an American
>empire. The United States, after all, often found
>itself bogged down in unseemly alliances with Latin
>America's most notorious regimes, relying on repressive
>paramilitaries to contain dissent. Ferguson generously
>agreed that Washington's approach to the region has
>been a disaster. But he went on to say that the United
>States should have occupied and administered the
>continent itself instead of shielding its power behind
>despots. Rather than letting actual, as opposed to
>virtual, history temper his enthusiasm for empire,
>Ferguson turns dross into gold, cheerfully arguing that
>the wreckage created by the United States in Latin
>America is proof that the problem is not U.S.
>imperialism but-wait for it-not enough U.S.
>imperialism.
>
>This response is the one-size-fits-all solution offered
>by almost every neocon, regardless of the conflict.
>Donald Kagan, for instance, now considers that the fall
>of Athens after the Peloponnesian War resulted not from
>imperial hubris but from Athens' hesitancy to fulfill
>its imperial mission. For imperialists concerned with
>matters closer to home, the same reasoning explains
>more than a century of U.S. failed hemispheric
>policies. Kagan's son, Robert, who helped execute the
>Contra war against Nicaragua in the 1980s, believes
>that the United States has been a prodigal empire in
>the Americas, wasting its power and money in erratic
>adventures, reluctant to settle down and assume its
>workaday responsibilities. Max Boot makes the same case
>in The Savage Wars of Peace, an encomium to the Marine
>Corps' military prowess-as demonstrated in the
>Philippines, Mexico, Panama, Nicaragua, Haiti, and the
>Dominican Republic, among other places. The United
>States did err in Latin America, Boot says, but the
>mistake was in believing that it could withdraw once
>the military phase of the operation was over. Boot
>presents his book as a challenge to the narrow focus of
>the Powell Doctrine, maintaining that the United States
>should be willing to intervene militarily throughout
>the globe and that those interventions should be broad
>in scope and long in duration. 'In deploying American
>power,' he writes, 'decision makers should be less
>apologetic, less hesitant, less humble.'
>
>The Western Hemisphere is actually the perfect place to
>test Ferguson's hypothesis that nations willing to
>submit to imperial authority would in exchange receive
>the benefits of stability, investment, and economic
>growth, because twice in the last century Latin
>Americans were party to such an arrangement. During the
>years preceding World War II there was perhaps no
>region more willing to give up a degree of sovereignty
>and follow Washington's lead than Latin America. And
>countries did so not because the U.S. beat them into
>submission; on the contrary, after decades of Latin
>American opposition to U.S. expansion, including
>protracted guerrilla wars, Washington surrendered its
>claim to unilateral intervention and began to tolerate
>economic nationalism. Ferguson, expectedly, denounces
>this shift in policy as a sign of weakness, even though
>it created conditions for an important period of
>prosperity and peace in Latin America.
>
>Governments throughout Latin America enacted New Deal-
>style reforms, adopting a definition of democracy that
>entailed political freedom and some degree of economic
>equality. After the war, however, as the United States
>swelled into an imperial power, it increasingly worked
>to undermine these programs. Well before the Cuban
>Revolution, Washington's 1954 overthrow of Guatemala's
>reformist government sent a clear signal that it would
>not accept social democracy so close to home. For the
>next four decades, despite nominal support for the
>continent's 'democratic left,' the United States would
>align with the most illiberal and revanchist forces in
>the hemisphere. The most passionate defenders of
>democracy, in fact, were likely to be found in the
>ranks of Washington's opponents-and singled out for
>execution by Washington's allies.
>
>After the Cold War, Latin America again yielded to U.S.
>authority. One country after another shook off
>dictatorships to open their economies to the world
>market. Governments reduced tariffs, weakened organized
>labor, privatized national industries, and slashed
>social spending. But this economic liberalization (of
>the kind that Ferguson prescribes for the rest of the
>world) has led not to prosperity but to dismal growth.
>Wealth inequality is at an all-time high, and poverty
>is endemic, particularly in relatively well-off
>countries such as Brazil and Mexico. Direct investment
>in the region has continued its three-decade decline,
>even in countries that have followed IMF edicts to the
>letter, and unbridled financial markets continue to
>wreak one disaster after another. As popular opposition
>to Washington's market liberalism again spreads in
>Bolivia, Brazil, Venezuela, and Argentina, the United
>States has responded by stepping up aid and training to
>Latin American militaries. Even more worrisome,
>considering the effort over the last decade to push
>soldiers back into their barracks, has been the Defense
>Department's call for Latin American armies to take a
>more active role in domestic policing.
>
>Rather than rummaging through British history to
>imagine what a global American empire would look like,
>today's imperialists should take an honest look at the
>region where the United States has actually had
>extensive imperial experience and ask themselves an
>obvious question: If Washington is unable to bring
>order and economic growth to Latin America, which falls
>squarely within its own back yard and whose population
>shares many of the United States' values, then how does
>it hope to do so in Iraq and the rest of the Middle
>East? Their response, no doubt, would be demonstrative:
>more imperialism.
>
>Niall Ferguson gives us any number of alternative pasts
>from which the future can draw its lessons. Max Boot,
>by contrast, writes that the 'past is an uncertain
>guide to the future, but it is the only one we have.'
>Both position themselves against dewy-eyed leftists,
>who supposedly allow their moralistic criticisms of
>American power to cloud their judgment. Yet the refusal
>of Ferguson and other neo-imperialists to take
>nationalism- the one consistent variable in all their
>fast-moving analogies-seriously is as utopian as
>Charles Fourier's nineteenth-century belief that, under
>socialism, the seas would lose their salt and become
>'lemonade.' Locals, they argue, should be willing to
>give up sovereignty for the sake of stability and
>investment. If not, the United States must steel itself
>to the task of imposing this arrangement. So we have
>Ferguson rehabilitating MacArthur's plan to nuke China
>and Boot proposing in the New York Times that the
>United States do in Iraq what it did between 1898 and
>1902 in the Philippines-where Marines tortured
>thousands, torched communities, and herded survivors
>into concentration camps; more than 200,000 died in
>what, according to one British witness, was not a war
>but 'murderous butchery.' That Boot can call this
>racist campaign 'one of the most successful
>counterinsurgencies waged by a Western army in modern
>times' indicates how successful neoconservatives have
>been in increasing the public's acceptance of
>atrocities committed in the name of national security,
>a tolerance that had been on the wane since Vietnam.
>
>Ferguson is more aware of the vicious legacy of
>imperial racism. He peppers his writing with ironic
>references to old-school colonialists, suggesting our
>distance from antiquated racist thinking and the
>possibility of a more dispassionate American world
>order. But what was Abu Ghraib if not an expression of
>institutionalized racism? Military strategists
>perfected interrogation methods by trolling through pop
>anthropologies to gain insight into the 'Arab mind,'
>working-class American recruits understood their
>charges to be 'sand niggers,' and government
>functionaries drafted carefully parsed memos, vetted by
>lawyers, outlining what is and is not torture and who
>is and is not covered by the Geneva Conventions.
>
>In her Origins of Totalitarianism, Hannah Arendt dubbed
>British colonialists who believed they could maintain a
>liberal empire without recourse to racist violence the
>'quixotic fools of imperialism.' Ferguson, who is no
>fool, knows that democracy, both in the metropole and
>in the colony, undermines empire. His celebrated
>liberal phase of the British Empire, for example,
>following its initial run of piracy and slavery,
>corresponded to a democratization of Britain's domestic
>politics that made imperialism untenable. As the kind
>of violence needed to maintain foreign rule became a
>matter of public debate, the electorate, given a voting
>choice, increasingly opted to pay for social welfare at
>home rather than empire abroad.
>
>The point of Colossus is that the United States not
>only can match Britain's empire but can do empire
>better. Hence Ferguson's calls for cuts in social
>spending to make for a more desperate and therefore
>more martial American citizenry. But because this
>hardened society has yet to be forged, Ferguson, who
>for hundreds of pages exhorts American leaders to show
>bold leadership, must settle for the role of court
>flatterer, whispering into the emperor's ear to
>dissemble, to declare publicly his intentions to vacate
>Iraq while furtively staying. At the end of the book,
>Ferguson offers advice to President Bush: 'There is in
>fact a great deal to be said for promising to leave
>[Iraq]-provided you do not actually mean it or do it.'
>
>Ferguson's easy acceptance of brutality in pursuit of
>an elusive liberal empire bears more than a passing
>resemblance to an earlier willingness of Soviet
>apparatchiks to justify repression in the name of a
>distant utopia. He has only one response to the
>inevitable resistance empire provokes: more resolve,
>which for the otherwise straight talker is a euphemism
>for more terror, more fear. But terror and fear, as all
>colonial powers have learned, are useless unless they
>are thorough and total. If Colossus doesn't tell us
>where the beefed-up political will it calls for may
>lead us, perhaps an answered can be culled from an
>earlier imperial storyteller. It was Rudyard Kipling,
>after all, who wrote in Kim that the 'Great Game' of
>imperial intrigue will be finished 'when everybody is
>dead.'
>
>[Greg Grandin is a professor of history at New York
>University and the author of The Last Colonial
>Massacre: Latin America in the Cold War (University of
>Chicago Press.]
>
>_______________________________________________________
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