Blinded by Opiate of the Masters, Fawaz Turki

Opinion, September 2003, www.aljazeerah.info

Blinded by Opiate of the Masters

Fawaz Turki

Arab News

The United States, according to the Center for Defense Information, has made an ever-greater commitment to its armed forces — $329 billion in 2002 alone — than China, Russia, Japan and all NATO countries combined. Currently it occupies and, in its own fashion, is trying to pacify 420,000 square miles, in Iraq and Afghanistan, at staggering costs to American taxpayers. In all, 370,000 American troops are today deployed in 120 countries around the world.

Does that get your attention? If it doesn’t, then consider what Greg Easterbrook had to say in the New York Times following the fall of Baghdad. “No other military is even close to the United States,” he wrote. “The American military is now the strongest the world has ever known, both in absolute terms and relative to other nations; stronger than the Wehrmacht in 1940; stronger than the legions at the height of Roman power ... the extent of American superiority has become almost impossible to overestimate.”

The megapower status of the United States is a dominant fact of life on the planet today, though “declinist” scholars, such as Paul Kennedy in his “The Rise and Fall of Empires” and Walter Meade in another declinist treatise called “Mortal Splendor,” have been warning the American establishment, since the late 1980s, that wanton arrogance, or hubris, can easily lead to overreaching, and overreaching to collapse. It happened to empires in the past, sometimes awfully fast — consider Britain’s transformation from a big power, swinging the old muskets around to subdue brown and black folks around the world, to a little island nation between 1915 and 1945.

The United States went into the land between the Tigris and the Euphrates, a country the size of California with at least as many citizens, not only to topple a regime, but also to change it, and ended up getting itself into a mighty fine mess. Getting the former was a cakewalk, but the latter can hardly be counted as a success.

An imperial foray is easy to begin, but difficult to complete — especially when you’re clueless about, Vietnam metaphors aside, “the hearts and minds” of the people whose society, culture and politics you presumably want to liberate by foisting Jeffersonian ideals on them. You sure as heck don’t begin, for example, by sponsoring American-appointed Iraqis to the Governing Council, who had either lived abroad or have no domestic following, to rule the country.

The administration, along with the neoconservative ideologues in it who had egged it on to go to war all along, believes that rebuilding Iraq will ultimately prove even easier than the task of rebuilding Germany and Japan, which “took seven years,” according to Donald Rumsfeld, among other officials, who has repeatedly verbalized such sentiments on talk shows over the last month.

Wrong. Germany and Japan were homogeneous societies with rigorously well-structured polities in the first place, and what Americans did there was simply to shift and reorganize those already existing polities. Moreover, both countries had been crushed to a pulp (in the case of Japan, with 200,000 of its people pulverized by two atomic bombs dropped on them in the space of 72 hours), and sapped of the will to resist.

Today in Baghdad, the bulletin board at US headquarters, according to media reports, will list one soldier killed here, five injured there, five killed here, one injured there, day in, day out, with American deaths already exceeding those during the war itself.

We’re talking a lot of angry young men out there, many of whom are not, honest, “former Baathist thugs,” who are ready to fight the occupation because, very simply, they don’t trust Washington’s intentions in their homeland, nor appear threatened by the vainglorious, swaggering challenge of the US president to “bring ‘em on.” But power, in the end, is an opiate and can blind you to forming a nuanced, engaged, multilateral view of the world.

In Iraq, the US indisputably has a quagmire on its hands. Yet President Bush continues to speak of not one big victory, but “the patient accumulation of successes.” Or, more like it, as the Economist opined last week: “The hapless accumulation of failures is sounding a more appropriate line.”

Earth, a planet hungry for peace

The Israeli apartheid (security) wall around Palestinian population centers (Ran Cohen, pmc, 5/24/03).

The Israeli apartheid (security) wall around Palestinian population centers in the West Bank (Ran Cohen, pmc, 5/24/03).