MISSIONARY LIBERALISM, LIBERAL IMPERIALISM

The configuration of ideas and movements that led to America’s ruinous engagement in Iraq included more than a fusion of the neo-conservative utopians, Armageddonite fundamentalists and Straussian seers that have been examined so far. This exotic and highly toxic blend of beliefs, none of them grounded in any observable or even plausible reality, had one further but equally dangerous ingredient: a type of ‘liberal imperialism’ based on human rights. Neo-conservatives were able to gain support for regime change in Iraq and potentially other Middle Eastern countries because it could be seen as applying liberal ideals of self-determination and democracy. Liberals insist that the legitimacy of government depends on its respecting the rights of its citizens. If any government fails in this regard, it can be resisted and overthrown – whether by its own citizenry or by an outside force. Human rights override the claims of sovereign states, and where these rights are severely violated other states – acting as the ‘international community’, in the terminology Blair coined in his speech in Chicago in 1999 – have the right, even the duty, to intervene to protect them.

This view seemed to be supported by humanitarian intervention in the 1990s, which, while failing to prevent some of the worst atrocities, succeeded in imposing a kind of peace in former Yugoslavia. The Balkan war led many liberals to endorse the attack on Iraq as a means of creating a new world order. Even now, some continue to believe the disastrous upshot does not undermine the rightness of military intervention to overthrow tyranny. Intervention of this kind amounts to a liberal version of imperialism, as has been recognized by some of its most influential advocates. Writing in The New York Times three months before the invasion of Iraq, Michael Ignatieff announced:

America’s empire is not like empires of the past, built on colonies, conquest and the white man’s burden … The 21st century imperium is a new invention in the annals of political science, an empire lite, a global hegemony whose grace notes are free markets, human rights and democracy, enforced by the most awesome power the world has ever known … Regime change is an imperial task par excellence, since it assumes that the empire’s interest has a right to trump the sovereignty of a state. The Bush administration would ask, What moral authority rests with a sovereign who murders and ethnically cleanses his own people, has twice invaded neighbouring countries and usurps his people’s wealth to build palaces and lethal weapons?²⁰

Ignatieff shows the attractions the new imperialism had for liberals. Who dares deny that tyranny is bad, or question the ideal of a world based on human rights? Has not liberalism always been a universalist creed? After all, the claim that its values are valid for all of humanity is a cardinal principle of liberal philosophy. Does it not follow that liberal states are entitled – indeed obliged – to impose their values throughout the world, even if this requires the use of force? For many liberals the ‘war on terror’ has been a successor to the Cold War – a struggle in which democracy prevailed over totalitarianism. Yet the differences are substantial. The Cold War was a conflict between states, while the ‘war on terror’ is one between states and a far more amorphous range of forces. The Cold War was waged between states pledged to rival Enlightenment ideologies, whereas the ‘war on terror’ is being waged against Islamist forces that claim to reject the Enlightenment. Yet again, the enemy in the Cold War was a communist system that never had popular legitimacy, while Islamist regimes –though very weak in comparison with the former Soviet Union – are gaining mass support. There is, in fact, hardly anything in common between the two conflicts. But like the Cold War the ‘war on terror’ could be seen as a universal crusade, a vast progressive enterprise in which practically every good cause under the sun could be subsumed, a new force that was

devoted to a politics of human rights and especially women’s rights, across the Muslim world; a politics against racism and anti-Semitism, no matter how inconvenient that might seem to the Egyptian media and the House of Saud; a politics against the manias of the ultra-right in Israel, too, no matter how much that might enrage the Likud and its supporters; a politics of secular education, of pluralism, and law across the Muslim world; a politics against obscurantism and superstition; a politics to out-compete the Islamists and Baathi on their left; a politics to fight against poverty and oppression; a politics of authentic solidarity for the Muslim world, instead of the demagogy of cosmic hatred. A politics, in a word, of liberalism, a ‘new birth of freedom’ – the kind of thing that could be glimpsed, in its early stages, in the liberation of Kabul.²¹

Paul Berman gave vent to this sublime vision in 2003. It contained no inkling that the result of the overthrow of secular despotism in Iraq would be a mix of anarchy and theocracy. The impossibility of liberalism in Afghanistan – which has only ever had something resembling a modern state when Soviet forces imposed, with enormous cruelty, a version of Enlightenment despotism on parts of the country – was too disturbing to contemplate. All the liberal causes that were wrapped up in the ‘war on terror’ were inherently desirable, and so – it seemed to follow – practically realizable. In their attitudes to regime change, neo-conservatives have been at one with many liberals. Regime change was an instrument of progress, and for the most part liberals have been no more willing than neo-conservatives to confront its human costs and abject failure. Such political opposition to the war as there has been in the US has come from elements of the paleo-conservative Right and sections of the Old Left. In the liberal media only the New York Review of Books remained untouched by war fever, while journals such as The Nation and The American Conservative voiced criticism from the Left and the Right. The public resistance to the war that voters voiced in the mid-term 2006 elections found few echoes among liberals. Most remained silent in the belief that the war showed American power acting as the final guarantor of freedom in the world.

Yet liberal imperialism was an impossible programme of action. Twentieth-century history has been dominated by resistance to western empires since the destruction of the Russian Imperial Fleet by Japan in 1905 – a defeat for European power that inspired anticolonial movements throughout Asia and which Jawaharlal Nehru, the first prime minister of India, described as one of the decisive events of his life. Britain’s failed attempt to assert its control over the Suez Canal, the withdrawal of France from Algeria, the humiliation of France and America in Vietnam and the defeat of Soviet forces in Afghanistan – these are only some examples of the impotence of western occupiers in non-western lands that has been demonstrated again and again over the past century. American defeat in Iraq is only the most recent example of this impotence.

Beyond the impossibility of any large-scale western imperial project at this juncture in history, the notion that America could be the agent of a project of this kind was highly implausible. The US has few of the attributes of an imperial regime. It has a large portfolio of countries over which it has varying degrees of influence – occasionally exercised by the threat of force, more often through a mix of economic sanctions and inducements. America’s relations with many of these countries display an imperialist pattern in which resources are extracted through the agency of governments that the US in some degree controls. In Latin America, the US has long acted in imperialist fashion to protect its economic and strategic interests. At present it has a massive military and naval presence in the Persian Gulf, while it is expanding its bases in central Asia and establishing itself in West Africa. Yet the US does not govern any of these regions and its forces have minimal contact with their peoples. Its bases are hermetically sealed bubbles of American life and its embassies fortress-like structures insulated against any incursion from their host societies. Empires come in several shapes and sizes; not all have been organized around the acquisition of territory. What is striking about American imperial relationships is that they include few long-term strategic commitments that can be counted on to survive the vicissitudes of American politics. When any American overseas military involvement becomes too costly in money or casualties it is likely to be abruptly terminated. As a result of this fact, which is taken as axiomatic in Washington and in the countries concerned, long-term alliances with local ruling elites of the kind that enabled empires to endure for centuries are rare. Most of those existing today, such as those in Britain, Germany and Japan, are survivals from the Second World War.

A lasting imperial system rests on the belief that it embodies a long-term commitment. Empires are commonly established by means that include the use of force, but they have been long-lasting – as in the case of the Romans, the Ottomans and the Habsburgs, for example –when force has served long-range political goals. The European colonial powers normally used force in this way, so that it was clear that their presence in the countries they occupied was meant to permanent. The creation of the Raj involved savage conflicts, and the Indian Mutiny in the mid-nineteenth century posed a serious threat to British rule. Even so, throughout most of the colonial period a few thousand British officers were able to rule the sub-continent without large-scale warfare. They did so by making alliances with the country’s rulers –by 1919 there were around 500 princely states locally ruled but pledged to the British monarchy. In contrast, American forces view themselves, and are seen by others, as transients – ‘tourists with guns’, as a National Guardsman in Afghanistan put it²² – and rarely forge any but the most short-term bonds with local elites or people. As a result they are compelled to rely on the intensive use of firepower, which cannot deliver long-term goals.

America lacks most of the prerequisites of empire and will not acquire them in any future that can be foreseen. How can there be imperialism – liberal or otherwise – when there are no imperialists? The US has some of the burdens of empire – including its financial costs, which are far more disabling than in the era of European colonialism. Unlike nineteenth-century Britain, which was the world’s largest exporter of capital, the United States is the world’s largest debtor. America’s military adventures are paid for with borrowed money – mostly lent by China, whose purchases of American government debt are crucial in underpinning the US economy. This dependency on China cannot be squared with the idea that America has the capacity to act as the global enforcer of liberal values. It is America’s foreign creditors who fund this role, and if they come to perceive US foreign policy as threatening or irrational they have the power to veto it. As Emmanuel Todd, the French analyst who in 1975 forecast the Soviet collapse, has noted:

The United States is unable to live on its own economic activity and must be subsidized to maintain its current level of consumption – at present cruising speed that subsidy amounts to $1.4 billion a day (as of April 2003). If its behaviour continues to be disruptive, it is America that ought to fear an embargo.²³

The US is losing its economic primacy, and its status as the ‘last superpower’ is bound to follow. Advancing globalization brings with it new great powers and the unexpected re-emergence of powers that seemed to be in irreversible decline. China and Russia may be able to live in peaceful coexistence with the US, but they will never accept American moral tutelage; the notion that they can be conscripted into service in a campaign to convert the world to American-style democracy is laughable. The ‘new American century’ envisioned by neo-conservatives has lasted less than a decade. In an episode that believers in Hegel’s idea of the cunning of reason will appreciate, neo-conservatives – acting as the unwitting servants of history – have turned the United States into a normal great power, one among several and having no special authority. More generally, power is flowing away from the liberal states that were the apparent victors in the Cold War and for the first time since the 1930s the rising powers in the international system are authoritarian states.

Liberal imperialism has also resulted in a retreat from liberal values in the US. The administration continues to insist that the president must be free to determine what counts as torture. Vice-president Dick Cheney, asked on a radio programme whether he was in favour of a ‘dunk in the water’ for terrorist detainees, replied that he was, declaring that the question was ‘a no-brainer for me’.²⁴ Techniques of ‘water-boarding’ – a form of torture used by the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, and whose use against Americans in the Second World War resulted in a Japanese officer being sentenced to fifteen years’ hard labour²⁵ – are not prohibited and can be practised routinely by the US. The same is true of sleep deprivation, a method of torture used in Guantanamo that was employed by the NKVD in the Stalinist Soviet Union to generate confessions in the ‘show trials’ of the 1930s.²⁶ Torture techniques involving sensory deprivation, which were used by the Chinese on American POWs in the Korean War, have also been used on José Padilla, an American citizen arrested as an enemy combatant, detained without charges from mid–2002 until January 2006 and found guilty of criminal conspiracy in August 2007.²⁷

By any internationally accepted standard of what constitutes torture, the world’s pre-eminent liberal regime has committed itself to the practice as a matter of national policy. Along with this there has been a shift away from the constitutional traditions that curbed American government in the past. The vote by the Senate on 28 September 2006 that allowed the president the authority to determine what counts as torture also suspended habeas corpus for people detained as terrorist suspects, denying their right to know the offence with which they are charged and to challenge their detention in court. Henceforth anyone charged with involvement in terrorism – not only foreign nationals but also US citizens – can be detained without charge and held indefinitely. In effect this put the executive above the law while placing the citizenry outside it. Taken together with the Patriot Acts, which permit surveillance of the entire American population, the US has suffered a loss of freedom that has no parallel in any mature democracy.

It is not the first time American government has acted to invade the freedoms of its citizens. The Alien and Sedition Acts that were passed at the end of the eighteenth century, the Espionage and Sedition Acts of 1917–18 and the ‘Red Scare’ that followed the First World War, the forcible internment of people of Japanese descent during the Second World War, all greatly expanded executive power. In each case the damage to freedom was not permanent – the laws that enabled it were passed during a period of war, then repealed or fell into disuse. The Bush administration’s expansion of executive powers has been more far-reaching, and because the ‘war on terror’ can never be won it has no end-point. As the 2006 mid-term elections showed, the US remains a functioning democracy, and it may be that legislation enabling torture and removing habeas corpus will be reversed under future administrations. The fact remains that it has ceased to be a regime in which the power of government is limited by the rule of law. The checks and balances of the constitution have failed to prevent an unprecedented expansion of arbitrary power.

The shift illustrates the delusive qualities of contemporary liberalism. The liberal theories that have been dominant over the past generation seek an escape from the hazards of politics in the supposed certainties of law. American liberal legalism – a school of thought that includes John Rawls, Ronald Dworkin, Bruce Ackerman and many others – aims to replace the murky negotiations of politics by the transparent adjudication of law.²⁸ In that way, it has been assumed, any threat to rights can be neutralized. In America, achieving this happy condition is the role of the Supreme Court. However, as the Bush administration has demonstrated, liberalism of this legalist variety is another Utopia. The Supreme Court can be politicized by rigging the judicial selection procedure, and if that fails the Court’s rulings can be ignored. The defence of constitutional freedoms then falls to legislators, who may – as in September 2006 – fear the electoral consequences of opposing the executive. At this point politics trumps law, as it does in other countries.

Liberals have come to believe that human freedom can be secured by constitutional guarantees. They have failed to grasp the Hobbesian truth, which Leo Strauss applied to the Weimar Republic, that constitutions change with regimes. A regime shift has occurred in the US, which now stands somewhere between the law-governed state it was during most of its history and a species of illiberal democracy. The US has undergone this change not as a result of its corrosion by relativism – as Strauss believed occurred in Weimar Germany – but through the capture of government by fundamentalism. If the American regime as it has been known in the past ceases to exist, it will be a result of the power of faith.

Contemporary liberals think of rights as universal human attributes that can be respected anywhere, but here they show a characteristic disregard of history. Current understandings of human rights developed along with the modern nation-state. It was the nation-state that emancipated individuals from the communal ties of medieval times and created freedom as it has come to be known in the modern world. This was not done without enormous conflict and severe costs. Large-scale violence was an integral feature of the process. If the US became a modern nation only after a civil war, France did so only after the Napoleonic wars and Germany after two world wars and the Cold War. In Africa and the Balkans the struggle for nationhood has run in parallel with ethnic cleansing, while the welding of China into a nation that is underway today involves the suppression of Muslim minorities and something not far from genocide in Tibet.

Liberal theorists tend to distinguish between ethnic nationalism, which they judge to be bad, and civic varieties they view as good. Repression is not only a feature of ethnic nationalism, however. Nations are created by the exercise of state power in a process that commonly involves the forcible integration or exclusion of groups viewed as alien. The construction of civic regimes in France and the US involved the use of schooling systems as instruments for integration, while war and conscription were used to create solidarity in the face of enemies. Liberal orthodoxy takes for granted that self-governing nation-states are freer than empires, but empires have often been friendlier to minorities – think of the toleration of the Ottomans when Europe was mired in wars of religion, the ethnic hatreds that were released by the fall of the cosmopolitan Habsburgs, or the destruction of the ancient multicultural city of Alexandria by the Egyptian nationalist Nasser. National self-determination marches hand in hand with ethnic cleansing and the uprooting of eclectic societies in which different ways of life have long coexisted in peace. Promoting self-determination universally, as neo-conservatives and liberal interventionists would like, means reproducing these evils on a worldwide scale.

Nation-states are not only the chief institutional vehicle of modern freedom but also, almost universally, of liberal democracy. In 1959 the American political scientist Seymour Martin Lipset reported the ‘absurd fact’ that all stable, long-standing democracies were monarchies, with the exception of the US, Switzerland and (at the time) Uruguay.²⁹ The fact is surprising only if one believes – absurdly – that democracy is self-legitimating. The few indisputably multi-national democracies that are thriving at the start of the twenty-first century – such as the UK, Spain and Canada – are monarchies and relics of empire. India is a flourishing multicultural democracy; but it is not multi-national and achieved its present stability only after a brutal partition with Pakistan, while Kashmir remains bitterly disputed. Except where they draw on monarchy for legitimacy, liberal democracies are nearly always nation-states. The attempt to project democracy beyond the national level – in the European Union, for example – has been a failure. The modern ideal of cosmopolitan democracy seems to be best realized in countries with pre-modern institutions.

With few exceptions, liberal democracy has taken root only in nation-states. But nation-states are rarely formed without mass killing, and in many parts of the world they may not be possible. Few of the countries of post-colonial Africa have developed a cohesive national identity, and the Middle East continues to be ruled by states that were dreamt up in the twilight of empire. Failed or semi-failed states exist in the Balkans and the Caucasus. Japan is a nation-state, but while China is determined to become one it remains an empire, and the same is true of Russia. Much of humanity will probably never live in nation-states. In the future as in the past the world will be governed by many kinds of regime.

The objection to universal democracy is not that some peoples are unfit for it. Democratic governments have been established in countries with very different cultures, while nothing prevents the most seemingly secure democracy slipping into tyranny. Any country can achieve democracy and any can lose it. Humankind is not divided between ‘the West’ – which despite having engendered totalitarianism still identifies itself with freedom – and the rest. Democracy has many advantages, especially in enabling governments to be changed without the use of force, but it is rarely achieved without a cost in violence while freedom may be no better protected in the end.

Where popular sentiment is illiberal, minorities may fare worse under democratic regimes than under some types of despotism. Even majorities may find their freedom curbed – as in the popular theocracy that is emerging in most of Iraq, where women are losing the freedom they had under Saddam. Overthrowing tyranny may bring democracy without advancing liberty. In the same way, democracy can allow the destruction of long-standing limits on government, as under the Bush administration. No constitution can impose freedom where it is not wanted or preserve it where it is no longer valued.

While liberal imperialism of the sort that was prevalent in the run-up to the war was an impossible programme, the Iraq adventure displayed, in a modified form suited to an intrinsically absurd project, some familiar imperialist traits. The geo-political aim of the enterprise was to seize control of the country’s oil, and though it has not enabled the increase of production that was expected, this seizure did occur. Beyond this act of appropriation, Iraq has been the scene of monumental fraud, with billions of dollars disappearing into the pockets of American corporations and Washington lobbyists. The corruption following the American invasion has been on a scale that dwarfs the scandals that surrounded the oil-for-food programme during the Saddam regime. Contracts for the reconstruction of Iraq have been preferentially allocated to American firms, with those that have close connections with the Republican party, the Bush administration and USAID – the United States Agency for International Development, which oversees the distribution of contracts – receiving the lion’s share. Many of the activities of government have been outsourced along with many of the traditional functions of the military. Tasks such as policing buildings, streets and oil wells, maintaining weapons systems and guarding supply convoys have been contracted out to corporations. UK private-security firms have been reported to have around 48,000 personnel in the country, outnumbering British troops by a factor of six to one.³⁰ Government has been privatized, an operation that has created many new sources of profit.

Rapacity of the sort that has occurred in Iraq since the invasion is normal. Imperialism is always about profit before anything else, and the rag-tag army of crooks and shysters that followed in the wake of American troops is not greatly different from that which trailed behind the colonial armies of earlier times. Nor is the crony capitalism in which companies with close connections to Washington have divided the spoils of war among themselves in any way unusual. Though its scale may be larger and its style more blatant in American-occupied Iraq, predatory greed is a universal feature of imperial conquest.

But this is still not imperialism in any classical sense. It is not only that the occupying power lacks the capacity to govern. By hiving off many of the functions of the state Iraq’s American occupiers have institutionalized the anarchy they created when they dismantled the state. The structures of the American-backed regime are not institutions of government. They are targets for capture by sectarian organizations and irregular militias, which use them to share out resources and neutralize opponents. In these conditions, creating a Saddam-like strong man to impose order on this chaos – as some ‘realists’ in Washington have proposed – is impossible. Such a strong man presupposes a type of Arab nationalism – secular, military and bureaucratic – that hardly exists today. Moreover, there is no state left in Iraq through which such a dictator could operate. The secular tyranny that was destroyed cannot be reinvented.

American analysts who grasp these facts sometimes suggest a three-way partition as a solution. But Iraq cannot be split into three states – it has already broken into two, with a Kurdish state now established in the north and the rest of the country savagely contested. Divided not only by their beliefs but also and more importantly by their rival claims on power and resources, the Sunni and Shia communities cannot be cleanly partitioned. The Sunni minority stands to lose everything and will fight to the death. With only around 60 per cent of the population composed of Shias, Iraq faces decades of ethnic cleansing and sectarian mass murder.

The US is powerless in face of the anarchy its invasion of the country has created. A phased withdrawal of American combat forces might seem to be the solution, and something of the sort was recommended by the Iraq Study Group, which was set up by Congress in March 2006 and reported in December of that year. The group’s co-chair was James Baker III, secretary of state in the administration of George Bush Snr and a consummate Washington insider. As an avowed realist in international affairs, Baker acknowledged there is no policy that can now guarantee stability in the country. But the group failed to confront a harder truth: the situation that has been produced by the US invasion of Iraq belongs to the class of problems that will be resolved by forces no one controls – and certainly not by the US. The anarchy that has been created in the country precludes a Vietnam-style American withdrawal. Vietnam had in the North a government that could govern the country, whereas Iraq has no effective government, and while a ‘domino effect’ failed to materialize in South-East Asia the fragmentation of the Iraqi state could well produce one in the Gulf. Though it may be masked in Washington, the fact of American defeat is evident throughout the region. Saudi Arabia, Syria, Iran and other countries are increasing their use of proxy forces in the country – with US forces now under fire from Sunni militias armed by America’s allies – which is becoming the site of a war for hegemony in the region. Escalation into a wider conflict has been the logic of events since the American invasion. The destruction of Iraq will go down in history as the trigger for a Thirty Years War whose outcome cannot be known but which will involve a revolutionary upheaval throughout the Gulf with repercussions in much of the world.

America’s adventure in Iraq has very little in common with the empires of the past. The colonial powers aimed to exploit the resources of the countries they conquered over extended periods. The East India Company and Hudson’s Bay Company were effectively governments, which endured for centuries and became part of long-standing colonial administrations. When the colonialists departed they left an inheritance not only of exploitation but also of institutions. Whatever its faults, the state of Iraq was one of these institutions.

The Iraq war served an economic system that forbids long-term commitments. In the casino capitalism that prevails in the early twenty-first century, investment has been replaced by gambling, and it will surely not be long before the war is written off as just another bad bet. Even the wealth that has been extracted in the occupation has a spectral quality. If there is a symbol that captures America in Iraq, it is not the colonial institutions of former times. It is Enron, which vanished leaving nothing behind.