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  So who won? One answer is that Clausewitz did. The United States once again pursued its political goals through war, one that its colossal economic and military superiority ensured was swift and cost few American lives: just ninety-one combat-related fatalities between the start of the war on March 20 and President Bush’s declaration of victory on the deck of the USS Abraham Lincoln six weeks later. This was a different war from those fought in the 1990s. After much talk of “shock and awe,” the preliminary air bombardment was short and selective, and much more of the fighting was left to highly mobile ground forces, which swept toward the main cities, encountering only desultory resistance. Saddam was toppled. After a nine-month manhunt he was found skulking in a “spider hole.” As it turned out, he had been bluffing: initial searches found little, if any, trace of weapons of mass destruction or even facilities to make them. But more fool Saddam. Had he simply told the truth to the inspectors instead of duping the CIA, he might have survived to a ripe old age amid the gaudy comforts of his numerous repulsive palaces. Even his conventional weapons proved virtually useless, for most of the men armed with them simply fled rather than fight.

  The war against Iraq therefore ended up being much more a war of humanitarian intent than anyone had anticipated. In the absence of conspicuous piles of WMD, attention turned to the second stated aim of the coalition, the liberation of the Iraqi people from tyranny. Here it became apparent within a very short time that not only Clausewitz but the United States had won. They might have reservations about President Bush, but when asked in June 2003 about the consequences of the war in Iraq, fully three-quarters of French, Italian and German respondents to the Pew Global Attitudes survey agreed that the Iraqi people were better off without Saddam Hussein.85 Even more striking, ordinary Iraqis seemed to share the same view. The first rigorously conducted poll of Baghdad, published in September last year, revealed that 62 percent of Baghdad residents believed “the ousting of Saddam Hussein was worth any hardships they might have personally suffered since the … invasion.” Moreover, two-thirds (67 percent) believed that Iraq would be somewhat (35 percent) or much (32 percent) better off five years from now than it was before the American action. Support for the regime change was especially strong in poor areas of the city.86 The only consolation for the opponents of the war was that the most popular Western politician in Iraq was none other than Jacques Chirac.87

  There is no gratitude in international affairs; as the saying goes, no good deed goes unpunished. In 2003 the United States went to war against a regime that had repeatedly broken international law, repeatedly defied the United Nations Security Council and—according to the organization Human Rights Watch—repeatedly murdered its own citizens, perhaps as many as three hundred thousand of whom Saddam caused to be executed and interred in mass graves. Most European governments supported the American decision to overthrow Saddam. Most rational people in Europe and in Iraq itself welcomed the fact that he was gone. Yet a great many of the same people complained that the United States had acted “unilaterally”; that it, rather than Iraq, was the “rogue nation.” This was nonsense. Already before 9/11 it was obvious that the United Nations was too weak an institution to deal effectively with renegade states engaged in military aggression and/or genocide. Bosnia and Kosovo had shown that American military leadership was the only effective solution to such challenges. Afghanistan had shown that the United States could achieve military success more or less single-handedly. But there was never any intention to act in complete isolation, there or in Iraq. There was a role for the UN—and indeed for NATO and all the other components of the international community—after the tyranny had been overthrown. That role was to assist in the very different task that turned out to be the inevitable concomitant of regime change: precisely that nation building of which President Bush and his closest advisers were so suspicious.

  Asked at a press conference during the Afghan War what the United States would do after the Taliban were overthrown, Secretary Rumsfeld gave a revealing answer. “I don’t think [it] leaves us with a responsibility to try to figure out what kind of government that country ought to have,” he declared. “I don’t know people who are smart enough from other countries to tell other countries the kind of arrangements they ought to have to govern themselves.”88 This was also the president’s view. “I oppose using the military for nation-building,” he told a meeting of his National Security Council three days after Rumsfeld’s statement, “Once the job is done, our forces are not peacekeepers. We ought to put in place a U.N. protection and leave….” He was notably sympathetic to his secretary of state Colin Powell’s notion of a “UN mandate plus third country forces ruling Kabul.”89 Like the dichotomy between unilateralism and multilateralism, however, this distinction between U.S. regime change and UN nation building was a chimera. In practice, the United States simply could not walk away from Afghanistan or from Iraq the moment the obnoxious regime it was fighting was no more.

  Even before the invasion of Iraq, what Michael Ignatieff has called “a distinctive new form of imperial tutelage called nation building”—“Empire Lite” in his witty coinage—was already under way in at least three countries.90 In each case it was American military intervention, though at no stage positively requested by the United Nations, that made nation building (to be precise, state building) by the UN possible. In each case it was the United Nations that gave the American presence international legitimacy and thereby reinforcements. The goals of both parties had certainly changed over time. In the Balkans the objective had been humanitarian: to halt genocide and an exodus of refugees. Ousting the Taliban from Afghanistan had obvious humanitarian benefits, but these were, as economists say, “externalities.” The main object had been to “root out” terrorists and their sponsors. The fundamental tendency, however, was imperialism in the name of internationalism. Whether they liked it or not, and whether the enemy was genocide or terrorism, the United States and the United Nations were now operating together as a kind “semi-empire.”91 This was also bound to be true in Iraq, despite the UN’s skepticism about the American rationale for regime change. Regime change and nation building were not after all distinct activities, as President Bush had hoped. The one shaded inevitably into the other, and while the United States might be capable of unilateral (or at least UN-less) regime change, it was not capable of nation building on its own. Nor, unfortunately for Bush and Rumsfeld, was the United Nations. By the end of 2003 it was an ineluctable reality that to reconstruct Iraq the United States and United Nations must put aside differences and unite.

  PART II

  FALL?

  Chapter 5

  The Case for Liberal Empire

  Imperialists don’t realize what they can do, what they can create! They’ve robbed this continent [Africa] of billions, and all because they are too shortsighted to understand that their billions were pennies, compared to the possibilities! Possibilities that must include a better life for the people who inhabit this land.

  FRANKLIN D. ROOSEVELT, 19431

  It would be ignorant, dangerous nonsense to talk about grants of full self-government to many of the dependent territories for some time to come. In those instances it would be like giving a child of ten a latch-key, a bank account, and a shot-gun.

  HERBERT MORRISON, 19432

  NO TO EMPIRE?

  Nation-states are a novelty compared with empires, for there have been empires since the beginning of written records. Colonization—the establishment of new settlements by large and organized groups of migrants— is of course a process that predates recorded history. Civilization—the emergence of complex social structures with urban centers—can be traced back to the fourth millennium before Christ. Empire, however, denotes something more sophisticated still: the extension of one’s civilization, usually by military force, to rule over other peoples. It is one of history’s truisms that empires rise and fall. One less commonly understood implication is that there are periods in history in which
there is no dominant empire, indeed sometimes no empire at all. In the 1990s the world faced this possibility. To put it starkly, the choice after the collapse of the Soviet Empire was between a world of independent nation-states, some but not all of them democracies, and an American imperium. Those opponents of the Bush administration whose slogan in 2003 was “No to Empire” took it for granted that the former was and remains a viable world order. Ironically, this was also the view of President Bush himself and indeed of most of his most senior advisers. As we have seen, though willing to use American military power to effect changes of government in rogue regimes and failed states, they had little appetite for “nation building,” a euphemism for a new kind of “multilateral empire” in which the United States and United Nations together took over and ran countries in the aftermath of regime changes. In theory, this imperialism of internationalism could last indefinitely in countries palpably incapable of stable self-rule. But as far as Bush was concerned, the American presence in Bosnia, Kosovo, Afghanistan and Iraq was no more than a temporary expedient; this was not nation building in the Clintonian sense but merely an interim, provisional form of administration, paving the way back to self-government for the countries in question.

  In short, both opponents and proponents of war to overthrow Saddam Hussein agreed that a swift return to full political sovereignty for Iraq was desirable; the same applied to the other countries under international administration. The question this chapter addresses is whether or not it is correct to regard national independence—what Woodrow Wilson called self-determination—as a universally viable model. Might it not be that for some countries some form of imperial governance, meaning a partial or complete suspension of their national sovereignty, might be better than full independence, not just for a few months or years but for decades?3 Paradoxically, might the only hope for such countries ever to become successful sovereign states (especially if we regard democracy as a key criterion of success) be a period of political dependence and limited power for their representative institutions?4 To answer that question, we need to compare the costs and benefits of both empire and independence in the modern period.

  FROM EMPIRES TO NATION-STATES

  The age of empires reached its zenith in the century stretching from the 1880s until the 1980s. For most of that period a relatively small number of empires governed nearly all of the world. On the eve of the First World War, Britain, France, Belgium, Holland and Germany, which among them accounted for less than 1 percent of the world’s land surface and less than 8 percent of its population, ruled in the region of a third of the rest of the world’s area and more than a quarter of its people.5 All of Australasia, 90 percent of Africa and 56 percent of Asia were under some form of European rule, as were nearly all the islands of the Caribbean, the Indian Ocean and the Pacific. And although only around a quarter of the American continent—mainly Canada—found itself in the same condition of dependence, nearly all the rest had been ruled from Europe at one time or another in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In both the north and the south, the polities of the American republics were fundamentally shaped by the colonial past.

  Nor do these calculations about the extent of the West European maritime empires tell the whole story of nineteenth-century empire. Most of Central and Eastern Europe was under Russian, German or Austrian imperial rule. Indeed, the Russian empire stretched from the Baltic to the Black Sea and from Warsaw to Vladivostok. And still intact, though in a position of increasing inferiority to the European empires, were the Ottoman Empire in the Middle East and the Chinese empire in the Far East. Independent nation-states, in short, were the exception to a worldwide imperial rule. Even Japan, the best-known example of an Asian state that had resisted colonization (though its economy had been forcibly opened to trade by the United States), had itself already embarked on empire building, having conquered Korea. And as we have seen, the United States, though forged in the crucible of anti-imperial war, had taken its first steps on the road to empire, having annexed Texas in 1845, California in 1848, Alaska in 1867 and the Philippines, Puerto Rico, Hawaii and Guam in 1898. Indeed, its nineteenth-century history can be told as a transition from continental to hemispherical imperialism.

  Yet the twentieth century rejected empire, in principle, if not in practice. The rejection may be said to have begun with the publication of one of the most influential of all anti-imperialist tracts, J. A. Hobson’s Imperialism: An Essay, the central thrust of which—that the British Empire was a racket, run for the sole benefit of a tiny elite of financiers and their clients—later inspired Lenin’s tract Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism. To Lenin, the First World War was a direct result of imperialist rivalries. Its consequences were, however, to overthrow no fewer than four Central and East European emperors (though Lenin himself ensured that the Romanov empire was reborn in a more malevolent form under Bolshevik rule). The five surviving West European empires limped through the 1920s and 1930s but were shattered in the 1940s by the German, Italian and Japanese bids to build new empires in Europe, Africa and Asia. The two superpowers that emerged victorious from the world wars, though empires in all but name, were both decidedly anti-imperial in their rhetoric. Elaborating on his predecessor Woodrow Wilson’s first draft for a new world order, Franklin Roosevelt conceived of the Second World War as a war to end empire. The Soviet Union, for its part, consistently equated fascism and imperialism and did not take long after 1945 to accuse the United States of sponsoring one and practicing the other. Both these anti-imperial empires believed they would derive strategic advantages from decolonization.

  Roosevelt envisaged a system of temporary6 trusteeships for all former colonies, as a prelude to their independence on the basis of the Wilsonian principle of self-determination (which the peacemakers after the previous world war had emphatically ruled out for non-European peoples). Despite the best efforts of Churchill, he got his way.7 Decolonization happened after the Second World War in a succession of great waves, postponed only where (as in the Middle East or Indochina) the Americans were willing to subsidize European colonial governments against Communist “insurgency.”8 The First World War had already dismantled three empires—the Habsburg, Hohenzollern and Ottoman—but many of their possessions had ended up in the hands of other empires, having enjoyed only the most fleeting tastes of independence. After 1945 it was different. Not only the British but also the French, Dutch, Belgian and Portuguese empires were wound up, rapidly in some regions of the world, slowly and painfully elsewhere, until by the 1970s little more than vestiges remained. Only three empires endured: the Russian and Chinese (which Roosevelt conceived of as somehow different from the West European empires because their colonies were not overseas and, perhaps, because their ideologies were overtly egalitarian) and, of course, the unspoken American empire.9 The result was a leap in the number of independent states in the world, which more than doubled. In 1920 there were 69 sovereign states in the world. By 1950 the number had risen to 89, and in 1995, by which time the Russian empire had finally fallen apart, there were 192, with the two biggest increases coming in the 1960s (mainly Africa, where no fewer than 25 new states were formed between 1960 and 1964) and the 1990s (mainly Eastern Europe).10

  Thus, impelled forward by a combination of European exhaustion, non-European nationalism and American idealism, the world embarked on an epochal experiment, an experiment to test 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.

  WHY DECOLONIZATION FAILED

  That hypothesis has been largely proved false. The coming of political independence has brought prosperity only to a small minority of former colonies. And although the former imperial powers no longer fight one another, decolonization has in many cases been followed by recurrent conflict between newly independent states and, even more often, within them. This has been the great double disappointment of the sixty years since the end of Wo
rld War II. Nor has the disappointment ended there. Self-determination was supposed to go hand in hand with democracy. But decolonization has often led not to democracy but, after the briefest of interludes, to indigenous dictatorship. Many of these dictatorships have been worse for the people living under them than the old colonial structures of government: more corrupt, more lawless, more violent. Indeed, it is precisely these characteristics that explain why standards of living have actually worsened in many sub-Saharan African countries since they gained their independence.11

  Most of the former colonies of the Middle East are wealthier only because nature endowed some of them with underground deposits of oil, full exploitation of which came only after they had gained their independence. But with few exceptions their polities are little better than despotisms. Colonialism was not all good, of course, and independence has not been all bad. But it is not convincing (though it is certainly convenient for the likes of the Zimbabwean despot Robert Mugabe) to blame all the problems of the developing world today on the malign after-effects of colonial rule. In the words of the African Development Bank’s 2003 report, “More than four decades of independence … should have been enough time to sort out the colonial legacies and move forward.”12 The experience of much of Africa and the Middle East since 1945, as well as large parts of Asia, makes it clear that Roosevelt’s faith in decolonization was misplaced.