[NYTr] Yankee, Go Home: USA's Imperialist History in the Middle East

[All the News That Doesn't Fit]

The Washington Post - Nov 11, 2007
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/11/09/AR2007110901568.html

YANKEE, GO HOME

In the Mideast, America Casts an Imperial Shadow

By Rashid Khalidi

Most Americans think that our role as a world power began with World
War II, the "good war," and then continued with the similarly noble
Cold War. We like to think that the United States acts in the world
exclusively in the name of ideals such as freedom and democracy.

So it may come as a bit of a shock to learn that the United States has
had an uninterrupted military presence in the Middle East for 65 years,
dating to 1942. Most Americans would also bristle at the idea that this
presence, from the arrival of GIs in North Africa onward, has
essentially become a continuation of nearly a century and a half of
European military adventures in the region. But history shows a
disturbing continuity between what the European colonial powers did in
the Middle East, starting with Napoleon's invasion of Egypt in 1798,
and what the United States is now doing in Iraq and elsewhere. Indeed,
the United States has managed in a few short years to do more damage in
the region than did the hated colonial powers that were finally driven
out only a few decades ago.

Of course, the European powers did not stint in their use of force in
the Middle East. As Juan Cole of the University of Michigan has shown,
Napoleon's troops savagely repressed Egyptian resistance even while the
French proclaimed the ideals of their Revolution. Aerial bombing of
civilians was pioneered by the Italians in Libya in 1911, perfected by
the British in Iraq in 1920 and used by the French in 1925 to level
whole quarters of Syrian cities. Home demolitions, collective
punishment, summary execution, detention without trial, routine torture
-- these were the weapons of Europe's takeover.

But Britain and France understood that naked power was not enough to
achieve lasting imperial control. They learned that they also needed
expertise, a knowledge of local languages and culture, and some form of
indirect rule that eventually removed their military forces from direct
contact with the local population. And although they faced decades of
stubborn resistance in an arc running from Morocco to Iran, they
managed to hold onto the reins until World War II shattered their
economies and unleashed the changes that brought independence to all
these countries.

During the Cold War, neither superpower crossed a red line by deploying
large numbers of troops or by occupying parts of the region outright --
until the Kremlin made the fatal, foolish mistake of invading
Afghanistan in 1979. That was the beginning of the end of the Soviet
Union, and of the Cold War era.

But since 2000, no one in a position of power in Washington seems to
have bothered to read any history. Believing that the demise of the
Soviet Union meant an end to checks and balances at home and to limits
abroad, and seduced by the blandishments of shallow-minded theorists
who believe that the rules that applied to all previous great powers do
not apply to the United States, the current administration has plunged
into not one but two land wars in Asia.

Once upon a time, after Korea and Vietnam, the words "land war in Asia"
might have inspired caution in Washington. But slaying the "Vietnam
Syndrome" that limited the executive branch's power to act abroad was
an uncontrollable obsession for the clique that has surrounded several
presidents since Richard M. Nixon, including such notables as Dick
Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld. These were men who, by and large, had never
seen combat, knew little of war and scorned history, geography and
expertise based on personal experience. Some of them were probably
unaware that Iraq was in Asia, and would not have cared if they knew.

Thus armed with the conviction that theirs were the noblest of purposes
and buoyed by the popular support that a president always receives
after an attack (particularly one as dastardly as 9/11), President Bush
and his advisers ignored 200 years of Middle Eastern history and
invaded Iraq, supposedly to spread democracy to the entire region.

As a general rule, democracy does not grow out of the barrel of a gun.
Moreover, few prologues are as unpropitious for the establishment of
democracy as war, invasion and occupation. Apologists for the Iraq
invasion have suggested ahistoric parallels between Iraq and postwar
Japan and Germany, ignoring the fact that the latter had been two of
the world's most highly developed industrial powers, with large middle
classes and established, generations-old traditions of parliamentary
government before they gave way to dictatorship in the 1930s.

We are told that Iraq is a recently created, artificial state; and it
is, like scores of other states that colonialism carved across three
continents. One would think that that would be all the more reason to
keep in place the institutions that held Iraq together, but the
arrogance of those in charge of the Pentagon and in Baghdad was as
limitless as their ignorance, and they swept away the entire Iraqi
governmental structure, putting in its place an overstretched American
army of occupation to control a vast, devastated country of more than
25 million people with a history of resistance to foreign control.

After the first shock of the invasion wore off, what people in Iraq and
all over the Middle East remembered was two centuries of Western powers
attempting to bring their countries under imperial control through
military force. They recalled decades of Western petroleum companies
controlling their oil. And unsurprisingly, the United States quickly
became as unpopular as the European colonial powers had ever been.

Iraq has changed everything. In Washington, a city obsessed with the
present, it was easy to forget that as recently as a few years ago, the
United States was not particularly disliked in the Middle East and that
al-Qaeda was a tiny underground organization with almost no popular
support. It was equally easy to forget that in the last phases of the
Cold War, the United States had managed to protect its interests in the
Middle East with no land forces on the ground, through an
over-the-horizon presence.

Today, al-Qaeda in Iraq threatens the security of entire districts of
the country; policymakers hint at a "South Korean" model of an
indefinite U.S. military presence in Iraq; the Pentagon is weighing
long-term plans for U.S. bases all over the region; and Washington
seems to assume that U.S. national interests require our troops to
fight their way across West Asia and North Africa to stop "the
terrorists," failing which we will find them crawling up the beaches of
Miami and Long Island.

This is madness. People in the Middle East are angry at the United
States not because of our values, many of which they share: democracy,
free enterprise, even many of our cultural values such as love of
family and respect for religion. They are angry at us, essentially,
because our forces are doing things in their back yard that we would
never tolerate from foreign troops in our own region.

We are the greatest power in world history. But that will make not a
whit of difference to the outcome in Iraq. We will not -- we cannot --
force the Iraqis to do what we want, any more than the British could
toward the end of their own attempt to rule Iraq, although they managed
to hold on for much longer than our doomed occupation will.

Our political leaders must recognize that force does not solve the
problem of terrorism. The real terrorists -- those blowing up civilians
in marketplaces and office towers, as opposed to Iraqis resisting U.S.
occupation -- can be dealt with only by means far more subtle than
military might. Dealing effectively with this elusive enemy requires
patience and a far more precise, carefully targeted and politically
sophisticated toolkit than the mighty bludgeon of the U.S. armed forces.

No true U.S. interest has been served by the invasion, destruction and
occupation of Iraq. We have done incalculable harm to that tragic
country and to our position in the world. Perhaps we can limit the
damage if we substitute a little humility for the blind hubris that led
us into this disaster -- an understanding of the limitations of armed
force and "a decent respect to the opinions of mankind," especially
those whose hearts we hope to win.


[Rashid Khalidi is the Edward Said professor of Arab studies at Columbia
University. His latest book is "The Iron Cage: The Story of the
Palestinian Struggle for Statehood." ]