Transition to an empire

The neo-imperialism of the US revives the Roman concept of moral 
domination, based on the conviction that free trade, globalisation 
and the diffusion of Western civilisation are good for the world  

By IGNACIO RAMONET

05/14/03: (Le Monde diplomatique) WHEN General Jay Garner landed in 
Iraq and arrived in bombed and looted Baghdad he declared: "This is a 
great day." As if his presence miraculously ended the thousand and one 
problems afflicting ancient Mesopotamia. What is astonishing is not the 
obscenity of the statement but the resignation and apathy with which 
the media covered the installation of the man who should really be 
called the proconsul of the United States. As if there were no longer 
international law. As if we had gone back to the days of the mandates 
(1). As if it were now normal for Washington to designate a retired 
officer of the US armed forces to govern a sovereign state.  

This decision to name a senior officer to run a defeated country, 
without even consulting the phantom members of the "coalition", 
is alarmingly reminiscent of the old practices of colonialism 
- Clive in India, Kitchener in the Sudan and Lyautey in Morocco. 
To think we had imagined such abuses to have been banned for ever 
because of political morality and the lessons of history.  

The US tells us that this is different , and that the transitional 
regime in Iraq should be compared to General Douglas MacArthur's regime 
in Japan after 1945. But that is even more alarming. It took the atomic 
destruction of the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945 - almost an 
apocalypse - for the US to name a general as administrator of a 
defeated power , at a time when the United Nations was not yet 
functioning.  

Now the UN does exist, at least in theory (2). And the invasion of Iraq 
by US forces and their British auxiliaries wasn't the conclusion of a 
world war (unless President Bush and his entourage regard the attacks 
of 11 September 2001 as the equivalent of world war).  

General Garner has indicated that his occupation will not be for ever. 
"We will be here as long as it takes. We will leave fairly rapidly". (3) 
But history teaches us that "as long as it takes" can be a very long time 
indeed. When the US invaded the Philippines and Puerto Rico in 1898 
on the altruistic pretext of "liberating" them and their peoples from the 
Spanish colonial yoke, the US soon ended up replacing the former 
power. In the Philippines it put down nationalist resistance and then did 
not leave until 1946, and continued to interfere in the country's affairs 
thereafter. In each subsequent national election the US supported its 
preferred candidate, including the dictator Ferdinand Marcos, in power 
from 1965 to 1986. And the US is still occupying Puerto Rico. Even in 
Japan and Germany, the presence of US armed forces remains massive 
58 years after the end of the second world war.  

So when General Garner arrived in Baghdad with his team of 450 
administrators it was hard to avoid the thought that the US, in this 
phase of neo- imperialism, is shouldering what Rudyard Kipling called 
"the white man's burden". Or what the great powers saw in 1918 as their 
sacred mission of civilising people seen as incapable of running their 
lives in the difficult conditions of the modern world.  

The neo-imperialism of the US revives the Roman concept of moral 
domination, based on the conviction that free trade, globalisation and 
the diffusion of Western civilisation are good for the world. But it 
is also a military and media domination exercised over peoples considered 
inferior (5).  

After the overthrow of Saddam Hussein's appalling dictatorship, the US 
promised that it would establish in Iraq an exemplary democracy, under 
the wing of the new empire, the influence of which would trigger the fall 
of all autocratic regimes in the region - including, we were told by James 
Woolsey, former director of the CIA and a confidant of Bush, those of 
Saudi Arabia and Egypt (6).  

Is such a promise credible? Obviously not. The US defence secretary, 
Donald Rumsfeld, hastened to point out that even if it was the desire of 
the majority of Iraqis as expressed at the ballot box, the US would not 
accept an Islamic regime in Iraq: "That isn't going to happen," he said 
(7). This is a very old law of history: empires impose their law on the 
vanquished. But there is also another law: those that live by empire die 
by it.  

(1) Invented at the end of the 1914-18 war, the idea of the mandate 
regime replaced that of the protectorate, which US president Woodrow 
Wilson considered too colonialist.  

(2) Even if more fanatical US hawks, such as Richard Perle, are already 
predicting its downfall. See Le Figaro, 11 April 2003.  

(3) The Guardian, London, 21 April 2003.

(4) See Yves Lacoste, Dictionnaire de g?opolitique, Flammarion, Paris, 1993.

(5) French and German opposition to the war against Iraq made it 
possible for this war not to be seen in Arab eyes as the expression 
of a "clash of civilisations".  

(6) International Herald Tribune, Paris, 8 April 2003.

(7) International Herald Tribune, Paris, 26 April 2003.

                          -==-

Source: Information Clearinghouse ...
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article3369.htm

Cheers, Steve..

---