3-31-06, 8:37 am
Recent British intelligence revelations about the prelude to the Iraq war got me to thinking about previous adventures in the recent and not so recent history of imperialism. Although this should only be news to establishment circles (who only criticize ruling class policies when the ruling class is divided), the revelations make clear that Bush, with Tony Blair’s support, was preparing to launch a war against Iraq regardless of whether or not he got the UN backing he was looking for (he didn’t) and regardless of the fact that the UN inspection teams hadn’t and weren’t going to find weapons of mass destruction (which he expected). But what is really interesting in these documents is the imperialist arrogance, the lack of any understanding of the country, the region, and the likely problems for the U.S. and the U.K. that the war would bring. At one point, Bush even suggests sending in U.S. planes with phony UN insignias and, if Iraqi forces fired on them, using that as a provocation to launch the war.
As a historian, I thought immediately of the failed Bay of Pigs imperialist invasion and the CIA’s use of planes and mercenary pilots to bomb Cuban installations that they claimed were Cuban air force planes flown by Cubans defecting to the side of the invaders. That led to disaster when the Cuban government produced photographs at the UN to prove that the CIA planes were the same basic model as theirs, but a more expensive version with solid rather than Plexiglas noses. (The CIA had a much bigger budget to purchase aircraft than the former Batista dictatorship.)
At the time of the Bay of Pigs invasion, the existence of the Soviet Union, the global anti-imperialist movement, and of course the Cuban people’s support of their revolution made it too costly for the Kennedy administration to launch a full-scale invasion after its surrogate anti-Cuban forces were decisively defeated and isolated. The 'secrecy' of CIA actions was in part an adjustment to the fact that the old colonial imperialism with its shoot first, asks questions later foreign policy was no longer tenable on the world scene.
Today, Bush and Blair acted as if they were pre-World War II imperialists proclaiming their right to send in gunboats, bombers, and troops to establish whatever local 'regime' they wanted based on arrangements made among themselves.
As in the past, the Iraqis and the other nations in the region were portrayed as the beneficiaries of a great civilization (today called democracy) that the imperialists brought. Their present rulers, whatever they were, and despite the imperialist support they had received in the past, were seen as 'barbarians' (today called terrorists and purveyors of 'weapons of mass destruction') who threaten 'Western civilization.'
The British imperialists particularly had missionaries and later scholars to provide them with information on the 'natives' and were pretty adept at playing religious and ethno-cultural groups against one another. Unlike the French, who often antagonized non-Christians by stressing the spread of Christianity along with culture in their conquered colonies, the British officially claimed to 'respect' local traditions and institutions as long as they kept people divided and served colonial interests.
Even with the hundreds of billions spent for intelligence and the research industry of both the universities and the corporate supported think tanks, the Bush administration has actually been pretty lousy at dividing and conquering its local enemies in Iraq, although I wouldn’t recommend that they turn to missionaries for information. In fact, the administration has been pretty good at uniting its enemies and giving a cold shoulder to genuine progressive secular interests that it claims to support.
In large part this may be because it, unlike British and other colonial imperialists, isn’t clear about separating its public propaganda from its private analysis of what is going on. This isn’t, as some would say, a result of the fact that it is 'new' at the imperialist game. The American Republic, defining itself as a 'continental empire' was adept at dividing and conquering indigenous peoples as it expanded westward and maneuvering against the British Empire (which generally opposed its expansion) as it gained control of the Northern half of Mexico. Right-wingers ignorance of even their own history can be seen in the present campaign in the Senate to both criminalize undocumented workers and establish some kind of fortified barrier along the U.S. Mexican border. The Treaty of Guadalupe-Hidalgo ending the Mexican war specifically forbade any militarizing of the border in order to both protect the U.S. territorial gains and make future conquests easier.
Even the Truman administration, for example, when accused the Soviets of supporting Greek Communist insurgents to spread revolution through the Balkans understood that the Soviets in any direct way weren’t doing anything of the kind. That fact enabled them to intervene on the side of the Greek rightist government effectively. If they had really believed and acted on their own propaganda of an aggressive 'totalitarian' enemy seeking world domination and used Greece and other specific cases as evidence for this, they in all probability would have gotten into World War III with the Soviets.
The Bush administration can’t seem to distinguish between its propaganda and real conditions, since its propaganda is its reality. It showed its hand early in the occupation when it suggested that Turkish troops be used in Iraq, as if centuries of Iraqi hostility to the Ottoman Turkish Empire had no meaning for Iraqis. That its only serious ally in the war, the British, replaced the Ottoman Turks as a colonial power after WWI also didn’t matter to Bush, who divided up the occupation zones of the country with Blair the way the colonial powers used to carve up Africa and the Near East.
The differences and rivalries between Shiite and Sunni Muslims also seemed to have no meaning for the administration, or the differences between secular and religious groupings. Wiser if not less brutal imperialists would have used those divisions to divide and conquer. The administration was been adept only at uniting the major groups in the country against it, however bitter their rivalries may be with each other.
What meaning will any constitution that Iraqis write under U.S. tutelage have if those in power see religious law as having precedence over it? How can anyone not in a propaganda bubble expect people whose whole history until the second half of the 20th century was to see empires install local rulers over them, claiming, as the Ottomans did, religious authority for the acts or, as the British did, bringing in an outsider to be their King, see the Bush administration’s not so subtle suggestions to them to choose the leaders Bush wants as anything but colonialism.
The British intelligence documents show that Bush didn’t really understand much of anything or care to understand. He liked to talk about the military aspects of the campaign like a boy playing a military video game. From his experience in the oil business, where he wasn’t too successful, he told Blair that the U.S. could quickly restore the oil fields. Regime change would be accomplished, the oil would be protected and the Iraqis and the world would be far better off, even if the Iraqis and the UN and the rest of the world, like the French, had their doubts.
The British went along with this as they have generally gone along with all major U.S. policies since the U.S. in effect replaced and absorbed the assets of the British Empire (and through the U.S.-NATO bloc all the pre WWII empires) in the cold war period, using anti-Communism and anti-Sovietism as its rationale and the sort of 'protectorates' its had previously established in the Caribbean and Central America as its model.
Franklin Roosevelt’s 'Good Neighbor' policy represented a major liberalization of the gunboat-dollar diplomacy of his predecessors. The development of the Cold War led the Truman and subsequent administrations to globalize that policy of indirect economic control supported when necessary by military power, with alliance systems used to provide a fig leaf of internationalism to such rule.
The Bush administration, the intelligence documents show, has gone back to simply taking over what it wants to with the consent of its diminishing 'Axis of allies,' Blair’s Britain, for the moment Berlusconi’s Italy, and a few others, and punching in its commercials about democracy, nation building, international terrorism, human rights, and weapons of mass destruction when and where it thinks they are needed. Such policies historically have led only to war, more wars, bigger wars, and eventually defeat and devastation for those peoples whose governments advance them. The left and for that matter the center-left must expose and oppose them in every instance and at every step.
--Norman Markowitz is a contributing editor of Political Affairs. Send your comments to
