Easy E
05-19-2003, 10:31 AM
The Point | How we use our strength will say everything about us
U.S. efforts at ridding the world of terrorists are admirable. That doesn't make us smarter and more decent than others
By Mark Bowden
For The Inquirer
A smattering of professionally smart people who ought to know better have been talking up the idea of an "American Empire," like the boy digging a hole in his backyard who, impressed with his progress, sets his sights on China.
This is the kind of silliness that often follows an important, fortuitous event for our country. The swift military victories in Afghanistan and Iraq have given wind to the ambitions of "neocolonialists" - just as after the Berlin Wall fell, there was a lot of hard blowing about a "New World Order."
Here's how that argument went: The triumph of democracy and capitalism over communism signaled a rising tide of freedom, a golden age of peace and prosperity, where the formerly enslaved and downtrodden were busy earning, buying, selling, and watching whatever they wanted on satellite TV, turning the rest of the world into a kind of giant suburb of the good old USA.
The talk of empire-building today has a similar ring of wishful thinking - at least to those convinced that suburban America represents a pinnacle of social development.
I'm as suburban and American as they come, but the notion was and is, of course, foolishness. A Scottish historian named Niall Ferguson has done us all the favor of pointing out just how foolish. He's out on the cable TV gab circuit talking up his book Empire, which holds up as an example for America the British Empire - those were the heavies in khakis mowing down civilians in that sweeping epic Gandhi several years back. Sadly, Ferguson is serious, but the very notion should give even the most enthusiastic neocolonizer pause.
There is deep cultural arrogance underlying such a thought. It presumes that because we are currently stronger than everyone else in the world, we are also smarter and more decent. If history serves as a guide, the latter virtues rarely flow from a position of absolute strength. What tends to flow from uncontested power is stupidity and evil. The great challenge we face is not colonizing the world - even in the fuzzy, benevolent, abstract way most of its proponents mean - but using our strength with wisdom and humility.
What should we want? A safer world, for starters. Our main legitimate priority is to thwart terrorist attacks and dangerous tyrants. This is what justified routing the Taliban and Saddam Hussein - assuming we eventually find the dangerous weapons he was supposedly manufacturing and stockpiling.
Beyond that, our only role is to facilitate health, prosperity, basic human rights, free markets and constitutional democracy - that is, democracy safeguarded by legal protections. We should more carefully define what we mean by "legitimate governments" - differentiate between those who rule with the consent of the governed and those that are nothing more than armed gangs of fanatics or thugs. We should be morally consistent. Toward that end, we need to do a better job of living up those ideals ourselves.
It is not helpful when Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld says that Iraq will not be allowed to form an "Iranian-type government." Now, even if this is U.S. policy (and it's easy to see why mullah rule would be undesirable to us), how smart is it to say things like that? If we are the benevolent conquerors we claim to be, then our role in that country ought to end as soon as Iraq has established a self-sustaining government of laws, capable of charting its own path while fending off whatever threats to its freedom emerge - from without and within.
Comments like Rumsfeld's strengthen the hand of those who claim the United States is not what it says it is and make it more difficult for those Iraqis who have taken us at our word to succeed.
Beneath the cultural arrogance is a deeper intellectual folly, the idea that we can design the perfect system, one that can handle any contingency. We can't. Take NASA, for example. Nobody has invested more intellect, time and money into designing a foolproof safety system, and yet look at the record of the space shuttle: plenty of dazzling success, to be sure, but that success has been punctuated by episodes of tragic failure.
Beware of anyone who claims to have everything figured out, be they ayatollahs, evangelists, or the authors of utopian political systems. Time and surprise ultimately defeat the most daring and the most careful of plans, just as they undo fortunes and empires.
Something so huge and rich as humanity defies prediction, analysis and central management. No one of us, persons or nations, is ever in the driver's seat. We are all just along for the ride. The best we can do is hold tight to basic truths, lean in the right direction, and pray.
U.S. efforts at ridding the world of terrorists are admirable. That doesn't make us smarter and more decent than others
By Mark Bowden
For The Inquirer
A smattering of professionally smart people who ought to know better have been talking up the idea of an "American Empire," like the boy digging a hole in his backyard who, impressed with his progress, sets his sights on China.
This is the kind of silliness that often follows an important, fortuitous event for our country. The swift military victories in Afghanistan and Iraq have given wind to the ambitions of "neocolonialists" - just as after the Berlin Wall fell, there was a lot of hard blowing about a "New World Order."
Here's how that argument went: The triumph of democracy and capitalism over communism signaled a rising tide of freedom, a golden age of peace and prosperity, where the formerly enslaved and downtrodden were busy earning, buying, selling, and watching whatever they wanted on satellite TV, turning the rest of the world into a kind of giant suburb of the good old USA.
The talk of empire-building today has a similar ring of wishful thinking - at least to those convinced that suburban America represents a pinnacle of social development.
I'm as suburban and American as they come, but the notion was and is, of course, foolishness. A Scottish historian named Niall Ferguson has done us all the favor of pointing out just how foolish. He's out on the cable TV gab circuit talking up his book Empire, which holds up as an example for America the British Empire - those were the heavies in khakis mowing down civilians in that sweeping epic Gandhi several years back. Sadly, Ferguson is serious, but the very notion should give even the most enthusiastic neocolonizer pause.
There is deep cultural arrogance underlying such a thought. It presumes that because we are currently stronger than everyone else in the world, we are also smarter and more decent. If history serves as a guide, the latter virtues rarely flow from a position of absolute strength. What tends to flow from uncontested power is stupidity and evil. The great challenge we face is not colonizing the world - even in the fuzzy, benevolent, abstract way most of its proponents mean - but using our strength with wisdom and humility.
What should we want? A safer world, for starters. Our main legitimate priority is to thwart terrorist attacks and dangerous tyrants. This is what justified routing the Taliban and Saddam Hussein - assuming we eventually find the dangerous weapons he was supposedly manufacturing and stockpiling.
Beyond that, our only role is to facilitate health, prosperity, basic human rights, free markets and constitutional democracy - that is, democracy safeguarded by legal protections. We should more carefully define what we mean by "legitimate governments" - differentiate between those who rule with the consent of the governed and those that are nothing more than armed gangs of fanatics or thugs. We should be morally consistent. Toward that end, we need to do a better job of living up those ideals ourselves.
It is not helpful when Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld says that Iraq will not be allowed to form an "Iranian-type government." Now, even if this is U.S. policy (and it's easy to see why mullah rule would be undesirable to us), how smart is it to say things like that? If we are the benevolent conquerors we claim to be, then our role in that country ought to end as soon as Iraq has established a self-sustaining government of laws, capable of charting its own path while fending off whatever threats to its freedom emerge - from without and within.
Comments like Rumsfeld's strengthen the hand of those who claim the United States is not what it says it is and make it more difficult for those Iraqis who have taken us at our word to succeed.
Beneath the cultural arrogance is a deeper intellectual folly, the idea that we can design the perfect system, one that can handle any contingency. We can't. Take NASA, for example. Nobody has invested more intellect, time and money into designing a foolproof safety system, and yet look at the record of the space shuttle: plenty of dazzling success, to be sure, but that success has been punctuated by episodes of tragic failure.
Beware of anyone who claims to have everything figured out, be they ayatollahs, evangelists, or the authors of utopian political systems. Time and surprise ultimately defeat the most daring and the most careful of plans, just as they undo fortunes and empires.
Something so huge and rich as humanity defies prediction, analysis and central management. No one of us, persons or nations, is ever in the driver's seat. We are all just along for the ride. The best we can do is hold tight to basic truths, lean in the right direction, and pray.