Back when the US chaired the 2004 Sea Island G8, George Bush’s flagship proposal centred on the idea of a Greater Middle East Initiative, or GMEI (by way of a reminder, here’s what Brookings had to say about it then). At the time, there was heavy criticism – not only of of the GMEI’s optimistic hopes about democratisation, but also its dubious geographical assumptions: could Iran and Afghanistan really be lumped together with all the Arab countries?
But here’s the thing. If the idea of a Greater Middle East was clumsy, there’s still a case for coming up with some new geographical categories to reflect changed political realities in the region. In particular, it’s surprising that we still have no one category that draws together Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan.
Another week, another comparison between the US and the last days of Rome. This week, the man full of woe about military overstretch and fiscal implosion is David Walker – the Comptroller General of the United States and head of the Government Accountability Office, no less – who writes in the FT that:
America’s fiscal, healthcare, education, energy, environment, immigration and Iraq policies are in need of review and revision. Timely action is needed because Washington’s historical crisis-management approach to dealing with hard public policy choices is no longer prudent.
Rather than discussing whether America today is or isn’t like Rome’s last days in the late fourth century CE, I’ll just note how successfully the “US heading into a decline-and-fall scenario” meme continues to propagate itself (c.f. last week’s post about Thomas Homer-Dixon‘s latest book), not least among Americans themselves – and make two additional observations.
One is that the “decline and fall” meme of popular imagination – riots, starvation, conquest, a thousand years in the Dark Ages – rests on an incomplete, and rather Atlanticist, view of Rome. After all, there is the small matter of the eastern empire, i.e. Byzantium, as it became. Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of Rome runs for a full 1,045years beyond Alaric’s conquest of Italy in 408CE, all the way to the fall of Constantinople in 1453.
Byzantium’s rise after the split of the Roman Empire provides a precise illustration of Homer-Dixon’s central point: if breakdown can lead to collapse, it can also be a springboard for transformation and renewal. This is a useful and important counter-meme to the riots / starvation / Dark Age meme – and one which deserves to be propagated more often.
The other observation is simply: we could do with some more constructive historical analogies than the ones we have today. Other than the decline-and-fall analogy, the other one most discussed today is Vietnam; another relentlessly gloomy reference point in the popular imagination. (Update: I have just remembered the subject of my last post – whether Iraq is at a ‘Weimar moment’. So I include myself in this criticism!)
Maybe we could do with some more hopeful historical analogies; so here are three starters for ten. Other suggestions welcome. (more…)
Writing in the Washington Post today, George Will poses a question that I’ve been wondering about lately: if political pressure on the Bush Administration forces a substantial withdrawal of troops sooner rather than later, just as conservatives in the US begin to hope that the tide is turning, what the hell will that do to any prospects for bipartisanship any time in, oh, the next couple of decades? As Will observes:
Come September, America might slip closer toward a Weimar moment. It would be milder than the original but significantly disagreeable. After the First World War, politics in Germany’s new Weimar Republic were poisoned by the belief that the army had been poised for victory in 1918 and that one more surge could have turned the tide. Many Germans bitterly concluded that the political class, having lost its nerve and will to win, capitulated. The fact that fanciful analysis fed this rancor did not diminish its power.
The Weimar Republic was fragile; America’s domestic tranquility is not. Still, remember the bitterness stirred by the accusatory question “Who lost China?” and corrosive suspicions that the fruits of victory in Europe had been squandered by Americans of bad character or bad motives at Yalta. So, consider this: When Gen. David Petraeus delivers his report on the war, his Washington audience will include two militant factions. Perhaps nothing he can responsibly say will sway either, so September will reinforce animosities.
From the Los Angeles Times this morning: the news that the US Department of Defense was (until halted by an investigation by the Military Religious Freedom Foundation) intending to distribute “freedom packages” to troops in Iraq. What would they contain?
Not body armor or home-baked cookies. Rather, they held Bibles, proselytizing material in English and Arabic and the apocalyptic computer game “Left Behind: Eternal Forces” (derived from the series of post-Rapture novels), in which “soldiers for Christ” hunt down enemies who look suspiciously like U.N. peacekeepers.
Tempting to snigger it may be, but as the op-ed – written by Military Religious Freedom Foundation staff – notes:
American military and political officials must, at the very least, have the foresight not to promote crusade rhetoric in the midst of an already religion-tinged war. Many of our enemies in the Mideast already believe that the world is locked in a contest between Christianity and Islam. Why are our military officials validating this ludicrous claim with their own fiery religious rhetoric?
Someone’s found interview footage of Dick Cheney being interviewed in 1994 about the 1991 Gulf War. Should US or UN forces have pressed on to occupy Baghdad, the interviewer wonders? No, says Cheney: it would have led to a quagmire. Anyway, he continues, the Administration concluded that when it came to figuring out how many US servicemen deaths it would be worth to take down Saddam Hussein, the answer was “not very many”.
Which, when you stop to think about it, doesn’t do a great deal for the theory that the current Administration went to war with Iraq because of ‘unfinished business’ post-91…
