by John Gray
The use of torture at Abu Ghraib followed a familiar pattern. During the year after the fall of Saddam anyone could end up a victim. Thousands of people were swept up from the streets and subjected to systematic abuse. In acting in this way, American forces were following a well-trodden path. Torture was used widely by the Russians in Chechnya, the French in Algeria and by the British in Kenya in the 1950s. Unlike these predecessors, who inflicted extremes of physical pain, however, American interrogators focused on the application of psychological pressure, particularly sexual humiliation. The methods of torture employed in Iraq targeted the culture of their victims, who were assaulted not only as human beings but also as Arabs and Muslims. In using these techniques the US imprinted an indelible image of American depravity on the population and ensured that no American-backed regime can have legitimacy in Iraq.
US military authorities have condemned the abuse that took place at Abu Ghraib. However, while the practice seems to have been resisted by sections of the Army, torture did not occur as a result of accident or indiscipline. From the start of the ‘war on terror’ the Bush administration flouted international law on the treatment of detainees. It declared members of terrorist organizations to be illegal combatants who are not entitled to the protection of the Geneva Convention. The detainees held in the concentration camp at Guantanamo fall into this category, and so did Taliban and al-Qaeda suspects captured in Afghanistan. Being beyond the reach of international law, they were liable to torture. In Iraq the Bush administration evaded international law by a different route. Security duties at Abu Ghraib and other American detention facilities were outsourced to private contractors not covered by military law or the Geneva Convention. In effect, the Bush administration created a lawless environment in which abuse could be practised with impunity. Torture at Abu Ghraib was not the result of a few officers acting beyond their brief. It was the result of decisions at the highest levels of American leadership.
Since Abu Ghraib, the Bush administration has continued to defend the use of torture, while military judges, the CIA and the US military have continued to resist the practice. In February 2006 the CIA’s chief counter-terrorism officer Robert Grenier was fired for opposing torture and ‘extraordinary rendition’.16 It has been reported that the network of secret jails set up by the administration to house prisoners sent there under the special rendition programme (whereby suspects are abducted to countries where they can be tortured without difficulty) may have been shut down because the CIA – unconvinced of the efficacy of torture and fearful that officers who practise it could later be prosecuted – declined to carry out further interrogations. Senior military judges refused to sign a declaration of support for Bush’s policies on ‘coercive interrogation’.17 As with the administration’s use of unverified intelligence, its decision to employ torture was resisted in all the main institutions of American government, and, as before, the administration carried on with its policies.
Disaster in Iraq was hastened by the willingness to use methods that were inhumane and counter-productive. Some of these errors may have been avoidable, but a pattern of arrogant incompetence was built into the Bush administration. It refused to accept advice from the branches of government where expertise existed, such as the uniformed military, the CIA and the State Department. Instead it relied on the counsel of those in the administration whose views were shaped by a neo-conservative agenda, including the Office of Special Plans. But the picture of post-war Iraq that neo-conservatives disseminated was a tissue of disinformation and wishful thinking, while the willingness to use intolerable means to achieve impossible ends showed the utopian mind at its most deluded.
The ease with which a wildly unreal assessment of conditions in Iraq came to be accepted in America had several sources. Public opinion accepted the war only after a campaign of disinformation. It was persuaded of a link between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda when it was known that none existed and informed that Saddam’s regime was engaged in an active weapons programme of which there was no reliable evidence. The neo-conservatives who orchestrated the campaign were themselves blinded by illusions, some of them innate to their way of thinking. They believed the methods needed to achieve freedom were the same everywhere: the policies that were required in Iraq were no different from those that had been used to spread freedom in former communist countries. But what is feasible on the banks of the Danube may not be possible on the Euphrates – even supposing peace prevailed in Iraq as it did in most of post-communist Europe – and this ardent neo-conservative belief in a universal model went with a deep indifference to the particular history of the country. If other cultures are stages on the way to a global civilization that already exists in the US, there is no need to understand them since they will soon be part of America. The effect of this adamant universalism is to raise an impassable barrier between America and the rest of humanity that precludes serious involvement in nation building.18
In Iraq this cultural default reached surreal extremes. In the shelter of the Green Zone, interns on short-term secondment from Washington – some from neo-conservative think tanks – plotted the future of Iraq insulated from any perception of the absurdity of their plans. Had the goals of the American administration been achievable at all, it would only be after many decades of occupation. Instead, the impossible was attempted in months. The armed missionaries who dispatched American forces to Iraq expected the instant conversion of the population, only for these forces to be repulsed as enemies. Robespierre’s warning to his fellow Jacobins of the perils of Napoleon’s programme of exporting revolution by force of arms throughout Europe was vindicated again, two centuries later, in the Middle East.
Iraq is only the most extravagant example of a trend in foreign policy that aimed to renew, in liberal guise, something resembling the European empires of the past. In this view, toppling tyranny in Iraq was not just an American attempt to secure hegemony in the Middle East. It was the start of a new kind of imperialism guided by liberal principles of human rights.
MISSIONARY LIBERALISM, LIBERAL IMPERIALISM
The humanitarian, like the missionary, is often an irreducible enemy of the people he seeks to befriend, because he has not imagination enough to sympathize with their proper needs nor humility enough to respect them as if they were his own. Arrogance, fanaticism, meddlesomeness, and imperialism may then masquerade as philanthropy.
George Santayana19
The configuration of ideas and movements that led to America’s ruinous engagement in Iraq included more than a fusion of the neo-conservative utopians, Armageddonite fundamentalists and Straussian seers that have been examined so far. This exotic and highly toxic blend of beliefs, none of them grounded in any observable or even plausible reality, had one further but equally dangerous ingredient: a type of ‘liberal imperialism’ based on human rights. Neo-conservatives were able to gain support for regime change in Iraq and potentially other Middle Eastern countries because it could be seen as applying liberal ideals of self-determination and democracy. Liberals insist that the legitimacy of government depends on its respecting the rights of its citizens. If any government fails in this regard, it can be resisted and overthrown – whether by its own citizenry or by an outside force. Human rights override the claims of sovereign states, and where these rights are severely violated other states – acting as the ‘international community’, in the terminology Blair coined in his speech in Chicago in 1999 – have the right, even the duty, to intervene to protect them.
This view seemed to be supported by humanitarian intervention in the 1990s, which, while failing to prevent some of the worst atrocities, succeeded in imposing a kind of peace in former Yugoslavia. The Balkan war led many liberals to endorse the attack on Iraq as a means of creating a new world order. Even now, some continue to believe the disastrous upshot does not undermine the rightness of military intervention to overthrow tyranny. Intervention of this kind amounts to a liberal version of imperialism, as has been recognized by so
me of its most influential advocates. Writing in The New York Times three months before the invasion of Iraq, Michael Ignatieff announced:
America’s empire is not like empires of the past, built on colonies, conquest and the white man’s burden … The 21st century imperium is a new invention in the annals of political science, an empire lite, a global hegemony whose grace notes are free markets, human rights and democracy, enforced by the most awesome power the world has ever known … Regime change is an imperial task par excellence, since it assumes that the empire’s interest has a right to trump the sovereignty of a state. The Bush administration would ask, What moral authority rests with a sovereign who murders and ethnically cleanses his own people, has twice invaded neighbouring countries and usurps his people’s wealth to build palaces and lethal weapons?20
Ignatieff shows the attractions the new imperialism had for liberals. Who dares deny that tyranny is bad, or question the ideal of a world based on human rights? Has not liberalism always been a universalist creed? After all, the claim that its values are valid for all of humanity is a cardinal principle of liberal philosophy. Does it not follow that liberal states are entitled – indeed obliged – to impose their values throughout the world, even if this requires the use of force? For many liberals the ‘war on terror’ has been a successor to the Cold War – a struggle in which democracy prevailed over totalitarianism. Yet the differences are substantial. The Cold War was a conflict between states, while the ‘war on terror’ is one between states and a far more amorphous range of forces. The Cold War was waged between states pledged to rival Enlightenment ideologies, whereas the ‘war on terror’ is being waged against Islamist forces that claim to reject the Enlightenment. Yet again, the enemy in the Cold War was a communist system that never had popular legitimacy, while Islamist regimes –though very weak in comparison with the former Soviet Union – are gaining mass support. There is, in fact, hardly anything in common between the two conflicts. But like the Cold War the ‘war on terror’ could be seen as a universal crusade, a vast progressive enterprise in which practically every good cause under the sun could be subsumed, a new force that was
devoted to a politics of human rights and especially women’s rights, across the Muslim world; a politics against racism and anti-Semitism, no matter how inconvenient that might seem to the Egyptian media and the House of Saud; a politics against the manias of the ultra-right in Israel, too, no matter how much that might enrage the Likud and its supporters; a politics of secular education, of pluralism, and law across the Muslim world; a politics against obscurantism and superstition; a politics to out-compete the Islamists and Baathi on their left; a politics to fight against poverty and oppression; a politics of authentic solidarity for the Muslim world, instead of the demagogy of cosmic hatred. A politics, in a word, of liberalism, a ‘new birth of freedom’ – the kind of thing that could be glimpsed, in its early stages, in the liberation of Kabul.21
Paul Berman gave vent to this sublime vision in 2003. It contained no inkling that the result of the overthrow of secular despotism in Iraq would be a mix of anarchy and theocracy. The impossibility of liberalism in Afghanistan – which has only ever had something resembling a modern state when Soviet forces imposed, with enormous cruelty, a version of Enlightenment despotism on parts of the country – was too disturbing to contemplate. All the liberal causes that were wrapped up in the ‘war on terror’ were inherently desirable, and so – it seemed to follow – practically realizable. In their attitudes to regime change, neo-conservatives have been at one with many liberals. Regime change was an instrument of progress, and for the most part liberals have been no more willing than neo-conservatives to confront its human costs and abject failure. Such political opposition to the war as there has been in the US has come from elements of the paleo-conservative Right and sections of the Old Left. In the liberal media only the New York Review of Books remained untouched by war fever, while journals such as The Nation and The American Conservative voiced criticism from the Left and the Right. The public resistance to the war that voters voiced in the mid-term 2006 elections found few echoes among liberals. Most remained silent in the belief that the war showed American power acting as the final guarantor of freedom in the world.
Yet liberal imperialism was an impossible programme of action. Twentieth-century history has been dominated by resistance to western empires since the destruction of the Russian Imperial Fleet by Japan in 1905 – a defeat for European power that inspired anticolonial movements throughout Asia and which Jawaharlal Nehru, the first prime minister of India, described as one of the decisive events of his life. Britain’s failed attempt to assert its control over the Suez Canal, the withdrawal of France from Algeria, the humiliation of France and America in Vietnam and the defeat of Soviet forces in Afghanistan – these are only some examples of the impotence of western occupiers in non-western lands that has been demonstrated again and again over the past century. American defeat in Iraq is only the most recent example of this impotence.
Beyond the impossibility of any large-scale western imperial project at this juncture in history, the notion that America could be the agent of a project of this kind was highly implausible. The US has few of the attributes of an imperial regime. It has a large portfolio of countries over which it has varying degrees of influence – occasionally exercised by the threat of force, more often through a mix of economic sanctions and inducements. America’s relations with many of these countries display an imperialist pattern in which resources are extracted through the agency of governments that the US in some degree controls. In Latin America, the US has long acted in imperialist fashion to protect its economic and strategic interests. At present it has a massive military and naval presence in the Persian Gulf, while it is expanding its bases in central Asia and establishing itself in West Africa. Yet the US does not govern any of these regions and its forces have minimal contact with their peoples. Its bases are hermetically sealed bubbles of American life and its embassies fortress-like structures insulated against any incursion from their host societies. Empires come in several shapes and sizes; not all have been organized around the acquisition of territory. What is striking about American imperial relationships is that they include few long-term strategic commitments that can be counted on to survive the vicissitudes of American politics. When any American overseas military involvement becomes too costly in money or casualties it is likely to be abruptly terminated. As a result of this fact, which is taken as axiomatic in Washington and in the countries concerned, long-term alliances with local ruling elites of the kind that enabled empires to endure for centuries are rare. Most of those existing today, such as those in Britain, Germany and Japan, are survivals from the Second World War.
A lasting imperial system rests on the belief that it embodies a long-term commitment. Empires are commonly established by means that include the use of force, but they have been long-lasting – as in the case of the Romans, the Ottomans and the Habsburgs, for example –when force has served long-range political goals. The European colonial powers normally used force in this way, so that it was clear that their presence in the countries they occupied was meant to permanent. The creation of the Raj involved savage conflicts, and the Indian Mutiny in the mid-nineteenth century posed a serious threat to British rule. Even so, throughout most of the colonial period a few thousand British officers were able to rule the sub-continent without large-scale warfare. They did so by making alliances with the country’s rulers –by 1919 there were around 500 princely states locally ruled but pledged to the British monarchy. In contrast, American forces view themselves, and are seen by others, as transients – ‘tourists with guns’, as a National Guardsman in Afghanistan put it22 – and rarely forge any but the most short-term bonds with local elites or people. As a result they are compelled to rely on the intensive use of firepower, which cannot deliver long-term goals.
America lacks most of the prerequisites of empire and will not acquire them in any futu
re that can be foreseen. How can there be imperialism – liberal or otherwise – when there are no imperialists? The US has some of the burdens of empire – including its financial costs, which are far more disabling than in the era of European colonialism. Unlike nineteenth-century Britain, which was the world’s largest exporter of capital, the United States is the world’s largest debtor. America’s military adventures are paid for with borrowed money – mostly lent by China, whose purchases of American government debt are crucial in underpinning the US economy. This dependency on China cannot be squared with the idea that America has the capacity to act as the global enforcer of liberal values. It is America’s foreign creditors who fund this role, and if they come to perceive US foreign policy as threatening or irrational they have the power to veto it. As Emmanuel Todd, the French analyst who in 1975 forecast the Soviet collapse, has noted:
