Are We Rome?

by Cullen Murphy

  The second component, according to Hartz, is a messianic streak: “Embodying an absolute moral ethos, ‘Americanism,’ once it is driven onto the world stage by events, is inspired willy-nilly to reconstruct the very alien things it tries to avoid.” The American Idea becomes a commodity for export, maybe the only item of domestic manufacture that can’t be replaced by cheap foreign knock-offs. It shaped the occupation of Germany and Japan. It animated the battle of ideas during the Cold War—Jimmy Carter’s human-rights campaign, Ronald Reagan’s crusade against the “evil empire.” The messianic impulse is so deeply rooted that it emerges not only in contexts like Iraq, which tempted some in Washington with the possibility of transforming the entire Arab world, but even in a context that is completely devoid of humanity, like the moon. “We came in peace for all mankind” was the announcement that Americans engraved on a plaque for the moon’s surface—a message that, so far as we are aware, has been read by no one since it was left behind in 1969.

  One corollary of a messianic tendency is the desire for public acknowledgment, for gratitude. The Romans sought “symbolic deference” from enemies and supplicants; the tombstone of a first-century governor proclaims proudly that he had brought barbarian leaders “to the riverbank that he protected” in order that they should “adore Roman standards.” In 2004, as America looked for a suitable Iraqi to head a provisional government, the president laid down a single criterion: “It’s important to have someone who’s willing to stand up and thank the American people for their sacrifice in liberating Iraq.” In 2006, amid the occupation’s continuing horrors, President Bush held a meeting with his war cabinet and outside experts and expressed the view, according to one participant, that “the Shia-led government needs to clearly and publicly express the same appreciation for United States efforts and sacrifices as they do in private.”

  A messianic outlook makes no sense if it’s not possible for other people to be saved. The Romans never shed their cultural stereotypes, but they came around to the view that “Roman-ness” was potentially accessible to anyone who embraced Rome’s values. Americans are contradictory in just the same way. We harbor a full panoply of stock images—of Arabs, of Africans, of Germans and French. We can produce stereotypes while on autopilot. Once, some years ago, a poll asked Americans for their opinion of a fictitious ethnic group it called the Wisians, and respondents gave them a low favorability ranking: 4.12 on a scale of 9 (above Iranians and Gypsies, below Greeks and Koreans). At the same time, Americans tend to see “others” as being more or less exactly like ourselves; it’s the default presumption. Or at least other people would be like us if only certain cultural impediments and institutional restraints were removed—if only they had democracy, for instance; if only they had free markets and iPods. Human nature, in other words, is basically American. This may be a comforting sentiment, but it can end up enabling just as much ignorance as arrogance or disdain does. The “just like us” argument is especially insidious if you get the “us” part wrong. One great American myth is that other peoples ought to be able to solve their ethnic and sectarian differences peaceably, because “we did”—which, as Benjamin Schwarz has written, simply ignores the vast amount of ethnic cleansing and cultural obliteration that the American settlement entailed, and that afterward kept the melting pot from boiling over. Lynne Cheney has a point when she encourages Americans to learn more of their own history, although history like this probably isn’t what she has in mind.

  “Sameness” is a delusion of globalism. There is the “McWorld” sameness of popular commerce and culture—guerrilla fighters in Madonna T-shirts, Google spoken everywhere—and then there is the sameness of the elites. The sociologist Richard Florida, taking issue with parts of Thomas Friedman’s “the world is flat” thesis, argues that in fact the modern world is “spiky”—most of the wealth, creativity, and entrepreneurship on the planet is contained in some fifty city regions, and it is overseen by a class of people who move easily among these de facto city-states and often owe allegiance mostly to the class itself. The world appears flat, in other words, when you’re at the tree-canopy level. The Roman Empire, too, was an urbanized and spiky place. The elite of Rome felt completely at home in the thin slice at the social top of, say, Antioch or Athens, Alexandria or Narbonne. But did they connect with, or understand, the millions of “locals” in the far-flung provinces, or even in the Italian countryside? Not really. “There seems to have been a sharp cultural cleavage between the upper classes,” writes A.H.M. Jones, “who had not only received a literary education in Latin and Greek but probably spoke one or the other of these languages”—the Business Class and NPR crowd—“and the mass of the people, who . . . spoke in a different tongue,” such as Celtic, Gothic, Coptic, or Punic—Rome’s version of flyover people and the NASCAR nation.

  Like those of imperial Rome, America’s elites are an urban and international group, perhaps on their way to forming a distinct transnational class. They are cosmopolite-citizens who often have more in common with members of that same class around the world than with other members of their own society. The elites of Washington, New York, Los Angeles, and Boston may be American by birth, but their wall hangings are from Peru, their sculptures from Nunavut, their literary fiction from Sri Lanka, their CDs from Brazil, their basmati from India, their wine from New Zealand. Their religious values, if they have any, may be drawn impressionistically from Eastern and Western traditions—an eclectic pantheon.

  “The empire was ruled by an aristocracy of amazingly uniform culture, taste, and language,” writes the historian Peter L. Brown.

  In the West, the senatorial class had remained a tenacious and absorptive elite that dominated Italy, Africa, the Midi of France, and the valleys of the Ebro and the Guadalquivir; in the East all culture and all local power had remained concentrated in the hands of the proud oligarchies of the Greek cities. Throughout the Greek world no difference in vocabulary or pronunciation would betray the birthplace of any well-educated speaker. In the West, bilingual aristocrats passed unselfconsciously from Latin to Greek; an African landowner, for instance, found himself quite at home in a literary salon of well-to-do Greeks at Smyrna.

  In modern terms this would be DavosLand or AspenWorld, and if it’s where you happen to live, you can be misled into thinking that it’s a very large place, and the only one on the planet that matters.

  “All I Need to Know . . .”

  THE AMERICAN-CONTROLLED Green Zone in Baghdad serves as a microcosm of American attitudes toward the non-American world: the innocence, the optimism, the arrogance, the ignorance, the idealism, the zeal. When American forces captured Iraq’s capital, in April of 2003, they created a headquarters zone in the four-square-mile precinct of palaces and parks, hotels and villas, military monuments and government buildings, that lies at the very heart of Baghdad. As the security situation began to crumble, a few months after the occupation began, the Green Zone was sealed off by concrete blast walls ten feet high. The U.S. administration took up its work under the blue dome of Saddam Hussein’s former Republican Palace; the Green Zone was soon home to thousands of civilian and military personnel. L. Paul Bremer, an American diplomat, was brought in to administer “free Iraq” from inside this Praetorium, and despite his official title (“administrator of the Coalition Provisional Authority”), he was routinely referred to in the press as the American “proconsul,” a term that harked back two millennia to Rome.

  The unstated premise of the Green Zone seemed to be that Iraq was a tabula rasa on which Washington’s operating procedures—its “civilizing mission,” as Velleius Paterculus might have put it—could easily be inscribed. Prior to taking up his post in Iraq, the proconsul had pursued a typical cursus honorum, American style: Ivy League education, foreign service, ambassadorship, Kissinger Associates, Marsh & McClennan, farmhouse in Vermont. He had never been to Iraq. Behind the Green Zone’s walls the degree of isolation from Iraq was felt by everyone but gave pause to few. Virtuall
y no one spoke any Arabic (and translators, scarce at the outset, would be in short supply even for front-line fighting units three years into the war). “From inside the palace,” one American adviser later wrote, “staff members often had to call home to the United States to ask family and friends about what had just happened only a mile away by means of mortar, rocket, or car bombings near the Green Zone.” (This adviser, who had brought a George W. Bush “Mission Accomplished” action figure with him to Iraq, finally became disillusioned.)

  Taking an image from mathematics, the historian Charles Maier argues that empires tend to be organized according to “a fractal set of hierarchies”—that is, the structural principles (and flaws) of the whole are replicated at every level in those of the parts, and vice versa. The Green Zone is a fractal domain. Bureaucrats and civilian experts representing scores of government agencies, oblivious of culture or history, were brought in to create an embryonic version of American government for the Iraqis to adopt as their own. Americans were enlisted to help draft a new constitution. They drew up scores of new American-inspired laws to address even the least urgent matters, such as patents and copyrights and other kinds of intellectual property. They created shadow ministries of agriculture, education, electricity, human rights, oil, trade, youth and sports, and more. Monday-night seminars were held to teach prominent Iraqis the basics of a free-market economy. (“I hoped that these sessions would evolve into a sort of Council of Economic Advisers to the interim government we intended to set up,” Bremer recalled in a memoir.) One department, seized with a desire for tax reform along neoconservative lines, sought to put into place a 15 percent flat tax—this in a nation where taxes had been neither levied nor paid. Another official devoted his tour of duty to implementing a traffic code for the entire nation of Iraq, taking as his model the traffic code of the state of Maryland.

  One Iraqi employed in the Green Zone—as, among other things, a translator for Paul Bremer—recalled an incident involving an American military attaché:

  Lt. Col. Bill came over to my office to enlist my help in finding him an interpreter. He complained that the officials of the former Ministry of Culture could not speak English. Pointing at a book on my desk, he asked, “So what is this book you are reading?”

  “The bible,” I started to say.

  “But I thought you are Shia!” he cut me off.

  I told him that the book, The Old Social Classes and the Revolutionary Movements of Iraq, was Hanna Batatu’s book on Iraq, and that it was a must-read for anyone dealing with modern Iraq’s political history.

  Bill pulled from his back pocket a green paperback, published in the mid-’80s by Iraq’s Ministry of Tourism, and with a straight face told me, “All I need to know about Iraq is in here.”

  This kind of outlook explains a fiasco in Somalia in 2006. With few reliable indigenous Somali sources and little cultural understanding, but quick to impose a preconceived template on an evolving reality, American intelligence officers misinterpreted a series of events on the ground as a terrorist resurgence, and in response began funding local warlords to serve as a counterforce. Heavily armed and flush with cash, the warlords themselves became a source of trouble, inviting a powerful local backlash and the rise to power of a militant Islamist with reputed ties to al-Qaeda—the exact reverse of the intended outcome.

  Unlike Denmark or Costa Rica or most other countries, America has an impact on every other place in the world. Even without “unapologetic and implacable demonstrations of will,” America’s behavior influences the price of gasoline in Mexico, the duration of airport delays in Singapore, the television lineup in Jordan, the standard of living in Shanghai, the spread of AIDS in Botswana. America’s impact may be unprecedented in its scope, but the phenomenon itself is one that Rome knew well. And so is the phenomenon of blowback. Everything America touches can potentially touch us back—often unpredictably, and maybe not for years. In its proxy war against the Soviets in Afghanistan, America trained and armed Muslim warriors from all over the world, many of whom turned into the multinational jihadists we are fighting now. As part of the war on drugs, Washington encouraged farmers in South America to stop growing coca and to start growing flowers—creating a big export crop and undermining America’s own flower industry. For more than half a century American troops have helped to safeguard South Korea’s security, giving rise to positive Korean words like yonmi (“associate with America”) and sungmi (“worship America”)—but also to words of reaction like hangmi (“resist America”) and hyommi (“loathe America”). Nothing is more symbolic of America’s global influence than the Internet, developed initially by the defense industry: even the electrons do America’s bidding! But this same globalizing force enhances the economic power of other nations, and puts insidious new tools into the hands of those who would do America harm. The blow-back problem is a reality that can’t be eliminated. But ignorance makes the problem worse, by concealing the fact that it’s even there.

  On the Fourth of July in that first year of the American occupation the explosions over the Green Zone were not mortar rounds but fireworks, like the ones on the Mall in Washington. In so many ways the enclave was a replication not just of America but of the American capital and its mindset, as if this form of transplant would cure what ailed Iraq. Green Zone telephones were even given American area codes—703, one of the area codes for metropolitan Washington, which happens also to be used by the Pentagon; and 914, which designates Westchester County, in suburban New York. If all the world is potentially an America in embryo, then why shouldn’t the Green Zone be a local call?

  5

  The Borders

  Where the Present Meets the Future

  The barbarians were adapting themselves to Roman ways, were becoming accustomed to hold markets, and were meeting in peaceful assemblages. They had not, however, forgotten their ancestral habits, their native manners, their old life of independence. . . . They were becoming different without knowing it.

  —Cassius Dio, Roman History

  Ai pledch aliyens to di fleg

  Of di Yunaited Esteits of America.

  —phonetic guide handed out at an immigration rally, 2006

  HADRIAN’S WALL, the great stonework fortification that stretches across the neck of northern England like a thrall’s collar, occupies a romantic place in the historical imagination. My own introduction came one long-ago fall morning when, as a student, I cracked open a new third-year Latin textbook and came across a color photograph of the wall in winter, dusted with snow, relentlessly climbing up crags and down defiles, until it disappeared into a horizon beyond time. The wall, I read, had been built at the command of the emperor Hadrian, beginning around 120 A.D., to delineate the boundary between Roman Britain and the barbarian hinterland to the north, and it stretched seventy-five miles from the mouth of the Tyne, on the east, to the Solway Firth, on the west. There was a gateway in the wall at every mile, and a pair of turrets between each two milecastles. Every manned point was visible to two others. With torches, I imagined, you could relay a signal from the North Sea to the Irish Sea in minutes.

  In one of those reinforcing coincidences that can fix a memory for all time, soon after seeing that textbook photograph I came across Rudyard Kipling’s Puck of Pook’s Hill, which contains this evocation of what it might have been like for a Roman soldier arriving at the northern British frontier for the first time:

  The hard road goes on and on—and the wind sings through your helmet plume—past altars to legions and generals forgotten. . . . Just when you think you are at the world’s end, you see a smoke from east to west as far as the eye can turn, and then, under it, also as far as the eye can stretch . . . one long, low, rising and falling, and hiding and showing line of towers. And that is the wall!

  Reading those words even now I feel a rush of excitement, and involuntarily pull an imaginary cloak a little tighter around my shoulders.

  To be sure, in the course of fifteen centuries the wall h
as been dismantled in many places, as people used its expertly cut building stones for houses and sheep pens and churches nearby. Hadrian’s Wall was the original Home Depot. Even in the best-preserved stretches the wall is now only about six feet high (and about six feet thick), rather than the fifteen feet high of Hadrian’s time. But no matter; it is an impressive sight. I’ve walked long stretches of the wall on two occasions in the past few years. My first view of it came on a ridge a little north of the old Roman camp at Vindolanda. A bend in the road, and there it was: a serpentine bulwark running up and down along the beetlebrowed ridges. It was wintertime, close to the solstice, and that far north the sun sets very early—around 3:00 P.M. But in truth the winter sunset heralds two hours of dusky purple and orange in the southwestern sky, above a serrated landscape visible to a range of thirty miles. The low sun brought into sharp relief the system of defensive trenches and earthworks that parallel the wall on both sides. Each step left a trace in the frozen grass. To a Roman soldier looking south, the first olive tree would have seemed very far away indeed.

  Northumbria was a Roman military zone, and leaving aside the wall itself, signs of the Roman presence are everywhere. A major Roman road, the Stanegate, runs east to west, still as straight as a rule in many places, though mostly a country track and sometimes a farmhouse driveway. One glance at a 1:25,000 ordnance map reveals Roman remains, some excavated and some not, every half inch or so. Here and there the words “cultivation terraces” and “Roman aqueduct (course of)” suggest how the legions sustained themselves. The Roman relics are interspersed on the map with designations like “tumulus” and “cairn,” remnants of the culture that the Romans came among but never eradicated.