The end of the Cold War closed an epoch. The United States now stood alone as a superpower, the first in world history. That did not mean it could rest on its laurels. The agenda of 1950 might be complete. But the grand strategy of the American state had always been broader. The original vision of 1943 had been put on hold for an emergency half-century, but never relinquished: the construction of a liberal international order with America at its head. Communism was dead, but capitalism had not yet found its accomplished form, as a planetary universal under a singular hegemon. The free market was not yet worldwide. Democracy was not invariably safe. In the hierarchy of states, nations did not always know their place. There was also the detritus of the Cold War to be cleared away, where it had left relics of a discredited past.
In the immediate aftermath of the Soviet collapse, the last were details that took care of themselves. By 1992, the regimes in South Yemen, Ethiopia and Afghanistan had all fallen, Angola had come to its senses, and Nicaragua was back in good hands. In the Third World, scarcely a government was left that any longer cared to call itself socialist. There had always, however, been states which without making that misstep were unacceptable in other ways, some failing to respect liberal economic principles, others the will of what could now be called, without fear of contradiction, the ‘international community’. Few had consistently defied Washington, but nationalist posturing of one kind or another might still lead them in directions that would need to be stopped. The Panamanian dictator Noriega had long been on the CIA payroll, and supplied valuable help in the undeclared war against the Sandinistas. But when he resisted pressure to drop his take of the drug trade, and started to edge away from Washington, he was summarily removed with a US invasion in late 1989.
A much larger offence was committed by the Iraqi dictatorship in seizing Kuwait the following year. The Baath regime headed by Saddam Hussein had also enjoyed CIA assistance in coming to power, and played a useful role in pinning down the Iranian revolution in protracted trench warfare. But though merciless to communists, as to all other opponents, the regime was truculently nationalist, permitting no foreign oil companies to operate on its soil and, unlike the Egyptian dictatorship, no American control of its decisions. Whatever the historic rights and wrongs of Baghdad’s claims to the sheikhdom to the south, a British creation, there could be no question of allowing it to acquire the Kuwaiti oilfields in addition to its own, which could put Iraq in a position to threaten Saudi Arabia itself. Mobilizing half a million troops, topped up with contingents from thirty-odd other countries, after five weeks of aerial bombardment Operation Desert Storm routed the Iraqi army in five days, restoring the Sabah dynasty to its throne. The cost to the US was nugatory: 90 per cent of the bill was picked up by Germany, Japan and the Gulf states.
The Gulf War, the first Bush proclaimed, marked the arrival of a New World Order. Where only a year earlier the invasion of Panama had been condemned by majorities in both the General Assembly and the Security Council of the UN (Russia and China joining every Third World country to vote for the resolution, the UK and France joining the US to veto it), the expedition to Iraq sailed through the Security Council, Russia approving, China abstaining, America tipping Third World states for their service. The end of the Cold War had changed everything. It was as if Roosevelt’s vision of the world’s posse had arrived.1 To cap the US triumph, within a few months of these victories, the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, hitherto an ineffectual residue of the late sixties, was transformed into a powerful instrument of American hegemony with the submission of France and China to it, sealing a nuclear oligarchy in the Security Council, under which signature of the treaty would henceforward become a condition of international respectability for lesser states, save where Washington wished to waive it—Israel was naturally exempted.2 In four short years, the colourless elder Bush could be accounted the most successful foreign policy president since the war.
Clinton, profiting from a third-party candidate, was elected on a dip in the domestic economy, the recession of 1991. But like every contender for the White House since the fifties, he assailed the incumbent for weakness in fighting America’s enemies abroad, calling for tougher policies on Cuba and China, in a stance backed by Nitze, Brzezinski and fellow-spirits, for whom Bush had been too soft on dictators and insufficiently resolute in pursuing violators of human rights.3 In office, however, Clinton’s first priority was to build out the liberal order of free trade into an encompassing global system under US command. Bush had not neglected this front, but lost power before he could finalize either the creation of a regional economic bloc welding Mexico and Canada to the United States, or the protracted negotiations to wrap up the Uruguay Round at GATT. Clinton, overriding opposition in his own party, pushed through NAFTA and the transformation of GATT into the WTO as the formal framework of a universal market for capital to come. Within that framework, the US could now play a more decisive role than ever in shaping an emergent pan-capitalist world to its own requirements.
In the first decades of the Cold War, American policies had been permissive: other industrial states could be allowed, even assisted in the face of Communist danger, to develop as they judged best, without undue regard for liberal orthodoxy. From the seventies onwards, American policies became defensive: US interests had to be asserted against competitors within the OECD, if necessary with brutal coups d’arrêt, but without undue intervention in the rival economies themselves. By the nineties, Washington could move to the offensive. The neoliberal turn had deregulated international financial markets, prising open hitherto semi-enclosed national economies, and the United States was strategically master of a unipolar world. In these conditions, the US could for the first time apply systematic pressure on surrounding states to bring their practices into line with American standards. The free market was no longer to be trifled with. Its principles had to be observed. Where protection, either social or national, infringed on them, it should now be phased out. The Washington Consensus—imperatives shared by the IMF, the World Bank and the US Treasury—laid down the appropriate rules for the Third World. But it was the Mexican and Asian financial crises, each a direct result of the new regime of footloose global finance, that gave the Clinton administration the real opportunity to drive American norms of market-friendly conduct.4 With far the deepest capital markets of any major economy, and the global reserve currency, the United States stood for the moment controller of the very turbulence its model of accumulation was unleashing. The triumvirate of Greenspan, Rubin and Summers could be billed by the local press as the ‘Committee to Save the World’.
Mexico, Korea, Indonesia: these were important targets for IMF mediation. But the leading object of US concern was naturally Russia, where the collapse of communism did not ipso facto ensure a smooth passage to capitalism, essential for the consolidation of victory in the Cold War. For the Clinton administration, the maintenance of a political regime in Moscow willing to make a complete break with the past was a priority. Yeltsin might be drunk, corrupt and incompetent, but he was a convert to the cause of anti-communism, who had no qualms about shock therapy—overnight freeing of prices and cutting of subsidies—or the handing-over of the country’s principal assets for nominal sums to a small number of crooked projectors, advisers seconded from Harvard taking a cut. When he bombarded the Russian parliament with tanks and faked victory in a constitutional referendum to stay in power, Clinton’s team warmly congratulated him. His reelection in danger, a timely American loan arrived, with political consultants from California to help his campaign. His obliteration of Grozny accomplished, Clinton celebrated its liberation. Russian finances melting down in 1998, the IMF stepped into the breach without conditionality. In exchange, Yeltsin’s diplomatic alignment with Washington was so complete that Gorbachev, no enemy of the US, could describe his foreign minister as the American consul in Moscow.
The worldwide extension of neoliberal rules of trade and investment, and the integration of the former Soviet Union into its system, could be seen as fulfilments of the long-range vision of the last years of Roosevelt’s presidency. But much had changed since then, in the reflexes and ambitions of US elites. The Cold War had ended in the economic and political settlement of an American peace. But that did not mean a return to arcadia. American power rested not simply on force of example—the wealth and freedom that made the US a model for emulation and natural leader in the civilization of capital—but also, inseparably, force of arms. To the expansion of its economic and political influence could not correspond a contraction of its military reach. The one, its strategists had long insisted, was a condition of the other. For the Clinton regime, the disappearance of the Soviet threat was thus no reason for withdrawal of forward US positions in Europe. On the contrary: the weakness of Russia made it possible to extend them. NATO, far from being dismantled now that the Cold War was over, could be enlarged to the doorstep of Russia.
To do so would put a safety-catch on any attempt to revive Muscovite aspirations of old, and reassure newly liberated East European states that they were now behind a Western shield. Not only this. The expansion of NATO to the East represented an assertion of American hegemony over Europe, at a time when the end of the Soviet Union risked tempting traditional US partners in the region to act more independently than in the past.5 To make the continental point clear, NATO was extended to Eastern Europe before the EU got there. At home, NATO enlargement enjoyed bipartisan support at congressional level—Republicans were as ardent for it as Democrats. But at elite level, where grand strategy was debated, it caused the sharpest ex ante split since the Second World War, many hardened Cold Warriors—Nitze, even Clinton’s own defence secretary—judging it a dangerous provocation of Russia, liable to weaken its newfound friendship with the West and foster a resentful revanchism. To help Yeltsin’s reelection in 1996, Clinton postponed it for a year.6 But he knew his partner: only token protests were forthcoming. In due course, NATO enlargement was then doubled, as ‘out of area’ military operations without even a façade of defence—Balkans, Central Asia, North Africa—expanded the geopolitical projection of the ‘Atlantic’ alliance yet further.
Meanwhile, the new unipolar order had brought a third innovation. Federal Yugoslavia, communist but not part of the Soviet bloc, disintegrated in the last period of the Bush administration, its constituent republics breaking away along ethnic lines. In Bosnia, where no group was a majority, the European Community brokered a power-sharing arrangement between Muslims, Serbs and Croats in the spring of 1992, promptly repudiated at US instigation by the first, who declared Bosnian independence, triggering a three-way civil war. When a UN force dispatched to protect lives and bring the parties peace failed to stop the killings, the worst committed by Serbs, the Clinton administration trained and armed a Croat counterattack in 1995 that cleansed the Krajina of its Serb population, and in conjunction with a NATO bombing campaign against Serb forces brought the war to an end, dividing Bosnia into three sub-statelets under a Euro-American proconsul. US actions marked two milestones. It was the first time the Security Council subcontracted a military operation to NATO, and the first time an aerial blitz was declared a humanitarian intervention.
Four years later, a far more massive NATO assault—36,000 combat missions and 23,000 bombs and missiles—was launched against what was still formally the remnant of Yugoslavia, in the name of stopping Serb genocide of the Albanian population in Kosovo. This was too much for the Yeltsin regime, facing widespread indignation at home, to countenance formally in the Security Council, so UN cover was lacking. But informally Moscow played its part by inducing Milošević to surrender without putting up resistance on the ground, which was feared by Clinton. The war on Yugoslavia set three further benchmarks for the exercise of American power. NATO, a supposedly defensive alliance, had—newly enlarged—been employed for what was patently an attack on another state. The attack was a first demonstration of the ‘revolution in military affairs’ delivered by electronic advances in precision targeting and bombing from high altitudes: not a single casualty was incurred in combat by the US. Above all, it was legitimated in the name of a new doctrine. The cause of human rights, Clinton and Blair explained, overrode the principle of national sovereignty.
The final innovation of the Clinton presidency came in the Middle East. There, the survival of Saddam’s dictatorship was a standing defiance of the US, which had to be brought to an end. When the rout of the Iraqi Army in the Gulf War was not followed, as expected, by the overthrow of the Baath regime from within, Washington pushed the most far-reaching sanctions on record through the Security Council, a blockade that Clinton’s national security adviser Sandy Berger boasted was ‘unprecedented for its severity in the whole of world history’, banning all trade or financial transfers of any kind with the country, save in medicine and—in dire circumstances—foodstuffs. The levels of infant mortality, malnutrition, and excess mortality that this blockade inflicted on the population of Iraq remain contested,7 but confronted with an estimate of half a million, Clinton’s secretary of state declared that if that was the toll, it was worth it. When economic strangulation could not be achieved, Clinton signed the Iraq Liberation Act into law in 1998, making the political removal of Saddam’s regime explicit US policy, and when stepped-up secret funding of operations to topple it were of no more avail, unloaded wave after wave of high explosives on the country. By the end of 1999, the same year as the war in Yugoslavia, in six thousand Anglo-American sorties some four hundred tons of ordnance had been dropped on Iraq.8 Nothing quite like this had ever happened before. A new weapon had been added to the imperial arsenal: undeclared conventional war.
III
In a departure from the normal pattern, the second Bush campaigned for the White House calling for a less, not more, preceptorial American role in the world at large. In office, the initial priority of his defense secretary was a leaner rather than larger military establishment. The bolt from the blue of September 2001 transformed such postures into their opposite, the Republican administration becoming a byword for aggressive American self-assertion and armed force to impose American will. For the first time since Pearl Harbour, US soil had been violated. Retribution would leave the world in no doubt of the extent of American power. The enemy was terrorism, and war on it would be waged till it was rooted out, everywhere.
This was a nationwide reaction, from which there was virtually no dissent within the country, and little at first outside it. Apocalyptic commentary abounded on the deadly new epoch into which humanity was entering. The reality, of course, was that the attentats of 9/11 were an unrepeatable historical fluke, capable of catching the American state offguard only because their agents were so minimal a speck on the radar-screen of its strategic interests. In the larger scheme of things, Al Qaeda was a tiny organization of marginal consequence, magnified only by the wealth at the disposal of its leader. But though the outcome of its plan to attack symbolic buildings in New York and Washington was a matter of chance, its motivation was not. The episode was rooted in the geopolitical region where US policies had long been calculated to maximize popular hostility. In the Middle East, American support for dynastic Arab tyrannies of one stripe or another, so long as they accommodated US interests, was habitual. There was nothing exceptional in this, however—the pattern had historically been much the same in Latin America or Southeast Asia. What set the Middle East apart was the American bond with Israel. Everywhere else in the postwar world, the US had taken care never to be too closely identified with European colonial rule, even where it might for a spell have to be accepted as a dike against communism, aware that to be so would compromise its own prospects of control in the battlegrounds of the Cold War. The Free World could harbour dictators; it could not afford colonies. In the Middle East alone, this rule was broken. Israel was not a colony, but something still more incendiary—an expansionist settler state established, not in the eighteenth or nineteenth century, when European colonization was at its height across the world, but in the middle of the twentieth century, when decolonization was in full swing. Not only that: it was a state explicitly founded on religion, the Promised Land for the Chosen People—in a region where a far more populous rival religion, with memories of a much earlier confessional intrusion into the same territory and its successful expulsion, still held virtually untouched sway. A more combustible combination would be difficult to imagine.
American grand strategy, however construed, could have no rational place for an organic—as distinct from occasional—connection with a state offering such a provocation to an environment so important to the US, as the world’s major source of petroleum.9 Israeli military prowess could indeed be of use to Washington. Counterproductive when allied to Anglo-French colonialism in 1956, it had inflicted a welcome humiliation on Soviet-leaning Arab nationalism in 1967, helped to deliver Egypt to the United States in 1973, and crippled the PLO in driving it from the Lebanon in 1982. But there were limits to this functionality: the IDF had to be restrained from occupying Beirut, and told to sit tight during the Gulf War. Israeli firepower alone, of whose potential political costs in the Arab world all American rulers were aware, offered no basis for the extent of the US commitment to Israel over half a century. Nor were the virtues of Israeli democracy amidst the deserts of despotism, or the frontier spirit uniting the two nations, more than ideological top dressing for the nature of the relationship between Tel Aviv and Washington. That stemmed from the strength of the Jewish community within the American political system, whose power was on display as early as 1947—when Baruch and Frankfurter were to the fore in the bribes and threats needed to lock down a majority at the UN for the partition of Palestine—and became decisive in the formation of regional policy after 1967, installing a supervening interest at odds with the calculus of national interest at large, warping the rationality of its normal adjustments of means to ends.10
If the American connection with Israel was one factor setting the Middle East apart from any other zone of US power-projection abroad, there was another. Iraq remained unfinished business. The Baath state was not just any regime unsatisfactory to Washington, of which at one time or another there had been—indeed still were—many in the Third World. It was unique in postwar history as the first state whose overthrow was the object of a public law passed by Congress, countersigned by the White House, and prosecuted by years of unconcealed, if undeclared, conventional hostilities. During the Cold War, no Communist regime had ever been comparably outlawed. For Saddam’s government to survive this legislation and the campaign of destruction it authorized would be a political-military defeat putting in question the credibility of American power. The second Bush had come to office promising a lower US profile at large, but never peace with Baghdad. From the start, his administration was filled with enthusiasts for the Iraq Liberation Act.
Finally, there was a third feature of the Middle Eastern scene that had no counterpart elsewhere. Over the course of the Cold War, the US had used a wide range of proxies to fight assorted enemies at a remove. French mercenaries, GMD drug lords, Cuban gusanos, Hmong tribesmen, South African regulars, Nicaraguan Contras, Vatican bankers—all in their time acted as vehicles of American will. None, however, received such massive support and to such spectacular effect as the mujahedin in Afghanistan. In the largest operation in its history, the CIA funnelled some $3 billion in arms and assistance, and orchestrated another $3 billion from Saudi Arabia, to the guerrillas who eventually drove the Russians out of the country. But beyond anti-communism, in this case unlike any other comparable operation, there was virtually no common ideological denominator between metropolitan principal and local agent. The Afghan resistance was not just tribal—Washington knew how to handle that—but religious, fired by a faith as hostile to the West as to the Soviet Union, and attracting volunteers from all over the Muslim world. To the cultural barrier of Islam, impenetrable to American oversight, was added the political thicket of Pakistan, through which aid had to pass, whose ISI enjoyed far more direct control over the different mujahedin groups and their camps in the Northwest Frontier than the CIA could ever do. The result was to set loose forces that delivered the United States its greatest single triumph in the Cold War, yet of which it had least political understanding or mastery. When out of the post-communist dispute for power in Kabul, the most rigorist of all Islamist groups emerged the Afghan winner, flanked by the most radical of Arab volunteers, the confidence and energy released by a victorious jihad against one set of infidels turned, logically enough, against the other, whose support had been tactically accepted in the battle against the first, without any belief that it was otherwise preferable.
Al Qaeda, formed in Afghanistan, but composed essentially of Arabs, had its eyes fixed on the Middle East rather than Central Asia. The first public manifesto of its leader explained his cause. The fate of Palestine held pride of place. The outrages of Israel in the region, and of its protector the United States, called the devout to action: to the shelling of Beirut should answer that of its perpetrators. Nor was this all. Since the Gulf War against Iraq, American troops were stationed in Saudi Arabia, violating the sanctity of the Holy Places. The Prophet had expressly demanded jihad against any such intrusion. The faithful had triumphed over one superpower in Afghanistan. Their duty was now to expel the other and its offshoot, by carrying the war to the enemy. Behind 9/11 thus lay, in theological garb, a typical anti-imperialist backlash against the power that had long been an alien overlord in the region, from an organization resorting to terror—as nearly always—out of weakness rather than strength, in the absence of any mass basis of popular resistance to the occupier.11
The Bush administration’s counterblow was rapid and sweeping. A combination of high-altitude bombing, small numbers of special forces, and purchase of Tajik warlords brought down the Taliban regime in a few weeks. There were seven American casualties. The US-led occupation acquired UN auspices, later transferred to NATO, and a pliant regime, headed by a former contractor for the CIA, in Kabul. Diplomatically, Operation Enduring Freedom was a complete success, blessed by all major powers and neighbouring states; if Pakistan at gunpoint, Russia not only of its own accord, but opening its airspace for Pentagon logistics, with the ex-Soviet republics of Central Asia competing with each other to offer bases to the US. Militarily, Taliban and Al Qaeda commanders might have escaped their pursuers, but high-technology war from the skies had done all that could be asked of it: the RMA was irresistible.
The speed and ease of the conquest of Afghanistan made delivery of a quietus to Iraq the obvious next step, premeditated in Washington as soon as 9/11 struck. Two difficulties lay in the way. Iraq was a much more developed society, whose regime possessed a substantial modern army that could not be dispersed with a few irregulars. A ground war, avoided in Yugoslavia, would be necessary to overthrow it. That meant a risk of casualties unpopular with the American public, requiring a casus belli more specific than general loss of US credibility if the Baath regime lingered on. Casting about for what would be of most effect, the administration hit upon Iraqi possession of—nuclear or biological—weapons of mass destruction, presented as a threat to national security, as the most colourable pretext, though Saddam Hussein’s trampling of human rights and the prospect of bringing democracy to Iraq were prominently invoked alongside it. That there were no more weapons of mass destruction in Iraq than there had been genocide in Kosovo hardly mattered. This was a portfolio of reasons sufficient to create a broad national consensus—Democrats and Republicans, print and electronic media, alike—behind an attack on Iraq.12 European publics were more apprehensive, but most of their governments rallied to the cause.
The conquest of Iraq was as lightning as of Afghanistan: Baghdad fell in three weeks, where Kabul had required five. But the Baath regime, more long-standing than the Taliban, had a capillary structure that proved capable of ferocious resistance within days of the occupation of the country, detonating a Sunni maquis compounded by a rising among Shi’a radicals. The danger of a common front of opposition to occupiers was short-lived. Sectarian bombing of Shi’a mosques and processions by Salafi fanatics, and sectarian collaboration with the US by the top clerical authorities in Najaf as a stepping-stone to Shi’a domination, precipitated a civil war within Iraqi society that kept American forces in control, precariously at first, but eventually allowing them to split the Sunni community itself, and bring the insurgency to an end.
The third major ground war of the country since 1945 was, for the US, a relatively painless affair. Though its absolute cost in constant dollars was greater than the war in Korea or Vietnam—hi-tech weaponry was more expensive—as a percentage of GDP it was lower, and its impact on the domestic economy much less. Over seven years, American casualties totalled 4,500—fewer than two months of car accidents in the US. Unpopular at home, after initial euphoria, the war in Iraq never aroused the extent of domestic opposition that met the war in Vietnam, or had the electoral impact of the war in Korea. Flurries of disquiet over torture or massacre by US forces soon passed. As in those earlier conflicts, the cost was borne by the country for whose freedom America ostensibly fought. It is possible that fewer Iraqis were killed by the invasion and occupation of their country than by the sanctions whose work they completed. But the number—at a conservative count, over 160,000—was still proportionately higher than total American casualties in World War Two.13 To death was added flight—some two million refugees in neighbouring countries—ethnic cleansing and breakdown of essential services. Ten years later, over 60 per cent of the adult population is jobless, a quarter of families are below the poverty line, and Baghdad has no regular electricity.14
Militarily and politically, however, US objectives were achieved. There was no winter rout on the Yalu or helicopter scramble from Saigon. The Baath regime was destroyed, and American troops departed in good order, leaving behind a constitution crafted within the largest US embassy in the world, a leader picked on its premises by the US, and security forces totalling 1,200,000—nearly twice the size of Saddam’s army—equipped with US weaponry. What made that legacy possible was the support the American invasion received from the leaderships of the Shi’a and Kurdish communities that made up two-thirds of the population, each with longer histories of hostility to Saddam Hussein than Washington, and aims of replacing his rule. After the occupation was gone, the Iraq they divided between them, each with its own machinery of repression, remains a religious and ethnic minefield, racked by Sunni anger and traversed in opposite directions by manoeuvres from Turkey and Iran. But it has ceased to be an affront to the dignity of empire.15
Elsewhere too the Bush administration, distinct in rhetoric, was continuous in substance with its predecessor. Clinton had bonded with Yeltsin, a soft touch for the US. Bush did as well or better with Putin, a hard case, who yet granted Russian permission for American military overflights to Afghanistan, and put up with the extension of NATO to the Baltic states. China was no less supportive of the descent on Kabul, both powers fearing Islamic militancy within their own borders. The EU was cajoled into opening negotiations with Turkey for entry into the Union. If further deregulation of world trade with the Doha Round came to grief on India’s refusal to expose its peasants to subsidized Euro-American grain exports, of much greater strategic significance was the lifting by Bush of the US embargo on nuclear technology to India, paving the way for closer relations with Delhi. Liberals wringing their hands over the reputational damage to America done by Iraq need not have worried. Among the powers that counted, the invasion was a Panama in the sands, leaving no discernible trace.
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1Bush: ‘A world once divided into two armed camps now recognizes one sole and preeminent superpower: the United States of America. And they regard this with no dread. For the world trusts us with power—and the world is right. They trust us to be fair and restrained; they trust us to be on the side of decency. They trust us to do what’s right’: State of the Union Address, January 1992.
2Susan Watkins, ‘The Nuclear Non-Protestation Treaty’, New Left Review 54, Nov–Dec 2008—the only serious historical, let alone critical, reconstruction of the background and history of the treaty.
3Derek Chollet and James Goldgeier, America Between the Wars: From 11/9 to 9/11, New York 2008, pp. 35–7. Robert Kagan was another supporter of Clinton in 1992.
4For the latter, see Peter Gowan, The Global Gamble, London and New York 1999, pp. 76–9, 84–92, 103–15.
5‘A final reason for enlargement was the Clinton Administration’s belief that NATO needed a new lease of life to remain viable. NATO’s viability, in turn, was important because the alliance not only helped maintain America’s position as a European power, it also preserved America’s hegemony in Europe’: Robert Art, America’s Grand Strategy and World Politics, p. 222. Art is the most straightforward and lucidly authoritative theorist of US power-projection today. See ‘Consilium’, pp. 150–5 below.
6Chollet and Goldgeier, America Between the Wars, pp. 124, 134.
7For a critical review of the evidence, see Michael Spagat, ‘Truth and death in Iraq under sanctions’, Significance, September 2010, pp. 116–20.
8See Tariq Ali, ‘Our Herods’, New Left Review 5, Sept–Oct 2000, pp. 5–7.
9See ‘Jottings on the Conjuncture’, New Left Review 48, Nov–Dec 2007, pp. 15–18.
10See ‘Scurrying towards Bethlehem’, New Left Review 10, July–Aug 2001, pp. 10–15 ff.
11For a levelheaded discussion: Michael Mann, Incoherent Empire, London and New York 2003, pp. 113–5.
12As at every stage of American imperial expansion, from the mid-nineteenth century onwards, there was a scattering of eloquent voices of domestic opposition, without echo in the political system. Strikingly, virtually every one of the most powerful critiques of the new course of empire came from writers of a conservative, not a radical, background. This pattern goes back to the Gulf War itself, of which Robert Tucker co-authored with David Hendrickson a firm rejection: the United States had taken on ‘an imperial role without discharging the classic duties of imperial rule’, one in which ‘fear of American casualties accounts for the extraordinarily destructive character of the conflict’, giving ‘military force a position in our statecraft that is excessive and disproportionate’, with ‘the consent and even enthusiasm of the nation’: The Imperial Temptation: The New World Order and America’s Purpose, New York 1992, pp. 15–16, 162, 185, 195. Within a few weeks of the attentats of 11 September 2001, when such a reaction was unheard-of, the great historian Paul Schroeder published a prophetic warning of the likely consequences of a successful lunge into Afghanistan: ‘The Risks of Victory’, The National Interest, Winter 2001–2002, pp. 22–36. The three outstanding bodies of critical analysis of American foreign policy in the new century, each distinctive in its own way, share similar features. Chalmers Johnson, in his day an adviser to the CIA, published Blowback (2000), predicting that America would not enjoy impunity for its imperial intrusions around the world, followed by The Sorrows of Empire (2004) and Nemesis (2006), a trilogy packed with pungent detail, delivering an unsparing diagnosis of the contemporary Pax Americana. Andrew Bacevich, once a colonel in the US Army, brought out American Empire in 2002, followed by The New American Militarism (2005), and The Limits of Power: The End of American Exceptionalism (2008), in a series of works that recover the tradition of William Appleman Williams—to some extent also Beard—in lucid contemporary form, without being confined to it. Christopher Layne, holder of the Robert Gates Chair in Intelligence and National Security at the George Bush School of Government and Public Service at Texas A&M, has developed the most trenchant realist critique of the overall arc of American action from the Second World War into and after the Cold War, in the more theoretically conceived The Peace of Illusions: American Grand Strategy from 1940 to the Present (2006)—a fundamental work.
13For this figure, see the Iraq Body Count, which relies essentially on media-documented fatalities, for March 2013: civilian deaths 120–130,000.
14‘Iraq Ten Years On’, Economist, 2 March 2013, p. 19.
15The underlying spirit of the American invasion was captured by Kennan when the PLA drove back MacArthur’s troops from the Yalu in December 1950: ‘The Chinese have now committed an affront of the greatest magnitude to the United States. They have done us something we cannot forget for years and the Chinese will have to worry about righting themselves with us not us with them. We owe China nothing but a lesson’: Foreign Relations of the United States, vol. VII, pp. 1345–6. In his final years, Kennan had broken with this outlook and vigorously opposed the attack on Iraq.