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A splendid little war
By Hani Shukrallah
The twentieth century is likely to end belatedly, sometime in March/April 2003, with the establishment of American military rule in Iraq.
A short 20th century (as defined by British historian Eric Hobsbawm) had ended with the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. And while Hobsbawm’s “age of extremes” opens with the First World War, our long century’s beginning is less immediately devastating, if no less obvious: the 1898 Spanish-American War, the “splendid little war” which gave the US dominion over Guam, Puerto Rico and the Philippines. It launched the world, irrevocably, into the age of American empire: by the 1940s an American (Time and Life publisher Henry Luce) could refer to the American century. Half a century on few around the world, friends or foes of US global hegemony, would dispute his assertion.
And it is not without merit; I expect, to view the impending war in Iraq as a sort of seal on the first American century, a kind of culmination of the long, if by no means inevitable, historical process that placed Bush Jr. and his gang of global marauders as the reviled but uncontested masters of the world.
The commonalties between the two events that began and culminated the American century are remarkable: the flimsy pretext (the sinking of the Maine versus Saddam Hussein’s WMDs and links to Al-Qa’eda); a powerful mass media (from Hearst’s yellow press to satellite TV) that has the ability to create a fictional reality well suited to American business interests; and the absurd, trigger-happy “rough rider” mindset, its flagrant stupidity shored up by a mindless (‘God’s on our side’) arrogance. And, of course, the penchant for “splendid little wars” — what, according to Noam Chomsky, the American military establishment currently calls “conflict with much weaker enemies”.
Of course, neither Teddy Roosevelt nor William Randolph Hearst could have dreamed of the amazing sleights of hand that a century of empire and technological innovation have given US rulers and their ever compliant and complicit media. The now you see it now you don’t bag of tricks is fabulous in its audacity: the “very weak enemy” is made to appear a horrifying threat to humanity that must be confronted at any price, conjuring images of Hitler, Stalin and, much more relevant, of Hollywood disaster movies. But with a shake of the wand the monster is to be turned back into a rabbit. War against this terrible enemy will be conducted at very little cost in lives, will require very little sacrifice and will be over before you can say body bags. It will be “a splendid little war”. The cost in human lives is naturally calculated in terms of “our boys”; enemy losses do not count since a cooperative corporate media has made it possible to blame them on the enemy.
It began with one little war and ends with another, both ugly, sordid and blatantly contrived. The one set the American republic on the road to empire, the other is designed to proclaim the absolute, irrevocable and uncontested global supremacy of that empire. But will the last century go down in history as simply the American Century, or as the first of other American centuries? Have we seen the rise of the American empire, and can now look towards its fall, or are we merely at the start of a thousand-year American Reich?
One such answer was recently provided by Bill Emmott, the editor of the Economist, in a lengthy article published in The Sunday Times of 12 January, in its news review section. Under the rhetorical title: “Will America surrender?” Emmot provides an elegy for American imperialism in the last and, it would seem, this and all future centuries, revealing an embarrassing degree of sycophancy that only certain British gentlemen seem capable of. (The best explanation for that propensity that I can come up with may be summarised in a popular Egyptian saying “the bald- headed woman flaunts her niece’s hair.”)
The article, as it happens, is an extract from a book titled: 20:21 Vision: Twentieth Century Lessons for the Twenty-First Century, which was due to be published by Penguin at the end of last month. Having apparently studied the history of the last century, the Economist editor concludes that only two questions matter in this one: “One is whether capitalism will survive, thrive and retain the current, unusual allegiance that it commands around the world. The other is whether America will continue to keep the peace, making the world safe for capitalism to spread, by retaining its clear pre-eminence as a political, military, economic and cultural power, by retaining the desire to exercise its power as a force for peace and progress.”
Would that the answers were as simple as the questions, Emmot laments. Soon enough, however, we discover that not only are the answers simple, they are simple-minded. Emmot has no doubts that capitalism is the best of all worlds, and neither does he have any doubts that American “pre-eminence” is the only way to save the world from utter chaos and collapse. Sure, there are some problems with capitalism (such as the fact that more than half the world lives on less than $2 a day), and with Pax Americana (Vietnam?), but these he dismisses as incidental to his basic, and as far as I am aware, unique premise: world wars one and two were a result of the fact that the US was yet to inherit Great Britain as the undisputed master of the world. Who needs a Hobsbawm and genuine, hard-earned scholarship when American-style journalists such as Mr Emmot can turn out such facile history?
But as Mr Emmot’s book was hitting the shelves at the beginning of February, and as the author was, perhaps, coming to take his proper place beside such paragons of hilarious history as Huntington and Fukoyama, the scene was very different. Ironically, both in Davos, where 1,000 captains of global capital and their bureaucratic cronies had collected, and in Porto Alegre, where over 100,000 members of a whole range of social movements from around the world gathered, American “pre-eminence” was under attack. The prospects of an American-governed capitalist world system were a source of gloom in Davos and profound opposition in Porto Alegre.
The long (American) century will soon be over. What’s to come next? Will the coming war in Iraq herald the coming to being of a new, brutal, unchangeable and incontestable imperial order or, alternatively, the beginning of the end of empire? I do not know. I very much doubt however that there can be a second American century, simply because (and here I’m borrowing from something Chomsky said in Porto Alegre last week), it is very doubtful that the human species can survive another century “under existing state capitalist institutions”, ruled over and made safe from democracy by force of American arms.
The source: Al-Ahram Weekly.