No more Pax Americana

14 April 2007

David Selbourne says that George Bush is losing the war in Iraq as surely as George III lost the war against the American colonists — and that the US imperium has entered on its decline after only six decades

But America’s problems are of a familiar kind in the history of great empires and nations. Misjudgment of the enemy, incompetent leadership, and divisions over policy caused similar turmoil in Britain in the late-18th century. At that time its war with the Americans was being lost, as the Americans are now losing the larger-scale struggle against the world-force of Islam.

On 22 March 1775, four weeks before the first shot had been fired in anger in what was to be an eight-year war between the rebellious colonists and the redcoats, the great Whig parliamentarian Edmund Burke stood up in the House of Commons and accused the Tory government of Lord North of being ‘grossly ignorant of America’. Declaring that ‘a great empire and little minds’ — the minds, say, of a Bush, a Rice, a Cheney — ‘go ill together’, he condemned the ‘woeful variety of schemes’, the ‘doing and undoing’, and the ‘shiftings and changings and jumblings of all kinds’ which characterised British policy towards the emerging United States.

He might have been talking of today’s White House, Pentagon and State Department, of the blunders of judgment and strategy in Iraq, and — more perilous — of America’s larger failures in the teeth of Islam’s advance. Like America now, Britain was a great economic and military power. It wanted to keep things as they were under its imperium, protect its markets, and hold on to its sources of wealth in the New World and elsewhere, just as corporate America must hold on at all costs to its resources in the Middle East and beyond. Yet, on the eve of the war with America, the British monarch George III and his ministry are regarded by historians as having been ‘insufficiently astute’ for their task, ‘ill-advised’ and ‘misinformed’.

Just as the British were accused by Burke of having no understanding of the ‘true temper of the minds’ of the Americans, so the inner strengths and growing momentum of Islam are being misjudged today. There are differences, of course. Among them, the Americans were fighting the Brits out of a ‘fierce spirit of liberty’, while Islamists seek to subject the entire infidel world to their faith. But Islam’s spirit is an equally formidable weapon in the present struggle. ‘You ought not to trifle with so large a mass of the interests and feelings of the human race,’ Burke warned the Commons, referring to a mere two million Americans whose numbers were increasing at what he called an ‘alarming’ rate. And 1.2 billion Muslims?