No more Pax Americana

11 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

It was also wrongly believed by the British that the ‘trouble’ in the American colonies was the work of ‘infatuated wretches’, the predecessors of today’s ‘minority of Muslim fanatics’. In May 1774, the governor of New York called the rebels against British rule ‘reptiles’; others described them as ‘scoundrels’, ‘peasants’, ‘bandits’, ‘murderers’ and ‘sons of darkness’, language close to that used by American rednecks about today’s ‘insurgents’ and ‘terrorists’ in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere.

‘Believe me, my lords, the very sound of cannon would carry them off,’ thought one British parliamentarian. ‘The Americans are in general the dirtiest, the most contemptible, cowardly dogs you can conceive. They fall dead in their own dirt,’ said another. And not long before the British surrendered to the Americans at Yorktown in 1781, assurances were still being given in parliament that ‘so vast is our superiority everywhere that no resistance on their part is to be apprehended’. Today, with not even Baghdad secured after over four years of war — and the expenditure of hundreds of billions of dollars — the White House still talks in terms of a ‘victory’ over ‘extremists’ and ‘killers’, even if the delusion that a Jeffersonian democracy can be created in Mesopotamia appears to have been abandoned.

Burke was wiser. He shrewdly saw the American colonists’ cause as containing a ‘principle of energy’. Likewise, resurgent Islam, despite its internal divisions, has a powerful common morality and religious culture. Indeed, at its ascetic best, Islam is as puritan as a now-obese and self-indulgent US was at its founding. It is also threateningly hard-headed at a time when Americans, and others, have come to believe that their increasingly trivial and hedonistic ideas of ‘liberty’ represent the high point in the evolution of political thought. One thing is plain: the ‘free market’ has not got the beating of the Koran, while a Washington or a Lincoln would not have been in the hands of Big Oil.