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

The nation which in Burke’s days lost the plot against America, as America is losing the plot now, was deeply divided: Whig and Tory, landed interest and urban, conservative and radical. Today, America is equally divided about what is to be done in Iraq and in the wider war. The outcome is exactly what Burke described in March 1775: policies which contain an ‘incongruous mixture of coercion and restraint’. It is an incoherence which has simultaneously aided Islam’s advance and America’s self-defeat. Moreover, the hostility of the Whigs for the Tory administration of Lord North and the Hanoverian king is being echoed in the open contempt shown for President Bush by some Democratic Congressional leaders. ‘Calm down with the threats,’ the strident Nancy Pelosi told him at the end of last month — after he had warned Congress that he would veto its attempts to tie his hands in the conduct of the Iraq war — ‘there is a new Congress in town.’ ‘He has dug a hole so deep he can’t see the light,’ she has also said. What Burke called ‘prudent management’ and ‘care and calmness’ at a time of ‘distraction’ are lacking from such feverish statements.

However, Burke would have found some of the causes of this dissension familiar. Thus, in the England of George III, radicals felt more sympathy for the American rebels than for their own government. And just as they objected then to the arbitrary power of the king, so the Republican Senator Chuck Hagel felt driven a fortnight ago to remind the President (‘I am the decision-maker’) that ‘this is not a monarchy’. In Britain’s 18th-century war with America, critics saw the war as ‘impractical’ and ‘ruinous’, as today’s critics of America’s war in Iraq see it as ‘unnecessary’, ‘disastrous’ and a ‘grotesque mistake’. At worst, yesterday’s British radicals wished defeat upon their own country; there are many ‘liberals’ in America today who would not be sorry to see their country forced to retreat from Afghanistan and Iraq.