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

Moreover, the US military is as divided as the British army was in the War of Independence. In the highest ranks of the British officer corps there were similar differences over strategy and tactics, poor morale, replacements of commanders and uncertainty over the justice of their cause. Then, as now in Iraq, soldiers sent to fight saw that they were not fighting a minority of the population, contrary to what they had been told. There were thousands of British troops stationed in America. But they were not enough, while military reinforcements — like the American ‘surge’ in Iraq — were of no avail.

Why? Because, among other things, the British army found in America what General Thomas Gage, the commander-in-chief, called a ‘ferment throughout the continent’, a ‘phrenzy’. Or as Burke asked in the House of Commons in an unnerving parallel with the situation in Iraq, ‘What advances have we made towards our object by the sending of a force? Has the disorder abated? I cannot avoid a suspicion that the plan itself is not right.’ The use of British force against the Americans, added Burke — who was in favour of ‘conciliation’ with the colonists — could have only a ‘temporary effect’; as it can have only a temporary effect today in battling with an armed world-faith.

Despite relatively few American losses in the Iraq war, the sense in the US that it is at the limits of what can be endured is a sign of deep unease. There is nothing for the non-Muslim world to gloat over in all this. The US needs help, not merely because it could not in any circumstances take on Islamism alone, but because its power in the world is on the wane. Yet since its power is waning, it is decreasingly able to get such help except on the terms that others set. It has also been actively obstructed in its purposes by its friends as well as by its foes. Indeed, the obstacles being put in America’s path easily dwarf those which the British faced when the French came to the aid of the Americans in 1777, and helped them gain their independence.