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03/28/2006:

"Martin Jacques: Decline and fall"

Bush's foreign policy has failed ignominiously in Iraq, but where does that leave the liberal imperialists?

Liberal imperialists, 1990-2006, RIP? Hardly, but their tails are down. And so they should be. I am referring, of course, to a school of thought associated with the left that took wind after the end of the cold war and came to believe that the US was a benign power that could intervene around the world for the good of democracy and human values.

In the mood that prevailed after 1989, it was perhaps not entirely surprising: the left felt defeated, and many busily took the road of rejecting everything from their past as mistaken. This, for some, included the warm embrace of the US. The first Gulf war was easy to support, and so was American intervention in the Balkans tragedy. The US was not just the global policeman: it was the friendly bobby down the street, waiting to deliver good sense and virtue to some faraway country.

And so we had the spectacle of left figures rushing to support the US occupation of Iraq. It would bring democracy to Iraq, they proclaimed; human rights as well; peace to the region, and the end of a global threat. Rarely has such a huge undertaking ended in such rapid, ignominious and public failure. Just three short years later, the country is on the verge of civil war and patently ungovernable More than 15,000 US troops have been killed or wounded, and many tens of thousands of Iraqis are dead, with absolutely no end in sight and the prospect of worse to come.

It was always an illusion to believe that the US was essentially a benevolent power whose actions were universalistic and altruistic rather than primarily interest-driven. One could understand, perhaps, in the backwash of 1989, people believing this, or wanting to believe it. And Clinton was in the White House to give such a position an air of plausibility for New Labour and its intellectual outriders. But these guys' fulsome embrace of the US coincided with Bush, a major lurch to the right and the triumph of the neoconservatives. This was the full-blown imperialism of a power that believed it could now rule the world without constraint - unilateralism, pre-emptive war, an overwhelming emphasis on military force, and a military budget that exceeded that of the rest of the world put together. Far from being the benign force of liberal imperialist fantasy, Guantánamo, Abu Ghraib and the like have told a rather traditional story of how an imperial power behaves when it feels unconstrained. Bizarrely their embrace of the US coincided with its most naked act of imperial aggression and its greatest moment of global isolation.
guardian.co.uk