The Empire Strikes

With the recent invasion and occupation of Iraq by U.S. forces, historians and cultural commentators have begun to invoke the ‘E’ word when describing America’s identity in the world. But is it justified?

from: http://www.guerrillanews.com/war_on_terrorism/doc3204.html

America gets imperial in Iraq


While some would say that America is not an empire, in the traditional sense – and others that is already an empire in decline – the prevailing interpretation is that the United States has become something much more than a “superpower.”


In this interview, conducted for GNN’s upcoming feature film “True Lies,” radio commentator and Oxford University historian Felipe Fernandez-Armesto deconstructs the legacy of Earth’s imperial dynasties, dispelling conventional (liberal) wisdom that they were all evil and exploitative. Focusing on the invasion of Iraq, Prof. Fernandez-Armesto explains how elites are able to motivate the populace to spill blood for their causes and why media is such a crucial element to the expansion of their imperial desires:

GNN: In our generation there is a view that imperialism is a bad word. It’s hard to imagine people thinking of it as a good thing. It wasn’t always that way.

FELIPE FERNANDEZ-ARMESTO: I would say that on the whole, if you look at it very broadly, most empires have been good. At least they have not been any worse than any other kind of state.

Empires in the sense that Reagan used the term (when he berated the Soviet system as an empire), which maintains power by continual menace and brutality and violence, are actually very rare in history, because for most of history that kind of system has not worked very well. The only way you can maintain a state which endures for a long length of time is by getting people’s collaboration on the ground and cooperating with traditional and local elites. That’s how the Chinese empire has endured for such a long time and that’s how the British empire achieved such an extraordinarily large and vibrant system in the 19th and early 20th centuries. Therefore, on the whole, I think that you can say that empires have advantages for their subject peoples.

Certainly if you compare empires, you will find evil states and states that are very oppressive and odious to their peoples. It’s not a peculiarity of imperialism. We’re still living in a postcolonial age. In order to dismantle the empires of the 20th century we need, in a sense, to manufacture an anti-imperialist ethos. The effects of the dismantling of various 20th century empires shows that that ethos wasn’t really justified because very often the situation after the withdrawal of empirical power (and alas, especially in Africa) was much worse in independence than it was in the imperial era. I don’t want to whitewash empires. I particularly don’t want to whitewash the great European empires of the 19th and 20th centuries. The British, French and German empires, because they were in my opinion guilty of a great deal of intellectual impropriety. Racism above all, affected peoples’ lives and spread misery around the world. They are also outrageously inefficient, particularly about delivering food where it was needed. And I hold the British Empire, in particular, responsible for a great deal of 19th century famine from Ireland to India.

So I won’t whitewash them, but I think you’ve got to give them their due. I offer one such good example of imperialist virtue by citing the British empire’s commitment to the abolition of slavery.

That was something, which in honesty was not in the interest of the British people. It was dismantled not for economic, but for moral reasons. In history, that’s quite an extraordinary example of commitment of the state to a moral purpose. And it was achieved at the cost of an enormous amount of British blood and money. You can cite that. The empires of today, like the American empire, and the empires of the future, should measure themselves I think against that kind of achievement. America has got to ask itself today what are we going to do for the world which is comparable to the efforts the British made when they were the world’s hegemonic superpower to the abolition of slavery.

GNN: Empires are often built at the behest of the elite who will benefit from trade and from the administration of those colonies. However, the foundation of the empire is the work of the people themselves. How are the people inspired, coaxed or encouraged to work on behalf of the empire and how is it made to seem as though it is in their interest?

FFA: On the whole, that’s how empires work. They get people to collaborate and sometimes to identify with the state. A very remarkable example of this is the Roman empire where the concept of Roman citizenship spread throughout the empire. Romans continually granted the status of “Roman citizen” to ever more subject communities and what you got was a single culture and strong kind of Roman identify and commitment to the empire amongst Hebrews, Celts, Greeks and Romans.

But really the Roman empire was a Romanic Greek empire in the east and a Romanic Celtic empire in the west, but subject peoples really identified emotionally with it. When it collapsed it didn’t collapse because people rebelled within their own empire, it collapsed because of things that were happening from outside.

The British empire didn’t work by bossing people around and fighting them but by finding collaborative elite through whom they could guide the local economy and policy into the channels and into the directions that they wanted.

Empires work best when the imperialist is delivering to its subject peoples something they need. What they deliver can be economic prosperity, or it can be something very elementary like peace, or security against outside enemies. What I think is a really critical thing is that imperial elites can be sources of the administration of justice, which I call the “stranger effect.”

The imperialist comes from outside society so that he is not embroiled in its historic hatreds and rivalries. He can bring objectivity to the administration of justice – in the British empire it was the district commissioner. He may have just been a lone figure with nothing more than a pistol in his pocket but he travels around these vast territories amongst peoples who could easily get rid of him if they wanted to but because he is delivering that objectivity, he can help sort out their problems and their disputes and so they are actually very glad to have him. As long as the empire is not fiscally oppressive to make those advantages worthwhile, it endures.

GNN: Using that last analogy, look at Iraq, where a lot of American soldiers really felt that they were going to become that force. Iraqis haven’t quite felt that way – or maybe they have. Can you comment using that specific case and how maybe it’s backfired?

FFA: Yes, I think British military leader Field Marshall Montgomery said, “One of the great laws of war, is never invade Russia.” Well there’s another great law of war, which is never invade Vietnam. Americans made a big mistake there. I think another such law is don’t invade Iraq. I think this is a grotesquely moral deception. I also think it was a tad or so worse than a crime, it was a mistake. 

They don’t have that objectivity, but even if they did, I don’t think any outsider could ever sort out the problems of Iraq because this is a society so divided by historic hatreds and rivalries. Saddam kept the peace by extraordinary kind of vicious, odious and morally reprehensible means, but he kept the peace. And no others, yet, devised any other means in Iraq of doing so. Probably the long-term solution for Iraq is fragmentation – but the Americans don’t have the moral authority to impose that solution on the country so they have got to keep living from day to day. There doesn’t seem to be a long-term plan. Part of the reason for that is it’s very difficult to devise one that will have any chance of working.

GNN: The foot soldiers, the people who go out and fight the wars for the empire, the people who are citizens of the state – they often need to be encouraged as well. In this case, much of the spoils from this current occupation are going directly to the few. Historically, how have the common people been motivated and inspired? And what role has media, hype and propaganda played into that?

FFA: I suppose if you’re looking over the whole of history and attempting to make a very broad generalization, this wouldn’t be one that holds universally. Probably the broadest possible generalization I can offer in response to that question is “duty.” The foot solider is usually involved in the process of imperialism for what he can get out of it. In most empires he has a role as a colonizer. Ordinary soldiers who settled on frontiers, who often married locally, were given land by the state. They were leaving the world of restricted social-economic opportunity at home and acquiring social-economic opportunities by going out to the frontier. Sometimes, of course, those soldiers deserted as they could do better by allying with their potential victors than they could by serving their imperial masters back home. In order to keep them functioning as agents of the empire, the empires had to reward them.

Unfortunately, that’s where American capitalism has got it right. It’s based on an unfortunately accurate reading of human nature. Because you can persuade people to do things out of altruism, especially in the short-term, and rhetoric and propaganda can play a big part in that. And if you tell people lies, like the country we’re invading is a threat to us, or if you tell lies like these people are longing to be liberated, and it’ll make them much better off than they formally were – you can temporarily get people to act for you, galvanized in this moral dynamism. Unfortunately, moral dynamism usually runs out of steam in history, and I don’t think American draftees and volunteers are going to continue fighting in Iraq happily whilst the rhetoric that took them there corrodes.

GNN: There’s a view we have now that people, in a sense, have been lied to. I mean, you talked about the Iraq situation and why we needed to go there. But are there myths that society needs sometimes to conjure, to tell itself, to reaffirm to itself, so that it allows itself to move in the ways that it needs to? Do we tell ourselves lies sometimes to justify what we’re doing abroad?

FFA: Life is unsustainable without lubrication by lies. We know that in our own everyday lives. Who can put his hand on his heart and say that everything that he’s ever told his wife or his children has been crudely truthful. The truth is often hurtful; it very often directly inspires violence. So actually, we always need to protect ourselves from the ill effects of the truth. What’s true in ordinary individuals and family and community life is also true of bigger communities and bigger collectives that we call nations and countries and states. Actually the whole of history is a tissue of such myths, which are there to create collective identities in the first place, or defend them when they’ve been created, or to generate hatreds against other communities with whom you have to go to war for some reason or another.

You can’t begin to understand history without a chronology. But history is motivated – moved along far less by the facts that really happened than by the false constructions people put on them.


What was the reality of Iraq at the time of the start of the conflict? It was a very modest regional power, incapable of winning a war against any of its neighbors except Kuwait, which is a rather disproportionate conflict. It was a regional power that had been suffering a decade of economic recession; the central command of which had been eroded by devolution to the Kurdish autonomous region in the North; which was barely able to control the restlessness of its own minorities – especially the Kurds and the Shia – which was in a state of approaching disintegration which was ruled in an ad hoc fashion by a dictator with no real provision for the future or for the succession. A state that had notoriously inefficient armed forces, which had neither the resources nor the equipment to fight a significant war and which had weapons that were antiquated, virtually rusting away. And yet you know it could be convincingly sold to ignorant publics (the United States and Britain) as a major threat, against world peace and a direct threat to the security of countries that are thousands of miles beyond the reach of its weapons and indeed beyond the reach of its agents. The consequence of that was a war, and that is the power of lies.


GNN: Paul Wolfowitz, one of the major members of that neo-con elite, at one point in Vanity Fair magazine was very open about the fact that weapons of mass destruction probably may not be the main central focus or reason for us being there. He said that very openly, and yet it never trickled down to the masses. Do elites typically speak to their own in a way that is more frank than the way they talk to the common man? In other words, for some people in America, they understand implicitly, we’re there for oil, we need oil, we’re an island, we don’t have any and therefore we must act in our interest, but at the same time keeping a sort of shuffled deck for the public. Can you characterize that?

FFA: It’s certainly true that elites speak frankly to their own and lie to everybody else. You’ve only got to listen to the Nixon tapes to see a good example of that in America. I certainly don’t think that you can sell a war without affecting some kind of moral dimension. Certainly not in a country which has the traditions of Western civilization because the doctrine that war is evil is very deeply embedded in our Western tradition.


Ever since Aristotle and Augustine, and in Christian thought, people have been struggling to find ways of justifying war when it has to be justified. I will not seep very deep into our tradition. I don’t think people in the West would ever accept a war, which was sold purely on grounds of economic advantage. I have got a solution. I mean, I don’t know whether it’ll work, but it’s worth trying. I think that war is always evil. I don’t say that for the canting Moorish reasons. I don’t mean it’s evil just because people get killed. In some ways I think that’s almost one of the lesser evils of war. War makes a corrupting environment. It makes people behave in an evil way. Ordinary, everyday nice American boys who love mom and apple pie become the perpetrators of the Mai Lai massacre. You always get atrocities in war, and very often they’re committed by people who, in peace time, are nice guys… the person who lives next door. That seems to me to be the really evil thing about war. That’s what we really should be concentrating on when we tell ourselves everyday we must try to avoid going to war.


Of course, sometimes, war is necessary. But we can’t justify it in terms of justice, because it’s always going to be unjust. But we can – justification is the wrong word – but we can explain it and defend it in terms of necessity. Necessity only really arises when you are under very very direct threat of attack or when you’re actually being attacked or when there’s no other way of defending the weak against the strong by intervening violently on their behalf – and even if you do that, you’ve got to do it justly… you’ve got to do it for everybody who’s in that position because one of the problems with justifying the Iraq war, for example, was that by saying the Iraqi people were oppressed by Saddam Hussein, you intervene on behalf of the oppressed minority. Anyway you are actually doing an injustice toward all the other minorities on whose behalf you don’t intervene. So necessity seems to me be a better argument than justice.


GNN: One story that captured that hearts and minds of American people was the Jessica Lynch story. It was this woman who was captured and then rescued from the hospital and really that was the story that was sold. Pentagon tapes were delivered to the networks; they played them without even questioning them. Over here in Britain, there was a great documentary which actually deconstructed that event and publicized it to the world. Talk about why the British media seems to be more deconstructivist and more critical than the American press. What does that say about the societies?

FFA: In the case of the present conflict, obviously there’s never been the kind of consensus in favor of the conflict in Britain than there was at the time it started in America. The other country that I think opened this connection was my other country, Spain. Where the government fell in with the British and American program even though the domestic population was almost solidly against it. The press in Britain and Spain have had big constituencies, large sums of clients or customers who’ve wanted deconstructionist stories of this kind. Obviously, they’ve been provided with them.


The press is a business like everything else and gives their readers what they want to hear. Americans for most of the time they’ve been in Iraq haven’t wanted to hear stories about why they shouldn’t be there, why they should never have gone there in the first place, and what they’re doing wrong now that they’re there. But of course as time goes on and the constituency against the war in America grows so the press will become equally active in supplying them with stories of the kind they want. The weird things about societies like ours, where the press and the media are so important in opinion formation – is that people are influenced by the headlines. They are influenced by the initial stories but not by the retractions. The initial story, when it first comes out, is blazing away on the front page, but the retraction is in small print on page 19. That’s another way in which lies are more important and more powerful than facts – increasingly powerful in our society, because our society is for that reason more susceptible.


GNN: You say in your comments that Americans haven’t wanted to hear the reasons why we shouldn’t be there, whereas British people perhaps have been much more eager to hear them to the point where the BBC may have overstepped– we will find out. Can you characterize how society wants to be lied to? Can you talk about what that says about them and how that might have become the case?

FFA: Well, as I say, I think lies are an inseparable part of life. I’m not sure that American politics are more dishonest than those of other states. I think they are all pretty close to being absolutely dishonest. I think idealism has considerably eroded in America in the very recent past. Maybe there’s just a little bit of residual idealism, which makes American citizens more inclined to believe what the government tells them – a little bit less skeptical and less cynical than in our rather disenchanted “old” world. To me, that makes people more prone to be misled.


Another respect in which there’s a significant difference between America and the rest of the world… on the whole my advice to those all over the world is “Don’t believe anything the politicians say because they’re in it for the votes and for what they can get out of power once they’ve taken power.” In the golden age before you had professional politicians, politics was run by a sort of aristocracy of service.


And there was a tradition of nobility, and you could sometimes have honest leaders. It’s very rare nowadays. It’s almost unknown.


GNN: Obviously Murdoch has been very powerful in jumping people’s passions. Have you seen American media lately? I’ll tell you about it, it’s very jingoistic, it uses the word patriotism, flags are flying in the base line of the screen. Can you characterize that phenomenon? Is that typical to empire building?

FFA: I don’t watch these shows. I prefer to keep my lunch in my stomach. I don’t watch that stuff, and therefore what I say is very much subject to correction by those who have. But I think, in the case of Fox, it’s essentially a commercial decision. Murdoch’s a benefactor of mine. I do a lot of work for the Murdoch press myself, but I don’t mind saying frankly that I think his guiding principle is good old-fashioned capitalism. He’s in the media to make money; he’s not primarily there to change the world. The political agendas that he imposes on his media empire, are the agendas that he thinks will be commercially successful, that are going to resonate with the public.


In the case of Fox, it’s niche marketing. Fox News programs are exploiting the public that is there for a very upbeat, patriotic, jingoistic, religiously aggressive message. And in a country like America we know there’s a very large number of sad, middle aged guys who never really grew up, who sort of like playing with planes and tanks and stuff. I think there’s a big constituency for that kind of programming and that kind of entertainment. We shouldn’t kid ourselves that it’s information – it’s entertainment being sold to a public that’s up for it. I’m not going to moralize about that. If we’ve got any sense we know that these guys are in business and what they do they do to make money.


GNN: Can the media be, and has it historically been, a crucial element to driving expansionist empire agendas?

FFA: I don’t know any society (this is not peculiar to empires) that hasn’t tried to communicate with its citizens or subjects by means of propaganda. I have a really amusing example of imperial propaganda from the empire of Ashoka, the ruler of most of India in the second century BC who was a Buddhist. He embraced Buddhism; he used some Buddhist clergy as bureaucrats. The viability of his state depended to a great extent on its alliance with the Buddhist establishment. All over the empire of Ashoka he erected these rock inscriptions which survive to this day, all about how he was observing Buddhist doctrine. And these were rock inscriptions which you’d find all over the empire to influence public opinion. Even more interestingly, he also uses Buddhism to justify imperialism. He talks about the conquests of dharma. He’s actually pursuing a policy which is flatly against the ideology embedded, literally engraved, into these rock inscriptions. It’s a classic case of spin. You take the message and massage it.