The Spectator
David Selbourne
With both houses of the US Congress set to maintain their challenge to
President Bush's conduct of the conflict in Iraq — and being accused in
turn of 'meddling in military strategy' and of wanting to 'set a date
for surrender' — America's problems in its so-called 'war on terror'
are deepening. In the gathering disorder, the recent visit to Damascus
of Nancy Pelosi, the new Speaker of the House of Representatives, a
visit carried out against the President's wishes but with the approval
of the region's jihadists, served only to undercut the US
administration's hostile position on Syria. Last week's humiliation of
Britain at Iran's hands, with service personnel apologising to their
captors after being taken hostage and bishops this week thanking Tehran
for its mercies, also compounded the difficulties faced by the US in
seeking to check the growing ambitions of its foes.
But America's problems are of a familiar kind in the history of great
empires and nations. Misjudgment of the enemy, incompetent leadership,
and divisions over policy caused similar turmoil in Britain in the
late-18th century. At that time its war with the Americans was being
lost, as the Americans are now losing the larger-scale struggle against
the world-force of Islam.
On 22 March 1775, four weeks before the first shot had been fired in
anger in what was to be an eight-year war between the rebellious
colonists and the redcoats, the great Whig parliamentarian Edmund Burke
stood up in the House of Commons and accused the Tory government of
Lord North of being 'grossly ignorant of America'. Declaring that 'a
great empire and little minds' — the minds, say, of a Bush, a Rice, a
Cheney — 'go ill together', he condemned the 'woeful variety of
schemes', the 'doing and undoing', and the 'shiftings and changings and
jumblings of all kinds' which characterised British policy towards the
emerging United States.
He might have been talking of today's White House, Pentagon and State
Department, of the blunders of judgment and strategy in Iraq, and —
more perilous — of America's larger failures in the teeth of Islam's
advance. Like America now, Britain was a great economic and military
power. It wanted to keep things as they were under its imperium,
protect its markets, and hold on to its sources of wealth in the New
World and elsewhere, just as corporate America must hold on at all
costs to its resources in the Middle East and beyond. Yet, on the eve
of the war with America, the British monarch George III and his
ministry are regarded by historians as having been 'insufficiently
astute' for their task, 'ill-advised' and 'misinformed'.
Just as the British were accused by Burke of having no understanding of
the 'true temper of the minds' of the Americans, so the inner strengths
and growing momentum of Islam are being misjudged today. There are
differences, of course. Among them, the Americans were fighting the
Brits out of a 'fierce spirit of liberty', while Islamists seek to
subject the entire infidel world to their faith. But Islam's spirit is
an equally formidable weapon in the present struggle. 'You ought not to
trifle with so large a mass of the interests and feelings of the human
race,' Burke warned the Commons, referring to a mere two million
Americans whose numbers were increasing at what he called an 'alarming'
rate. And 1.2 billion Muslims?
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.
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.
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.
Furthermore, increasingly complex alliances are being formed by
America's rivals and challengers in order to thwart its geopolitical
aims. For instance, relationships between Russia and North Korea,
Russia and Iran, China and Pakistan, China and nations in Africa such
as Sudan and Angola, and even between Iran and Venezuela, make
President Bush's claims to be 'fighting to advance the cause of freedom
around the world' increasingly vainglorious. As Burke observed,
18th-century Britain faced problems with an 'extensive empire' too
large to be kept under control. By the last quarter of the 19th
century, however, when the British had learnt the arts and crafts of
imperial command — and numbered only some 35 million — it ruled a
fourth of the world's population. But it is too late for the US to
follow suit. Islam and America's competitors have seen to that.
Moreover, as historical processes quicken, the longevity of empires is
diminishing: the American imperium, like the Soviet, has entered on its
decline after only some six decades. There will be no future Pax
Americana.
Now it is the turn of Islam to assert itself, for the third time in
history, across large swaths of the globe. It is a bitter truth that
the worst of Islamists, many of whose purposes are ugly and craven,
should be crowing loudest over America's travails. In the 18th century,
the American colonists had outgrown the Brits; today, it is clear that
Mohammed is unlikely ever to go on his knees to the American mountain.
And in these travails, George the Second of America has proved no wiser
than George the Third of Britain.
David Selbourne is the author of The Losing Battle with Islam.
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