History on the gallop: America must pause

Any historian worth his salt will tell you the world that emerged in 1945 after the Allies’ smashing victory over Germany and Japan in World War II has virtually vanished into thin air. It was so in 1919. After the heated, contentious but always stirring deliberations of the victors at Versailles, three leaders and three nations stamped their rule virtually all over the world. They were Woodrow Wilson of America, Lloyd George of Great Britain and George Clemenceau of France. Britain and France would eventually slip into the imperial shadows as their economies stalled and their armies stagnated.

America stood alone – but not for long. The Second World War came.

The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics under Joseph Stalin not only maintained the formidable armies that bloodied Hitler’s Germany on a 1,400-mile front – and slaughtered the Wehrmacht’s best armies at Stalingrad – but exploded the nuclear bomb. With the bomb, the USSR became a superpower alongside the US. And this would last until 1989-91 when the Cold War ended. The Soviet Union crumbled under the weight of a communist ideology it could not sustain. Japan rose to become the world’s second mightiest economy after the US. But conquered and humiliated country that it was, Japan abjured war "as an instrument of national policy". As a result, the once formidable Dai Nippon dwindled into a pathetic military pygmy, unable to resurrect the once redoubtable warrior code of the Bushido.

Superpowers are superpowers because they amass tremendous economic wealth on top of a highly productive manufacturing and large population.

But even more so, volonté au pouvoir (the will to power) that led to the greatest of empires, the Roman Empire, was backstopped by a prodigious military machine the world had not witnessed since then – the invincible Roman legions of the Caesars. Their sophisticated bladed weaponry, attacks and defense in rhythmic phalanxes, unexampled courage and fury in battle, the superb wealth of Roman culture and ideology, its laws and administrative genius, its codes of social and official conduct, made for an empire that lasted a thousand years.

Civitas Romanus sum (I am a Roman citizen) was the proud cry of every Roman subject. Once captured by a band of infidels, St. Paul of Tarsus invoked his Roman citizenship and was freed immediately.

And so where are we now? As far as our senses can tell us, our world has narrowed to what happens in Iraq. There the most powerful nation the world has ever seen (militarily, economically, culturally, ideologically) has its conquering finger on Iraq’s heart, Iraq’s soul, Iraq’s oil riches, Iraq’s probable destiny. The US launched a war on a virtually defenseless small country, a war which almost the whole world condemned. Two US reasons: Iraq’s supremo was a brutal, bloodthirsty, berserk dictator, Saddam Hussein his name is. On top of that, he amassed weapons of mass destruction – bacteriological and chemical – designed or destined to devastate America.

So Saddam had to be eliminated. So his weapons of mass destruction had to be destroyed. So the US-led war on terrorism could forge ahead after eliminating the first demon of the "Axis of Evil" which included North Korea and Iran. But where oh where are those weapons of mass destruction? They have not been found until now.

But the dimes of time rain down. The powers that rule the world, in the main America, will have to dance nimbly on these dimes to justify and rationalize the resort to war. Nazi Germany did and failed. Fascist Italy did and failed. Japan did and failed. Napoleon and later the France of the Third Republic did and failed. The Soviet Union did and failed. Now it’s America’s turn.

On the way to implementing the dreams of 1945, the spread of Pax Americana to all four corners of the globe, did the US do the right thing? By invading Iraq? By ignoring the rest of the world? Did the US dream too extravagantly by beating its breasts as a "universal civilization" the rest of the world should emulate? To hear President George W. Bush talk, his is the only snap of a finger in a world dominated by the US, soft-voiced as it may be, the only oracle.

Says Prof. Samuel Huntington of Harvard:

"European colonialism is over. American hegemony is receding. The erosion of Western culture follows, as indigenous, historically rooted mores, languages, beliefs and institutions assert themselves. The growing power of non-Western societies produced by modernization is generating the revival of non-Western cultures throughout the world."

Says former US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger: "The test of history for the United States will be whether we can turn our current predominant power into international consensus and our own principles into widely accepted international norms. That was the greatness achieved by Rome and Britain in their times."

America’s invasion of Iraq, as Jane Fonda says now, "has made the whole world hate us".

Says Joseph Nye, dean of the Kennedy School of Government, Harvard: "As global interdependence has increased, many argued that globalization is merely a disguise for American imperialism… (quoting Der Spiegel):… ‘Globalization wears a Made-in-USA-label’… The United States is undoubtedly the world’s number one power. But how long can this situation last?"

Virtually all these were articulated before America’s war on Iraq. Kissinger denounced the invasion.

It was what Professor Nye called "unilateralism" as against "multilateralism". It was America’s "go-it-alone" pre-emptive war against Europe’s (with Tony Blair’s exception) multilateral conviction. And thus the wreckage, temporary perhaps, of the United Nations as the world’s only forum to determine the immense latitudes of war and peace. It is ironic that an American president, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, together with British Prime Minister Winston Churchill held hands aboard the Prince of Wales to launch the concept of Atlantic Charter. This at a time the Allied Armies were storming Europe and Asia in the war’s homestretch 1944-45.

So many ribs of the Atlantic Charter – again at the pioneering instance of the US and Britain – were taken to form the lodestone of the United Nations. Roosevelt had died. Harry Truman took over to fit in the spine of the UN, its heart, its soul, "the unity of the English-speaking nations of the world," as FDR and Churchill often intoned.

It was a different America then. It is a different America now. It was a different world civilization then. It is a different world civilization now.

A Mars-smitten America must go back to the days and years when its cultural masts bulged with orchestral crash of "the land of the free and the home of the brave". It may have defined liberty too much by pulling out almost all of the stops for individual freedom and human rights, by liberating sex till it became a brazen, foul-smelling commodity, by overselling Hollywood. Still, it was okay. But when a Republican America took over, the world was again its imperial oyster. When September 9, 2001 struck, the US leadership heard anew the imperious and imperial language of the Caesars – George W. Bush, Richard Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Condoleezza Rice.

But could America still back off? Could the world again swing 180 degrees to the America where everybody could speak out, where nobody was above the law, where a foreigner never felt he was a foreigner, and freedom was a brace of matches repeatedly struck in the dark – anytime, anywhere. Oh lawdy, lawdy.

A conquered Iraq would be the supreme test.

The lesson must be learned by Washington that the arrogance of power drove it to war on Iraq. It shunted aside the United Nations which was the dream of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, a great American who looked at the diversity of the world as a blessing, not a curse. The US must understand the Iraqi people do not look upon America as a liberator but a conqueror. Yes, the hated and reviled Saddam Hussein was overthrown. But this did not mean the Iraqis were only too ready to wrap themselves in the folds of the Stars and Stripes. They want their own government, chosen by them, not a puppet and papoose government smelling of hot dogs, McDos, Kentucky Fried Chicken, and the insipid verbal vapors of George W. Bush.

America must pause.

It must moderate, if not do away with, its bully language. It must not look at America as the only game in town. There is Asia, for instance, whose cultural riches, rapidly growing economy, and military nuclearization have proven a match for Pax Americana.

America must reverse gears if it is to be loved again by the world.