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From: thirdrail (Thursday, December 20)
Random Thoughts: another throw-away
This Canadian newspaper's site address (thestar.com) allows those interested to find a December 9 op-ed by Richard Gwyn titled, "Imperial Rome lives in the U.S." Had meant, and forgot, to post this item when it first appeared; however, a commentary in yesterday's War Street Journal jogged my memory. Later for that.
Gwyn's argument is overstated. Even if it wasn't, arguments from analogy, along with attempts to construct historical (or ideological) parallels, are tricky. But such exercises, though not always fruitful, can sometimes be fun.
Here is a small sample from Gwyn:
"...the America of today isn't at all yesterday's America. Today's America is Rome...But being Rome is more than just having power and cruise missiles, instead of short, stabbing swords. It's a matter of attitude, of psychology, of self-perception.
"It's knowing that you are Rome and not caring what anyone else thinks or really caring about anyone else at all. It's about being prepared to kick ass---any ass, anywhere---without apology or self-doubt and, if need be, without explanation.
"Sept. 11 didn't so much cause the change as confirm it and quicken it and...since the U.S. quite obviously is the contemporary Rome in every dimension...it might as well act like the old Rome.
"The British historian Niall Ferguson has called this transformation 'the formalization of American imperialism.'"
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Rather surprised Gwyn didn't decorate his piece with quotations from Edward Gibbon's The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, but then Gwyn's prose would suffer by comparison. Gibbon crafted far more elegant phrases to describe imperial Rome's "kick ass" policies.
One can learn an enormous amount from Gibbon without embracing his primary explanations for Rome's fall. And his treatment of Islam, while flawed, seems rather generous next to some of what has recently appeared in print. If memory serves, Gibbon suggested that Islam had greater "purity" as a religious system than Zoroastrianism, was more liberal than Mosaic law, and seemed "less inconsistent with reason" than Christianity, which by 700 AD had degenerated even further into crass superstition. (Make of this what you will. There's more but we're already badly off course. I now understand why Gwyn might have avoided even mentioning Gibbon.)
How does any of this pertain to that "reminder" from The Wall Street Journal? Well, in his op-ed, "Crushing al Qaeda Is Only a Start," Reuel Marc Gerecht suggested that the luminous display of U.S. firepower trained at Afghanistan hasn't restored the "awe" of the Arab world, such awe being necessary for protection of "American interests abroad and citizens at home." According to this resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, only a war with Iraq ("we have no choice") will create the proper "fear and respect" that are our due as the planet's remaining superpower.
While he doesn't trouble himself with such matters as legal niceties, likely civilian deaths, or other trivia, neither does Gerecht bother serving up the usual tired pretexts for another war with Iraq. There's no speculation designed to convey the impression that Iraq is complicit in the horrors of 9/11, no visions of mad Iraqi scientists mixing biotoxins or developing nuclear bombs, or even the familiar rhetoric about "evil," in which Saddam morphs into bin Laden or Hitler.
But scattered amidst all of his other nonsense are some ugly racist assumptions about "the moral bankruptcy of the entire region." The Arab world is a zone ostensibly inhibited by a lesser breed that responds only to force and the fear it produces. Moreover, "America actually loses face in Muslim eyes by not enforcing an unabashedly pro-Western, pro-Israeli agenda..." This, one supposes, is a more contemporary way of saying: "All these people understand is a damned good caning, one that shows them who's the boss. They actually respect that sort of thing, you know." The British, for whom "cane" was largely used as a transitive verb, understood this sentiment.
Gerecht's "unconditional war against Iraq is [also] aimed at establishing the Arab world's first democracy..." Evidently, force must be applied on behalf of so noble a principle (democracy, in case anyone wondered) because the poor benighted buggers have never done it for themselves.
There is a proper name for all of this. And there was a time when imperialism announced itself plainly and robustly, a time that the neo-conservatives at The Weekly Standard think of as the Good Old Days.
One conservative economist, Joseph A. Schumpeter, understood imperialism (at least in its ancient form) very well. His description of ancient Rome in Imperialism and Social Classes, published in 1919, has rather a modern ring. Schumpeter wrote that Rome's policies, which pretended to "aspire to peace" but "unerringly generated war," created "a continual preparation for war [and] meddlesome intervention" everywhere.
"There was no corner of the known world," Schumpeter wrote,"where some [Roman] interest was not alleged to be in danger or under attack. If the interests were not Roman, they were those of Rome's allies, and if Rome had no allies, then allies would be invented. When it was utterly impossible to contrive such an interest...it was the national honor that had been insulted." [uncorrected copy]
MORE LATER.
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