Conservative
historian/columnist Niall Ferguson politely avoids more prosecutorial labeling,
but describes the critical issues quite neatly. KwC
America's Brittle Empire: The U.S. doesn't have the necessary military manpower or
fiscal solvency of its imperial predecessors in Iraq.
OpEd by Niall Ferguson,
Los Angeles Times, October 24, 2006
You would have thought 300 million Americans would be enough to rule the world
— or at least a couple of medium-sized failed states. The population of Iraq is
27 million, that of Afghanistan 31 million. Yet the same week that the U.S.
population officially passed the 300-million mark, we heard two startling
admissions that testify to the scale of crisis facing Washington's unspoken
empire.
Asked Sunday on ABC's "This Week" program whether the situation in
Iraq was comparable to that in Vietnam at the time of the 1968 Tet Offensive —
an event popularly (though wrongly) perceived as the beginning of the end for
the U.S. defense of South Vietnam — the president conceded the comparison
"could be right." And on Thursday, the spokesman for the U.S.
military command in Iraq confessed that the Army's latest effort to quell the
escalating civil war in central Iraq "has not met our overall expectations
of sustaining a reduction in the levels of violence" — military-speak for
"has totally failed." A year ago, these admissions would have been
headline news. Today, people just shrug. That Iraq is Washington's new
"quagmire" has become conventional wisdom.
But why should this be so? Less than a century ago, before World War I, the
population of Britain was 46 million, barely 2.5% of humanity. And yet the
British were able to govern a vast empire that encompassed an additional 375
million people, more than a fifth of the world's population. Why can't 300
million Americans control fewer than 30 million Iraqis? Three years ago, as the
United States swept into Iraq, I wrote a book titled "Colossus,"
which offered a somber prediction, summed up in its subtitle, "The Rise
and Fall of the American Empire." My argument was that the United States was unlikely to be
as successful or as enduring an imperial power as its British predecessor for
three reasons: its financial deficit, its attention deficit and, perhaps most
surprisingly, its manpower deficit. Rather cruelly, I compared the American
empire to a "strategic couch-potato … consuming on credit, reluctant to go
to the front line [and] inclined to lose interest in protracted
undertakings."
I wish I'd been proved wrong. Sadly, events in Iraq have borne out that
analysis. No
Marshall Plan for the Middle East materialized to revive the Iraqi economy. And domestic support for the enterprise proved short-lived.
I have spent much of the last month on the road, talking to readers in
bookstores and lecture halls from downtown Manhattan to Pasadena to rural
Arizona. Practically everyone I have talked to — including many a Republican —
yearns for their country to get out of Iraq.
Lack of funds. Ephemeral support. These problems were not hard to predict
because they had characterized previous U.S. incursions into foreign lands (the
postwar occupations of West Germany and Japan remain the only exceptions that
prove the rule). The manpower deficit, however, remains puzzling. Just why is
the world's third-most -populous country so short of boots on the ground? The
obvious answer is that, considering the size of the U.S. population and the
Pentagon's vast budget, the American military is a remarkably small outfit. In
2004, the number of Department of Defense personnel on active duty was
1,427,000, substantially fewer than the country's 2-million-strong prison
population. Of those on active duty, barely a fifth were overseas, of whom
171,000 were in Iraq. That works out to 0.06% of the total U.S. population.
The number of troops currently in Iraq is less than 140,000. That's roughly as
many soldiers as Britain sent to the same country to defeat an insurgency in
1920 — at a time when the population of Iraq was a 10th of what it is today.
The low level of military participation in the United States is, admittedly,
something of a national tradition. A hundred years ago, the armed forces
accounted for 1.6% of the French population, 1.1% of the German population and
0.9% of the British population — but only 0.1% of the American population. The
difference is that today the U.S. is trying to play the kind of role that the
European powers played back then. It's an empire, to put it bluntly, with too
few legions.
To make matters worse, the Department of Defense has been run since 2001 by a
man who fervently believes that less is more. It was Donald Rumsfeld, we now
know, who repeatedly dismissed expert advice that several hundred thousand
troops would be needed to ensure the stability of postwar Iraq.
In 2003, I argued that this kind of error could be corrected if only U.S.
leaders would learn some history. That was naive. Policy about Iraq has never been based
on a rational assessment of that country's needs. Rumsfeld's paramount concern
appears to have been to win the turf wars between the Defense Department, the
Joint Chiefs and the State Department — just as Vice President Dick Cheney's
was to satisfy the appetites of the GOP base for big tax cuts and cheap
victories. Writing in the 1920s, German historian Eckart Kehr argued that the
foreign policy of the Kaiser's Germany was the defective product of the
"primacy of domestic politics."
I have come to see that U.S. foreign policy suffers from a similar pathology. The primacy of domestic politics — in the form of bureaucratic infighting
and electoral manipulation — explains why the Iraq enterprise has, from the
outset, been so chronically short-staffed.
The personnel deficit is not just about politics, however. "We're an
empire now," a presidential aide told the journalist Ron Suskind in a
moment of hubris in 2004, "and when we act, we create our own
reality." But maybe the reality is that the U.S. is demographically incapable
of acting as a traditional empire. After all, empire is partly about the export of people; about
colonists and settlers.
The United States,
by contrast, is about the import of people, to the tune of roughly 1.5 million
newcomers a year; the country expands by importing, not exporting, people.
In short, we seem doomed by domestic politics and demography to re-enact
Vietnam in Iraq. The only question is what age the 300-millionth American will
be when the last American is airlifted out.
http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-ferguson24oct24,0,3795697.column?coll=la-news-comment-opinions
