Emperor George

[afffa]

This war is un-American. That's an unlikely word to use, I know: it has an
unhappy provenance, associated forever with the McCarthyite hunt for reds
under the beds, purging anyone suspected of "un-American activities".
Besides, for many outside the US, the problem with this war is not that it's
un-American - but all too American.
But that does an injustice to the US and its history. It assumes that the
Bush administration represents all America, at all times, when in fact the
opposite is true. For this administration, and this war, are not typical of
the US. On the contrary, on almost every measure, they are exceptions to the
American rule.

The US was, after all, a country founded in a rebellion against imperialism.
Born in a war against a hated colonial oppressor, in the form of George III,
it still sees itself as the instinctive friend of all who struggle to kick
out a foreign occupier - and the last nation on earth to play the role of
outside ruler.

Not for it the Greek, Roman or British path. For most of the last century,
the US steered well clear of the institutions of formal empire (the
Philipines was a lamentable exception). Responsibility was thrust upon it
after 1945 in Germany and Japan. But as a matter of deliberate intent,
America sought neither viceroys ruling over faraway lands nor a world map
coloured with the stars and stripes. Influence, yes; puppets and proxies,
yes. But formal imperial rule, never.

Until now. George Bush has cast off the restraint which held back America's
42 previous presidents - including his father. Now he is seeking, as an
unashamed objective, to get into the empire business, aiming to rule a post-
Saddam Iraq directly through an American governor-general, the retired
soldier Jay Garner. As the Guardian reported yesterday, Washington's plan for
Baghdad consists of 23 ministries - each one to be headed by an American.
This is a form of foreign rule so direct we have not seen its like since the
last days of the British empire. It represents a break with everything
America has long believed in.

This is not to pretend that there is a single American ideal, still less a
single US foreign policy, maintained unbroken since 1776. There are, instead,
competing traditions, each able to trace its lineage to the founding of the
republic. But what's striking is that George Bush's war on Iraq is at odds
with every single one of them. Perhaps best known is Thomas Jefferson's call
for an America which would not only refuse to rule over other nations, it
would avoid meddling in their affairs altogether. He wanted no "entangling
alliances". If America wished to export its brand of liberty, it should do it
not through force but by the simple power of its own example. John Quincy
Adams (before Bush, the only son of a president to become president), put it
best when he declared that America "goes not abroad in search of monsters to
destroy". Could there be a better description of Washington's pre-emptive
pursuit of Saddam Hussein?

The Jeffersonian tradition is not the only one to be broken by Operation
Iraqi Freedom. Last year the historian Walter Russell Mead identified three
other schools of US foreign policy. Looking at them now, it's clear that all
are equally incompatible with this war.

Those Mead calls Hamiltonians are keen on maintaining an international system
and preserving a balance of power - that means acknowledging equals in the
world, rather than seeking solo, hegemonic domination. So Bush, whose
national security strategy last year explicitly forbade the emergence of an
equal to the US, is no follower of Alexander Hamilton. Jacksonians,
meanwhile, have always defined America's interests narrowly: they would see
no logic in travelling halfway across the world to invade a country that
poses no immediate, direct threat to the US. So Bush has defied Andrew
Jackson. Woodrow Wilson liked the idea of the US spreading democracy and
rights across the globe; banishing Saddam and freeing the people of Iraq
might have appealed to him. But he was the father of the League of Nations
and would have been distressed by Washington's disregard for the UN and its
lack of international backing for this war.

Which brings us to a key un-American activity by this Bush administration.
Today's Washington has not only broken from the different strands of wisdom
which guided the US since its birth, but also from the model that shaped
American foreign policy since 1945. It's easy to forget this now, as US
politicians and commentators queue up to denounce international institutions
as French-dominated, limp-wristed, euro-faggot bodies barely worth the
candle, but those bodies were almost all American inventions. Whether it was
Nato, the global financial architecture designed at Bretton Woods or the UN
itself, multilateralism was, at least in part, America's gift to the world.
Every president from Roosevelt to Bush Senior honoured those creations.
Seeking to change them in order to adapt to the 21st century is wholly
legitimate; but drowning them in derision is to trash an American idea.

The very notion of unprovoked, uninvited, long-term and country-wide invasion
is pretty un-American, too. When it thinks of itself, the US is a firm
believer in state sovereignty, refusing any innovation which might curb its
jurisdiction over its own affairs. Hence its opposition to the new
international criminal court or indeed any international treaties which might
clip its wings. Yet the sovereignty of the state of Iraq has been cheerfully
violated by the US invasion. That can be defended - the scholar and former
Clinton official Philip Bobbitt says sovereignty is "forfeited" by regimes
which choke their own peoples - but it is, at the very least, a
contradiction. The US, which holds sovereignty sacred for itself, is engaged
in a war which ignores it for others.

The result is a sight which can look bizarre for those who have spent much
time in the US. Americans who, back home, resent even the most trivial state
meddling in their own affairs are determined to run the lives of a people on
the other side of the planet. In New Hampshire car number plates bear the
legend, Live Free or Die; a state motto is Don't Tread on Me. If
a "government bureaucrat" comes near, even to perform what would be
considered a routine task in Britain, they are liable to get an earful about
the tyranny of Washington, DC. Yet Americans - whose passion for liberty is
so great they talk seriously about keeping guns in case they ever need to
fight their own government - assume Iraqis will welcome military rule by a
foreign power.

Talk like this is not that comfortable in America just now; you'd be
denounced fairly swiftly as a Saddam apologist or a traitor. The limits of
acceptable discussion have narrowed sharply, just as civil liberties have
taken a hammering as part of the post-9/11 war on terror. You might fall foul
of the Patriot Act, or be denounced for insufficient love of country. There
is something McCarthyite about the atmosphere which has spawned this war,
making Democrats too fearful to be an opposition worthy of the name and
closing down national debate. And things don't get much more un-American than
that.