The Unbearable Liteness of Being An Idiot. posted by Richard Seymour

I Can't Believe It's Not Imperialism!

Not without justice, you might think, Michael Ignatieff dubs America an “Empire Lite” in his eponymous book on the theme of humanitarian intervention. True, it has no colonies, no Raj, no satraps and no armies breaking open markets (well, leave the last one to linger). But, it does exercise global domination of unprecedented scale through its economic and military power, strictly ordering the international division of labour in its own image. It exercises regulative rather than constitutive power, determining the destiny of nations from afar but without the burdens associated with imperial tutelage. Now, for Ignatieff, this is no rebuke. He claims he has no interest in the use of the term ‘empire’ as an epithet, but only as a descriptive term enabling a sensible discussion of American power and its limits. The key question, he avers, “is whether empire lite is enough to get the job done”. Precisely what that “job” is becomes apparent in the rest of the book. (Introduction, Page 3).


Lite Headed.

Focussing on three fronts of American power – namely Bosnia, Kosovo and Afghanistan – Ignatieff seeks to draw out some of the ways in which a modern empire, even one in denial as America is, is compelled to dispose of its power for the general good. His style is that of reportage, getting down on the ground and talking to the people who make it all happen. So, in Kosovo he has a chat with Bernard Kouchner, the former head of Medicin Sans Frontiere, and current proconsul to the region. He acts, Ignatieff reports, as an imperial governor, quelling disputes here, banning newspapers there when they threaten a revival of ethnic tensions, trying "to create political trust where none exists; to create democracy where none has ever taken root before”. (Page 72). Kouchner’s history as a soixant-huitard and then as a Socialist Party man as discussed perfunctorily. His courtship of the media is considered as an extension of his humanitarian work, while his work for the state is treated in light of his doctrine that humanitarianism cannot be divorced from politics and government.

A heroically sympathetic treatment of Kouchner as a humanitarian functions as a displacement for actually discussing the empirical imperial reasoning behind the Kosovo intervention, and the actuality of the occupation in Kosovo, which is only discussed in apologetic terms. Yes, there are problems but, as Kouchner complains, the media are only interested in failure. (Page 75). If everything were working fine, there would be no cameras in Kosovo. Indeed, the thought that simply asking the “imperial governor” for his opinion on the matter might not provide the most balanced or insightful view of the situation hardly seems to have occurred to Ignatieff. The reason for this is not mysterious. Ignatieff was one of the most passionately exercised liberals in favour of that particular intervention, and presumably has no particular desire to depict it as having led to a dysfunctional hotbed of nationalism, ethnic cleansing, corruption, child prostitution, and racist murder. Indeed, Ignatieff simply takes the Nato case for granted. The Nato bombardment "stopped Milosevic" and put a halt to his ethnic cleansing, even if the facts say otherwise. (Page 52). It was "the use of imperial power to support a self-determination claim by a national minority". (Pages 70-1).

Never mind. Kouchner "is a doctor, an MD, and in this case, his patient is a rugged, south Balkan province the size of Connecticut that remains on life support a year after the Nato intervention". Yes, Ignatieff really does write like this. And yes, the comparison with Connecticut really is for an American audience. According to Ignatieff, Kouchner has done a creditable job under the auspices of the UN. They have provided "shelter" for returning refugees, established a national currency (the Deutschmark) and restarted the schools. (Quite whether this reflects at all well on Nato and the occupying powers is another matter. At the end of the war, the World Bank assessed the damage to Kosovo as being worth $1.2bn . The bulk of this is almost certainly urban damage to housing and schools caused by bombing.) Where the occupation has failed has been in exactly that area in which it has exerted most energy, and in which it's primary justification has lain - getting "Kosovars to live with the remaining Serbs", a "significant embarrassment". (Page 51).


Kouchner Loves Up The Media.

Bridge Over Troubled Water

Ignatieff's segment on Bosnia acknowledges what he later seems to deny - that Nato intervention in Yugoslavia has "always been an imperial project" attempting to "integrate the Balkan peninsula - eventually - into the architecture of Europe, and, in the meantime, to reduce the flow of its three major exports: crime, refugees and drugs". (Page 32). Now, this explanation may seem much more compelling than those offered by Western spokespeople at the time, but it also omits the major explanation offered by Clinton for the Kosovo venture - Nato's "credibility". In fact, what Ignatieff does instead is expend several pages relating the story of a bridge being built in Mostar. It's sort of a symbol, if you like, for the attempt to build a bridge "between Croats and Muslims, a bridge between the internationals and the locals, and a bridge between the Muslim world and Europe". (Page 38). Its rebuilding will give Bosnia the "happy ending" it needs. (Page 39). Ignatieff doesn't go into much detail on the order of Bosnian rule, merely mentioning the threat of corruption here, the intervention of a "viceroy" there. There is no sustained analysis to speak of, merely impressionistic detail woven into a narrative of tedious detail and worthless prose. Consider this passage, where Michael talks to the French architect seeking to rebuild the bridge:

"So, I say, gesturing at all the loose stone gathered on the river bank below the bridge, you were going to put these back up exactly where they were? Pequeux looks disappointed. I have clearly understood nothing at all. 'We are not going to use the old stones. It's not going to be the old bridge. It's going to be a new bridge.'
'A new old bridge', I venture." (Page 42).

Comment is superfluous.


Mostar Bridge Before Its Destruction.

In Ignatieff's prose, deadpan observations pass for wit, platitudes pass for solemn vows, impressionism passes for insight. And that, literally, is the height of his narrative on Bosnia. For the truly curious, I suggest David Chandler's book Faking Democracy After Dayton.

Afghanistan: "Be Allah you can be".

The warlords may run huge swathes of Afghanistan as their own private fiefdom, and commit multiple acts of brutality but they "don't threaten the cohesion of Afghanistan as a nation. They don't threaten its existence as a state". (Page 83). But, according to Weber's definition, a state exerts hegemony over a specified territory by virtue of its monopoly of violence. "By that rule of thumb, there hasn't been a state in Afghanistan since the Soviet Union invaded in 1979 and the war of resistance began", and therefore the answer is to get "the guns out of the warlords' hands" and open up "space for political competition free of violence". (Pages 83-4). This won't happen as long as America is shoving money into the warlords' hands, but that doesn't detain Ignatieff. The trouble, as far as he is concerned, is that there aren't enough US troops in Afghanistan. "Imperial presence is the glue that holds Afghan deals together, but there is precious little of it to go around. Bosnia, which would easily fit into a couple of Afghanistan's thirty provinces, has 18,000 peacekeepers" while Afghanistan has none outside of Kabul. (Page 88).

The natives are insufficiently terrified, Ignatieff notes. "Nation-building lite looks too lite in Mazar to be credible for long. Authority relies on awe as much as one force, and where awe is missing, as it was in Mogadishu, Somalia, in 1993, Americans die." What a lament! "The British imperialists understood the power of awe", he complains. The only thing that "keeps the peace" in Afghanistan now is "the timeliness and destructiveness of American airpower". (Page 89). Aside from the ugly racism of the remark about Mogadishu (thousands of Somali deaths merit no comment), the ideological service this provides is unmistakeable. The trouble isn't too much bombing, but not enough bombing! The problem is that America will not provide "the illusion of permanence" so central to the survival of an empire. (Page 90).

Washington ought to "help Karzai, and the only help that counts in Afghanistan is troops", Ignatieff says. (Page 92). Interestingly enough, Karzai has had a few words himself to say on what "help" would count in Afghanistan. $27.5 billion would help , especially as "the country [is] still largely in ruins and plagued by a stubborn Taliban-led insurgency and militias run by regional warlords responsible for a worsening opium cultivation problem." Naturally, little help of the kind requested has been forthcoming. Plenty of American money is going to Afghan warlords , the kind Ignatieff thinks America is insufficiently terrorising.

Naturally enough, there is little analysis of worth in Ignatieff's discussion. Once again, it's all about chats he has had with this or that diplomat, things he has seen, a few significant details from aid organisations. But the fundamental assumptions of the book come out in the course of discussion. For example:

"Imperialism used to be the white man's burden. This gave it a bad reputation. But imperialism doesn't stop being necessary just because it becomes politically incorrect ... Nation-building is the kind of imperialism you get in the human rights era, a time when great powers believe simultaneously in the right of small nations to govern themselves and in their right to rule the world." (Page 106).

Perhaps there were other grounds for objecting to imperialism other than the racist modes of legitimation that went with it? And, Ignatieff's condescdending attitudes to the locals suggests that racism is not entirely gone from our lexicon:

"It would be too much to say that the brickmaker wants us infidels here, exactly, but I would venture that he knows he needs us..." (Page 108).

Who "us" is merits some thought. Ignatieff, posing as something of an intellectual, a daring liberal willing to stand apart from the government and challenge its insufficient dedication to the causes it espouses, in fact identifies with that state to the core. His vulgar apologetics for imperial hypocrisy crystallises the point somewhat:

"The fact that empires cannot always practise what they preach does not mean they do not believe what they preach ... Those who regard imperial attachment to human rights as entirely cynical might ask themselves what price consistency?" (Page 111).

Anyone with half an education could, with time and effort, compose an encyclopedia of examples in which it would be devastatingly simple for the US government (or other imperial forces) to honour stated commitments to human rights. Namely by not colluding with the terror. Say, if the US withdrew its present support for Colombian right-wing militias, or if it had not colluded with the Turkish regime as it bludgeoned the Kurds in the South. Or perhaps if Britain had not provided Suharto with a great list of names to start his killing machine. Just off the top of my head. But this does not matter. Those examples would surely, in the mind of an Ignatieff, be constructed as "liberal good intentions", as in the case of the Vietnam war:

"What defeated the Americans in Vietnam, among many other things, was a failure to understand that liberal good intentions, even when equipped with helicopter gunships, are no match for the aroused power of modern nationalism ... Vietnam was a titanic clash between two nation-building strategies, the Americans in support of the South Vietnamese versus the Communists in the north." (Page 117).


"Liberal Good Intentions".

Delay for a second your automatic internal dialogue. The cognitive dissonance between your knowledge of basic fact and this offensive bit of fiction is understandable, but stay it for a while. Think of fluffy clouds, and deer skipping over a brook. Think of sea gulls larking about over the rocks and cliffs. Think bunny rabbits, chocolates and Valentine Cards. Calmer now? I want you to take Michael Ignatieff for his word. I want you to learn this lesson once and for all, and don't you ever forget it:

"Liberal good intentions" means mass murder.

It's official now. Ignatieff may have failed to write an single intelligent sentence in this book. He may have made unconscious mockery of his own case. And he may have been disgustingly racist in the process. But he has unwittingly made plain what only a few radicals and Marxists have hitherto suspected. For this, at least, I shall forever cherish his tawdry little polemic. Dog-eared, rambling, depositing nuggets of shit everywhere, it truly is man's best friend.