Desperately Seeking Similitude, Part II posted by Richard Seymour

According to Crispin Blunt MP , ‘we’ are now the problem in Iraq, and ‘we’ had better extricate ourselves before we are kicked out. You are, Crispin, a credit to your family name. But you are also a Tory, so no cigar. I noted the other day how the fashion for similes with Iraq had produced a number of oddities in print (of particular note, the comparison by a neo-conservative with Cambodia following the re-entry of the Khmer Rouge in the early 1990s). Iraq is like Kenya, Indonesia, Vietnam, Algeria etc. Johann Hari compared it to Serbia and Sierra Leone, which he considers humanitarian interventions. The one comparison I neglected, and the one that Crispin has pointed out (I’m sure he was thinking of me at the time) is with Iraq. Yes. Iraq is like Iraq:

The reason for the failed policy is simple. When the British occupied Iraq following the first world war, they were greeted initially as liberators of Iraqis from the Ottoman empire. But over time the British came to be seen as occupiers. Iraqi experts and historians predicted that, after nine months or so, the American and British forces that came to liberate Iraq from Ba'athist rule would be seen again as foreign occupiers.

I won’t bother rehearsing the Bremner, Bird and Fortune sketches on Britain’s past involvement with Iraq, but you will intuit my reaction. I don’t actually know much whether ‘we’ were welcomed at the time. Let’s see what Niall Ferguson has to say about it… Well! Indeed, there is something of interest here:

"The Arabs had to feel they were fighting for their own freedom, Lawrence argued, not for the privilege of being ruled by the British instead of the Turks. His ambition, he wrote, was

that the Arabs should our first brown dominion, and not our last brown colony. Arabs react against you if you try to drive them, and they are as tenacious as Jews; but you can lead them without force anywhere, if nominally arm-in-arm. The future of Mesopotamia is so immense that if it is cordially ours we can swing the whole Middle East with it.

It worked." (Niall Ferguson, Empire: How Britain Made the Modern World, London, 2003, pp. 314-8).

It worked, that is, for a while. The Arabs could be gulled, but only for as long as it took for Britain to make Mesopotamia its "last brown colony".

So, Iraq is like Iraq. But still we are not exhausted. Isabel Hilton writes for Open Democracy that Iraq is like many previous imperial episodes, especially in respect of the latest torture revelations:

The former CIA operative Robert Baer, who joined the CIA in the 1970s, said in a recent interview that when he worked for the agency torture was a sacking offence. He cited the example of two CIA operatives in Guatemala who were dismissed when a Guatemalan colonel they were running was accused of torture.

Yet in Vietnam, thousands of prisoners had already died in US "tiger cages." In Iran under the Shah’s regime, the Savak used methods outlined in CIA training manuals. In Latin America in the 1970s and early 1980s torture and disappearance became established practices throughout the continent under military dictatorships that had the support of the United States, whose officers had been trained in the US-run School of the Americas in Panama and whose security policies were coordinated through a network organised and run by US agencies.

Argentina, Chile, Brazil, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Paraguay tortured wholesale under successive US administrations without suffering any sanctions from Washington ... When Ronald Reagan came to power in 1980, a pandemic of torture and extra-judicial murders spread throughout Central America, practiced by military officers who had received US training in "interrogation techniques." If the methods were not publicly approved, the results were applauded.

As if that wasn't enough, Niall Ferguson detects some haunting echoes from Empire Past:

The Battle of Omdurman was the prototype for the kinds of war the US has been fighting since 1990, against Iraq, against Serbia, against the Taliban. Just as the US Air Force bombed Serbia in 1999 in the name of 'human rights', so the Royal Navy conducted raids on the West African coast in the 1840s and even threatened Brazil with war as part of the campaign against the slave trade. And when Mr Blair justifies intervention against 'bad' regimes by promising aid and investment in return, he is unconsciously echoing Gladstonian Liberals, who rationalized their military occupation of Egypt in much the ame way. (Ferguson, op cit, p. 377).

I don't believe Blair's mimicking of Gladstone is in any way unconscious. But how the neo-imperialist would love to return to the days when one could speak of Empire as a matter of duty and honour! As Robert Cooper put it:

The most logical way to deal with chaos, and the one employed most often in the past, is colonisation. But this is unacceptable to postmodern states. Empire and imperialism are words that have become a form of abuse and no colonial powers are willing to take on the job, though the opportunities - perhaps even the need - for colonisation is as great as it ever was in the nineteenth century.

Lousy political correctness! I suppose you'll be against cross-burning next!

But let me see if I have this straight. Iraq is like Algeria, Vietnam, Kenya, Lebanon, Cambodia, the Battle of Omdurman, Serbia, Afghanistan, Sierra Leone, Argentina, Chile, Brazil, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Paraguay, the 1881 invasion of Egypt and the abolition of slavery. A large family of resemblances by any measure.

For me, however, it's just like when Muhammed Ali knocked George Foreman out in Zaire in 1974.