> Yeah, the U.S. destroyed Iraq, but it can't really rule it.
In a nutshell that's what Michael Mann says in a book I picked up from the library last night. He calls what we have Incoherent Empire.
Here's some excerpts from an interview:
http://globetrotter.berkeley.edu/people4/Mann/mann-con4.html
[...]
....this is the shift in political and ideological [ideals], which comes down to the very general assertion I made that this is not the age of empire, this is the age of nation state. The notion that Iraq is for Iraqis as Somalia is for Somalis, as France is for the French, this is dominant across the world. This is the main ideology of our times, national self-determination. That makes it really difficult. The British and the Romans were never confronted by this belief. Sorry, I correct myself. In the twentieth century [the British] were, partly as a result of the spread of liberalism or socialism to India and places like that. Indians for the first time began to think of themselves as "Indians"; previously, it had been our term for them. And so the British were confronted by Indian nationalism. Once that happened, the writing was on the wall for the European empires ... the self-destruction of World War II to add to it. But the Indian nationalist movement was too strong even before World War II for the British to last very much longer. And this rolled around the world disposing of the other empire. In the case of Vietnam, of course, it was Vietnamese nationalism which defeated us.
So though Iraqis, if we can return to Iraq, are grateful to us for liberating them from Saddam -- they really hate Saddam and his memory, or almost all of them do -- they don't want to be occupied by America. So they have a deeply ambivalent view of us. Though they're disputing among themselves -- Kurds, Shiite, Sunni -- they dislike Americans even more if Americans are occupying and seeming to rule over them.
So it's this political and ideological shift in the world which makes it ... it wasn't just a mistake that we invaded Iraq without political allies; we'd have had very great difficulty in getting them. We could have made overtures to the Shia, but of course in doing that we'd be setting in motion political forces that we don't quite like, the possibility of a pro-Iranian theocratic movement. But this is what the more pragmatic empires in the nineteenth century would have done. They would have assumed that at a later stage they could suppress that, but used them as their allies. We, of course, used Islamists in Afghanistan against the Soviet Union. That's how we used bin Laden at first, until the situation changed and he turned against us.
[...]
Your book is called Incoherent Empire. Why "incoherent," and what does incoherence lead to?
It's incoherent because the different forms of power are at odds with each other. We have enormous military power....although not in pacification; but we are schizophrenic about political power, about whether we have allies or not. We shift between these two. In terms of ideological power, our militarism is contradicting the values that we say we stand for.
Also, we do stand for these values. The world stands for more humane values than it did in the nineteenth century, so that we cannot do what the British did, and what the French did. I don't want to glorify previous empires. Faced with the Sunni triangle they would go rampaging in it. British forces would go in -- they'd loot and burn. They burned villages, they burned crops, they killed young men in villages that were supposed to have dealt with the enemy, and exercised an enormous amount of repression. We can't do that; the world has changed, and we don't want to do that. So we are held back, ideologically. There are contradictions between the different forms of power.
And also, there is not only weapons of the weak in the military terms, but in ideology, too, weapons of mass communication. Al Jazeera, Al-Arabia, Arab newspapers and websites communicate across the Middle East. Nineteenth century empires were not faced with local people who could communicate in this way. So they learn all about our atrocities, obviously seen through their own perspective.
So it's incoherent because these things are very uneven and they contradict each other.
Where does it lead? Well, it's leads to failure. In fact, in real terms, the administration is recognizing this. Our troops are being pulled back into a smaller number of securer bases, and leaving the Iraqi police force to take the brunt. We immediately see a reduction in our loss rate, our casualty rate, and a massive increase in theirs. We've abandoned the notions of privatizing Iraqi industry. We're accepting in various ways that we cannot do what we intended originally to do. Though we're not admitting it publicly, and the administration obviously can't admit anything publicly before the election, the administration is recognizing that this was a mistake, and it can't do it again. At least, I hope so. But, of course, if there's another 9/11, well, who knows what emotions this will stir up amongst us?
So this may be just a blip and we may return to what we used to have in the 1990s.