If you want to encounter the imperial, anti-democratic mentality that many military and media elites in the U.S. subscribe to, you could do worse than to read this Thomas E. Ricks editorial in the Washington Post:
In October 2008, as I was finishing my latest book on the Iraq war, I visited the Roman Forum during a stop in Italy. I sat on a stone wall on the south side of the Capitoline Hill and studied the two triumphal arches at either end of the Forum, both commemorating Roman wars in the Middle East.
To the south, the Arch of Titus, completed in 81 A.D., honors victories in Egypt and Jerusalem. To the north, the Arch of Septimius Severus, built 122 years later, celebrates triumphant campaigns in Mesopotamia. The structures brought home a sad realization: It’s simply unrealistic to believe that the U.S. military will be able to pull out of the Middle East.
It was a week when U.S. forces had engaged in combat in Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan — a string of countries stretching from the Mediterranean Sea to the Indian Ocean — following in the footsteps of Alexander the Great, the Romans and the British. For thousands of years, it has been the fate of the West’s great powers to become involved in the region’s politics. Since the Suez Crisis of 1956, when British and French influence suffered a major reduction, it has been the United States’ turn to take the lead there. And sitting on that wall, it struck me that the more we talk about getting out of the Middle East, the more deeply we seem to become engaged in it.
It is “our fate,” as a great imperial power — on the model of imperial Greece, Rome, and Britain — to “become involved” in the Mideast, to take our “turn.” We can “talk” about leaving the region to its own devices, but all the while we will inevitably “become engaged in it” more deeply.
We apparently don’t choose policy in this country — and Ricks is apparently unwilling to argue for his preference that we stay in Iraq as a matter of policy, to in other words take responsibility for his preference — but hide behind vague references to fate and inevitability and the tragic role that great powers by necessity must adopt in the wider world.
Meanwhile, talking to military personnel in Iraq, Ricks concludes that:
The quiet consensus emerging among many who have served in Iraq is that U.S. soldiers will probably be engaged in combat there until at least 2015 — which would put us at about the midpoint of the conflict now.
“What the world ultimately thinks about us and what we think about ourselves,” U.S. Ambassador Ryan Crocker said to me last year, “is going to be determined much more by what happens from now on than what’s happened up to now.”
In other words, the events for which the Iraq war will be remembered probably haven’t even happened yet.
It’s nice to know that the “quiet consensus” that is emerging does not take into account the unambiguous and well-documented preferences of either the American or Iraqi people. To be clear here: what bothers me most about Ricks’ editorial isn’t his preferred policy — staying in Iraq for years, if not decades, to come — but his attempt to conceal his preference behind the vague passive-voiced rhetoric of inevitability, fate, and the imperial-minded White Man’s burden.
I can argue with — and respect — someone who takes responsibility for his preferences and political stances, but there is no reasonable way to argue with those who dishonestly speak in the self-effacing language of inevitability, of the fact that we will “probably be engaged in combat” without recognizing that — though we can’t make the world conform to our dreams and wishes; that is, we live in the world we have, not the world we want — we nonetheless get to choose whether we’re engaged in combat in Iraq, and accept the consequences of withdrawal. We decided to go in; we can decided to leave.
If you think we ought to say — or that the cost of leaving is too high — Thomas E. Ricks, tell me why.