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Why power is America's weakness
Comparisons may be odious and analogies tricky, but they can be indispensable. Which ones are chosen, however, is a matter of some importance. In the current debate over Iraq, the analogy of choice has been Vietnam. A much better one is the Suez crisis of 1956.
The dictator of a Middle Eastern country incurs the wrath of two leading western states. The threat he poses is grossly exaggerated and he is regularly compared to Hitler. The two states decide to remove him. They do so without consulting their main western allies, causing an angry rift between hitherto close friends. The question of United Nations approval or disapproval assumes importance. So does the question of the pre-emptive use of force.The plan of attack involves the use of phoney evidence. The implementation of the plan is strikingly inept. Popular support for the venture, initially strong, drains away. The whole episode ends with the two principal western actors embarrassed and with their international prestige seriously damaged.
Analogies are never exact, of course. Britain and France did not succeed in removing Gamal Abdel Nasser, while the US did end Saddam Hussein's rule, and that is a big plus. On the other hand, the Suez crisis did not involve much bloodshed, while the Iraq operation has cost thousands of lives.What the final balance of similarities and differences will be is uncertain. The Suez crisis caused the downfall of a British prime minister; whether the Iraq crisis will ultimately destroy George W. Bush and Tony Blair remains to be seen.
In the more innocent days of the 1950s, the Westminster convention - that if a minister strongly disagreed with government policy he would resign - was still honoured. One of those who did resign over Suez was Anthony Nutting, the foreign minister responsible for Middle East affairs. He subsequently wrote a book about the crisis, No End of a Lesson. It was a good title, for the British did indeed learn some hard truths from the episode.It was brought home decisively to the British that despite spending no less than 8 per cent of their gross domestic product on defence and having conscripted military forces of 700,000, their claim to "Big Three" superpower status after the second world war was no longer sustainable. Conscription was abolished in the UK soon afterwards and, in little over a decade, Britain was to give up every pretence of a strategic presence "east of Suez".
The second part of the lesson was spelt out by General Sir Charles Keightly, who had commanded the Anglo-French force in the venture, in his post-mortem on Suez: "It was the action of the US which really defeated us in attaining our object. This situation with the US must at all costs be prevented from arising again."All subsequent British leaders have accepted that conclusion, even to the point of abandoning the traditional British policy of always trying to create and maintain a balance against any prospective hegemon. (The French, of course, drew a different conclusion from Suez: never again to rely on America.)
As well as the similarities, there is one basic difference between the British experience of 1956 and the American experience of 2003-4. The former was the result of insufficient power, the latter of excessive power, resulting in hubris.Errors resulting from weakness are easier to identify and correct than those resulting from strength. Weakness, once recognised, deprives one of choices and compels one to adjust one's ambitions quickly if disaster is to be avoided. When things go wrong for the very powerful, on the other hand, there is always the inclination to blame not the folly and impracticality of one's goals but the implementation of policy, or lack of resolution and support on the part of others, or simply bad luck. Hegemons do not easily learn the lesson of modifying their ambitions. What they are most likely to conclude from failure is that they must pursue those ambitions more ardently and efficiently next time.
Conspicuous among those who will suffer politically from the Iraq episode will be the second-generation neo-conservatives, both inside and outside the Bush administration. It was mainly their influence that, in the space of a few months, caused the "war on terror" to metastasise into a commitment to remake the world in America's image. Polemically brilliant and tactically resourceful, they did not have a prudential bone in their bodies and were strategically reckless - youngish men in a hurry, trying to get done in a year and by the exercise of military power what should have required at least a generation of patient, multi-faceted effort to achieve.These neo-conservatives will come out of this episode politically diminished. But the impulse they represented - to spread American democratic and liberal values to the rest of the world - will not die. They were merely its latest vehicle, not its creators. The conviction that the US is destined to be the model and inspiration for the world goes deep and is as old as the country itself. For better or worse, it is unlikely to diminish while American power is at its zenith.
Suez forced the British to give up the pretence that they were still an authentic global power. The lesson that Iraq should teach the US is that even the will of an authentic global hegemon will not prevail unless it is exerted with restraint, patience, willingness to compromise and a respect for the views of other significant operators. Unless, that is, the hegemon behaves as a member of a concert of states. The real success of the terrorists is that they have made it much harder for Americans to accept this.The writer, Owen Harries, a former editor of The National Interest, is a senior fellow at the Centre for Independent Studies in Sydney.
