This perhaps is as good a time as any to sound the drumroll. Now that US Secretary of State Colin Powell has stirred his nation with a presentation to the Security Council on Saddam Hussein’s “calculated cruelty”, the dawn of the 21st century’s first empire can safely be announced. We had, of course, been warned — by advocates of intervention and by Powell himself, via a newspaper article — not to expect an Adlai Stevenson expose. There was “no smoking gun”, he had cautioned, but there had been no intimations of the drama ahead. No teasers about the well-buffeted narrative, with grainy aerial shots and tantalising telephone intercepts. No presentation eve notice about his flair for the melodramatic pause and his crafty capacity to dwell on the liberal interventionist dilemma. With the close of Powell’s 75-minute guided tour through Iraq’s “web of lies”, however, concluded any chance for the transfixed global audience to catch any more surprises. The rest of the Security Council members stuck to their familiar script. The British echoed their transatlantic pals, the French stayed perched on their fence, and the Russians and Chinese continued to repose faith in the weapons inspectors. It is a funny old game they play. But in Powell’s assertion that Iraq is in material breach of UN Resolution 1441, America’s break from the routine is already perceptible. Some call it unilateralism, others rant against American exceptionalism. Michael Ignatieff prefers to term it American Empire. In a scholarly essay published last month, he points to an irony. Here was President George W. Bush, swept into office on an isolationist plank, determined to bow out of taxing engagements and demanding treaties, but forced by circumstance to halt the retreat. There he was, counting on the two oceans to moat his continent, making extravagant plans to secure the skies with a missile defence, till the Gang of September 11 demonstrated the porousness of shield. And drew a non-interventionist administration out towards the outposts of empires of yore — indeed in the first instance, to Afghanistan, graveyard of more than one empire. And, in almost systematic progression, now to Iraq. Writes Ignatieff: “Iraq is not just about whether the United States can retain its republican virtue in a wicked world. Virtuous disengagement is no longer a possibility. Since September 11, it has been about whether the republic can survive in safety at home without imperial policing abroad.” Imperial responsibility abroad, besides laying down the rules of engagement as per American interests, entails lugging an unwieldy legacy. It means sifting through the ruinous legacy of old empires — Ottoman, British, Soviet — and resolving the conflicts they bequeathed. It also means, says Ignatieff, patrolling swathes of insurgent zones. Alas, it means much more than taking inventory of men and bayonets and despatching them to the Gulf, it means facing up to a bigger challenge: “Iraq is an imperial creation that would commit a reluctant republic to become the guarantor of peace, stability, democratisation and oil supplies in a combustible region of Islamic peoples stretching from Egypt to Afghanistan.” America, in other words, is called upon to dispense justice and secure freedom in farflung corners of the world. It is not a seasonal affliction, a passing itch to stomp around in the desert, it’s a long-term demand of history and circumstance. America must tread the earth, leaving democracy in its wake. We are blessed! Ignatieff has put forth a compelling argument, putting a sheen of sobriety on chatter from Washington’s think tanks and New York City’s sidewalk cafes about the hyperpower’s pre-eminent role. Bushies too are chiming along. In distinctly Reaganesque nuances they are seeking to give a moral underpinning to their foreign policy. Two decades ago, the Hollywood hero spoke of the “evil empire”; his legatee recalled that phrase, that facile split between good and evil, by thundering on about the “axis of evil”. And yet, instead of making a rivetting case for the empire striking back, why is it that the Bush administration appears to be hunting a phantom menace? Why is it that America’s resolve is being, to use George Dubya’s most memorable coinage, mis-underestimated? Not one of the US’s much wooed allies would claim that Saddam Hussein is not harbouring biological or chemical weapons. Certainly, it can be nobody’s case that Saddam is a benign dictator — his passion for conquest and his track record in using those weapons of mass destruction are too well documented. And just a year after an America-led alliance bombed Afghanistan out of the stone age, the liberal argument for the reconfiguration of Iraq’s polity is well-stated. Why, then, why are the Bushies striking such a lonesome picture — barring, of course, the rah-rahs from their cheerleader-in-chief Tony Blair? Perhaps because there seems to be no clarity to Washington’s imperial vision. We are repeatedly informed that oil and the suddenly rampant speculation about Iraq’s undiscovered oil fields have nothing do with Washington’s promise to keep the peace in a post-Saddam Iraq. Indeed, we are flooded with estimates of the financial package — ranging from $100 billion to $1.9 trillion — that Washington could commit to the reconstruction of Iraq. But no one’s forgotten 1991. Most of the current dramatis personae in Washington held key positions in George Bush Senior’s war cabinet, when after bombing Saddam’s Republican Guards into retreat, American forces halted their march on Baghdad. The official line then was that their mandate was limited to the liberation of Kuwait, but it was immediately acknowledged that the US still considered Iran its prime foe in the region, that it would be loath to oversee the disintegration of Iraq to Tehran’s advantage. To present a truly convincing case for intervention, America needs to give reason to believe that it is not intent on just striking names off a laundry list of troublesome dictators and scramming. It needs to come clean on its purposive agenda to rescue Arab politics from the radicals. Baghdad is the logical base from which to effect change. What is uncertain is Washington’s commitment to effecting that change.
