Invading Iraq: US Imperialism?
by James R. Holmes
Reprinted from The Boston Globe
November 14, 2002

George Orwell observed that political speech was often used to obscure rather than convey meaning. Terms such as "democracy" and "fascism," said Orwell, meant little more than "something not desirable." Indeed, some things never change - witness the use of "imperialism" to describe everything from whacking Saddam Hussein to opening a fast-food joint in Paris.

Any word that elastic has no real content. It's a bipartisan tactic. Massachusetts Senator Ted Kennedy recently abused the term when he and his colleagues were debating whether to authorize the use of force against Iraq. "The administration's doctrine," proclaimed Kennedy, "is a call for 21st century imperialism that no other nation can or should accept."

Not to be outdone, Pat Buchanan, standard-bearer of the hard right, declared, "We will soon launch an imperial war on Iraq with all the 'On-to-Berlin!' bravado with which French poilus [soldiers] and British Tommies marched in August 1914." Kennedy and Buchanan: Politics really does make strange bedfellows!

What the opponents of war with Iraq really object to is American power and the willingness to use that power abroad - not to imperialism in any meaningful sense. To qualify as imperialism, a policy must involve either an acquisition of foreign territory or the use of military force to compel peripheral nations to provide wealth to the center - to the United States. The Bush foreign policy meets neither criterion.

Look at America's first flirtation with empire. In 1898 the US Navy demolished the Spanish fleet at Manila Bay, facing President William McKinley with a quandary: what to do with an archipelago, made up of 7,000 islands, that had been wrested from one imperial power and was hotly desired by America's great power rivals.

McKinley was a diffident Caesar. Although he wanted a naval station in the Philippines, the president recoiled at the thought of annexing the entire archipelago. Yet he ultimately concluded that he could not abandon the Filipinos to the tender mercies of Kaiser Wilhelm. German warships had steamed into Philippine waters, fanning fears that the Europeans would shut the United States out of the China trade.

The president's decision to push for annexation of the Philippines, not to mention the ensuing war to subdue the Filipino opposition, fueled an outcry.

Carl Schurz, vice president of the hastily organized Anti-Imperialist League, made the strongest case against a policy of imperialism. For Schurz, who had supported war against Spain on humanitarian grounds, a policy of annexation amounted to "criminal aggression." He thus turned the words of President McKinley - who had rebuffed demands for the annexation of Cuba in precisely those terms - against him.

The anti-imperialists foretold that America would do itself enormous harm at home if it undertook an imperial enterprise in East Asia.

Schurz interpreted McKinley's about-face on the Philippines as proof that the United States, if it once yielded to the temptation to acquire foreign territories, would be unable to resist embarking on a "career of conquest," much as the European nations had.

That would lead inexorably to ruinous military expenditures and militarized politics. Furthermore, the United States would have to choose between administering its new holdings as dependencies - upholding its rule by force of arms - and admitting them to the Union.

Both courses of action repelled the anti-imperialists. The former, bellowed Schurz, would enact "substantially arbitrary government" over the islands - surrendering the ideal, defended at frightful cost in the Civil War, that there were no second-class Americans; the second would bring "tropical peoples" unaccustomed to republican self-rule into the Union - and import a host of problems.

So much for the history lesson. Now, does President George W. Bush's showdown with Iraq constitute a latter-day exercise in imperialism along the lines of 1898?

Nope. First, even the president's most vehement critics don't accuse him of plotting to annex Iraqi territory. More likely, given its dubious track record in Afghanistan, the administration will balk at committing the resources necessary to stabilize a post-Saddam Iraq.

Second, Bush isn't trying to reduce Iraq to economic servitude. If the president were jockeying for cheap Iraqi oil, as the antiwar movement maintains, he would simply push to lift the longstanding UN sanctions. Baghdad would be pleased as punch to sell the American people all the petroleum they could use - why bother seizing and administering such a large, unruly country?

In short, there's an intellectually respectable case to be made against war in the Persian Gulf; it just isn't an anti-imperial case.

James R. Holmes is a research fellow in security studies at the Institute for Foreign Policy Analysis and a Doctoral Candidate at The Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University.