Black Mass: How Religion Led the World into Crisis (27 page)

devoted to a politics of human rights and especially women’s rights, across the Muslim world; a politics against racism and anti-Semitism, no matter how inconvenient that might seem to the Egyptian media and the House of Saud; a politics against the manias of the ultra-right in Israel, too, no matter how much that might enrage the Likud and its supporters; a politics of secular education, of pluralism, and law across the Muslim world; a politics against obscurantism and superstition; a politics to out-compete the Islamists and Baathi on their left; a politics to fight against poverty and oppression; a politics of authentic solidarity for the Muslim world, instead of the demagogy of cosmic hatred. A politics, in a word, of liberalism, a ‘new birth of freedom’ – the kind of thing that could be glimpsed, in its early stages, in the liberation of Kabul.
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Paul Berman gave vent to this sublime vision in 2003. It contained no inkling that the result of the overthrow of secular despotism in Iraq would be a mix of anarchy and theocracy. The impossibility of liberalism in Afghanistan – which has only ever had something resembling a modern state when Soviet forces imposed, with enormous cruelty, a version of Enlightenment despotism on parts of the country – was too disturbing to contemplate. All the liberal causes that were wrapped up in the ‘war on terror’ were inherently desirable, and so – it seemed to follow – practically realizable. In their attitudes
to regime change, neo-conservatives have been at one with many liberals. Regime change was an instrument of progress, and for the most part liberals have been no more willing than neo-conservatives to confront its human costs and abject failure. Such political opposition to the war as there has been in the US has come from elements of the paleo-conservative Right and sections of the Old Left. In the liberal media only the
New York Review of Books
remained untouched by war fever, while journals such as
The Nation
and
The American Conservative
voiced criticism from the Left and the Right. The public resistance to the war that voters voiced in the mid-term 2006 elections found few echoes among liberals. Most remained silent in the belief that the war showed American power acting as the final guarantor of freedom in the world.

Yet liberal imperialism was an impossible programme of action. Twentieth-century history has been dominated by resistance to western empires since the destruction of the Russian Imperial Fleet by Japan in 1905 – a defeat for European power that inspired anticolonial movements throughout Asia and which Jawaharlal Nehru, the first prime minister of India, described as one of the decisive events of his life. Britain’s failed attempt to assert its control over the Suez Canal, the withdrawal of France from Algeria, the humiliation of France and America in Vietnam and the defeat of Soviet forces in Afghanistan – these are only some examples of the impotence of western occupiers in non-western lands that has been demonstrated again and again over the past century. American defeat in Iraq is only the most recent example of this impotence.

Beyond the impossibility of any large-scale western imperial project at this juncture in history, the notion that America could be the agent of a project of this kind was highly implausible. The US has few of the attributes of an imperial regime. It has a large portfolio of countries over which it has varying degrees of influence – occasionally exercised by the threat of force, more often through a mix of economic sanctions and inducements. America’s relations with many of these countries display an imperialist pattern in which resources are extracted through the agency of governments that the US in some degree controls. In Latin America, the US has long acted in imperialist fashion to protect its economic and strategic interests. At present it
has a massive military and naval presence in the Persian Gulf, while it is expanding its bases in central Asia and establishing itself in West Africa. Yet the US does not govern any of these regions and its forces have minimal contact with their peoples. Its bases are hermetically sealed bubbles of American life and its embassies fortress-like structures insulated against any incursion from their host societies. Empires come in several shapes and sizes; not all have been organized around the acquisition of territory. What is striking about American imperial relationships is that they include few long-term strategic commitments that can be counted on to survive the vicissitudes of American politics. When any American overseas military involvement becomes too costly in money or casualties it is likely to be abruptly terminated. As a result of this fact, which is taken as axiomatic in Washington and in the countries concerned, long-term alliances with local ruling elites of the kind that enabled empires to endure for centuries are rare. Most of those existing today, such as those in Britain, Germany and Japan, are survivals from the Second World War.

A lasting imperial system rests on the belief that it embodies a long-term commitment. Empires are commonly established by means that include the use of force, but they have been long-lasting – as in the case of the Romans, the Ottomans and the Habsburgs, for example –when force has served long-range political goals. The European colonial powers normally used force in this way, so that it was clear that their presence in the countries they occupied was meant to permanent. The creation of the Raj involved savage conflicts, and the Indian Mutiny in the mid-nineteenth century posed a serious threat to British rule. Even so, throughout most of the colonial period a few thousand British officers were able to rule the sub-continent without large-scale warfare. They did so by making alliances with the country’s rulers –by 1919 there were around 500 princely states locally ruled but pledged to the British monarchy. In contrast, American forces view themselves, and are seen by others, as transients – ‘tourists with guns’, as a National Guardsman in Afghanistan put it
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– and rarely forge any but the most short-term bonds with local elites or people. As a result they are compelled to rely on the intensive use of firepower, which cannot deliver long-term goals.

America lacks most of the prerequisites of empire and will not
acquire them in any future that can be foreseen. How can there be imperialism – liberal or otherwise – when there are no imperialists? The US has some of the burdens of empire – including its financial costs, which are far more disabling than in the era of European colonialism. Unlike nineteenth-century Britain, which was the world’s largest exporter of capital, the United States is the world’s largest debtor. America’s military adventures are paid for with borrowed money – mostly lent by China, whose purchases of American government debt are crucial in underpinning the US economy. This dependency on China cannot be squared with the idea that America has the capacity to act as the global enforcer of liberal values. It is America’s foreign creditors who fund this role, and if they come to perceive US foreign policy as threatening or irrational they have the power to veto it. As Emmanuel Todd, the French analyst who in 1975 forecast the Soviet collapse, has noted:

The United States is unable to live on its own economic activity and must be subsidized to maintain its current level of consumption – at present cruising speed that subsidy amounts to $1.4 billion a day (as of April 2003). If its behaviour continues to be disruptive, it is America that ought to fear an embargo.
²³

The US is losing its economic primacy, and its status as the ‘last superpower’ is bound to follow. Advancing globalization brings with it new great powers and the unexpected re-emergence of powers that seemed to be in irreversible decline. China and Russia may be able to live in peaceful coexistence with the US, but they will never accept American moral tutelage; the notion that they can be conscripted into service in a campaign to convert the world to American-style democracy is laughable. The ‘new American century’ envisioned by neo-conservatives has lasted less than a decade. In an episode that believers in Hegel’s idea of the cunning of reason will appreciate, neo-conservatives – acting as the unwitting servants of history – have turned the United States into a normal great power, one among several and having no special authority. More generally, power is flowing away from the liberal states that were the apparent victors in the Cold War and for the first time since the 1930s the rising powers in the international system are authoritarian states.

Liberal imperialism has also resulted in a retreat from liberal values in the US. The administration continues to insist that the president must be free to determine what counts as torture. Vice-president Dick Cheney, asked on a radio programme whether he was in favour of a ‘dunk in the water’ for terrorist detainees, replied that he was, declaring that the question was ‘a no-brainer for me’.
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Techniques of ‘water-boarding’ – a form of torture used by the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, and whose use against Americans in the Second World War resulted in a Japanese officer being sentenced to fifteen years’ hard labour
²⁵
– are not prohibited and can be practised routinely by the US. The same is true of sleep deprivation, a method of torture used in Guantanamo that was employed by the NKVD in the Stalinist Soviet Union to generate confessions in the ‘show trials’ of the 1930s.
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Torture techniques involving sensory deprivation, which were used by the Chinese on American POWs in the Korean War, have also been used on José Padilla, an American citizen arrested as an enemy combatant, detained without charges from mid–2002 until January 2006 and found guilty of criminal conspiracy in August 2007.
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By any internationally accepted standard of what constitutes torture, the world’s pre-eminent liberal regime has committed itself to the practice as a matter of national policy. Along with this there has been a shift away from the constitutional traditions that curbed American government in the past. The vote by the Senate on 28 September 2006 that allowed the president the authority to determine what counts as torture also suspended
habeas corpus
for people detained as terrorist suspects, denying their right to know the offence with which they are charged and to challenge their detention in court. Henceforth anyone charged with involvement in terrorism – not only foreign nationals but also US citizens – can be detained without charge and held indefinitely. In effect this put the executive above the law while placing the citizenry outside it. Taken together with the Patriot Acts, which permit surveillance of the entire American population, the US has suffered a loss of freedom that has no parallel in any mature democracy.

It is not the first time American government has acted to invade the freedoms of its citizens. The Alien and Sedition Acts that were passed at the end of the eighteenth century, the Espionage and
Sedition Acts of 1917–18 and the ‘Red Scare’ that followed the First World War, the forcible internment of people of Japanese descent during the Second World War, all greatly expanded executive power. In each case the damage to freedom was not permanent – the laws that enabled it were passed during a period of war, then repealed or fell into disuse. The Bush administration’s expansion of executive powers has been more far-reaching, and because the ‘war on terror’ can never be won it has no end-point. As the 2006 mid-term elections showed, the US remains a functioning democracy, and it may be that legislation enabling torture and removing
habeas corpus
will be reversed under future administrations. The fact remains that it has ceased to be a regime in which the power of government is limited by the rule of law. The checks and balances of the constitution have failed to prevent an unprecedented expansion of arbitrary power.

The shift illustrates the delusive qualities of contemporary liberalism. The liberal theories that have been dominant over the past generation seek an escape from the hazards of politics in the supposed certainties of law. American liberal legalism – a school of thought that includes John Rawls, Ronald Dworkin, Bruce Ackerman and many others – aims to replace the murky negotiations of politics by the transparent adjudication of law.
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In that way, it has been assumed, any threat to rights can be neutralized. In America, achieving this happy condition is the role of the Supreme Court. However, as the Bush administration has demonstrated, liberalism of this legalist variety is another Utopia. The Supreme Court can be politicized by rigging the judicial selection procedure, and if that fails the Court’s rulings can be ignored. The defence of constitutional freedoms then falls to legislators, who may – as in September 2006 – fear the electoral consequences of opposing the executive. At this point politics trumps law, as it does in other countries.

Liberals have come to believe that human freedom can be secured by constitutional guarantees. They have failed to grasp the Hobbesian truth, which Leo Strauss applied to the Weimar Republic, that constitutions change with regimes. A regime shift has occurred in the US, which now stands somewhere between the law-governed state it was during most of its history and a species of illiberal democracy. The
US has undergone this change not as a result of its corrosion by relativism – as Strauss believed occurred in Weimar Germany – but through the capture of government by fundamentalism. If the American regime as it has been known in the past ceases to exist, it will be a result of the power of faith.

Contemporary liberals think of rights as universal human attributes that can be respected anywhere, but here they show a characteristic disregard of history. Current understandings of human rights developed along with the modern nation-state. It was the nation-state that emancipated individuals from the communal ties of medieval times and created freedom as it has come to be known in the modern world. This was not done without enormous conflict and severe costs. Large-scale violence was an integral feature of the process. If the US became a modern nation only after a civil war, France did so only after the Napoleonic wars and Germany after two world wars and the Cold War. In Africa and the Balkans the struggle for nationhood has run in parallel with ethnic cleansing, while the welding of China into a nation that is underway today involves the suppression of Muslim minorities and something not far from genocide in Tibet.