The most damning verdict of all on American policy came from General Smedley D. Butler, the most decorated marine of his generation, in an article he wrote for the magazine Common Sense in 1935: I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in. I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefit of Wall Street. The record of racketeering is long. I helped purify Nicaragua for the international banking house of Brown Brothers in 1909–1912. I brought light to the Dominican Republic for American sugar interests in 1916. 1 helped make Honduras “right” for American fruit companies in 1903…. Looking back on it, I feel I might have given Al Capone a few hints. The best he could do was to operate his racket in three city districts. We Marines operated on three continents.130
This would always be the most damaging allegation against American imperialism: that for all its high-minded statements of intent, it boiled down to a Wall Street racket.
As envisaged by Wilson, the new “League of Nations” would not merely guarantee the territorial integrity of its member states but might consider making future territorial adjustments “pursuant to the principle of self-determination.”15 To Europeans this might seem revolutionary; to Americans, Wilson insisted, it was as self-evident as the opening lines of the Declaration of Independence: “These are American principles, American policies. We could stand for no other. And they are also the principles and policies of forward looking men and women everywhere, of every modern nation, of every enlightened community. They are the principles of mankind and must prevail.”16
There were three difficulties with all this. The first was that it was richly hypocritical. In 1916 Wilson had drafted a speech that included the characteristically sententious line “It shall not lie with the American people to dictate to another what their government shall be….” His secretary of state, Robert Lansing, wrote succinctly in the margin: “Haiti, S Domingo, Nicaragua, Panama.”17
Even before the United States entered the war, Henry Luce, the proprietor of Time and Life magazines, had urged Americans “to seek and to bring forth a vision of America as a world power, which is authentically American…. America as the dynamic center of ever-widening spheres of enterprise, America as the training center of the skilled servants of mankind, America as the Good Samaritan, really believing again that it is more blessed to give than to receive, and America as the powerhouse of the ideals of Freedom and Justice—out of these elements surely can be fashioned a vision of the Twentieth Century… the first great American Century.”19 The contrast between these grandiloquent injunctions and the panic-stricken reactions when Japan attacked Pearl Harbor could not have been more complete.20 In the words of one reporter, “No American who lived through that Sunday will ever forget it. It seared deeply into the national consciousness, shearing away illusions that had been fostered for generations. And with the first shock came a sort of panic. This struck at our deepest pride. It tore at the myth of our invulnerability. Striking at the precious legend of our might, it seemed to leave us naked and defenseless.”21 Writing in the Washington Post, Lippmann spoke of Americans as an “awakened people.” Yet even as the roused giant struck back, growing ever more assured of its share in an Allied victory after the battle of Midway, there remained a reluctance to acknowledge the irrevocable nature of the global commitment.
What made all this so persuasive, though in many ways it was coincidental, was the catastrophic failure in any way to “contain” communism in China, for by this time the Nationalist armies of Chiang Kai-shek had been driven right off the Chinese mainland by the Marxist Mao Zedong and his peasant army—the revolutionary heirs of postwar chaos, just as Lenin and the Bolsheviks had been thirty years before. Yet for all its defensive connotations, the American notion of containment, predicated though it was on the threat from another, malignant empire, was itself implicitly an imperial undertaking, as Truman himself let slip when he pronounced America’s responsibility to be even greater than those that had once faced “Darius I’s Persia, Alexander’s Greece, Hadrian’s Rome [and] Victoria’s Britain.” The only way to “save the world from totalitarianism,”93 Truman argued, was for “the whole world [to] adopt the American system,” for “the American system” could survive only by becoming “a world system.”94
Those South Vietnamese who acted on the assumption that the Americans would stay—would at least defend a partition on the Korean model—underestimated the growing power of liberalism and a bad conscience within the American elite. Even a young American officer like Philip Caputo, who openly averred that he was “battling … the new barbarians who menaced the far-flung interests of the new Rome,” did so with a strangely apologetic air:155 “Maybe it was the effect of my grammar-school civics lessons, but I felt uneasy [searching a Vietnamese village], like a burglar or one of those bullying Redcoats who used to barge into American homes during our Revolution…. I smiled stupidly and made a great show of tidying up the mess before we left. See, lady, we’re not like the French. We’re all-American good-guy GI Joes. You should learn to like us. We’re Yanks, and Yanks like to be liked. We’ll tear this place apart if we have to, but we’ll put everything back in its place.”156 The effects of such imperial denial were ultimately crippling to American strategy Within a short time, the reality—that imperialists are seldom loved— began to sink in, as one disillusioned veteran put it: “We’re supposed to be saving these people and obviously we are not looked upon as the saviors here. They can’t like us a whole lot. If we came into a village, there was no flag waving, nobody running out to throw flowers at us, no pretty young girls coming out to give us kisses as we march through victorious. ‘Oh, here come the fuckng Americans again. Jesus, when are they going to learn?’ ”157
The Goldwater-Nichols Act (1986) had transformed the command structure of the American military, promoting the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff to the role of principal military adviser to the president and, more important, creating a new elite of five “unified combatant commands,” each with responsibility for all the armed services in a specific geographical area.83 Of particular importance was the transformation of the Rapid Deployment Joint Task Force into a new Central Command, which was to be central in more than a geographical sense.84 The redrawing of the atlas implicit in this new structure had important operational implications, since the United States patently did not have forces deployed equally in all five regions. CENTCOM in particular had relatively few available troops; the commander in charge of this strategically vital region, stretching from the Horn of Africa to Central Asia, was at first a chief with few Indians. One consequence of this was the growth in importance of the highly mobile Special Operations forces.85 Significantly, the substantial increases in the budgets of these new military entities coincided with sharp reductions in the funding of the State Department.86 Above all, the process of rethinking the American way of war—to be precise, the process of learning the lessons of Vietnam—finally bore doctrinal fruit. As Bush Senior’s chairman of the JCS, General Colin Powell spelled out what these lessons should be. Never again would the generation of officers who had led the war effort in Vietnam “quietly acquiesce in halfhearted warfare for half-baked reasons that the American people could not understand or support.” Henceforth the United States “should not commit forces to combat overseas unless the particular engagement or occasion is deemed vital to our national interest and that of our allies”; when such cases arose, and only as a “last resort,” troops should be committed “wholeheartedly, and with the clear intention of winning”; they should be given “clearly defined political and military objectives,” but both the means and the ends “must be continually reassessed and adjusted if necessary,” and there must be “some reasonable assurance we will have the support of the American people and their elected representatives in Congress.” (It was partly to ensure that such support was forthcoming that Powell later added the important rider that all American interventions should have an “exit strategy.”) 87
Secondly, the United States needs to commit significant sums to the postwar reconstruction of the Iraqi economy, just as the City of London helped stabilize Egyptian finances in the 1880s. In the medium term, Iraq can hope to attract foreign investment and to finance some of its own recovery from exploiting its oil reserves. But confidence needs to be kindled; Iraq needs something equivalent to the big loans floated by the Rothschild bank in the 1880s and 1890s that were used to stabilize Egyptian finances. The trouble is that Iraq’s existing foreign debts are daunting: $120 billion to foreign governments, multilateral lenders and commercial banks, to say nothing of up to $125 billion in reparations claims arising from Saddam’s wars of aggression. This is why the International Monetary Fund, the modern equivalent of the Rothschilds, needs to be involved, and soon, in overhauling Iraq’s finances.75 Without substantial debt forgiveness, the country’s econom will be criled.
Benjamin Disraeli once called a conservative government “an organized hypocrisy.” Perhaps the best thing we can hope for is that the same will one day be said of “liberated” Iraq. A formal return to Iraqi self-government clearly had to be announced in 2004. But there also needed to be continuing limitations on the country’s sovereignty in order to ensure economic recovery, internal political stability and the future security of those countries Iraq once menaced.76 Ambassador Negroponte must be prepared to be Iraq’s Lord Cromer, viceroy in all but name for decades. And if no American wants the job after 2005, we may be reasonably sure that under the right terms and conditions a European will volunteer.
In an important but underreported speech he gave in June 2003, the former leader of the British Liberal Democrat Party, Paddy Ashdown, reflected on the “principles of peacemaking” he had learned in his capacity as high representative in Bosnia and Herzegovina (a post created by the Dayton peace accords). His seven principles were as follows:
[To have] a good plan and stick to it. This plan needs to be drawn up, not as an after-thought, but well in advance, as an integral part of the planning for the military campaign.
[To] establish the rule of law—and do so as quickly as possible…. It is much more important to establish the rule of law quickly than to establish democracy quickly. Because without the former, the latter is soon undermined.
[To] establish your credibility straight away. The more robustly a peacekeeping force deals with any initial challenges to its authority, the fewer challenges there will be in the future.
To start as quickly as possible on the major structural reforms—from putting in place a customs service or reliable tax base, to reforming the police and the civil service, to restructuring and screening the judiciary, to transforming the armed forces.
[To ensure] that the international community organizes itself in [the] theatre in a manner that can work and take decisions.
[To establish] an exceptionally close relationship between the military and civilian aspects of peace implementation.
[To] avoid setting deadlines, and settle in for the long haul…. In-stalling the software of a free and open society is a slow business. It cannot be done … in a year or so…. Peace-keeping needs to be measured not in months but decades. What we need here … is “sticktoitiveness” … the political will, the unity of purpose, and the sheer stamina as an international community to see the job through to lasting success. That means staying on, and sticking at it, long after the CNN effect has passed.77
There is wisdom in all seven of Ashdown’s principles, above all the last one. It is nevertheless significant that such sentiments could be expressed more easily by a Briton running an international protectorate in a European country than by an American running a provisional authority in a Middle Eastern one. No less noteworthy was Ashdown’s eighth and final principle:
8. [To give] peace-building … a political destination. For Iraq, that may be a democratic and prosperous state in a peaceful and secure Middle East. For Bosnia, it is Europe.
In just three years, the first of around seventy-seven million baby boomers will start collecting Social Security benefits. In six years they will start collecting Medicare benefits. By the time they all are retired, an official estimates, the United States will have doubled the size of its elderly population but increased by barely 15 percent the number of taxpaying workers able to pay for their benefits. Economists refer to the government’s commitment to pay pension and medical benefits to current and future elderly as part of the government’s “implicit” liabilities. But these liabilities are no less real than the obligation to pay back the principal plus the interest on government bonds. Indeed, politically, it may be easier to default on explicit debt than to stop paying Social Security and Medicare benefits. While no one can say for sure which liability the government would renege on first, one thing is clear: the implicit liabilities dwarf the explicit ones.
The scale of these implicit liabilities was laid bare in 2003 in a paper by Jagadeesh Gokhale, a senior economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland, and Kent Smetters, the former deputy assistant secretary of economic policy at the U.S. Treasury. They asked the following question: Suppose that today the government could get its hands on all the revenue it can expect to collect in the future, but had to use it, also today, to pay off all its future expenditure commitments, including debt service. Would the discounted present value of all its future revenues suffice to cover the discounted present value of all its future expenditures? The answer is a decided no. According to their calculations, the shortfall amounts to $45 trillion.33 To put that figure into perspective, it is twelve times larger than the current official debt held by the public and roughly four times the country’s annual output. Gokhale and Smetters also asked by how much taxes would have to be raised or expenditures cut—on an immediate and permanent basis—to generate, in present value, $45 trillion. They offer four alternative answers (see table 14). The government could, starting today, raise income taxes (individual and corporate) by 69 percent, or it could raise payroll taxes by 95 percent, or it could cut Social Security and Medicare benefits by 56 percent, or it could cut federal discretionary spending altogether—to zero.