Government officials from the United States and Iraq have held ceremonies, the American military forces have departed Iraq, and the war that began with an American invasion early in 2003 has finally come to an end.
There are those who have claimed and will continue to claim that the war was a failed attempt by America at imperial conquest. They are wrong. It was a different failure.
The United States concluded its attempts at imperialism when, towards the end of World War II, it liberated the Philippines from Japanese occupation and set that country up with its own government. The Philippines had been an American possession since the Spanish-American War of 1898, when a victorious United States assumed the right to rule the last of the Spanish overseas possessions. After decades of largely inept imperial-like rule and attempts to pacify the local population, the US lost the country to the Japanese Empire early in 1942.
The United States had learned that it was not good at imperialism long before invading Iraq. Americans do not make good imperialists. We do not have the inclinations or the skills that are needed to be successful at imperialism. Americans are capitalists--or at least they want to think of themselves as capitalists--and imperial conquests do not attract capital investments from the imperial power. Instead, an imperial conqueror must be prepared to suck the resources and wealth out of a conquered land. That requires knowledge and capabilities that are not a part of our national character, and in any case we believe that no other country has in its possession anything of value that we cannot acquire less expensively in some other way. Even with an enormously powerful American military presence in Iraq, any Iraqi oil that flowed to the US was purchased at market rates.
Perhaps, then, it can be said that the assertions of American imperialism are incorrect because we are too lazy and/or too cheap to be imperialists.
It would be more accurate to say that the invasion of Iraq and subsequent eight year war were largely the result of American leadership that failed to remember and appreciate the lessons of history.
Various justifications for the war were propounded by the Bush Administration during 2002 and 2003. When all was said and done, there was never any tangible evidence that Iraq, under the government of the Saddam Hussein regime, presented a threat to the United States.
What it came down to was this: in the eyes of the Bush Administration, Saddam Hussein was such a brutal dictator and a bad person that he had to go, and making that happen could be accomplished only by an American military invasion of Iraq. It was decided that Saddam's evil behavior was justification enough all by itself. The decision yielded the concept of "preemptive war" known as the Bush Doctrine.
That is a hugely visible example of running a government by the philosophy of "the ends justify the means." This is a governmental philosophy which says that the end result that we are trying to achieve is so meritorious that it justifies whatever actions we employ to achieve it. The logic was this: Saddam was so bad that whatever we did would be good as long as it was intended to remove him from power. The payoff would be that the bad guy would not have an opportunity to do more evil, either to America or to any place else.
Which took us on a slope that is as slippery as a mountain ski run that has been iced over.
Speaking of cold things, I remember during the Cold War that we Americans used to take pride in saying that our system was better than the Soviet system of the USSR because for us the means would justify the ends. Our legal system, our laws, our democracy, our free enterprise and capitalistic behaviors would eventually prove themselves to be superior to the Soviet analogs and the end result would be a better life for our people--more prosperous, more healthy, more secure and more enjoyable. The Soviet claim was that the great majority of people immediately need more than could be provided to them through a free enterprise, legalistic, democratic system where the levers of power are manipulated by those with the most money. The Soviet solution was centralized economic planning through the government, and inhumane repression of alternative voices.
The American way won; the Soviet way lost. We showed that actions which are worthy, honorable, peaceful, democratic and bounded by laws will achieve superior goals by providing the social basis for further actions that are worthy, honorable, peaceful, democratic and bounded by laws. Our claim is and always has been that this is the more ethical way to run a country; in fact, that it is the more ethical way to run a world.
The Soviet Union passed into history two decades ago, and the belief that "the means justify the ends" thereby proved itself to be stronger than was the Soviet belief. This is no small thing; it was the end result of a conflict between colliding social and governmental systems that spanned most of the 20th century. It bears remembering.
We strayed from the stronger philosophy a few years ago with the invasion of Iraq. We went with the weaker philosophy. We went with the loser's way of doing things.
From now on, let's stay with the better and stronger philosophy. Let's stay with the winner's way of running a country.
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