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I tolerate this century, but I don't enjoy it.
All of the ephemera that is far too trivial to be bothered with elsewhere on this site or, depending on your point of view, a meta-commentary on it. This ephemera includes, but is not limited to art, music and literature. Most of the content here will be discussed in terms that are as abstract as possible, reality being a singularly overrated concept.
Monday, June 14, 2004
Niall Ferguson has given an interview on the reasons why the ten failed American attempts at nation building so outweigh the two successful examples:"The current account deficit of 5 percent of GDP translates into a huge reliance on foreign capital. Whereas a hundred years ago, Britain was the world’s banker -- it exported capital in net terms on a colossal scale and was in a position to underwrite its imperial activities with serious investment... You really struggle to be a successful empire if you are also the world’s biggest debtor... The second deficit is a manpower deficit. There are no colonists, no settlers willing to leave the United States and go out and Americanize the Middle East, the way that a hundred years ago there were people pouring out of the British Isles.
It’s probably going to take ten years at the basic minimum to make Iraq a stable, functioning market economy with something resembling democracy. And I just think that there is a complete lack of realism about that here because people think, "Oh, this isn’t empire, this is just liberation. "
To a large extent, I can't help wondering if this isn't an overly optimistic judgement on America's suitability for its putative imperial role. In economic terms, US economic growth has essentially been funded by foreign investment, which tends to prove elusive during unstable conditions. While a heavily industrialised economy might well benefit from warfare, this is not sufficient for the US economy where consumer spending tends to prove as elusive during unstable conditions as foreign investment.
This difficulty extends rather further than a lack of realism over Empire; it also applies to the very nature of the US military. British troops had been prepared for activity in Iraq through years of experience in urban warfare (Northern Ireland) and the broader diplomatic and policing activities (UN peace keeping missions ironically enough, something shunned by the US after the respective debacles in Lebanon and Somalia) an occupation requires. By contrast, the technological superiority of the US hyperpower tends to rest on precision guidance weapons delivered by airpower. Frederick Kagan argues that this represents a serious flaw in US military strategy:"Even in Afghanistan, Bosnia, and Kosovo, ground forces or the threat of their use played the decisive role in bringing the enemy to surrender. In Afghanistan and Bosnia, the U.S. relied on local forces to supply the ground troops, which helped convince the hostile regimes to give in, but also left the U.S. politically beholden to its allies and unable to achieve its political aims as a result. During the Kosovo operation Slobodan Milosevic withstood the American air attack right up until it became clear that a ground attack might follow—and then he surrendered... it goes without saying that only ground forces can execute the peacemaking, peacekeeping, and reconstruction activities that have been essential to success in most of the wars America has fought in the past hundred years."
Although there is a lack of manpower for US military operations (the draft having been mentioned on more than a few occasions in the last year or so), the two other points Ferguson makes are arguably one; cultural. In cultural terms, America remains a nation of immigrants who look back on the rest of the world with suspicion and feel little inclination to hold a passport. While Ferguson may well be correct to note that an occupation force exactly the same size as that Britain originally used in Iraq is hardly adequate when the population of Iraq has grown greatly since that time, a further part of the problem is the general lack of knowledge of other cultures. In Ferguson's history of the British Empire he observed that the specialist knowledge of figures like TE Lawrence gave Britain a considerable advantage over Germany; it might well be said that much the same currently applies to the United States.
posted by Richard 7:30 pm
