Iraq in historical context: America casts an "imperial shadow" in the Middle East

There is a worthwhile Op-Ed from Columbia University’s Professor Rashid Khalidi in the Washington Post last Sunday that situates the American war and occupation on Iraq in the history of Western colonialism in the region. (h/t Juan Cole)

He starts off by quickly dispatching with the romantic, yet entirely historically inaccurate notion of American Exceptionalism vis a vis Middle East statebuilding in the 20th Century. First, he points out that “the United States has had an uninterrupted military presence in the Middle East for 65 years, dating to 1942.” (emphasis added) This is an interesting point as it relates to how how civilians in the region most likely would come to view the US: Not as a protector nor as a force for political, economic or even military stabilzation but rather as an imperial, colonial power. Yes, anyone who has a basic grasp of US-Middle East relations in the last 100 years already understands this fully, but unfortuntaely most Americans are woefully ignorant of their own history, let alone American military activities halfway across the world.

He goes on: “[H]istory shows a disturbing continuity between what the European colonial powers did in the Middle East, starting with Napoleon’s invasion of Egypt in 1798, and what the United States is now doing in Iraq and elsewhere.” Bush as a 21st Century stand-in for Napolean Bonaparte? It is indeed a bit of stretch for Khalidi to imply this equivocation, but it is true that the neoconservatives’ noble experiment for democracy promotion in the Mid East has caused the same type of disaster as Napolean’s own 18th Century empire-building campaign.

Khalidi offers another great insight:

[S]ince 2000, no one in a position of power in Washington seems to have bothered to read any history. Believing that the demise of the Soviet Union meant an end to checks and balances at home and to limits abroad, and seduced by the blandishments of shallow-minded theorists who believe that the rules that applied to all previous great powers do not apply to the United States, the current administration has plunged into not one but two land wars in Asia.

Once upon a time, after Korea and Vietnam, the words “land war in Asia” might have inspired caution in Washington. But slaying the “Vietnam Syndrome” that limited the executive branch’s power to act abroad was an uncontrollable obsession for the clique that has surrounded several presidents since Richard M. Nixon, including such notables as Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld. These were men who, by and large, had never seen combat, knew little of war and scorned history, geography and expertise based on personal experience. Some of them were probably unaware that Iraq was in Asia, and would not have cared if they knew.

Thus armed with the conviction that theirs were the noblest of purposes and buoyed by the popular support that a president always receives after an attack (particularly one as dastardly as 9/11), President Bush and his advisers ignored 200 years of Middle Eastern history and invaded Iraq, supposedly to spread democracy to the entire region.

Go read the whole thing.