GEORGE W. BUSH needs a second term at the White House. This US presidency is
halfway through an experiment whose importance is almost literally
earth-shattering. Its success or failure could be a beacon for the future. I
want to see that experiment properly concluded.
What the President and his advisers are trying to do will be a colossal
failure. But failure takes time to show itself beyond contradiction. The
theory that liberal values and a capitalist economic system can be spread
across the world by force of arms, and that the United States of America is
competent to undertake this task, is the first big idea of the 21st Century.
It should be tested to destruction. The opening American presidency of the
new millennium — George W. Bush, 2001-2009 — should serve as an object
lesson to the world for the decades to come. There must be no room left for
argument. The President and his neoconservative court should be offered all
the rope they need to hang themselves. When they do, when they fail, when
America's dream of becoming the new Rome dies, there should be no possible
excuse, no straw at which Republican apologists can clutch.
Throughout history, failed ideologues have protested that they were never
really given the chance to put their ideas into practice. Their disciples
remain, still believing, still evangelising for the next attempt. Let the
former President George W. Bush find no such cult to puff his memory. Give
him the chance to see this thing through to the end, so that nobody will be
able to claim that it was the American people who let him down; that the
voters’ nerve failed before he could finish the job. Let him finish the job.
Then the failure can be pinned to him and to his project, not to any
infirmity of the people’s purpose.
Incoming governments, especially if they represent big new ideas, are rarely
well served when their victory leaves a lingering sense that the loser lost
only the election, not the argument. It was good for Thatcherism and for
Britain that in the 1974 general elections Harold Wilson was given the
opportunity to resume a Labour government until five years later his
successor could run it right into the buffers. We needed first to test the
muddle of postwar British socialism through to its complete discredit.
We well and truly did. James Callaghan’s Government really was the last gasp
of all that, and a quarter-century later one need only say “winter of
discontent” to recall the total and humiliating extinction of a whole
philosophy of government. The awful memory still haunts, and has moulded,
its new Labour successors. Even today, even after the pain of Thatcherism,
there is almost nobody alive who would with a straight face argue that a
mixed economy run in partnership with organised labour is the answer for
Britain.
In 1974 the British people had not despaired of corporatist government. They
needed one more kick in the groin from the ghost of Karl Marx before they
were ready for the shock of Margaret Thatcher. She was lucky to inherit a
country which, in more than the electoral sense, had turned its back on the
ideas she routed.
Tony Blair, when his time came, was lucky to inherit a similar sense of
national revulsion against the former governing party. If the Tories had
been ejected in 1992, Neil Kinnock would have taken the reins of a nation
quite unsure what it should do next. Thatcherism had not quite run its
course. A few years more were needed for the electorate to realise that her
party had lost its way.
It was not John Major’s fault that he presided over a gathering storm of
impatience and disgust, but he did. The storm broke in the general election
of 1997, and cleared the air for his new Labour successors. Mr Blair had won
the argument fair and square. He has since enjoyed the two terms that he
probably deserved to prove that fine words and a lot of fiddling about
cannot be a permanent prescription for government. His time, too, will come,
and when it does nobody will be able to claim that the Third Way was not
given a fair crack of the whip. The Third Way is dead: we have let its own
originator kill it.
America’s neoconservatives deserve a similar chance. I have listened to what
Senator Kerry has to say, the way he says it, and the record of what he has
done in politics so far, and I cannot gather from it any sense of national
direction which can rival that of Mr Bush. Mr Kerry is full of intelligent
doubt, and all at sea. Mr Bush knows what he stands for.
The President is magnificently and unambiguously wrong. He has become the
vehicle for a dawning neo-imperialist urge which surely had to surface now
that the US has become the world’s only super- power; and he has surrounded
himself with a cabal of advisers ready to turbocharge the imperialist
impulse — “because we can” — with a moral energy — “because we should”.
It would have been strange indeed if a great nation, unthreatened by any rival
in the world, had not felt the stirrings of an adventurism such as this.
Given that the Soviet Union fell more than a decade ago, the question to
Uncle Sam should perhaps be: “What took America so long?” But carried into
action the new impulse is doomed. The answer to “because we can” is “you
cannot”. The answer to “because we should” does not therefore arise.
What the world has begun to receive recently is a lesson in the impotence of
brute power and technological sophistication. The lesson is set to continue
through Mr Bush’s second term, if he gets it.
Earlier this year, before most people in Britain had even noticed that
Washington was to “hand over” sovereignty to Iraq on June 30, I tried to
explain on this page how the plan was doomed, and how the new government in
Baghdad would be a despised puppet, ruinous to maintain, just as those
long-forgotten governments of South Vietnam became. But I reckoned without
the zeal which can keep such experiments alive.
As a plant cutting may “take” in the right soil, Mr Bush and his friends
believe that in the Arab world their new administration will take, because
(they believe) what America wants for Iraq is what, deep down, Iraqis want
for themselves. When at first this approach does not succeed, the neocons
persuade themselves that one more heave will do the trick. They have to
believe this because they cannot allow themselves to think that an Iraqi
insurgency could be anywhere near the popular pulse. When evidence points to
an ambiguous Iraqi attitude towards the insurgents, Bushites must resort, as
Marxists do, to the doctrine of false consciousness: they will say that Arab
opinion has been brainwashed.
We should be properly inoculated against this error for it has a potency. The
President may be no genius, but I am not one of those smug leftwingers who
takes Donald Rumsfeld or Richard Perle to be fools or knaves, or who dismiss
their argument as shallow. Their argument is deep. It may not work in
practice, but it does make sense. Like classical Marxism, it has a logic of
its own, a thrilling and terrible cogency whose philosophical roots can be
detected in J.S. Mill, in the American Declaration of Independence, in the
preamble to the US Constitution, in Kipling and Rhodes.
A simple and moving idea resonates through all these words. It is the idea
that the principles we now hold are, at the most profound level, universal.
Other peoples, other cultures, other nations hold them too — or would, if
only they were given the chance. Show them the light, and they will follow.
Through the prism of this theory every system of government which fails to
uphold our own values is seen as a perversion of natural law, a denial of
essential human nature, and at war with the real (if unconscious) wishes of
its own citizens.
The removal of such systems of government, if necessary by force of arms, and
the installation — if necessary by force of arms — of governments which
resemble our own, become, to the liberal interventionist, only superficially
acts of coercion, for he is lifting from people an alien yoke. If this is
not how they see things today then tomorrow they will, they must. To the
liberal interventionist, the thought never occurs that Saddam Hussein might
have been a product of the whole Iraqi people and their history, as well as
an imposition upon them. They think that he was only an imposition and in
their hearts the people know it. Remove him, thinks the interventionist, and
they will love us. If at first they do not rise and hail us then another
heave is called for: one last heave.
Let them have that one last heave; and another; and another. And when every
heave fails, and this President's successors have to begin the cruel and
dirty process of withdrawal, let there remain not the ghost of a suspicion
in any American mind that George W. Bush and his friends were not given
their chance to try.
