The Empire Burden
Newsweek, 12 June 2009
When George Orwell was a young man in the 1920s, he served as a British policeman in the colony of Burma. On duty there he saw, as he put it, “the dirty work of empire at close quarters.” He deplored the “white man’s” oppression of the “native people” in “the East.” But what Orwell found most disconcerting was the trap his own country had fallen into. “When the white man turns tyrant, it is his own freedom that he destroys,” Orwell wrote a few years later in his essay “Shooting an Elephant.” “In every crisis he has got to do what the ‘natives’ expect of him. He wears a mask, and his face grows to fit it.”
We may have moved beyond the paternalistic rhetoric of the early Orwell, but more recent jargon like “mission creep,” coined during the Somalia debacle of the early 1990s, covers similar ground. In fact, the history of the past century should have proved conclusively that empires are traps, draining enormous resources and eventually enormous prestige from those who build them. Whether past imperialists saw their missions as conquerors and occupiers or liberators, peacekeepers and nation-builders, or all of the above, those Western countries that have claimed “a foothold in a foreign land,” as the 19th-century naval strategist A. T. Mahan put it, have often found themselves serving interests that were no longer clearly their own.
The Obama administration is learning that lesson. It came to office a little more than four months ago committed to withdrawing from Iraq, and to stabilizing Afghanistan so it could get out of there, too. But we heard recently from U.S. Army Chief of Staff Gen. George Casey that plans have been drawn up in case American fighting forces have to remain in Iraq for another decade?and this despite a written agreement with Baghdad to pull all troops out by the end of 2011. Why? Not least because the Iraqis that the Americans helped put in power think they may need those forces to stay. Iraqi Vice President Adil Abdul-Mahdi recently told a small group of reporters that he is “very concerned” about what will happen if the Americans leave. So, he suggested, the United States might well be asked to remain.