Global Policy Forum

By Ignacio Ramonet

When General Jay Garner landed in Iraq and arrived in bombed and looted Baghdad he declared: "This is a great day." As if his presence miraculously ended the thousand and one problems afflicting ancient Mesopotamia. What is astonishing is not the obscenity of the statement but the resignation and apathy with which the media covered the installation of the man who should really be called the proconsul of the United States. As if there were no longer international law. As if we had gone back to the days of the mandates (1). As if it were now normal for Washington to designate a retired officer of the US armed forces to govern a sovereign state.

This decision to name a senior officer to run a defeated country, without even consulting the phantom members of the "coalition", is alarmingly reminiscent of the old practices of colonialism - Clive in India, Kitchener in the Sudan and Lyautey in Morocco. To think we had imagined such abuses to have been banned for ever because of political morality and the lessons of history.

The US tells us that this is different, and that the transitional regime in Iraq should be compared to General Douglas MacArthur's regime in Japan after 1945. But that is even more alarming. It took the atomic destruction of the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945 - almost an apocalypse - for the US to name a general as administrator of a defeated power, at a time when the United Nations was not yet functioning.

Now the UN does exist, at least in theory (2). And the invasion of Iraq by US forces and their British auxiliaries wasn't the conclusion of a world war (unless President Bush and his entourage regard the attacks of 11 September 2001 as the equivalent of world war).

General Garner has indicated that his occupation will not be for ever. "We will be here as long as it takes. We will leave fairly rapidly". (3) But history teaches us that "as long as it takes" can be a very long time indeed. When the US invaded the Philippines and Puerto Rico in 1898 on the altruistic pretext of "liberating" them and their peoples from the Spanish colonial yoke, the US soon ended up replacing the former power. In the Philippines it put down nationalist resistance and then did not leave until 1946, and continued to interfere in the country's affairs thereafter. In each subsequent national election the US supported its preferred candidate, including the dictator Ferdinand Marcos, in power from 1965 to 1986. And the US is still occupying Puerto Rico. Even in Japan and Germany, the presence of US armed forces remains massive 58 years after the end of the second world war.

So when General Garner arrived in Baghdad with his team of 450 administrators it was hard to avoid the thought that the US, in this phase of neo-imperialism, is shouldering what Rudyard Kipling called "the white man's burden". Or what the great powers saw in 1918 as their sacred mission of civilising people seen as incapable of running their lives in the difficult conditions of the modern world.

The neo-imperialism of the US revives the Roman concept of moral domination, based on the conviction that free trade, globalisation and the diffusion of Western civilisation are good for the world. But it is also a military and media domination exercised over peoples considered inferior (5).

After the overthrow of Saddam Hussein's appalling dictatorship, the US promised that it would establish in Iraq an exemplary democracy, under the wing of the new empire, the influence of which would trigger the fall of all autocratic regimes in the region - including, we were told by James Woolsey, former director of the CIA and a confidant of Bush, those of Saudi Arabia and Egypt (6).

Is such a promise credible? Obviously not. The US defence secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, hastened to point out that even if it was the desire of the majority of Iraqis as expressed at the ballot box, the US would not accept an Islamic regime in Iraq: "That isn't going to happen," he said (7). This is a very old law of history: empires impose their law on the vanquished. But there is also another law: those that live by empire die by it.

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