Cause thay are too fucking stupid

"Zak" <Zak@home.com> wrote in message
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Americans Have Not Learned
The Lessons Of History
By Niall Ferguson
The Telegraph - UK
4-9-4


Around this time last year I had a conversation in Washington that
summed up what was bound to go wrong for America in Iraq. I was
talking to a mid-ranking official in the US Treasury about American
plans for the post-war reconstruction of the Iraqi economy. She had
just attended a meeting on precisely that subject. "So what kind of
historical precedents have you been considering?" I asked. "The
post-Communist economies of Eastern Europe," she replied. "We have
quite a bit of experience we can draw on from the 1990s."

When I suggested that the problems of privatisation in Poland might
not prove relevant on the banks of the Euphrates, she seemed
surprised. And when I suggested that she and her colleagues ought at
least to take a look at the last Anglophone occupation of Iraq, her
surprise turned to incredulity. Not for the first time since crossing
the Atlantic, I was confronted with the disturbing reality about the
way Americans make policy. Theory looms surprisingly large.
Neoconservative theory, for instance, stated that the Americans would
be welcomed as liberators, just as economic theory put privatisation
on my interlocutor's agenda. The lessons of history come a poor
second, and only recent history - preferably recent American history -
gets considered.

That's why there hasn't been a month since the invasion of Iraq last
year without some clapped-out commentator warning that Iraq could
become "another Vietnam". For many Americans - including the
Democratic contender for the presidency, John Kerry - the only history
relevant to American foreign policy is the history of the Vietnam War.
True, the Department of Defence has commissioned some ambitious
historical studies. In August 2001, Donald Rumsfeld's office produced
"Strategies for Maintaining US Predominance", which compared America's
bid to establish "full spectrum dominance" with the attempts of
previous empires. Most of it, however, consisted of pretty superficial
economics and the conclusion was that technological change has put the
US in a league of its own, so more detailed comparative study would be
superfluous.

There was amazement last year when I pointed out in the journal
Foreign Affairs that in 1917 a British general had occupied Baghdad
and proclaimed: "Our armies do not come into your cities and lands as
conquerors or enemies, but as liberators." By the same token, scarcely
any American outside university history departments is aware that
within just a few months of the formal British takeover of Iraq, there
was a full-scale anti-British revolt.

What happened in Iraq last week so closely resembles the events of
1920 that only a historical ignoramus could be surprised. It began in
May, just after the announcement that Iraq would henceforth be a
League of Nations "mandate" under British trusteeship. (Nota bene, if
you think a handover to the UN would solve everything.) Anti-British
demonstrations began in Baghdad mosques, spread to the Shi'ite holy
centre of Karbala, swept on through Rumaytha and Samawa - where
British forces were besieged - and reached as far as Kirkuk.

Contrary to British expectations, Sunnis, Shi'ites and even Kurds
acted together. Stories abounded of mutilated British bodies. By
August the situation was so desperate that the British commander
appealed to London for poison gas bombs or shells (though these turned
out not to be available). By the time order had been restored in
December - with a combination of aerial bombardment and punitive
village-burning expeditions - British forces had sustained over 2,000
casualties and the financial cost of the operation was being denounced
in Parliament. In the aftermath of the revolt, the British were forced
to accelerate the transfer of power to a nominally independent Iraqi
government, albeit one modelled on their own form of constitutional
monarchy.

I am willing to bet that not one senior military commander in Iraq
today knows the slightest thing about these events. The only
consolation is that maybe some younger Americans are realising that
the US has lessons to learn from something other than its own
supposedly exceptional history. The best discussion of the 1920 revolt
that I have come across this year was presented by a young
Chicago-based graduate named Daniel Barnard at a Harvard University
history conference. This week at New York University it was the
economics undergraduates who organised a question and answer session
for three senior UN diplomats, including the current (German)
president of the Security Council. Their questions - particularly
about the likely consequences of a premature American withdrawal -
seemed a great deal better informed about the realities of modern
imperialism than the anodyne stuff routinely trotted out by the White
House.

The high quality of political debate in the American universities
suggests that the delusion of American "exceptionalism" may be waning.
But for the time being US policy in Iraq is in the hands of a
generation who have learnt nothing from history except how to repeat
other people's mistakes.

- Niall Ferguson's book Colossus: The Rise and Fall of the American
Empire will be published next month by Penguin

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