Published in 1967, a time when the Vietnam war was reaching pitch height, when the Chinese Cultural Revolution (1966-1976) was just gaining momentum in its disastrous course, and when the Prague Spring (from January 1968) was about to prove the Soviet Union true to its dictatorial form (invasion of Czechoslovakia in August 1968), the book of William Fulbright, Senator from 1945 to 1974 and Chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee (1959-1974) - the Arrogance of Power - still imparts wisdom and poise today
For better or for worse, the lessons drawn from the Senator’s own experience (revolution in Cuba – 1959 – and Bay of Pigs 1961 failed invasion), invasion of the Dominican Republic – 1965-1966 – and the Tonkin Resolution (1964) giving President Johnson a (more or less) free hand in build-up of the Vietnam war – are not only of historical interest
The arrogance to which Senator Fulbright points is uncomfortably close to the geopolitical gambit which is playing out in our own times
Mission creep
…Having done so much and succeeded so well, America is now at that historical point at which a great nation is in danger of losing its perspective on what is exactly in the realm of its power and what is beyond it…
The causes of the malady are not entirely clear but its recurrence is one of the uniformities of history: power tends to confuse itself with virtue and a great nation is peculiarly susceptible to the idea that its power is a sign of God’s favor….
And Fulbright observes how the ‘fatal temptations of power’ led the greatest nations to embrace a ‘special responsibility’ for other nations, to make them in their own shining image – which surely prepared their downfall in the wake of their overextension…
History suffers from an overload of such an imaginary sense of ‘mission’ from Athens’ attack on Syracuse (413 BC), or invasions of Russia by Napoleon (1812) and by Hitler (from 1941) …and Iraq’s occupation by Allied (mostly US) forces yesterday, or Russia’s aggression of Ukraine today retain the bite of their bloody consequence
‘Overextension’ is the hard lesson imparted time and again to the great Powers of their day…
Power for power’s sake
The drift in the exercise of power is perplexing – as anyone will observe, the pull seems to be an irresistible attraction (pandering to the worst in human psyche), the causes advertised as meritorious (at least to the missionaries engaged in the effort) and their ultimate consequences hopeless
Time and again, the causes – territory, advancement of great principles or control of natural resources – ended up in the dust of heated mêlées, and the millions who died in the First World War would have been hard pressed to explain how the killing fields of Flanders were justified by the assassination of an Austrian heir in Sarajevo....
...or, on a contemporary note, how the Second Iraq War was supposed to contribute to the installation of a democratic regime in Baghdad
With wry humor, the plaque one intelligence officer had on his wall listed “The Six Phases of a CIA Covert Action Program”: “euphoria, confusion, disillusionment, search for the guilty, punishment of the innocent, distinction for the uninvolved.”
Covert or out in the open, the American ‘preventive war’ in Iraq has been true to form, a text-book case laying bare the weaknesses of a failing super-power
Relations with Saddam’s Iraq had been convoluted – to say the least – as Steve Coll, author of The Achilles Trap, tells it:
- The Reagan Administration’s military support to Iraq in the 80’s intended to keep the war with Iran on track (even as Baghdad gassed tens of thousands of its own people)
- But the US Administration was working all the while with Israel to provide military support to Iran in hopes of gaining the release of American hostages held by Hezbollah in Lebanon (using the proceeds of the arms sales to support anticommunist rebels in Nicaragua)
The invincible ignorance of idiosyncratic, unconstrained American officials brought to naught ever since the more sincere American attempts at direct dialogue to ease tensions
None of which can explain why early in the early 2000's, to quote Gideon Rose in the Foreign Affairs Review Essay of Mr Coll's book, the United States decided to change course and deal with terrorist threats through preventive war on Iraq
- 9/11 did not have to lead to such an outcome, since what happened that day had nothing to do with Iraq. What produced the war was the underlying challenge of maintaining Gulf security, combined with Saddam’s bizarre behavior, combined with the psychological impact of 9/11 on those same officials
In truth, Saddam – understandably confused by the overlapping, overt and covert American operations – could not NOT be equivocal and wholly suspicious, to say nothing of his paranoia
In Mr Coll’s words
[Saddam] assumed that an all-powerful C.I.A. already knew that he had no nuclear, chemical, or biological weapons. . . . Since America knew the truth but nonetheless faked claims that he was still hiding illicit arms, he reasoned, what did this imply? It meant that the Zionists and spies lined up against him were using the WMD issue cynically to advance their conspiracy to oust him from power. He saw no reason to play their game or deal with their prying inspectors.
Missionary zeal galore
Senator Fulbright’s pointed interrogations put lessons NOT learned in Iraq in unsparing light
- Causation trotted out by the proponents of intervention has disappeared from public conscience – Gulf security surely has not improved and Saddam’s bizarre behavior, while true, seems to be a flimsy justification of actual warfare
- Certain unfathomable drives of human nature, hidden behind the rationale of national interest, were advanced by the Senator for lack of sensible explanation, and this may be true, one more time, when logic flew out of the window in Iraq, in the name of ‘the psychological impact of 9/11' on these unconstrained American officials
Again, referring to Mr. Coll’s book,
"As Cheney said in 1994, in defense of the U.S. decision to not topple Saddam during the Gulf War, “Once you got to Iraq and took it over, took down Saddam Hussein’s government, then what are you going to put in its place? . . . It’s a quagmire.”
The George W. Bush administration got around that problem by ignoring it. Its war plan lacked an ending—and so, unsurprisingly, the war never really ended, with the conflict lurching from one battle to another for years to come"
What recent American powerplays lay bare, is a sense of mission which flips confusingly, and unpredictably, from humane magnanimity to principled puritanism
Neither with well-intentioned generosity nor by pulling up the drawbridge will America find the resolve to confront the arrogance of the competing great powers on the world scene, Russia and China
America's innate sense of mission might need to find a narrow path as its foreign policy is pulled between global engagement and isolationism - there is no other way as will be discussed in "the Two Roosevelts"