On war and empire: Vidal strikes back

Last week, as TV screens filled with images of dust-storm-shrouded supply convoys, U.S. POWs being paraded for propaganda and grieving, angry Iraqi civilians denouncing President Bush, some commentators registered surprise at how a war that began swiftly and efficiently had suddenly turned slower and messier. Gore Vidal, taking in the scene from his Hollywood Hills home, was not among those caught off-guard.

“Needless to say, I’m a past master of the I-told-you-so school, so I’m having a field day,” Vidal says in a tone far more grave than self-congratulatory. “I said it isn’t going to be a ‘cakewalk,’ ” he continues, referring to a prediction made by Kenneth Adelman of a Pentagon advisory board that “demolishing Hussein’s military power and liberating Iraq would be a cakewalk.”

“These are very tough people, and they’re in their country,” Vidal says. “And though Mr. Bush is marvelously motivated with Christian idealism, they are also motivated with their own kind of Muslim idealism or whatever one wants to call it. It isn’t going to be easy.”

The business of empire-building has seldom been easy -- temperamentally, socially or economically -- for the United States, Vidal suggests. And yet an empire, he says, is precisely what America has become. Rather than a republic that minds its own business and goes to war only in self-defense, he says, the U.S. is now acting as an aggressor nation that seeks to extend its influence abroad while chipping away at civil liberties at home.

“We’ve been [an aggressor] before, in 1846 against Mexico, particularly, and in the Philippines in 1900, when we denied them independence, having promised them that,” says Vidal, whose latest book is “Dreaming War: Blood for Oil and the Cheney-Bush Junta” (Nation Books). “So we’ve been in the empire business before, but never so nakedly and never so stupidly. Everything the government said was untrue, starting with the Big Lie, which was that Saddam Hussein was responsible for 9-11, and then the Al Qaeda connection. As there was none, then there was no reason to attack him.”

There’s been nothing at all haphazard about America’s imperial rise, says the author of essays, plays and some 25 novels, including “Burr,” “Lincoln” and five other titles collectively known as the “narratives of empire.” Jefferson, whose 1803 purchase of the Louisiana Territory doubled the size of the infant nation, spoke approvingly of “our empire,” Vidal says. The Monroe Doctrine, the Mexican War and Spanish-American War all furthered the country’s global reach.

But it wasn’t until the end of World War II that America began consolidating its imperial designs, at home and abroad, into what became “the national security state,” Vidal says. Like Truman’s decision to use nuclear weapons against Japan at the end of World War II, the current war on Iraq has more to do with asserting American power on a global scale and striking fear in potential enemies than it does with any actual, immediate threat or practical military or political goals, Vidal believes. The invasion of Iraq, he says, “is like Truman saying the world is ours and we’ve got this weapon and don’t fuss with us, and our writ is law. And thus began the Cold War and thus began Stalin’s paranoia, which was already quite well developed over many years of misrule.”

That led, in turn, to the Red Scare, Vidal goes on, as the American mid-century worldview envisioned fresh threats at home to match the perceived threats coming from all corners of the planet. Even so, Vidal thinks, the threats to civil liberty posed by Sen. Joe McCarthy and the House Un-American Activities Committee in the 1950s aren’t as great as those posed by the USA Patriot Act, passed in response to the Sept. 11 attacks. “There was never any talk of suspending habeas corpus and of total surveillance and of going into peoples’ houses and searching it without a writ,” he says.

If the prospects for disarming and deposing Saddam Hussein with relative ease look cloudier to some than they did a week ago, so do those for rebuilding Iraq and setting up a new government there, Vidal says. Though the U.S. and its allies rebuilt both Japan and West Germany after World War II, reconstructing essential institutions and helping shape new political infrastructures, a post-war Iraq would be “not comparable at all,” Vidal believes. “Germany and France were great civilizations, with long liberal traditions in both countries.... We were dealing with not only our equals but in many ways, intellectually and politically, our betters.”

While Iraq does possess an educated professional class of potential administrators and bureaucrats, Vidal says, the country is unlikely to tolerate an outside occupation force for very long, if at all. “Whoever we put in, if it’s an American general, is going to be torn to pieces by an angry mob. They’re not going to put up with an ‘infidel’ running their country. They all have vivid memories of British and French colonialism in that part of the world.”

The truth, says Vidal, is that despite its unprecedented military and economic power, the U.S. really isn’t cut out to be an empire. Unlike Victorian-era Britain, with its large Oxford- and Cambridge-educated foreign service class, we don’t have a ready-made army of bureaucrats ready to administer Iraq. We also can’t afford to pay for such an occupation, he says.

Among Vidal’s favorite observers of America’s past is William Appleman Williams, one of the so-called “revisionist” historians whose views gained influence during the 1960s and ‘70s. The revisionists argued that while American foreign-policy makers often believe themselves to be acting with the best of intentions and from democratic ideals, their actions tend not to differ so much in practice from those of Europe’s 19th century great powers, schooled in Bismarckian expediency.

“I’d say by and large it is not a good thing to mix in the internal affairs of other countries,” he says. “It’s generally resented. What if the Canadians had come down to count the votes in Florida [during the 2000 presidential election] knowing that it was all crooked and that they alone would be disinterested and able to straighten it out? I believe there would be objections raised about sovereignty. In Vietnam we tried to keep them from holding an election that we didn’t want won by Ho Chi Minh. He wanted to be an ally. So we start sending troops to have him killed. This is where interfering in other peoples’ affairs leads to.”