The Empire Slinks Back
By NIALL FERGUSON


Wheresoever the Roman conquers, he inhabits. < Seneca

Iraq has fallen. Saddam's statues are face down in the dust. His evil
tyranny is at an end.

So -- can we, like, go home now?

You didn't have to wait long for a perfect symbol of the fundamental
weakness at the heart of the new American imperialism -- sorry,
humanitarianism. I'm talking about its chronically short time frame. I
wasn't counting, but the Stars and Stripes must have been up there on
the head of that statue of Saddam for less than a minute. You have to
wonder what his commanding officer said to the marine responsible, Cpl.
Edward Chin, when he saw Old Glory up there. ''Son, get that thing down
on the double, or we'll have every TV station from here to Bangladesh
denouncing us as Yankee imperialists!''

An echo of Corporal Chin's imperial impulse can be heard in the last
letter Cpl. Kemaphoom Chanawongse sent home before he and his Marine
unit entered Iraq. Chanawongse joked that his camp in Kuwait was like
something out of ''M*A*S*H'' -- except that it would need to be called
''M*A*H*T*S*F'': ''marines are here to stay forever.''

But the question raised by Corporal Chanawongse's poignant final joke
-- he was killed a week later, when his amphibious assault vehicle was
blown up in Nasiriya -- is, Are the marines in Iraq ''to stay
forever''? No doubt it is true, as President Bush said, that the
America will ''honor forever'' Corporal Chanawongse and the more than
120 other service personnel so far killed in the conflict. Honored
forever, yes. But there forever? In many ways the biggest mystery about
the American occupation of Iraq is its probable duration. Recent
statements by members of the Bush administration bespeak a time frame a
lot closer to ephemeral than eternal. As the president himself told the
Iraqi people in a television broadcast shortly after the fall of
Baghdad: ''The government of Iraq and the future of your country will
soon belong to you. . . . We will respect your great religious
traditions, whose principles of equality and compassion are essential
to Iraq's future. We will help you build a peaceful and representative
government that protects the rights of all citizens. And then our
military forces will leave.''

What the president didn't make entirely clear was whether the departing
troops would be accompanied by the retired Lt. Gen. Jay Garner and his
''Office of Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance,'' newspeak for
what would once have been called Omgus -- the Office of Military
Government (United States). Nor was he very specific about when exactly
he expected to see the handover of power to the ''peaceful and
representative government'' of Iraqis.

But we know the kind of time frame the president has in mind. In a
prewar speech to the American Enterprise Institute, Bush declared, ''We
will remain in Iraq as long as necessary and not a day more.'' It is
striking that the unit of measure he used was days. Speaking less than
a week before the fall of Baghdad, Paul Wolfowitz, the deputy secretary
of defense, suggested that Garner would be running Iraq for at least
six months. Other administration spokesmen have mentioned two years as
the maximum transition period. When Garner himself was asked how long
he expected to be in charge, he talked about just three months.

If -- as more and more commentators claim -- America has embarked on a
new age of empire, it may turn out to be the most evanescent empire in
all history. Other empire builders have fantasized about ruling subject
peoples for a thousand years. This is shaping up to be history's first
thousand-day empire. Make that a thousand hours.

Let me come clean. I am a fully paid-up member of the neoimperialist
gang. Twelve years ago -- when it was not at all fashionable to say so
-- I was already arguing that it would be ''desirable for the United
States to depose'' tyrants like Saddam Hussein. ''Capitalism and
democracy,'' I wrote, ''are not naturally occurring, but require strong
institutional foundations of law and order. The proper role of an
imperial America is to establish these institutions where they are
lacking, if necessary . . . by military force.'' Today this argument is
in danger of becoming commonplace, at least among the set who read The
National Interest, the latest issue of which is practically an American
Empire Special Edition. Elsewhere, writers as diverse as Max Boot,
Andrew Bacevich and Thomas Donnelly have drawn explicit (and in Boot's
case, approving) comparisons between the pax Britannica of Queen
Victoria's reign and the pax Americana they envisage in the reign of
George II. Boot has gone so far as to say that the United States should
provide places like Afghanistan and other troubled countries with ''the
sort of enlightened foreign administration once provided by
self-confident Englishmen in jodhpurs and pith helmets.''

I agree. The British Empire has had a pretty lousy press from a
generation of ''postcolonial'' historians anachronistically affronted
by its racism. But the reality is that the British were significantly
more successful at establishing market economies, the rule of law and
the transition to representative government than the majority of
postcolonial governments have been. The policy ''mix'' favored by
Victorian imperialists reads like something just published by the
International Monetary Fund, if not the World Bank: free trade,
balanced budgets, sound money, the common law, incorrupt administration
and investment in infrastructure financed by international loans. These
are precisely the things Iraq needs right now. If the scary-sounding
''American empire'' can deliver them, then I am all for it. The catch
is whether or not America has the one crucial character trait without
which the whole imperial project is doomed: stamina. The more time I
spend here in the United States, the more doubtful I become about this.

The United States unquestionably has the raw economic power to build an
empire -- more, indeed, than the United Kingdom ever had at its
disposal. In 1913, for example, Britain's share of total world output
was 8 percent, while the equivalent figure for the United States in
1998 was 22 percent. There's ''soft'' power too -- the endlessly
innovative consumer culture that Joseph Nye argues is an essential
component of American power -- but at its core, as we have seen in
Afghanistan and now in Iraq, American power is far from soft. It can be
very, very hard. The trouble is that it is ephemeral. It is not so much
Power Lite as Flash Power -- here today, with a spectacular bang, but
gone tomorrow.

Besides the presidential time frame -- which is limited by the
four-year election cycle -- the most obvious symptom of its
short-windedness is the difficulty the American empire finds in
recruiting the right sort of people to run it. America's educational
institutions excel at producing young men and women who are both
academically and professionally very well trained. It's just that the
young elites have no desire whatsoever to spend their lives running a
screwed-up, sun-scorched sandpit like Iraq. America's brightest and
best aspire not to govern Mesopotamia, but to manage MTV; not to rule
Hejaz, but to run a hedge fund; not to be a C.B.E., or Commander of the
British Empire, but to be a C.E.O. And that, of course, is one reason
so many of the Americans currently in Iraq are first-generation
immigrants to the United States -- men like Cpl. Kemaphoom Chanawongse.

America's British allies have been here before. Having defeated the
previous Ottoman rulers in the First World War, Britain ran Iraq as a
''mandate'' between 1920 and 1932. For the sake of form, the British
installed one of their Arab clients, the Hashemite prince Faisal, as
king. But there was no doubt who was really running the place. Nor did
the British make any bones about why they were there. When two Standard
Oil geologists entered Iraq on a prospecting mission, the British civil
commissioner handed them over to the chief of police of Baghdad; in
1927 the British takeover paid a handsome dividend when oil was struck
at Baba Gurgur, in the northern part of Iraq. Although they formally
relinquished power to the ruling dynasty in 1932, the British remained
informally in control of Iraq throughout the 1930's. Indeed, they only
really lost their grip on Baghdad with the assassination of their
clients Faisal II and his prime minister, Nuri es-Said, in the
revolution of 1958.

The crucial point is this: when the British went into Iraq, they stuck
around. To be precise, there were British government representatives,
military and civilian, in Baghdad uninterruptedly for almost exactly 40
years.

And that brings up a simple question: Who in today's United States
would like to be based in Baghdad as long as the British were -- which
would be from now until 2043?

''Don't even go there!'' is one of those catch phrases you hear every
day in New York. Somehow it sums up exactly what is flawed about the
whole post-9/11 crypto-imperial project. Despite their vast wealth and
devastating weaponry, Americans have no interest in the one crucial
activity without which a true empire cannot enduringly be established.
They won't actually go there.

A British counterexample. Gertrude Bell was the first woman to graduate
from Oxford with a First Class degree. She learned to speak Arabic
during an archaeological visit to Jerusalem in 1899 and, like T.E.
Lawrence, became involved in British military intelligence. In 1920,
she was appointed Oriental Secretary to the British High Commission in
Baghdad. She died there in 1926, having scarcely visited England in the
interim. ''I don't care to be in London much,'' she wrote. ''I like
Baghdad, and I like Iraq. It's the real East, and it is stirring;
things are happening here, and the romance of it all touches me and
absorbs me.''

Dotted all over the British Empire were thousands of ''Orientalists''
like Gertrude Bell -- simultaneously enamored of the exotic ''Other''
and yet dominant over it. Her account of Faisal I's coronation in 1921
perfectly illustrates their mode of operation: ''Then Saiyid Husain
stood up and read Sir Percy's proclamation in which he announced that
Faisal had been elected king by 96 percent of the people in
Mesopotamia, long live the King! with that we stood up and saluted him,
the national flag was broken on the flagstaff by his side and the band
played 'God Save the King' -- they have no national anthem yet.''

The British regarded long-term occupation as an inherent part of their
self-appointed ''civilizing mission.'' This did not mean forever. The
assumption was that British rule would end once a country had been
sufficiently ''civilized'' -- read: anglicized -- to ensure the
continued rule of law and operation of free markets (not to mention the
playing of cricket). But that clearly meant decades, not days; when the
British intervened in a country like Iraq, they simply didn't have an
exit strategy. The only issue was whether to rule directly --
installing a British governor -- or indirectly, with a British
''secretary'' offering ''advice'' to a local puppet like Faisal.

In other words, the British did go there. Between 1900 and 1914, 2.6
million Britons left the United Kingdom for imperial destinations (by
1957 the total had reached nearly 6 million). Admittedly, most of them
preferred to migrate to the temperate regions of a select few colonies
-- Canada, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa -- that soon became
semiautonomous ''dominions.'' Nevertheless, a significant number went
to the much less hospitable climes of Asia and Africa. At the end of
the 1930's, for example, the official Colonial Service in Africa was
staffed by more than 7,500 expat Brits. The substantial expatriate
communities they established were crucial to the operation of the
British Empire. They provided the indispensable ''men on the spot'' who
learned the local languages, perhaps adopted some local customs --
though not usually to the fatal extent of ''going native'' -- and acted
as the intermediaries between a remote imperial authority and the
indigenous elites upon whose willing collaboration the empire depended.

Expat life was not all tiffin and gin. As Rudyard Kipling saw it,
governing India was a hard slog: ''Year by year England sends out fresh
drafts for the first fighting-line, which is officially called the
Indian Civil Service. These die, or kill themselves by overwork, or are
worried to death or broken in health and hope.'' Yet this was a service
that could confidently expect to attract the very brightest and best
products of the elite British universities. Of 927 recruits to the
Colonial Service between 1927 and 1929, nearly half had been to Oxford
or Cambridge. The proportion in the Indian Civil Service was even
higher.

Why were so many products of Britain's top universities willing to
spend their entire working lives so far from the land of their birth,
running infernally hot, disease-ridden countries? Why, to pick a
typical example, did one Evan Machonochie, an Oxford graduate who
passed the grueling Indian Civil Service exam, set off for Bengal in
1887 and spend the next 40 years in India? One clue lies in his Celtic
surname. The Scots were heavily overrepresented not just in the
colonies of white settlement, but also in the commercial and
professional elites of cities like Calcutta and Hong Kong and Cape
Town. The Irish too played a disproportionate role in enforcing British
rule, supplying a huge proportion of the officers and men of the
British army. Not for nothing is Kipling's representative Indian Army
N.C.O. named Mulvaney. For young men growing up on the rainy, barren
and poorer fringes of the United Kingdom, the empire offered
opportunities.

Yet economics alone cannot explain what motivated Machonochie or Bell.
The imperial impulse arose from a complex of emotions: racial
superiority, yes, but also evangelical zeal; profit, perhaps, but also
a sincere belief that spreading ''commerce, Christianity and
civilization'' was not just in Britain's interest but in the interests
of her colonial subjects too.

The contrast with today's ''wannabe'' imperialists in the United States
-- call them ''nation-builders'' if you prefer euphemism -- could
scarcely be more stark. Five points stand out.

First, not only do the overwhelming majority of Americans have no
desire to leave the United States; millions of non-Americans are also
eager to join them here. Unlike the United Kingdom a century ago, the
United States is an importer of people, with a net immigration rate of
3.5 per 1,000 and a total foreign-born population of 32.5 million (more
than 1 in 10 residents of the United States).

Second, when Americans do opt to reside abroad, they tend to stick to
the developed world. As of 1999, there were an estimated 3.8 million
Americans living abroad. That sounds like a lot. But it is a little
more than a tenth the number of the foreign-born population in the
United States. And of these expat Americans, almost three-quarters were
living in the two other Nafta countries (more than one million in
Mexico, 687,700 in Canada) or in Europe (just over a million). Of the
294,000 living in the Middle East, nearly two-thirds were in Israel. A
mere 37,500 were in Africa.

Third, whereas British imperial forces were mostly based abroad, most
of the American military is normally stationed at home. Even the B-2
Stealth bombers that pounded Serbia into quitting Kosovo in 1999 were
flying out of Knob Noster, Mo. And it's worth remembering that 40
percent of American overseas military personnel are located in Western
Europe, no fewer than 71,000 of them in Germany. Thus, whereas the
British delighted in building barracks in hostile territories precisely
in order to subjugate them, Americans today locate a quarter of their
overseas troops in what is arguably the world's most pacifist country.

Fourth, when Americans do live abroad they generally don't stay long
and don't integrate much, preferring to inhabit Mini Me versions of
America, ranging from military bases to five-star ''international''
(read: American) hotels. When I visited Lakenheath air base last year,
one minute I was in the middle of rural Cambridgeshire, flat and
ineffably English, the next minute, as I passed through the main gate,
everything -- right down to the absurdly large soft-drink dispensers --
was unmistakably American.

The fifth and final contrast with the British experience is perhaps the
most telling. It is the fact that the products of America's elite
educational institutions are the people least likely to head overseas,
other than on flying visits and holidays. The Americans who serve the
longest tours of duty are the volunteer soldiers, a substantial
proportion of whom are African-Americans (12.9 per cent of the
population, 25.4 per cent of the Army Reserve). It's just possible that
African-Americans will turn out to be the Celts of the American empire,
driven overseas by the comparatively poor opportunities at home.
Indeed, if the occupation of Iraq is to be run by the military, then it
can hardly fail to create career opportunities for the growing number
of African-American officers in the Army. The military's most effective
press spokesman during the war, Brig. Gen. Vincent K. Brooks,
exemplifies the type.

The British, however, were always wary about giving the military too
much power in their imperial administration. Their parliamentarians had
read enough Roman history to want to keep generals subordinate to
civilian governors. The ''brass hats'' were there to inflict the
Victorian equivalent of ''shock and awe'' whenever the ''natives'' grew
restive. Otherwise, colonial government was a matter for
Oxbridge-educated, frock-coated mandarins.

Now, ask yourself in light of this: how many members of Harvard's or
Yale's class of 2003 are seriously considering a career in the postwar
administration of Iraq? The number is unlikely to be very high. In
1998/99 there were 47,689 undergraduate course registrations at Yale,
of which just 335 (less than 1 percent) were for courses in Near
Eastern languages and civilizations. There was just one, lone
undergraduate senior majoring in the subject (compared with 17 doing
film studies). If Samuel Huntington is right and we are witnessing a
''clash of civilizations,'' America's brightest students show
remarkably little interest in the civilization of the other side.

After graduation, too, the members of America's academic elite
generally subscribe to the ''Wizard of Oz'' principle: ''There's no
place like home.'' According to a 1998 survey, there were 134,798
registered Yale alumni. Of these, little more than 5 percent lived
outside the United States. A mere handful -- roughly 70 -- lived in
Arab countries.

Sure, the bolder products of the Kennedy School may be eager for
''tours of duty'' in postwar Baghdad. And a few of the star Harvard
economists may want to do for Iraq what a couple of their professors
did for post-Soviet Russia back in the early 90's. But what that means
is flying back and forth, writing a bunch of papers on ''transition
economics,'' pocketing some fat consultancy fees and then heading for
home.

As far as America's Ivy League nation-builders are concerned, you can
set up an independent central bank, reform the tax code, liberalize
prices and privatize the major utilities -- and be home in time for the
first reunion.

It can of course be argued that Americans' tendency to pay flying
visits to their putative imperium -- rather than settling there -- is
just a function of technology. Back in the 1870's, by which time the
British had largely completed their global network of railways and
steamships, it still took a minimum of 80 days to go around the world,
as Jules Verne celebrated in the story of Phileas Fogg. Today it can be
done in a day.

The problem is that with the undoubted advantages of modern technology
comes the disadvantage of disconnection. For example, Secretary of
State Colin Powell was criticized earlier this year for conducting his
foreign policy by telephone. It was noted that Powell had traveled
abroad twice in 2003 already, but one trip was to Davos, Switzerland
(Jan. 25-26), and the other was to the Far East (Feb. 21-25). We can
only guess at how much more Secretary Powell might have achieved if he
had paid a visit to Paris -- or Ankara -- last month. And it is not
just the big guns who seem happiest close to the Beltway. Recall, too,
how after 9/11 the C.I.A. had to scour American colleges to find anyone
capable of speaking fluent Pashto. It turned out that most C.I.A.
officers preferred life in Virginia to what the British once called the
North-West Frontier. (Have you seen the state of the restrooms up the
Khyber Pass?)

One of this month's most disturbing pieces of news was that Garner's
team at the Office of Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance would
include people from the State Department and the U.S. Agency for
International Development ''who have worked in a similar capacity in
the former Yugoslavia, in Haiti and in Somalia.'' Considering the
pitifully short duration of American interventions in those countries,
their dismal failure in two of three cases and the vast differences
between Iraq and all three, this is scarcely encouraging. Even more
surreal was the disclosure that the Office of Reconstruction and
Humanitarian Assistance has been hiring British Gurkhas to provide
security around their Kuwait base. A nice imperial touch, granted, but
a bunch of Gurkhas are hardly going to blend in discreetly in downtown
Baghdad.

What, then, about the much-vaunted role of nongovernmental
organizations? Might they provide the men and women on the ground who
are so conspicuously hard to find in government service?

It is true that a substantial number of Americans are currently working
overseas for NGO's. An American friend of mine recently startled his
friends -- not to mention his wife -- by quitting his artist's studio
and his teaching job in London, where he has spent much of the last 20
years, to take a position with a French-run aid agency in one of the
most dysfunctional of Central Africa's wretched republics. Perhaps he
will find the new life he seeks there. But most Americans who do this
kind of thing start younger and spend little more than a year overseas.
For many it is not much more than a politically correct ''gap year''
before starting at graduate school.

Nor should we pin too much hope on the aid agencies that, like the
missionaries of old, can be as much an irritant as a help to those
trying to run a country like Iraq. It is one of the unspoken truths of
the new imperialism that around every international crisis swarms a
cloud of aid workers, whose efforts are seldom entirely complementary.
If Garner's team successfully imposes law and order in Iraq, economic
life will swiftly pick up and much aid will be superfluous. If it fails
to impose order, aid workers will get themselves killed -- as they
frequently do in lawless Chechnya.

The dilemma is perhaps insoluble. Americans yearn for the quiet life at
home. But since 9/11 they have felt impelled to grapple with rogue
regimes in the hope that their overthrow will do something to reduce
the threat of future terrorist attacks. The trouble is that if they do
not undertake these interventions with conviction and commitment, they
are unlikely to achieve their stated goals. Anyone who thinks Iraq can
become a stable democracy in a matter of months -- whether 3, 6 or 24
-- is simply fantasizing.

Where, then, is the new imperial elite to come from? Not, I hope,
exclusively from the reserve army of unemployed generals with good
Pentagon connections. The work needs to begin, and swiftly, to
encourage American students at the country's leading universities to
think more seriously about careers overseas -- and by overseas I do not
mean in London. Are there, for example, enough good scholarships to
attract undergraduates and graduates to study Arabic? How many young
men and women currently graduate with a functioning grasp of Chinese?
That, after all, is the language of this country's nearest imperial
rival, and the power President Bush urgently needs to woo if he is to
deal effectively with North Korea.

After Kipling, John Buchan was perhaps the most readable writer
produced by British imperialism. In his 1916 thriller ''Greenmantle,''
he memorably personifies imperial Britain in the person of Sandy
Arbuthnot -- an Orientalist so talented that he can pass for a Moroccan
in Mecca or a Pathan in Peshawar. Arbuthnot's antithesis is the
dyspeptic American millionaire John Scantlebury Blenkiron: ''a big
fellow with a fat, sallow, clean-shaven face'' and ''a pair of full
sleepy eyes, like a ruminating ox.'' These eyes have seen ''nothing
gorier than a presidential election,'' he tells Buchan's hero, Richard
Hannay. The symbolism is a little crude, but it has something to it.

Well, now the Blenkirons have seen something gorier than an election.
But will it whet their appetites for an empire in the British mode?
Only, I think, if Americans radically rethink their attitude to the
world beyond their borders. Until there are more Americans not just
willing but eager to shoulder the ''nation-builder's burden,''
adventures like the current occupation of Iraq will lack a vital
ingredient. For the lesson of Britain's imperial experience is clear:
you simply cannot have an empire without imperialists -- out there, on
the spot -- to run it.

Could Blenkiron somehow transform into Arbuthnot? Perhaps. After all,
in the years after the Second World War, the generation that had just
missed the fighting left Harvard and Yale with something like Buchan's
zeal for global rule. Many of them joined the Central Intelligence
Agency and devoted their lives to fighting Communism in far-flung lands
from Cuba to Cambodia. Yet -- as Graham Greene foresaw in ''The Quiet
American'' -- their efforts at what the British would have called
''indirect rule'' were constrained by the need to shore up the local
potentates more or less covertly. (The low quality of the locals backed
by the United States didn't help, either.) Today, the same fiction that
underpinned American strategy in Vietnam -- that the United States was
not trying to resurrect French colonial rule in Indochina -- is peddled
in Washington to rationalize what is going on in Iraq. Sure, it may
look like the resurrection of British colonial rule in Iraq, but
honestly, all we want to do is give the Iraqi people democracy and then
go home.

So long as the American empire dare not speak its own name -- so long
as it continues this tradition of organized hypocrisy -- today's
ambitious young men and women will take one look at the prospects for
postwar Iraq and say with one voice, ''Don't even go there.''

Americans need to go there. If the best and brightest insist on staying
home, today's unspoken imperial project may end -- unspeakably --
tomorrow.

-------
Niall Ferguson is Herzog professor of financial history at the Stern School of Business, New York University, and a senior research fellow of Jesus College, Oxford. 
He is the author of ''Empire: The Rise and Demise of the British World Order and the Lessons for Global Power.''