Is "Imperialism" Really the Right Word for What We're Doing in Iraq?

The American and indeed global political dialogue is increasingly sloppy. People throw around terms with blatant disregard for their meanings, usually with malice, or at least political point scoring. Thus conservatives with whom one disagrees become fascists, Nazis, or better yet, somehow evocative of Hitler. Lefties become Communists, Marxists, and, natch, Stalinists. Right-wingers want a police state. Left-wingers hate America . The effects of this increasingly divisive dialogue, or rather, these dueling monologues, are growing more and more corrosive, and their future effect on the body politic will likely continue to have deleterious effects.

Not surprisingly, the war in Iraq and the larger War on Terror under which it is supposed to be subsumed are front and center in this cacophonous shouting match. Critics of the war blithely threw around accusations of “unilateralism” without apparently knowing what that rather precise term means. Supporters of the war countered with vitriol asserting that their foes were anti-Americans who had learned nothing from 9-11 and who were handmaids to evil, a self-righteous bit of claptrap that served to further the replacement of reasoned disagreement with pointed ad hominem .

Into this increasingly contentious fray we can add the question of “Empire,” “imperialism,” and “colonialism.” These too are terms that have or at least should have meaning. Their meaning might not be precise, and may be debatable, but those who use these terms, especially in an accusatory way to buttress their own side in a political debate, bear the burden of proving that American actions are imperialistic, not simply by asserting that it is so ipse dixit .

What the United States is doing in Iraq is open to interpretation and to dispute. This is as it should be in a free society where open debate and discussion is not only welcome, but necessary to the survival of democracy. Some believe that on the whole America is trying to fight evil and remove scourges. Others argue as passionately that by taking on a role beyond that which much of the world would grant us, we are acting like that which we vow to oppose. Into the breach come the assertions that this war (or perhaps more precisely, these wars) represent imperialistic endeavor. This strikes me as, at the least, an anachronistic accusation.

It may be difficult to pin down just what an imperial power does, but one of those things self evidently is to establish empire. However sloppily it is being done, however dubious the outcome, and however self interested the current administration's intent, it seems that the last thing they want to do is establish a colonial holding in Iraq . Indeed for many of us the war's most immediate result has been chaos borne of unwillingness to nation build, reluctance to be in it for the long haul. Better to proclaim victory, however pyrrhic or false or insecure, than to stay in it for the duration. Yet to guarantee any sort of democracy in Iraq , whatever one thinks of the war and its justifications, it seems to me that it would be irresponsible not to remain, not to engage in the nation building that President Bush so derided in the debates with Al Gore in 2000. When I think of the colonial states in Africa in the twentieth century, whether manifested in the form of direct rule, indirect rule, or settler colonies, I do not see foreshadowing of what the United States is currently doing. I do not even see neo-colonialism, a term thrown around as much as just about any without regard to establishing its actual meaning in the current context.

This argument is intended neither to praise nor to bury the current war. That is not the question on the table. But it is to say that when one throws around the term “colonialism,” or its partners “imperialism” and “empire,” it is too often done with the goal of smiting down the other side, and not with any concern for definitional integrity, analytical rigor, or historical accuracy. Our work as scholars should allow us to contribute to a constructive discussion, and not to exacerbating the destructive shouting matches of the age.

Reprinted from the January 2004 issue of the Safundi Research Newsletter, published by Safundi: The Journal of South African and American Comparative Studies, and available at http://www.safundi.com/.