America's Problematic Empire

In the end, the American proconsul slipped out of Iraq with scarcely a word. L. Paul Bremer III pronounced the country a better place than the one once littered with Saddam Hussein's torture chambers, thanked the officials who had served with him on the now defunct Coalition Provisional Authority, bestowed power on the new Iraqi prime minister, Iyad Allawi, and was gone.

It was a low-key exit reflecting problems that Mr. Bremer, and perhaps any American, could not resolve. Iraqis, in their vast majority, were pleased to be freed of their dictator and were mesmerized by his first appearance in court last week, but they have no wish to be ruled by the United States.

The Age of Empire is passed, and governments throughout the world were uncomfortable with what they saw as the brazen exercise of American authority over a country reduced to vassal status through force of arms. Mr. Bremer, a Christian ruling a Muslim country, could not fail to be a lightning rod to Islamic extremists in Iraq and beyond.

Perhaps"proconsul," with its echoes of imperial Rome, is a harsh word for the former administrator of Iraq. I met Mr. Bremer last December in his office in Mr. Hussein's bizarre Republican Palace, built in the despot's favored Mesopotamian Fascist style. He was businesslike, determined and self-effacing. But the setting, an ornate monument to a tyrant, seemed to capture all the irreconcilable contradictions of his role.

Mr. Bremer's mission was to bring freedom and democracy to Iraq. Yet he proposed rule"of the people, by the people and for the people" from a palace inside a sprawling fortress known as the Green Zone, where he was severed from contact with the life of average Iraqis.

"We don't do empire," Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld declared memorably after the first phase of the war. But Mr. Bremer was obliged to do something that looked very much like it. He directed political affairs, doled out contracts, drafted regulations and discussed the next military move with American commanders at the palace - all in a country where hostility could not be tamed and that was not and would never be his.

Here, perhaps, was the core of the problem: the United States seldom, if ever, looked more like an empire in a 19th-century British guise than over the 14 months of Mr. Bremer's rule. Indeed, the extent of America's wealth, firepower and cultural influence today gives it a dominance that almost certainly exceeds any achieved by Britain, even at the height of its power.

In Iraq, America's use of its power was blunt. This was not consensual hegemony, or empire by invitation, or rule through surrogates, but the direct hand of President Bush's proconsul placed on every significant lever of Iraqi power. That the rule had a goal declared noble by the United States scarcely seemed to matter.

Yes, the United States ruled over Cuba and the Philippines after the Spanish-American War, but it retreated from Cuba quickly enough and from the Philippines in 1946. Yes, the United States governed and remade Germany and Japan after 1945, but the consensus around that enterprise after World War II was overwhelming. Yes, the United States, during the cold war, was ready to show it would punish defectors from the Western camp, and did so in Chile and elsewhere. But there were two empires then.

"When we had half the world and the other guys were really nasty, our imperial power was often seen as a good thing," said Charles S. Maier, a historian at Harvard."But when you are one of one, it looks less attractive and more conspicuous."

Certainly, American rule of Iraq has often looked heavy-handed. So it is not surprising that the United States' presence there, which endures in the form of more than 130,000 troops, has prompted a lively debate over whether the United States is today an empire. Views have ranged from an embrace of the label to outrage....