In Dreams of Empire, Tony Judt explores how “the world has changed in ways that make imperial power uniquely difficult to sustain”:
In the first place, it is hard to be an imperial democracy. Given the choice, voters are reluctant to pay the full cost of sustaining an empire. In a democratic setting the sentiment that money might be better spent at home can be more easily exploited by political opponents, especially when expensive postwar “stabilization and reconstruction” (i.e., nation-building) is at stake. That is why US administrations have sought to underwrite overseas adventures (first in Vietnam and now in Iraq) by borrowing money rather than taxing the American citizenry, and have tried, so far as possible, to outsource — i.e., privatize — the unglamorous nation-building part.
Moreover, the US is handicapped when it comes to exporting the image of its own democratic virtues: because it has rather too many undemocratic allies (Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, and Uzbekistan come to mind) and because America does not always regard democracy as an unalloyed virtue if it produces the wrong results. Open elections in Iraq or Palestine right now would produce outcomes wholly unwelcome in Washington, as they have done or threatened to do in other places at other times. The British and the French, not to mention the Russians, did not have this problem: whatever “values” they were exporting, universal suffrage was not one of them.
Secondly, it is almost impossible to practice empire in a world of instantaneous mass media transmission. Imperial control is violent. Colonization, as the Marquis de Gervaisis observed apropos of France’s seizure of Algeria back in the 1830s, unavoidably entails “the expulsion and extermination of the natives.” But most people at home in the imperial metropole never saw that. Not so today.
To watch crimes being enacted is very different from reading about them after the fact. That is why Bill Clinton was forced into the Balkans in 1995, once the images from Bosnia had become daily fare on American television. There is a good reason why Washington now “embeds” reporters and looks with disfavor upon the independent Qatar-based al-Jazeera television network (whose equipment we damaged in both Kabul and Baghdad and which the sovereign authorities in Iraq have now temporarily banned) — the same reason the Bush administration severely restricts visual coverage of American casualties in Iraq.
The crimes of Abu Ghraib were as nothing set against what King Leopold of Belgium did to his Congolese slave laborers or the British massacre of 379 civilians at Amritsar in the Punjab in 1919. The difference is that everyone has seen what happened at Abu Ghraib. We don’t know how ordinary Belgians would have responded to seeing what their government was doing in central Africa; but in any case our own sensibilities are heightened. When the inevitable dirty work of exercising power over reluctant foreigners — expropriation, violence, corpses — is available in real time for all to see, the case for empire becomes a lot harder to sell.
Thirdly, the US cannot be an effective empire precisely because it comes in the wake of all the other empires before it and must pay the price for their missteps as well as its own. The French had been to Vietnam before the US got there. The Russians (and before them the British) have been to Afghanistan. And everyone has been to the Middle East. When Donald Rumsfeld assured his troops in Baghdad that
unlike many armies in the world, you came not to conquer, not to occupy, but to liberate, and the Iraqi people know this [emphasis added]
he was decidedly unoriginal. That’s what the British General Stanley Maude said in Baghdad ninety-seven years earlier (“Our armies do not come into your cities and lands as conquerors or enemies, but as liberators”) — not to mention Napoleon Bonaparte’s proclamation upon occupying Alexandria in 1798:
Oh Egyptians… I have not come to you except for the purpose of restoring your rights from the hands of the oppressors.