And now before our very eyes, 600 years later, Baghdad is close to being blown to bits by a nation a thousand times mightier than the Mongols. A United States of America so far without rival, inhabiting the peaks of every kind of power. Who can declare war on any nation it wants under the principle of pre-emptive war and say: "This is mine."
But America promises to be different. Iraq will be rebuilt and reconstructed. It will be freed. The passion and the balm of American democracy will swim upon the leavings of Saddam Hussein’s brutal dictatorship. And all will be well again under Pax Americana. For is not America a model for all the world, rich and militarily powerful beyond imagination? A land of the free and home of the brave? Its malls and shopping citadels beyond compare? On whose shores stand the world’s most famous beacon – the Statue of Liberty?
When a nation becomes too strong, too full of itself, shrugging off the sage counsel of its best friends and allies, believing only in its own wisdom, I start having my doubts.
Certainly, America cannot be too overly proud of its imminent conquest of Iraq. The spectacle is not sporting. It is that of Mike Tyson smashing Manny Pacquiao to kindling wood or, if you will, Muhammad Ali strangling a Barbie doll. Soon Baghdad will fall, and Iraq occupied by the conquering hordes of America. Here is where the real test will come. Will the occupant behave like the Archangel Gabriel? Or will the occupant behave like all conquerors in history behave – sink its power and culture like a knife into the conquered’s heart? After all, America’s war is against terrorism. And it would dig out terror in Iraq and Baghdad with a ferocity that could approximate the equally hideous face of counter terror.
Honestly, I still don’t know.
A student of history, this columnist is not easily gulled by the roseate catechism of conquerors. The great historian Arnold Toynbee plunged his verbal knife into the "parochialism and impertinence" of the West manifested in the "egocentric illusion" that the world revolved around it. Oswald Spengler too sneered at the "unit of history" theory, that there is "only one river of civilization, our own, and that all others are either tributary to it or lost in the desert sands," Fernand Braudel sought understanding of the "great cultural conflicts in the world, and the multiplicity of its civilizations." The Chinese, Islam, Hindu, Buddhist.
Now we quote Samuel Huntington who warned the late twentieth century, has "blossomed forth in the widespread and parochial conceit that the European civilization of the West is now the universal civilization of the world".
No, we don’t buy. In fact, what we are witnessing today is the start of the crackup of that "universal" European civilization. America, once of Europe, once a great and flourishing extension of the Old World, has insolently broken away. And in breaking away, America has turned its back on its once-proud creation, the United Nations. Pax Americana started in 1945. The end of the Second World War saw America, as another historian Paul Kennedy testified, "as the only country which became richer – in fact, much richer, rather than poorer because of the war." More than one-half of the world’s total manufacturing production took place in the USA. And the world’s capacity to kill and conquer – with arms.
"Economically, the world was its oyster," Kennedy wrote. "And Pax Americana had come of age."
To top it all, at the time, America possessed a monopoly of atomic bombs. Hiroshima, Nagasaki, in a twinkle, became atomic ash. And all the world shuddered at how the invisible atom could cause so much destruction.
So what followed was the erection of the battlements of empire. These were the conferences of Bretton Woods, the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (now the World Trade Organization), and a "laissez-faire system that inevitably worked to the advantage of the country in the most competitive position (the US)". Henry Luce of Time magazine exulted at the time: "American experience is the key to the future. America must be the older brother of nations in the brotherhood of man." That was hubris in grand manner.
After the conquest of Hitler, Mussolini, Franco, US leadership looked eastward and fairly exclaimed: "It is now our turn to bat in Asia!" Even as the world turned bipolar. Even as Russia too extended itself into empire, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics and beyond. Russia belched the near irresistible but failed siren song of Marxism: "From each according to his work, to each according to his needs." Even as China awakened from a sleep of 200 years. And Beijing’s breath blew far and wide.
What did the Soviet Union in was this: It was a military giant but an economic dwarf. It could never become a model for a Third World girding for what Adlai Stevenson said was the "revolution of rising expectations". A camel caravan, according to Nikita Khruschehev himself, loaded with food and provisions, would be stripped bare by hungry Soviet citizens barely after it had passed the outskirts of Moscow.
As we witness the war in Iraq, the crack-up of the Atlantic Alliance, the march of millions all over the world against America’s military intrusion into Iraq, it is easy to come to the conclusion of Samuel Huntington (The Clash of Civilizations And The Remaking of the World Order). He said the world may be "a well developed international system but at best only a primitive international society". Primitive is the defining world. What we hear more today are the sounds of strife in a human jungle than a world 2000 years after Jesus Christ bearing the scepter of peace and goodwill. And on the other side, we hear the piercing Islamic cry of "Allah Akhbar!" (Allah is great!) ploughing into the Middle East with remorseless resonance. Will the world ever know peace in our time?
Thus the intifada, the continuing slaughter of the innocents on both sides. This is what humankind has come to?
Even the faces of those who rule or seek to rule do not assure. President George W. Bush’s eyes and lips give him away. The words are velvet soft, meant to assure. But they come off like the low hiss of rattlesnakes that deal venom and nothing else. The visage of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, his whispered grit-jawed utterances comprise the top of a huge rock which, when turned, yields reptilia. Vice President Dick Cheney, likewise. Saddam Hussein, of course, has a face tilted like a wicked battlefield concealing land mines and weapons of mass destruction. Ariel Sharon and Yassir Arafat are the opposite sides of a coin minted in the darkest pits. Kim Jong-il of North Korea possesses probably the most horrendous leadership hair-do below which a simian face leers malice and malediction. And spits the threat of "total war".
We can almost point to the day and the hour that the world shifted.
This was September 11, 2001. Three suicide commercial aircraft manned by largely Muslim terrorists, pounded the guts of America by smashing their vehicles into the World Trade Center and Pentagon. America was stricken. Its centuries-old immunity from invasion blinked out like a busted headlight. About three thousand died. The shock turned into livid anger. The leadership packaged this anger well. It declared total war on international terror. The leadership’s fury had a Neanderthal warhead: "Those who are not for us are against us."
This was no longer the voice of Abraham Lincoln or George Washington or Franklin Delano Roosevelt. It sounded like a cry from Mein Kampf. A snarl from the cave. And it frightened everybody. It was the Old Testament’s "an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth." It was an America sounding and behaving like God. It was an America suddenly strange to the rest of the world which half believed in its munificence.
It was to many an America scratching off its hallowed republican visage and baring Dorian Gray with bloody daggers in his teeth.