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2 America's Opium War By Dmitry Shlapentokh
After the US
congressional election last November, President
George W Bush gave the impression that nothing had
really changed in Iraq and "there is no
alternative but victory". This might be said by
the leader of any country engaged in war; he or
she would proclaim that "there is no alternative
but victory" and that "there is a steady
improvement in the military situation".
Americans who are old enough can remember
that the same statements were made during the
Vietnam War. Even when all
those
at the top in Washington were quite sure that the
war was lost, they proclaimed that there was
"light at the end of the tunnel".
Democrats, who this month became the
majority in both the House of Representatives and
the Senate, hate to be seen as defeatists. And
they proclaim that they also wish that victory
could be achieved. The war just needs a new
strategy, a "fresh look" and new people. But they
do hold that the troops should be withdrawn in the
foreseeable future, regardless of the situation on
the ground.
Secretary of defense Donald
Rumsfeld's departure, as well as the departure of
John Bolton, the US ambassador to the United
Nations (who regards the UN as an outdated,
corrupt bunch of cronies who live at the expense
of American taxpayers), and the ambassador in
Baghdad, Zalmay Khalilzad (who recently again
assured Congress that victory was at hand),
indicates for any observer not bamboozled by
propaganda that the "patient", meaning the war, is
terminally ill.
No one can predict its
departure for the other world, and of course the
"doctors" proclaim that death is just a new form
of life, that is, defeat is just a peculiar form
of victory. Still, regardless of
political/linguistic equilibrists, the signs of
defeat are clear.
The end of the war
certainly will inspire historians and political
analysts to find analogous events. In fact, there
are already quite a few who have engaged in
comparisons between the present and the past.
Europeans, especially the German left, compare
Bush to Adolf Hitler and recently launched legal
action against Rumsfeld as a war criminal. In
their view, US defeat could be compared to the
defeat of Nazi Germany.
This assumption
is, of course, pure nonsense. A national-socialist
United States would have followed the road of Nazi
"socialism", with strict state control over the
major industries and banks bordering on
nationalization, the practical end of the stock
market, and socialized medicine and a wide
protective net. And, of course, such a state would
have reinstated the draft, which would have
dispatched the feminist left, a dedicated fighter
against "hegemonic discourse", and the prosperous
conservative bankers to the same foxholes in Iraq
or Afghanistan.
Others - actually quite a
few others - see the situation as analogous to the
Vietnam or Korean War. This analogy also seems not
to work. In Vietnam, the US faced not just the
Vietcong but hundreds of thousands of North
Vietnamese regulars; in Korea, it faced not just a
huge North Korean army but millions of Chinese
"volunteers".
In Iraq, by contrast, the US
is faced with at most a few thousand active
fighters. This puny force has confronted almost
150,000 Americans and allies and, at least
nominally, hundreds of thousands of Iraqi troops,
paramilitary and police and held them to a
standoff. And for every dollar spent by
insurgents, literally billions have been spent by
US taxpayers.
Whereas these historical
comparisons have not worked, the Opium War at the
beginning of the 19th century between China and
Britain does provide an apt analogy.
Imperial China as the modern US To understand this comparison, we can take a
quick look at imperial China before the Opium War.
It was an enormous state that exercised the most
profound influence over Southeast Asia. From the
17th century until almost the middle of the 19th,
the Qing Dynasty had experienced no serious
military setback.
On the contrary, the
empire expanded in all directions and became one
of the biggest empires in history, in both numbers
of people and area. The Chinese state had huge
resources, so the defeat in the Opium War, in
which it confronted just a few British ships, was
a great surprise. The defeat exposed not just
China's military weakness but the weakness of the
entire Qing social/economic machinery. Why did
this happen?
The reason for defeat Those who elaborate on the debacle point out
that the major reason was self-centeredness. The
elite regarded any outsider as a barbarian who
could hardly teach the Chinese anything. The
entire Chinese society, the mandarins and the
populace, believed that its organization was the
best of all possible arrangements.
It was
not the Chinese who should embrace the foreigners'
way of life but the foreign barbarians who should
follow the Chinese. The reason for such a stubborn
refusal to study anything new was simple: radical
innovations would endanger the privileges of the
ruling bureaucracy - the mandarins.
And
even the Opium War did not lead to much change in
this system. The attempt to change it in 1898
failed, and the mandarins and the Dowager Empress
Cixi decided instead to incite the mobs against
foreigners, blaming them for the increasingly
painful problems of Chinese society. The
pogrom-type violence against foreigners known as
the Boxer Rebellion led to China's defeat and
humiliation, and the 1911-12 revolution led to
collapse and disintegration.
One might
assume that Oriental mandarins have nothing to do
with the US, which projects an image to the
outside world of an
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