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3 Bush: In the footsteps of
Napoleon By Juan Cole
French Egypt and American Iraq can be
considered bookends on the history of modern
imperialism in the Middle East. The Bush
administration's already failed version of the
conquest of Iraq is, of course, on everyone's
mind; while the French conquest of Egypt, now more
than two centuries past, is all too little
remembered, despite having been led by Napoleon
Bonaparte, whose career has otherwise hardly
languished in obscurity.
There are many
eerily familiar resonances between the two
misadventures, not least among
them that both began with supreme arrogance and
ended as fiascoes. Above all, the leaders of both
occupations employed the same basic political
vocabulary and rhetorical flimflammery, invoking
the spirit of liberty, security, and democracy
while largely ignoring the substance of these
concepts.
The French general and the
American president do not much resemble one
another - except perhaps in the way the prospect
of conquest in the Middle East appears to have put
fire in their veins and in their unappealing
tendency to believe their own propaganda (or at
least to keep repeating it long after it became
completely implausible).
Both leaders
invaded and occupied a major Arabic-speaking
Muslim country; both harbored dreams of a "Greater
Middle East"; both were surprised to find
themselves enmeshed in long, bitter, debilitating
guerrilla wars. Neither genuinely cared about
grassroots democracy, but both found its symbols
easy to invoke for gullible domestic publics.
Substantial numbers of their new subjects quickly
saw, however, that they faced occupations, not
liberations.
My own work on Napoleon's
lost year in Egypt began in the mid-1990s, and I
had completed about half of Napoleon's Egypt:
Invading the Middle East before September 11,
2001. I had no way of knowing then that a book on
such a distant, scholarly subject would prove an
allegory for Bush's Iraq War. Nor did I guess that
the United States would give old-style colonialism
in the Middle East one last try, despite clear
signs that the formerly colonized would no longer
put up with such acts and had, in the years since
World War II, gained the means to resist them.
The republic militant goes to war
In June of 1798, as his enormous flotilla
- 36,000 soldiers, thousands of sailors, and
hundreds of scientists on 12 ships of the line -
swept inexorably toward the Egyptian coast, the
young General Napoleon Bonaparte issued a
grandiose communique to the bewildered and seasick
troops he was about to march into the desert
without canteens or reasonable supplies of water.
He declared, "Soldiers! You are about to undertake
a conquest, the effects of which on civilization
and commerce are incalculable."
The
prediction was as tragically inaccurate in its own
way as the pronouncement George W Bush issued some
two centuries later, on May 1, 2003, also from the
deck of a great ship of the line, the aircraft
carrier the USS Abraham Lincoln. "Today," he said,
"we have the greater power to free a nation by
breaking a dangerous and aggressive regime. With
new tactics and precision weapons, we can achieve
military objectives without directing violence
against civilians."
Both men were
convinced that their invasions were announcing new
epochs in human history. Of the military vassals
of the Ottoman Empire who then ruled Egypt,
Napoleon predicted: "The Mameluke beys
[emirs or officials] who favor exclusively English
commerce, whose extortions oppress our merchants,
and who tyrannize over the unfortunate inhabitants
of the Nile, a few days after our arrival will no
longer exist."
Napoleon's laundry list of
grievances about them consisted of three charges.
First, the beys were, in essence, enablers
of France's primary enemy at that time, the
British monarchy which sought to strangle the
young French republic in its cradle. Second, the
Egyptian rulers were damaging France's own
commerce by extorting taxes and bribes from its
merchants in Cairo and Alexandria. Third, the
Mamluks ruled tyrannically, having never been
elected, and oppressed their subjects whom
Napoleon intended to liberate.
This holy
trinity of justifications for imperialism - that
the targeted state is collaborating with an enemy
of the republic, is endangering the positive
interests of the nation, and lacks legitimacy
because its rule is despotic - would all be
trotted out over the subsequent two centuries by a
succession of European and American leaders
whenever they wanted to go on the attack. One
implication of these familiar rhetorical turns of
phrase has all along been that democracies have a
license to invade any country they please,
assuming it has the misfortune to have an
authoritarian regime.
Bush, of course, hit
the same highlights in his "mission accomplished"
speech, while announcing on the Abraham Lincoln
that "major combat operations" in Iraq "had
ended". "The liberation of Iraq," he proclaimed,
"is a crucial advance in the campaign against
terror. We've removed an ally of al-Qaeda, and cut
off a source of terrorist funding."
He put
Saddam Hussein's secular, Arab nationalist Ba'ath
regime and the radical Muslim terrorists of
al-Qaeda under the sign of September 11, 2001,
insinuating that Iraq was allied with the primary
enemy of the United States and so posed an urgent
menace to its security. (In fact, captured Ba'ath
Party documents show that Saddam's fretting
security forces, on hearing that Abu Musab
al-Zarqawi had entered Iraq, put out an all points
bulletin on him, imagining - not entirely
correctly - that he had al-Qaeda links.) Likewise,
Bush promised that Iraq's alleged "weapons of mass
destruction" (which existed only in his own
fevered imagination) would be tracked down, again
implying that Iraq posed a threat to the interests
and security of the US, just as Napoleon had
claimed that the Mamluks menaced France.
According to the president, Saddam's
overthrown government had lacked legitimacy, while
the new Iraqi government, to be established by a
foreign power, would truly represent the conquered
population. "We're helping to rebuild Iraq, where
the dictator built palaces for himself, instead of
hospitals and schools. And we will stand with the
new leaders of Iraq," Bush pledged, "as they
establish a government of, by, and for the Iraqi
people."
Napoleon, too, established
governing councils at the provincial and national
level, staffing them primarily with Sunni
clergymen, declaring them more representative of
the Egyptian people than the beys and emirs
of the soldiery who had formerly ruled that
province of the Ottoman Empire.
Liberty
as tyranny For a democracy to conduct a
brutal military occupation against another country
in the name of liberty seems, on the face of it,
too contradictory to elicit more than hoots of
derision at the hypocrisy of it all. Yet, the
militant republic, ready to launch aggressive war
in the name of "democracy", is everywhere in
modern history, despite the myth that democracies
do not typically wage wars of aggression.
Ironically, some absolutist regimes, like those of
modern Iran, were remarkably peaceable, if left
alone by their neighbors.
In contrast,
republican France invaded Belgium, Holland, Spain,
Germany, Italy, and Egypt in its first decade
(though it went on the offensive in part in
response to Austrian and Prussian moves
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