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3 Bush: In the footsteps of
Napoleon By Juan Cole
to invade France). The United
States attacked Mexico, the Spanish Empire, the
Philippines, Haiti and the Dominican Republic in
just the seven-plus decades from 1845 to the eve
of the US entry into World War I.
Freedom
and authoritarianism are nowadays taken to be
stark antonyms, the provinces of heroes and
monsters. Those closer to the birth of modern
republics were comforted by no such moral clarity.
In Danton's Death, the young Romantic
playwright Georg
Buchner depicted the radical
French revolutionary and proponent of executing
enemies of the Republic, Maximilien Robespierre,
whipping up a Parisian crowd with the phrase, "The
revolutionary regime is the despotism of liberty
against tyranny."
And nowhere has liberty
proved more oppressive than when deployed against
a dictatorship abroad; for, as Buchner also had
that famed "incorruptible" devotee of state terror
observe, "In a republic only republicans are
citizens; royalists and foreigners are enemies."
That sunlit May afternoon on the USS
Abraham Lincoln, Bush seconded Buchner's
Robespierre. "Because of you," he exhorted the
listening sailors of an aircraft carrier whose
planes had just dropped 1.6 million pounds of
ordnance on Iraq, "our nation is more secure.
Because of you, the tyrant has fallen, and Iraq is
free."
Security for the republic had
already proved ample justification to launch a war
the previous March, even though Iraq was a poor,
weak, ramshackle Third World country, debilitated
by a decade of sanctions imposed by the United
Nations and the United States, without so much as
potable drinking water or an air force. Similarly,
the Mamluks of Egypt - despite the sky-high taxes
and bribes they demanded of some French merchants
- hardly constituted a threat to French security.
The overthrow of a tyrannical regime and
the liberation of an oppressed people were
constant refrains in the shipboard addresses of
both the general and the president, who felt that
the liberated owed them a debt of gratitude.
Napoleon lamented that the beys "tyrannize
over the unfortunate inhabitants of the Nile"; or,
as one of his officers, Captain Horace Say,
opined, "The people of Egypt were most wretched.
How will they not cherish the liberty we are
bringing them?" Similarly, Bush insisted, "Men and
women in every culture need liberty like they need
food and water and air. Everywhere that freedom
arrives, humanity rejoices; and everywhere that
freedom stirs, let tyrants fear."
Not
surprisingly, expectations that the newly
conquered would exhibit gratitude to their foreign
occupiers cropped up repeatedly in the dispatches
and letters of men on the spot who advocated a
colonial forward policy. Bush put this
dramatically in 2007, long after matters had not
proceeded as expected: "We liberated that country
from a tyrant. I think the Iraqi people owe the
American people a huge debt of gratitude. That's
the problem here in America: they wonder whether
or not there is a gratitude level that's
significant enough in Iraq."
Liberty in
this two-century old rhetorical tradition,
moreover, was more than just a matter of rights
and the rule of law. Proponents of various forms
of liberal imperialism saw tyranny as a source of
poverty, since arbitrary rulers could just usurp
property at will and so make economic activity
risky, as well as opening the public to crushing
and arbitrary taxes that held back commerce.
The French quartermaster Francois Bernoyer
wrote of the Egyptian peasantry: "Their dwellings
are adobe huts, which prosperity, the daughter of
liberty, will now allow them to abandon." Bush
took up the same theme on the Abraham Lincoln:
"Where freedom takes hold, hatred gives way to
hope. When freedom takes hold, men and women turn
to the peaceful pursuit of a better life."
'Heads must roll' In both 18th
century Egypt and 21st century Iraq, the dreary
reality on the ground stood as a reproach to, if
not a wicked satire upon, these high-minded
pronouncements. The French landed at the port of
Alexandria on July 1, 1798. Two and a half weeks
later, as the French army advanced along the Nile
toward Cairo, a unit of General Jean Reynier's
division met opposition from 1,800 villagers, many
armed with muskets. Sergeant Charles Francois
recalled a typical scene. After scaling the
village walls and "firing into those crowds",
killing "about 900 men", the French confiscated
the villagers' livestock - "camels, donkeys,
horses, eggs, cows, sheep" - then "finished
burning the rest of the houses, or rather the
huts, so as to provide a terrible object lesson to
these half-savage and barbarous people".
On July 24, Napoleon's Army of the Orient
entered Cairo and he began reorganizing his new
subjects. He grandiosely established an Egyptian
Institute for the advancement of science and gave
thought to reforming police, courts and law. But
terror lurked behind everything he did. He wrote
General Jacques Menou, who commanded the garrison
at the Mediterranean port of Rosetta, saying, "The
Turks [Egyptians] can only be led by the greatest
severity. Every day I cut off five or six heads in
the streets of Cairo ... To obey, for them, is to
fear." (Mounting severed heads on poles for
viewing by terrified passers-by was another method
the French used in Egypt ...)
That August,
the Delta city of Mansura rose up against a small
French garrison of about 120 men, chasing them
into the countryside, tracking the blue coats down
and methodically killing all but two of them. In
early September, the Delta village of Sonbat,
inhabited in part by Bedouin of the western Dirn
tribe, also rose up against the Europeans.
Napoleon instructed one of his generals, "Burn
that village! Make a terrifying example of it."
After the French army had indeed crushed the
rebellious peasants and chased away the Bedouins,
General Jean-Antoine Verdier reported back to
Napoleon with regard to Sonbat, "You ordered me to
destroy this lair. Very well, it no longer
exists."
The most dangerous uprisings
confronting the French were, however, in Cairo. In
October, much of the city mobilized to attack the
more than 20,000 French troops occupying the
capital. The revolt was especially fierce in the
al-Husayn district, where the ancient al-Azhar
madrassa (or seminary) trained 14,000
students, where the city's most sacred mosque
stood, and where wealth was concentrated in the
merchants and guilds of the Khan al-Khalili
bazaar. At the same time, the peasants and
Bedouins of the countryside around Cairo rose in
rebellion, attacking the small garrisons that had
been deployed to pacify them.
Napoleon put
down this Egyptian "revolution" with the utmost
brutality, subjecting urban crowds to artillery
barrages. He may have had as many rebels executed
in the aftermath as were killed in the fighting.
In the countryside, his officers launched
concerted campaigns to decimate insurgent
villages. At one point, the French are said to
have brought 900 heads of slain insurgents to
Cairo in bags and ostentatiously dumped them
before a crowd in one of that city's major squares
to instill residents with terror. (Two centuries
later, the American public would come to associate
decapitations by Muslim terrorists in Iraq with
the ultimate in barbarism, but even then hundreds
such beheadings were not carried out at once.)
The American deployment of terror against
the Iraqi population has, of course, dwarfed
anything the French accomplished in Egypt by
orders of magnitude. After four mercenaries, one a
South African, were killed in Fallujah in March of
2004 and their bodies desecrated, Bush is alleged
to have said "heads must roll" in retribution.
An initial attack on the city faltered
when much of the Iraqi government threatened to
resign and it was clear major civilian casualties
would result. The crushing of the city was,
however, simply put off until after the American
presidential election in
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