Summary
Title: Resurrecting Empire: Western Footprints and America’s Perilous Path in the Middle East
Author: Rashid Khalidi
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
ISBN: 0807002348
Pro:
• Strong arguments for why America’s course of action is flawed
• Passionate account of recent Middle Eastern history
Con:
• Book contains some glaring errors, due perhaps to author’s passion and prejudices
Description:
• History of Western imperialism in the Middle East
• Explanation of how Western involvement in the region has caused rather than solved problems
• Argues that American military intervention will make things worse, not better
Book Review
What reason do we have to think that America’s current program in Iraq and neighboring countries will do any better than earlier efforts by Britain and France? What, if anything, are we doing to ensure that the mistakes of the past are not repeated? These are a couple of the themes of Rashid Khalidi’s book Resurrecting Empire: Western Footprints and America’s Perilous Path in the Middle East. The Edward Said Chair in Arab Studies and director of the Middle East Institute at Columbia University raises the specter of an American empire that is doomed to failure, describing how similar situations were badly handled in the past and the ways in which we are simply making the same errors again.
There are two basic aspects to Khalidi’s position that America is becoming an imperial power, even if not a colonial power. The first involves America’s decision to go to war in Iraq in the first place. Traditionally Americans have prided themselves on the principle that they did not go to war unless forced to as a last resort — for example, when attacked themselves. Unlike European nations, Americans did not normally launch military adventures abroad to capture territory and subjugate others.
This image of America was never accurate, but it was more often true than not. In Iraq, though, we are seeing the “not” coming to the fore again. Khalidi rejects the argument that Iraq was an immediate threat and describes the invasion as a war of choice rather than necessity.
Khalidi’s second point is that America has assumed for itself the task of “democratizing” Iraq and, through it, the rest of the Middle East. Most Americans would regard this as a laudable goal and would not see any connection between this and the colonialism of European imperial powers. This is where Americans’ ignorance of history is an issue because European colonialism was never simply about creating colonies.
European politicians and intellectuals told themselves and others that the colonial enterprise was altruistic, serving to bring civilization to the barbarous peoples of the world. It may be that such claims were more rationalizations of colonial policy than genuine feelings of altruism — of course, the American neoconservatives preaching the good news of democracy in the Middle East do not themselves have a long record of promoting this goal, so the charge of rationalization could just as well be leveled here as well.
- “Before the president’s sudden embrace of democracy in the Middle East, the actions of these and other closely allied countries rarely provoked the ire of the Bush administration, or indeed of earlier administrations. ...[T]he overall American record in the area of the promotion of democracy and human rights in the Middle East has in fact been a poor one since the United States became a major power there after World War II.“
The point is not so much that there has been a shift in American policy — or at least American rhetoric — but that there is an analogous attitude of arrogance in which the superior West insists that valuable civilization or democracy will only reach the Middle East if imposed through force of arms and military might. There are still people in the region who remember fighting the British and French so it should be expected that they will draw the obvious parallels and treat America as another imperial power.
