Imperial Histories/Imperial Tragedy; or, America's Middle East

LT. STUDDARD:

With all due respect sir, atheists make the best historians.

COL. JOHNS:

No, deconstructionists make the best historians.

LT. STUDDARD:

Sir, I’m not sure that even makes sense.

— Adriano Shaplin, Pugilist Specialist

ATOSSA:

O vivid dream that lit the darkness of my sleep,

How clearly you forewarned me of calamity!

And, Councillors, how lightly you interpreted!

— Aeschylus, The Persians

Although the warning has classical antecedents, that we ignore history at our peril stands as one of the most familiar axioms of modernity. The lesson seems so hackneyed as to suffer ready dismissal even in its more ominous formulation — that those who remain ignorant of history are doomed to repeat it. Doomed indeed: Our lack of reflection on the maxim enacts the very admonition it would offer.

Though they differ in scope and emphasis, Mahmood Mamdani’s Good Muslim, Bad Muslim and Rashid Khalidi’s Resurrecting Empire both ask us to pause and to reflect on the surprising careers of America’s many Middle Eastern wars, because the ignored “history” that our emptied maxims refer to is more slippery than we could ever imagine. Mamdani confines himself to American policies and interventions across the globe during the decades of the Cold War in order to understand the roots of terrorism. He starts with a much-invoked distinction in this “post-9/11” rhetorical climate: that between “good Muslims” — those open to secularism, religious tolerance, and the West — and “bad Muslims,” who are so mired in their “culture” or perhaps in economic disadvantage as to perceive terror as the only solution to their plight. Mamdani dismisses such “culture talk” as masking a profound politicization of Islam through encounters with American foreign policy initiatives, particularly during the Reagan era. Khalidi, by contrast to Mamdani’s global scope but briefer historical span, takes a longer-term view of European and American imperialisms¹ in a single region, the Middle East. Khalidi adopts as his especial concern the fraught histories of Western intervention during the twentieth century. British, French, and American activities in the Middle East ultimately exposed occidental yammerings about the need for greater democratization and constitutionalism as mere fluff insofar as democratic concerns always lost out to Western economic and geopolitical interests, especially Americans’ and Europeans’ dependency on oil.

Although only Khalidi explicitly assumes it as a grand theme, we can learn much from both authors about the tragic infelicity of history. Reading them together, one arrives at the conclusion that imperial histories have become imperial tragedy because America, afflicted by a tragic historical triumphalism, refuses to examine the historically overdetermined deficit between the speech acts it intends to send (“democracy,” “liberation”) and what is actually received by those performatives’ audience (“imperialism,” “occupation”). This unexamined deficit is tragically costing thousands upon thousands of lives.

Ignorant to the outrageous fortunes of signification, America, imagining itself as world-historical democratic liberator, has inadvertently cast itself in a pre-existing role as imperialist occupier. This came as a rude surprise to many in the American military and executive establishment who, judging by their words and deeds since the beginning of the current hostilities with Iraq in 2003, so desperately wanted to believe their intervention a unique event. If there is anything that world leaders may learn from “deconstructionists” as regards history, though, it is that there is no such thing as an unprecedented event. The walls that would mark off the supposedly unique event or sign from historical context and contingency do not exist. Hence, the American Occupation of Iraq will always have been available to pre- and re-iteration: America as Israel in Palestine, as Britain in Iraq and Transjordan, as Napoleonic France in Egypt and Syria, as the US...