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investment opportunities. But also those military ventures could promote the possibility of personal regeneration: moral, physical, even spiritual, through war. So religious longings for salvation combined with masculine anxieties about weakness, and issued in a vitalist worship of force to generate a transatlantic fascination with violence. By 1900, intellectual and political leaders on both sides of the Atlantic had begun to see war itself as a regenerative experience. Even the pacifist and anti-imperialist William James, after all, felt he had to come up with a moral equivalent for war-the implication was, of course, that war itself carries moral significance. One significant imperialist speaker from the time, a senator from Indiana, among the most influential advocates for empire and God's plan for America, in January 1900 demanded annexation of the Philippines as part of a larger global strategy. "The Philippines are only the beginning," he said, and I quote: "Just beyond the Philippines are China's illimitable markets. We will not retreat from either. We will not repudiate our duty in the orient. We will not renounce our part in the mission of the race of trustees under god in the civilization of the world, and we will move forward to our work. Not howling out regrets like slaves with their burdens, but with gratitude for a task worthy of our strength, and thanksgiving to almighty god that he has marked us as his chosen people henceforth to lead in the regeneration of the world." One could hardly find a more sweeping case for regeneration through empire.
But the most significant figure making these kinds of assertions in the early 20th century was Theodore Roosevelt: the focus of a contemporary cult in Washington, you may notice. George Bush himself, John McCain, David Brooks, people in and out of power, have recently converged on the consensus agreement that Roosevelt was a kind of model president, a model of national greatness in action. And I want to suggest to you that this is a bunch of nonsense and that the man was an overrated blowhard. He was involved with a lifelong romance with bloodletting, and he was constantly confusing, in what were very symptomatic ways, physical and moral courage, in what was part of a constant conflation of the individual and the nation. This kind of thing came up most often in the run-up to WWI when Roosevelt was constantly badgering Woodrow Wilson to go ahead and get involved. "Wilson is, I think, a timid man physically," Roosevelt wrote to his friend Cecil Spring Rise in 1914. Three years later he's saying the same thing: "He's a very cold and selfish man, a very timid man when it comes to physical danger." In response to the German request for negotiations in October of 1918 Roosevelt said, "let us dictate peace by the hammering guns and not chat about peace to the accompaniment of the clicking of typewriters." Internationalists, he believed, were a sorry crew. Their message appealed to "weaklings, illusionists, materialists, lukewarm Americans, and faddists of all the types that vitiate sound nationalism." Well, WWI ended these fantasies of regenerative war for a while, except among fascists. The striking thing, though, about WWII, the most necessary war in American history, was the absence of grandiose claims. Rather there was a kind of dominant mood of grim necessity, of let's get this dirty business over with and get home. And you can find this in everything from the cartoons of Bill Maiden to the poetry of Randall Jarrell.
During the Cold War we see a brief resurgence of the rhetoric of moral regeneration. Eisenhower himself in his inaugural address of 1952 poses the forces of light against the forces of darkness. But overall, what we see emerging out of the cold war confrontation is a strategy of containment rather than a rollback, under the influence of foreign policy thinkers like Reinhold Niebuhr, who has been cited here a good deal. Preemption was a right wing fantasy. And it prompted Senator Fulbright's prescient observation in 1966, when the Goldwater right was pressing for preemptive war against China to prevent it acquiring nuclear weapons, that a preemptive war in defense of freedom would surely destroy freedom, because one simply cannot engage in a barbarous action without becoming a barbarian, because one cannot defend human values by calculated and unprovoked violence without doing damage to the values one is trying to defend.
Of course, even as Fulbright was writing those words the Vietnam war was escalating. And also escalating was the rhetoric of the moral mission meant to justify it. And you can consult Vietnam veterans' memoirs on this and you will find abundant emphasis on the rhetoric of moral mission. Priests were telling their congregations, which included future Vietnam soldiers and veterans, that it's a good thing to kill communists. GIs were urged to believe that they were going over there to fight evil. Plain as it could be. Earlier than most contemporaries, Fulbright saw the hollowness of that mission and the futility behind the rhetoric. Even by 1966 the volume of bombs dropped on jungles and villages was already being compared to the bombing of German cities during WWII, and the counterinsurgency program was killing more innocent villagers than Viet Cong guerillas. In the face of this futility, apologists for the war had little to offer except bogus analogies to WWII. Despite official claims, it was soon apparent that South Vietnam in 1964 was not Poland in 1939, that Ho Chi Minh was not Hitler, and that Diem was not Winston Churchill. Then as now these analogies would have been farcical if they had not been so destructive, for example when the Johnson administration evoked the specter of another Munich to characterize the consequences of negotiating with the Viet Cong. Here you had the treatment of slight and superficial resemblances as if they were full-blooded analogies, Fulbright argued, as if the notion of history repeating itself were an adequate substitute for thinking rather than a history. In the absence of any actual arguments for the war critics were forced to demystify the rhetoric of the war-makers. "There is a kind of voodoo about American foreign policy," Fulbright wrote, "certain drums have to be beaten regularly to ward off evil spirits. Certain words must never be uttered except with derision. The word appeasement comes as near as any word can to summarize everything that is regarded by American policy makers as stupid, wicked, and disastrous. Like isolationism, it is meant to recall the war against fascism, the mere mention of which would end serious discussion." Again as Fulbright pointed out, Churchill himself maintained that "appeasement may be good or bad according to the circumstances. Appeasement from strength was magnanimous and noble and might be the surest and only path to world peace."
Well, even if no policy makers came to grips with Churchill's wisdom, the failure of American policy eventually became impossible to ignore. Fulbright's views gradually acquired legitimacy and, for a while in the 1970s, even encouraged a broader evaluation of imperial hubris. The waste of life in Vietnam led many Americans of all ages and social backgrounds, and even many members of Congress, to question the equation of power and virtue that had sustained the foreign policy of global intervention that had been in place since WWII. But that sort of self-questioning did not survive for long. Almost as soon as the last helicopter left the roof of the American embassy in Saigon, the embittered American right began to construct a narrative of American defeat. Like the tale told by German rightists in 1919, this was a story of a stab in the back. According to this fantastic account, the war effort was not thwarted on the battlefield but on the homefront by the anti-war movement and their allies in the liberal media. To our shame we Americans simply lacked the political will to back our boys to victory. So after years of inadequate support we finally packed them up and sent them home. A noble cause, in Ronald Reagan's phrase, "was undone by fainthearted liberals." This narrative made its way slowly into mainstream debate. At first it surfaced mainly in commercial entertainment, but soon the narrative began to seep into public discourse and policy discussion as well. Reagan set the tone that allowed this to happen. When he announced that it was morning in America he implied that once again assertions about the moral grandeur of America's world mission could be uttered without fear of evoking skepticism. Power and virtue were remarried in this resurgent rhetoric of redemption.
Still, there was that worrisome Vietnam syndrome, that vestigial reluctance to commit American troops overseas that allegedly required repudiation. Part of the reason it required repudiation was a growing American involvement in the Middle East to protect our access to oil. This was a bipartisan project. But the rest of the reason involved confronting the demon of national weakness. The first Gulf War promised to exorcise that demon but failed to do so. At least it failed to do so to the satisfaction of the Republican operatives and policy intellectuals who began calling themselves neoconservatives, and a smaller group of them who called themselves Vulcans. The Vulcans were led by Dick Cheney and Don Rumsfeld, both members of the Ford administration who had endured the humiliating spectacle of the last Americans leaving Saigon. When they took over foreign policy in the Bush administration, as reliable witnesses have testified, they were resolved from the outset to invade Iraq and unseat Saddam Hussein. There were many motives for this, but one was undoubtedly the urge to root out the Vietnam syndrome once and for all; to erase the memory of that humiliating defeat by doing it right this time. The post 9/11 atmosphere gave them the opportunity to construct a new narrative, one that, like its Cold war predecessor, once again justified military intervention abroad as a combination of self-defense and sanctified mission. The political success of this narrative required systematic lying-not only about the present: nonexistent weapons of mass destruction, the nonexistent connection between Saddam Hussein and al Quaeda-but also about the past, especially the Vietnam war. The story of the stab in the back suited the Bush Administration's purposes perfectly: it vindicated the purity and rationality of American war aims in Vietnam, resurrecting the fantasy that the special forces counterinsurgency strategy was on the verge of carrying the day, when the nation, its morality weakened by cowardly critics, lost its nerve. The narrative of the Vietnam war by now pervaded the punditocracy, and it provided a crucial subtext for backing the Iraq war. It's important to point out that protecting access to Mideast oil has been a bipartisan project promoted by Carter and Clinton as well as Reagan and the older Bush. Andrew Bacevich, who is himself a career military man and now a professor of political science at BU, has written a book that I recommend highly, called The New American Militarism. And in that book he argues that the American projection in to the Middle East has begun to constitute in his view a WW FV, that is, the war following the war. The current Bush administration did not start that war, but it has expanded that war catastrophically. Expansion required the excuse of 9/11 and the rewriting of recent history. It also required the recall of historical antecedence, the rhetoric of regenerative war which was brought up to a fever pitch by Teddy Roosevelt himself, now the cult hero of Washington, and the man that Bush decided to stand in front of when he was defending the domestic spying program. Interesting juxtaposition there.
This revival of regenerative war rhetoric also accompanies a rebirth of history, the history that allegedly ended in 1989 with the narrative of western progress and human mastery. As we know, reports of the death of history turned out to be premature. And nowhere has the revival of regenerative war rhetoric been more apparent than among the intellectuals and national security advisors cheering Bush on, including the liberal hawks who deploy a morally sensitive version of that same rhetoric. Michael Ignatieff, for example, tells us that "empire has become a precondition for democracy." And if that sounds Orwellian to you, good for you. He summons the US to "use interior power to strengthen respect for self-determination and to give states back to abused and oppressed people who deserve to rule for themselves." This is a man who can write interminable treatises about the American empire in the NY Times Magazine without once using the dread word capitalism. The neocons, however, are more blunt. They tell us-this is from a NY Times interview-that "small wars of conquest and uplift, like the one in Iraq, are an established tradition in American history and a damn fine one at that." Imposing the rule of law, property rights and other guarantees at gunpoint if need be. This is what these neocons say American foreign policy should be about. Michael Ledine, a fellow in Mideast affairs at the American Enterprise Institute, has this to say: "war promotes virility, character, virtue, while peace encourages servility, indolence, corruption, materialism and effeminate behavior." And this last he somewhat bafflingly applies to the Clinton administration. So here we are. We are back in the moral universe of Teddy Roosevelt, and it is not a pretty place. Once again fantasies of invulnerability underwrite dreams of regeneration through empire. Once again the reveries of old club men nodding off in their chairs and the middle aged intellectuals sitting poised at their keyboards. Once again the comfortable and culpable sing the praises of war while the vulnerable and innocent experience the exquisite impact of steel upon flesh.
Elshtain: I'm almost afraid to say anything for fear I'll get on Jackson's list of rogues and knaves, but at any rate, I think that if you're going to talk about inflated messianic rhetoric you've got to put Wilson there too. Really, Jackson, I think that your condemnation needs to be a bit more bipartisan. I think that the notion that we're in some unusually horrific moment, facing a constitutional crisis heretofore unknown and unparalleled, is overblown. Sorry, but sometimes people make these arguments to dramatize their own moment and their bravery in standing out against what they think is going on. And you know, for every claim about what's unprecedented I can point to all sorts of counter-examples. You don't have to go back to Lincoln, for example, on the issue of military commissions, which were used by FDR, as you know. So let's not make the argument that these are somehow unprecedented things. They're not. They are familiar throughout our history, and they involve clashes between the executive and the other branches. There's nothing really new in this. I did a masters paper on the war powers of the presidency, and the truth of the matter is that the Supreme Court has always been rather loath to lock horns with the president at a time of war. Now you might think that's a terrible thing, but its been a sort of standard feature of our history. So the present moment doesn't seem to me to be the worst that we have ever been in. God knows there are times one can point to in the past that seem to be far more laden with horrific possibilities for the future of the republic.
On the other hand, Jackson, I agree with you on this moral regenerative stuff. But I think that you've been dreadfully unfair to Michael Ignatieff with your throwaway line about empire. Those of you who know Ignatieff's work will know that before becoming an MP in Canada he was the director of the Carr Center for Human Rights at Harvard University, which is the center where Samantha Power wrote the prizewinning book on genocide, a Problem From Hell. And the overwhelming concern of the people at the Carr Center is precisely with the kinds of situations that Bernard-Henri has been describing, with atrocities, systematic slaughters, the sorts of things going on in the black holes of the world, and what can be done about them. And I think the point that Ignatieff was making in his NY Times piece was simply that all attempts to bring minimal institutional structure and order, and minimal civic decency, will fail if people are being killed with impunity. That a minimal requirement is some basic order so that folks are not being slaughtered in a chaotic situation. And the question is, how does one take that first step? The argument that Ignatieff is making in his work is very much in line with the current position that's being taken by the UN itself in the new mandate that I've been talking about, which is the responsibility to protect. Let me just give you a few lines from a genocide prevention report. "The responsibility to protect is the idea that atrocities that take place inside one country are the concern of us all. The UN's embrace of this idea has potentially huge impact for the world's poorest and most vulnerable." This constitutes a fundamental change in some reigning ideas of sovereignty and the notion that if it's happening within your own country you're simply invulnerable. That led to the view that Hussein's gassing of the Kurds was nobody else's business. As a result of this report, among other things, the EU is now working on the European rapid reaction force so that they at least might be capable of responding with rapid and decisive action to apply a fully coherent approach to the whole spectrum of crises that are talked about in the ability to protect document. The document also goes on to say, "only a small number of countries including the US, France, and Britain have the capacity to protect forces abroad, and a willingness to do so for humanitarian purposes." A new military capacity is being developed in Western countries equipped with light, highly mobile units linked by intelligence and communication to promote awareness, precision and effectiveness to improve the capacity for humanitarian intervention. Now if you agree that people should not be slaughtered with impunity, the question I think would be what is to be done and who is to do it? Jackson and I would agree that the problem with a messianic approach is that it presumes to fulfill certain ends without restraint. And without a kind of appropriate humility or a sense of the real gravity of the matter. But it's sad, I think, that those who are really struggling, as Ignatieff has been, with how to resolve these kinds of situations nonetheless come in for the kind of summary dismissal that we've heard here.
Massing: I don't know, Jean, that Ignatieff has been trashed all that unfairly. And really, it's hard not to feel that Jackson's observations on messianism are a lot more important than a throwaway line or two. And seriously, Jean, the problem with Ignatieff is, in spite of the fact that the Carr Center has been instrumental in pushing for the humanitarian interventions that most of us support, he has also helped discredit the whole notion of humanitarian intervention in general. That's no small thing, and it's not a casual dismissal of Ignatieff to point that out.
Elshtain: I still think you can't deal with Ignatieff in a sentence or two and put him in this long line of rogues and knaves. He deserves better than that. I do think that if the final result of the Iraq war is to discredit universalism and the possibility of further humanitarian intervention, then that will be a terrible price to pay. I don't think that that's a done deal, but I agree it's a genuine worry.
Schell: Ignatieff is a complex and admirable writer, but he's made very grave mistakes that are a source of much of the world's confusion, and that does tend to discredit the mission. Remember, we do have an administration-though Jean won't agree on this-that has put forth in the clearest most unvarnished terms what is definitely an imperial ambition. The ambition to be preeminent in military force so that all other counties can just go about their peaceful ways is a virtual definition of empire. What we need is a conception of humanitarian obligation, and an implementation of it, and instruments for implementing it, that are not imperial in character. That would entail a real fortifying of the international community, a building up of alliances. Let it be done under the auspices of the UN, though there are other instrumentalities that might be founded or that already exist. But to go that way means accepting some constraints. Sometimes you won't be able to do something because it won't be legitimized by the proper support of the international community. If we continue to think that only American empire is a precondition for global democracy we're not going to have democracy. And I don't think we're going to have empire either, because that too has been a flop. But that's another matter.
Lévy: I would like to respond to Jackson, first on the question of original sin. It's true, I believe, that the question of original sin is one of the main political questions confounding modernity. And you know, the stem cell of totalitarianism in all its forms-fascist, communist, fundamentalist-is the denial of original sin. I believe that the origin of any totalitarianism is the transformation of radical evil into a merely provisional illness. That is where catastrophe begins. The hypothesis of radical evil, the idea that there is a certain negativity embedded in the very core of humanity, in each of us, a negativity that we have to resist, but which will be ever-present, this idea is a sort of defense against the will to power, the will to purity. But the first gesture of any totalitarian is to say that radical evil doesn't exist. There is only a little illness, very human, caused by a precise identifiable virus, or microbe, which we totalitarians have identified. It's easy to see, and easy to cure. We have the good medicines; we have the magic elixir. Just suppress the Jews, if you are a Nazi. Just suppress the bourgeoisie, if you are communist. Just suppress the Jews again, and the Christians, and the bad Muslims, if you are a Muslim Brother of Egypt, or a Hamas fanatic. The first gesture of totalitarianism is to identify the source of illness and to exterminate it. Then they pretend to have a healthy body. So at the beginning, you have in totalitarianism the will to purity, and at the end the indomitable transformation of politics into a clinic, with the good or successful politician as a clinician. At the source of the will to power is the will to cure. And at the end a healthy body will know how to get rid of its impurities.
How not to think of Celine at this point, a writer who begins with a belief in radical evil and in original sin. When he traveled to the end of night that is the point of origin. He believes that there is a part of night which is absolutely impossible to delete, impossible to suppress, which is in the heart of every one of us. This Celine, this democrat Celine was saluted and welcomed by Sartre and others. He is a dark Celine. Then at the end of the '30s he remembers that his first job was to be a doctor, specializing in identifying viruses and curing the flesh. This was the Celine who in his youth wrote a famous medical thesis. And now, grown up, this Celine says of course! It is so easy. My despair about the heart of man was absurd. I have just to find the origin of my darkness-the origin of the darkness of the human species. There should be a virus and there should be an antidote against it. And so he says, the Jews. If we remove the Jews we will rid ourselves of the night. The Céline of the pamphlets is the one who turns politics into the clinic and, in his unique way, exemplifies the theology and politics which Jackson stressed for us.
But I am not persuaded at all, Jackson, by what you said about the question of empire. I listened to what you said with uneasiness. Number one: American empire. I know what you mean. The Vietnam War was the formative experience of my youth, my first political involvement. I was the creator in Paris of the Committee for Vietnam, a committee which was the base for militants who were against the Vietnam war in the French student movement. So we agree on that terrible war. But American empire? When I see the results of American imperialism throughout the last 50 years, I find it impossible, you know, to agree with you that there has been such a thing. Latin America? You look today at the situation of Latin America, look at the different leaders, from Chavez to Castro and others not so bad but still not acceptable to the Americans, and you say, surely, not a powerful, not a successful empire. When you see the imperial army of America you see, as in Iraq, that often the most difficult missions are carried out by private security companies. Strange for an imperial power, no? Strange again is that, as soon as this country with this so-called imperial army is asked to withdraw, usually it does. When America had some bases in Saudi Arabia all the Saudis had to do was demand withdrawal and it was done. Same again in the Philippines in 1991. So again a strange empire, a weak army, not the big triumphant imperial army. Think of the failures. Vietnam, Iraq, Somalia, Latin America and so on.
And strange also that if you look at American imperialism throughout the last sixty years and study the US operations abroad, it's rare to find anything but reluctance. When America intervened in Europe during WWII, you know better than I do that this was not really an expression of the will of American citizens or of the government. The Americans didn't have the will to do very much when confronted with Stalin. America won against Hitler but they could do nothing with Stalin. A great crime, really, or at least a defeat, that America had to leave to Stalin half of Europe. Ask the Czechs, ask the Poles, and they will say America made a deal immediately with the dictator Stalin and that this was not at all the policy of an imperial power. Can you deny that the first Gulf War was at the provocation of Hussein? You know, President Bush's father did not one morning while shaving himself say I am going to make a war with Saddam Hussein. And even the second war in Iraq, in many ways a tragedy, is not to be simply explained as an imperialist adventure. It was a bad reply to what Bush and Cheney and Rumsfeld thought was an offensive Muslim fundamentalism and, as others have said, a terrible misreading of the facts in the Middle East. But at the very least, Iraq shows us a very strange imperialism, not quite what we know from the past, where imperialism has had to do with conquest, initiative, staying power, effective functionaries.
Why is everything, then, so different with America? First, it may be that America has at its very core, its identity, something which prevents it from going to the end of its imperial aims, assuming it has any such aims. America is a decolonized nation. The origin of America is very important. The origin of America is anti-imperialist. The real empire was the English empire, and America was born after a war of liberation. This is in the genetic code of this country.
Number two, I think that this strange empire is strange because though there are some people here who really believe that America should rule the world, there are many others in the country who don't believe this. In France when we had an empire, a hundred percent of the political class embraced this program. Our grandfathers all believed that empire was just, whether they were on the left or the right, in the name of universalist values or whatever. In America it is far from being the same. Here many people hate the very idea of America being an empire. And that includes many on the right, where there is still a large isolationist wing. Those people believe that America should go abroad only when we have been hit, and then, after retaliating we should withdraw immediately. And so it is very hard to have a real imperialist policy with so many adverse forces inside the country.
And number three, and the most important: maybe America is not quite an empire because the time of empire is past. I would like to recommend a great book written by a friend of mine, an Italian author named Toni Negri, who wrote with an American author Empire. Negri was a master thinker of the extreme left which was at the edge of and sometimes inside the terrorist movement associated with the Red Brigades. He was the master thinker of the Red Brigades; he spent 15 years in exile in France and ten years in jail in Italy for that connection. In Empire he says that to continue to speak about empire in the old European way is to miss the reality of the relationships of power today. The old idea of an empire is the idea of a big nation-Portugal, England, France-defining itself by swallowing other parts of the world and imposing its rule. The model is center to periphery. This is a model of the Roman Empire. And Negri say s that today, with globalization, modernization, and multiplication of the sources of power, the fact is that a real source of power might well be a company rather than a state. Microsoft may be more important than any nation, even America. Big syndicates, big mafias, big associations of nations like G7 and G8 confront us with a new regime of domination, a system of power without any real center. Negri says that there is a risk to us if we continue to think in the old categories, where we don't pay attention to the power of huge medical trusts and pharmaceutical laboratories which can control the fate of large populations in Africa and elsewhere and with no real control by nations or imperial powers. We also maybe miss paying serious attention this way to the black holes. Maybe this is a separate discussion, and I'll have to come back to Skidmore College with Negri next time to debate this with my colleagues at this table.
Lears: There is a whole body of literature that distinguishes among various types of empire and certainly treats the American version as quite idiosyncratic and not at all conforming to the European model. I'm persuaded by several examples provided by Bernard. Nevertheless, one wouldn't want to deny that there is in the American model an element of the old style military occupation and control of territory from time to time. The Phillipines after all, were the site of a ten year war of resistance that has received virtually no coverage in American history textbooks. But that was a bloody and horrific war. I agree that there is and has been lots of bungling. And I agree, too, that there hasn't been a coherent ideology. I'll even say thank god we do have this tradition of lower case republicanism. The countertendency cited by Bernard is still alive, and I cherish that. And yet there is what Jonathan calls concentration of power, even if America is at best a kind of immaterial empire, one that can operate often without relying on military personnel. And certainly the privatization of the effort in Iraq is one of the most insidious aspects of it, because it is suspended from public scrutiny and allows policies to be conducted that the American public might want to know about and might want to debate and do something about. There is no accountability at all.
At the same time it's a good idea to cite an American military budget that exceeds that of the entire rest of the world. What is that being used for? We can come up with another word besides empire, but obviously our military is being used for projection of American power globally. Obviously ours is not the old style European empire. It's subtler and more complicated. Yes, there are men and women who can serve multinational corporations that have nothing to do with American interests and needs. And American troops can be deployed for corporate interests.
Lévy: What is one example of American troops serving a private interest?
Lears: Just take for one example the reconstruction of Baghdad and the role of Halliburton and other corporations.
Lévy: But you don't think, do you, that these operations were undertaken solely to allow for that? Okay, I agree that there is not a complete divorce between nationalism and the interests of multinational capital. But these relations are not very clear, and I am not ready to accept that America has soldiers in all parts of the world mainly because she wants to reinforce its companies. The causality in most of these places is not as clear as a simple economic argument would make it, though of course, Jackson, you didn't make a simple economic argument.
Lears: I agree that it's impossible to do justice here with a clear-cut systematic argument. But everyone can at least agree, I think, that we didn't go into Iraq principally to ensure that Muslim women won't have to wear headscarves any more. The fact is, we are in Iraq for a very long time. We are building permanent bases there, and though that is not something the media wants to talk about, it does really amount to a fairly regular army of occupation. People talk about not wanting a repeat of Vietnam War syndrome, but it's pretty clear that there won't be a corresponding Iraq War syndrome. We have ambitions for Iraq that won't allow us to get out of there for a long, long time.
But let me turn for a moment to Woodrow Wilson. I think in some ways Jean unfairly characterized him. There's no doubt that he was a messianic idealist and engaged in the ruthless suppression of civil liberties during WWI. On the other hand he was greatly more realistic than he's been given credit for, particularly with respect to the idea of an international organization and how it should work. He recognized that for the League of Nations to be more than a debating society it had to be able to abridge national sovereignty. Nations had to be willing to submit disputes to arbitration. He knew this was an idealistic goal but he was willing to try and move us and others toward that. Certainly Wilson was more realistic than Roosevelt about war. TR was genuinely in love with war while Wilson hated it. The whole point of the League of Nations, after all, no matter how inadequate it was, was to reduce the likelihood of war. It was part of Wilson's commitment which, in retrospect, you can denounce as hopelessly idealistic (he was certainly too rigid in his attempts to carry it out), but it was at least an attempt to reduce the likelihood of war.
Schell: I absolutely agree with Bernard that the time of empires is over. I actually wrote a book about it called The Unconquerable World. But even if you concede that at best America is a strange sort of creature, it has-as several people here have pointed out-some of the ambitions and marks of a sort of empire. We have moved, after all, into a new phase which is the militarization of the strange empire, call it what you will. And if it is failing, the reason is exactly as Bernard describes it, which is that the time of empire is over and that many people are learning to resist it. In time they kick out the imperial powers, and so I think we will leave Iraq and just leave our bases behind.
Massing: A member of our audience was speaking with me at the break a while ago about the origins of the US and the war against indigenous peoples that might be built into the American genetic code that Bernard was talking about. And there is no question, as this young man was saying, that the last century has been catastrophic for indigenous peoples on a global level. We see this in the black holes we've discussed, though maybe we haven't quite succeeded in tying those examples together with our focus on war in general and with the entire history of European and American imperialism, which has always involved a combination of military occupation, free trade, and missionization. The question, I think, or one question, is haven't we all along been committed to the idea of a civilizing mission, and is this not an aspect of humanitarian intervention? And in this way wouldn't it be fair to say that we are enmeshed in a history of violence that includes a humanitarianism that is in many ways an extension of the old civilizing mission? The young man I spoke with was eager that I set this question on the table, and I hope I've done it some justice.
Schell: Let me address the question with reference to the native Americans. Certainly the white settlers in America were an imperial power vis a vis the continent, though what unfolded was not of course in the classical European style of imperialism. In fact, what we got was something much more radical than that. It was ethnic cleansing. Extermination. Drive them out. So that the difficulties of European imperialism, which led in the end to failure, were "solved" in the case of the US by policies that were much more radical. Of course part of the reason was the Native Americans were much fewer in numbers than other indigenous populations, and spread out over a much greater space, and so this very radical solution was possible. But I do think, as you suggest, that the colonizing of the American continent was very important for the formation of the American character because, in many ways, it taught us the idea that war could be absolutely successful. You could go out there and accomplish your ends, though by a very brutal and extreme means. There was in this a kind of wiping the slate clean effect, as if America had been more or less pristine and untouched before the settlers arrived. That's what allowed for a projected idea of innocence. And I think the point here is that when the US does go abroad on an imperial mission, it doesn't do so in the same way the Europeans did, but does so with a claimed innocence that goes back to, or derives from, the very radical experience of turning the continent into the US, driving the Native Americans out, and pretending that nothing like a war of conquest or extermination had taken place.
Boyers: If no one objects, I'm going to ask Bernard to bring this conference to a conclusion.
Lévy: Conclude? Surely not. It is impossible to conclude this sort of discussion. But I'll begin to say something by remarking that we have all, obviously, been trying to find ways of discovering and speaking the truth. The pursuit of the truth, this effort to bear witness, oscillates constantly between two philosophies, one deriving from Plato, the other from Nietzsche. In Plato we have the old metaphysical conception of the truth as one, unique and perfect and at the disposal of those who have the strength and the will to go out of the cave and look at it. On the opposite side we have the negator, the one who denies the metaphysical ideal of the truth. Nietzsche says the truth does not exist. We have instead perspectives, interpretations. These are the two extremes, between which the witness, somebody who tries to do the task of man, must navigate. The reality is that truth exists, though not in the way that Plato said, and also that there are interpretations, but not in the sense that there is no core reality around which the witness revolves even if the truth remains invisible and unreachable.
About innocence, which has been invoked several times here: I see what you mean-Jackson, and Jonathan-when you say that this thematic is present in the American mind and in the American ideology. And yet I am not so sure that innocence is still the dominant aspect of American identity. I am not so sure. I have sometimes even the feeling that Americans are perhaps the most guilty people I know. I listened to what Jonathan Schell said and thought it was completely true, but what is a little amazing is that in the two years I spent here doing research for American Vertigo, frankly, I did not meet one average American who would deny that Americans should still be feeling guilty about the Indians. The fact that America, as democratic as it is, was built on a crime, is overwhelmingly prevalent, even if it would be denied by certain extremists who think America never did anything wrong. In my country most people don't acknowledge the idea that we committed crimes in our colonial empire. There is today a debate in France about whether there were some positive aspects to colonialism. Half of France still believes in that idea, which is frankly disgusting. In America the very different tendency to guilt is a kind of victory, I think, which was really achieved not only with the civil rights movement of the '60s, but with the victory of the political correctness movement. America is a country today where it's frankly very risky to utter a word of racism, to tell a bad joke against Jews, or blacks. America is a country where guilt has made such inroads in the very language that certain kinds of ugliness are not permissible. This to me is great. I believe it is a kind of progress and an achievement in spite of what some feel is an unnecessarily repressive regime. Language is, after all, the very place where domination and humiliation often do their damage. Of course a lot of people would like to speak as they would wish about blacks and Jews and Indians, but they don't. They complain about the censorship of language, but it is not censorship; call it instead civilization, or courtesy. The arrangement works in America better than in any European country, and that means to me that you are no longer the people of innocence you were before. Good. Admirable. I said critical things about America in this conference, but there are many wonderful things here. This, too, is important to say.
To conclude, I would say that though we have, all of us, disagreed about many things, we have tried to listen to each other without ever shying away from controversy. All of us, with our differences, agreed that humanitarian intervention and a version of universalism should be saved from the neocon rhetoric of humanitarian war which is intended to disguise their true aims.
My hope for this Salmagundi conference is that we can help with the task of our generation, which is to save universalism from the caricature and corruption which we have described here. Of course we know that the task needs a genuine multilateral enforcement of international law that can prevent some of the worst bloodbaths of our time. This is, in one sense, a task for diplomats and policy makers. But it is a task also for the intellectuals, and these debates show that we have a generation that can accomplish this. Thank you.
A conference on Bernard-Henri Levy's book, War, Evil, The End of History, and America Now, participated by the author, Jonathan Schell, Benjamin Barber, and Jean Elshtain, among others. Levy's book deals with places like Colombia, Sri Lanka, South Sudan, Burundi, the twin state of Rwanda, and considered an ideological assault against what he calls the aesthetics of war.
Copyright Skidmore College Spring 2008 | * This is the edited transcript of a conference that took place in March, 2006 at Skidmore College | *Bernard-Henri Levy, War, Evil, and The End of History (NY: Melville House, 2004) | BENJAMIN BARBER is a Distinguished Senior Fellow at Demos, as well as president and director of the international NGO, CivWorld. His seventeen books include Jihad vs. McWorld and, most recently, Consumed: How Markets Corrupt Children, Infantilize Adults and Swallow Citizens Whole | JEAN ELSHTAIN is Laura Spelman Rockefeller Professor of Social and Political Ethics in the Divinity School of the University of Chicago. Her books include Public Man, Private Woman, The Family in Political Thought, Meditations on Modern Political Thought, Women and War, Democracy on Trial, Augustine and the Limits of Politics, Real Politics, and New Wine in Old Bottles. ... CAROLYN FORCHÉ is Professor of English at Skidmore College and author of A Gathering of Tribes, The Country Between Us, The Angel of History and Blue Hour | PHILIP GLOTZBACH is President of Skidmore College | JACKSON LEARS is Editor of Raritan and Professor of History at Rutgers University. He is author of Something for Nothing: Luck in America, Fables of Abundance: A Cultural History of Advertising in America and No Place of Grace ... BERNARD-HENRI LÉVY's books available in English include Barbarism With A Human Face, Who Killed Daniel Pearl?, Sartre: The Philosopher of the Twentieth Century, War, Evil and The End of History and American Vertigo | MICHAEL MASSING is a contributing editor at the Columbia Journalism Review whose books include Now They Tell Us, The American Press and Iraq, and The Fix: Solving The Nation's Drug Problem | JONATHAN SCHELL is The Nation's peace and disarmament correspondent and the Harold Willens Peace Fellow at The Nation Institute. His books include The Fate of the Earth, The Unconquerable World: Power, Nonviolence and the Will of the People, The Real War, The Gift of Time and A Hole in the World . He is Visiting Professor at The Graduate Faculty of The New School University
Document SLMG000020080626e4410000l
The Banker: Supplement: Nigeria - A State Of Disrepair - The Dire State Of Nigeria's Transport And Power Sectors Are Hindering The Country's Growth. President Yar'Adua Has Made Tackling The Problem A Priority For His Administration But The Sheer Size Of The Task Make.
JOHN MCCARTHY

2,170 words

1 April 2008

The Banker

BKNA

English

(c) 2008 The Banker
Nigeria's transportation, utilities and communications infrastructure is extensive, but in many respects decrepit and often critically overburdened. The rehabilitation of existing infrastructure and its ongoing expansion has repeatedly been identified as one of the critical challenges facing the country's government. For this it will need foreign investment on a huge scale, as even the windfall oil revenues that the country has enjoyed in recent years are not equal to the task.
President Umaru Yar'Adua has vowed that his new administration will continue the infrastructure improvements begun by his predecessor Olesegun Obasanji. His budget for 2008 reflects the importance the government attributes to this, with some N225bn ($1.95bn) - nearly 7.8% of total expenditure - dedicated to the power sector alone.
Government investment infrastructure, however, represents only a small proportion of overall requirements. Private financing is therefore being sought from multiple directions. Domestically, second-tier banks such as First Bank of Nigeria have spotted lucrative financing opportunities that were once the sole domain of their top-tier competitors, establishing partnerships with Nigerian entrepreneurs tendering for major infrastructure contracts. For the time being, however, international investors backed by international banks still offer the greatest potential in terms of investment volume. They continue to tender for the vast range of government contracts, but in an era of increasing corporate environmental, social governance and auditing concerns, many have grown more risk-averse in a country that has become a byword for corruption.