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Jewish World Review Oct. 25, 2006 / 3 Mar-Cheshvan, 5767 America's brittle empire By Niall Ferguson http://www.JewishWorldReview.com | You would have thought 300 million Americans would be enough to rule the world — or at least a couple of medium-sized failed states. The population of Iraq is 27 million, that of Afghanistan 31 million. Yet the same week that the U.S. population officially passed the 300-million mark, we heard two startling admissions that testify to the scale of crisis facing Washington's unspoken empire. Asked Sunday on ABC's "This Week" program whether the situation in Iraq was comparable to that in Vietnam at the time of the 1968 Tet Offensive — an event popularly (though wrongly) perceived as the beginning of the end for the U.S. defense of South Vietnam — the president conceded the comparison "could be right." And on Thursday, the spokesman for the U.S. military command in Iraq confessed that the Army's latest effort to quell the escalating civil war in central Iraq "has not met our overall expectations of sustaining a reduction in the levels of violence" — military-speak for "has totally failed." A year ago, these admissions would have been headline news. Today, people just shrug. That Iraq is Washington's new "quagmire" has become conventional wisdom. But why should this be so? Less than a century ago, before World War I, the population of Britain was 46 million, barely 2.5% of humanity. And yet the British were able to govern a vast empire that encompassed an additional 375 million people, more than a fifth of the world's population. Why can't 300 million Americans control fewer than 30 million Iraqis? Three years ago, as the United States swept into Iraq, I wrote a book titled "Colossus," which offered a somber prediction, summed up in its subtitle, "The Rise and Fall of the American Empire." My argument was that the United States was unlikely to be as successful or as enduring an imperial power as its British predecessor for three reasons: its financial deficit, its attention deficit and, perhaps most surprisingly, its manpower deficit. Rather cruelly, I compared the American empire to a "strategic couch-potato … consuming on credit, reluctant to go to the front line [and] inclined to lose interest in protracted undertakings." I wish I'd been proved wrong. Sadly, events in Iraq have borne out that analysis. No Marshall Plan for the Middle East materialized to revive the Iraqi economy. And domestic support for the enterprise proved short-lived. I have spent much of the last month on the road, talking to readers in bookstores and lecture halls from downtown Manhattan to Pasadena to rural Arizona. Practically everyone I have talked to — including many a Republican — yearns for their country to get out of Iraq. Lack of funds. Ephemeral support. These problems were not hard to predict because they had characterized previous U.S. incursions into foreign lands (the postwar occupations of West Germany and Japan remain the only exceptions that prove the rule). The manpower deficit, however, remains puzzling. Just why is the world's third-most -populous country so short of boots on the ground? The obvious answer is that, considering the size of the U.S. population and the Pentagon's vast budget, the American military is a remarkably small outfit. In 2004, the number of Department of Defense personnel on active duty was 1,427,000, substantially fewer than the country's 2-million-strong prison population. Of those on active duty, barely a fifth were overseas, of whom 171,000 were in Iraq. That works out to 0.06% of the total U.S. population. The number of troops currently in Iraq is less than 140,000. That's roughly as many soldiers as Britain sent to the same country to defeat an insurgency in 1920 — at a time when the population of Iraq was a 10th of what it is today. The low level of military participation in the United States is, admittedly, something of a national tradition. A hundred years ago, the armed forces accounted for 1.6% of the French population, 1.1% of the German population and 0.9% of the British population — but only 0.1% of the American population. The difference is that today the U.S. is trying to play the kind of role that the European powers played back then. It's an empire, to put it bluntly, with too few legions. To make matters worse, the Department of Defense has been run since 2001 by a man who fervently believes that less is more. It was Donald Rumsfeld, we now know, who repeatedly dismissed expert advice that several hundred thousand troops would be needed to ensure the stability of postwar Iraq. In 2003, I argued that this kind of error could be corrected if only U.S. leaders would learn some history. That was naive. Policy about Iraq has never been based on a rational assessment of that country's needs. Rumsfeld's paramount concern appears to have been to win the turf wars between the Defense Department, the Joint Chiefs and the State Department — just as Vice President Dick Cheney's was to satisfy the appetites of the GOP base for big tax cuts and cheap victories. Writing in the 1920s, German historian Eckart Kehr argued that the foreign policy of the Kaiser's Germany was the defective product of the "primacy of domestic politics." I have come to see that U.S. foreign policy suffers from a similar pathology. The primacy of domestic politics — in the form of bureaucratic infighting and electoral manipulation — explains why the Iraq enterprise has, from the outset, been so chronically short-staffed. The personnel deficit is not just about politics, however. "We're an empire now," a presidential aide told the journalist Ron Suskind in a moment of hubris in 2004, "and when we act, we create our own reality." But maybe the reality is that the U.S. is demographically incapable of acting as a traditional empire. After all, empire is partly about the export of people; about colonists and settlers. The United States, by contrast, is about the import of people, to the tune of roughly 1.5 million newcomers a year; the country expands by importing, not exporting, people. In short, we seem doomed by domestic politics and demography to re-enact Vietnam in Iraq. The only question is what age the 300-millionth American will be when the last American is airlifted out. Every weekday JewishWorldReview.com publishes what many in in the media and Washington consider "must-reading". Sign up for the daily JWR update. It's free. Just click here. BUY THE BOOKS Click HERE to purchase it at a discount. (Sales help fund JWR.). Click HERE to purchase it at a discount. (Sales help fund JWR.). Niall Ferguson is a professor of history at Harvard University. He is the author of "Empire" (Basic Books, 2003) and "Colossus" (Penguin, 2004). Comment by clicking here. 10/17/06: Failing to stop North Korea from going nuclear may have been the last straw for the onetime guardian of world order 10/03/06: Why Churchill opposed torture 09/27/06: Insanity on a Global Scale 09/19/06: The GOP will hang on 09/13/06: Long Live Royal Bloodlines! 09/05/06: Red-state Republicans and blue-faced liberals are starting to agree: Green is the way 08/29/06: What if the London Bombers Succeeded? 08/15/06: Testing the Limits of the U.N.: Who seriously expects Kofi Annan to stop Al Qaeda terror attacks? 08/08/06: The coming tsunami of trash 07/18/06: Forget the '60s and ‘Make Love, Not War.’ Today's world is facing a Summer of Rage 07/11/06: When will China pull the plug on North Korea? 06/20/06: Hedge funds vs. central bankers: Will inflation, deflation or recession win in the coming months? 06/13/06: Britain's economy is just like America's — minus the entrepreneurs and growth 06/06/06: The X-Men have taken over Washington 05/30/06: Quit protesting, profs! 05/23/06: World markets' wild ride: Economic volatility is back with a vengeance 05/16/06: The Cold Wars are coming 05/09/06: Many commentators are missing dangerous political shift 05/02/06: Put some sugar in your tank 04/25/06: Hu and the dog that didn't bark 04/18/06: Should Americans be less optimistic? 04/11/06: Globalization's second death? 04/04/06: So many ‘special’ friends 03/28/06: Let's get it right about what has gone wrong 03/21/06: Congress is trying to give the world a globotomy 03/14/06: Lame ducks can still bite back 03/07/06: A 19th Century critique of a 21st Century president 02/28/06: The crash of civilizations 02/21/06: Not the president, but close 02/14/06: Want historic trouble? Look south 02/07/06: Greenspan advising Britain? It's housing bubbles, deficits and potential meltdowns all over again 01/31/06: Missing the Cold War 01/24/06: It's a sick, Thick World 01/17/06: Tomorrow's world war today 01/03/06: Scotland, it's over, but keep the accents 12/20/05: History, democracy and Iraq 12/20/05: History, democracy and Iraq 11/22/05: Ghost of Napoleon haunts Tony Blair 11/22/05: Can it happen in Britain too? 11/15/05: Red plus blue equals purple 11/10/05: The fires of disintegration 11/01/05: Triumph of an über-wonk © 2006, Los Angeles Times Distributed by Los Angeles Times Syndicate

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