Why we will never leave Iraq.
I left the lights on again. I often do but a scene this morning in Globe Trekker, a travel show, forced me to question why. The British host Ian was stranded in Mozambique. No streetlights lined the dirt road and the black evening surrounded him. The night was held back by the weak glow of the camera. Ian mockingly whispered through a strained smile, "It’s very dangerous out here."
I watched the TV, blackened by the Mozambique night, in a too bright room that exposed my wastefulness. I saw my privilege to use without worry in my long hot shower, in the plastic bottles piled in the trash, in the food left uneaten. I don’t have to think about anything ever running out.
The privilege to demand without end is my inheritance as a member of the City on a Hill, the classic image of American Exceptionalism, an ideological tradition that began with the English Puritans. They believed we were destined be a model for humanity and lead it to salvation. Today their religious morality has been overtaken by our modern consumer-morality where we are purified of want and each desire is met with a product that answers it.
Again, we are the model of humanity, like mannequins living inside a display needing to be seen by the world while being separated from it. One of the signs of that separation is we enjoy lives of infinite desire on a planet of finite resources. The only way to sustain such lives is to expand the empire and seize the labor and fuel of the globe. American Exceptionalism becomes imperialism that justifies itself with guilt. We have to save the world from itself.
Former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright said, "If we have to use force, it is because we are America. We are the indispensable nation. We stand tall. We see farther into the future." Her statement is not a partisan cliché but the very core of American ideology. The world is blind and we are burdened by the vision of what must be, of the U.S. as an eternal force beyond the reach of time.
The Right’s use of American Exceptionalism is well known but it’s a tradition of liberals as well. Democrats invoke the rhetoric of responsibility to demand we wait until Iraq stabilizes before leaving. So former presidential nominee Rep. John Kerry and Rep. John Murtha, an ex-marine and war vet, offer us strategic re-deployment rather than immediate withdrawal. The Democrats have found their voice and it is an echo of the past.
If we leave, it’s not destruction of Iraq that terrorifies us but the reality of our failure, of the limits to our exceptionalism. If our imperialism fails than the "American way of life" it protects ends and we can no longer consume endlessly, we return to the finite world of limited resources. It is the world that the rest of humanity lives in.
When Colin Powell warned Bush on Iraq, "If you break it you own it", he tried to give the president a sense of responsibility. Now his warning has become the administration’s excuse for staying. We own Iraq and are responsible for its future. If anything history shows that no nation can own another but Imperial guilt is useful as the last guise of power.
We are told if we leave blood will soak the streets red. It’s true, a Civil War will intensify and tear Iraq apart as the rivalries between Shiate and Sunni, Kurd and Arab are settled in the flash of gunshot and with the swing of a blade. Women will continue be locked inside homes and veils and fear. If we leave and the blood runs we will not stop it because the only pain we are prepared to acknowledge is the end of the American Century, of our exceptionalism.
Yet all if this is an illusionary discussion because the decision to stay or leave is one we will never make. We won’t leave. Even if Democrats win the Congress in 2006 and the White House in 2008, we won’t leave. We are protecting more than oil we are guarding our identity as the "indispensable nation" as the ideal that guides humanity. We won’t leave. Our military may pull back but in won’t pull out. We won’t leave because we are addicted to power and I am addicted to my privilege and for decades to come in the City on the Hill, the lights will be on at night.