DURING the first half of the 20th century, when the British still occupied India and a nationalist movement had erupted against the British Empire, sundry U.S. journalists were dispatched to observe the scene and interview Mahatma Gandhi. “What,” one of them asked the Indian leader, “do you think of Western civilization?” The old fox smiled. “It would be a good idea,” he replied. Seventy-five years later, Iraqis suffering the abuses of an oppressive first year under the U.S. occupation would probably endorse Gandhi’s sentiment.

To sell the Iraq instalment of the war against terrorism, the U.S. had justified the war as necessary to free the good and common people from a tyrant. Once removed, and with the benefit not of foreign nation-builders but of bureaucrats to ease the transition, the path would clear, swords could be turned into ploughshares, and the desert would bloom in a transformed and democratized Middle East. If at home President Bush and his cadre of acolytes were merchants of fear, on the road, to justify foreign adventures, Donald Rumsfeld et al. were merchants of hope.

Some in the West hoped that the U.S. intervention in Iraq would lead to democracy. Few in Iraq suffered such illusions. They were only too well aware that at the height of the repression in Iraq, Saddam Hussein had been a favoured Western ally, barely criticized in the U.S. media. And what has happened has confirmed Iraqi doubts. At a single nod from the conquerors, time-servers such as Ahmed Chalabi (aptly described in The New Yorker as the man “who sold the war”) are reduced to primitive obscurity. Saddam’s former ally (whom Saddam later tried to have killed), the ex-Baathist Iyad Allawi, is the new puppet prime minister. And all this is welcomed by the “international community,” showing once again that it is the wealth and military strength of the U.S. that enables them to buy the services of poorer and weaker states.

In any case, with the revelations of the abuses at prisons in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Cuba, the U.S. has lost whatever moral authority it purported to have, and the result is a genuine clash of civilizations – one that could have been easily avoided.

In the spring of 1917, when the British entered Iraq, the statement of purpose was similarly virtuous: the generals and their battalions came not as conquerors but as liberators. To allow that controlling Iraq back then was part of a grander design to secure the Middle East as a European access-route to Asia would have divested the occupying force of the moral authority necessary for success. Always, the occupier requires a mask: the benign bestower of a better life, a better “civilization.”

The British, of course, had assets the U.S. lacks. One was a long and storied colonial legacy rooted in a commitment to settlement. Legions decamped from the British Isles to populate the globe. In so doing, they – at home, the marginalized, the impoverished, the outcasts; away, the pioneers, the entrepreneurs, the pirates – contributed mightily to another great asset: through the ingenious workings of mercantilism, they filled the treasury of Westminster with ever-ballooning capital and established Britain as the world’s banker. Most importantly, the British embraced their empire as righteous, utilitarian, and a civilizing force.

In contrast, latter-day Americans suffer from intellectual and historical amnesia, and a sense of denial bordering on the delusional. Despite U.S. insistence to the contrary, we have, for the first time in human history, the existence of a single empire, and it is the American Empire at the beginning of the “New American Century.” The U.S. military is stationed in 138 countries, and, in key geopolitical regions such as the Middle East, it secures strategic partnerships through the provision of defence services, military hardware, and corporate investment. This is especially true in Israel and Saudi Arabia, the Middle Eastern bête noires for Muslim fundamentalists. Israel is a false economy, more and more dependent on Western capital inflows and by the day losing its claim to being the region’s only democracy. In Saudi Arabia, U.S. corporate investments exceed $400 million a year, and U.S. companies have more than two hundred joint ventures (principally in the petrochemical and energy sectors) with Saudi Arabian companies. Certainly support for Israel opens the doors to Islamic and Arab charges that the West aids and abets the unlawful occupation and confinement of Palestinians. But, post-Iraq, all indications now suggest that the long-standing reciprocity between the U.S. and the House of Saud – to Islamic critics, oil in exchange for military bases in the home of Mecca and Medina – will result in Saudi Arabia’s becoming the new hotbed and target of Islamic militancy.

In the absence of a system wherein the financial benefits of foreign investment accrue directly to the U.S. treasury, the costs of maintaining and expanding this empire – notwithstanding the U.S.’s status as the world’s largest debtor nation, the present administration appears committed to military budgets in excess of the next largest fifteen nations combined – should be the key issue in the upcoming U.S. presidential election. What, after all, is this global overreach putting at risk? If the economists are correct, how can social-security cheques, state medical insurance, the welfare state, etc., be sustained in the face of a balance sheet that reads “$45 trillion in the hole”? But, given the Administration’s refusal to use the “E” word, President Bush’s beliefs in divine guidance and “might is right,” and only faint challenges from American liberals to U.S. imperial aspirations, it is hard to imagine a change of course.

The most recent evidence of historical amnesia and a messiah complex lies in the lack of a measured exit strategy following “Operation Iraqi Freedom,” a war whose rapid result could have been guessed at by grade-school children. (Tony Blair knew that it would be a long haul, and the complicity in this charade of the British prime minister, whose country’s occupation of Iraq lurched on until 1955, proves that the diseases of blind faith and hubris have spread across the Atlantic.) But there is more to it. The absence of planning bespeaks a collective mind existing in a permanent present, and an adolescent insistence that “history begins with us.”

Contributing to this permanent present are television and the Internet – two “assets” the British were free of – and it is these tools of communication that have caused the U.S. to lose both the propaganda war and its moral authority. (After Gulf War I, embedding journalists was a brilliant strategic ploy, which, with rare exceptions, successfully contained the story for the homeland audience. In hindsight, this may have been the only “mission accomplished.”) In the interregnum between President Bush’s proclamation of victory and the day of uneasy transition to a dubious Iraqi self-rule, the bombs and body counts continued to soar, and the negative news became a daily headline. The image is more powerful than the word, and matters reached their nadir when the torture photographs from the Abu Ghraib prison were broadcast on Arab television and released over the Internet. The damage could not be controlled; the mask was off. On the ground, the liberators suddenly looked no better than the Baathist thugs of Saddam Hussein’s security militias.