(This 2004 essay appeared in the premier issue of Principia Dialectica.)
In June 2004, President Bush traveled to France to commemorate the sixtieth anniversary of U.S. troops landing on the beach of an occupied country as liberators. The satirical Canard enchaîné, which refered to GI George as Omaha Bush, points out that his comparison between the liberation of France from Nazi control and the occupation of Iraq is only appropriate in the sense that nearly five hundred Norman women were raped by American soldiers, according to historian Jean-Pierre Azéma. The purportedly clever White House advisers should know that there must be at least a slight resemblance for Bush to successfully imitate Franklin Delano Roosevelt.
If Bush and his advisers ruled with a real sense of history and knowledge of art — as opposed to their biblical visions of apocalypse — they might instead compare the invasion and occupation of Iraq with Napoleon Bonaparte’s Peninsular War (1808-1814), and the Abu Ghraib photographs of prison abuse with Francisco de la Goya’s ink drawings and paintings of the torture and other horrors inspired by the nineteenth century French campaign in Iberia. Napoleon was intent on wiping out the dreaded Bourbons in Madrid and bringing his backward southern neighbors into his Continental System but soon faced a massive popular revolt in both Spain and Portugal. The warfare, from which the word guerilla traces its origin, was particularly intense in the interior; in July 1808, a 20,000-strong French division was forced to surrender to guerilla forces at Baylen. The tactically successful French siege and storming of Saragossa showed the world, with 50,000 dead bodies filling the streets after the battle, that the Spanish people would rather perish than submit to foreign conquerors.
U.S. forces face similar popular resistance in Iraq. Moreover, the American retreat from captured territory, as well as every kidnapping, sabotaged convoy or pipeline, sets an inspiring example for radical Muslims worldwide. The countless civilian deaths and prison abuse photos make it unlikely that Iraqi hearts and minds will be won over by the American side. Bush speaks about democracy and trade benefits for Iraq, but the world is well aware, or should be, that a group led by the first prime minister of supposedly liberated Iraq, Iyad Allawi, was sponsored by the CIA and was responsible for terrorist bombings against Iraqis. The world must also know that untold, because unmetered, Iraqi oil has been plundered by the United States. Like Napoleon before him, Bush is justly seen more as a conqueror than a liberator.
The Spanish ulcer, as the Peninsular War was called, played a major role in the French emperor’s downfall. He was intoxicated with power that was becoming more and more illusory when he set his sights to the east. Napoleon’s 1812 invasion of Russia diverted resources that might have otherwise been used to fight the Anglo-Portuguese army under the duke of Wellington, who eventually drove the French out of Spain in 1814. If Bush could find the time away from his political campaign and his golfing and ranching and bike riding, he might venture into the National Gallery of Art and take a gander at the portrait of Napoleon, hand in vest, by Jaques-Louis David.
The optimistic image of the emperor working into the night on his legal code belies the historical realities of his reign. Perhaps Bush would see something of himself in this little man — the boldness and decisiveness — who wanted to rule the world, but whose reign was such a disaster for his country. Economic growth stagnated for a generation in France as a result of the Napoleonic Wars and the emperor failed to reconcile the factional conflicts stemming from the revolution, as he promised he would.
Like Napoleon and his consuls, historians will view Bush and his epigones as being an elite that seized power in a coup d’etat — Florida was Bush’s Brumaire — and did its best to entrench the privileges of wealth and power with war. Hegel was mistaken when he maintained Napoleon was the World Soul who would give a positive legacy to the French Revolution. The Terror turned outward under the emperor in a series of brutal and far-flung military campaigns, attempting to export the Continental System. Bush, with his War on Terror and freetrade globalization, is more like Bonaparte than he would care to admit. The Iraqi ulcer, which has no cure because of the long-established Iranian interest in the oil fields around Basra and the Faw Peninsula, may be the mistake that brings him down.
Clinton’s soft-power approach to foreign policy, which the Bush team deems effeminate, was better for business and reflected the power of Treasury Secretaries Robert Rubin and Larry Summers within the administration. Whereas the logic of capital figured highly in Clinton’s foreign policy decisions, supporting the global financial system and helping to overcome its crises, territorial logic, often but not always in contradiction with capital logic, characterizes Bush’s foreign policy. The pillars of U.S. Middle East policy during the 1970s oil crisis, Iran and Saudi Arabia, have crumbled; they have been replaced by Israel and now Iraq thanks to this costly and disruptive land grab. Time will tell if Iraq pays off for our imperial statesman, that is, if the oil in the acronym and at the heart of Operation Iraq Liberation can stave off threats to what Sanguinetti aptly called the commodity necessary for the production and consumption of other commodities.
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