BEIRUT — According to official Washington explanations, President George W. Bush is working hard to achieve a wholesale transformation of Iraq, and the Middle East, into a more stable, productive, democratic nation, and region. I know Bush enjoys reading a lot of American history, but he would do well to check out some historical narratives from this region, especially if he is sending many thousands more young American men and women with guns and missiles to engage with the natives out here. He might specifically benefit from reading about another Western leader who towered over the world and similarly tried to rearrange the Middle East — the Roman Emperor Diocletian.
Bush, like Diocletian, speaks in the sweeping vocabulary of those who do cosmic rearrangements, describing the challenge he sees as the defining battle of his generation. He acts with equal boldness, on the same grand scale. In the late 3rd Century, Diocletian ordered a major military and administrative reorganization of Rome’s eastern frontier provinces, centered — not coincidentally — around Mesopotamia, now called Iraq.
Diocletian (240 – 311) undertook a major program of building forts and highways throughout the Arabian provinces, after he had imposed a humiliating treaty on his defeated Sassanian (Persian) foes. Around the same time the Sassanians also launched a significant fortifications program, in order — no surprise — to protect themselves against their militarily powerful Roman neighbors.
For three centuries to follow, Rome and Persia fought intermittent wars separated by brief periods of uneasy peace, temporary conquest and subjugation, and occasional mutual exhaustion. By the early 7th Century, Rome and Persia were both battered by their perpetual wars, their own civil strife and border clashes with third parties, and were unable to resist the militant Arabs who emerged from Arabia under the banner of the new religion called Islam.
In 636, at Yarmouk in Jordan and Qadisiyya in modern Iraq, the Arabs of Islam defeated both the Byzantine Romans and the Persians. The Middle East lands of Rome and Persia were eventually conquered and united in the new Islamic realm. The forts of the Romans and Persians remain to be seen today throughout the land — tourist sites mainly attesting to the futile doctrines of military conquest.
The new strategy for Iraq announced by President Bush Wednesday night will continue to generate great debate for some time to come. But events will soon enough reveal if it is a feasible, rational approach to the dilemmas that Washington has largely created for itself in this region, or if it proves to be a Diocletian-like bit of imperial self-assertion. It may only add to the already rich history of this issue yet another cautionary tale about imperial tendencies and dangers.
One of the historic developments during Diocletian’s rule was the expanded role and status of the imperial court, and the explicit linking of the
emperor’s rule with the realm of the gods. Diocletian transformed the emperor’s post into something of a vice-regency of God — even declaring himself the son of Jupiter — becoming increasingly detached from the day-to-day affairs of ordinary people and more focused on implementing the divine will on earth, including in Mesopotamia. People in his presence had to prostrate themselves on the ground before him. Diocletian emasculated the republican institutions of the Roman state, turning the fabled Senate of Rome into little more than a local council, thus removing most political checks and balances and opening the way to autocratic governance. And his persecution of Christians almost certainly prompted the faith to spread more rapidly.
Some of this may be relevant to events today, or it may just be curiously fascinating — as stories of tragic mortals usually are. George W. Bush speaks of Iraq and the Arab world in a language of imperial disdain, and acts with an exaggerated sense of divine pomp and circumstance, emboldened by a fearlessness anchored in military might and certitude of the nobility of his mission. Yet he makes repeated mistakes — as he admitted this week while changing policy — and the consequences of his policy in the Middle East appear to bring about the opposite of his stated intentions: more terrorism, less stable states, spreading Islamism, weaker central governments, and more intense anti-Americanism.
Bush has displayed an unusual combination of confidence and confusion that we do not normally find, say, in domestic politics or local neighborhood relationships. This is the unique manifestation of the deadly allure of imperium — the sense that one has the absolute power to rule over distant, foreign lands and people who are considered vital for the well-being of one’s nation or state. What Bush sees as a sensible surge appears more clearly to many in the Middle East as the more familiar scourge of imperial history.
Rami G. Khouri is an internationally syndicated columnist, the director of the Issam Fares Institute at the American University of Beirut, editor-at-large of the Beirut-based Daily Star, and co-laureate of the 2006 Pax Christi International Peace Award.
Copyright ©2007 Rami G. Khouri / Agence Global
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Released: 12 Janaury 2007
Word Count: 782
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