Djelloul Marbrook

The United States of America was born out of conflict with imperialism, but it finds itself unsuccessfully trying to clean up imperialist messes from Indo-China to Iraq.

How has this happened?

I think the answer lies in the tension between Jeffersonian ideal and piratical capitalism. We have failed to reconcile these two driving impulses. Indeed, we haven’t even tried. The people we elect in the name of our ideals sell them out to market interests determined to supplant failed imperialist adventures.

Iraq is such a (mis)adventure. The only sense it made for the British Arabist Gertrude Bell to draw Iraq up as we are now failing to reconstitute it was to satisfy colonialist ambitions. The Turks could have told the British and French, who carved out modern Iraq, and so could have the Arabs. But nobody was listening to them.

In Vietnam the American intelligence community conflated French economic interests with capitalism’s conflict with communism, denigrating the documented fact that Ho Chi Minh, the rebel leader, was more influenced by Jefferson than Marx. History has born this out.

Again and again, we have moved in to pick up colonialist pieces when our historic ideals dictated otherwise. The most intriguing exception is Algeria. John F. Kennedy simply told the French it was time to go. But we didn’t learn the larger lesson Algeria might have taught: terrorism can’t be overcome with state terrorism or with shock and awe. It’s a disease that has repeatedly plagued caliphates and kingdoms, democracies and oligarchies. Violence begets violence. In Algeria the violence of French military mutineers and the violence of the rebels devastated the country, and in the end exhaustion, not policy, prevailed.

The French were not in Algeria or Indo-China out of idealism or the goodness of their hearts. They were business rapists. We’re not in Iraq in the name of democracy, we’re there to make money for business executives and shareholders who hold profit over idealism. The French might talk about La Gloire, the Nazis might talk about the thousand-year reich, and the British might talk about the splendor of Magna Carta, but in the end modern conquest is about money and exploitation.

The conflict between our political ideals, which the American masses truly believe in, and our business goals is complicated by the rising involvement of religion in secular affairs. Our founders envisioned a secular state tolerant of religious diversity, but many of today’s religionists are intolerant of any ideas but their own. And this is true in Israel and among the Muslims. The rise of stone-deaf extremism in the Abrahamic cultures is the world’s biggest problem.

Extreme capitalism, extreme ideology, extreme religion equal disaster. A nation of ideologues who refuse to hear each other out, who refuse to make room for differences, can’t reconcile capitalist excess with the ideals to which everyone pays lip service. If we’re unable to modulate capitalist enterprise with our social and political conscience we will lose this beloved republic.

—DM