Turkish officials repeatedly have accused the United States of insufficient efforts to prevent attacks into Turkey from Iraq by the PKK, which has waged a guerrilla war for autonomy since 1984 at a cost of 37,000 lives. Turkey also has threatened military incursions into Iraq against the rebels, which the United States fears would alienate Iraqi Kurds, the most pro-American ethnic group in the region.

Ralston said the United States has not yet met Turkish demands for the capture of PKK operatives and destruction of a rebel base in a mountainous area of Iraq near the Turkish and Iranian border. He said, however, that the United States would consider options against the group available to a U.S. military stretched by many challenges in Iraq.

As you can see, the US client attacks Turkey and Turkey now needs US help to stop it. This can (and probably will) go on forever. Thus the US now has this leverage against Turkey, leverage they didn’t have in 2002.

That probably had little to do with an intrinsic ineptitude of the British as empire builders, however. It is a cliché, but the British empire was a thalassocracy. The cliché goes on to say that thalassocracies tend to be fragile.

It could have hardly been otherwise. Apart from the obvious imperatives of geography, during its formative stages the British empire suffered from a lack of manpower. The British soldier remained a relatively rare commodity till well into the nineteenth century. His thorough drilling and practiced markmanship led to the myth of the “best soldier in the world” and all that.

Incidentally, if one bears in mind that they don’t much care about progress and are instead focused on teh power, the “demography is destiny” crowd make some amount of sense.

For better or for worse, my views on Israel are pretty generic and mainstream. I don’t necessarily buy fully into Israel’s characterization as a “bulldog”. Whichever the case might be, the comparison between currentday Turkey and Egypt in the sixties and seventies is somewhat whimsical.

The repercussions of the Vietnam war I’m talking about are obviously actual geopolitical ones, not the alleged effect of the war on the American psyche. As many have not failed to point out, the notion that it is abnormal to entertain some form of selfdoubt in the aftermath of a war—the notion in other words of a “Vietnam syndrome” under which the US would have allowed itself to become a “pitiful, helpless giant”, a head case unable to find “peace and security through strength”—is bullshit. This is something that many Europeans tend to forget when they talk about the “traumatic” effects of decolonization, Suez etc.

What this all goes to show furthermore, speaking of Afghanistan and the River Plate, is that the British Empire was very fragile even at its peak in the 1800’s. It didn’t last nearly as long as e.g. the Roman, Spanish, Portuguese or medieval Arab empires, didn’t involve as much territory or people as is often overstated (only half of India was ever under British control, and most of the land within the “empire” was uninhabited wasteland in the Canadian north and Aussie interior), and the British also had a nasty habit of losing embarrassing colonial wars against “darkie” adversaries for whom they had contempt. An entire British army got wiped out in Afghanistan in the 1840’s and did so again around 1880 at Maiwand and in the guerrilla conflict that followed. Two British invasions of the River Plate in South America after 1805 (Napoleon was a useful distraction) were defeated by a bunch of Spanish/Creole/African ne-er-do-wells led by some French mercenary named Liniers—around the same time that the original Muhammad Ali smashed the British in Egypt. Even in Haiti of all places, the British got whacked by L’Ouverture, though L’Ouverture had a powerful ally in yellow fever, I guess. Fast-forward to after WWII—but before Suez in 1956—and the British were getting spanked around in Indonesia in the Anglo-Indonesian War of 1945 (basically trying to force Anglo-Dutch control over the pesky Indonesians to prevent both their empires from crumbling, failed miserably esp after Surabaya), while getting kicked out of Israel/Palestine by Irgun bombings in 1948.

What it all adds up to, frankly, is that the British were a pretty lousy imperial military power—what “empire” they had largely depended on buying off local chieftains and incorporating them into the British capitalist/mercantilist system, which indeed worked for a while so long as the British banking houses could bribe the nawabs into keeping quiet. But after WWI with the British nearly bankrupted, the Exchequer started to run out of bribe money, with much less incentive therefore for local luminaries in the colonies to play along. After WWII those angry natives were not only angry but well-armed, as the Brits learned to their detriment.

I don’t think current Iraqi oil production matters much, as long as a lot of oil is sitting under that sand and “we” own it.

Oil tends to be useful only once you have extracted it. The hydrocarbon law that´s making the rounds in Iraq is favourable to Coalition interests, obviously, but given the general security situation, the thriving oil smuggling industry that has developed in Southern Iraq and the fact that Kirkuk is being and will be fought over, it could become so much waste paper. I also have the strong suspicion that America´s nominal Shiite „allies“ like SCIRI and Da´wa assume that America´s staying power is significantly less than Iran´s, that happens to be from the neighbourhood and all that. I wouldn´t necessarily bet the farm on the continued Anglospheric „ownership“—to use your own terms—of the oil. The vagaries of politics in a country torn by war could remove the Coalition cronies from the picture, just as easily as the Coalition Provisional Authority declared Saddam-era contracts and promises null and void.

Saudi Arabia? My impression is that Saudi princes are sweating bullets and cooperating with Israel against Iran, has this ever happened before?

There´s never been much love lost between Saudi Arabia and the Iranian regime, and the history of Israeli-Saudi relations is not one of single-minded enmity, anyway. The tentative Israeli-Saudi détente is rather an indication of the failure of the neocon attempt to undermine the Saudis.

BTW, on those rare occasions when the interests of the Israeli and the Saudi lobbies coincide fully—like when Saddam invaded Kuwait—important things, things of import, tend to occur in Washington. It would not speak highly of the dog´s might, if he were to be wagged by the tails in the future.

Turkey? The US is seriously sponsoring Kurds in Northern Iraq and Turkey might easily find itself in a position similar to Egypt’s in the Israel-Egypt situation: either get used to being constantly attacked by a vicious American bulldog or become an American client.

Ah, but Turkey is stronger than Egypt, the Turks regard the prospect of an independent Kurdish state in Iraq as a direct threat to their territorial integrity (whereas after 1967 the Sinai was only a bargaining chip for the Israelis) and –perhaps more importantly—tough rhetoric towards America or such measures like the denial of Turkish territory for the deployment of US troops, in the 1-03-2003 vote, do not entail much of an electoral penalty in Turkey.

Dan:

All this talk about the Iraq war being “one of the greatest disasters of modern times” reminds me of the addendum Budd Schulberg wrote in 1989 to his classic, “What Makes Sammy Run?” in which he ranted at length about the earth-shattering, historic corruption represented by the Iran-Contra scandal. Needless to say, it’s rather jarring to open a novel written during the 1940s about the 1930s, only to find the author harping on a 1980s political controversy that had already faded into obscurity by the late 1990s. I understand that historical perspective sometimes evaporates in the heat of the moment, but it’s worth reminding oneself that the significance of current events can rarely be judged except in retrospect.

What a long-winded way to formulate a banality: „only time will tell“. A banality that ignores that there appear to be many people whose ability to evaluate the significance of the war has been seriously impaired by the fact that they have died as a direct consequence thereof, of course.

At any rate, wars –those one loses first and foremost—tend to be more significant than mere „political controversies“, irrespective of the similar reception that both may or may not get among blasé Beltway courtiers and others of their ilk. Oh, and make no mistake, the Iran-Contra scandal foreshadowed much of the crap which this Administration has been pulling off (which is not surprising, given the people involved). Its aftermath in particular reinforced the culture of impunity that Nixon´s pardon established (you know, Ford was such a healer).

Your nonchalance might be predicated on the myth that Vietnam had no serious repercussions. This is utter bullshit, eaten up by the ladleful by the American right. It is also a convenient appendix to the Dolchstosslegende summed up with particular poignancy by Ronnie´s „purveyors of weakness“ line.

However, the legacy of Vietnam is still felt: it is pretty much out of the question for the US to try to further its interests in the Far East by dint of conventional war. And it is in the Far East where most of the XXI century will happen, as it were.

It is not entirely unconceivable that in the aftermath of the Iraq war similar levels of wilful self-delusion are seen.

Note to whomever this may be of interest: since people like Dan are essentially impervious to arguments of a moral nature, it is more satisfying and perhaps even more effective to remind those people that no, they don´t get to bestride the orb like colossi.

In fact, the Suez crisis is a great example. Although it was no doubt shocking at the time, we can see in hindsight that its effect on the Middle East was minimal. Nasser’s entire pan-Arab project was all the rage for about a decade, then collapsed utterly in the aftermath of the Six-Day War. By the mid-70’s—when the oil crisis finally gave the Arab world a bit of global clout—Nasser’s successor had already evicted his Soviet advisors and thrown in his lot with the US, and was about to make peace with Israel. Meanwhile, Ba’athism had devolved from a pan-Arab cause to a mere platform for personality-cult autocrats in Syria and Iraq. In other words, the Nasserite project was pretty much doomed regardless, and it’s hard to see what long-term difference the Suez crisis could have made, regardless of its real or hypothetical outcome.

As for its effect on Britain—well, there’s already consensus here that it was far more symbolic than real. British colonialism was already pretty much a dead letter by 1956, and while Suez may have driven the point home to the doubters in vivid fashion, in practice it likely neither sped nor slowed the Empire’s demise. Likewise, those who see the Iraq war today as a momentous world turning point may ultimately discover that there’s less historical heft to it than meets the eye.

The generations who are now growing/grown up don’t have things like the Suez Crisis, or (much as the baby boomers will find it difficult to understand) Vietnam or even the civil rights movements in their living memory.

My point was not just about Blair, Bush, and the political class, but also voters. Had Eden remained leader his party would have been blown out of the water.

I think it says a lot about their arrogance. I suppose this derives from having won the Cold War internationally and having triumphed over organised labour domestically: in London as in the US (and elsewhere) you can see a metropolitan class that is not just doing extremely well for itself, but is convinced that Freedom And The Englihtenment is intimately connected with people like them being in power and being able to get what they want. Everybody else is a dinosaur or a barbarian or a loser: they, however, are good and right and talented and on the side of history. Such people do not admit error.