Perils Of Victory

"He was absorbed already in the dilemmas of Democracy and the responsibilities of the West; he was determined--I learnt that very soon--to do good, not to any individual person but to a country, a continent, a world." President George W. Bush could relate to a guy like that. Yet Alden Pyle, the hero in Graham Greene's 1955 novel "The Quiet American," represents all that Europeans fear about the United States when it sets out, as it appears intent on doing just now, to change the world. "He was," Greene wrote, "as incapable of imagining pain or danger to himself as he was incapable of conceiving the pain he might cause others."

Today that deadly tension between high-minded ideals and what seems like willful ignorance of danger has European and Arab leaders in a state of near panic. Members of the Bush administration talk as if war in Iraq will open the way to peace and harmony in the never-peaceful, never-harmonious Middle East; help revitalize the world economy with cheaper oil, and strike a powerful blow against terrorism. But few policymakers close to the action expect those results. None doubt that the United States will win the war, but they anticipate an absolutely murderous aftermath. "We are really scared of a new wave of terror," blurts out one senior official in France. "The consequences will not be immediate," predicts an Arab ambassador at the U.N. "You might see GIs distributing chocolates in the streets of Baghdad and being embraced--for three months. And then the opposition to the new colonial power will emerge, and to any other clients being imposed as Iraqi leaders."

The question is not whether people in the region want more democracy, greater freedoms, a stake in a stable future without the constant threat of war. They're desperate for all that. But there's no confidence that this American administration, or any other, has a genuine long-term commitment to helping them achieve those goals. They've heard the talk too many times before, then seen the Americans walk.

"Surely our friends have learned lessons from the past," President Bush said last week, alluding to Saddam's deceptions and lies, then repeating what appeared to be the line of the day: "This looks like a rerun of a bad movie. And I'm not interested in watching it." But that's not the only historical show in town. As the Europeans and Arabs see it, when the Americans talk about "occupation," they don't have a clue what that means. America has never been occupied, in fact, while in living memory just about every country in Europe and the Middle East has been occupied, or an occupier, or both. They have no illusions about what Rudyard Kipling called "the savage wars of peace."

As the historian C. Vann Woodward pointed out, the brutalizing experience of occupation has never become an acknowledged part of the American experience, so policy tends to be "grounded on the legends of success and invincibility" and "illusions of innocence and virtue." "We sought no territorial aggrandizement, coveted no 'colony,' desired no subject people," said Woodward. "We came to liberate, not to enslave." (Sound familiar?) Yet, writing during the Vietnam War, Woodward noted that "as the years passed and the Vietnamese will to freedom became less conspicuous than American coercion of the Vietnamese, the suspicion grew that we had a deeper commitment to American pride than to Vietnamese freedom."

Ancient history? Perhaps a rerun we just don't want to watch.