All hat and no cattle Pat Buchanan December 28, 2005 HOW long ago was it that you last heard some pundit blather on about the US being "the greatest empire since Rome"? Quite a while, I imagine. For if the Iraqi insurgency has done nothing else, it has induced a sense of humility and of the limits of American power. Surely all Americans hope the Iraqi elections will usher in a coalition that will let us depart. But it is time we stood back and took a hard look at what this war tells us, not only about the US's ability but also about the wisdom of trying to remake the world in the American image. Is this generation of Americans really up to the task? Is it really willing to pay indefinitely in blood and treasure to realise the ambitious agenda George W. Bush has set out? Consider: Though the 2169 US war dead are not 4 per cent of the men we lost in Vietnam, the US home front has buckled. Half the nation wants out. Is this how a mighty empire reacts to a little adversity? The US fields armed forces one-tenth the size of its forces in 1945, and not half as large as the forces commanded by Dwight Eisenhower and John Kennedy. Yet the very suggestion of a return to the draft, which we readily accepted in the 1950s, causes a firestorm of indignation and protest. Apparently, few of the country's future leaders wish to risk their lives in the "global democratic revolution". Nor have the rest of us been called on to sacrifice. We spend 4 per cent of our gross domestic product on the military. In Ike's day, it was 9 per cent; in Ronald Reagan's, 6 per cent. But any proposal to raise taxes to expand US armed forces to enforce the Bush doctrine against Iran or North Korea would have Republican supply-siders digging the cobblestones out of the streets of Georgetown. When it comes to empire, the US is - in a phrase Bush used to hear often growing up in west Texas - "all hat and no cattle". And whether we invaded to liberate Iraq from a brutal tyrant, or to strip a dangerous regime of weapons of mass destruction or to establish democracy, does the world appreciate it? Does the world really want the US to democratise mankind? A new Zogby poll of 3900 people in six once-friendly Arab nations finds that, when asked to name the leader they detest most, 45 per cent named Israel's Ariel Sharon, but Bush has moved into second at 30 per cent. British Prime Minister Tony Blair was a distant third at 3 per cent. No one else was close. Only 6 per cent agreed with al-Qa'ida's goal of a caliphate ruling the Islamic world and only 7 per cent approved of its terrorism, but fully 36per cent admired how al-Qa'ida "confronts the US". How admired is President Bush? When he urged the Iranians to go to the polls and repudiate the mullahs, they responded by choosing as president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who makes former pragmatic president Hashemi Rafsanjani look like Saddam Hussein's US lawyer Ramsey Clark. When Condi Rice stiffed the leader of the Muslim Brotherhood on a visit to Cairo, the brotherhood soared in Egyptian eyes and swept to victory in 60 per cent of the parliamentary races it contested. Everywhere, nationalists burnish their credentials by dissing us. In Canada, Prime Minister Paul Martin seeks to save a scandal-ridden regime by pandering to Canadians' dislike of the US. Hugo Chavez made himself the toast of South America by flipping off Bush at the Argentine summit. Evo Morales just swept to victory in Bolivia by promising to defy the Americans. When Bush went to Seoul, he was informed that South Korea was pulling out of Iraq. The US ambassador, who denounced North Korea as a criminal regime, was told to shut up. East Asia just held its first summit, to which the US was not invited. The Uzbeks have told us: Close your air base and get out. Because of charges that we used secret prisons in Europe to interrogate jihadists and European Union airports to transfer them there, the US has never been less admired in NATO Europe or its president more despised. Is it not thus apparent the world does not really want an American empire, or American hegemony or Bush's "democratic revolution"? Is it not equally apparent that we Americans, unwilling to conscript our young or further tax ourselves, cannot sustain a global policy that commits us to defending nations all over this world, most of which do not even like us? However Iraq ends, the era that began with the fall of the Berlin Wall has reached its close. That place in the sun the greatest generation won for us, and the Cold War generation kept for us, the baby-boomer generation appears to have lost, perhaps forever. America needs a new vision. America needs a new foreign policy. Pat Buchanan, a former US Republican presidential candidate and special adviser to Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan, is a columnist with the Creators Syndicate. http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/common/story_page/0,5744,17672967%5E7583,00.html
