Welcome to Iraqland, or not
By RICK SALUTIN
Friday, March 28, 2003 - Page A19 Globe & Mail
In this unipolar world that has existed since the collapse of the Soviet
Union, all roads lead to Washington. It may be offensive to some to hear
me say that but it happens to be true. If you want to live in Disney World,
you can believe something else. Brian Mulroney
Speaking as someone who spent five days in Disney World the week before
the start of the current invasion (some say war, some say attack), I don't
think it's such a bad vantage point for understanding what is going on,
and wrong, over in Iraqland.
How so? The premise of U.S. foreign policy is pretty much: We act, no
one else reacts, except according to our script. We bomb; you feel shock
and awe. We invade; you strew flowers and welcome us. The U.S. government
and its backers have said these things explicitly. The rest of the world
is expected to behave, in effect, as loyal employees. There is no allowance
for variant reactions.
In Disney World, you get to travel all over the world (and beyond) without
leaving Florida. You take an African safari, or visit Asia, Mexico, even
Canada -- with no sense of the otherness that comes from being somewhere
you are not at home. Real otherness always has a touch of menace since
you don't know it. One value of travel is overcoming that fear and realizing
you can be comfortable in an unfamiliar space. What Disney World implies
is that you can do the travel without leaving home, or confronting fear
and defeating it -- because no one you meet, even when they are nationals
from the countries depicted, will depart from the corporate script of
smiles and friendly service.
In Disney World and elsewhere, you often meet Americans who have done
long "tours" to distant lands, frequently as military, yet seem
strangely unmoved by the experience, as if they went on a Disney Park
Hopper pass. Contrast this with other imperial powers. The British or
French often got deeply involved, colonized lands, learned the language,
sometimes "went native," exchanged populations and entered reciprocal
relations, negative or positive but, at any rate, recognizing each other's
particularity and autonomy, so that Yeats the Irish nationalist "pardoned"
Kipling, the English imperialist, because of their common devotion to
the English language. The U.S. doesn't get entrenched or culturally "bogged
down" in this way. They don't put themselves in the heads of the
locals -- which may be self-preserving but means a reaction you never
asked for, like the current one in Iraq, can take you completely aback.
This gulf between imperial attitudes was exemplified in the British and
U.S. media this week, as things started going iffily in the invasion.
U.K. papers were rife with ominous precedents such as General Stanley
Maude, who told the people of Baghdad in 1917, "Our armies do not
come into your cities and lands as conquerors, but as liberators";
they compared this to Lieutenant-Colonel Tim Collins, who told British
troops just before this attack, "We go to liberate, not to conquer"
-- and concluded that the same Iraqi resistance and British withdrawal
may follow. George Bush, on the other hand, says he is fighting "not
to conquer but to liberate," and receives none of the historical
or ironic perspective that a more engaged media memory might bring to
bear. Instead, the U.S. media tend to repeat official assurances that
everything is "on plan" while ignoring the obstinate fact that
those "others" are choosing to react in their own way.
You could hear the same cheery American ahistoricality toward our country
in U.S. Ambassador Paul Cellucci's wounded plaint this week. "We
would come to aid Canada without hesitation," he said categorically.
Like when? 1812, when the U.S. invaded? The Fenian raids in the 19th century,
launched from the U.S.? The First World War or the Second -- when the
U.S. arrived three years after it started? Or as Lloyd Axworthy asked:
when we needed more recent help with the land-mines treaty or for establishing
an International Criminal Court that might have been useful in handling
Saddam Hussein's crimes short of all-out war? Maybe the ambassador thinks
he's in the Canadian pavilion at Epcot, where no one would ever venture
a disputatious reply, no matter what the provocation.
I'd like to end with a word of thanks to Brian Mulroney for continuing
to be, as so often in the past, a source of inspiration for these columns.
Even when deriding any view of the world that isn't compliantly U.S.-centred,
he invokes an American image (Disney World) to describe it. I think of
him as Old Faithful, spouting reliably, to cite an alternate U.S. tourist
site. Oh, and if anyone thinks this column is "anti-American,"
let me remind you: I'm the guy who was having a helluva good time in Disney
World -- just two weeks ago today!
By RICK SALUTIN Globe and Mail, Toronto |
