History repeats itself: India and Iraq

Reading in Simon Schama's "A History of Britain" this morning about Britain's 19th-century ideals regarding its empire -- bringing British parliamentary democracy to India and the rest of the world. Listen to this:

The white sahibs and memsahibs had -- most of them -- only the very best of intentions.... There was indeed money to be made... but what was that beside the noble dedication to eradicating poverty, disease and ignorance, which was the truly British imperial mission?...

On that day of magnanimous self-liquidation, the 'heaven-born' (as the Indian Civil Service liked to call itself) would depart in peace leaving its erstwhile charges grateful, devoted, peaceful, prosperous and -- this was the special bonus for that future modern world -- free....

There is no doubt that those ideals were sincerely held; even as their realization was constantly thwarted and, in the end, indefinitely postponed. There is equally no doubt that it seldom occurred to the governors of the empire... that their military and economic power had actually caused many, if not most, of the problems they claimed to be in India to correct. The conditions in which British ideas of 'progress' and 'civilization' were introduced were, at the same time, the conditions that doomed them to failure....

The liberal promise of shared betterment without bloodshed, the evolution of self-government through educated citizenship... remains, arguably, one of the nobler wrecks of western optimism. Its submerged ruins still lie deep in the modern consciousness, sending up ripples of pride or guilt to the surface of contemporary British life. (Vol. III, pp 268 - 269)

The echoes with America's interventionist and idealistic hopes for Iraq are self-evident. Sometimes I think it is inevitable that America's hubris, like that of the Brits, will inevitably be punctured and that the American "empire" will fade as did Britain's.

Steven P. Gilbert