FOR WANT OF A NIALL AN EMPIRE WAS LOST:

Liberty and imperialism don't mix (Mark Steyn, 13/04/2004, Daily Telegraph)

I was sorry to see Niall Ferguson, currently living high off the hog in the bosom of the Great Satan, reduced to peddling the Max Hastings bloody-ignorant-Yanks-blundering-around-the-world line in Saturday's Telegraph. He trotted through a brisk precis of the 1920 Iraqi uprising against the British and then wrote confidently: "I am willing to bet that not one senior military commander in Iraq today knows the slightest thing about these events."

I'll take that bet! What do you fancy? Ten thousand bucks per commander, rising commensurately as we go down the ranks? Last year, at a roadblock in the desert between Rutba and Ramadi, I spoke to a humble sergeant who, on discovering I wrote for this great British newspaper, said: "Wow! You guys got into some serious [stuff] here, right?" On the passenger seat I had my copies of the Karshs' Empires Of The Sand and David Fromkin's A Peace To End All Peace. "That's a great book," he said of the latter. [...]

In fact, I'd say Ferguson has got it exactly backwards. These days, you see far more about the British experience in Iraq in the American papers than in Fleet Street's. Nary a week goes by without my old friend Max Boot singing the praises of some doughty imperial footnote in the Los Angeles Times. Last week it was Colonel Robert Warburton, political officer on the Northwest Frontier from 1879 to 1897.

For my own part, whenever I'm speechifying in America, I get asked far more questions about Gertrude Bell and General Allenby than about, oh, Mo Mowlam and Robin Cook. The reason is obvious. When you look at the current hotspots of the Islamist threat — Iraq, the Khyber Pass, Kashmir, the West Bank, Sudan — America is spending a lot of time mopping up the failures of British imperialism — or, to be more charitable, of late-period fag-end fainthearted British imperialism.

It's nearly impossible to read the Fromkin book without becoming furious at the Brits and the French. They made Woodrow Wilson look good.

Posted by Orrin Judd at April 12, 2004 11:56 PM