OBLIGATORY NAPOLEONIC REFERENCE:

Something Napoleonic about Bush (JAITHIRTH RAO, 3/18/05, Indian Express)

Napoleon is known to most of us for his military and political achievements in the European arena. Jena and Austerlitz, the Code Napoleon and the Arc d’Triomphe and so on are the stuff of general knowledge. Very few people know that Napoleon invaded Egypt and Palestine. He defeated the Egyptians at the Battle of the Pyramids and his campaign at Acre was riddled with controversy. Napoleon’s intrusion into the Middle East had little lasting impact on his overall career. One could argue that it was a sideshow.

While the biographer of Napoleon may make the Egyptian campaign a footnote, the historian of the Middle East will not. Every one of them will tell you that Napoleon’s brief interlude in Egypt marked a major inflexion point in the history of that entire region. It was a military, political and cultural watershed with incalculable consequences to the collective psyche of all inhabitants. One can think of the Middle East before and after the Napoleonic shock treatment. And by the way, this goes for historians in all ideological camps — those who think of Napoleon and his army as benign as well as those who ascribe every kind of malefic design and effect to them.

I would make the argument simply as a matter of historical prophecy that Bush will go down in the same category as Napoleon in terms of his impact not only on the history of the Middle East but also in terms of the analogy that Bush’s intervention will be seen by future historians as having similar consequences — creating a discontinuity, establishing an inflexion point. And again I would appeal to persons from all ideological schools to examine this simply in terms of impact, not based on whether they think the intervention is desirable or not. And remember, contemporary students as well as future historians, you read about this first in my column!

Revolutions happen for different reasons. The fiscal bankruptcy of the “ancien regime” and the obtuse and stubborn unwillingness of the aristocracy to share power with the bourgeoisie caused the French Revolution. Comprehensive defeat in war combined with the “agony of the thousand-mile long front that even Comrade Lenin underestimated”, as Yevgraf Zhivago put it, led to the Russian Revolution. Commodore Perry’s insistent stance with the Shogun led to the end of the Shogunate and the Meiji Revolution in Japan. The aspirations of the Chinese diaspora and the discredited state of the Manchu nobility led to the Chinese Revolution of 1911. Comprehensive defeat followed by a conscious rejection of the banner of the Islamic Caliphate and the embrace of Anatolian Turkish identity made possible the Kemalist Revolution in Turkey. The direct military intervention by President George W. Bush in the Mesopotamian sands in the early years of the 21st century already seems to be gaining the contours of the event which will precipitate the yet-to-be-named revolution in the Middle East.

The physical presence of the Anglo-American coalition, the worldwide disgust with the horror of totalitarian regimes (the Baathist tyranny being merely the most egregiously sickening one), the exemplary impact of elections where actually the results turned out quite different from what the conquerors might have wanted, the ability and the willingness of the winning armies to punish the sadists among them after open trials while the regimes of the Middle East treat the existence of their own torture-chambers as matters of casual routine, the simple fact that there are a hundred newspapers and a hundred cable channels in the previously monochromatic Iraq — all of these are impacting the psyche of the much-maligned Arab street in ways that we may not be able to discern for a long time. After all, we are too close to the events and do not have the benefit of the telescope of history.

For the leader of a political party known for its inward-looking isolationist platform, for the leader of a country which has constantly debated as to whether it even wants to bother with the blood-lettings of the old world, it is quite ironic that Bush is the person making what seems to be disproportionate impact in one of the world’s oldest, most-intractable regions. Unlike Napoleon who never understood how important a role he played in Middle Eastern annals, Bush seems to be conscious of it.

Which old intractable region haven't we Reformed?

Posted by Orrin Judd at March 17, 2005 9:07 PM