How stands the empire?

How long ago was it that you last heard some pundit blather on about
America 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 our ability,
but about the wisdom of trying to remake the world in our own image.

Is this generation of Americans really up to the task? Is it really
willing to pay indefinitely in blood and treasure to realize the
ambitious agenda George W. Bush has set out? Consider:

Though our 2,150 war dead are not 4 percent of the men we lost in
Vietnam, our home front has buckled. Half the nation wants out. Is this
how a mighty empire reacts to a little adversity?

Today, we field armed forces one-tenth the size of U.S. forces in 1945,
and not half as large as the forces commanded by Ike and JFK. Yet, the
very suggestion of a return to the draft, which we all readily accepted
in the 1950s, causes a firestorm of indignation and protest.

Apparently, few of our future leaders wish to risk their lives in the
“global democratic revolution.”

Nor have the rest of us been called on to sacrifice. Today, we spend 4
percent of our GDP on the military. In Ike’s day, it was 9 percent; in
Reagan’s, 6 percent. But any proposal to raise taxes to expand U.S.
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, we are – 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 WMD, or to establish democracy, does the
world appreciate it? Does the world really want America to democratize
mankind?

A new Zogby poll of 3,900 people in six once-friendly Arab nations
finds that, when asked to name the leader they detest most, 45 percent
named Ariel Sharon, but Bush has moved into second at 30 percent. Tony
Blair was a distant third at 3 percent. No one else was close.

Only 6 percent agreed with al-Qaida’s goal of a caliphate ruling the
Islamic world, and only 7 percent approved of its terrorism – but
fully 36 percent admired how al-Qaida “confronts the U.S.”

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 Hashemi Rafsanjani look like
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 percent of the parliamentary races it
contested.

Everywhere today, 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 United States. 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 is pulling
out of Iraq. The U.S. ambassador, who denounced the North as a criminal
regime, was told to shut up. East Asia just held its first summit –
to which the United States was not invited. The Uzbeks have just told
us: Close your airbase, and get out.

Because of charges that we used secret prisons in Europe to interrogate
jihadists and E.U. airports to transfer them there, the United States
has never been less admired in NATO Europe, nor 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. And perhaps forever.

America needs a new vision. America needs a new foreign policy.