Auguries on Iraq

The overture to the Bush administration’s drumbeat for war in Iraq was a spate of well-orchestrated commentary by the right-wing punditocracy in early 2002, after the apparent defeat of the Taliban, that hailed the United States as the new Roman Empire, dominant and unchallengeable. 

Conservatives, it seemed, had imbibed deeply of a classical education.  Soon we were all reminded of Cicero’s famous epigram, frequently invoked by Caligula, “Oderint dum metuant” – “Let them hate (us), so long as they fear.”

Nor was the analogy to imperial Rome simply a literary flourish of conservative columnists; it penetrated to the highest levels of Washington policymakers. “We’re an empire now,” a senior official in the Bush White House famously told Ronald Suskind.  “We create our own reality.”

Rome has long exerted a fascination on the American political imagination.  Our founding fathers studied Roman history carefully, anxious to create political institutions in the New World that would withstand the temptations that sank Rome’s free republic.  This week we are reminded of an eerie foreshadowing of today’s dilemma in Iraq, with the anniversary on August 8 of the death of imperial Rome’s commander-in-chief, the emperor Trajan, in 117 A.D.

Frustrated by the efforts of Parthia (today’s Iran) to extend its influence in what we now call the Middle East, Trajan four years earlier had decided to resolve the “eastern question” once and for all by overthrowing the dissembling regime to Rome’s east.  Trajan’s legions stormed the Parthian capital Ctesiphon, near today’s Baghdad, and incorporated Mesopotamia and Assyria – all of modern Iraq – as provinces of the Roman Empire.

Ah, it was a splendid military victory.  Eighteen centuries later Benito Mussolini would commemorate it in a giant map on a wall adjacent to the ruins of the Roman Forum, showing the extent of Rome’s dominion even into Mesopotamia.  But it proved a debilitating triumph – and short-lived.

The war drained the imperial treasury.  Rome’s magnificent military was stretched thin.  Roman garrisons in the newly occupied territories found themselves under attack by armed elements in the local population.  An uprising by Jews in eastern Libya and Egypt forced the transfer of overstretched legions to suppress this more imminent danger.

Trajan was too deeply invested in his policy of expansion to acknowledge the mounting costs.  He persisted in the occupation of today’s Iraq, and a troop surge of sorts subdued the opposition in Mesopotamia.  But even his closest advisors realized this was not sustainable. 

When Trajan died on August 8 of the Roman year 870 (A.D. 117), his designated successor Hadrian immediately ordered a troop withdrawal that returned the lands of modern Iraq to their previous rulers.  Peace prevailed for a half century along the restored Euphrates frontier.  The hemorrhage of war on Rome’s treasury was halted, its defenses were rebuilt, and the Roman commonwealth commenced an extended economic boom that made for what Edward Gibbon would describe as one of the happiest periods of human history.

The architects of the Bush administration’s ambitious effort to settle the Middle Eastern question once and for all will not publicly acknowledge the cost and futility of their adventure.  Some will undoubtedly continue to celebrate the triumph of arms, oblivious to the wider damage to American global interests.

But waiting in the wings is a prospective successor to the expiring Bush administration – new leadership that, without looking back for inspiration to Hadrian, may nonetheless reach a similar conclusion about perpetuating a military presence in “Mesopotamia” after a hard-nosed calculation of gains and losses. 

Comments

[Elwin sykes]

Thanks, Jeffrey, for your splendid point or ironic comparison. I remember reading in The New Yorker a reference to the Sussind encounter with a very arrogant White House aide verbally flexing his sense of the administration's political might. Also (ironically), today is the anniversary of Nixon's resignation speech!

[Jeff Laurenti]

A private correspondent of classical education notes the following: "not to forget that after another defeat in Mesopotamia, 244, the Romans acquired their first dark-skinned emperor, Philippus Arabus..."
This hint at an Obama election in the ashes of Bush's Iraq invasion does, however, stretch the historical analogy to the breaking point -- after all, it was more than 125 years after the aborted effort to bring Mesopotamia into the Roman orbit.