The death of this crackpot creed is nothing to mourn

The wider conflict now engulfing Iraq lays bare the absurdity of liberal interventionism - and the decline of US power

John Gray
Tuesday July 31, 2007
The Guardian

Contributed by Lucia

"The era of liberal interventionism in international affairs is over. Invading Iraq was always in part an oil grab. A strategic objective of the Bush administration was control of Iraqi oil, which forms a key portion of the Gulf reserves that are the lifeblood of global capitalism. Yet success in this exercise in geopolitics depended on stability after Saddam was gone, and here American thinking was befogged by illusions. Both the neoconservatives who launched the war and the many liberals who endorsed it in the US and Britain took it for granted that Iraq would remain intact.....

.... Iraq is at risk of becoming the centre of a wider war, which the US can do very little to prevent - which shows up the lack of proportion in comparing the present conflict with Vietnam......

.....The feared domino effect in south-east Asia did not occur, but Iraq could be the scene of a domino effect in reverse in which the country's warring neighbours fall into the void left by the Americans' departure. By any standard, defeat in Iraq would be a more devastating blow to US power than Vietnam.

The most important - as well as most often neglected - feature of the conflict shaping up around Iraq is that the US no longer has the ability to mould events....

.....Neoconservatives spurned stability in international relations and preached the virtues of creative destruction. Liberal internationalists declared history had entered a new stage in which pre-emptive war would be used to construct a new world order where democracy and peace thrived. The result of these delusions is what we see today: a world of rising authoritarian regimes and collapsed states no one knows how to govern......

The liberal interventionism that took root in the aftermath of the cold war was never much more than a combination of post-imperial nostalgia with crackpot geopolitics. It was an absurd and repugnant mixture, and one whose passing there is no reason to regret. What the world needs from western governments is not another nonsensical crusade. It is a dose of realism and a little humility."