One of Sullivan’s readers whines about the use of the word empire:

This is not the British in Malaysia.

Quite true.  Unlike the British, our government seems to have no intention of leaving Iraq under any circumstances. 

One wonders if these people understand how British rule, or Roman rule for that matter, was extended to many of the places that later became “the empire.”  In many cases, the Romans and the British alike initially made a number of treaties with local rulers, who agreed to submit to occupation and taxation in exchange for being secured in their traditional (or usurped) rights, and over time these local rulers became merely figureheads to maintain a useful fiction that helped maintain the imperial system or they were liquidated/removed and replaced with direct imperial administration.  Our useful fiction is that the Iraqi government is a sovereign democratic one, we are currently demanding the right to occupy their country militarily, but we seem to have done without demanding the ability to tax Iraqis for our own revenues.  As far as I can tell, that is the only significant structural difference between a long-term military occupation of Iraq and old-style colonialism.  British rule in India did not begin with anything so obvious as a direct invasion, the elimination or expulsion of the old ruling class and the creation of an entirely new political order from stratch.  First, they merely did business with the existing rulers, then co-opted them and then the relationship became more coercive and hegemonic.  All the while the formal domestic institutions of a representative constitutional monarchy not only remained in place at home, but were gradually liberalising at the same time that the empire was expanding.  Not only is there no contradiction in having an officially democratic regime engage in imperialism, but it has happened several times in the history of modern democracies.  The “liberal imperialism” of Gladstone and the “Tory democracy” of the late 19th century helped fuel expansionist policies in Africa.  Roman rule throughout the Near East was the result of a series of treaties made with local kings (and, of course, backed up with military might).  Rome was just a republic making treaties with the legitimate rulers of various states, so why worry about empire?    

There is nothing “excessive” about the word empire to describe the political and military domination of other countries.  Hegemony may be slightly more precise, but the practical difference between hegemony and empire is not very great when hegemony entails the establishment of dozens of military bases on foreign soil.  Perhaps people who believe that Washington and Baghdad are merely negotiating a bilateral “status of forces” agreement as between two equal, sovereign states also think that the Batavian Republic was a free and independent state that just had a very friendly relationship with France.  Oh, but that couldn’t have been imperialism–France was democratic at the time!  France and the Batavian Republic also made a treaty, one that was quite disadvantageous to the Dutch but a treaty all the same, so that must have made the ensuing occupation all right.   

If there is one good thing that might come out of the disaster of the war in Iraq, it is that the absurd, excessive and naive faith that democracies are never aggressive and imperialistic may be shaken at least a little.