The New Right’s appropriation soon after September 11, 2001 of the tropes of historical destiny, of glorious and beneficent empire resurgent, could be countered either by exposing it as a hollow sham (a matter of no substance, merely of rhet-oric),29 or by a return to the earlier twentieth-century critiques of American empire as leading to Caesarism and to apocalypse. Such critiques begin to gather momentum after the president’s address to the United Nations on September 12, 2002 (the day after the first anniversary of 9/11), when George W. Bush declared that if the UN was not going to act against Iraq, the United States would do so alone.30 A spate of articles, in both the British and the American press, subsequently compared the US president negatively with Julius Caesar, or with the Roman emperors more generally.
The day after the address, Robert Fisk, the Middle East correspondent for the British newspaper the Independent, observed that seated in the UN General Assembly, surrounded by green marble fittings and a backcloth of burnished gold, the president was able to enjoy the furnishings of an emperor, ‘‘albeit a diminutive one.’’
Indicating how Bush was selling his war against Iraq on the basis that such a regime supported terrorist attacks, the correspondent ended his piece dramatically: ‘‘What was the name of that river which Julius Caesar crossed? Was it not called the Rubicon? Yesterday, Mr Bush may have crossed the very same river.’’ 1 The same day, another British newspaper, the Guardian, carried a lead comment by its columnist Polly Toynbee, in which she described Bush as ‘‘this unlikely emperor of the world,’’ telling the UN in effect to pass a resolution on war or be bypassed. ‘‘What the US wants, the UN had better solemnise with a suitable resolution - very like the Roman senate and one of its lesser god-emperors.’’32 The accompanying political cartoon by Jas showed a wreathed and togate emperor incongruously waving a small Stars and Stripes in his hand as he stands in an advancing armored personnel carrier. Similarly, a photomontage of Bush as a wreathed and breastplated Roman emperor, gesturing thumbs down for death (figure 30.1), appeared a few days later on the cover of the tabloid insert of the same newspaper above the legend: ‘‘Hail, Bush. Is America the new Rome?’’ Although the enclosed article by Jonathan Freedland (which it was designed to illustrate) was concerned with the historical analogy ofempire rather than emperor, the image strongly suggests a critique of the presidency as an imperial, ruthless, and arbitrary mode of leadership.
Publisher's Note:
Permission to reproduce this image online was not granted by the copyright holder. Readers are kindly requested to refer to the printed version of this chapter.
Figure 30.1 ‘‘Hail, Bush.’’ Cover of G2, Guardian (September 18, 2002). Photomontage by Steve Caplin. Reproduced by permission.
Toward the end of2002, across the Atlantic, a similarly Caesarian condemnation of George W. Bush appeared in Harper’s Magazine under the title: ‘‘Hail Caesar!’’ Referring back to the decision on October 11 by Congress to invest the president with the power to order an invasion of Iraq whenever it occurred to him to do so, the writer Lewis H. Lapham described it as ‘‘[a]kin to the ancient Roman practice of enthroning a dictator at moments of severe crisis.’’ He continued, sardonically, both Senate and House of Representatives were much relieved to have escaped the chore of republican self-government and pass it over to Caesar’s sword. Despite the absence of slaughtered goats, the subtext of their vote could still be understood as a submissive prayer to their great general:
Our President is a Great General; he will blast Saddam Hussein and rescue us from doom. To achieve this extraordinary mission he needs extraordinary powers, so extraordinary that they don’t exist in law... Great is Caesar; God must be with him.33
Here, as in the British examples above, Caesar appears as a natural consequence ofand counter to the neoconservative embrace of empire.34 Comparison of Bush and Caesar works to create a striking and sensational narrative of the abrogation of power by traditional republican institutions, the usurpation of their authority by an untrustworthy leader, a turn in time of crisis to dictatorship, the illegitimate declaration of war, the march blindly across forbidden borders into an invasion which will bring with it historic, potentially disastrous, consequences.35 And as the moment of invasion drew nearer, early in 2003, even libertarian advocates of empire such as Michael Ignatieff touched nervously again upon the apocalyptic visions of a Thomas Cole or an Amaury de Riencourt:
The impending operation in Iraq is thus a defining moment in America’s long debate with itself about whether its overseas role as an empire threatens or strengthens its existence as a republic. The American electorate, while still supporting the president, wonders whether his proclamation of a war without end against terrorists and tyrants may only increase its vulnerability while endangering its liberties and its economic health at home.... To call America the new Rome is at once to recall Rome’s glory and its eventual fate at the hands of the barbarians.
World History
