December 22, 2003	Monday	Shawwal 27, 1424

PHILADELPHIA: Here’s a quiz. What period of American history do the next three paragraphs describe?

A Republican president, hoping to distract attention from thorny problems at home, leads the United States to war against a decrepit government under the moral banner of liberating an oppressed people.

US troops, dispatched into battle on the basis of exaggerated intelligence reports, soon find themselves mired in a protracted guerrilla war in a strange faraway land they will have to occupy for years.

Meanwhile, America assumes a brash new imperial role yoked to the interests of its business elites, while at home, the FBI employs special police powers bestowed by Congress in a brutal crackdown on supposed enemies of the state.

That may all sound like a left-liberal account of the Bush administration’s “war on terror”, but it’s actually a glimpse into an earlier American era offered by “The Politics of War”, a history of the years 1890 to 1920 that was written in 1979 by the late political essayist Walter Karp.

The period witnessed the outbreak of the Spanish-American War under Republican William McKinley and America’s emergence from World War One under Democrat Woodrow Wilson.

But for Karp, a chain-smoking journalist with a passion for politics, the era not only saw America’s metamorphosis from humble republic to world power. It also marked the defeat of what he termed the last great struggle to maintain a US republic “free of oligarchy, monopoly and private power”.

With US troops now in Iraq and Afghanistan, and pundits comparing US President George W. Bush to McKinley and Wilson, Karp’s former colleagues have published a new paperback edition of “The Politics of War” (Franklin Square Press) as a jaundiced guide to America’s current political debate.

DEJA VU: “It’s the best history book I know about that casts light on our current circumstances,” said Lewis Lapham, editor of Harper’s magazine, which takes a scathing editorial line on the Bush White House.

Karp, who died in 1989 at the age of 55, authored eight books, worked as a contributing editor at Harper’s and wrote for several other magazines.

In the paperback’s introduction, Lapham touts Karp as a literary dissenter in the tradition of Mark Twain and Ambrose Bierce. But not everybody familiar with Karp’s work embraces it as definitive history.

The New York Times Book Review once said Karp’s writing flaws included “cranky speculation disguised as argument”.

“He’s a better polemicist than a historian. It’s not that he gets things wrong, but that he gets them only partly right,” said Texas A&M University history professor H.W. Brands, author of “Woodrow Wilson”.

Where standard texts portray Woodrow Wilson as a visionary akin to Abraham Lincoln, Karp sees a narrow self-seeker who manoeuvered America into World War One to satisfy his own ambition to become God’s peacemaker.

“The most fanatical idealist does not cling to the principles of a lifetime more tenaciously than Wilson could pursue a noble aim he had just invented to suit his ambitions,” Karp writes.

Missing from Karp’s account, says Professor Brands, is the horrifying spectacle of the 1914-1918 war in Europe and the impending fear of a collapse of civilization that could be forestalled only by US involvement.

SUPERFICIAL COMPARISONS: Brands also cautions against drawing more than superficial comparisons between Wilson and Bush.

“Wilson was a dedicated internationalist who would have pursued democracy in Iraq in the company of other nations,” he said. “Our go-it-alone approach calls into question the current administration’s commitment to democracy.”

Karp also takes a vitriolic tone with McKinley, describing a master manipulator who presented his expansionist war against Spain as the implacable will of providence.

“Like the buncombe artist who cranked the handle that operated the ‘Wizard’ of Oz, so McKinley now cranked the handle of ‘destiny’, set in motion the ‘march of events’, and manipulated the ‘hand’ of the ‘Almighty’, which was no more than an empty glove,” Karp writes.

Thomas Donnelly, resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, agrees that there are numerous parallels between Iraq and the Spanish-American War, including allegations of trumped-up intelligence reports and deadly insurgent attacks on occupying US troops.

But he said it would be folly to accept Karp’s contention that morality played no role in late-19th-century American policy in the Caribbean and the Pacific, other than to rally public opinion behind the war effort.

“That sort of narrow, realist, hard power-calculus doesn’t explain American action in the world,” said Donnelly. “It’s a little too neat, and it misses the flavour of the time.”—Reuters