The Unsinkable Career of America's Leading Twerpo-Imperialist Pundit, Max Boot

By Mark Ames, The Nation. Posted January 14, 2009.

I have read and heard plenty of people who argued that blacks were better off under slavery or under apartheid, and they're rightly labeled racists. So I would like to know why no one is holding Boot accountable for publishing the same argument about subjects of the British Raj, and why Boot's editors at the Journal (or the LA Times or his peers at the Council on Foreign Relations) not only allow him to get away with this, but validate it by providing him establishment cover--is this what they mistake for "maverick" thinking?

Boot apparently isn't interested in or bothered by the British Empire's terrible legacy of genocide, famine or racism. In fact, he seems to relish the idea that twenty-first-century America is fighting wars today created by imperial Britain's divide-and-rule strategy: "It is striking--and no coincidence--that America now faces the prospect of military action in many of the same lands where generations of British colonial soldiers went on campaigns," he crowed in a 2001 Weekly Standard piece published in the wake of the September 11 attacks.

Boot approves of this because it means that America will have finally played imperial Britain. He even offers a list of some fine examples of imperial Britain's triumphs, including the destruction of Egypt's rebel forces in 1882, and the wholesale slaughter of the Sudanese rebels in the Battle of Omdurman in 1898. While Boot praises the results of these military campaigns--"Both Sudan and Egypt remained relatively quiet thereafter," he writes--what he fails to mention is how they were kept "relatively quiet": by brutality, famine and slaughter. An American journalist writing for the New York Herald in 1877 observed in Egypt that "The Englishman looks upon these people as his hewers of wood and drawers of water, whose duty is to work and to thank the Lord when they are not flogged." And Omdurman was nothing more than a mass slaughter: the British, armed with new machine guns and artillery, killed some 12,000 Sudanese rebels armed with spears and flintlocks from a distance of a few kilometers away. As war analyst Gary Brecher recently observed, for the Brits, Omdurman was "a sort of geometry exercise, with Brit field officers mainly trying to arrange the Maxims' fields of fire the way you'd set up sprinklers to get maximum coverage of a football field."

Boot ignores these unpleasant details because he's not trying to debate anyone; he's just working this like a character actor: the armchair conquistador, the Max von Sydow of print pundits.

It's a schtick whose silliness knows no bounds, as evidenced in his bizarre fetish for pith helmets.

Afghanistan and other troubled lands today cry out for the sort of enlightened foreign administration once provided by self-confident Englishmen in jodhpurs and pith helmets.

At least this explains why so many Brits have been getting shot and killed in Helmand province: if only they'd worn their pith helmets...

At every key moment in America's disastrously run "global war on terror", Boot shows up dressed up in his pith helmet and rhino-hide whip. In the summer of 2003, when the Iraq occupation started going bad, Boot one-upped himself in a Financial Times op-ed, "Washington Needs a Colonial Office":

We need to create a colonial office--fast.

...[I]t should take its inspiration, if not its name, from the old British Colonial Office and India Office. Together, these two institutions ran large swaths of the world with a handful of bright, honest, industrious civil servants. They had an enormous impact, given the small numbers involved; there were seldom more than 1,000 members of the Indian civil service to administer hundreds of millions of Indians.

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Mark Ames is editor of the Moscow English alt weekly, The eXile. He is the author of Going Postal: Rage, Murder, and Rebellion: From Reagan's Workplaces to Clinton¿s Columbine and Beyond.

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