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May-June 2007
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< previous | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 But he claims he has never had the slightest contact with the Bush administration, and says the “neocon” charge is “absolutely malicious.” He notes, “I was always consistent in saying that the United States was not likely to make a success of the invasion of Iraq because, unlike Britain, it had the three deficits I wrote about: in manpower, capital, and above all, staying power. I also opposed British involvement in the war. I wrote in the Financial Times that this may have been in the interest of the United States, but it was not in Britain’s interest. But I was heeded neither in London nor in Washington. “My lament and refrain in those distant days was, ‘Why does America ignore British history? Why does nobody here talk about 1920, and Britain’s experiences in Baghdad?’ Remember what Churchill said: ‘At present we are paying eight millions a year for the privilege of sitting on an ungrateful volcano out of which we will in no circumstances get anything worth having.’ It was a revelation to me that Americans were so parochial. I must say I came here no doubt with all kinds of illusions, but I was still surprised. I think that what happened is that people said, ‘Well, this guy is in favor of empire (which empire they don’t say), so therefore he must be in favor of the war.’ What I did say was that the United States should use its power more aggressively to get rid of rogue regimes and failed states, but the notion that that had any role to play in 2003 is absurd. “I also said that the time for a ‘surge’ was 2004—I mean, if you’re going to do it, do it right. And the piece I wrote then for the New York Times, which got me into a lot of trouble, said the time for ruthlessness was at that moment. You had to stop the insurgency then and there; you had to whack Fallujah, you had to whack al-Sadr. But the army backed off, and that was a disastrous mistake. The credibility and legitimacy of U.S. forces on the ground have only gotten shakier. “We need another idea at this point. I’ve suggested putting in UN troops.” (This column was roundly derided, too—particularly in that part of the media where the UN is synonymous with fecklessness and corruption, opinions he actually shares.) But, he persists, “I’m thinking of, say, Indians with blue helmets. Where in the world can the United States expect to find an ally prepared to put up sincere interest and support? Perhaps in India; India is a country with a large conventional force, and with a commitment to fight the war on terror.” One way out of the appearance, so distasteful to his critics, of creating an empire in Iraq, is, to put it succinctly: hypocrisy. He wrote in the New Republic:
“I don’t think running away is an option,” he explains. “I think regardless of who is president, we are still going to have a military presence in Iraq by 2012. It’s not like Vietnam; you can’t just walk away, leaving it to go to hell, with everybody killing one another. As bad as that was, it had no geopolitical cost at all for Americans; the costs of failure were zero. Whereas the geopolitical cost of running away here is almost unimaginable. Not only would a full-scale regional civil war create all sorts of opportunities for Iran. It creates all sorts of opportunities for the Iranian-backed Shi‘ah and the wildest Sunni radicals who are behind al Qaeda. It makes your most important ally in the region, Israel, desperately vulnerable.”
These dark and freighted subjects—Vietnam, Israel, indeed most of the life-and-death questions of the last half-century—will be examined in Ferguson’s forthcoming undertaking: a biography of Henry Kissinger. It will be a “global” biography in the sense, he says, that “there isn’t a government that doesn’t have a view of this man. You’re dealing with an individual who had a significant role in almost every international crisis of the 1970s.” Kissinger himself invited Ferguson to write the biography, and gave him access to his papers, upon which work has begun. But first, Ferguson must finish his book on Siegmund Warburg, who, though hardly known in the United States, was highly influential in European financial circles between the 1950s and 1980s. The Warburg book began back in Ferguson’s days in Hamburg, when he met a Warburg relative who invited the young Scot, a historian now morphing into an economic historian, to look at the family papers. “So there I was,” Ferguson recalls, “sitting in the M.M. Warburg bank offices in Hamburg, and it was there that I really had my first encounter with serious historical research. Reading through the Warburg papers, I realized that here was an economic story I needed to understand. Why did the Germans lose control of their currency? What exactly had gone wrong? “But there was another story which was not new to me. I’d always understood its importance. This was the story of the German Jews and their predicament. I was gripped by the most important and certainly the most perplexing tragedy of modern history, which was the tragedy of the Jews. The Jews—tremendously successful, not only in economic life, but also in cultural life, the standard-bearers of modernity in the arts and in political innovations of the modern period, and of course the ultimate victims of the backlash against it in the 1930s and ’40s. “That really started my interest in German-Jewish history,” he continues. “And it wasn’t long after finishing my book, Paper and Iron, in which the Warburgs were central figures, that I was asked to look at the Rothschild archives, with a view to writing a substantial work on the history of the Rothschilds. It was an opportunity I seized with both hands, and I spent five years practically living in the Rothschild archives in London, with visits to important stuff in Russia and Frankfurt. By the time I was done, I think I was about as deeply immersed in German-Jewish history as it’s possible for a non-Jew to be; after all, it was ironic that somebody with my background was asked to write this book.” The House of Rothschild has been called the finest book ever written about this dynasty, a work that “reaffirms one’s faith in the possibility of great historical writing,” according to historian Fritz Stern. Dense with family details, it unfolds a formidable skein of transactions, contracts, codes, and regulations that took the family from the ghetto of Frankfurt to the status of wealthiest family in the world—perhaps in history—in a deft shadow play illuminated against the grievous background of the ugliest kind of anti-Semitism. But why is Ferguson destined to find himself so “deeply immersed in German-Jewish history”? Has he not enough to do defending and perhaps perpetuating his arguments on empire? There is no answer—yet—to the “irony” that a disputatious Scot should be chosen to write the story of not one, but three, German-Jewish world players who dominated history. Perhaps a hint can be found in Ferguson’s own suggestion that the Scots are in many significant ways similar to the Jews: “Scottish Calvinism gave rise to impulses comparable to those we associate with Jews in the modern period. A high regard for literacy. An emphasis on education as a route to social mobility. An aptitude for finance and for science.” Whatever the reason, he says with a laugh, “through it all, I have become a thorough philo-Semite.” For more on this irony, we must await the coming cascade of books. Meanwhile, we might contemplate a possible counterfactual: What if we prove Ferguson wrong, don the purple, and show up as the next empire? Janet Tassel is a contributing editor of this magazine.  
 
 
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