In this unipolar world that has existed since the collapse of the Soviet Union, all roads lead to Washington. It may be offensive to some to hear me say that but it happens to be true. If you want to live in Disney World, you can believe something else.
— Brian Mulroney

Speaking as someone who spent five days in Disney World the week before the start of the current invasion (some say war, some say attack), I don’t think it’s such a bad vantage point for understanding what is going on, and wrong, over in Iraqland.

How so? The premise of U.S. foreign policy is pretty much: We act, no one else reacts, except according to our script. We bomb; you feel shock and awe. We invade; you strew flowers and welcome us. The U.S. government and its backers have said these things explicitly. The rest of the world is expected to behave, in effect, as loyal employees. There is no allowance for variant reactions.

In Disney World, you get to travel all over the world (and beyond) without leaving Florida. You take an African safari, or visit Asia, Mexico, even Canada—with no sense of the otherness that comes from being somewhere you are not at home. Real otherness always has a touch of menace since you don’t know it. One value of travel is overcoming that fear and realizing you can be comfortable in an unfamiliar space. What Disney World implies is that you can do the travel without leaving home, or confronting fear and defeating it—because no one you meet, even when they are nationals from the countries depicted, will depart from the corporate script of smiles and friendly service.

In Disney World and elsewhere, you often meet Americans who have done long “tours” to distant lands, frequently as military, yet seem strangely unmoved by the experience, as if they went on a Disney Park Hopper pass. Contrast this with other imperial powers. The British or French often got deeply involved, colonized lands, learned the language, sometimes “went native,” exchanged populations and entered reciprocal relations, negative or positive but, at any rate, recognizing each other’s particularity and autonomy, so that Yeats the Irish nationalist “pardoned” Kipling, the English imperialist, because of their common devotion to the English language. The U.S. doesn’t get entrenched or culturally “bogged down” in this way. They don’t put themselves in the heads of the locals — which may be self-preserving but means a reaction you never asked for, like the current one in Iraq, can take you completely aback.

This gulf between imperial attitudes was exemplified in the British and U.S. media this week, as things started going iffily in the invasion. U.K. papers were rife with ominous precedents such as General Stanley Maude, who told the people of Baghdad in 1917, “Our armies do not come into your cities and lands as conquerors, but as liberators” they compared this to Lieutenant-Colonel Tim Collins, who told British troops just before this attack, “We go to liberate, not to conquer” — and concluded that the same Iraqi resistance and British withdrawal may follow. George Bush, on the other hand, says he is fighting “not to conquer but to liberate,” and receives none of the historical or ironic perspective that a more engaged media memory might bring to bear. Instead, the U.S. media tend to repeat official assurances that everything is “on plan” while ignoring the obstinate fact that those “others” are choosing to react in their own way.

You could hear the same cheery American ahistoricality toward our country in U.S. Ambassador Paul Cellucci’s wounded plaint this week. “We would come to aid Canada without hesitation,” he said categorically. Like when? 1812, when the U.S. invaded? The Fenian raids in the nineteenth century, launched from the U.S.? The First World War or the Second — when the U.S. arrived three years after it started? Or as Lloyd Axworthy asked: when we needed more recent help with the land-mines treaty or for establishing an International Criminal Court that might have been useful in handling Saddam Hussein’s crimes short of all-out war? Maybe the ambassador thinks he’s in the Canadian pavilion at Epcot, where no one would ever venture a disputatious reply, no matter what the provocation.

I’d like to end with a word of thanks to Brian Mulroney for continuing to be, as so often in the past, a source of inspiration for these columns. Even when deriding any view of the world that isn’t compliantly U.S.-centred, he invokes an American image (Disney World) to describe it. I think of him as Old Faithful, spouting reliably, to cite an alternate U.S. tourist site. Oh, and if anyone thinks this column is “anti-American,” let me remind you: I’m the guy who was having a helluva good time in Disney World — just two weeks ago today!

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Rick Salutin

Rick Salutin is a Canadian novelist, playwright and critic. He is a strong advocate of left wing causes and writes a regular column in the Toronto Star.