In a wide-ranging and almost comprehensible critique of American foreign policy and the conduct of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, Rowan Williams, a cranky lunatic who also happens to be the Archbishop of Canterbury, said that the US is the worst imperial power ever.
As the head of the Church of England, Williams felt compelled to draw this distinction between our foreign policy in Iraq and the British treatment of India:
“It is one thing to take over a territory and then pour energy and resources into administering it and normalising it. Rightly or wrongly, that’s what the British Empire did — in India, for example. It is another thing to go in on the assumption that a quick burst of violent action will somehow clear the decks and that you can move on and other people will put it back together — Iraq, for example.”
Royal English must define some words differently than us Yanks: "administering" and "normalising" apparently have the same meaning as "violently subjugating" and "ruthlessly exploiting" would on this side of the pond; "clear[ing] the decks" and letting "other people ... put it back together" are roughly analogous to "overthrowing a dictator and maintaining a military presence for 4 and a half years."
He closes us out with this candidate for understatement of the century: Williams said the Muslim world must acknowledge that its “political solutions were not the most impressive”.
I am not defending the mistakes we've made in Iraq, or Afghanistan, nor do I want to play down the enlightened rulership the British so gracefully allowed the Indians to flourish under for 340 years, but saying that Islamo-Fascist theocratic governments managed by genocidal maniacs is "not the most impressive" political solution is letting them off a little light, don't you think?
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