The burdens of empire.(Lengthened shadows: I)

On September 2, 1898 at Omdurman on the banks of the Nile just south of Khartoum, an Anglo-Egyptian army under the command of General Herbert Horatio Kitchener faced a Sudanese army led by the Khalifa, the local leader of the fundamentalist Wahabbist sect of Islam. The British were clearly outnumbered. Their twenty thousand soldiers faced fifty-two thousand troops of the Dervish Islamic fraternity. The British were the better armed, with fifty-five Maxim guns supported by gunboats in the river, but the Dervishes had two Maxim guns of their own plus an extensive arsenal of field artillery. Kitchener's troops, in uniforms of red jackets and white helmets, formed battle squares, their backs to the Nile. A mile away behind some low hills, the Dervishes, in ascetic white robes, their heads shaven, formed a line five miles long. At dawn a hilltop observer, the twenty-three-year-old Winston Churchill, who had joined the British expedition as a correspondent for the Morning Post, saw the Dervishes charge over the hills, chanting in unison: "There is one God and Muhammad is the Messenger of God."

The Sudanese army was no match for the well-drilled, well-armed British troops. Churchill watched wave after wave of Dervishes "struggling on through a hell of whistling metal, exploding shells and spurting dust--suffering, despairing, dying." British guns quickly reduced the desert tribesmen to what Churchill called "dirty bits of newspaper" strewn across the plain. Within five hours it was all over. Ten thousand Dervishes were killed outright. Ninety-five per cent of their army suffered casualties. On the British side, there were four hundred casualties and of these only forty-eight were dead.

Kitchener's expedition to Omdurman had been in retaliation for the death of General Charles George Gordon in Khartoum in 1885. Gordon and a small Anglo-Egyptian force had been victims of the Mahdi, a charismatic Islamic leader who had revived the militant Wahabbist sect in the Sudan in the early 1880s. During the thirteen years the British government deliberated over its response, the Mahdi died and it fell to his successor, the Khalifa, to confront the infidels. The victorious Kitchener showed no respect for Islamic sensitivities. After the battle, he destroyed the Mahdi's tomb and carried off his head in a kerosene can as a trophy. There were no more Muslim uprisings. The Sudan soon became a British colony, one more link in a chain of African territory that by 1920 stretched from the Cape to Cairo.

The Battle of Omdurman was not unique. It was largely a repetition of a number of similar events that punctuated British expansion throughout the nineteenth century. Another had taken place in 1866-1867 in Abyssinia where the Emperor Theodore seized British and European officials and diplomats and held them hostage in his mountain fortress at Magdala. Sir Robert Napier led a 13,000-strong British-Indian force that overran the fortress and rescued the hostages, leaving 2000 Abyssinian casualties and the Emperor dead, all for the cost of twenty British soldiers wounded and none killed.

These incidents from the history of the British Empire bear a number of obvious similarities to the outcomes of the American incursions into Afghanistan and Iraq in our own time. The United States demonstrated in both places that it could inflict rapid military defeat on its enemies with minimal losses to itself. The easy victories of both past and present tell the same cautionary tale: weak, backward countries with delusions of grandeur who take on the world's leading military power usually suffer the consequences; the loser subsequently becomes a dependent of the victor, whose realm of political liability expands accordingly.

In his speech to the American Congress on July 17, 2003, the British Prime Minister Tony Blair tried to argue that the situation the world faced today was unprecedented. There was no immediate danger of conflict between the world's most powerful nations, he said. Instead, the threat to security came from disorderly states and political movements among the less powerful. "There never has been a time," Blair said, "when, ... except in the most general sense, a study of history provides so little instruction for our present day." He went on: "When we removed the Taliban and Saddam Hussein, this was not imperialism. For these oppressed people, it was their liberation."

While Blair's final comment was certainly true, a more historical perspective might have given the Prime Minister a better insight into the imperial ramifications of these events The logic of Britain's world role in the nineteenth century has enough correspondence to the position of the United States today to repay the effort to examine their respective historical positions.