HE IS right or he is wrong. Which? “The war on terror is the decisive ideological struggle of the 21st century,” said George Bush on Monday. “It is a struggle for civilization... The safety of America depends on the outcome of the battle on the streets of Baghdad.” It is as Manichean as that.
Bush is wrong. My parents endured one life-or-death struggle, against Hitler’s fascism, and I grew up during another, against Soviet communism. Both were real threats. When Bush was dodging war service in Vietnam and Tony Blair was a supporter of CND, I had no qualms about backing nuclear deterrence. Foreigners did not just want to conquer my country and change the way I lived, but they had amassed sufficient state power to make that ambition plausible. I call that a threat to the security of the nation. It required massive defense.
Putting Osama Bin Laden (or Saddam Hussein) in this league is ludicrous. No force they could command could possibly have ranked with Hitler or Stalin as “a threat to the future of civilization.” Such a concept of history is illiterate and warped. The comparison offends those who fought and died in previous conflicts. It is populist rant, the exploitation by nervy politicians of the obvious fact that modern terrorism can kill more people than before (though it rarely has), and its perpetrators seem invulnerable to reason (though they rarely were).
Al-Qaeda has terrified Americans but not achieved a political goal — beyond inducing America to make itself more unpopular. Those to whom I talk about these things claim plausibly that, had the West not overreacted to 9/11, Bin Laden and his organization would now be dead.
Bush’s morbid 9/11 soliloquy was chiefly of interest as a study in the psychology of power, as are Blair’s frequent sound bites on global conflict. When in office such politicians, themselves chary of military service, love to tongue the trump of war and wrap themselves in the flag, except today they wrap themselves in the entire Western civilization. Such “threat inflation” enables them to spend huge sums on defense and send armies abroad on reckless adventures.
That NATO members are this week refusing to send more troops to die in Afghanistan is a measure of the gap opening between fine words in the White House and Downing Street and reality on the ground. Had Afghanistan been secured against insurgency in 2001-02, the case for rebuilding that country as a puppet Western state might just have held water. The Taleban had bowed to Western pressure (and bribery) in 2000-01 and briefly curbed poppy production. All that is too late now. Instead we have a deadly cocktail of military bravado, civilization hanging by a thread and “after us the deluge”.
The Bush/Blair thesis is that Bin Laden and his shadowy movement threaten the American and British governments, the democratic way of life, a free press, women’s rights, the Christian religion and civil liberty. This has to be nonsense. That a fanatic says something, even a fanatic with a bomb, does not constitute a cosmic threat. The West was not threatened when it was notionally “undefended” before 9/11 and is not threatened now. Most Western countries are healthy democracies with entrenched liberties, near invulnerable to military attack. Presenting Al-Qaeda or Ba’athism or the Taleban as a menace to civilization implies a dim view of civilization and the robustness of its values. Such scaremongering may serve someone’s leadership agenda but it is unreal.
On Monday the Tory leader, David Cameron, lectured Bush, Blair and his putative successor, Gordon Brown, on moderation. He deplored the naive language of counter-terror and pleaded for more humility and patience in dealing with Muslim states. For an advocate of the Iraq war this is something of a U-turn. Cameron declared himself a born-again “libcon”, a sanitized, semi-demilitarized neocon. Where this leaves his emphatically neocon foreign affairs spokesman, William Hague, is unclear. Does Cameron really mean to revert to Blair’s Chicago 1999 speech and pragmatic humanitarianism as the lodestar of Tory policy? If so, it means withdrawing from Iraq and Afghanistan and fighting instead in Darfur and Congo. It means canceling Eurofighters and Trident submarines and investing in infantry and field armor. It means engaging with Iran rather than threatening to bomb it.
Even so, a Tory leader is searching for a new language of foreign affairs and using such words as humility. This is encouraging. Western diplomacy must soon move on from the present rant to dealing with those whose lives and lands it has grievously harmed these past five years. Cameron’s language suggests a refreshing optimism. Western civilization is not vulnerable to jihadism, only to its own fears, insecurities and cowardice. It is that vulnerability against which “libcons” should be on their guard. The greatest threat to any democracy has always been from its own chosen rulers.
The present lunacy will pass. The West will get another bloody nose, withdraw and concentrate its proselytizing zeal on aid and example rather than on bombs and bullets. The much-vaunted neocon agenda, as Cameron said, had noble ambitions but was fatally short on realism. Its wars show why democracies must keep their leaders and their armies on a short rein. The wrong assessment of Saddam’s weaponry was followed by a far greater intelligence failure, that Iraqis and Afghans would welcome Western occupation. They never did and never will.
NATO’s impending failure in Afghanistan will run alongside the November elections in America, Blair’s departure from office and Cameron’s newfound enlightenment. All suggest a worm starting to turn. The stupid party in foreign policy is in retreat. Perhaps, at last, the intelligent party is returning to power.
