At the end of November, the Most Reverend and Right Honorable Dr. Rowan Williams, the archbishop of Canterbury for the last five years, delivered a scathing attack on the Bush administration’s foreign policy.
In an interview with Emel, a Muslim magazine, he said:
“It is one thing to take over a territory and then pour energy and resources into administering it and normalizing 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.”
Adding to his controversial remarks he went on to condemn Israel’s Wall. He described Western modernity as “eating away at the soul”. He wanted the Muslim world to acknowledge that its “present political solutions aren’t always very impressive”; I suspect many millions of Muslims would agree.
The Times (Nov. 26) sought out some political responses. Sir Gerald Kaufman, a former and rather good Labour shadow foreign secretary, told its correspondent:
“Basically I agree with the archbishop. He is not responsible for relations between this country and the US. In my view, the present administration of the US is a total disaster.”
Vincent Cable, who is putting up an impressive performance as acting leader of the Liberal Democrats, considered the archbishop has been right to draw attention to: “the way in which the Bush administration was responsible for the disastrous war in Iraq, is now threatening Iran with military action in a counterproductive manner and is pressing ahead with the arms race. I am not sympathetic to generalized attacks on America but Dr. Williams and other critics are talking about the Bush administration and not about America as a country.”
Dr. Rowan Williams is a previous archbishop of Wales. He is a forthright intellectual of great distinction and he has not been afraid to challenge the Labour government on the moral and social issues of the day. He keeps normally to a diplomatic form of language and yet can be very effective. Surrounded by a bitter dispute in the Anglican Church over homosexuality — which has just seen the Diocese of San Joaquin, California sever all ties — he remains nevertheless a towering and respected figure.
A great swathe of the population finds he talks much good sense. In this case few have a good word to utter about the Bush administration. Afghanistan is now regarded as more important than Iraq, and there is much criticism over the government’s plan to keep what is little more than a token force — at considerable risk to itself — in Basra.
The archbishop’s thoughts on India and the British Empire will have had a mixed reception. In the United Kingdom the older age groups tend to be proud of the nation’s colonial legacy, while the younger groups have experienced different arguments from teachers of a left of center background.
Jack Straw, a former foreign secretary, got into some trouble in 2002, when he said: “There’s a lot wrong with imperialism. A lot of the problems I have to deal with now are a consequence of our colonial past. India, Pakistan — we made some quite serious mistakes.”
Turning to the Middle East he had declared: “The odd lines for Iraq’s border were drawn by Brits. The Balfour Declaration and the contradictory assurances which were being given to Palestinians in private at the same time as they were being given to Israelis (sic) — again an interesting story for us but not an entirely honorable one.”
Last December, just before Christmas, the archbishop visited Israel and the West Bank. From Bethlehem, where the Christian community has fallen to a quarter of what it once was, he dispatched a newspaper article. Under the title “We mustn’t forget the plight of Arab Christians” he wrote:
“This Christmas, pray for the little town of Bethlehem, and spare a thought for those who have been put at risk by our short-sightedness and ignorance ...”
He believed that: “One warning often made and systematically ignored in the hectic days before the Iraq war was that Western military action — at that time and in that way — would put Christians in the whole Middle East at risk. They would be seen as supporters of the crusading West. At the very least, some were asking, shouldn’t we have a strategy about how to handle this? Well, we didn’t have one.”
The archbishop’s thoughts seem to stand the test of time.
