A
sensible, less militaristic,
way is possible
By JONATHAN
POWER
October 3, 2001
LONDON - The dust has begun to settle in more ways than
one. At last America is beginning to open up to a serious
debate on the complexities of defeating terrorism. Even
Secretary of Defence Donald Rumsfeld spells out the
difficulties of simply going to war.
It reminds me of the great novel of the Portuguese
Nobel literature laureate, Jose Saramago. In "Blindness"
he describes how the inhabitants of a whole city become
blind one by one. There is a universal emptiness of
being, with everyone moving around like lost hungry dogs
squelching through layers of excrement and refuse.
"Blindness" wakes the reader up to the subtleties of
everyday life- how we depend on a myriad of normal
interactions everyday where we can see what we do and
with whom we deal.
For a couple of weeks it seemed that the American
people, blind with righteous anger, led on by the cowboy
rhetoric of George Bush, wanted to make the world blind
too. Forgetting that their country was the pioneer of
globalisation and shared experience, they wanted to shut
down on normal international too and froing, giving and
taking and just fire the whole place, or at least those
parts that didn't agree with it 100%.
But, as in the end of the novel, the people are
finally losing their blindness. We now see that Mr Bush
is going to concentrate his fire on one organisation, the
al-Qaeda of Osama bin Laden. He is not going to open up
on Iraq, Iran, Syria, Sudan, and Libya et al. Indeed,
with the admission that three years ago Bill Clinton
ordered CIA operatives to be on the ground inside
Afghanistan and have yet nothing to show for their
labours, the Administration is starting to educate public
opinion that there may be no quick results.
All this is to the good, at least if we want to get to
the bottom of this malevolence that has shaken the world.
For a start - - most immediately and self-interestedly -
- such caution may save the western world from a deep
recession. The bombing has shaken business, consumer and
insurance confidence to the core. A real war waged
against an endless enemy - - the total opposite of the
heroic Gulf War, over and done with in a matter of days-
could be the economy's final undoing. And where then
would come the resources to deal with the myriad of
expensive demands the crisis has thrown up?
More subtly and more importantly this pause in the
helter-skelter gives the Western, so-called Christian,
world the opportunity to have an intense dialogue with
the Islamic one. There has been a real danger of imminent
polarisation, which seems to be part and parcel of the
tactics of bin Laden. If he can create a situation where
so-called fundamentalist Saudi Arabia is seen to be the
frontline in America's onslaught on rank and file
fundamentalists (who do live according to their creed),
it may provide a sufficient shifting of the sands from
below to topple the House of Saud and bring to power a
populist regime.
If this happened its ripple effects would go far and
wide and indeed, at that point, the West could even find
itself in the invidious position of courting Saddam
Hussein as a counter force to fundamentalism. (After all
he set out in 1980 to overthrown the fundamentalist,
revolutionary regime in Iran, and the West, so desperate
were they to knock Iran on the head, were happy to sell
him whatever war machines he asked for.)
Such a dialogue would mean resurrecting the promise
made by Secretary of State James Baker during the Gulf
War that the U.S. would move swiftly to push Israel and
Palestine to a settlement. In fact nothing that offended
Israel too much has been done and the push remained one
sided. It would also mean pulling America's overgrown
command base out of Saudi Arabia. It would mean a real
rapprochement with Iran which maybe the British foreign
secretary has begun with his recent visit to Tehran. And,
not least, it would mean a more intense effort to ready
Turkey for admission to the European Union and its
corollary, a powerful effort to educate European public
opinion to be more hospitable to the Muslim immigrant
workers in their midst. Short of this, the
Christian-Muslim relationship could sour to where indeed
there would be a "clash of civilizations". (Samuel
Huntington's mistake in his provocative book was not to
argue that there could be such a conflict but to see only
the bleak side.)
In the current issue of Prospect magazine, the Central
Asian expert Anatol Lieven lays out an exceptionally
clever, multi-layered, appraisal of the job that has to
be done. Nothing can go forward, he argues, unless
Washington "ends Cold War policies against Russia and
China". They have to become allies in this task of
defeating terrorism and this is not the time for
maintaining a relationship that assumes they are "major
threats to vital U.S. interests". Thus the talk of the
imperative for National Missile Defence has to be put on
one side. The U.S. also has to cut quickly loose from
being "effectively at war alongside Israel". For while we
cannot do much "to help the Muslim world out of its deep
historical malaise, or to make up for centuries of
defeat…we can diminish or at least distance
ourselves from the most glaring contemporary insult".
Written from Washington this is the kind of serious
long range thinking that the White House needs to absorb.
Progress has been made the last week. The blind are
opening their eyes. But the mess that has been created by
both terrorists and responders is going to take a lot of
clearing up.
I can be reached by phone +44
7785 351172 and e-mail: JonatPower@aol.com
Copyright © 2001 By
JONATHAN POWER
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