WE
CONDEMN THE VIOLENCE AGAINST THE PEOPLE IN NEW YORK - continued
America should not
squander its sympathy SIMON
JENKINS The Times
The
world is seeing America at its best. Those whom Britain honoured in London
yesterday and will honour in Parliament today are Americans that Britons know
and admire. They have a capacity for communal grief that does not neglect
individual tragedy. They know the meaning of restraint. Their humanity is not
outstripped by hysteria. Britain too has been a nation pounded by terror and can
offer the sympathy of experience. The special relationship is bonded, if bond is
needed, by the many Britons who also died on Tuesday.
But
the world is apprehensive. It prays that it is not about to see a different
America. That country is rattling every sabre and girding itself for war.
Wretched people in wretched cities across the Middle East are burying themselves
in bunkers. A global armada is on full alert. Nobody doubts America’s power to
visit unimaginable violence on others. But to what end? Americans are angry but
surely not stupid. They can distinguish determination from vengeance, caution
from appeasement, acts of will from acts of idiocy.
What
an argument looms ahead, what a ghastly parting of the ways. The debate over how
to react to the Manhattan slaughter could yet hew Nato in half and unleash
mayhem across half the world. The resulting carnage could even drive America,
still global guarantor of democracy, back behind its borders for a generation.
Such a catastrophe would be caused not by the perpetrators of this week’s
outrage. They deserve no such place in history. The cause would be faulty
analysis and reactive warmongering by the world’s most powerful nation.
In
the aftermath of horror, heart rules head. But head must reassert itself. I
could write this entire column in the current jargon of hatred, decrying the
“evil, foul, mindless, criminal, sick, inhuman monsters” who committed these
terrible acts. I could demand apocalyptic retaliation against every Arab suspect
on earth. It would make a good headline and excite the BBC.
Yet
listening and reading this past two days has left me appalled at the hawkishness
of pundits, politicians and commentators. They are the true destabilisers, the
menaces to peace. Of course they must struggle to reflect the disgust felt by
powerless citizens. They must hear the cry for authority to reassert control and
for justice to be swift. But the statesman’s job is not to rant but to think,
to channel understandable emotion into reasoned action. It is weakness that
jerks the knee and drops the bomb.
American
and British leaders (though not Tony Blair) have sonorously declared that
“democracy is at war”. This cannot be sensible. War is a “forcible
contention between states”. Neither America nor Britain, let alone worldwide
democracy, is more at risk this week than last. Thousands have died, along with
their murderers. Buildings are vulnerable, but not states and ideologies. What
good is served by pretending otherwise? The same target — the World Trade
Centre — was attacked in 1993 but failed to collapse. That act could have been
equally lethal, but war was not declared. The success of an atrocity does not
turn a terrorist into a warrior or his mob into a state.
The
word is being bandied about because it sounds macho and may yet be used to
legitimise an attack on a “harbouring state”. But Britain did not declare
war on America or Ireland for harbouring IRA killers. They caused more deaths,
proportionate to population, than were lost in Manhattan. By elevating an
atrocious act of well-funded killers into a campaign of global significance,
Washington and Nato glorify Osama bin Laden and his like and fan the flames of
anti-Americanism across the Middle East.
There
is no coherent use for the mass of weaponry being mobilised by America and her
allies in the Pacific, Atlantic and Indian oceans. The US Secretary of State,
Colin Powell, has promised “more than a single reprisal raid”. Hundreds of
dead Afghans will not right the wrongs of Manhattan, though it might spark a
further round of tit-for-tat atrocities. Hawks such as Al Haig and Britain’s
Lord Powell of Bayswater demand an “overwhelming response” as a means of
“deterring these madmen”. Suicidal madmen are not deterred.
Politicians
and editorials are demanding that the Taleban be ordered to extradite bin Laden
under threat of massive missile attack, with the same threat visited on
neighbouring Pakistan. What if these insecure regimes cannot deliver? It took
the presence of a land army to defeat both Presidents Saddam Hussein and
Slobodan Milosevic. America is unlikely to send a land army back to the Middle
East, least of all to Afghanistan. America’s ordering Arab governments to do
its bidding has been tested for more than a decade and has not worked. The
region today is the worst possible advertisement for such coercion. It has
produced the climate in which terror breeds.
Of
course Herculean efforts must be made to bring to justice those responsible. But
the pursuit of justice should be the essence of the strategy, building on the
unprecedented sympathy shown to America throughout the region. That sympathy is
a precious commodity. It took years to bring the Lockerbie suspects to book,
years of failed aggression against Libya. Success came only when the West
stopped ostracising Colonel Gaddafi and cut a deal with him. The best possible
outcome of this crisis would be a new sensitising of Western diplomacy in the
Middle East, as an essential preliminary to co-operation in countering regional
terrorism. It will never be countered by main force.
Even
the terrorist is a politician. He swims in a sea of hatred and clings to rafts
of grievance. The Americans have reportedly been shocked at how widely disliked
they are in the Middle East. They seem unaware of the impact on their image of
decades of anti-Palestinian partisanship and of the bombing and impoverishment
of Iraq. Until this dislike is tackled, the co-operation essential to rooting
out terrorism is unrealistic.
A
great assault on Muslim states from the air would be the answer to bin Laden’s
prayer. Fanatics would flock to his cause. To many Arabs it would seem to
legitimise the Manhattan slaughter. Nato revenge raids would not only lower the
West to the same barbarism as was shown by the terrorists. It could hardly be
more counter-productive to the anti-terrorist cause.
These
dreadful people seek neither wealth nor territory, only fame for their cause.
They need sanctuary. But the Russians spent a decade trying to flush them from
the Afghan mountains and were condemned by the West for their troubles. That
conflict destroyed a moderate regime and created a fanatical one, from groups
recklessly financed by the Americans. The British Empire met its Waterloo on the
North-West Frontier. So did the Russian Empire. Are the Americans about to
follow?
Nobody
doubts America’s power. Doubt surrounds only its projection. On Tuesday the
British Government offered Washington its immediate support, to establish a link
and restrain possible hotheads in the Bush Administration. This was well done.
There is already deep scepticism in Europe about America’s policy in the
Middle East. Nato has invoked Article 5 of its Charter. This joins Europe with
America in any military action but puts America under an obligation to consult
its partners first. The Foreign Secretary, Jack Straw, yesterday emphasised that
“Article 5 is not a blank cheque”. Any American response must be based on
“evidence of its likely effectiveness”. But can he and Mr Blair deliver
their manifest caution?
Nato
is on its mettle. In any American-led escalation of violence, all Europe will be
vulnerable to reprisal. From what we hear from across the Atlantic, America is
on the brink of doing what the perpetrators of the Manhattan slaughter must want
above all. Military retaliation would elevate their cause, idolise their leader,
devalue moderation and validate fanaticism. If ever history needed a catalyst
for a new and awful conflict between Arabs and the West, this could be it.
That
nations triumphant in the Cold War should even contemplate taking such a risk
beggars belief. It is not justified even by Tuesday’s horror in Manhattan. It
would be the victory of panic over reason, of brute force over common sense. Let
us pray it is not so.
Reflect and introspect