ANGRY OLD MAN 1
THE ATTACK ON THE WORLD TRADE CENTER on September 11 was a hideous atrocity, but once the first stunned horror had receded, I confess I was puzzled, dismayed, and at last appalled by some of the reactions to it. These have been discussed and analysed ad nauseam over the past months, and many of the points I made and the questions I raised in a public address before the Fourth Afghan War had been declared, somewhat rashly, by Mr Bush, have since come to be taken for granted, although they were far from being accepted at the time. My views may still be out of step with majority opinion, but since I’m writing for a personal record I don’t hesitate to repeat them, somewhat at random, as they struck me at the time, and still do.
Was I alone, shortly after the tragedy, in finding something tasteless about a three-minute silence which seemed to imply that the victims of a mere terrorist crime, however horrific, were worth more respect and mourning than the dead of two world wars? A trivial point, no doubt, yet it offended me almost as much as the hypocrisy of Bush and Blair in their refusal to explain why the Taliban, for shielding Bin Laden, could be treated as an enemy and targeted with the utmost ferocity, while the Irish Republic, which has given refuge and sympathy to the IRA, could not. We know why, of course: Bush presumably wants to get re-elected some day, and Blair wouldn’t dream of disturbing his ill-named peace process, but the fact remains that the intent of those maniacs who flew the aircraft into the twin towers was no more evil than the intent of the heroes who planted the bombs at Enniskillen and Omagh and tried to butcher the British Government at Brighton. Only the scale of atrocity was different, and scale matters nothing to the dead.
I am not suggesting that Dublin should have been treated like Kabul, merely noting the double standard, which has its roots partly in naked racism – just like the dropping on Japan of the atomic bombs, weapons which by no stretch of the imagination could have been used on Berlin or Vienna.
I was certainly not alone in noting that while a generation of terrorism in Britain (a terrorism largely financed from the United States which expected our help last September), and other terrorisms in Spain and Ceylon and elsewhere, barely merited a mention in the American press, it was a very different story when the US was hit by terrorism – suddenly it was an attack on the whole world, on freedom, on “demaahcracy”, etc., etc., and everyone was expected to fall in loyally behind American leadership.
It was not, of course, an attack on the world, or on anyone except America, and whatever the wisdom of Mr Bush’s war, Britain should have had no part in it. It was simply no affair of ours; we had not been attacked, nor was there any likelihood of an attack until Blair, with extraordinary impudence and stupidity, thrust us willy-nilly into the firing-line, with the patently irrational claim that action was less dangerous than inaction. The propaganda that it was everyone’s fight, trumpeted in Washington and echoed in London, was a necessary lie to coerce Europeans, especially the British, into America’s quarrel – and to give Blair the chance to strut the world stage in a parody of statesmanship, bask in ludicrous comparisons with Churchill while acting as Bush’s gofer, and distract attention from the mess New Labour had made at home.
Why Blair rushed with such indecent haste to stand shoulder to shoulder with America may be obvious; what was incredible was that a spineless Parliament let him get away with it, abusing his position and betraying his trust by railroading us into armed conflict without seeking a mandate from the nation’s elected representatives. What, one may ask, is Parliament for?
Wrong though he was, it was not surprising that Blair’s rash and unconstitutional behaviour was widely if thoughtlessly approved. The British are a loyal, belligerent, and rather sentimental people, and it was pointed out that America was a staunch friend and ally who had stood by us in the Second World War, so were we not bound to support her now? By all means, and it would have been right and proper to stand by America in 2001 exactly as she stood by us from 1939 to 1942: with moral support, intelligence assistance, boundless good will, and all the material aid we could muster – at a price – but stopping short of joining the fight. God knows the threat to the world now does not compare to that posed by Hitler in 1940; talk of how “the world changed forever” on September 11 is so much twaddle, and Bush’s bone-headed claim that whoever was not with America was against her was simply contemptible, as though he had the right to deny the option of neutrality to anyone who chose it.
The dictatorial dragooning of my country into war seemed to me to be quite as important as the moral question of blitzing hapless Afghans; British constitutional liberties were my first concern, not the follies and heedless brutalities of America’s present leaders. I might deplore the apparent mistreatment of prisoners of war and the continued killing of Afghan civilians by unnecessary bombing, but I consoled myself that this lapse from the standards of civilised behaviour was a temporary thing resulting from the unprecedented shock of September 11, when it was brought home to the American people that their country was no longer the impregnable fortress of their imagination. They were stunned, and infuriated into an understandable thirst for revenge – never mind silly excuses about self-defence, they wanted to “kick ass”, and since Bin Laden’s was not available, and the world’s greatest superpower was incapable of finding and seizing him, which would have been the sensible and proper course, the bemused Bush had to find another ass to kick, and homed in on Afghanistan’s Taliban government with demented slogans about crusades and just causes.
Meanwhile Blair was alarming Britons with deranged rhetoric about British leadership, and “sorting out” various parts of Africa, and generally creating a new heaven and a new earth, in a speech reminiscent of Palmerston’s fictitious comic address to the Improvement Club.* This, when everyone knew that Britain hadn’t the muscle for even another Falklands campaign.
Now, after all this – my disgust and anger at the risking of British lives in Bush’s war; my indignation that millions urgently needed at home should be squandered in rebuilding the country which America had devastated; my conviction that the end being sought in Afghanistan (whatever it was) did not justify the means; my despair at the sheer ignorance of Islam displayed by Western leaders;† my doubt whether disposing of the Taliban and Bin Laden would advance the campaign against terrorism very far; my fear that America’s blind belligerence might really let the terrorist genie out of the bottle; my impatience at their inability to understand (not just in Washington but in Little Rock and Shaker Heights) that by ill-treating captives and committing the crowning folly of photographing their cruelty for all the world to see,‡ they were creating a public relations disaster, reinforcing their enemies’ hatred, and setting an example for other ruthless regimes to follow; my total lack of confidence in the leadership of the US and Britain – after all this, it will surely be concluded that I am disloyal, unpatriotic, and above all anti-American, and deserving of the wrath and scorn (often quite venomous) poured on any who dare to oppose or even to criticise Anglo-American policies. Some writers in the British press whom I normally respect waxed almost hysterical about this, damning me and my like as doves if not traitors, and crying a rousing “Gung-ho!” from their armchairs.
Well, I am not anti-American. I’m pro-American to my backbone, and I share their grief and rage at the horror of Manhattan – but I am not prepared to stand shoulder to shoulder with them or anyone else unconditionally, I am not prepared to accept their leadership when they are manifestly unfit to provide it, I am not prepared (unlike Blair) to put our soldiers’ precious lives at Bush’s disposal, and most of all, I am not
