October 8, 2001. "The Bombing Begins!" screams today's headline
of the normally restrained Guardian. "Battle Joined,"
echoes the equally cautious International Herald Tribune,
quoting George W. Bush. But with whom is it joined? And how will it end?
How about with Osama bin Laden in chains, looking more serene and
Christ-like than ever, arranged before a tribune of his vanquishers with
Johnny Cochrane to defend him? The fees won't be a problem, that's for
sure.
Or how about with Osama bin Laden blown to smithereens by one of those
clever bombs we keep reading about that kill terrorists in caves but don't
break the crockery? Or is there a solution I haven't thought of that will
prevent us from turning archenemy into an arch martyr in the eyes of those
for whom he is already semi-divine?
Yet we must punish him. We must bring him to justice. Like any sane
person, I see no other way. Send in the food and medicines, provide the
aid, sweep up the starving refugees, maimed orphans, and body parts --
sorry, "collateral damage" -- but Osama bin Laden and his awful men, we
have no choice, must be hunted down.
Unfortunately, what America longs for at this moment, even above
retribution, is more friends and fewer enemies. And what America is
storing up for herself, and so are we Brits, is yet more enemies.
Because after all the bribes, threats, and promises that have patched
together this rickety coalition, we cannot prevent another suicide bomber
being born each time a misdirected missile wipes out an innocent village,
and nobody can tell us how to dodge this devil's cycle of despair, hatred,
and-yet again-revenge.
The stylized television footage and photographs of this bin Laden
suggest a man of homoerotic narcissism, and maybe we can draw a grain of
hope from that. Posing with a Kalashnikov, attending a wedding, or
consulting a sacred text, he radiates with every self-adoring gesture an
actor's awareness of the lens. He has height, beauty, grace,
intelligence, and magnetism, all great attributes unless you're the
world's hottest fugitive and on the run, in which case they're
liabilities, hard to disguise.
But greater than all of them, to my jaded eye, is his barely
containable male vanity, his appetite for self-drama, and his closet
passion for the limelight. And, just possibly, this trait will be his
downfall, seducing him into a final dramatic act of self-destruction,
produced, directed, scripted, and acted to death by Osama bin Laden
himself.
By the accepted rules of terrorist engagement, of course, the war is
long lost. By us. What victory can we possibly achieve that matches the
defeats that we have already suffered, let alone the defeats that lie
ahead? "Terror is theatre," a soft-spoken Palestinian firebrand told me
in Beirut in 1982. He was talking about the murder of Israeli athletes at
the Munich Olympics ten years before, but he might as well have been
talking about the Twin Towers and the Pentagon. The late Mikhail
Bakunin, evangelist of anarchism, liked to speak of the Propaganda of
the Act. It's hard to imagine more theatrical, more potent acts of
propaganda than these.
Now Mr. Bakunin is in his grave, and Mr. Bin Laden in his care must be
rubbing their hands in glee as we embark on the very process that
terrorists of their stamp so relish: as we hastily double up our police
and intelligence forces and award them greater powers, as we put basic
civil liberties on hold and curtail press freedom, impose news blackouts
and secret censorship, spy on ourselves and, at our worst, violate mosques
and hound luckless citizens in our streets because we are afraid of the
colour of their skin.
All the fears that we share -- Dare I fly? Ought I to tell the police
about the weird couple upstairs? Would it be safer not to drive down to
Whitehall this morning? Is my child safely back from school? Have my
life's savings plummeted -- are precisely the fears our attackers want us
to have.
Until Sept. 11, the United States was only too happy to plug away at
Vladimir Putin about his butchery in Chechnya, Russia's abuse of human
rights in the North Caucasus, he was told -- we are speaking of wholesale
torture and murder amounting genocide -- was an obstruction to closer
relations with NATO and the United States. There were even voices-mine
was one-that suggested Mr. Putin join Slobdodan Milosevic on trial in The
Hague. Let's do them both together. Well, goodbye to all that. In the
making of the great new coalition, Mr. Putin looks a saint by comparison
with some of his bedfellows.
Does anyone remember any more the outcry against the perceived economic
colonialism of the G8? Against the plundering of the Third World by
uncontrollable multinational companies? Seattle, Prague, and Genoa
presented us with disturbing scenes of broken heads, broken glass, mob
violence, and police brutality. Tony Blair was deeply shocked. Yet the
debate was a valid one, until it was drowned in a wave of patriotic
sentiment, deftly exploited by corporate America.
Drag up Kyoto these days, you risk the charge of being 'anti-American'.
It's as if we have entered a new Orwellian world where our personal
reliability as comrades in the struggle is measured by the degree to which
we invoke the past to explain the present. Suggesting there is a
historical context for the recent atrocities is, by implication, to make
excuses for them: Anyone who is with us doesn't do that; anyone who does,
is against us.
Ten years ago, I was making an idealistic bore of myself by telling
anyone who would listen that, with the Cold War behind us, we were missing
a never-to-be-repeated chance to transform the global community.
Where was the new Marshall
Plan? I pleaded. Why weren't young men and women from the U.S. Peace Corps, Britain's Voluntary Service overseas, and
their continental European equivalents pouring into the former Soviet
Union by the thousands?
Where was the world-class statesman and man of the hour, with the voice
and vision to define for us the real, if unglamorous, enemies of mankind:
poverty, famine, slavery, tyranny, drugs, brush-fire wars, racial and
religious intolerance, greed?
Now, overnight, thanks to Osama bin Laden and his lieutenants, all our
leaders are world-class statesmen, proclaiming their voices and visions in
distant airports while they feather their electoral nests.
There has been unfortunate talk -- and not only from Silvio Berlusconi
-- of a "crusade". Crusade, of course, implies a delicious ignorance of
history. Was Mr. Berlusconi really proposing to set free the holy places
of Christendom and smite the heathen? Was George W. Bush? And am I out
of order in recalling that we (Christians) actually lost the Crusades?
But all is well: Segnor Berlusconi was misquoted and the presidential
reference is no longer operative.
Meanwhile Mr. Blair's new role as America's fearless spokesman
continues apace. Mr. Blair speaks well because Mr. Bush speaks badly.
Seen from abroad, Mr. Blair in this partnership is the inspired elder
statesman with an unassailable power base, whereas Mr. Bush -- dare one
say it these days -- was barely elected at
all.
But what exactly does Mr. Blair, the elder statesman, represent? Both
he and the U.S. President at this moment are riding high in their
respective approval ratings, but both are aware, if they know their
history books, that riding high on Day One of a perilous overseas military
operation doesn't guarantee you victory come election day.
How many American body bags can Mr. Bush sustain without losing popular
support? After the horrors of the Twin Towers and the Pentagon, the
American people may want revenge, but they're on a very short fuse about
shedding more American blood.
Mr. Blair -- with the whole Western world to tell him so, except for a
few sour voices back home -- is America's eloquent white knight, the
fearless, trusty champion of that ever-delicate child of the mid-Atlantic,
the "Special Relationship".
Whether that will win Mr. Blair favour with his electorate is another
matter because the Prime Minister was elected to save the country from
decay and not from Osama bin Laden. The Britain he is leading to war is a
monument to 60 years of administrative incompetence. Our health,
education, and transport systems are on the rocks. The fashionable phrase
these days describes them as "Third World," but there are places in the
Third World that are far better off than Britain.
The country Mr. Blair governs is blighted by institutionalized racism,
white male dominance, chaotically administered police forces,. A
constipated judicial system, obscene private wealth and shameful and
unnecessary private public poverty. At the time of his re-election, which
was characterized by a dismal turnout, Mr. Blair acknowledged these ills
and humbly admitted that he was on notice to put them right.
So when you catch the noble throb in his voice as he leads us
reluctantly to war, and your heart lifts to his undoubted flourishes of
rhetoric, it's worth remembering that he may also be warning you, sotto
voce, that his mission to mankind is so important that you will have
to wait another year for your urgent medical operation and a lot longer
before you can ride in a safe and punctual train. I am not sure that this
is the stuff of electoral victory three years from now. Watching Tony
Blair, and listening to him, I can't resist the impression that he is in a
bit of a dream, walking his own dangerous plank.
Did I say 'war'? Has either Mr. Blair or Mr. Bush, I wonder, ever seen
a child blown to bits, or witnessed the effect of a single cluster bomb
dropped on an unprotected refugee camp? It isn't necessarily a
qualification for generalship to have seen such dreadful things -- and I
don't wish either of them the experience -- but it scares me all the same
when I watch uncut, political faces shining with the light of combat, and
hear preppy political voices steeling my heart for battle.
And please, Mr. Bush -- on my knees, Mr. Blair -- keep God out of this.
To imagine God fights wars is to credit Him with the worst follies of
mankind. God, if we don't know anything about Him, which I don't profess
to, prefers effective food drops, dedicated medical teams, comfort and
good tents for the homeless and bereaved, and without strings, a decent
acceptance of our past sins and a readiness to put them right. He prefers
us less greedy, less arrogant, less evangelical, and less dismissive of
life's losers.
It's not a new world order, not yet, and it's not God's war. It's a
horrible, necessary, humiliating police action to redress the failure of
our intelligence services and our blind political stupidity in arming
fanatics to fight the Soviet invader, then abandoning them to a
devastated, leaderless country. As a result, it's our miserable duty to
seek out and punish a bunch of modern medieval religious zealots who will
gain mythic stature from the very death we propose to dish out to them.
And when it's over, it won't be over. The shadowy bin Laden armies, in
the emotional aftermath of his destruction, will gather numbers rather
than wither away. So will the hinterland of silent sympathizers who
provide them with logistical support.
Cautiously, between the lines, we are being invited to believe that the
conscience of the West has been reawakened to the dilemma of the poor and
homeless of the earth.
And possibly, out of fear, necessity, and rhetoric, a new sort of
political morality has, indeed, been born. But when the shooting dies and
a seeming peace is achieved, will the United States and its allies stay at
their posts or, as happened at the end of the Cold War, hang up their
boots and go home to their own back yards? Even if those back yards will
never again be the safe havens they once were?
John Le Carré is a novelist,
best known for his The Spy Who Came in From the Cold
