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COMMENTARY
October 20, 2004
Letter to USA, I
The Americans go to the polls this year on All Souls which is Nov. 2nd -- two weeks from yesterday. I can't think of a more appropriate day in the ancient Christian calendar. On All Souls we traditionally lit our candles and carried them into our ancient cemeteries and set them down by the graves of our forefathers. A reminder that democracy is the tyranny of the living who vote not only on their own behalf but also for the dead and the unborn. The Americans also vote on behalf of the whole world -- living dead unborn -- for such is the power of the U.S. in the contemporary world that we must all from Ottawa to Harare to Rio to Seoul to Warsaw to remotest Darfur in Sudan live with the consequences of what Americans decide. I am a Canadian but that American election is more significant to my future than was our recent Canadian election. They are their brother's keeper whether they wish it or not. Many Americans would dearly love not to have to make the tough decisions that go with being the world's present "hyperpower". But I am glad they are stuck with it. For all their flaws they have proved through decades of real power a remarkably generous people; much short of sanctity as we all fall short. Imagine had communist Russia or China an Islamist Persia a fascist Germany or Japan had the U.S. near-monopoly on "force projection". The U.S. could walk away from Vietnam -- among the few wars it ever failed to win and perhaps the only one it ever lost on purpose -- and the consequences were felt by tens of millions of Vietnamese Cambodians and Laotians who were abandoned to a life of poverty and slavery under Communist regimes. Millions of boat people left in the wake of the U.S. retreat. That was the local result but there were other consequences. Upon discovering the 1970s generation of Americans had no stomach for protracted war the Communists were emboldened to advance. The people of Ethiopia and Eritrea of Angola and Mozambique of Nicaragua Grenada and Afghanistan paid for the failure of U.S. resolution. And less directly a Soviet Empire that might have begun collapsing with the fall of Hanoi in the 1960s (had the U.S. invaded North Vietnam) was granted another generation of life. East Germans Poles Czechs Hungarians -- and ultimately Latvians Armenians Ukrainians and Russians -- might sooner have been freed with less aggregate damage to their societies. Of course that is hypothetical. We cannot know what happens in an alternative universe. But we can in the main speculate that had the 1980s been a decade of Carterism instead of Reaganism the Soviet Union might still be with us. It was Reagan's decision to re-orient U.S. foreign policy from acceptance and support of the "d?tente" that provided the Soviets with a lifeline to active opposition and evagination that brought the Evil Empire down. Had Clintonism continued in the person of Al Gore it is easy to imagine a U.S. still debating with itself whether to "do something unilaterally" about Taliban Afghanistan while appealing haplessly for U.N. support. For even that regime change took extraordinary unilateral logistical nerve. The Clinton administration had its chance to wake over the first attack on the World Trade Centre in 1993 and chose to look the other way. Egyptian intelligence warned the FBI that Arab terrorists were entering U.S. flight schools after the attempt to fly an airliner into the Eiffel Tower in 1994. The Clintonians looked away after uncovering a plot to bring down 11 airliners over the Pacific in 1995; after Khobar Towers in 1996; after uncovering an Al Qaeda masterplan in Albania in 1997; after the embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998; after attempted terror strikes on the U.S. in 1999; after the USS Cole was hit in 2000. They chose consistently the path of least resistance. To be fair 9/11 was on an unignorable scale and for months after Americans were united in bi-partisan agreement to do more than mourn. But what would actually have been done without Mr. Bush's remarkable spine? As we now know from their own words Al Qaeda's strategists realized the U.S. would make a softer target than Egypt or Saudi Arabia after the terrorist El Sayyid Nosair was able to murder the Jewish radical Meir Kahane in New York City get caught and yet escape with only minor weapons charges thanks to technicalities in U.S. law -- back in 1990. John F. Kerry himself voted in the Senate against freeing Kuwait from Saddam Hussein in 1991. Had that not been done Saddam might by now control the oil production not only of Iraq and Kuwait but perhaps of the entire Middle East. And so the American voter must think not only about what has happened but about what has been avoided. David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
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