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SUNDAY SPECTATOR
October 7, 2001
Future alliance
The Americans call it a "war" the Europeans would prefer to call it some other thing but cannot think what. Granted the Americans have been guilty of flamboyance in the past have declared wars on everything from poverty to smoking. But the boy who cried Wolf! has it right this time and we should not cavil. It is anyway a monosyllable and uses less space than The sequence of events which began with the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington on Sept. 11. I prefer the hint of disyllable in the old Hobbes spelling warre but what can you do against today's sub-editors. War can have several definitions but is all one thing when it comes to effects. It involves incredible destruction and the transformation of all the warring parties. (Sometimes for evil sometimes for good.) In the case of this war there are already even more participants than in World War II; it promises to be a true "world war". The level of violence is much lower but then I fear we are still in the "phoney war" phase. (Older readers may recall the "phoney war" of 1939 the long months in which nothing seemed to happen before the full blossom in 1940.) >From the allied the Western point of view the war has started extremely well; which is no indication it will continue that way. President Bush and his remarkable war cabinet have masterfully assembled a coalition from common interests to strike the first blow. A very impressive strong-armed diplomacy has made slouching allies sit bolt upright and from Sudan to Pakistan to Central Asia prospective neutrals have come off the fence. Beyond the diplomatic President Bush has done the best job imaginable of communicating his intentions over the heads of his enemies. The Muslim world is presently more quiescent and accommodating than anyone (on our side) could reasonably have hoped; there is some degree of understanding that the battle is not against them. So effective have the preparations been that there are indications far beyond Afghanistan that terrorist networks are scurrying into defensive formations; that they have themselves been terrorized to some degree. But there is an important exception in Israel/Palestine where it is becoming increasingly obvious that organizations such as Hamas and Hezbollah -- left off the president's initial "terror list" for tactical reasons -- are escalating their battle against the Israeli state and where spectacular and well co-ordinated suicide hits are now being attempted against Jewish settlements in the West Bank and Gaza. These alone may have the power to upset all American planning and sow chaos throughout the Middle East. Moreover a false calculation by Palestinian radicals may have been encouraged by the Bush administration in its dire need to get the Palestinian question off the table before strikes elsewhere. Yassir Arafat himself has probably decided that this is the most promising moment to separate Israel from it's U.S. "sponsor" -- the moment when the Israeli national interest runs contrary to the American. It is alas something the Palestinian leadership have never learned and seem unable to learn: that under mortal threat democracies will finally stick together. In the last few weeks I have been writing in the daily paper about some of the astonishing changes to the world order that have happened in "phase one" -- the "phoney" stage -- of this war. The world's previous alliances have been revolved; the West has found allies under the most unlikely rocks. But in looking ahead to "phase two" we must expect further and perhaps even more dramatic changes in disposition. It is after the real fighting has started that in the old phrase the men are separated from the boys . It is at that point that the West's real allies in the region begin to emerge. These countries will be: Turkey Israel and India. Every other ally is working under duress every other government is on shifting sand. These three countries alone are the settled democracies of this vast region (which I am interpreting to extend from Morocco to Indonesia -- right across the south of Asia). The key point about each of these "solid" allies is not cultural or rather in each case the religious culture has been overwritten by the experience of freedom. Turkey is Muslim Israel is Jewish and India is Hindu-Muslim. But what they have in common is the strength that comes -- not on the surface but from under the surface -- of a democratic order however flawed. In the end these are the three countries the United States and its NATO allies can rely upon. Indeed so firm is this reliance that all three of these countries have been mostly overlooked in the first order of battle. It is assumed that they take care of themselves that they don't and won't need any kind of pay-off to stay on-side. For when President Bush said of Canada that "you don't have to thank your brother" he meant something that applies also to each of these cases. The governments the political elites in Turkey Israel and India adhere to the West almost unthinkingly. This is because it is a matter of their own survival. The destruction of democracy in any of these countries would portend a terrible loss less to the world than to the countries' own citizens. And each is truly a front-line state the people in each of these countries can look around them to know what is the condition into which they could not wish to slide. I believe that the Bush administration grasps this underlying configuration. In the words of a former U.S. state department official Some of these countries see the crisis as a danger, and some see it as an opportunity. The latter can be a happy coincidence for us, but we don't want to give too much and end up too close to countries that don't share our values in the slightest. He said aloud what the administration is thinking. I hope but have reason to hope that through the carnage that is coming a very real alliance will emerge as NATO did from the West's confrontation with the Soviet Union. It will be an international "NATO" of the democracies -- an alliance corresponding approximately to the present membership of the OECD. Our real allies in the world will be compelled to establish a protective perimeter around themselves. On the inside the free-market democracies; on the outside countries trying to get in. Moreover that is the most we can practically hope for. David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
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