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SUNDAY SPECTATOR
December 15, 2002
Denial & panic
On Sundays I try to be free of the positions I take in the newspaper on weekdays and vice versa for that matter. Believe it or not and I know some readers may have trouble with this on weekdays I am more reporting than commenting more explaining than preaching. The two activities -- reporting and commenting -- are so mutually interdependent that it would be dishonest not always to be doing a bit of both. But still one dancer or the other must lead. On weekdays in this job as in life I am not really telling people what should happen but rather what I think is happening. This naturally involves nice questions of judgement that reveal a writer clearly enough whether or not they also reveal the true course of events. But let me say and not really for the first time that the thing that most nauseates me in journalism is the writer with very strong opinions who masquerades behind the language of "objectivity". (For example I cannot tell you how much I despise much of the New York Times.) But there is still less and more (and sometimes less is more) an editorial page and news pages with different ways of dressing and speaking. "Commenting" and "preaching" require a certain aloofness; "reporting" and "explaining" a certain participation or tumbling in the hay. One writes either from the middle of things or from a figurative position above and it is useful to remember at every moment just where one is standing or suspended in space. Let me clinch my point in one neat stroke. A large number of readers both favourable and unfavourable are of the opinion from reading my daily commentaries that I agree with everything the U.S. President is doing in prosecution of the "war on terror". It would follow logically from this I should think that if I were in President Bush's shoes I would be doing more or less the same things. Yet this is not true at all. Had I been President of the United States -- and perish the thought but this is just for the sake of argument -- the dictatorship of Saddam Hussein in Iraq would have been removed last winter. The ayatollahs of Iran would have gone last spring. The Syrian Libyan and Sudanese despots would have disappeared through the summer and the Americans would now be occupying Riyadh. (These wouldn't have been full-scale invasions incidentally just special forces drop-in regime changes preceded by disarming air strikes.) Attempts would be underway to found something resembling Western-style democracies in each of these countries starting with the equivalent of the "de-Nazification" campaign in occupied Germany after the last world war but in this case aimed at the complete elimination of fanatical "Islamism" mad mullahs and all. I recognize however that this "point of view" -- my Machiavellian preference for getting the unpleasantness over with as quickly as possible -- tends to the na?ve. It tends to disregard many of the political realities which a real President of a real country is obliged to confront. For a U.S. President who had followed the agenda above might not even be in office any more. His own generals might have refused to obey him; the entire political class might have risen up as one; the Europeans might all have quit NATO. The problem for a President is not going to war per se when he believes that he must but taking these gun-shy people along with him. In the "real" world the everyday world where everything looks sane whether it is or not people do not like to jump in the cold water all at once. They would rather spread out the unpleasantness take it a little at a time start with a toe and then an ankle. In this real world if 9/11 hadn't happened the Taliban would still be in power in Kabul. Conversely in the real world the unspeakably corrupt autocratic and conniving princes who rule Saudi Arabia are probably quite safely in power until something even bigger than 9/11 is done -- within the United States or to a target such as St. Peter's in Rome -- and then all bets are off. In the real world people don't plunge in the cold water until the stakes are raised to the point where they must. Then you get the most extraordinary and sudden if sometimes inelegant dives. James Woolsey a former director of the CIA delivered a very interesting talk recently over breakfast at a Washington retreat. He was giving his hesitantly on-the-record assessment of how "World War IV" is going. (The expression implies that World War III was the Cold War which we were able to win against Communism by steadfastness luckily without a thermonuclear exchange.) He pointed out a number of distressing things about the degree of our exposure. For if the radical Islamists were just a little more intelligently organized a little less obsessed with symbols and a little more with substance they wouldn't need much luck to kill millions of people and bring the whole Western economy crashing down. Since I'm among the people who already understand this I didn't find the point especially interesting. It was something else he said something I'd never really thought about before that got my attention. He mentioned the internment of the Japanese during World War II. One of the more constant droning arguments among "liberals" or "leftists" is what a huge injustice this was. And it was in retrospect quite unnecessary. But Mr. Woolsey reminded that the decision to intern this whole ethnic population wasn't made by "conservatives" or "bigots". The three essential movers and shakers were Earl Warren then running for governor of California Hugo Black who wrote the Korematsu decision upholding the constitutionality of concentration camps and of course President Franklin Delano Roosevelt. In other words the three most prominent "liberals" in the United States of that day. All it took was Pearl Harbour. For this is how the world works I am sorry to have to tell you. The very people who live in denial of the magnitude of a problem and fight the hardest to avoid it are the ones who lose it when the lightning finally strikes. The flip side of denial is panic. David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
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