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SUNDAY SPECTATOR
December 29, 2002
A backward glance
In my view -- which is the view I tend to represent in these columns -- the year 2002 has been oddly uneventful. I am still writing from within it clearly a bit of distance would be useful to understanding it. But the further one gets away from a year the more one tends to lose interest. And on balance I think 2002 will prove to be one of those more forgettable years like 1931 or 1955 or 1977. I expect people looking back on the early 21st century will be inclined to elide 2002 to go straight from "9/11" and Afghanistan to what happened in 2003 without pausing. The mind needs visible symbols even to mark invisible events. Still I was rather surprised by 2002. At this time last year I was expecting a year of action not of contemplation. Given the urgency then of the threats to the United States and the West from what President George W. Bush was about to call the "axis of evil" it did not seem likely we could get through the year without war spreading to another major theatre. And yet a lot did happen in 2002 mostly out of public view. Events surfaced only briefly and apparently discretely: arrests in the U.S. Germany Pakistan Indonesia elsewhere; assassinations of several terrorist leaders at remote locations; shoot-outs with others in the Philippines Kashmir Somalia Yemen; quiet transfers to Guantanamo Bay; rumours of undercover operations in Kurdistan Morocco Jordan even Singapore. An "invisible war" has been carried on against Al Qaeda and increasingly against Hezbollah and other Islamist terrorist organizations mostly out of view of the media. To me as a journalist trying to pry -- trying to find out what is really going on -- I notice silence growing. As the year has progressed less and less information on more and more activity. And where information does leak out I notice it is usually from foreign not American sources. The Bush administration has succeeded in running a much tighter ship than any in recent memory. It tries not to share information with its enemies and therefore can less and less afford to share it with its friends. Likewise on preparations for Iraq. Earlier in the year I was surprised how openly people in the Pentagon would speak to me trading information; now the same people have nothing to add in the midst of an extraordinary build-up. The "inner history" of international events in 2002 will not be known for at least a decade and the full context may not emerge for several decades. Thus the "outward" history of the year may be misleading. The best one can say with certainty is that within the West's citadels of power the year was devoted to major preparations. A glance at military appropriations -- a huge and immediate increase in U.S. military spending -- would suggest a tremendous unpublicised effort to increase war production and accelerate technological innovation. The announcement that an anti-missile system will be deployed in Alaska within two years is a good example. It could easily have taken six or seven years; but the threat from North Korea and potentially even from China in some confrontation over Taiwan means the U.S. can't wait. What has happened outwardly this year is lost in a sea of detail. It is not something confined to the year 2002 rather an acceleration of what has been developing over more than a decade since the fall of the Berlin Wall. But like the anti-missile systems or the new generation of "bunker busters" and other munitions and guidance systems now being rushed into production the story is in the acceleration not in the direction of movement. I shall have to use the words "left" and "right" to explain what I mean with the usual apology for unavoidable intellectual shorthand. Looking back to the Cold War era it becomes obvious that superficial positions on "left" and "right" of the political spectrum have been exchanged. As one example where the left were previously obsessed with "human rights" and "democracy" -- demanding active effort to make the world a better place -- now these causes belong almost exclusively to the right. The "realpolitik" and "caution" of the right are now watchwords of the left. The idea of "containment" has been transferred almost entirely from right to left and it is the left today that is allergic to grand strategic ambitions. The fact before the collapse of the Soviet Union was that little could be done. The world was divided between the orbits of two superpowers and the forces in almost every local theatre struggling for democracy rule of law open economies and societies were stymied directly or indirectly by Communist subversion. Little proxy wars were being fought on many fronts invariably with Soviet assistance for one side and American for the other. There was little scope for advances in human freedom but to compensate little danger that the local conflicts could spread very far. Now the scope is large and the dangers are large. There is no longer the discipline imposed by the logic of Mutual Assured Destruction and neither the friends nor enemies of human freedom are hemmed. Suddenly now that it is possible indeed necessary to change the world the left guards the status quo and the right pushes forward. The left now looks to the past the right to the future. Throughout at least the West the left has become "conservative" in the old sense defending public institutions against the claims of the individual and the family. The right has become compensatingly "liberal" in the old sense of siding with the individual and the family against institutional power. It has been a year of taking stock of lull in the approach of great and frightening events. I think the effect has been to radicalize our thinking across the political spectrum. In the future I expect a new "left" and "right" will emerge from within what is now characterized as the "right" of the spectrum -- from the people willing to confront and wrestle with radically changed circumstances in the world. (The opposite of what happened in the last century.) And the "old left" enwrapped in nostalgia for a previous era will fade with that past. This process gained speed markedly in 2002. Events over the next few years will tend to confirm visibly what has happened mostly invisibly. David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
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