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COMMENTARY
November 7, 2001
Defining the pale
Less than two months after the terror strikes on New York and Washington the pace of change in both public and government attitudes is accelerating both at home in North America and around the world. Notwithstanding the anthrax scare which we can only hope is now passing the element of shock and panic in so many initial responses is itself beginning to metamorphose into a gritty will to fight and win the unwanted war. This is evident in public opinion polls both in the United States and throughout Europe and the West. Public support for the very long campaign ahead is hardening just as dreams of quick solutions evaporate. This is less perceptible day to day than week to week; though the media write headlines to an hourly schedule and seem still to feel as we did before Sept. 11 that our chief duties are to alarm and demoralize the general public. Most interesting in U.S. polls is that decline in support for the government's economic recovery "package" (it has fallen to 70 per cent) has not been accompanied by decline in support for vigorous military action in Afghanistan (still around 90 per cent). The U.S. public at least is able to distinguish what is worth debating from what requires solidarity and unflagging will. Germany yesterday made moves to commit a force of 3 900 elite soldiers to the Afghan campaign and a host of specialized military assets. Italy has now offered an armoured regiment attack helicopters fighter jets and specialists in mass-destructive warfare. The other European powers (plus Canada Australia New Zealand Japan) are likewise moving rapidly beyond lip service to commit themselves to the anti-terrorist front line. This has been achieved I think through the formation of an intra-European consensus that Europe itself is threatened -- could run but cannot hide. The easy anti-American posturing and second-guessing of the European media continues but at the top of European society (in governments) and below (among those queried in opinion polls) the smug attitudes of yesterday have all but vanished. The fear of a trans-Atlantic split on strategy is beginning to recede. The speech broadcast yesterday by President GeorgeW. Bush to the 17 post-Soviet U.S. allies of central and eastern Europe was the first to consciously address the "new world order" that has emerged from the attacks. It is paradoxical that while George Bush Senior used the phrase to describe the post-Cold War environment in which he pursued a huge police action to reverse Iraq's invasion of Kuwait the thing itself took a decade more to happen. It came out of the blue sky eight weeks ago and only now can we begin to see forward into a world that does not in any way resemble the one that came down with the Berlin Wall. In foreign policy the intervening decade was a lost era one in which we continued to assume the categories for thinking the "paradigm" that was appropriate to the old bi-polar order in which the U.S. and allies challenged the Soviet Union and its allies trying to "contain" Communist aggression. But an old paradigm is not so easy to shake off. One of the greatest problems now from the U.S. State Department outwards is for people raised in the old paradigm to think their way into the new one: to realize that what was required to fight the Soviet threat may not be useful may in practice be counter-productive in the struggle against international Islamist terrorism. In a brilliant article on the Wall Street Journal website Sunday Ralph Peters spelled this out. Our generals and diplomats both consciously and unconsciously wrestle to maintain some kind of "stability" among the regimes in the Middle East (especially Egypt and Saudi Arabia as formerly they tried to reinforce the Shah's Iran). We used to worry that such major countries would tilt the geopolitical balance by defecting to the Soviets. We knew all along that these regimes were corrupt and unpopular that their allegiance to the U.S. superpower was skin deep and to Western ideals non-existent. But we continue to assume that their support is critical to our attack on Islamist terrorism that without keeping them on our side (as they were in the 1991 coalition against Iraq) the battle is lost. But is the stability of the various "despotic but moderate" Muslim regimes any longer in the U.S. national interest or in the interest of the West at large? It was because they were still acting within the old Cold War paradigm that the first instinct of the young Bush administration was to "shore up its allies" in the region. And it was for this reason that it was rather shocked to find on revisiting after a decade of progressive disengagement that the U.S. does not really have any allies in the Middle East except: 1. The democracies Israel Turkey and India. 2. Allies of convenience and opportunity such as the dictatorships of former-Soviet Central Asia the Afghan Northern Alliance and the small emirates of the Persian Gulf. 3. Pakistan an ally by compulsion the first Muslim state to be confronted with the stark choice Friend or foe? -- to help the U.S. effort against Al Qaeda and Taliban or itself be attacked. As Seymour Hersh with his wealth of intelligence and diplomatic contacts has reported in the New Yorker -- the U.S. administration is still coming to terms with a response from Saudi Arabia that is almost obstructionist. And the people who make U.S. policy towards that country are themselves increasingly frustrated and angry. The House of Saud is of course a reliable enemy of Osama bin Laden -- for he threatens them as directly as he threatens the U.S. But the Sauds refuse to be seen co-operating directly with the U.S. even when they are for fear that this will inflame the fanatic mullahs and other Islamists who challenge their regime at home. In a broadcast on Saudi domestic television yesterday the crown prince Abdullah blew fire at the American media seemingly as a surrogate for the Bush administration itself. That his own state-sponsored media are awash in anti-Jewish and anti-American diatribes goes without saying. Under the old Cold War dispensation the U.S. had to quietly put up with anything the House of Saud demanded. Beyond the strategic threat of losing a powerful regional ally in the confrontation with the Soviet "evil empire" there was the security of the Western oil supply to consider. Europe and Japan remain deeply addicted to Arab oil the U.S. less so; and as I have written before the longer and even medium-term prospects are opening to vast new oil fields in Russia and elsewhere and to the new solar wind and nuclear energy technologies that are finally coming onstream. The use to the West of the despotic and backward Saudi regime is coming to an end. Yet at the same time the blind spot continues in U.S. calculations. The Bush administration is itself headed by two former oil executives and while the president belongs to a new generation the vice president Dick Cheney and other senior advisers seem to belong to the cautious old school whose motto is No matter what happens, don't offend these people. In his speech yesterday to the government leaders assembled at Warsaw President Bush was signalling a new U.S. attitude that is distinctly post-Cold War. He had already paraded the new relationship with the Russian president Vladimir Putin. It is hard to make any speech especially a subtle one idiot-proof and from what I could read and see yesterday the media were stressing the "Osama is looking for nuclear weapons" angle a fairly pure product of their imaginations for it was less than tangential to the words Mr. Bush actually spoke. He said We are at the beginning of our efforts in Afghanistan. And Afghanistan is the beginning of our efforts in the world. No group or nation should mistake America's intentions: We will not rest until terrorist groups of global reach have been found, have been stopped, and have been defeated. And this goal will not be achieved until all the world's nations stop harbouring and supporting such terrorists within their borders. ... I will put every nation on notice that these duties involve more than sympathy or words. No nation can be neutral in this conflict because no civilized nation can be secure in a world threatened by terror." He spoke as he did in Europe in early summer of building "a House of Freedom whose doors are open to all of Europe's people and whose windows look out to global opportunities beyond. Now that vision has been challenged but it will not change." If you read these words carefully as European leaders will now be doing you will see the "new world order" that is implicit in them together with the suggestion that it was already there before Sept. 11. Mr. Bush now acknowledges a new contest on a large scale between the democracies and "the rest" -- the countries including almost all of those in the Muslim world in which democratic reforms would seem to be permanently stalled or stillborn. He foresees growing co-operation and integration within our expanded Western alliance one that is coming to include Russia as well as the new Asian and Latin American democracies. He has almost explicitly reversed the Islamist contrast between the "Realm of Islam" and the "Realm of Jihad". In opposition towards our "House of Freedom" he implies the existence of a house of tyranny. And he looks upon it not as a source of revolving allies and enemies but rather aloofly through "windows". There may or may not be "opportunities" there; we won't hold our breath. In other words a "world order" is emerging in which a new front line is being drawn to supplement our internal borders. A frontier is being acknowledged beyond which any allies we have are merely allies of convenience and our primary object is not to win friends but to protect ourselves from the threat of terrorism. It will take months more likely years for the bureaucracies (including the American ones) to catch up with this new "paradigm". It is a huge ship that has to be turned but turn it must and the turn is beginning. David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
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