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COMMENTARY
January 31, 2002
The other shoe
WASHINGTON. It takes a day for the content of a political message such as President George Bush's State of the Union to sink in. Watching it here Tuesday night I was aware of the huge number of fellow journalists under sharp deadline pressure to review a performance like theatre critics and answer the first-night question: Did the play come up to expectations? (They answered mostly yes.) The morning after we ask: What was the meaning of it? The president's domestic wish-list is irrelevant to the world outside the U.S. What the speech sounded was the depth of the American commitment to win the "war on terror". From what I can discern Michael Gerson and speechwriting staff went through nearly thirty drafts as the administration tested its will internally. It was the last chance for any "doves" within to get punches pulled and qualifications written into what has emerged as the "Bush doctrine". That doctrine now stands unambiguously as the foreign policy of the United States probably for decades to come. While the essential principle was enunciated by President Bush even in the first moments after the terror strikes of Sept. 11th -- that the U.S. would now go after not only terrorists but the states that harbour them -- the implications of this have now been thought through. When for instance the president named Iraq Iran and North Korea he was in deadly earnest. He was effectively declaring a state of war with those regimes. The most significant term in the speech was the word axis . The conventional wisdom had been that enemies of the U.S. in the Middle East and elsewhere fall into distinct camps; that each terror network has its own discrete focus and purpose -- Wahabi or Shia Islamist Palestinian regional separatist etc. But the underlying reality is that all these causes are pursued on the international stage and that all these interests tend to be united on that stage by a common anti-American strategic aim. The old notion was that for instance the Al Qaeda leadership Iraq's Saddam Hussein and Iran's ayatollahs hate each other more than any of them hate the U.S. This was naive. The reality is that each hates the U.S. more than they hate each other. Just as the U.S. attempts to configure a coalition of interests against the terror networks and their sponsors this enemy coalesces against its main target. In the last few weeks an urgent rapprochement has been observed between the regimes of Iran and Iraq. Iran has been found to be playing an active role undermining the new Afghan government of Hamid Karzai by feeding weapons and advice to the country's western warlords. (The ayatollahs' intention may well be to create a killing zone for U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan on the model of Lebanon in the early 1980s.) The Israeli interception of the Karine A in the Red Sea meanwhile exposed the extent of the new affiliation between Iran's Hezbollah and the Palestinian administration of Yasser Arafat. The double-dealing of Saudi Arabia has been highlighted. On the one side Crown Prince Abdullah launches a fresh public relations campaign in the U.S. on the other Saudi diplomats are "normalizing" ties with both Iraq and Iran after years of circumspection. (One Pentagon strategist told me that the House of Saud has begun to resemble the board of Enron reaching for last straws.) Syria continues to play a similar game while the Gulf states Yemen Jordan and Egypt try to manoeuvre themselves well out of it -- having correctly gauged the degree of U.S. resolve. North Korea's role as a manufacturer and distributor of terrorist weaponry is a wild card in this. One diplomatic train wreck is coming in several weeks when President Bush is scheduled to visit South Korea where President Kim Dae Jung's detente-like "sunshine policy" towards the North now openly clashes with stated U.S. aims. North Korean intransigence makes such a policy untenable. For the issue of weapons of mass destruction has been put at the centre of the U.S. worldview. The lesson of Sept. 11th has sunk deeper and deeper: that here are states which both sponsor terrorists and are recklessly advancing nuclear biological and chemical weapons programmes and missile systems with intercontinental reach. Little time remains to prevent the next ghastly surprise on a scale far beyond what was done to lower Manhattan. It is no longer possible for the U.S. or its allies to assume complacently that the unthinkable cannot happen -- that America's enemies would never strike first. Mr. Bush's State of the Union address was a signal not only to the countries named and warned but to U.S. allies in Europe and elsewhere. For there is currently an ominous lull between storms. There is a danger that Europe's politicians will lock themselves into the comfortable view that the worst is over. The response of the international moderate left to the incarcerations at Guantanamo Bay suggested return to a mindset that should have been obliterated with the World Trade Centre -- the belief that cheap anti-American posturing can somehow deliver "peace in our time". By the tone of his remarks President Bush was telling Europe You're not off the hook. We will not to return to the business-as-usual of Sept. 10th. Impressive gains in the polls of Europe's right-wing parties both in opposition and government are anyway tending to deliver this message to the continent's political elites. (And in Britain for instance where surely 90 per cent of the media had "deep reservations" about the U.S. treatment of Camp X-ray prisoners follow-up polls suggest that 90 per cent of the British public did not share them.) The war in other words has hardly started. The easy part -- dispatching the Afghan terrorist regime -- has now been accomplished. The hard parts now lie ahead. The real question from the beginning has been Does the U.S. have the stomach for a conflict dimensionally larger than the Afghan campaign? On Tuesday after much internal wrangling and additional thought Mr. Bush repeated the answer Yes. David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
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