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COMMENTARY
March 13, 2002
Two coalitions
In his speech on the South Lawn Monday President Bush seemed oddly pacific. He has accustomed us to expect a certain quantity of blood and thunder and by comparison to his previous war speeches he seemed gently accommodating. His celebration of a fallen Australian soldier was a nice touch -- Australia has been there for the United States in every modern conflict from Korea to Vietnam to the Gulf wherever -- and he numbered American casualties with Afghans with Danes and Germans. He sincerely thanked the French for sending a quarter of their navy and even mentioned Canada for a change. His audience was full of diplomats 170 flags were flying and the speech explicitly acknowledged that terror had claimed many international victims before it fell from the skies on America and the great reckoning began. (And the reckoning is becoming international: the recent Operation Anaconda in eastern Afghanistan is for instance the first time Canadian troops have been deployed in an active war zone in half a century.) All this diplomacy was at the cost of big headlines. Nevertheless several new and substantive things were said or rather a picture was being drawn. It was Mr. Bush's first "we are the world" speech as president and was designed to communicate abroad his administration's very solemn belief that we are fighting a kind of World War. He was making a much more confident promise to be involved in rebuilding Afghanistan and by extension other countries that are "warzoned" not as an American project but as a world project. He was for the first time aloud looking forward to when this war might be over -- and therefore to the international order that should emerge from it. Implicit in his statements was a vision of nations working in concert that is post-NATO and actually post-United Nations; one in which the nation states commit themselves as states (and not as members of organizations) to active involvement in specific world tasks. It is a vision of U.S. "voluntarism" writ large and it grows directly out of the present experience of forming coalitions around tasks not tasks around coalitions. For the real tasks are not bureaucratic games they are urgent and important. For the moment he was allowing that there are in fact two coalitions. One consists almost exclusively of hard military powers willing to do the necessary -- the U.S. Britain probably Turkey certainly Israel if it is ever asked and India in a pinch. The other is what we see on the ground in Afghanistan -- a much larger medley willing to go anywhere once members of the first coalition have made it reasonably safe. "Do what you can do do what you will do and if you can't help don't get in the way is how I would summarize the sharp end of Mr. Bush's message. I think this has already gone over even better than the phrase, axis of evil" -- which had the desired effect of getting everyone's undistracted attention. For there is a further message almost subliminal in this. The United States does not believe itself to be omnipotent. It believes itself to be very powerful but on Mr. Bush's watch at least it will not pretend to be the model for every other nation. It has no reasonable choice but to lead the struggle to create international order out of the chaos of our times to free the world from the contagion of lethally armed fanatics -- the common enemies of all civilized mankind. In some sense the president actually believes the U.S. has a divine an historical vocation in this regard. It was the half-anniversary (aside to copywriters: there can be no such thing as a "six-month anniversary") of an instruction received as it were from the heavens. But Bush's God does not speak exclusively to the United States. He can find a unique role and mission for any country in world affairs. This God is saying no man is an island and no country can consider itself a non-participant in the life around it. To speak diplomatically is to speak especially to Europe. It is the continent that invented the concept and which has come to believe in its efficacy as the solution to almost any apparently intractable problem. (Neville Chamberlain was the ultimate European.) The Europeans hold up the British experience in Northern Ireland as an example of how to gradually defuse a crisis by smothering your terrorist enemy in polite verbiage until he cries for mercy and lays down his arms. It is the mark of a snoringly decadent civilization and a large part of the U.S. task is to wake Europe up. There was a remark an observation I was told Mr. Bush made to aides on his return from his European tour last June. You will recall that he went into even that trip taking hits for his "ignorance and simple-mindedness" from European media and chattering classes including several in high government positions. But after seeing the man close up many of the same said they were impressed by his knowledge intelligence and sophistication almost bowled over. (Low expectations are always worth cultivating.) On his return and in private he gave his own account of his exploits. To these aides he said something like Americans tend to decide things in terms of ideas and arguments. Europeans are more concerned with charm. I think this is a genuine insight. The Europeans are fairly easy to manage if you forget about ideas and arguments and just charm and be charmed by them. What they especially like is when we listen intently. It isn't actually necessary to concede anything -- and in the event Mr. Bush conceded nothing at all last June and they didn't seem to notice. There was not so much as a cosmetic change then to U.S. policies on missiles and "global warming". But he made them feel they had been consulted and that he wouldn't dream of such a gaucherie as acting in a unilateral way. As the occupant of America's "bully pulpit" (Teddy Roosevelt's phrase) Mr. Bush is now doing for the Europeans what he was doing more urgently for the Muslims in the first days after the 9/11 attacks; calling off the dogs. Americans are angry and as the polls seem to indicate -- support for fighting whether in Afghanistan or Iraq has not declined since Sept. 12th -- they are going to stay angry for a long time. No need to rouse them on that side. Instead they need to be deterred from lashing out counter-productively against people who aren't really their enemies yet. "The Muslims are our friends; the Europeans are our friends" -- this is what the president must be saying to the home audience with as much plausibility as can be mustered. Meanwhile get on with the job. And a significant part of that job requires convincing the Europeans that there is life after empire. That the world is no less a dangerous place than it was when they were directing traffic. That someone still has to play cop. To paraphrase: "We're going to do what we're going to do don't bother telling us not to. We'll take British help to cream Saddam Hussein since it is on offer but the rest of you have got to find lives. If you want us to do the fighting fine. But instead of telling us what our task should be find one of your own and put some spirit into it." David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
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