Wrapped up in itself
The US is more concerned with its losses than re-ordering the world. That could leave Tony Blair exposed
Jonathan Freedland Wednesday November 14, 2001 The Guardian
Monday was not a good day to fly into America. The skies may have been blue and the sun bright, but the mood was newly edgy and fearful. One day and two months after September 11, the national stomach was again knotted with anxiety. Yet another plane had plunged out of the sky and on to New York city, prompting the same dread thought: "Oh no, here we go again."
Officials did their best to calm nerves, rapidly jumping to the conclusion that the crash was not a sequel but a "catastrophic mechanical error". That was meant to be comforting, since engine failure should be a one-off, unlikely to be repeated. As yesterday's New York Times pointed out, it says much about the nation's altered state when news of a horrific accident counts as a relief. That's all they were talking about here on Monday night. Even as the Northern Alliance was marching on Kabul, marking the most dramatic shift yet in the war on Afghanistan, the plight of Flight 587 dominated radio, TV and casual conversation.
That's hardly a surprise; no country would be any different. But the crash in Queens is bound to confirm a cast of mind that was noticeable here already. It will ensure that America, post- September 11, remains concerned with one subject above all others: itself.
The evidence is all around. US flags still fly from the porches of small houses and the roofs of tall buildings; businessmen still wear stars-and-stripes pins in their lapels. Drive down Interstate 66 from Dulles airport and you see banner after banner hanging from motorway footbridges. "Our Spirit is Strong" says one, accompanied by the inevitable "God Bless America".
Scan the front pages and the focus is just as inward. A debate, accelerated by the latest crash, is currently raging over security at US airports. Republicans in the House are blocking a Democratic plan to create a 28,000-strong federal workforce to screen passengers and their bags: they think that it smacks too much of big government and they want a public-private partnership instead.
Meanwhile, even loyal Republicans are muttering that President Bush's chief of homeland security, Tom Ridge, is out of his depth and failing to make any impact in his newly-created post. They worry that Americans might avoid flying, with the big test coming during next week's Thanksgiving holiday, when Americans by the millions usually board planes to be with their families. If they don't, two or three carriers could shut down soon afterwards. That would hurt an economy that's already sick and add to a national mood that, although still resilient, is understandably low.
Others are pointing the finger at those who should have seen the al-Qaida threat coming. The FBI's failure to do that, and to find out who's been sending anthrax spores in the mail, has sent the bureau's already low stock plummeting. Now there are plans for a complete overhaul of the FBI from top to bottom.
These are the debates in America. They are about Americans and how they can better protect themselves from a new and alien threat. They could not be further away from the loud, and sometimes bitter, arguments we have been having in Britain.
For there is no debate about the rights and wrongs of the war in Afghanistan - none at all. A single congresswoman spoke out against it, and she has been all but ostracised by her Democratic colleagues. They made a tactical decision early to back the war, to prevent George Bush gaining political advantage from it - leaving themselves free to attack him on other fronts.
The result is total, bipartisan consensus. The questions so hotly fought over in Britain and Europe - the risk to Afghan civilians, the morality of cluster bombs and daisy cutters, the relevance of targeting Afghanistan when the al-Qaida threat lives in Frankfurt and Florida as much as Kabul and Kandahar - are barely heard here. A handful of agitators have spoken out against the war, but they are confined to America's loony left. "Opposing the war is just not a political position," says one long-time Washington Democrat. "It's not a social position," says another. In other words, doubts about the war have become unacceptable in polite company.
Nor do Americans give much time to the other discussion that has gobbled up airtime in Britain. There is little serious talk here about the root causes of terrorism - not about poverty or the malaise of bad governance across the Arab and Muslim world or the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. You'll find more opinion pieces on airport x-ray machines and new check-in procedures than about global injustice.
What explains this overweening US concern with itself, so at odds with the early post-tragedy talk of an America that had suddenly realised it could not live apart from the rest of the world? "Because you weren't the ones who were hit," says a former Clinton official, for whom America is still reeling from the shock of a day that cost more lives than any other in US history - including the bloodiest battles of the civil war. No wonder the country has no head for worries about Afghanistan or a remade international order. It is still tending its own wound; the fires at the World Trade Center are still smouldering.
This degree of introspection has consequences. An immediate one is that the wobble in support among America's allies - perhaps temporarily halted by the Taliban retreat from Kabul - goes unattended by Washington. The Bush administration has little feel for it, partly because it is not tuned to voices outside the US and partly because there is no equivalent wobble here. Bush has got so used to preaching to the converted in the US that he has no idea how to address the unconvinced beyond his shores.
The less obvious impact is on Tony Blair. He delivered an excellent speech on Monday night, reworking his Brighton doctrine of international community, rattling off the big tasks that are needed to reorder the world. But his message finds no echo from the Bush administration or the wider America. No American of stature speaks the way he does about the dragons teeth of terrorism sown by unfair trade rules or by unending regional conflicts.
This could either be very bad for Blair or very good. He could either be left out on a limb, sounding like a naïve idealist who signed up for a war expecting a mercy mission, when that war's masters had no such plans.
Or it could suggest an unspoken deal between Blair and Bush, under which the PM supports the war and, in return, gets to dictate the terms of the peace. His standing in the US remains extraordinarily high and he could be hoping to convert that into a global role once victory is won - as the man charged with implementing his Brighton wishlist on everything from remaking the UN to addressing climate change.
That is his best hope. For right now, he is singing his hymn of global good works alone. America is too busy soothing itself with songs of its own.