HUMAN SACRIFICE IN AFGHANISTAN
Unable to give a clear defence of the advantages of Western civilisation, George Bush and his European allies chose instead to fake resolve by bombing Afghanistan. Any hope that the war would serve an ennobling purpose dissipated in the tawdry reality of 'asymmetric warfare'. The Pentagon trumpeted their air superiority over Afghanistan on the second day of bombing, but the truth is that they did not even need to go there to assert air supremacy. If casualties have remained low, it is more likely the consequence of the scattering of the population than smart missiles. Washington's problem is that without any stated moral purpose, the bombing looks much like the World Trade Center attack: a splenetic outpouring of sanctimonious rage, to which human lives must be sacrificed.
SELF-DOUBT IN THE WEST
Despite the much-vaunted programme of consolidating the coalition, no sooner was the attack underway than a clamour of dissent gripped the Western camp. After the first night of bombing, the United Nations' fielded the most convincing spokesperson in the whole media campaign - to denounce the killing of four UN employees by the US. United Nations special envoy on Human Rights Mary Robinson demanded an end to the bombing to allow the aid to get through. A rattled Tony Blair scurried around the Middle East, only to be refused permission to visit Saudi Arabia, and settled for an interview with Osama bin Laden's favourite Qatar-based news station Al-Jazeera instead. For the most part, the 'peace movement' in the West is less a popular mobilisation against the war (which remains relatively popular amongst working Americans and Europeans) than the querulous anxieties of the intelligentsia. The greatest anger is reserved not for the bombs, so much as those few who have been foolish enough to suggest that the West may have made a positive contribution to civilisation, such as Silvio Berlusconi in Italy, or British Daily Telegraph defence correspondent John Keegan.
TERROR IN AMERICA
The Pentagon had greater difficulties establishing air supremacy over America than it did over Afghanistan. Military aircraft have already escorted down passenger planes to deal with drunken or disturbed passengers. Military reservists have been called up - not to serve in central Asia, but to police America. The release of anthrax spores in the mail added to the generalised sense of panic, stoked by Deputy President Dick Cheney, who, lacking any evidence, attributed the infections to Osama bin Laden. But it is not bin Laden who has succeeded in terrorising America, but the authorities themselves. Food hoarding and absenteeism have soared as the Bush administration's permanent, but objectless, mobilisation takes effect.
THE MYTH OF THE ISLAMIC BACKLASH Protests in Pakistan, Indonesia and Oman have elevated fears of an Islamic backlash against the bombings. These fears are misplaced. Popular protests in the Islamic world are hardly surprising at the point of the bombing (indeed, if Western leaders were sincere in their support for democracy, they would condemn the military suppression of such demonstrations). But the level of popular protest is relatively muted compared to the last great military assault on a Muslim country, Iraq, in 1991. Then demonstrations rocked the Arab world from Jordan to Morocco, destabilising governments in Algeria, Egypt and Yemen. Then the Western press largely ignored the popular anger against intervention, whereas today you only have to set light to the Stars and Stripes to be guaranteed airtime on CNN.
Those surprised by the strength of feeling in Pakistan forget that Pakistan is not a democracy, and General Musharraf has no need to respond to the popular will. Indeed, Pakistan was created with the express purpose of frustrating popular nationalism in India, by dividing the country against itself on religious lines. Pakistan's one 'popular' leader Zulfikar ali Bhutto never received a majority of seats in parliament, but took office in a deal to frustrate the East Pakistan winner Sheikh Mujib. Pakistani rulers have only ever ruled in defiance of democracy, and the present regime is far from being the exception to that rule.
Protests in Indonesia and Oman take the bombing of Afghanistan as their starting point, but express much more specific grievances, such as the presence of large numbers of British military personnel on manoeuvres in Oman, or the humiliation that the US and its allies visited upon Indonesia's military leaders recently.
But what is telling is the relative weight that Islamic opinion is given by Western leaders and pundits today. Having blithely ignored the concerns of the citizens of Islamic countries for generations, today the Western elite is strangely in awe of public opinion in Central Asia and the Middle East. The perception that the Islamic world is rising up against them is not based upon fact, but on the West's own fears. Their preoccupation with a 'backlash' is merely the guilty presentiment of their own moral exhaustion.
Like the last days of the British Empire, today's world policemen are obsessed with the question 'why do they hate us?' when the surprising answer is that, for the most part, they do not. Western goods, technology and even culture have never been more popular in the rest of the world. There is no popular opposition to the West, apart from an understandable objection to its militarism. The myth of the 'backlash' inverts reality. It sees all the hostility coming from the Islamic world to the West, when, for decades it has been the other way round. In the sorry prejudices of the dying British Empire, the equivalent of the 'backlash' theory was the charge of 'reverse racism' that Britain made, unjustifiably, against colonial peoples. -- James Heartfield