MONDAY SEPTEMBER 24 2001
Why don't we just hold an anger management workshop?
MICK HUME
Don't get me wrong; I am opposed to the war planned by President George Bush with the support of Prime Minister Tony Blair. The problem is that I find many of the arguments offered against America as incoherent as Bush's war talk.
American policy seems best described as gesture militarism, designed to show that something is being done. I distrust the motives of any leader who declares war first, and then tries to find somebody to fight against. In searching for bin Laden, it appears that America is primarily trying to rediscover its own sense of mission. And that is a dangerous, destabilising basis for superpower foreign policy.
However, critics of Bush and Blair are indulging in dubious gestures of their own. A little local example: at a memorial service for the victims of those terrible attacks, the Labour mayor of our London borough reportedly announced to mourners that "one man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter". In the past, where battle lines had been clearly drawn between sides fighting for opposing causes, that cliché might have had some relevance. But it can hardly be applied in the murkier world of today.
What freedom were those who flew hijacked planes supposed to be fighting for? It is hard to say, since no movement has claimed responsibility for the attacks, no State has supported them, no cause has attached itself to them. It does no good for anybody to imply that there might be some liberationary impulse behind such nihilistic, narcissistic acts of terrorism.
Yet there remains much wishful thinking on the Left that, even if the attacks themselves were insupportable, something good might yet come of it all. Back in our borough, for example, the Race Equality Council has asked us not only to unite against international terrorism, but also to "consider the underlying causes that force ordinary people to resort to this extreme hate crime". This patronising argument is lifted straight out of the social workers' manual. It depicts the people of the developing world as abused children who are "forced" by their hateful experience at the hands of the West to become hate-filled abusers in turn (conveniently ignoring the fact that the hijackers seem to have been well-educated and Westernised).
This retreat into therapeutic advice has been much in evidence at anti-war protests. Common criticisms have been aimed, not so much at Washington's interventionist foreign policy, but at America's alleged lack of respect for other people and failure to empathise with their feelings. At Friday's biggest "Stop the war" meeting in London, one speaker proposed teaching people about our "common vulnerability, the universality of loss and pain".
Another said the West should go to Muslims in Afghanistan and say "we're offering you kindness, love instead of hostility". If international conflict is to be reinterpreted in the language of inter-personal therapy, presumably the solution will be to send Americans on an anger management course and put the socially excluded of Afghanistan or Iraq on an at-risk register.
Above all, these sentiments appear to express people's sense of their own powerlessness today, and their fear of anybody doing anything decisive. That state of mind seemed well reflected on Saturday's CND protest in Whitehall, where people complained that a war between Bush and the Taleban would be "one fundamentalism against another", and the organisers asked that there be no banners, no slogans, no politics - just everybody dressed in black for an incoherent post-Diana-style display of emotional solidarity. Far from offering a positive alternative, that message of powerlessness and passivity can only encourage even greater feelings of insecurity in the world.
Unlike the "hands off" movements of the past, today's anti-war lobby does not want less Western intervention in the Third World. In fact it wants more far-reaching intervention, through such bodies as the International Criminal Court. Nor do leading peace lobbyists appear to share the principles of old-fashioned pacifism. Indeed, some have previously been willing to support wars that were packaged in the emotionally correct way, with enough tears and talk of human rights.
Labour Cabinet Minister Clare Short, the most prominent British critic of Bush's "crusade", was a hawkish cheerleader for the Clinton-Blair humanitarian crusade over Kosovo.
Perhaps those whose disquiet over this war is motivated largely by self-centred feelings of guilt and paranoia would be better off just lying down in a darkened room until it's all over.
Copyright 2001 Times Newspapers Ltd.
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