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<TD vAlign=top><FONT color=#000000 face=Arial size=2>MONDAY SEPTEMBER 24
2001</FONT></TD></TR>
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<TD vAlign=top><FONT face=Arial><FONT size=2><B><FONT color=#000000>Why
don't we just hold an anger management
workshop?</B></FONT></FONT></FONT></TD></TR>
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<TD vAlign=top><FONT color=#990000 face=Arial size=2>MICK
HUME</FONT></TD></TR>
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<TD vAlign=top width=400><FONT color=#000000><FONT face=Arial size=2>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. </FONT>
<P><FONT face=Arial size=2>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.
</FONT>
<P><FONT face=Arial size=2>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. </FONT>
<P><FONT face=Arial size=2>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. </FONT>
<P><FONT face=Arial size=2>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). </FONT>
<P><FONT face=Arial size=2>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”. </FONT>
<P><FONT face=Arial size=2>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. </FONT>
<P><FONT face=Arial size=2>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. </FONT>
<P><FONT face=Arial size=2>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.
</FONT>
<P><FONT face=Arial size=2>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. </FONT>
<P><FONT face=Arial size=2>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. </FONT>
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<TD><FONT color=#000000 face=Arial size=2>Copyright 2001 <A
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