The US has an ideological enemy harder to defeat than militant Islam
Salman Rushdie Wednesday February 6, 2002 The Guardian
They told us it would be a long, ugly struggle, and so it is. America's war against terror has entered its second phase, a phase characterised by the storm over the condition, status and human rights of the prisoners held at Camp X-Ray, and by the frustrating failure of the US to find Osama bin Laden and Mullah Omar.
Additionally, if America now attacks other countries suspected of harbouring terrorists, it will almost certainly do so alone, without the backing of the coalition that supported the action in Afghanistan. The reason is that America finds itself facing an ideological enemy that may turn out to be harder to defeat than militant Islam: that is to say, anti-Americanism, which is presently taking the world by storm.
The good news is that these post-Taliban days are bad times for Islamist fanatics. Dead or alive, Bin Laden and Omar look like yesterday's men, unholy warriors who forced martyrdom on others while running for the hills themselves. Also, if the persistent rumours are to be believed, the fall of the terrorist axis in Afghanistan may well have prevented an Islamist coup against President Musharraf in Pakistan, led by the more Taliban-like elements in the armed forces and intelligence services - people like the terrifying General Hamid Gul.
And Musharraf, no angel himself, has been pushed into arresting the leaders of the Kashmiri terrorist groups he used to encourage. (It's just two and a quarter years since he unleashed the same groups against India and engineered the last Kashmir crisis.)
Around the world, the lessons of the American action in Afghanistan are being learned. Jihad is no longer quite as cool an idea as it was last autumn. States under suspicion of giving succour to terrorism have suddenly been trying to behave with propriety, even going so far as to round up a few bad guys. Iran has accepted the legitimacy of the new Afghan government. Even Britain, a state which has been more tolerant of Islamist fanaticism than most, is beginning to see the difference between resisting "Islamophobia" and providing a safe haven for some of the worst people in the world.
America did, in Afghanistan, what had to be done and did it well. The bad news, however, is that none of these successes has won friends for the United States outside Afghanistan. In fact, the effectiveness of the American campaign may paradoxically have made the world hate America more than it did before.
Western critics of America's Afghan campaign are enraged because they have been shown to be wrong at every step: no, US forces weren't humiliated the way the Russians had been; and yes, the air strikes did work; and no, the Northern Alliance didn't massacre people in Kabul; and yes, the Taliban did crumble away like the hated tyrants they were, even in their southern strongholds; and no, it wasn't that difficult to get the militants out of their cave fortresses; and yes, the various factions succeeded in putting together a new government that is surprising people by functioning pretty well.
Meanwhile, those elements in the Arab and Muslim world who blame America for their own feelings of political impotence are feeling more impotent than ever. As always, anti-US radicalism feeds off the widespread anger over the plight of the Palestinians, and it remains true that nothing would undermine the fanatics' propaganda more comprehensively than an acceptable settlement in the Middle East.
However, even if that settlement were arrived at tomorrow, anti-Americanism would probably not abate. It has become too useful a smokescreen for Muslim nations' many defects - their corruption, their incompetence, their oppression of their own citizens, their economic, scientific and cultural stagnation. America-hating has become a badge of identity, making possible a chest-beating, flag-burning rhetoric of word and deed that makes men feel good. It contains a strong streak of hypocrisy, hating most what it desires most, and elements of self-loathing ("we hate America because it has made of itself what we cannot make of ourselves").
What America is accused of - closed-mindedness, stereotyping, ignorance - is also what its accusers would see if they looked into a mirror.
These days there seem to be as many of these accusers outside the Muslim world as inside it. Anybody who has visited Britain and Europe, or followed the public conversation there during the past five months, will have been struck, even shocked, by the depth of anti-American feeling among large segments of the population, as well as the news media.
Western anti-Americanism is an altogether more petulant phenomenon than its Islamic counterpart, and, oddly, far more personalised. Muslim countries don't like America's power, its "arrogance", its success; in the non-American west, the main objection seems to be to American people. Night after night, I have found myself listening to Londoners' diatribes against the sheer weirdness of the American citizenry. The attacks on America are routinely discounted ("Americans only care about their own dead"). American patriotism, obesity, emotionality, self-centredness: these are the crucial issues.
It would be easy for America, in the present climate of hostility, to fail to respond to constructive criticism, or worse: to start acting like the overwhelming superpower it is, making decisions and throwing its weight around without regard for the concerns of what it perceives as an already hostile world. The treatment of the Camp X-Ray detainees is a case in point.
Colin Powell's reported desire to grant these persons PoW status and Geneva Convention rights was a statesmanlike response to global pressure; his apparent failure to persuade President Bush and Mr Rumsfeld to accept his recommendations is a worrying sign. The Bush administration has come a long way from its treaty-smashing beginnings. It should not retreat from consensus-building now. Great power and great wealth are perhaps never popular.
And yet, more than ever, we need the United States to exercise its power and economic might responsibly. This is not the time to ignore the rest of the world and decide to go it alone. To do so would be to risk losing after you've won.