David Aaronovitch
Sunday March 9, 2003
The Observer

If I conjure up my childhood image of Americans, where others might see John
F. Kennedy, I see generals with skull faces under military caps. Americans
(except for a very few good ones, such as the black singer Paul Robeson, or
the Hollywood victims of Senator McCarthy) were interested in dollars and
war. The people they supported around the world were dictators, such as
Syngman Rhee of South Korea. The Soviet Union, though it, too, had missiles,
I understood to want peace and to support national liberation. The Red Army
sang songs, while the US army dropped bombs. I was a Cold War baby on the
wrong side of the curtain.
It is funny to see some of these images again, after all this time. The same
mad cartoon generals, holding the same missiles or dropping the same
fat-bellied bombs. The other week, the New Statesman carried a cover piece
by Francis Beckett, in which he wrote: 'The Bush administration is the final
corruption of an imperial nation convinced that its destiny is to rule.' I
am pretty sure that, circa 1959, you could have read almost exactly the same
words in the Daily Worker, substituting Eisenhower for Bush.

The Red Army, as I discovered at the age of 14, in August 1968, did not just
sing about the glories of the steppe. The Chinese were not all delighted to
find themselves living through the Cultural Revolution. The list of crimes -
from Chile to Angola - which are trotted out every time America is
discussed, mostly took place in the context of the Cold War, when we had a
terrified nuclear peace in Europe, and proxy wars and proxy dictators
throughout Asia, Africa and Latin America. Yet, if anything, the idea of
America which I inhaled as a boy is more widely shared now than it was even
back then.

Some of this is almost eternal semi-prejudice. Young, brash America is
characterised by recklessness, naivety and greed, just as (for the British,
at any rate) Italy is full of theatrical cowards and France of cynical
philanderers. Bill Clinton (that odd combination, a theatrical philanderer)
was often depicted by British cartoonists as riding a phallic rocket,
wearing a cowboy hat and going to war to try and extricate himself from the
consequences of his various liaisons.

But now it matters more. Since 11 September, we have all been frightened.
And, increasingly, we blame the Americans for frightening us. I think a lot
of ordinary Europeans (and quite a few Americans) believe that if the US
would somehow stop doing whatever it is that is so upsetting people, then
the threat would lessen, and we could get back to normal. The Yanks are
stirring the nest, we think, and we could all be stung.

We do, however, need reasons for this dangerous behaviour. That's why so
much pointless ingenuity has been expended on attempting to prove that the
impending invasion of Iraq is 'all about oil', and why the oil perception is
now so widespread. It gives easy explanation to the inexplicable.

For the more sophisticated among us, however, George Bush's famous
Christianity offers a slightly richer story. The prayerfulness of the
President points to a dangerously moralising, simplifying psychology -
though the religiosity of the Pope, the Archbishop of Canterbury and any
other cleric opposed to the war, somehow does not. Bush's revelation that
faith helped him overcome alcoholism is treated as though he also admitted
snake-charming, speaking in tongues and healing the sick.

This is in some ways ironic. Being on the centre-Left, I am a moralist too.
Unlike Jacques Chirac, I believe in taking political action for moral
reasons and not just for raisons d'etat . Paradoxically, I think that this
makes me less dangerous than the cynic in the long term, since what you
choose to ignore often comes back to bite you. I became a liberal
interventionist partly because of the moral impossibility of sitting and
watching while genocide or mass repression was happening, and partly because
I could see that a proliferation of failing, chaotic or semi-fascist states
was incredibly dangerous. Why else be in Sierra Leone? Or East Timor? Why
else try like hell - as Clinton did - to find an agreement between Israel
and the Palestinians?

Why Beckett's statement is so ludicrous is, of course, that Bush came to
power wanting not to intervene and not to build nations. During the bitterly
divisive election of November 2000, the Texas Governor cast Al Gore as the
naïve moralist who wanted to be the world's policeman. As one observer noted
at the time, Bush's story was that, 'America is over-committed around the
world, pushes its weight around too much, and tells other countries how to
run their affairs too often. We need to scale back, be humble and get out of
the nation-building business.' A Bush-supporting commentator put it this
way, 'Virtually every friendly state expects America to take the lead in
solving every problem everywhere. But the Cold War is over. The world is
dramatically less dangerous for the United States.' A year later, four
planes blew this conceit to smithereens.

The completeness of the administration's change of mind has taken many by
surprise, not least in the administration itself. From being relatively
indifferent to the nature of the regimes in the Middle East, the Republicans
have become deeply interested. Recently Richard Haass, a top State
Department official, told journalists, 'in many parts of the Muslim world,
and particularly in the Arab world, successive US administrations,
Republican and Democratic alike, have not made democratisation a sufficient
priority'.

You can say that again, although the criticism applies with equal force to
us in Europe. We have, over years, dealt with torturers and tyrants, sold
them weapons and flattered their egos. And if there is one thing that the
administration could do to win over sceptics, it would be to admit the
nature and origin of these errors. I would like to hear Donald Rumsfeld
agree that dealing with Saddam was a terrible mistake.

Had some chads not been dimpled, Rumsfeld would not have a government job
and Gore would have been president on 11 September. He would certainly have
invaded Afghanistan, and would probably have made a similar assessment of
the need to deal with Iraq.

Some things Gore might have done better (though it is worth recalling the
skill with which Bush handled the immediate post-attack situation, his visit
to a mosque and his elaborate reassurance to Muslims - not bad for a barmy
crusader).

Gore would not have courted a reputation for treating the world
contemptuously over issues such as climate change and missile defence. He
would not have been represented in Europe by such disastrous old Cold War
triumphalist figures as Richard Perle and Ken Adelman. I don't think a Gore
Secretary of Defence would have been so stupid as to contrast 'Old Europe'
with a friendlier new Europe. Above all, I think that Gore would have acted
to maintain a much stronger pressure on Israel - even in the face of the
suicide campaign - to discuss concessions to the Palestinians. It would
probably not have been enough, but it would have been something.

I don't pretend to understand what the French and Germans are up to
strategically. They cannot stop the war, but perhaps their target is to stop
the war after that. If so, the Iraqi people are as much a victim of their
power politics as they would be if the US were to invade then hand them over
to some undemocratic successor. I do know, however, that the French way -
the anti-American way - will make it much more difficult to get the world's
most powerful nation on-side for the great tasks that face us. You can hear
the complaints already.





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