The
world has drifted
apart from America
By
Jonathan
Power
September 6, 2002
LONDON - The tragedy of September 11th was not just
the incinerated bodies and the shock to the political
nervous system of our one and only superpower, it is that
a year later it has led to America becoming separated
from the world at large. Governments may still pay formal
allegiance to Washington, but behind the façade of
politeness few have a kind word. As for the people, who
last had a conversation where real empathy for America's
predicament was readily apparent? Even the most
sympathetic or most loyal have their doubts. It was not
that "America had it coming to it". That would be to
exaggerate (although a poll published today reports that
a majority of Europeans think that U.S. policy is
partially to blame for the September 11th attack). But
having been hit so hard in the solar plexus America then
seemed to rear up like a wounded elephant and trample
everyone's grass, while bellowing that "who is not with
us is against us". The world suddenly saw America in a
sharper light. What had been fuzzy before became less
ambiguous, the contours sharper and the image clearer -
the pizazz of American life, cultural, political or
militaristic, at one time considered stimulating,
reassuring, even envy-making, now seemed, depending on
the vantage point, a bridge too far, a highway to
damnation, a path to perdition or, at the very least,
simply a road map to where people did not want their own
societies to head. One didn't have to be an earnest
Muslim to feel this.
Hypocrisy is a tribute which vice pays to virtue. Few
maybe have yet stopped watching the violent and sexually
loaded films or the pornographic Spam that America pours
out to the word. No one, apart from a few anxious Saudis,
has pulled out their fortunes from their American
investments. No one, even the more economically and
political secure Europeans, dare challenge America
directly in a way it hurts, like announcing the closure
of Nato assets for use in a war against Iraq. But
underneath there is an ebb tide that Americans should
ignore at their peril. To win a round, whether it be in
Afghanistan or in Iraq, but lose the world is not a very
clever thing to do.
Americans like to think of their country, to quote
Ronald Regan, as "a shining city on a hill". Maybe in
Madison, Wisconsin, there is something of that. But in
most American big cities there is the most appalling
racial discrimination (despite the remarkable
emancipation of a black middle class), crime, social and
family disintegration, school violence and urban decay.
America's prisons can offer the worst of the Soviet gulag
and American justice is reserved for those with deep
pockets. Its propensity to see violence as the preferred
political solution is no new philosophy of Dick Cheney
and Donald Rumsfeld but runs like a ribbon through the
recent history of the fratricidal Central American wars,
the long running tribal war in Angola, the initial war in
Afghanistan when Osama bin Laden and his friends were
operating against the Soviet army under the tutelage of
the CIA, back to the wars of Vietnam and Cambodia, which
even many on the right in America now consider a terrible
mistake, so pointless became the carnage relative to what
was largely an imagined problem of hostile communist
takeover. Yet on every occasion God is regularly invoked
as a support and sanction, reminding us of Olusegun
Obasanjo's apt and penetrating remark, "God is
quite capable of upholding his own causes".
The threat from global terrorism is "at least partly a
reaction to the looming global presence of the United
States", as Professor Steven Walt of Harvard has
succinctly put it. "Some Americans are likely to ask if
the danger might also be reduced if it were not as
visibly and actively engaged in trying to run the world."
Only when voices from within like his are seriously
listened to will America avoid the disaster it is now on
course to head into. A war with Iraq, as former National
Security Advisor, Brent Scowcroft, has wisely argued,
will throw the whole of Middle East into a period of
serious political disturbance. If America does manage to
depose Saddam Hussein it is quite likely on past
performance to end up putting its weight behind an
equally malevolent figure. (After all it is not so long
ago since Washington gave satellite intelligence and
military guidance to Saddam in his war against its
neighbour Iran.) The outwards waves thrown up by the
turbulence of a war with Iraq is also likely to embolden
the extremists in Pakistan who could with a deft
assassination throw that nuclear-armed country into the
hands of the politically irresponsible.
America may bully its way past its European allies and
over and round the despairing council of its Arab friends
all the way to Baghdad. Conceivably it will pull off the
regime change, perhaps the democratisation, it says it
wants. But the chances of success are slim. This
operation even more than Vietnam has too many uncertain
and difficult elements that could make it go badly
wrong.
Last time everyone said "come home America" and
friends and partners from all over the world rushed to
help bind up the psychological wounds and help America
simply (too simply) put Vietnam behind it.
But this time if things go wrong the tide has already
turned. When America loses its chutzpah and looks for
support it could well find itself beached on a long and
desolate no man's land. Who any longer will want to stand
up and be seen as a friend of America?
I can be reached by phone +44
7785 351172 and e-mail: JonatPower@aol.com
Copyright © 2002 By
JONATHAN POWER
Follow this
link to read about - and order - Jonathan Power's book
written for the
40th Anniversary of
Amnesty International
"Like
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