Hello folks,

Some of you may find the following from _The Nation_ of interest.

Ray
-------------
From:  http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20011119&c=1&s=lecarre

A War We Cannot Win
by John le Carré


October 8

"The bombing begins," screams today's headline of the normally restrained
Guardian. "Battle Joined" echoes the equally cautious Herald Tribune,
quoting George W. Bush. But with whom is it joined? And how will it end? How
about with Osama bin Laden in chains, looking more serene and Christ-like
than ever, arranged before a tribune of his vanquishers with Johnnie Cochran
to defend him? The fees won't be a problem, that's for sure.

Or how about with a bin Laden blown to smithereens by one of those clever
bombs we keep reading about that kill terrorists in caves but don't break
the crockery? Or is there a solution I haven't thought of that will prevent
us from turning our arch-enemy into an arch-martyr in the eyes of those for
whom he is already semi-divine?

Yet we must punish him. We must bring him to justice. Like any sane person,
I see no other way. Send in the food and medicines, provide the aid, sweep
up the starving refugees, maimed orphans and body parts--sorry, "collateral
damage"--but bin Laden and his awful men, we have no choice, must be hunted
down.

But unfortunately what America longs for at this moment, even above
retribution, is more friends and fewer enemies. And what America is storing
up for herself, and so are we Brits, is yet more enemies; because after all
the bribes, threats and promises that have patched together the rickety
coalition, we cannot prevent another suicide bomber being born each time a
misdirected missile wipes out an innocent village, and nobody can tell us
how to dodge this devil's cycle of despair, hatred and--yet again--revenge.

The stylized television footage and photographs of bin Laden suggest a man
of homoerotic narcissism, and maybe we can draw a grain of hope from that.
Posing with a Kalashnikov, attending a wedding or consulting a sacred text,
he radiates with every self-adoring gesture an actor's awareness of the
lens. He has height, beauty, grace, intelligence and magnetism, all great
attributes unless you're the world's hottest fugitive and on the run, in
which case they're liabilities hard to disguise. But greater than all of
them, to my jaded eye, is his barely containable male vanity, his appetite
for self-drama and his closet passion for the limelight. And just possibly
this trait will be his downfall, seducing him into a final dramatic act of
self-destruction, produced, directed, scripted and acted to death by Osama
bin Laden himself.

By the accepted rules of terrorist engagement, of course, the war is long
lost. By us. What victory can we possibly achieve that matches the defeats
we have already suffered, let alone the defeats that lie ahead? Terror is
theater, a soft-spoken Palestinian firebrand told me in Beirut in 1982. He
was talking about the murder of Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics, but
he might as well have been talking about the twin towers and the Pentagon.
The late Bakunin, evangelist of anarchism, liked to speak of the propaganda
of the Act. It's hard to imagine more theatrical, more potent acts of
propaganda than these.

Now Bakunin in his grave and bin Laden in his cave must be rubbing their
hands in glee as we embark on the very process that terrorists of their
stamp so relish: as we hastily double up our police and intelligence forces
and award them greater powers, as we put basic civil rights on hold and
curtail press freedom, impose news blackpoints and secret censorship, spy on
ourselves and, at our worst, violate mosques and hound luckless citizens in
our streets because we are afraid of the color of their skin.

All the fears that we share--"Dare I fly?" "Ought I to tell the police about
the weird couple upstairs?" "Would it be safer not to drive down Whitehall
this morning?" "Is my child safely back from school?" "Have my life's
savings plummeted?"--are precisely the fears our attackers want us to have.
U ntil September 11, the United States was only too happy to plug away at
Vladimir Putin about his butchery in Chechnya. Russia's abuse of human
rights in the North Caucasus, he was told--we are speaking of wholesale
torture, and murder amounting to genocide, it was generally agreed--was an
obstruction to closer relations with NATO and the United States. There were
even voices--mine was one--that suggested Putin join Milosevic in The Hague;
let's do them both together. Well, goodbye to all that. In the making of the
great new coalition, Putin will look a saint by comparison with some of his
bedfellows.

Does anyone remember anymore the outcry against the perceived economic
colonialism of the G8? Against the plundering of the Third World by
uncontrollable multinational companies? Prague, Seattle and Genoa presented
us with disturbing scenes of broken heads, broken glass, mob violence and
police brutality. Tony Blair was deeply shocked. Yet the debate was a valid
one, until it was drowned in a wave of patriotic sentiment, deftly exploited
by corporate America.

Drag up Kyoto these days and you risk the charge of being anti-American.
It's as if we have entered a new, Orwellian world where our personal
reliability as comrades in the struggle is measured by the degree to which
we invoke the past to explain the present. Suggesting there is a historical
context for the recent atrocities is by implication to make excuses for
them. Anyone who is with us doesn't do that. Anyone who does, is against us.

Ten years ago, I was making an idealistic bore of myself by telling anyone
who would listen that, with the cold war behind us, we were missing a
never-to-be-repeated chance to transform the global community. Where was the
new Marshall Plan? I pleaded. Why weren't young men and women from the
American Peace Corps, Voluntary Service Overseas and their Continental
European equivalents pouring into the former Soviet Union in their
thousands? Where was the world-class statesman and man of the hour with the
voice and vision to define for us the real, if unglamorous, enemies of
mankind: poverty, famine, slavery, tyranny, drugs, bush-fire wars, racial
and religious intolerance, greed?

Now, overnight, thanks to bin Laden and his lieutenants, all our leaders are
world-class statesmen, proclaiming their voices and visions in distant
airports while they feather their electoral nests.

There has been unfortunate talk, and not only from Signor Berlusconi, of a
crusade. Crusade, of course, implies a delicious ignorance of history. Was
Berlusconi really proposing to set free the holy places of Christendom and
smite the heathen? Was Bush? And am I out of order in recalling that we
actually lost the Crusades? But all is well: Signor Berlusconi was misquoted
and the presidential reference is no longer operative.

Meanwhile, Blair's new role as America's fearless spokesman continues apace.
Blair speaks well because Bush speaks badly. Seen from abroad, Blair in this
partnership is the inspired elder statesman with an unassailable domestic
power base, whereas Bush--dare one say it these days?--was barely elected at
all.

But what exactly does Blair, the elder statesman, represent? Both men at
this moment are riding high in their respective approval ratings, but both
are aware, if they know their history books, that riding high on Day One of
a perilous overseas military operation doesn't guarantee you victory on
Election Day. How many American body bags can Bush sustain without losing
popular support? After the horrors of the twin towers and the Pentagon, the
American people may want revenge, but they're on a very short fuse about
shedding more American blood.

Blair--with the whole Western world to tell him so, except for a few sour
voices back home--is America's eloquent White Knight, the fearless, trusty
champion of that ever-delicate child of the mid-Atlantic, the Special
Relationship. Whether that will win Blair favor with his electorate is
another matter, because he was elected to save the country from decay, and
not from Osama bin Laden. The Britain he is leading to war is a monument to
sixty years of administrative incompetence. Our health, education and
transport systems are on the rocks. The fashionable phrase these days
describes them as "Third World," but there are places in the Third World
that are far better off than Britain.

The Britain Blair governs is blighted by institutionalized racism, white
male dominance, chaotically administered police forces, a constipated
judicial system, obscene private wealth and shameful and unnecessary public
poverty. At the time of his re-election, which was characterized by a dismal
turnout, Blair acknowledged these ills and humbly admitted that he was on
notice to put them right. So when you catch the noble throb in his voice as
he leads us reluctantly to war, and your heart lifts to his undoubted
flourishes of rhetoric, it's worth remembering that he may also be warning
you, sotto voce, that his mission to mankind is so important that you will
have to wait another year for your urgent medical operation and a lot longer
before you can ride in a safe and punctual train. I am not sure that this is
the stuff of electoral victory three years from now. Watching Blair, and
listening to him, I can't resist the impression that he is in a bit of a
dream, walking his own dangerous plank.

Did I say war? Has either Blair or Bush, I wonder, ever seen a child blown
to bits, or witnessed the effect of a single cluster bomb dropped on an
unprotected refugee camp? It isn't necessarily a qualification for
generalship to have seen such dreadful things, and I don't wish either of
them the experience. But it scares me all the same when I watch uncut,
political faces shining with the light of combat, and hear preppy political
voices steeling my heart for battle.

And please, Mr. Bush--on my knees, Mr. Blair--keep God out of this. To
imagine that God fights wars is to credit Him with the worst follies of
mankind. God, if we know anything about Him, which I don't profess to,
prefers effective food drops, dedicated medical teams, comfort and good
tents for the homeless and bereaved, and, without strings, a decent
acceptance of our past sins and a readiness to put them right. He prefers us
less greedy, less arrogant, less evangelical and less dismissive of life's
losers.

It's not a new world order, not yet, and it's not God's war. It's a
horrible, necessary, humiliating police action to redress the failure of our
intelligence services and our blind political stupidity in arming and
exploiting Islamic fanatics to fight the Soviet invader, then abandoning
them to a devastated, leaderless country. As a result, it's our miserable
duty to seek out and punish a bunch of modern-medieval religious zealots who
will gain mythic stature from the very death we propose to dish out to them.

And when it's over, it won't be over. The shadowy armies of bin Laden, in
the emotional aftermath of his destruction, will gather numbers rather than
wither away. So will the hinterland of silent sympathizers who provide them
with logistical support. Cautiously, between the lines, we are being invited
to believe that the conscience of the West has been reawakened to the
dilemma of the poor and homeless of the earth. And possibly, out of fear,
necessity and rhetoric, a new sort of political morality has indeed been
born. But when the shooting dies and a seeming peace is achieved, will the
United States and its allies stay at their posts or, as happened at the end
of the cold war, hang up their boots and go home to their own backyards?
Even if those backyards will never again be the safe havens they once were.

Copyright David Cornwell © 2001.


© 2001 The Nation Company, L.P