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The President and his consequences (21 November 2003) Published in Labour Left Briefing (December 2003) Children in Baghdad have a new game. They go up in small groups to US soldiers, who are either on foot patrol or more usually in their tanks. The children wave and smile. At the same time, they compete with one another to call out in Arabic the most obscene insults they can think of at the soldiers. "The children here know all about the mothers of these soldiers," an Iraqi colleague joked to me during one such encounter. The soldiers don't understand a word that they hear and think the children are being friendly. They always raise their thumbs or wave back. Sometimes they give out sweets or (bizarrely) beanie baby toys. Of course, this sends the children into fits of giggles, as they try to conceive even more revolting substances to compare the soldiers and their relatives to. President Bush's visit to Britain in November was not all that different from this. He listened to Tony Blair's platitudes on something Blair labelled a "real living alliance". Like the soldiers in Iraq, he will go back believing in the friendliness of the natives (though it's not known if he gave Blair a beanie baby). Meanwhile, hundreds of thousands were out in the streets throughout the country to denounce Bush's policies, his arrogance and his lies. They have good reasons to this do this. At the most direct and self-interested level, Bush's invasion of Iraq produces fear of the anticipated response. One of the more striking results from a November poll of European citizens organised by the European Commission showed that fear of terrorism was greatest in those countries whose governments supported the invasion of Iraq. Indeed, the three countries most at fear are those encumbered with the three strongest allies of Bush as premiers: Britain, Spain and Italy. As Blair and Bush met, two British-linked facilities in Istanbul were devastated in what may tragically be the first step in a long and bloody cycle of violence. The message to political leaders from common sense, and at least a minimal awareness of how people behave, is clear: if you want to preserve the safety of your citizens and reduce the level of fear, you don't ally yourself with international aggressors. However, the climate of hostility generated by the war on Iraq and its consequences also has the effect of encouraging some of those who are brought up to believe in the innate goodness of American power to find other targets to blame. In mid-summer, a survey conduced by the Washington-based Pew Research Centre found that more US citizens agreed that "Islam encourages violence" than disagreed. This wasn't the effect of the September 11th attacks: in the aftermath of that, in March 2002, 33% of those who had an opinion believed that there was a link between the religion and violence. This had jumped to 52% by July 2003. Iraqis are now ruled by a country in which the predominant belief is that their religion is inherently violent. It's not a recipe for an amicable relationship. In general, Bush's world has become increasingly divided into bitterly antagonistic camps. An October poll in Israel conducted by the Jaffee Centre for Strategic Studies showed that the numbers of Israelis who supported "encouraging" the Arab population of Israel to emigrate, and who believed that the Palestinians of the occupied territories should be forcibly deported ("transferred", in the euphemism used), were at record levels – 57% and 46% respectively. Assuming that the Arab population of Israel (around 18%) opposed both propositions, a clear majority of Israeli Jews now support full-blown ethnic cleansing. If Israel takes this line of action in future, the support of the US looks increasingly likely: the Pew survey mentioned earlier finds that now 36% of US citizens believe that "the state of Israel is a fulfillment of the biblical prophesy about the second coming of Jesus." The mirror image of these results is that fewer people in the Muslim world believe that a solution is possible to the Arab-Israeli conflict that falls short of the outright victory of one side and the conquest of the other. According to surveys by the Pew Research Centre, less than a quarter in most Muslim countries believe that Palestinian rights can be upheld whilst the State of Israel continues to exist. The changes in attitudes towards the US and its policies are severe: in 2002, 25% of Jordanians had a favourable view of the US. That has fallen to only 1% by the end of the Iraq war. In Pakistan, 28% believed in 2002 that their religion was under threat from external powers. That had risen to 64% a year later. When George Bush last visited the UK in April, during the first phase of the war on Iraq, Tony Blair stood alongside him and told him that "the regime is weakening, the Iraqi people are turning towards us". The truth is very different: seven months later, the US has restarted aerial bombardments in a futile endeavour to quell a violent resistance movement than can outlast and outwit them. As Blair welcomed Bush to London this time, he would have been well advised to tell him how fractured the world had become under his presidency, and how his legacy will be decades of intense, angry violence between peoples whose core values have now been pitched against each other. Instead, like the American soldier in the tank, all he did was stick his thumbs in the air, oblivious to the voices of hatred all around him.
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Author: Glen Rangwala Back to the Index of Writings |
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