That's life, I suppose. All the blogs I'd intended for this weekend were derailed by incoming relatives and a vicious migraine; and now I've been summoned cross-country to help lift bookcases. As a result, today's blog is but a short piece, prompted by the headline on the guardian [sic], which said something to the effect that 'voters want Britain to distance itself from the US.'
Having been in America for the best part of three years, I'm surprised and slightly sickened by the level of anti-Americanism in this country; and those three years were spent at Yale, possibly the most anti-American bit of America, although I'm prepared to accept the claims of Berkeley and UCLA. Most of this sentiment can be politely expressed as 'visceral,' which is a euphemism for 'mindless,' and rooted in all sorts of interesting contradictory positions.
For instance, what has become of Sir Max Hastings? In my absence, he seems to have become a modern-day Colonel Blimp: at the merest mention of President Bush, or indeed building houses in the countryside, steam issues from his ears and he expostulates 'By Gad!' as his cheeks burn with righteous indignation.
Anyway, we may return to the preposterous Sir Max on another occasion; for the time being, back to the guardian [sic], and also the survey a few weeks back that revealed just how low America lay in the standing of the British public.
Firstly, it seems apparent that the desire for Britain to distance itself from America is based not on any definable sense that Britain has any better ideas, but merely that Britain shouldn't be Steve McClaren to America's Sven. We'd be much better off pursuing our own independent policy, right? Or - better still - heading a united European Union foreign policy. When Lord Patten spoke at Yale earlier this year, he expressed incredulity that the Bush administration had arbitrarily thrown over the 'Pax Americana' of the post-war world, and insisted that the world needed to get together round a table and thrash out its problems that way.
I know this is a radical statement, but it just might be that Britain actually agrees with America, and there is no point having an independent (ie, anti-Iraq, pro-Palestine) foreign policy for the sake of having one. This is just adolescent, and the jibes about Tony Blair as George Bush's 'poodle' are mired in this boggy perspective. I happen to support Liverpool - but then, it's my local team. I don't feel the need to support Port Vale just because nobody else does.
Secondly, and this is particularly relevant to the criticism from the Left, there is a marginally commendable desire to support the underdog. Unfortunately, this has petrified to the extent that the underdog is always assumed to be in the right. At its most extreme, this leads to the (possibly unconscious) belief that suicide bombers are driven to such lengths by the sheer brutality of their oppressors. As ever, this is effective because it contains a hint of truth: no doubt if they had bigger and better weapons they'd use them, but it hardly follows that the desire to detonate yourself proves the inherent rightness of your cause. Another example might be the guardian's infamous comment post-9/11 that 'a bully with a bloody nose is still a bully.'
Over on the Right, there are a number of strategies of attack. There's the national security angle, which insists that the Middle East is far better off dealt with by furtive British diplomacy.
Funny, isn't it, that this kind of realpolitik is commended when the Americans don't do it, and condemned as dealing with dictators when they do?
There's also the 'yah-boo-sucks' school that excoriates the Americans for the 'mess' they've made of Iraq. Apart from the fact that a greater American military presence would have been lambasted as occupation at the time of the invasion, the Americans' greatest culpability seems to lie in their naivety. Who knew that Sunnis and Shias would want to kill each other with such alacrity? There's a distinct media nostalgia for the days of Saddam, when it was at least clear which Iraqis were killing which other Iraqis.
On a very brutal level, it could easily be said that the Iraq of 2002 was safer (and therefore 'better') than the Iraq of today. But, without wishing to trivialise the subject, let me draw an analogy from football: when Jamie Carragher slid in to intercept a West Ham cross in the FA Cup Final, he accidentally scored an own goal. Obviously not the desired result, but it was certainly not his job to leave the ball on the grounds that he couldn't answer for the consequences.
Then there's the unspeakable criticism on the 'you can't expect some people to just adopt democracy' lines. I hope I don't need to explain how revolting this is, but you could start by trying to convince the millions of Iraqis who've already voted.
There's anti-Bushism, for reasons I confess I never grasped, unless it's because the President actually doesn't really care what the opinion-formers in academia and the media think. It should be remembered that he's the 9/11 President, history was thrust upon him and (as a sidenote) the American economy, which I distinctly remember was predicted to tank in the months following, has motored along rather nicely ever since. Okay, so he has trouble stringing a sentence together, but he is without doubt a man of vision and ideas, which will of course be divisive. Domestically, everyone agrees that something has to be done about the tax codes, social security and immigration, but Congress is ducking the pass, leaving the President with nowhere to go.
Finally, there's sheer envy and snobbery about the so-called 'vulgarity', 'materialism', 'fundamentalism' and 'racism' of America. All true to an extent, but consider the dynamism and power of America. It's truly bizarre to live in New Haven and see otherwise intelligent people excoriate the society that provides them with the right to buy 57 kinds of coffee whilst excoriating the society that gives them the freedom to excoriate their society...and so on.
It's worth repeating, that if America and Israel are imperialist oppressors, they are the least competent imperialist oppressors in history. We might all secretly wish for Sweden and New Zealand to be the world's superpowers, but they're not, and if they were they would also have to be the world's de facto policeman.
And how quickly people forget. What are we doing in Afghanistan? comes the cry, followed by sanctimonious Max Hastings and Peter Oborne types who smugly dust off Kipling and insist that nobody will ever subdue Afghanistan. Well fine, clearly we should just have left the Taliban in situ and negotiated with them as required.
In relation to Israel's current (and unarguably disproportionate) action in Lebanon, there is a belief, also applied to any action against Islamist forces, that it is counter-productive because it just creates more martyrs.
Okay, but taken to its logical conclusion, this seems to indicate the belief that doing absolutely nothing at all would apparently convince the 'terrorists' to give up and go home. Or possibly we should take David Cameron's advice and hug them. This is popularly known as 'addressing the root causes of terrorism' and suggests that if we can just find out why they're so angry, everything will be fine.
At the bottom of this is the rather sweet Enlightenment belief that, when people say they want to kill us because of who we are, they're actually lying.
But what if we're not all reasonable people?
So much left unsaid. But this will have to do for a start.
