[A-List] Comments on Timothy Garton Ash article

["Michael Keaney" <michael.keaney@xxxxxx>]

Welcome to the Titanic

The west is falling apart after Europe's 9/11, just as it did after
America's

Timothy Garton Ash
Thursday March 18, 2004
The Guardian

So when London is bombed by al-Qaida will you blame Tony Blair? If we're to
stay free, in a dangerous world, we need to think straighter than that.

[MK: And how "straight" would that be? Had Blair not followed Bush, and so
hysterically, into this unholy mess, then he could legitimately have claimed
to have been "defending our way of life". Instead he has put it in danger,
as he and his lunatic Home Secretary proceed to tear up what civil liberties
we are supposed to be defending in the first place. The Spaniards,
meanwhile, have every right to blame Aznar for what has happened to them,
although there is an even longer, simmering issue over the Spanish
possession of the enclaves of  Ceuta and Mellila, as well as a few
uninhabited islands to the north, relics of Spain's imperial past.]

A week, to the day, after the Madrid bombings, and a year, to the day, after
Blair made his passionate case to the House of Commons for participating in
the American-led war on Iraq, we have to recognise that two things can both
be true: 1) Blair was wrong to take us to war on Iraq, which has not helped
us defeat al-Qaida; 2) Blair is right to warn us that we are all threatened
by an Islamist terrorism which predates the Iraq war, which would target us
even if we were not in Iraq, and which will be encouraged by the promised
Spanish retreat from Iraq. And al-Qaida associates will chalk that up as a
triumph for their attack on Madrid.

[MK: So we are to deduce from this that Spain was correct to join an illegal
war for the wrong reasons. As is Britain. This is certainly "straight"
thinking.]

Not just Britain but all other European countries, and the United States,
are floundering in the confusion between these two things. This has been a
terrible week for what remains of the west. After a few moments of moving
solidarity - the great demonstrations in Spain, the three minutes' silence
observed right across Europe - we have again tumbled into bitter disarray.
That happened within months of America's 9/11, as Europeans and Americans
disagreed on how to respond to the assault launched by Osama bin Laden. Now
it's happened within days of Europe's 9/11.

[MK: If, by disarray, you mean that the split between the US and its
European allies has grown wider again, then you are certainly correct. If
you mean that Britain looks rather more isolated politically, then you are
certainly correct. If you mean that the Spanish people are floundering in
confusion about their position with respect to participation in an illegal
invasion of a sovereign territory, then you are most certainly wrong.]

Rightwing American commentators charge Spanish voters with "appeasement".
This is crass. More than three-quarters of the Spanish electorate turned out
for a massive defence of democracy in the face of terror. Every single
Spanish voter was a soldier in the "war on terror". They voted different
ways for all sorts of reasons. Historically, high turn-outs have favoured
the left. Some of the former communist electorate voted tactically for the
socialists. Many swing voters punished the conservative government of José
María Aznar for initially attributing the attacks to the Basque terrorist
organisation Eta. And, yes, some emotionally blamed him for having made
Spain a more likely terrorist target by supporting Bush's war on Iraq. But
to say that this vote adds up to "appeasement" is a stupid slur.

[MK: On this we agree. To accuse the Spanish of appeasement would have been
more appropriate when Aznar was supportive of and acquiescent to the
aggression of the Bush administration. And to accuse the Spanish people of
cowardice is to ignore the massive numbers of people on the streets of Spain
immediately following the bombings, when they clearly demonstrated their
disregard for the potential threat of further bombs. The vote adds up to the
Spanish people's rejection of the deceit perpetrated  by the Aznar
government. For a good analysis of this, see
http://archives.econ.utah.edu/archives/a-list/2004w11/msg00021.htm.]

So far as the Spanish voters' intentions are concerned, the election result
was not subjectively a victory for al-Qaida. But it is, as Marxists used to
say, an objective victory for al-Qaida. The Madrid bombings look likely to
do exactly what a message posted on a radical Islamist website months ago
said they should do: exploit the election moment to knock Spain out of the
"Crusader-Zionist" coalition in Iraq. Conclusion: terror works.

[MK: Er, no Tim. The election is an objective loss for the imperialist
aggression of the Bush administration and its European poodles. The
conclusion that terror works is consistently drawn by successive US
administrations and their British allies whose "humanitarian interventions"
invariably involve the use of cluster bombs and depleted uranium weaponry,
the former often dropped from the height of 17,000 feet. Not forgetting the
use of cruise missiles fired from ships safely offshore. And let us not
forget the terror systematically deployed against the people of Palestine by
the Israeli state, with the full support of successive US administrations.
That people should fight back against such terror, using sometimes
deplorable tactics, ought to be viewed as a measure of the seriousness of
the situation that has arisen to make such action seem justifiable. If
"terror works" on us in the affluent West at all, it is in serving as a
convenient excuse to ignore the reasons why so many people in this world
should feel so strongly about what our leaders are doing to it.]

The problem has been compounded by a disastrous first press conference by
Spain's new socialist prime minister, José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, who is
long on names but short on experience. It would, of course, have been quite
wrong for him to renege on his election promises: including one to withdraw
Spanish troops from Iraq unless a full UN mandate radically changes the
character of the occupation. However, the vehement tone in which he repeated
his criticism of Anglo-American policy in Iraq, talking of a war based on
"lies" and calling for "self-criticism" by Blair and Bush, was suited to a
pre-bombing election rally but not to a statesman assuming the leadership of
a nation now in the frontline of an international defence of freedom against
Islamist terror. "You can't just go and bomb people," said Mr Zapatero. The
bombs he was referring to were not the al-Qaida bombs that had just
massacred his own people but American bombs dropped on Iraq a year ago. It
was almost as if Bush and Blair had planted the bomb at the Atocha station.

[MK: Yes, and isn't "Timothy Garton Ash" a mouthful? What's wrong with "Tim
Ash"? And what is your experience, going from well funded academic post to
well-paying columnist's job to well-paid academic post? And what is
Zapatero's disastrous performance? Only to have said what is so utterly,
transparently true -- that the war was founded upon lies and has been
conducted throughout on that basis. And what makes British bombs any less
destructive than Al-Qaeda's? If anything they are more destructive, having
been fired from a great height/distance, and in immeasurably larger
quantity. And, Tim, the cluster bombs which our leaders have repeatedly
justified as a necessary armament are still going off. Children play with
them, when they are not using as toys scraps of armour irradiated by
depleted uranium weaponry. Bush and Blair have inflicted far worse carnage
upon the people of Iraq than al-Qaeda could so far muster against Spain, or
the US on 9/11, for that matter. Or is this thinking not straight enough for
you, Tim?]

As a result, Americans are again denouncing lily-livered Europeans, France
is quietly celebrating the return of Spain to "old Europe", and everybody is
squabbling about Bush and Iraq instead of confronting, together, today's
threats to our freedoms. Like the Bourbons, we have forgotten nothing and
learned nothing.

[MK: Ugh! There is nothing more distasteful than the sight of a quietly
celebrating Frenchman. And to reiterate -- for Britain, the biggest threat
to "our freedoms" is David Blunkett. To remind you:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/guardianpolitics/story/0,3605,1169337,00.html;
http://www.sundayherald.com/40592;
http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,3604,1153873,00.html; ad nauseam.]

Here are a few of the things we should be talking about, instead. One of the
men who is alleged to be behind the Madrid bombing, Jamal Zougam, was living
in Spain under investigation by the police or intelligence services of at
least three nations - Spain, France and Morocco. Why didn't they work out
what he was up to? How can we improve police and intelligence cooperation
across Europe and across the Atlantic? What changes should we all accept? I
think, for example, that we should now have identity cards, to be carried at
all times. And what kind of limitations to civil liberties should we never
accept? Answer: Guantánamo, or any European equivalents.

[MK: Identity cards? That sounds good, until you consider how much this
represents a further extension of state power and loss of "our freedoms".
Consider this:

Colin Thubron's wonderful book In Siberia (1999) describes the author's
visit to a village on the river Yenisei in the far north inhabited largely
by one of the native peoples of Siberia, the Entsy. It is a remote, brutal
place where the only consolation is getting drunk. He meets an old man who
is living in the village hospital because his house burned down before his
eyes. He had time to run in just once before it was too late. What had he
salvaged, Thubron wonders, in those few seconds? His passport. For in
Russia, 'without his passport he could not move, did not live.'
The 'passport' referred to is not for the luxury of foreign travel. It is
the internal passport, an instrument of state control like the identity
cards that David Blunkett is planning for us. Until 2002 it recorded not
only your name, age and address, but your 'nationality' as well. Our word
'Russian' does duty for two distinct adjectives, rossiski and russki. The
Russian Federation, like the Russian Academy of Sciences, employs the first,
while the second is used for ethnic Russians, their language, and other
matters pertaining to them. Hence not all citizens of the Russian Federation
are Russian. Some are Entsy, Buryats or Chechens - or Jews, for officialdom
does not allow you to be both Russian (russki) and a Jew. As a foreigner
without my passport searching Vladivostok for a British consul, I would be
in a far better situation than the Russian woman on the train would be if
her passport went missing. What for me would be a great nuisance, for her
would be a disaster possibly worth risking death to avoid. With her passport
gone, registering her domicile with the police would be impossible, which in
turn would prevent her getting an officially registered job.

>From "Diary" by M. F. Burnyeat in London Review of Books, Vol 26 No 4, 19
February 2004.]

How can we make Muslims feel more at home in Europe, thus draining the swamp
in which terrorist mosquitoes breed? We have at least 12 million Muslims in
the European Union already. The vast majority of them are peaceful,
law-abiding citizens, horrified by such acts, but a significant minority are
also impoverished, unemployed, alienated. To meet them, you have only to
hang around one of the small squares in the Lavapies neighbourhood of
Madrid, which was a haunt of Jamal Zougam. I remember talking there to a
20-year old, unemployed, illegal Moroccan immigrant, who told me that "the
Jews" were probably responsible for the attack on the twin towers in New
York. He admitted frankly to earning his living by petty crime, since, he
said, he could not get the papers required to work.

How do we integrate such Muslim immigrants into our societies? By telling
their daughters they can't wear headscarves at school? A group calling
itself the Servants of Allah has just sent an open letter to the French
prime minister, denouncing the veil ban as "a declaration of war to the
Muslim world". Yet to retreat in the face of such threats is bad, too.

[MK: How do we interpret "retreat" here? The headscarf ban is stupid and
ought to be rescinded at once. But now that would appear to be an
appeasement of terrorists, when in fact, objectively speaking, it would be a
restoration of sanity. Lest we forget, there is a growing resentment of what
is perceived to be a religiously motivated war against Muslims by gun-toting
Bible-quoting chickenhawks. And for all France's opposition to the Iraq war,
anyone can see that the French government is not so principled as to refuse
whatever economic benefits might now be won in post-invasion Iraq. Or
anywhere else for that matter. But, as Marxists used to say, this is just
the nature of imperialism.]

Then there's the whole agenda of reform in the wider Middle East, from
Morocco to Iran. Yes, we should have started with the Israeli-Palestinian
conflict, which is a recruiting sergeant for al-Qaida, rather than Iraq.
Nothing much will happen on this front until after the American presidential
elections, but on November 5 Europe should be on the telephone to the
president-elect - whether he's called Kerry or Bush - saying with one voice:
that's what you have to do next.

[MK: Not a bad idea, except that it has been done before, with diminishing
returns. The US political class is in thrall to the Israel lobby, and it's
not so much the executive that is affected but the legislature -- our
leaders would be better advised getting on the phone to every Congressman
and Senator right now, and be prepared to finance their re-election
campaigns instead of the pro-Israel interest groups that very much get what
they pay for. Consider this:

The problem does not come down to narrow vision, or 'Jewish money' (the
standard anti-semitic explanation), or even to America's long-standing
military strategy, which assumes Israel to be a bedrock ally - a more
even-handed policy would be more likely to enhance the US strategic profile
than to erode it. Rather, the force durably proscribing any more
constructive policy is the Congress, where one-sided support for Israel is
deeply ingrained. This is the result, very largely, of Israeli-lobby
leverage and campaign contributions (of various kinds) but major US business
interests in Israel have to be borne in mind, as does the well- organised
Christian Right, with its bizarre millennialist fixation on a Jewish Israel
as portending the Endtimes.
Even more limiting of US foreign policy are the attitudes of individual
Congressmen and women. Their public statements indicate that the great
majority have internalised right-wing Israeli propaganda. For decades, the
Israeli lobby has presented Congress with the narrative of a beleaguered
Jewish people trying to build a homeland in a tiny country huddled on the
Mediterranean while fending off irrational Islamic/Arab hostility. With
members from both parties saturated in these assumptions and hooked by hard
financial and electoral clout, the Presidency is greatly constrained in any
attempt it might make to lever the Israeli Government towards a loathed and
costly policy change - withdrawing or freezing settlements, for instance -
even though there are dissenting Israelis who would ardently endorse it. Any
move in this direction on the part of any President would be political
suicide. The US, then, is not neutral, but neutralised; its foreign policy
remains committed to supporting Israel's 'welfare' however the Israeli
Government conceives it, which is why it can have no independent impact on
settlement policy.

>From "The One-State Solution", by Virginia Tilley, in London Review of
Books, Vol 25, No 21, 6 November 2003]

A year after we invaded Iraq, we may wish we had not. Even if a sober
analysis suggests that the Bush administration would probably have done it
anyway, we may blame Blair for so enthusiastically going along. But now
we're there, it would be criminal, self-lacerating folly for anyone to wish
that the democratic reconstruction of Iraq should fail. We Europeans have an
even more vital interest in that than the Americans do.

[MK: But even more than any Europeans the Iraqis have the most vital
interest of all. And it is their right and responsibility to bring it to
pass. Not, yet again, well-meaning colonists bearing the white man's burden.
And until this sinks into the consciousness of our leaders and the wider
public, accustomed to the deceiving flattery of the so-called superiority of
Western civilisation (Big Brother, the Weakest Link, Joe Millionaire, the
Apprentice, et al.), we will continue to provoke the anger and retaliation
of peoples whose centuries of subjugation under dictators has suited the
interests of our leaders -- until now, that is. Why should the Iraqis or
anyone else believe that Bush and Blair represent the first generation of
Western leaders who have suddenly renounced self-interest and have got in
touch with their altruistic side?]

These are just a few of the things we should be talking about. But we're
not. They say the band carried on playing as the Titanic went down. Well,
we're not holed yet; we've just been brushed by a small iceberg. But the
look-outs and the crew are all staring at the bridge, where the Spanish
first lieutenant is having a stand-up row with his British mate, the Italian
cook is badmouthing the American engineer, and the French midshipman is
admiring himself in the mirror, while much larger icebergs loom ahead.

[MK: There you go again, with your dig at "the French". I suggest, Tim, that
we should do what is more practicable than trying to sort out "the West",
and first and foremost let's deal with Britain. Let's establish exactly
where "we" are and where "we" want to be. That's enough work for anyone.]