For the first time in my life, I feel as though we – the West, the ‘goodies’ – are behaving in many ways more like those whom we used to disdain as the ‘baddies’.
Whatever Osama bin Laden’s intentions, the Twin Towers atrocity of 9 September 2001 was a master-stroke. The first hostile attack on USA soil since the British burned the White House in the war of 1812, it touched a sensitive nerve in the American psyche which sent common-sense thinking awry and induced a national mood of undignified panic. As the incumbent president was not the most sagacious of the varied bunch who have held his office – to put it mildly – and his administration was dominated by signatories of that hubristic document Project for a New American Century [/www.newamericancentury.org/statementofprinciples.htm], the USA has, in the following years, behaved like an infuriated elephant floundering in a swamp, lashing out blindly around the world. Most regrettably, it has been aided and abetted in it’s purblind policies by the UK – or at least, by our God-guided [in his own estimation] prime minister who, while protesting his intention to act as a moderating influence on Big Brother across the Pond, has in fact been dragged along willy-nilly like a tin can tied to a mastiff’s tail.
When these two proclaimed their doctrine of ‘pre-emptive intervention’ to impose democracy on countries and peoples who have no notion or desire for it, I was irresistibly reminded of the Europe of my youth, where Hitler and Mussolini rampaged across borders bringing their ‘New Order’ to reluctant recipients. Not only is the new ‘doctrine’ wrong in principle, it has little if any hope of working. Anyone with even the most superficial knowledge of the Middle East and Asia should know that however much the West meddles, and for a time dominates, it is impossible for us to keep the indigenous people of those regions permanently in subjection. Whatever the moral and practical shortcomings of the old British Empire, those who administered our colonies at least had some understanding – at times quite profound – of the peoples they ruled. Their successors here, and even more in the USA, seem bereft of any such wisdom.
All this is deeply depressing, especially when one’s personal time is drawing short. But, as Yellow Duck so sagely says in the burrow today, nothing lasts for ever and the political weather can change very quickly. There are increasingly clear signs that the majority of people in both the UK and USA no longer support the policies of our Dear Leaders. For whatever reason – even if only because the policies obviously aren’t succeeding - that gives cause for hope.
