Crawling from the Wreckage (11 page)

“You know, it’s a funny thing, every one of the bastards that are out for legalizing marijuana is Jewish. What the Christ is the matter with the Jews, Bob? What is the matter with them? I suppose it is because most of them are psychiatrists.”

Nixon had much more to say about this, but one should not conclude that he was a single-minded anti-Semite. He was an equal-opportunity paranoid who believed that homosexuals, Communists and Catholics were also plotting to undermine America by pushing drugs.

“Do you know what happened to the Romans? The last six Roman emperors were fags … You know what happened to the popes? They were laying the nuns; that’s been going on for years, centuries. But the Catholic Church went to hell three or four centuries ago. It was homosexual …

“Dope? Do you think the Russians allow dope? Hell no … You see, homosexuality, dope, uh, immorality in general: these are the enemies
of strong societies. That’s why the Communists and the left-wingers are pushing it. They’re trying to destroy us.”

The reason for this thirty-nine-year war, in other words, is that President Richard Nixon believed that he was facing a “Jew-homo-doper-Commie-shrink-lefty-pope” conspiracy, as
Washington Post
writer Gene Weingarten put it in a gloriously deadpan article in 2002. But that is just plain wrong. As subsequent developments have shown, it is actually a Jew-homo-doper-Commie-shrink-lefty-pope-
Latino
conspiracy.

You will note that I have some difficulty in curbing my contempt for most of the discussions of the “terrorist threat” that have been inflicted on us in the past few years. This is because I remember a time when the military, at least, understood that terrorism is a political strategy, not just “mindless violence,” and that the biggest mistake you can possibly make is to overreact. Doing so is falling into the trap they have laid for you
.

Once upon a time, all of the professional armed forces of the Western world understood that, because they spent the fifties, sixties and seventies fighting various revolutionary movements in the Third World that used terrorism extensively as a tool in their struggle. By the seventies, indeed, all the military staff colleges, where they trained the next generation of senior officers, devoted a large part of the curriculum to guerrilla wars and terrorism. But that generation is gone from the armies now, and so are most of the insights that came at a very high price
.

“With the right policies, this is a war we can win, this is a war we must win, and this is a war we will win,” said Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry in Tennessee on August 31. “The war on terrorism is absolutely winnable,” repeated his vice-presidential running mate, Senator John Edwards. That is utter drivel, and they must privately know it, but truth generally loses to calculated lies in politics.

This outburst of bravado was prompted by President George W. Bush’s brief brush with the truth about terrorism the previous weekend, when he told an interviewer that he did not really think you can win the war on terror, but that conditions could be changed in ways that would make terrorists less acceptable in certain parts of the world. For a moment there, you glimpsed a functioning intellect at work. Such honesty rarely goes unpunished in politics.

This heroic attempt to grapple with reality was a welcome departure from Mr. Bush’s usual style—“I have a clear vision of how to win the war on terror and bring peace to the world,” he had claimed as recently as August 30—and his opponents pounced on it at once. “What if President Reagan had said that it may be difficult to win the war against Communism?” asked John Edwards, in one of the least credible displays of indignation in American history.

Mr. Bush promptly fled back to the safe terrain of hypocrisy and patriotic lies. “We meet today in a time of war for our country, a war we did not start, yet one that we will win,” he told a veterans’ conference in Nashville on September 1. But it is not “a time of war” for the United States, and it cannot “win.”

Some 140,000 young American soldiers are trapped in a neo-colonial war in Iraq—where there were no terrorists until the U.S. invasion—and their casualties are typical of colonial wars: fewer than 1 percent killed per year. As for the three hundred million Americans at home, exactly as many of them have been killed by terrorists since 9/11 as have been killed by the Creature from the Black Lagoon in the same period. None.

The rhetoric of a “war on terror” has been useful to the Bush administration, and terrorism now bulks inordinately large in any media where the agenda is set by American perspectives. On the front page of the
International Herald Tribune
that carried the story on Mr. Bush’s return to political orthodoxy on terrorism, four of the other five stories were also about terrorism: “Twin bus bombs kill 16 in Israel,” “Blast leaves 8 dead in Moscow subway,” “12 Nepal hostages slain in Iraq,” and “French hold hectic talks on captives.”

In other words, thirty-six of the quarter-million people who died on this planet on August 31 were killed by terrorists: close to one in eight thousand. No wonder the
International Herald Tribune
headlined its front page “A Deadly Day of Terror,” although it would have been on firmer statistical ground if it had replaced the headline with “A Deadly Day for Swimming” or even “A Deadly Day for Falling Off Ladders.”

Actually, more than thirty-six people were killed by “terrorists” on August 31—perhaps as many as fifty or sixty. The rest were killed in wars that the United States is not all that interested in: in Nepal, Peru, Burundi and in other out-of-the-way countries, where the local guerrillas are not Muslims and have no imaginable links with the terrorists who attacked the U.S.

Governments fighting Muslim rebels—such as the Israelis fighting the Palestinians in the Israeli-occupied territories or the Russians fighting the Chechens in Russia—have had more success in tying their local counter-insurgency struggles to the U.S. “war on terror,” and as a result Washington doesn’t criticize their human-rights violations much. But the only terrorists the U.S. government really worries about—and this would be equally true under a Kerry administration—are terrorists who attack Americans. There aren’t that many of them, and they aren’t that dangerous.

George W. Bush spoke the truth, briefly, at the end of August, when he said that the “war on terror” cannot be won. It cannot be won
or
lost because it is only a metaphor, not an actual war. It is like the “war on crime,” another metaphor—but nobody ever expects that the “war on crime” will one day end in a surrender ceremony where all the criminals come out with their hands up, and afterwards there is no more crime. It is a
statistical
operation, and success is measured by how successful you are in getting the crime
rate
down. Same goes for terrorism.

You could do worse than to listen to Stella Rimington, the former director of MI5, Britain’s intelligence agency for domestic operations: “I’m afraid that terrorism didn’t begin on 9/11 and it will be around for a long
time. I was very surprised by the announcement of a war on terrorism because terrorism has been around for thirty-five years … [and it] will be around while there are people with grievances. There are things we can do to improve the situation, but there will always be terrorism. One can be misled by talking about a war, as though in some way you can defeat it.” As Mr. Bush said before his handlers got the muzzle back on.

One small fact that will help to clarify the following story: London was awarded the 2012 Olympics on July 6, 2005, the day before the suicide bombers struck several targets in the city
.

Tony Blair flew down from the G8 summit in Scotland to be with Londoners in their time of trial, and you can hardly blame him. It’s not that we needed him to take charge—it was only four smallish bombs, and the emergency services were doing their job just fine—but the tabloid newspapers would have crucified him if he hadn’t shown up and looked sympathetic in public.

No doubt he was feeling sympathetic, too, but the words he used rang false. The accent was British, but the words were the sort of thing that comes out of the mouth of George W. Bush—all about defending British values and the British way of life. He didn’t mention God, so he’s still British under it all, but I’m pretty sure I even heard him use Mr. Bush’s favourite words, “freedom” and “resolve.” I’m also pretty certain that this cut very little ice with most Londoners.

This is a town that has been dealing with bombs for a long time. German bombs that fell during the Blitz in September–December 1940 killed 13,339 Londoners and seriously injured 17,939 more. In 1944, London was the first city in the world to be hit by cruise missiles (the V-1s or “buzz bombs”) and, later that same year, it was the first to be struck by long-range ballistic missiles (the V-2s, which carried a ton of high explosives).

During the Second World War about thirty thousand Londoners were killed by German bombs and three-quarters of a million lost their homes. Then, between 1971 and 2001, London was the target of 116 bombs set
by various factions of the Irish Republican Army, although they only killed fifty people and injured around one thousand. And not once during all those bombings did people in London think that they were being attacked because of their values and their way of life.

It was quite clear to them that they were being attacked because of British
policies
abroad, or the policies of Britain’s friends and allies. The people who organized the bombings wanted Britain out of the Second World War, or British troops out of Northern Ireland, or the British army out of the Middle East (or maybe, in this instance, the whole G8 to leave the rest of the world alone). Nasty things, bombs, but those who send them your way are usually rational people with rational goals, and they almost never care about your values or your way of life. It’s political, not personal.

Londoners understand this, and such knowledge has a remarkably calming effect: once you have grasped this basic fact, you are no longer dealing with some faceless, formless, terrifying unknown, but a bunch of people who are willing to kill at random in order to get your government to change its policies. Moreover, they can’t hurt all that many people. In a large city, the odds are very much in your favour: it will almost always be somebody else who gets unlucky.

This knowledge breeds a fairly blasé attitude towards bombings, which was much in evidence this morning when I had to go in to Harley Street at noon to pick up my daughter from school. (They didn’t let school out early; it was just the last day.) The buses and the London Underground weren’t running and a lot of streets were blocked off by the police, but everybody was finding ways round them, on foot and in cars. You pull over to let the emergency vehicles pass, and then you carry on.

What happened to the victims of the bombs was horrible, and the British media did their best to stir up panic and fury, but it didn’t work. In fact, several times during the day, I overheard people say something along the lines of “Bloody terrorists. Always get it wrong. If only they’d done this two days ago then we wouldn’t be lumbered with the bleeding Olympics.”

One would-be terrorist eventually got the Nobel Peace Prize
.

The oddest bit of news this week has been the tale of the hunt for Nelson Mandela’s pistol, buried on a farm near Johannesburg forty-three years ago. It was a Soviet-made Makarov automatic pistol, given to Mandela when he was undergoing military training in Ethiopia. (He also went to Algeria, to learn from the revolutionaries who had just fought a savage eight-year war of independence to drive out their French colonial rulers.) A week after he buried the gun, he was arrested by the apartheid regime’s police as a terrorist and jailed for life.

It’s very hard now to imagine Nelson Mandela as a terrorist. He is the most universally admired living human being, almost a secular saint, and the idea that he had a gun, and was prepared to shoot people with it, just doesn’t fit our picture of him. But that just shows how naïve and conflicted our attitudes towards terrorism are.

Nelson Mandela never did kill anybody personally. He spent the next twenty-seven years in jail, and only emerged as an old man to negotiate South Africa’s transition to democracy with the very regime that had jailed him. But he was a founder and commander of Umkhonto we Sizwe (Spear of the Nation), the military wing of the African National Congress (
ANC
), and
MK
, as it was known, was a terrorist outfit. Well, a revolutionary movement that was willing to use terrorist tactics, to be precise, but that kind of fine distinction is not permissible in polite company today.

As terrorist outfits go,
MK
was at the more responsible end of the spectrum. For a long time, it only attacked symbols and servants of the apartheid state, shunning random attacks on white civilians even though they were the main beneficiaries of that regime. By the time it did start bombing bars and the like in the 1980s, Mandela had been in prison for twenty years and bore no direct responsibility for
MK
‘s actions—but neither he nor the
ANC
ever disowned the organization. Indeed, after the transition to majority rule in 1994,
MK
‘s cadres were integrated into the new South African Defence Force alongside the former regime’s troops.

There’s nothing unusual about all of this. Jomo Kenyatta in Kenya, Archbishop Makarios in Cyprus, Robert Mugabe in Zimbabwe, and a dozen other national leaders emerged from prison to negotiate
independence after “terrorist” organizations loyal to them had worn down the imperial forces that occupied their countries. In the era of decolonization, terrorism was a widely accepted technique for driving the occupiers out. South Africa was lucky to see so little of it, but terrorism was part of the struggle there, too.