October, 2003

The Bush team's hard time selling their war is getting harder. First it was a war to disarm Saddam, and they haven't found him or his weapons. If he had them, he's still got them and can use them. If he never had them, sixty thousand people were killed and a hundred thousand mutilated for no good reason. Then it was to rid a grateful country of a heinous tyrant, and more of the country are shooting at them than ever shot at him, or his people. Most people are less happy now than they were in February, and they're getting unhappier, and shooting more accurately.

Now it's to persuade America to give eighty-seven billion dollars to people who are shooting at them. Give more money to their schools, say, than Americans get, and maybe in a year or two they'll stop shooting at us, and apologise for the American boys they've killed. The American people will buy that, surely, and cough up.

Insanity is when you drift so far from ordinary human deduction, and ordinary human emotion, that you become a danger, or a trial, to people around you. By this criterion American foreign policy is insane. Ask any United Nations delegate in private if this is so, and they will sadly nod their head, and shrug.

The problem is not, I think, that they got the details wrong, or the execution wrong, or the propaganda wrong, or the spin wrong. It's that the whole thing is crazy at its heart. Because you can't have a War On Terrorism, any more than you can have a War On The Hand Grenade, or a War On The .303 or a War On The Bowie Knife, or a war on Greek Fire. You can't have a war on a method of war. If you can, please tell me how you conduct it.

To see how crazy it is all you have to do is rename it The War On Suicide Bombers. If we kill enough suicide bombers we'll deter them from killing themselves and us if we're nearby. If we kill enough people who embrace death as an ecstatic affirmation of their life on earth and their prospects in heaven they'll stop doing it. This is just not so. You can't threaten a suicide bomber, you can only punish her family afterwards, illegally, unjustly and cruelly, in ways that, like bulldozing their house, make no friends. In ways that breed more suicide bombers. So it doesn't work. A war on suicide bombers doesn't work.

And if suicide bombers are part of the terrorism we're at war with, and we're not able to scare them, and their relatives hero-worship and emulate them, and they keep on procreating, and a hundred thousand of them kill three hundred thousand of us, we lose the war. We also don't make friends of a proud people we have already, with previous wars and sanctions, killed a million of. Those million dead will have twenty relatives who'll miss them, and there are only twenty-six million people, give or take a bunker-busted residence, in all Iraq.

This is kindergarten stuff. Halve the figures and the result is the same. You do not make a friend of a man or a woman whose brother or father or sister you have killed. More Iraqis died in April (probably) than Americans -- 58,000 -- in the Vietnam War. More Iraqis died in the Gulf War and the sanctions that followed than Americans -- 700,000 -- in the American Civil War. Yet the Americans expected to be welcomed in Iraq. They're as crazy as that.

Why are they as crazy as that? It's because, I think, they don't have in their tradition the same kind of family love that Europeans and Asians, Africans and Polynesians have. Families, like names and noses, they think of as disposable goods. The average American has been married twice, and left behind in Europe an extended family he rarely sees. He has quarrelled with his wife, or his son, or his brother, over the religion he should embrace. He has accused his son or his daughter of deserting his faith, he has believed the Devil has got to them. He has consigned them -- his children, his siblings -- to hellfire.

He believes that those who sin should fry in hell, even if they are part of his bloodline. And he thinks that Iraqis react in this way to brothers, sisters, uncles who still believe in Saddam. He thinks that Iraqis don't mind their relatives being arrested, tortured, or bunker-busted if they believe the wrong things, if they choose the devil Saddam and his ways. And they're wrong about that. Iraqis, like other human beings, hate the people who murder their relatives. For them no reason for this is good enough.

It's kindergarten stuff. And the Bush team have drifted so far from ordinary human emotion they imagine the world will help them kill more suicide bombers to make the world a safer place. You hear more logic in padded cells.
And it's a pity.