Bush's stark terms are unreal

This year, the Bush administration has given tens of millions of dollars to what is now its number one enemy, the Taliban regime in Afghanistan. The funds have been delivered in return for the Taliban's efforts to eliminate opium production. As recently as last month, US Assistant Secretary of State Christina Rocca, the senior State Department official for southern Asia, pledged another $1.5 million to help UN drug-control efforts in Afghanistan in response to the Taliban's ban on poppy cultivation.

In a very poor country, these are significant sums: the total funds given by the US are probably about half the size of the Taliban government's annual Budget.

These contributions were made as part of a war: the so-called "war on drugs". This is the way such wars work. You declare your determination to extirpate a menace that threatens your civilisation. You hold your nose and make alliances with all sorts of thugs because, for the moment, they serve your purpose. You forget that, in an unstable world, actions have unpredictable consequences. You are unprepared for grotesque ironies.

Later, when things go wrong, it is permissible to say these things. After Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait and the US went to war against him, it was no longer anti-American to say that previous US support for him was a bad idea. After Osama bin Laden turned on America, it was OK to suggest that the CIA funding which had helped to create his network might have been a bit unfortunate.

At the time, however, to say these things was to be anti-American. Just as, at the moment, you won't hear anything about the alliance with the Taliban in the war on drugs. It would complicate things and complications, however truthful, distract from the rhetoric of war.

That rhetoric has little time for reality, because it has itself a deeply fictive quality. It is driven by the John Wayne syndrome. John Wayne was the quintessential icon of unflinching Americanism. He portrayed it so convincingly that many people believed he really was a war hero. In fact, of course, he deftly avoided combat. Thus the John Wayne syndrome: the more belligerent the rhetoric, the less likely it is that the speaker has ever experienced war.

We've seen this at work in recent days. The real tough guys have been calm, dignified, rational. Colin Powell, who fought in Vietnam and headed the US armed forces at the time of the Gulf War, has been cool, downbeat and sensitive to the complexities of the 21st century world.

Rudolph Giuliani, the Mayor of New York, who in his previous life as a prosecutor took on the Mafia, has been a model of decency and restraint. For anyone who has watched Giuliani closely over the years and seen the most tactless, abrasive and insensitive man in America, his emergence at a time of immense trauma as a real leader has been quite astonishing.

Conversely, however, there is George Bush. It is somehow entirely predictable that a man whose family connections got him a safe posting in the Texas Air Reserve during the Vietnam war should resort to the language of a bad cowboy movie.

Having spent the most vicious war in recent US history defending, as cynical New Yorkers liked to say, Texas against Mexico, he feels free to indulge himself in mock-heroic clichΘs.

A key element of this rhetoric, repeated over and over again, is that there is no middle ground in this new war. The message is that we must all make a choice.

Either we support, wholeheartedly and unquestioningly, whatever it is that the US decides to do, or we will be assumed to be on the side of the terrorists. Either we are loyal followers, or we are enemies.

It needs to be said that we do not have to accept these terms. They are, for a start, self-contradictory. On the one hand, we are asked to accept that the attack on the US was an attack on all of us, an assault not on a country but on concepts such as civilisation and democracy in which our way of life is included.

On the other, we are effectively being told that we have no right to a view about the nature of the response to those attacks. It is our war but we have no right to discuss how it is fought.

What happens in the coming months is of tremendous significance for all of us. Failure to act effectively against the perpetrators of the crimes against humanity on September 11th will leave the way open for actions which have previously been confined to airport thrillers to become real. If, for example, there were to be a successful terrorist attack on Sellafield - a threat that is now well within the range of possibility - Ireland would be devastated.

On the other hand, the kind of serial killing that is being actively canvassed by some within the Bush administration would make the world an even more dangerous place. There is serious talk of an open-ended war, not just on Osama bin Laden or the Taliban, but on Iraq, Libya, Sudan, Somalia and, in a neat stroke of opportunism, Cuba.

There is some solid middle ground between these catastrophic alternatives. It lies with a return to something that the US has actively worked against: the creation of an International Criminal Court to punish all crimes against humanity, backed if necessary by military force. By using its presidency of the UN Security Council to put this back on the agenda, Ireland could do the world, and America, a big favour.

fotoole@irish-times.ie