It seems like only yesterday that George W Bush was an ignorant, bigoted redneck, a spoilt brat of a Texan under the thumb of sinister neo-conservatives who had Strangelovely plans to take over the world.
This past week, though, he has been greeted as the potential saviour of Africa. Bush’s “compassionate conservativism”, once dismissed as a cynical ploy to win the election, has been dusted off and presented to polite applause across the dark continent.
Sir Bob Geldof has made Guardian readers choke over their muesli by telling them: “You’ll think I’m off my trolley when I say this, but the Bush administration is the most radical — in the positive sense — in its approach to Africa since Kennedy.”
There has been a similar welcome for Bush’s £9 billion plan to tackle Aids, which threatens to halve the population of otherwise decently governed countries such as Botswana.
Perhaps the president’s most audacious gesture yet was his photocall at the grim door of the slave citadel on Goree Island, off the coast of Senegal, through which thousands of Africans filed, never to return.
For Goree Island is one of the most misery-drenched spots on earth. Grabbed in succession by the Portuguese, the Dutch, the English and the French, it was a key entrepôt for the “triangular trade” — cloth, gunpowder and rum from Bristol and Liverpool to west Africa, then slaves from Africa to the West Indies, then raw sugar back home to England, so the ship was never empty. The trade was so valuable the Liverpool worthies named their spanking new harbour Gorey Quay.
These were the horrific antecedents of today’s globalisation, and the suspicions of the anti-globalisation brigade are that Bush and his allies have scarcely less nefarious schemes to keep Africans in a modern version of slavery. The Americans are accused of turning their attention to Africa only to secure oil supplies. The United States fiercely protects the patents of its drug companies to deny poor Africans access to vital medicines. They subsidise their farmers so lavishly that African nations have no hope of export earnings to service their crippling debts.
Yet for all these alleged sins, it is increasingly admitted that Africa cannot do without the United States, or without the West generally. Nor can the Middle East or other deprived and conflicted parts of the Third World. The reason can be summed up in a word which, until recently, we have been shy of using: order.
When law and order have broken down into looting, casual violence and the beginnings of civil war, only timely, robust intervention by a superior force can avert slaughter on a terrible scale.
For years this pretty obvious fact was dodged and veiled out of a wish not to offend the amour-propre of newly independent states. Any member of the United Nations — up to and including Saddam Hussein’s Iraq — had the right to manage its own internal affairs without interference. The UN could intervene only in the most tactful way, with a carefully restricted mandate and only after a visibly catastrophic breakdown of order.
The old imperial powers, after all, were the last people who ought to be sticking their oars in. They were the ones who had bequeathed unstable frontiers, an ill-educated elite and desperate poverty. All through the run-up to the war in Iraq we were reminded of Britain’s murky past in the region.
Tony Blair could secure a mandate for going to war only by asserting, with his hand on his heart, that Saddam presented a serious and imminent threat beyond his borders. I have not met anyone who changed their mind as a result of either the sexed-up or the dodgy dossier. But these were indispensable rituals. It would not have sufficed to say that Saddam is a monster who has murdered hundreds and thousands and is a beacon to terrorists throughout the region.
The irony is that the whole weapons of mass destruction claim should now pose this huge embarrassment to the government, just as the doctrine of non-intervention which made the claim necessary is beginning to crumble. It is now widely recognised that the longer you leave either “failed states” or “rogue states” — two phrases nobody had heard of 10 years ago — the worse the trouble will be.
These days, small states in trouble have no shame in calling for outside intervention. Britain’s intervention in Sierra Leone was almost universally welcomed there. In Liberia even the appalling Charles Taylor, himself responsible for many of the horrors, wants the Americans to go in.
This week the parliament of the Solomon Islands has persuaded Australia to deploy its biggest military force in the Pacific since the second world war to help to stabilise the Happy Isles, as they were once known, after a coup and an ethnic civil war.
Many of these countries are simply too weak to resist unaided the forces that are tearing them apart. Weapons are so cheap and so are lives. And the trouble tends to bleed across national frontiers, from Liberia to Sierra Leone and Guinea and Côte d’Ivoire.
It is easy to blame the UN. But the UN is only the mirror that reflects our governments and ourselves in all our impatience and chronic compassion fatigue. Nor can the most dedicated non- governmental organisation supply the indispensable basis of law and order. From Rwanda to Haiti, Bosnia, Somalia and Rwanda again, the story is much the same: pitifully inadequate UN forces with no proper mandate to restore order, sent too late and left to bleed until their home governments panic at the casualties and withdraw them, resolving to make even less effort in future to keep up their UN dues.
In her book We Did Nothing, Linda Polman gives an account of these terrible episodes, which combine the horrors of Apocalypse Now with the grotesquery of Evelyn Waugh’s Scoop or Black Mischief.
The bit that sticks in my mind is when she is sheltering with a small group of Zambians in blue helmets surrounded by 150,000 Hutu refugees who keep pushing dying babies under the camp wire at her. She has not even done a first aid course. After a week of this the camp gates fly open and in run seven men in flapping white coats with the Médecins sans Frontières logo.
“Thank heavens, help at last,” she cries to the Zambians. “Sorry,” one of the doctors tells her, “we’re only staying till 4 o’clock, it’s too dangerous here.” It is then a quarter past three.
If we were willing to pay for it and to endure the casualties, we could easily afford to maintain sizeable peacekeeping forces on standby, either through the UN or through the European Union. They might do more good in the poor and desperate parts of the world than half the aid that the West disburses.
Until then we shall no doubt go on expecting the Americans to do most of the peacekeeping while we do most of the complaining about the way they do it.
