Who needs James Bond again? Hollywood offers no shortage of suave sex and
violence. Television delivers breasts, hunks and blood galore. Yet something
in the national psyche craves the return of a hero who operates on the
wilder shores of national defence, an embodiment of Britishness against a
deadly foe.
For all that, I sense it is not James Bond we have missed but his enemies.
Forged in an age of real nuclear menace, the Bond novels concocted fiends
whose aim was to demolish the planet or at least hold it to ransom.
They were potent and had class: Dr No with his Goya, Goldfinger with his
aphorisms, Blofeld, Largo, Drax. They stood proxy for the Great Satan. If
they had a weakness it was their implausibility, but most of them had “the
bomb” or some such histrionic device. They were enemies worthy of our hero
and in the age of the fabricated war on terror we view them with nostalgia.
Bond’s new foe is in the drugs business, which is weak. The contemporaneous
return of Indiana Jones has handled the enemy problem by recalling the
Soviet Union to the colours, replacing the hackneyed Nazis in deference to
the German market.
If you cannot come up with a fake new enemy, fall back on an old real one,
even if it has made the Russians apoplectic. “We are outraged by this film,”
said a spokesman for the St Petersburg Communist party, “which has nothing
to do with reality” – a refreshingly accurate insight.
Enemy starvation is a sign of weakness in a country. It suggests a loss of
self-confidence, a collapse of political cohesion. To Orwell in Nineteen
Eighty-Four enemies were necessary to a totalitarian state. When Tony Blair
was in trouble he fell back on the same device, the politics of fear. “I
feel passionately,” he said in 2004, “that we are in mortal danger of
mistaking the nature of the new world in which we live.”
This doom-laden declaration contained all the messianic buzz phrases listed by
the political theorist Ulrich Beck as “elixir to an ailing leader”: feeling,
passion, mistaking nature, the new world and mortal danger. They summoned up
a need for unity where democracy offered none and loyalty to the leader when
it was disintegrating.
Margaret Thatcher assumed the same mantle but did so in a plausible cause. She
revelled in being the “Iron Lady” of Soviet demonology and drew rhetorical
strength from the dying embers of Soviet power in the 1980s. She then drew
real strength from the Falklands war. Both Moscow and Buenos Aires were
classical enemies, visible and available for military defeat.
There is no ghost of such an enemy today. There is no menacing state and
nothing at which a defence minister can point an expensive bomber, carrier
or submarine. There are criminal outrages that cause temporary mayhem and
suck billions into “anti-terror” defences, but there is no big foe.
The answer given by today’s more youth-oriented cultural phenomenon, Grand
Theft Auto IV, is not a Nazi or a communist, a nuclear boffin or a drug
lord. The enemy is the world beyond the self, a world of diverse moral
choices in which the operator/hero is a gun-toting Slav adrift in modern
America. This, the most popular video game of all time, grossing $500m in
its first week in April, internalises enemy starvation. It suggests that
western youth, or at least a sizeable part of that market, has no need of a
Great Satan handed down by government. It creates its own Satans of the
mind.
This is clearly not enough for those in power. They yearn for an easily
characterised, demonised foe. In the 1950s the FBI created a singular entity
called “the mafia” – as opposed to the reality of disparate criminal gangs –
to justify its federal status and ballooning budget and to explain its
failure to suppress outbreaks of local organised crime. It needed an enemy
worthy of it and was irate when witnesses denied its existence.
So today the potency of Al-Qaeda, the Islamist group, is exaggerated a
thousandfold by western security agencies and their industrial and political
masters. Not a mullah preaches, not a bomb explodes, not a sack of
fertiliser is found in a Bradford suburb but the murmur is passed to the
press, “Al-Qaeda-linked . . . this is big.”
From all we can glean about Al-Qaeda – and there is now a library on the
subject – in 2001 it was confined to a few bases in Afghanistan, where,
being Arab, it was not popular and was running short of hospitality.
It had no purchase on the Pashtun areas where it was confined and its global
projection was based on Osama Bin Laden’s ability to finance spectacular
explosions elsewhere. The 9/11 outrage was counterproductive to Bin Laden’s
cause until the Americans started bombing Kabul.
Governments reacted to 9/11 by needing to portray Al-Qaeda as a body of
fiendish efficiency and global strength. Its cells had to be everywhere, its
influence titanic, its fanaticism superhuman. The name is seldom absent from
George Bush’s lips, its existence legitimising any illiberal outrage. It is
no longer Al-Qaeda, but the Al-Qaeda menace, the Al-Qaeda war, the
all-consuming, all-threatening Al-Qaeda Satan. It has taken over the mantle
of Hitler from Bush’s earlier crude evocation of Nazism, the “axis of evil”.
This has vastly inflated Al-Qaeda’s status among the ranks of world
anti-Americanism and recruited thousands to its ranks. Shadowy individuals
acting in its name are now indeed a widespread pest. They are barely held in
check in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan and rely on their glorification by
Bush to pull rank wherever they go.
The West has not curbed Al-Qaeda.
The movement has been honoured by Blair, the neocons and the military
industrial complex as the global antithesis to the once-vaunted new world
order. Never can so wretched an outfit have been awarded so vast a dignity.
Al-Qaeda is thus an Orwellian classic, a necessary enemy. As portrayed by
Philip Bobbitt in his new book, Terror and Consent, it is the ultimate
Smersh, terrorist without aim or purpose, secretive, fanatical and blessed
with an awesome arsenal on the brink of going chemical, biological and
nuclear. Its alleged goal is to create mayhem as a prelude to some notional
world theocracy.
Accordingly, say Bobbitt and others, western defence, western law, the
institutions of democracy and the sinews of freedom must go on a footing of
unprecedented preparedness to confront this “new global reality”. Confronted
with such a Satan, Bond needs his licence to kill. If the licence does
collateral damage to the cause of freedom, that proves only how great was
the threat and how correct the analysis.
I don’t see Al-Qaeda as such a foe. Nobody who recalls 9/11 is in any doubt of
the efficiency of those who planned and executed it. Nor need we doubt that
other cells may exist, intent on something similar.
Throughout history there have been people whose reckless anarchy is capable of
killing people by the hundred. So-called Islamo-fascism has offered a
breeding ground for such fanatics and merits the most careful diplomacy and
watchfulness.
Bombs threaten life and property, as would more harmful devices not yet found
in the possession of terrorists but that they might conceivably obtain. I am
happy to have a proportion of my taxes devoted, as now, to preventing this.
Such policing, not “war”, has been mostly successful without putting Britain
on a war footing.
What I cannot do is join the pessimists in claiming that western civilisation
is so enfeebled by immorality, as the Bishop of Rochester implied last week,
as to be structurally vulnerable to bomb explosions, devoid as they are of
any political programme or local support. Because a terrorist claims to
attack western culture does not make the claim plausible. Conrad’s terrorist was
equally grandiloquent in his demented ambition. This is childish
fear-mongering.
I have more faith in western democracy than the lily-livered neocons. I
believe in the robustness of its institutions, its traditions and its
liberal outlook. They beat the real threat of communist totalitarianism.
Nothing on the present horizon is remotely comparable to that. I rather
agree with the St Petersburg comrades. That some people need the emotional
prop of a Great Satan does not make Satan any more real.
