In my lifetime, the United States has decided to go to war on four occasions, and has come to the brink of war several other times. The four wars were the Second World War, Korea, Vietnam and the Gulf War. Now the United States is prepared to go to war again; indeed, it would require an extraordinary surrender by Saddam Hussain to prevent it.
Last week I went to New York to discuss the prospect of a second Gulf War with American friends. I had been impressed, during the summer, by the number of Americans coming to England who had serious reservations about American policy. Some of them were opposed to war in all circumstances; that is the view of the anti-war protesters who are taking full-page advertisements in the New York Times. Others support the war because they see no alternative, but are full of doubts and anxieties.
I do not think the polls can, without detailed analysis, give a conclusive view of American public opinion. What answers the polls get depend on what questions they ask. No two people I talked to held exactly the same balance of views. A small minority take the isolationist, or pacifist, view: no war in any circumstances. They are outside the mainstream of the debate, which is taking place as much inside the consciences of individual Americans as it is between Americans.
The first thing that strikes one is that this is not a party issue, nor is it the central issue of the very even mid-term election campaign which is now being fought. Both parties support the President’s policy, as the votes in Congress have shown. It is not hard to find liberal Democrats who are giving robust support to the President’s policy, sometimes because of their commitment to Israel. It is equally easy to find conservative Republicans who have serious doubts about the likely outcome. Obviously it is easier for Democrats who are doves to speak out, and for Republicans who are hawks. But both parties are divided, at least in their private discussions.
At lunch last Tuesday I had the chance to discuss these movements of opinion with Dick Morris, the political adviser who was the architect of President Clinton’s re-election campaign in 1996. I told him that I had been meeting Americans who supported the President’s policy, but with doubts. He said that he thought “ambivalence” was a more accurate word that “doubt”. His view is that about two thirds of those who have an opinion support the policy, but that they have very natural anxieties, particularly about possible terrorist threats.
Before the Second World War the support for isolationism ran at about 40 per cent. After 1945, isolationism lost its political power, because it divided into two streams of conservative and left-wing isolationism, but it retained about the same level of support. Dick Morris’s reading of American public opinion is that support for the President’s policy is, if anything, stronger than could have been expected at this stage.
In all politics, and in particular in American politics, events change attitudes. The South should not have fired on Fort Sumter in 1861; the Germans should not have sunk the Lusitania in 1915; the Japanese should not have attacked Pearl Harbour in 1941. By the same logic, Al-Qaeda should not have destroyed the Twin Towers in 2001. Before these acts of aggression, negotiation was still open; the American determination had not crystallised.
After they had occurred, the destruction of the aggressor became inevitable. In each of these wars, the initial challenge came from the other side. But once Americans are convinced that they face an implacable enemy, that has a revolutionary effect. The aim of terrorists is to radicalise their own potential followers; 9-11 radicalised the American people, despite their anxieties.
Some of the opponents of the war argue that al-Qaeda and Saddam Hussain are two separate groups, but al-Qaeda is indeed an enemy of Saddam Hussain. The Americans I was meeting do not see it like that. They regard all Islamic terrorism as forming a single threat.
Americans do not know, or much care, what precise relationship exists between al-Qaeda and the Bali terrorists. They see them both as being in the same line of business, and do not doubt that some links exist between them. They see Saddam Hussain in the same light. He is the brutal dictator of an Islamic country; he had repeatedly supported terrorists and used terror himself. To allow him to develop weapons of mass destruction would, they think, be as irrational at allowing al-Qaeda to do so.
So far as most Americans are concerned, Islamic terrorists, whether they belong to the al-Qaeda network or are Palestinian suicide bombers, or plant bombs in Indonesia or Kashmir, or lead terrorist governments, all form part of the same global threat.
There is no longer such a thing as a friendly terrorist, not even in Northern Ireland. There is certainly no such thing as an acceptable Islamic terrorist, or any distinction between the threat represented between one group of Islamic terrorists and another. Iraq itself is only marked out because as a state it has the capacity to manufacture weapons of mass destruction.
Again and again, I was asked: “What else can we do?” I was being asked this by people who are far from being uncritical supporters of the policy. They have heard the arguments that have been going on in Washington between the State Department and Pentagon, or, inside the Pentagon, between the generals and the politicians. They fear the possible consequences of further terrorist spectaculars in the US, or, still worse, biological attacks, possibly including smallpox. If 9-11 had not happened, they might be still on the side of inaction. But they now believe that time is not on the side of the United States in the war against terrorism.
This is the bedrock of American opinion, despite the “ambivalence” to which Dick Morris rightly refers. The reaction of foreign countries has changed the pattern of American international relations. Before 9-11, Europe was seen as an ally, and Russia and China as opponents. No longer. Russia and China, despite some difficult negotiations, are widely seen as necessary partners in the war against terror.
Continental Europe, and the EU itself, is seen as unreliable and irresponsible. The German election, in which Chancellor Schröder won a last-minute victory by campaigning against the United States as a warmonger, is not going to be forgotten. Winning any French concession at the United Nations has been as difficult as drawing an impacted tooth. “Don’t they understand the danger?” is as common an American comment as: “What else can we do?”
Equally, there is widespread gratitude and admiration for Tony Blair. Another typical comment is that Britain has had three great Prime Ministers in modern times, Winston Churchill, Margaret Thatcher and Tony Blair. Historically-minded Americans discuss the continuities between the Pax Britannica of the Imperial period and the Pax Americana of the present day. I was asked whether the British resented the fact that power and responsibility had passed from Britain to the US. I said not. It has certainly become much easier to explain to Americans why some of us in Britain do not wish to join the euro.
This week the UN Security Council is expected to decide its resolution on Iraq. Presumably there will be a compromise. France’s negative position is not all that strong. France is no longer a great power; indeed, it is questionable whether France has ever been a great power since 1870.
A French veto at the Security Council would simply mean that the Pax Americana would not be operated through the United Nations — an outcome some Americans would welcome. Such a veto is a diplomatic possibility, but it would be an absurd exaggeration of the real power of France.
The United States is determined to disarm Iraq; that will almost certainly involve changing the regime. In New York the expectation was that war would happen at some time between mid-December and late January — a six-week window of opportunity which is only eight weeks away. This policy involves great dangers, of which Americans are well aware. They believe that the danger from Saddam Hussain, left free to develop chemical, biological and nuclear weapons, would be even greater.
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