I Know Bush. He's Your Best Chance For Peace

Written by David Frum on Sunday November 23, 2003

For a visiting North American, there was something terribly sad about London last week. Everything had been prepared for a glorious celebration of Anglo-American friendship. The flags had been massed, the backdrop was beautiful - but the stage was empty. I felt that I had wandered into Miss Havisham's bedroom: everything had been readied for an event that never quite took place.

The protests themselves were not so impressive: they felt much less energetic and purposeful than the last anti-war protest I attended in London, the October 2002 march on Hyde Park. What was most disturbing was not the vehement hatred of Bush and the United States expressed by a radical fringe, but the cool dismissal of him expressed by the great moderate middle of British society.

Again and again I was asked about the odds that Bush might lose in 2004, to be replaced by some Democrat who would offer alternative policies: "alternative" being a euphemism for "conciliatory". A good many people, particularly in the media, are telling themselves that if only Bush could be got rid of, the US would release the Guantanamo detainees, withdraw from Iraq and create a Palestinian state.

Think again. Bush may fail. But if he fails, it is unlikely that America today will then conclude: "How terrible that the people of the Middle East gravitate towards violence and authoritarianism. It must be our fault. Quick - let's give them a Palestinian state so they will stop blowing up our office towers."

It is much more likely that Americans will conclude: "Something is seriously wrong with these people. And we'd better take steps to protect ourselves from them." You do not, after all, have to send your armies into the heart of the Middle East to fortify your society against Middle Eastern terror. You can also do it by barring Middle Eastern people from your territories and keeping careful watch over those who have already entered. You can do it by supporting regimes willing to crack down on terrorist organisations by any means necessary. You can do it by cutting back on your presence in the region, reducing investment and trade, striking from a distance whenever any state or group seems close to acquiring weapons of mass destruction - but otherwise consigning the people of the region to stagnate in their own rage.

Many Europeans interpret rage as evidence that the enraged must have been victimised. Americans are less prone to accept such excuses. That's why they execute murderers. That's why they are so overwhelmingly unsympathetic to the Palestinian cause. (Americans as a whole sympathise with Israel over the Palestinians by a margin of three to one; Republicans by a margin of seven to one; conservative Republicans by a margin of eight to one.)

Since September 11, President Bush has again and again challenged the view that Islam is biased towards violence and against democracy. He has dismissed as "condescending" the view that the one-fifth of mankind who follow Islam have unfitted themselves for self-rule - and repeatedly praised Islam as a good and peaceful faith. Polls suggest that Americans are already decreasingly likely to agree.

One of America's largest foundations, Pew, regularly sponsors surveys of American attitudes towards religion and public life. It has found that between March 2002 and June 2003, the proportion of Americans who agree that Islam is more likely than other religions to encourage violence rose from 25 per cent to 44 per cent.

In the wake of the Vietnam war, there appeared a sudden burst of artistically ambitious movies about the US debacle in Indochina: The Deer Hunter and Apocalypse Now being the two most successful. These movies offered similar interpretations of what had gone wrong - well-intentioned Americans had been drawn into an evil vortex they did not understand, and had been corrupted and destroyed. Left-wingers hated these movies: Surely, they argued, it had been the Americans who had been the destroyers and the Vietnamese who had been the victims? But that message was unheard - or, if heard, disdained.

In the wake of an American failure in Iraq, no imaginable American president - not Wesley Clark, not Howard Dean - would dare propose an increase in foreign aid or other assistance to the Middle East. A failure would be interpreted as a vindication of America's isolationists and pessimists, not its Leftists and pacifists - as proof that gunmen and suicide bombers actually do epitomise the region's values and culture.

Fortunately, it now seems overwhelmingly probable that the US will succeed in Iraq and that Bush will be re-elected; that the Iraqis will gain their freedom and the Palestinians will get their state. And if and when these things do happen, Europeans and Britons will have to accept that George W Bush is not some weird American fad - that he represents something big and important about the United States.

Americans are fundamentally a generous and optimistic people. Those political leaders who have achieved lasting success in American politics - such as Franklin Roosevelt and Ronald Reagan - did so by appealing to Americans' best qualities. If the people approve and return George W Bush, it will be because he did the same: because he extended the universal principles that Americans espouse to that vast and challenging stretch of earth from Morocco to Malaysia.

Almost everybody agrees that the war on terror represents a new kind of war. It is hardly surprising, then, that those in charge of this war should sometimes make mistakes. Perhaps the timing of this state visit was one of those mistakes. But over the next five years, there will be plenty of opportunities to correct that error - and for this President who has risked so much to advance the common ideals of the English-speaking peoples to return to Great Britain to receive the cheering welcome he deserves.

Category: David Frum in Print