analysis: powell's speech and the iraqi end game, page-18

re: b&b analysis:pst. a bit of juicy rw gossip pow Here's a bit of Right Wing propaganda to get your teeth into or in Whiska's case to cause him to wee in his nappies. lrj


Greg Sheridan: DESPISING AMERICA

February 06, 2003


The Howard Government deserves praise for the substance of its policy on Iraq, for sticking to that substance even though it is, for the moment at least, electorally unpopular. John Howard is rightly putting good foreign policy ahead of domestic politics.

Good God, you can't imagine how strange it feels to type those words.

This column has had a lot of criticism of Howard on foreign policy over the years, especially his policy towards Asia. That criticism still stands. But when it faced the biggest question that history has thrown at it – namely the war on terror, the danger posed by the inter-action of rogue nations acquiring weapons of mass destruction with international terrorism, and the specific need to disarm Iraq – the Howard Government stood up for what was right.

That is not to say it has handled the politics of the situation well. But the politics are tricky partly because of the hysterical anti-Americanism afflicting our chattering classes.

One of the fascinating things about the Australian Iraq debate is that Iraq doesn't figure in it much. The Government is almost the only participant talking about Iraq. Simon Crean barely mentioned it in his speech on Tuesday. Many of the commentators ostensibly on Iraq hardly mention Iraq at all, because analysing Iraq requires some intellectual work, whereas sounding off about the US requires only attitude.

Anti-Americanism should be studied as a serious psychological affliction, a pathological condition which paralyses the mind's analytical capacity. Contemporary anti-Americanism has many sources. Let me offer you just a few.

The first is the US itself. No society is more self-critical or self-analytical than the US. As most of our intellectual life is an imitation of the US, so our critique of the US is often an imitation, sometimes a direct import, of the US. Journalists strive to be Woodward and Bernstein of Watergate fame.

The broad and not very intelligent satire of The New York Times's Maureen Dowd – who as The New Republic's Martin Peretz recently commented, has never said a single interesting thing about any serious policy issue – is read here as serious political insight. The New York Times, The Washington Post and a few other left-liberal east coast papers both hate the Bush administration specifically, and are the avatars of liberal guilt generally. Their exaggerated critique is copied here with super-abundant enthusiasm.

Then there is European anti-Americanism, especially that of France and Germany, two faded and unprincipled lags of old Europe. How come these Americans are so powerful when we are so culturally superior, they cry. Condescension is the preserve of the impotent everywhere.

Because the debate about Iraq takes us to the Middle East, Arab anti-Americanism, which is closely related to Arab anti-Semitism, is important too. There is not a single Arab nation which has made a success of modernisation, nor one which is a democracy. Arab anti-Americanism is similar to its European cousin: why are the Americans so powerful when we are the supreme culture? It must be because of malevolent conspiracy. Most Arab nations promote sickening anti-Semitism. Anti-Americanism and anti-Semitism feed into each other in the fantastic conspiracy theories that dominate much of the Arab mind.

Then there is the US's universalism. Because the US is so rich and so big, whatever you don't like in human nature you can find in abundance there.

Then too there is the psychological indulgence of the child and its parents. Many Western baby boomers have never passed psychologically beyond the stage of adolescence, with the US as their simultaneously forbidding and indulgent parents. One of the quintessential syndromes of adolescence is the ability to rebel against your parents, safe in the knowledge that they'll love you and protect you anyway.

This relates to the next source of anti-Americanism which is imitation of the glorified Hollywood rebel. Many of the chattering classes cherish the image of themselves as rebels. But they live and breathe in the security provided ultimately by the US alliance system. They're rebelling against mum and dad. No one is more celebrated in contemporary Western culture than the individualistic rebel. Baby boomers are especially assiduous in awarding themselves the status of rebel moral hero. By only rebelling against the ever tolerant US they risk no personal discomfort from their heroism, always a happy combination.

There is also, in the special hatred of the chattering classes for Bush, a virulent anti-Christian quality. That this is echoed in the official church bureaucracies here, all of them now wholly owned subsidiaries of the Left, is not surprising. The US is the most church-going of modern Western societies. George W. Bush is an avowed orthodox Christian.

So, oddly enough, was Bill Clinton, but that was a kind of elaborate in-joke. He didn't take it seriously so his admirers didn't hold it against him.

But, especially in devotedly secular Australia, the fact that Bush thanks the merciful God who is behind all history sends the Phillip Adams-style mind into something like the heebie-jeebies. Anti-Catholicism used to be the anti-Semitism of the intellectual. Now that Catholics are indistinguishable from Protestants, it's anti-conservative Christian sentiment generally.

Finally, after Bali, Australians also seem to have a mixed-up Singapore syndrome, that we mustn't send the troops overseas or they won't be here to defend us, or we'll upset the terrorists. In truth, our useful but modest military pre-deployment in the Gulf will have no effect on our ability to operate in our own region. And the terrorists hate us already.

By the way, here's a prediction. The balloon will go up, I guess, between February 28 and March 7. Notwithstanding the virulence of pathological anti-Americanism, a swift liberation of Iraq will see public opinion come around and the Howard Government vindicated.

Greg Sheridan is The Australian’s foreign editor