In the global village that is our world, the man who becomes the President of the United States affects us all. So in this week in which George W Bush has won himself another four years I write in a gloomy mood. The prospect of another four years of George W Bush is terrifying. Not because of what he can do to America but because of what he can do to the rest of us. In the past four years his foreign policy and his Christian fundamentalist worldview have made the world a much more dangerous place than it used to be. So what he can achieve in the next four years is almost too terrifying to contemplate. Already, those of more pessimistic bent than I are beginning to worry about nuclear crusades and a Third World War.
Remember the time when Bill Clinton described our relatively harmless subcontinent as the most dangerous place in the world? How would he describe his own country now, led as it is by a man who believes he is right about everything because his Christian God is always right, and backed by a country who loves him for his faith-based politics and for the clarity of his stand where the world is concerned.
Nobody can accuse President Bush of not having clarity in his worldview. From those first terrible moments of September 11, 2001, he showed absolute clarity. He was going to get the men responsible for the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon and he was going to teach them the lesson of their lives. So far we all agreed with him. The world was on his side because there was no other side. Who could possibly support a bunch of religious fanatics who thought killing innocent civilians was what Allah asked of them as the price of their ticket to Paradise? Personally, I continue to believe that the American attack on Afghanistan was a justifiable response. Osama bin Laden was an honoured guest of that country and at the time it was led by a bunch of barbarians, so depraved, so devoid of basic humanity that they executed veiled women for crimes they did not know they had committed. After the destruction of Bamiyan’s magnificent Buddhas it would have bothered me not at all if every last Taliban had been blown to bits.
Afghanistan had to be saved from the mad men who had seized it and Osama and his lunatic army had to be defeated. I backed Bush the whole way on his initial military response, as did more than half the world and certainly more than half of India. We were more than ready to be in the vanguard of the war on terrorism because had we not suffered, until 9/11, more than any other country? My first doubts about the global war on terrorism began when I noticed that Saudi Arabia and Pakistan were being counted among America’s closest allies. And, when Bush started talking about God and righteousness he began to sound, to my heathen ears, no different than the Islamic fundamentalists who were blowing themselves up in the name of their own God and righteousness. The only way to win this war on terrorism is to make it a fight between reason and faith, and neither Bush nor his advisors seem to have noticed this in the past four years. When it becomes faith against faith, memories of ancient wars between Christianity and Islam revive and jehad acquires a meaning it did not have when the global war against terrorism began.
Where the war became something else altogether was when President Bush thought it necessary to invade Iraq to destroy those weapons of mass destruction that were never found. Reams have been written on the subject and I have no intention of going over the same ground in this column, but if the new Bush administration wants to work towards making the world a less dangerous place then it must work towards defusing the Iraq bomb. Iraq has today become to even moderate Muslims a symbol of what they no longer see as a war on terrorism but a war on Islam. Osama bin Laden could not have dreamed up a better scenario for his battle against Western civilisation or a more fertile recruiting ground for the mujahideen he needs to fight the jehad against the West.
Meanwhile, instead of becoming a model democracy for the Middle East’s other countries to emulate, Iraq goes every day from barbarism to more barbarism with America seemingly unable to halt its terrible slide into chaos.
Remember the time when Bill Clinton described our relatively harmless subcontinent as the most dangerous place in the world? How would he describe his own country now, led as it is by a man who believes he is right about everything because his Christian God is always right, and backed by a country who loves him for his faith-based politics and for the clarity of his stand where the world is concerned.
Nobody can accuse President Bush of not having clarity in his worldview. From those first terrible moments of September 11, 2001, he showed absolute clarity. He was going to get the men responsible for the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon and he was going to teach them the lesson of their lives. So far we all agreed with him. The world was on his side because there was no other side. Who could possibly support a bunch of religious fanatics who thought killing innocent civilians was what Allah asked of them as the price of their ticket to Paradise? Personally, I continue to believe that the American attack on Afghanistan was a justifiable response. Osama bin Laden was an honoured guest of that country and at the time it was led by a bunch of barbarians, so depraved, so devoid of basic humanity that they executed veiled women for crimes they did not know they had committed. After the destruction of Bamiyan’s magnificent Buddhas it would have bothered me not at all if every last Taliban had been blown to bits.
Afghanistan had to be saved from the mad men who had seized it and Osama and his lunatic army had to be defeated. I backed Bush the whole way on his initial military response, as did more than half the world and certainly more than half of India. We were more than ready to be in the vanguard of the war on terrorism because had we not suffered, until 9/11, more than any other country? My first doubts about the global war on terrorism began when I noticed that Saudi Arabia and Pakistan were being counted among America’s closest allies. And, when Bush started talking about God and righteousness he began to sound, to my heathen ears, no different than the Islamic fundamentalists who were blowing themselves up in the name of their own God and righteousness. The only way to win this war on terrorism is to make it a fight between reason and faith, and neither Bush nor his advisors seem to have noticed this in the past four years. When it becomes faith against faith, memories of ancient wars between Christianity and Islam revive and jehad acquires a meaning it did not have when the global war against terrorism began.
Where the war became something else altogether was when President Bush thought it necessary to invade Iraq to destroy those weapons of mass destruction that were never found. Reams have been written on the subject and I have no intention of going over the same ground in this column, but if the new Bush administration wants to work towards making the world a less dangerous place then it must work towards defusing the Iraq bomb. Iraq has today become to even moderate Muslims a symbol of what they no longer see as a war on terrorism but a war on Islam. Osama bin Laden could not have dreamed up a better scenario for his battle against Western civilisation or a more fertile recruiting ground for the mujahideen he needs to fight the jehad against the West.
Meanwhile, instead of becoming a model democracy for the Middle East’s other countries to emulate, Iraq goes every day from barbarism to more barbarism with America seemingly unable to halt its terrible slide into chaos.
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