America seems much in need of Roosevelt's maxim to stop fearing fearitself. Virtually all comment on the Mumbai massacre has mentioned 9/11 andal-Qaeda, and thus invited citizens to continue feeling afraid. No matterthat Mumbai appears to have been primarily about Kashmir and the status ofIndia's Muslims. No matter that Osama bin Laden has no dog in that fight.Any stick will do to elevate al-Qaeda as America's enemy number one.
Last week, the CIA warned of a terrorist threat that "might be unleashed"during the presidential transition, a threat which George Bush described as"dangerously real". On Wednesday Barack Obama was formally told by acongressional inquiry that "it is more likely than not that a weapon ofmass destruction, either nuclear or biological, will be used in a terroristattack" in his first year of office. The inquiry demanded an official beappointed "to oversee efforts to prevent such an attack," as if millions ofAmericans in and out of uniform were not doing that already.
Then London added its pennyworth, with a Home Office minister, Lord West,telling of "another great plot building up again" and a "huge threat" fromal-Qaeda. The purpose of this scaremongering is a mystery.
Reactions to Mumbai have seemed to suggest Americans still seeking afellowship of pain, as after the London and Madrid bombings. Gone are thedays when Americans would tell Britons to shrug off IRA terrorist attacks(many instigated from America) and grow up. Any explosion anywhere nowabets the extraordinary 9/11 iconography, underpinning the politics of fearthat has been the leitmotif of the Bush presidency.
Debating this presidency in New York on Tuesday night, I found myselfpitted against Bush's the impresario of fear, Karl Rove. Nothing in hismaster's glorious reign quite matched his "victory" over terror. The senseof unreality was equaled by Rove's supporters, to whom all who did notfear the "Islamo-fascists" were "liberal upper-east side elitists", anapparently crushing epithet. One assured me that Afghanistan would soon bewon by merely "moving the surge" to Kabul. The whole evening was like thescene in Gone with the Wind where Southern gallants out-boast each otherin predicting victory over the Yankees.
Rove was undeniably a master manipulator of fear politics, likeTony Blair's Alastair Campbell, who called him a "kindred spirit". BothBush and Blair were led to portray al-Qaeda in its Tora Bora cave as theyhad Saddam Hussein, as a threat to their respective realms. It was what thesociologist, Ulrich Beck, described as an exaggerated risk "exploited as anelixir to an ailing leader." On this the two leaders built a culture ofself-validating counter-terrorism, with both the absence of any threat andthe presence of one can be made equally supportive.
Every explosion anywhere is nowadays described to the media as"al-Qaeda-linked." What seven years ago was a tiny if efficient cabal offanatics has been turned by western propaganda into a global menace,ridiculously on a par with Hitler and post-war communism. Whoever said thepolitical brain has advanced over time was mad.
On every visit to America I am stunned by the pervasiveness offear. Terrified officials pounce on the slightest deviation from securityrules. Americans must strip almost to their underwear to board even theshortest domestic flights. IDs are scanned in the meanest office blocks.Computers must be dismantled. National Guardsmen troop out at dawn toprotect New York installations "against the terrorist threat."
The repressive patriot acts -- mocking a patriotism that was once built oncourage and the rule of law -- remain in operation. Getting through Americanimmigration with a brown face is an indignity that many Indians and Arabsof my acquaintance now simply refuse to endure. I had trouble even with aBaghdad visa in my passport.
Barack Obama, who is pledged to close Guantanamo Bay, is being challengedto say what he will do with what the conservative Weekly Standard assertsare "250 participants in the most devastating terrorist attacks in history"from "an enemy unlike any other this nation has ever faced." Britons shouldnot be smile at this hyperbole. The same madness afflicts Jacqui Smith'sHome Office.
In the 1960s the American political scientist, Richard Hofstadter,puzzled over the anti-intellectualism of much of American public life,echoing the remark of the Puritan, John Cotton, in 1642 that "the morelearned and witty you bee, the more fit to act for Satan." Listening to thedebate on Tuesday I realised how deep is that strand, how strong the lineof descent to the war on terror from previous generations who likewisepuffed up the mafia and home-grown communism.
The 1950s Kefauver commission on organised crime sought a foe to demoniseas foreign, sinister and ubiquitous. The inquiry found that there was nonational "mafia" worthy of the name, or of their attention, just disparatebunches of local hoodlums. Kefauver and the FBI whose burgeoning empiredepended on him, were furious. They had come to need the mafia and itsmenace to justify their budget, effort and status.
The same synthetic sense of fear enveloped the McCarthy hearings oncommunism. A grain of truth was exaggerated to boost McCarthy's standing asa defender of the people against a real and present danger, that of redsunder every bed. Communism had to be erected as an internal weapon of massdestruction, and much cruelty resulted.
At least organised crime and communism posed genuine threats to Americanliberties. Al-Qaeda does not, yet it has become the ruling obsession ofBush's courtiers. They see al-Qaeda fiends on every side, bearded mullahs,caches of bombs, ricin and anthrax. The precautionary principle has becomefanaticised. By treating the unknown as an enemy, we ensure that theunknown becomes one.
Most the outrages committed by graduates of the Pakistan terrorism campsare locally motivated, and will continue as long as such motivationsurvives. A network of criminal suicide squads with no coherent programmehas no conceivable hope of undermining western democracy. It can just setoff bombs, and will always do so if front-line policing is weak andconstantly overruled by a grand "counter-terrorism" bureaucracy.
Just when America had won a real victory in the century-old combatwith communism, it allowed itself to be terrified by a band of fanaticswho, in part through America's negligence, "got lucky once" and pulled offa coup on 9/11. For seven years its behaviour at home and image abroad havebeen dogged by the reaction to it. The challenge to Obama, here aselsewhere is immense.
The attractive feature of the America in which I once lived was its boldself-confidence. To find the survivors of the Bush presidency stillcowering in a mental bunker afraid of a bunch of Arabs -- and with Britishministers for company -- strips western democracy of a leadership thatshould be both heroic and sensible. It is surely an un-American activity.