LONDON IN LONDON’S GUARDIAN last month, Seumas Milne decried the war in Afghanistan as a “cruel absurdity”–an assault on “one of the poorest and most ruined countries in the world by the planet’s richest and most powerful state.” Now that the war against the Taliban looks like a rout, the numerous Europeans who have rubbished the U.S.-led campaign as a militarily doomed human-rights disaster may be pulled up short. So far, pictures of Afghans jubilantly shaving beards and flying kites appear to document more of a liberation than one more callous act of American browbeating. Nevertheless, many Europeans since September 11 have betrayed a deep discomfort with according victim status to the almighty United States. The World Trade Center and Pentagon, anthrax, another air disaster in Queens–these days Americans seem to display the ultimate in cultural avarice. With all that power and money, now they expect sympathy too. Since everyone loves a winner, European backing for the campaign in Afghanistan is almost certain to resurge, absent scandalous Northern Alliance atrocities. But given how short a time the United States has needed its allies to hang in there, popular European support for retaliation against al Qaeda has proven tellingly thin. It was only three weeks into the campaign when Le Monde declared, “The conduct of the war alarms Europe,” while peace protests in Berlin, Naples, and London were gathering momentum; 15,000 demonstrators turned up in Trafalgar Square to condemn the bombardment on November 18, when such events were already teetering on the brink of anachronism. According to polls, support for participation in the coalition war effort in both Germany and Italy had sunk in one month to a mere 51 percent. Even in the U.K., enthusiasm had been dwindling, from 74 percent support on October 10 to 62 percent on October 28. Extremists are notoriously shrill, but often give vent to feelings that moderates share but are too embarrassed to say outright. Hence another left-wing Guardian journalist, Charlotte Raven, may have reassured a broad church when, as the crematory ash still swirled about lower Manhattan on September 18, she wrote, “It is perfectly possible . . . to dislike the United States just as much as you did before the WTC went down. . . . America is the same country it was before September 11. If you didn’t like it then, there’s no reason why you should have to pretend to now.” Well, what a relief. So jarring was the role reversal of poor, brutalized America that the European left wasted no time in restoring the United States to its rightful role as archfiend. Discomfited by CNN broadcasts of soot-streaked firemen for whom they were obliged to feel sorry, news reporters seized gratefully on more familiar visions of tattered refugee queues and the pluming strikes of B-52s. Thank heavens the United States–as Raven so sensitively described it, “a bully with a bloody nose”–was back to exploiter and aggressor, the breaker of treaties, the killer of babies. This attachment to the United States as “the great Satan” is almost as powerful among Continental anti-globalists as among Islamic fundamentalists. Of course, it’s always disagreeable to relinquish an enemy, as we understand who we are in some measure through whom we repudiate. But many a European’s too-perfunctory denunciation of September 11 and too-eager return to Yank-bashing has displayed a psycho-political pathology all its own. For starters, substituting Uncle Osama for Uncle Sam is intellectually unsatisfying. Plowing airliners into office blocks is self-evidently evil; to deplore the attacks’ mastermind is to join the common ruck, and to get lost in the chorus. Demonizing the United States–for all its flaws, democratic, and hardly given to careening airliners into other countries’ skyscrapers without provocation–requires far more political athleticism, and credit accrues to the one who succeeds. Further, attacks on U.S. soil of such magnitude accord Americans the kind of pathos that worldly and war-weary Europeans prefer to monopolize. Suddenly the United States is bloodied, generating just the kind of history of which its people are so famously unconscious. Overnight, Americans are less fresh-faced, and harder to make fun of. While the Europeans who lived through World War II are increasingly few, ex-pat New Yorkers like me could return from a stint in Manhattan this fall as if from the Battle of the Bulge. When traders at my local market in South London asked where I had been, “New York” universally elicited a fallen countenance, sober solicitation, a shake of the head. The ingenuous air-head from the land where nothing ever happens went up in smoke one Tuesday morning. Now she’s not only garnering sympathy, she has street cred. But the unseemly haste to restore the United States as international villain has gone beyond avant-garde indignation over its now being cool to be American. Blaming September’s assaults on U.S. foreign policy fortifies the soothing fiction that Islamic fanaticism is directed exclusively against the United States. There are even hints of collaborative appeasement in denunciations like those of London’s Daily Mail columnist Andrew Alexander, who in the immediate wake of the attacks decried America’s “self-sought imperial role” that had deservedly “made it enemies of every sort across the globe.” We’re on your side! the finger-pointing implies. You terrorists don’t want us, you want those guys! To whatever degree Seumas Milne’s railing against America’s “unabashed national egotism and arrogance” not two days after the attacks amounted to a craven attempt to sic the dogs on someone else, the diversionary motive was probably subconscious, and born of anxiety. For September 11 shattered the quasi-divine appearance of U.S. omnipotence. Lo, America is mortal. And if even “the planet’s richest and most powerful state” can be jeopardized, there is, politically, no God. Thus the devastation in New York and Washington can’t help but have plunged Europeans into the secular equivalent of a religious crisis. In the pre-September 11 universe of America-as-God, a perfectly unchanging climate, a thriving Third World, and a just and stable Palestinian state would all have been within reach but for the United States and its greedy, manipulative policies. Yet if the United States is not all-powerful, unpredictable weather, poverty, and political impasse are Europe’s responsibility, too–and so is the United States, when under attack. No wonder so many Europeans are anxious to restore the iconography of times past. For the entire Western world, the United States is the security guarantor of last resort. Europeans take their access to this ultimate “bully” so much for granted that leftists routinely taunt and jeer the very nation to which they would turn in crisis. Since demonization is merely the flip side of deification, the scramble these last two months to restore the United States to its traditional role of bogeyman has been, ironically, a desperate and self-interested frenzy to reconstruct America’s image as invincible. The prospect of a superpower ally across the Atlantic that is just another country with its own limitations–fragile and vulnerable, whose people might need your help as much as you need theirs–is apparently too frightening to contemplate. Lionel Shriver is a London-based American writer. December 3, 2001 – Volume 7, Number 12
