-->Helpless, heedless... and a hope of being right

Martin Woollacott
Tuesday March 18, 2003
The Guardian

America is moving toward war in a mood combining helplessness and heedlessness, a hope of being in the right, an anxiety about the possibility of being wrong, and patriotic feeling in equal proportions.
The conflict is thousands of miles away and will be fought by professional soldiers rather than by the conscripts who went off to Vietnam and earlier wars, which means it can the more easily be put to the back of the mind, even at this moment of its beginning.

The president's sombre speech, not without eloquence, will now alert many to the risks being faced. But in the American capital yesterday, at least until the president spoke, the last gasp of diplomacy and the first hot breath of war were not evident outside government offices and foreign policy institutes. The day was marked more by irritation at unusual traffic jams and extra choruses of sirens, presumably the consequence of road closures and alerts for security reasons.

The presidents who took the United States into the two world wars did so with statements that emphasised both the grave threat to America and the reluctant nature of the American response."The forces endeavouring to enslave the entire world are now moving toward this hemisphere," said Roosevelt in 1942."The state of war between the United States and the Imperial German government which has been thrust upon on the United States is hereby formally declared," said the Wilson government in 1917.

The United States slid into the Vietnam war after Congress was persuaded that there had been a serious provocation in the Tonkin Gulf, but Lyndon Johnson was later to insist that the war was both unavoidable and necessary. With Iraq, President Bush has in hand a congressional permission in advance.

In his speech, like his predecessors, he emphasises both the necessity of war and the reluctance of the United States to engage in it. But his speech most resembled that of President McKinley on the eve of the Spanish-American War, demanding of the government of Spain that it immediately"relinquish its authority... in Cuba... and withdraw its land and naval forces." It was an ultimatum that nobody could imagine the other side could accept.

The success of the Bush administration in somehow persuading many Americans that Saddam Hussein is not only connected to al-Qaida but directly involved in the September 11 attack has given the war a motif of revenge.

But this time, quite apart from the many families who have sons and daughters on the line in the Middle East, there is the uneasy feeling that the theatre in which this spectacle will be watched is not a safe neighbourhood cinema but one where the roof could come crashing in in the shape of terrorist action against American targets.

As hostilities begin, the differences between the anti-war and pro-war schools in the United States have been partially submerged by their common feeling that the administration's diplomacy and its military and political preparations have been inept.

Turkey's possible last-minute decision to permit US forces to pass through is seen as typical."How could we go in 18 months from having everybody on our side to a situation in which we are going to war with just one major ally? It's quite a feat," said one opponent of the war. But, equally,"we have not managed this well," said an advocate of military action.

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