Letter from Woodstock

Tribune, London

 

Hell-bent on war and nearly alone.

 

John Mason, Woodstock,

February 8th, 2003

 

 

Yesterday a lone protestor stood on the Woodstock Green carrying a placard with a quote from Senator Byrd of West Virginia: “AMERICA IS IN A SATANIC TRANCE.” I tend to agree. Recently we’ve seen a lot of this sort of thing up in the Catskills. Over 2000 folks from the Hudson Valley went to Washington for the January 18^th peace march, while hundreds more braved the sub-zero temperatures at a dozen smaller rallies scattered across the region. All across the Northern Tier of the United States, a major peace movement is rising - with dozens of City and town councils passing anti-war resolutions everywhere from the State Assembly in Maine to the San Francisco City Council. The Woodstock town council has done so as well, but it’s a sure sign of the mounting desperation in the peace camp here that our latest move has been to deluge the French Embassy in Washington with faxes appealing to President Jacques Chirac to veto a second UN resolution on Iraq. Certainly there’s no point deluging the Bush White House with appeals for peace, for the cold fact remains that opinion within the U.S. has turned against the “No War Now” position.

Over the past two weeks, George Bush and Colin Powell have succeeded in rallying the country with highly orchestrated media campaign following their one/two punch - Bush’s State of the Union address and Powell’s performance before the UN Security Council. In my view, they have done so by advancing “a bodyguard of lies” and by leaving their policy goals for a post Saddam Iraq undeclared. For instance, a majority of Americans now believe that Iraqis were part of the terrorist commando that attacked the World Trade Centre and that Iraq has WMD’s capable of striking the United States. Polls that were evenly split a month ago now show a 66% majority in favour of taking military action against Iraq - even though 45% believe the conflict could last a year and would produce significant American and Iraqi casualties. But the polls also show that a majority still favours giving the UN inspectors more time and does not want America to go to war without international backing. The President’s support seems a mile wide but may only be an inch deep.

 Ever since Colin Powell’s highly effective media show at the UN, we’ve been playing out the end game on Iraq. Across the Southlands, base communities are emptying out, and troop ships are leaving their homeports. Some 250,000 American and British troops are moving to their pre-invasion stations with a March timetable to keep. It seems we’re determined to live out the “War of the Worlds” scenario that is Bin Laden’s most cherished dream.

Understandably tensions with the “Old Europe” are on the rise and suddenly the yawning divide across the Atlantic is all the news here. The leader in the New York Post last weekend read “Axis of Weasel: France and Germany Wimp Out On Iraq.” The implication is that you Brits and ourselves are the only “stand-up guys” remaining on the planet.

Displays of Anti Americanism abroad regularly make headlines here, but the general “anti-Europeanism” of the American media has gone largely unappreciated. It’s clear, for instance, that a “contract” has gone out on France. Hollywood screenwriters have been instructed to give next season’s villains a distinctly French “twist,” and Thomas Friedman of the New York Times writes that the time has come to “knock France off the Island.” By this he means to take away France’s seat on the UN Security Council and give it to some reliable friend. His preferred candidate is the nuclear-armed India of the BJP.

This orgy of “Euro bashing” followed Donald Rumsfeld’s remarks dismissing Franco German resistance to the invasion of Iraq as the bitter complaint of an “old Europe” left behind by the “new.” In fact, Donald’s “New Europe” isn’t that new at all. He includes mainly countries that are strong in their friendship with the American Big Brother but in little else. With the exception of Blair’s Britain, the “New Europe” is made up of the orphans of the “old Warsaw Pact,” plus the post Francist right in Spain and the post Fascist right in Italy. In terms of either domestic political support or real military assets, Bush’s “coalition of the willing” amounts to pretty thin stuff.

But never mind how thin the coalition, its members are all running to provide cover for the Administration’s effort to convince the American public that we’re not really going into war with Iraq alone. An added benefit has been to divide the European Union against itself. This last is an objective that American diplomacy now shares with traditional British realpolitik. But it seems to me that Bush’s terrible resolve to tear down the international system that we spent much of the 20^th century building up is a stupidity worthy only of Kaiser Bill.

                                    Reader comments may be sent to jmason@hvc.rr.com.