Issue 739
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My quote was: 'As we back the US in bombing the bejesus out of Afghanistan...we wage our own war against Afghan refugees.' What on earth did this have to do with condoning terrorism?
On the same day, in similar reductive vein, columnist Miranda Devine named her traitors. Her rhetorical trick was the same as Bolt's – while he used the words of Saddam Hussein to drag critics of US foreign policy into the terrorist's camp, she used those of the Taliban leader.
It looked like crude McCarthyism to me. But then I saw the light, courtesy of a Late Night Live interview with left-wing columnist Christopher Hitchens in the US, who has strongly criticised some leftist American opinion on the bombings.
He said there is a loony left and a loony right, with one thing in common. Both blame the US for what happened and say no more. The loony left says the United States has got its just deserts for its state-sponsored terrorism and support for dictatorships in its economic interests.
The loony right, led by fundamentalist Christian Jerry Falwell, blames America because of its materialism and secularisation.
The non-loon debate is about the nature, breadth and core principles of an effective United States response. Citizens around the world are vitally concerned in the correct answers – everyone fears the nightmare scenario of World War III, religious war, a war without end in a world consumed by fear.
For that debate to be informed one must understand the enemy and understand and learn from history.
Bolt and Devine avoid it completely by slam-dunking anyone who raises such matters with accusations of bad faith. They chose not to dispute the history, or to interpret it differently. They simply deny it a place.
For instance, the question of whether the United States should kill thousands of innocent civilians in a reprisal attack goes to the question of the values the United States is seeking to defend, and whether such a response would escalate rather than end bin Laden's grand plan to trigger a holy war.
This debate has raged within the Bush war Cabinet. Some hawks wanted to wipe out Afghanistan and Iraq. At the extreme end, car stickers holler: 'Nuke Afghanistan: No-one will miss it anyway.'
So far these forces have been overruled by the Bush Administration, in favour of a complex and delicate attempt to build a Coalition of most world powers, including Muslim nations, to fight the threat. So far the Coalition has isolated the Taliban, promised to feed Afghan refugees fleeing Afghanistan, avoided civil war in Pakistan and united old enemies on the side of America.
There are suggestions of a nation-building program for post-Taliban Afghanistan along the lines of the Marshall plan, which rehabilitated Germany after World War 11.
For what the New York bombing proved is that overwhelming military might is not a defence in today's world. The war against terrorism must be won in other ways.
As Paul Keating said so graphically last week, 'It's not building a cocoon like (the) missile defence around the United States with (a) Mad Max world outside, but rather one where our security, the security of all of us, is more particularly catered for by the fact that we don't tread over other people, and that we do run the whole world in a way which does chip away at a bit of our own strength, our own privilege, but which makes it happier and more secure.'
I believe readers are hungry for these debates. In Australia's post-leadership politics, we get nothing from the major party heads but bipartisan banalities or adversarial emptiness. It is left to the commentariat and the Australian people to address big-picture global issues, which have dogged us for years but seemed too big to comprehend, let alone tackle.
The Devine/Bolt play seeks to close down that conversation. It annihilates history and the lessons we can learn from it. Its accusatory emotionalism buries rationality. It decries suggestions of double standards without explaining why.
Surely readers deserve more than a blame-game slanging match bereft of genuine engagement and mired in name-calling. That style has had its day, and not only in politics. There are more important matters to discuss.
Email: mkingston@mail.fairfax.com.au
Margo's web diary - www.smh.com.au/news/opinion/webdiary/
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Political Corrections