John Roughan: September 11 has terrible effect on US thinking

An abiding image after a week of war is of a pinch-faced young infantryman, looking too frail for his helmet and battle kit, huddled with his unit somewhere in Kuwait, awaiting the call.

Squatting beside him, one of these newly "embedded" reporters asked how he felt about the invasion. The kid replied that he was raring to go because it was payback "for what they did to us on September 11".

Some people, the reporter gently told him, believe Iraq had nothing to do with September 11. "Well," the kid said, "I dunno anything about that. But if they did they sure deserve what they're gonna get."

What has happened to America?

At the front of the protest parades there are people who have regarded the United States as the aggressor in every war it has entered since 1945. I'm not one of them. I've never seen the US start a war before.

Doubtless there are a few Latin American adventures I should have noticed, but outside its hemisphere the US always seemed to me a model of restraint, moved to use its power only when it saw an immediate need to quell aggression against its friends.

And when it saw the need, as in the first Gulf War, it would act decisively, leaving me relieved that our security did not depend on a committee at the United Nations.

But something has gone terribly awry in Washington and it might have more to do with the events of September 11 than we have considered.

The evidence is not just the sentiments of one callow soldier, one obsessive President or even the military myopia of the advisers he admires.

I read this week an essay that has come to be regarded as seminal in American political thinking since it was published last year.

The writer, Robert Kagan, argued that the debate over Iraq was symptomatic of a rift in the way that the US and Europe now view the role of power in the world.

It is a bloody-minded piece, written by someone who had been living in Europe and listening too long to criticism of the current Administration of his country. But even allowing for that, the tract is a disturbing insight to the effects of September 11. A taste:

"Europeans have concluded, reasonably enough, that the threat posed by Saddam Hussein is more tolerable for them than the risk of removing him. But Americans, being stronger, have reasonably enough developed a lower threshold of tolerance for Saddam and his weapons of mass destruction, especially after September 11."

He offers this curious analogy. "A man armed only with a knife may decide that a bear prowling the forest is a tolerable danger, inasmuch as the alternative, hunting the bear with only a knife, is actually riskier than lying low and hoping the bear never attacks.

"The same man armed with a rifle, however, will likely make a different calculation of what constitutes a tolerable risk. Why should he risk being mauled to death if he doesn't need to?"

In other words, it doesn't matter whether Saddam actually makes a threatening move. It is enough that he is around. If you have the power to destroy him, you can and should. This is not the principle that governed American foreign policy before September 2001. It does not seem to matter now what supposed beneficiaries think, or want.

It doesn't matter that nobody has found the bear's weapons of mass destruction, or proved that he has passed them to terrorists or, as the soldier said, whether he had anything to do with September 11. Power is to be used as and when you like. America has gone feral.

Even in Vietnam the US acted on the genuine belief it was helping that country to resist an external power. By the time it realised the enemy had nationalism on its side it was in too deep to get out quickly.

In the end the interference merely helped to ensure that Vietnam emerged with a character of government it cannot now easily shake off. Could the same happen to Iraq?

Already Iraqis are failing to follow the script. They were supposed to greet the tanks with garlands of flowers. Basra was to be liberated within hours. The port of Umm Qasr and the river crossing at Nasiriyah were to be mere pit-stops on the imperial progress to Baghdad. But it seems the regime has a bit more going for it. Nationalism possibly.

When Arabs are interviewed about this war they invariably damn Saddam Hussein but seem to resent the US invasion even more. That is not hard to understand. People prefer to fix their own problems. Nations would sooner live with their tyrant than see a foreign power come in uninvited to put them right.

That is the source of the overwhelming resentment CNN reporters have been trying to convey from Amman, Cairo and other Arab capitals. The studio presenters don't know what to do with it. You can almost hear the producer's voice in their ear: "This isn't the story. Cut at the next breath. We're going back to the battle."

America does not see itself as the aggressor anywhere after the shock of that morning 18 months ago. I thought I understood September 11. I was awake watching television. I knew the terror of those hours and afterwards I felt the same sense of injustice that Americans expressed.

Whatever mistakes the US had made in the Middle East, I argued, could not justify an attack like that. There was no moral equivalence.

But as I watch this obscenity in Iraq, the events of September 2001 suddenly seem a long time ago and less exceptionable. Can one unprovoked attack justify another?

The US used to stand for something better. I just hope Iraq puts up sufficient resistance to work this bad blood out of the American system.

Herald Feature: Iraq