By RUPERT CORNWELL
At first it was said September 11 was a day that demonstrated America's weakness. It was supposed to have ushered in a new form of "asymmetrical" warfare in which the weak would be the equal of the strong. And indeed, the catastrophe did reveal US vulnerability, just as the Palestinian suicide bombers have proved the vulnerability of Israel.
It demonstrated, too, how the smartest and most expensive missile defence serves no purpose against jets that have been commandeered and turned into human-piloted, kerosene-laden missiles.
Nor can the most ubiquitous and sophisticated electronic surveillance protect against terrorists armed with humble box-cutters, or who smuggle a crude nuclear device in one of the 98 per cent of general cargo containers that do not get inspected when they arrive at a US port.
And how could anyone detect the presence, say, of five cans of smallpox spores in a briefcase? Yet if the contents of these were released in five different cities, one study suggests the total of deaths would be a minimum 25,000 before the source of the outbreak was even determined.
But, however callous it sounds, such potential carnage is a strategic irrelevance. September 11 has laid bare not so much the weakness of America, but its immense and utterly unchallenged power. We are not talking about the soft power of trade, finance, services and culture but the bottom-line, hard power of military might.
Europeans were vaguely aware of this truth before the terrorist attack, as they sheltered under America's nuclear umbrella during the Cold War, and watched in jealous admiration as the US drove Slobodan Milosevic out of Kosovo from an altitude of 4572m without deploying a single soldier on the ground.
But now it is a reality that threatens to reshape international relations, and the way in which those relations have been organised for more than half a century.
All that trammels American power is America's sense of restraint. Not since Rome, runs the conventional wisdom, has one state been so militarily dominant. And who can disagree?
US defence spending, at some US$400 billion ($859 billion) this year, tops that of the next 15 countries combined, and the gap is widening.
The financial disparity understates the gulf between the technologically cutting-edge weaponry and integrated infrastructure at the disposal of the Pentagon and other militaries, riddled with duplication and obsolete equipment and sapped by shrinking defence budgets.
In the 1991 Gulf War less than 10 per cent of the bombs and missiles used were smart weapons. In Afghanistan the figure rose to 65 per cent. Today, if George Bush goes after Saddam Hussein, as seems more than possible, smart weapons will constitute an even higher proportion of the Pentagon's arsenal.
When Bill Clinton was in the White House, that reality was masked by the former President's knowledge of international affairs, his fluency and his ability to charm everyone who encountered him.
George W. Bush comes up short in all three categories. Instead, the hard-nosed approach to domestic civil liberties in the war against terror is matched by a hard-nosed attitude in foreign policy. Clinton, you always sensed, was squeamish about the use of raw force. Bush has no such inhibitions, as Afghanistan proved.
In retrospect, the Taleban is easily seen as a pushover, an unpopular regime whose downfall was hastened by a ready-made internal opposition in the shape of the Northern Alliance. But it didn't seem like that at the time.
Liberal commentators raised the spectre of Vietnam, and dire warnings abounded that American attackers would meet the same fate as the British and Russians in the 19th and 20th centuries.
Instead, Afghanistan was Kosovo writ large. Small wonder the hawks who seem to have Bush's ear, led by his Vice-President, Dick Cheney, predict that Iraq will prove much less of a problem than the doomsayers predict.
Indeed, the good citizens of Baghdad will be dancing in the streets when the GI liberators arrive. And even if resistance is more substantial than Cheney expects, the US would surely prevail with little ado in any shooting war.
All this was hard to grasp as the jets smashed into the Twin Towers on that beautiful autumn morning. But 12 months on, the reality of global power has never been more brutally obvious.
Even if the terrorists took out Chicago or Los Angeles with a nuclear weapon, America would still bestride the planet without a challenger in sight. And the US now has the power to make or break the existing international system that it was instrumental in establishing after World War II.
The debate over Iraq merely underlines this. Iraq has become the test case for America's attitude to the world. The debate reverberates everywhere, causing ructions in the British Labour party, influencing an election campaign in Germany and sending tremors through the Arab world. But the argument that really matters is playing out in Washington. The rest of us can do no more than hold our collective breath.
The implications go far beyond Iraq. If the US goes in, a precedent will have been set. America will have served notice it will intervene where, when and how it chooses, whatever the generally accepted rules of the international game.
The hard men in Washington would claim they are behaving as anyone else would in similar circumstances. Throughout history, they would argue, powerful countries have always done what they could get away with, not least Britain in its imperial heyday.
But as President Bush leans ever closer to the hawks, world opinion turns steadily against America. This raises the second great paradox in the aftermath of September 11. Less than a year after his country suffered the most devastating terrorist onslaught in history, Bush has managed to squander all the sympathy that welled up around the world, and then some.
We naively assumed the horror of the event, and the realisation that the US was no longer immune from a scourge all too familiar to much of the rest of the world, would bring a change of heart in Washington. The illusion faded quickly as the Bush Administration displayed its disregard for a consultative approach.
And if America invades Iraq, then what? Should Bush put his "pre-emptive strike" doctrine into practice, how could Washington complain if India were to take matters into its own hands and strike "pre-emptively" at Pakistan over Kashmir, or if Russia used Chechnya as a pretext to invade Georgia and bring that troublesome former Soviet republic back under control?
No wonder the widespread fear that American action could be a recipe for global anarchy, causing the the unravelling of the rules that, however imperfectly, govern international relations.
All this is the linear descendant of September 11. The terrorist attacks fused America's belief in a special destiny, its so-called "exceptionalism" with a resurgent patriotism and a colossal sense of outrage.
Add to that the overriding physical power of the country and its quasi-religious certainty that it is a unique force for good in the world, and the result was bound to be combustible.
This is the conundrum that must be resolved: how to accommodate America's unchallengeable might within an international system that imposes rules of civilised behaviour on everyone.
That is why what happens over Iraq in the wake of September 11 is shaping up as the true watershed in international affairs.
- INDEPENDENT
Story archives:
Links: War against terrorism
Timeline: Major events since the Sept 11 attacks
America's watershed
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