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America needs to manage hatred: Indian Express
New Delhi, Mar 25: Operation Shock and Awe is tearing into Iraq and the war of opinions is raging apace. The Realists say the war is directly beneficial to India. That it is America`s war on terror which has finally brought the LTTE and the Nagas to the negotiating table and pushed the Kashmir election forward.
New Delhi, Mar 25: Operation Shock and Awe is tearing into Iraq and the war of opinions is raging apace. The Realists say the war is directly beneficial to India. That it is America’s war on terror which has finally brought the LTTE and the Nagas to the negotiating table and pushed the Kashmir election forward.
Opposing the Realists is a massively popular revulsion with the war. In fact, this is a unique moment for the anti-war voice. Precisely, because it is so broad based, it must transcend the ghetto of Leftist sanctimoniousness and use its power to push America to a sharper engagement with reality. Cries of “the tentacles of Wall Street”, “unilateralism”, “breakdown of consensus” and a “sinister Zionist-capitalist conspiracy to take over the world” will only imprison the anti-war voice in past cliches.
“I am utterly opposed to the war,” writes author Amos Oz, “but my opposition to it is severely tested every time I hear these loathesome voices.” Indeed, protests against the war will lose their potency if they are hijacked by the celebrity author of a single bestseller determined to harness all the world’s Big Causes to her own personality cult.
Every anti-war voice needs to accept the following. All empires are by definition “unilateral”. The Holy Roman Empire was unilateral. The British empire was unilateral. And the American empire is unilateral. The Left craves for a “bilateral” Soviet-US balance of power yet this was a state of history no more than three decades old. And there was no “consensus” before World War II. The US initially refused to participate and Soviet Russia signed the famous Nazi-Soviet pact with Germany in 1939. Also, India has no history of moral outrage against invasions. India supported the Soviet invasion of Hungary as well as of Afghanistan and was silent on the invasion of Czechoslovakia. When India “invaded” Bangladesh in 1971, it did not seek permission from the United Nations. War still remains, as Clausewitz said, “a continuation of policy by other means”, however savage its outcome.
Arguments against the war need not bluster about imperialism, but instead attack the Disneyland notion of the Bush administration that “good” people must kill “evil” people. Given the inordinate anger against America in the world the “management of hatred” is the superpower’s foremost tasks. For this it needs its wily great gamers, clever adventurers like Younghusband and Lawrence and low profile “frontiersmen” who can mingle with Muslim moderates and persuade them to overthrow the extremists. Any historian knows how well the British did it. The sole superpower needs to wear a jalabeya and walk the souks of West Asia, not remain driven by the remote theorising of antiseptic think tanks of both Left and Right.
Bureau Report
Opposing the Realists is a massively popular revulsion with the war. In fact, this is a unique moment for the anti-war voice. Precisely, because it is so broad based, it must transcend the ghetto of Leftist sanctimoniousness and use its power to push America to a sharper engagement with reality. Cries of “the tentacles of Wall Street”, “unilateralism”, “breakdown of consensus” and a “sinister Zionist-capitalist conspiracy to take over the world” will only imprison the anti-war voice in past cliches.
“I am utterly opposed to the war,” writes author Amos Oz, “but my opposition to it is severely tested every time I hear these loathesome voices.” Indeed, protests against the war will lose their potency if they are hijacked by the celebrity author of a single bestseller determined to harness all the world’s Big Causes to her own personality cult.
Every anti-war voice needs to accept the following. All empires are by definition “unilateral”. The Holy Roman Empire was unilateral. The British empire was unilateral. And the American empire is unilateral. The Left craves for a “bilateral” Soviet-US balance of power yet this was a state of history no more than three decades old. And there was no “consensus” before World War II. The US initially refused to participate and Soviet Russia signed the famous Nazi-Soviet pact with Germany in 1939. Also, India has no history of moral outrage against invasions. India supported the Soviet invasion of Hungary as well as of Afghanistan and was silent on the invasion of Czechoslovakia. When India “invaded” Bangladesh in 1971, it did not seek permission from the United Nations. War still remains, as Clausewitz said, “a continuation of policy by other means”, however savage its outcome.
Arguments against the war need not bluster about imperialism, but instead attack the Disneyland notion of the Bush administration that “good” people must kill “evil” people. Given the inordinate anger against America in the world the “management of hatred” is the superpower’s foremost tasks. For this it needs its wily great gamers, clever adventurers like Younghusband and Lawrence and low profile “frontiersmen” who can mingle with Muslim moderates and persuade them to overthrow the extremists. Any historian knows how well the British did it. The sole superpower needs to wear a jalabeya and walk the souks of West Asia, not remain driven by the remote theorising of antiseptic think tanks of both Left and Right.
Bureau Report