OF COURSE, JIMMY STEWART FLEW FOR SAC

Hitchens v Hitchens, but not what you'd expect in the battle over Iraq. (Stephen Barton, May 22, 2003, Online Opinion)

Peter Hitchens wrote in The Spectator before the war began, "There is nothing conservative about war. For at least the last century war has been the herald and handmaid of socialism and state control". War, Hitchens seems to say, is the product of grand ideas, and perhaps that includes boastful American liberalism. Hitchens feared the destructive power of the not-so-quiet American, "for the attacker war is no longer terrible enough. Some people have grown too fond of it. They are not conservatives in any serious meaning of the word". [...]

The implicit question was: are British, indeed Western, interests served by such a course of action? Is Iraq worth the bones of one British squaddie? Not surprisingly we find here a similarity with Enoch Powell's arguments against the first Gulf War.

Powell argued that any talk of appeasing Saddam was "nonsense", continuing:

Saddam Hussein may not be nice and his form of government not to our taste. That is no business of ours nor of the United States ? The world is full of men engaged in doing evil things. That does not makes us policemen to round them up nor judges to find them guilt and to sentence them ? we as a nation have no interest in the existence or non-existence of Kuwait. I sometimes wonder if, when we shed our power, we omitted to shed our arrogance.

Powell places the same emphasis on interests rather than ideas, and we also see the conservative's mournful pessimism on the character of man and his
works.

In an interview with the Atlantic Monthly, Stephan Schwartz, author of the Two faces of Islam, typifies the position that Peter Hitchens and Parris react against.

We are going to help the Arab and Muslim nations find their own way to democracy, prosperity and stability on their own terms ? If I'm proven wrong and in the end we do stick by the reactionary wing of the Saudi regime, then I guess I'll have to admit that I was wrong in trusting our leaders, and I have to go back to the left ? I truly and with absolute sincerity believe that Dr Wolfowitz is on the same page with me on this ... He is a supporter of world-wide democracy ? I want America to be the powerful nation that brings democracy and freedom to those oppressed. I want America to be the liberator.

Such a comment would leave some conservatives both in the UK and the US profoundly shaken. What is curious is that people like Schwartz have heard in Republican George W Bush a call to arms. When George W Bush spontaneously called to rescue workers on the rubble of the World Trade Centre on 14 September, "I can hear you. The rest of the world hears you. And the people ? And the people who knocked these buildings down will hear all of us soon", he set the scene for this unlikely alliance.

Bush's call that day was no Gettysburg address but it served its purpose. In an era of carefully scripted phrases and considered rhetoric, it was both intensely powerful and moving. For liberals and neo-cons alike, it was firmly in the tradition of Kennedy's "bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe to assure the success and survival of liberty". It was an outburst of instinctive American idealism.

Jonathan Holmes' unfairly maligned Four Corners documentary of the neo-cons summed up this mood with the title, American Dreamers. Such idealism instantly arouses the suspicion of some conservatives. Peter Hitchens' opposition, like that of many British conservatives, seems to be the reflex revulsion at the vulgar American.

This idealistic American repels Hitchens. He instead believes in an alternative America with its "generous citizens in their quiet towns and peaceful suburbs which I love so much". One can't help thinking that Hitchens' preferred America is some idyllic New Hampshire village, perhaps the kind of place where a real life Jimmy Stewart character would make his dignified way through life.

Mr. Powell, subconsciously, nails it when he mentions the loss of British power. For the Tory far Right opposition to America is a function of bitterness over British decline, rather than a matter of principle. Meanwhile, as a resident of an idyllic New Hampshire village, though n Jimmy Stewart, let me assure the author that the generous, peaceful citizenry mostly wants to bomb France on the way to bomb Saudi Arabia. Posted by Orrin Judd at May 27, 2003 8:35 AM