BOMBING BRITAIN BACK TO THE NINETEENTH CENTURY

Let's look on the bright side for a moment. Winter is coming and the opportunities for military action against Afghanistan are narrowing. The "global coalition against terrorism", thankfully, looks a little shakey this morning. Key front line states, as the media calls them, are having second thoughts. Countries in the Russian sphere of influence, like Uzbeckistan, are playing for a higher price for their co-operation, following a script written for them in Moscow. Iran is having nothing to do with the whole business. The ceasefire in Palestine has completely broken down - something that would be a dire tragedy in any other circumstance, but in the present extreme times, may actually act as a hindrance to plans for a much bigger war. Pakistan continues to act as intermediary giving both sides information, but, wisely, never quite as much as either really wants in its urgent desire to eliminate the other from the game. Indeed, it may be that at some distant future date we will thank the pragatists in power in Pakistan for their adroit handling of this alarming confrontation, notwithstanding the fact that they are an undemocratic military regime. And, of course, Saudi Arabia, the real eye of the storm, is becoming extremely cautious as the tower of middle eastern cards begins to look increasingly wobbly.

We are seeing that fanaticism is not limited to one side in this unfolding tragedy. Moralistic liberal imperialism can be every bit as dangerous a doctrine as the moralistic Wahabist form of Islam. I was reading the morning papers debating whether Mr Blair is modelling himself on Churchill or on Gladstone and thinking to myself that Palmerstone was a more apt comparison. Then I read the Guardian and found that John Pilger had reached the same conclusion. One must presume that, despite the wobbles in the "coalition", the bombing is still going to start pretty soon. No matter what we are told about the precision capacities of current weapons, many rockets will miss their targets and many targets will include civilians anyway. If the reluctance of front line states to be open to being blamed afterwards means that the whole thing is done from aircraft carriers then the similarity to Palmerstone's gunboats will be even more obvious.

That people see this war as dating from 11 September is simply a token of the "a long way away doesn't matter" mentality. After all it is now very clear that the USA has been trying to kill Osama Bin Laden for at least three years and that his organisation has been attacking American targets for even longer. The sudden declaration of a "war of terrorism" sounds a bit hollow. The public, in Britain at least, do sense that a double standard is being used. We did not fire cruise missiles at Catholic towns in Northern Ireland, nor at the cities in America where many people who financed the IRA lived. Worse, we seem blind to the amount of terrorism - or guerilla warfare, depending which side you are on - that has been instigated, provisioned, trained and supported by the UK and USA. Is that now going to cease? It seems very unlikely that it will. The use of proxy forces to do our dirty work has been a long established usage. Indeed it is difficult for an imperial exercise to avoid it without overly depleting the home population. The number of British troops it would take to fulfil Mr Blair's ambitions is so vast that we would need to bring back conscription - and some.

Historically, people who fight against us are called insane, evil criminals until such time as they are successful when they become heads of states and are accorded a new dignity and recruited into the lower ranks of the world political class. This is certainly what happened in all the former British colonies. Britain did gradually declare itself independent of its empire and the sense that had previously had to be maintained of British people as inherently morally superior to all other races has gradually faded during my lifetime. Thanks be for that. It is very disturbing to see that kind of rhetoric now coming to the fore again. Apparently we British can now reorder this world. Our qualifications for doing so are firstly our economic and military might (we might get a bit of help from the Americans, I suppose) and our moral superiority (since we are all Americans now, anyway, it seems).

Of course, there is nothing wrong with Americans being Americans and Brits being Brits in their own place. What is problematic is when we start assuming that our values are superior and therefore we are superior and therefore we have the right to impose. Our superiority is supposedly based upon the fact that we are a "free country". However, the amount of freedom a state allows its citizens is a fairly direct function of how threatened that state feels. We have in the last few weeks seen how quickly there is talk of taking our freedoms away when we feel threatened. If we simply transpose this knowledge and think how threatened many countries in the world feel - and in particular how threatened by us - then we may be able to understand why they have less freedoms. In the period of its glory, the Islamic world was renowned for its liberal society in comparison with the Christian West. But then, at that time they were the superpower and we felt threatened.

The other lesson of history is, of course, that imperial powers become fat on tribute and in due course become soft and unwilling to take casualties or hardships and so gradually become vulnerable to tougher races from beyond their borders. The latter make inroads and the declining empire makes punitive expeditions that wreak considerable slaughter. Sooner or later, however, the house of cards coms tumbling down. If history repeats itself, then the sight of the World Trade Tower crumbling down may well prove to be a symbolic portent of what is to come. In the case of Rome it took a couple of hundred year. Nowadays I think we may assume things are likely to move a bit faster. A punitive expedition against Afghanistan may or may not be successful, but in the medium term we have got a lot of learning to do if we are to survive and resorting to a nineteenth century approach is not going to do the trick indefinitely.



David Brazier,
The Buddhist House
12 Coventry Road, Narborough, Leics LE9 5GB
0116.286.7476
www.amidatrust.com