THE words chosen by Prime Minister Zafarullah Khan Jamali, following his election as Leader of the House, were brief but judicious, as he stressed two elements — continuity, and friendship towards all countries — in his remarks on foreign policy.

President Ziaul Haq had made it a practice to include rising young politicians from all parts of the country in delegations to the annual UN General Assembly Session in New York from September to December each year. This served two purposes: these politicians gathered valuable international experience and also developed a certain loyalty to the president for giving them an opportunity for educative outing. Many of them rose to positions of power and influence, both in the provinces, and at the centre, and such exposures broadened their mental horizons.

Not all political members of the delegation showed the level of interest and involvement in the business of the UN session that was expected of them. Some were more keen than the other to have a good time and to shop and go sightseeing. A few took the business of the committees to which they were assigned more seriously. Mr Jamali, then in his late thirties, was one of those who were punctual in attending the daily delegation meeting in the Pakistan Mission, and followed the progress of the General Assembly, as well as of the relevant committee with interest.

Pakistan’s foreign policy has had a certain continuity over the years, owing to the national consensus that exists on major elements of it. These include the Kashmir dispute, the nuclear programme, and friendly relations with the Islamic world. Since 1989, the year that witnessed the end of the cold war, as well as the launching of a democracy movement all over the globe, including Kashmir, the international order has been in a state of transition, with a multiplicity of trends. This period saw the break-up of the Soviet Union, where communism lost power, as well as of Yugoslavia, where Europe connived at Serb nationalism as it went berserk and resorted to genocide of Muslims in Bosnia and Kosovo.

The US emerged as the sole superpower, whose policies and perceptions have had a profound influence on the course of world events. These perceptions, centring on non-proliferation and the emerging threat from Islamic militancy, made it necessary for Pakistan to defend its interests under daunting circumstances. The events of September 11, 2001, have transformed the global environment, and the world is currently preoccupied with the war against terrorism, with Pakistan once again a frontline state, as Mr Jamali stated in his brief but telling remarks on foreign policy. The problems of law and order in the country are also linked to terrorism, among other factors. At the same time, the fact remains that India has sought to exploit the post-9/11 concern about terrorism by abandoning the path of dialogue in favour of threats and intimidation on the pretext of Pakistan being involved in “cross-border terrorism” in Kashmir.

The accession to political power of an elected government in Islamabad creates a situation in which India cannot afford to keep rejecting a dialogue with Pakistan. After settling down, perhaps the highest foreign policy priority of the government would be to call for a resumption of the Agra process. The opportunity for a meeting with Prime Minister Vajpayee could arise soon if India signals the acceptance of the January dates for the SAARC summit in Islamabad. Indeed a successful summit could serve a two-fold purpose: activate SAARC and facilitate a political dialogue between Pakistan and India. The current state of heightened tension in occupied Kashmir might also improve, with a reduction in the level of repression in the state.

Two other areas of foreign policy will engage the attention of the new government. One relates to the war against terrorism, in which Pakistan’s role remains critical, with US threatening to attack Iraq as a part of that war, adding a delicate dimension to that role. The other is Afghanistan, where Pakistan’s geographical contiguity compels an active role, even though its stock there has declined somewhat as a result of the course of events over the past several years.

Taking up the emerging crisis over Iraq, Pakistan has done well not to play a leading role in voicing opposition to American jingoism. But there is no doubt that public opinion in the country is increasingly restive over the likely fall-out of a possible attack on Iraq. With the US public opinion still dazed by the trauma of 9/11, in which the hijackers were all Arab and Muslim, the broad direction of the US policy is to counter ‘Islamic militancy.” This is behind the current US resolve to launch its awesome might to establish its control over the Islamic heartland.

Bush has deployed a formidable military force in the Gulf region and shows every sign of putting it to action, even if Saddam Hussein satisfies the UN arms inspectors that he does not have the means to pose a threat to the region or the US. As public sentiment demands, Pakistan should join those who wish to strengthen the role of the UN, and of international law, and to prevent a unilateralist assault on the Islamic world.

Coming to Afghanistan, Pakistan’s image there has suffered as both the Northern Alliance and Taliban supporters have grievances of their own, which has enabled India to stage a comeback there. However, Pakistan has played its cards well, and President Musharraf has established a good equation with the interim government of Hamid Karzai. As the US turns its attention to the Middle East, there is a danger that Afghanistan may again be left in the lurch, as it was in 1989, after enduring great suffering and enormous damage.

There can be no doubt about the sensitivity of the people of the provinces of the NWFP and Balochistan to the situation inside Afghanistan as reflected in the results of the elections in these two provinces. One of the challenges for the new government would be to use its influence, in concert with other Muslim countries and the EU, for a more effective UN role in implementing the Born accord. Stability and peace will come to Afghanistan if the current emphasis on the war against terror, that involves reliance on warlords, is party shifted to reconstruction and to restoring the writ of Kabul in the provinces.

Prime Minister Jamali would be expected to make provision for changes in emphasis in the existing foreign policy that benefit the resource-rich but underdeveloped province of Balochistan. The development strategy of the Musharraf government over the last three years has already given a place of pride to Balochistan, through such projects as the construction of the Mekran Highway, and Gwadar port, as well as the activation of the Saindak project with Chinese assistance. The long-term prosperity of Balochistan is linked to its integration into the development projects of ECO, for which a master plan was prepared at Quetta ten years ago.

The Mekran coast is not only rich in marine resources but also offers the shortest outlet to the Indian Ocean for the landlocked states of Central Asia. Prime Minister Jamali would be expected to speed up interaction with Central Asia and to promote a more active role for Pakistan in the moves to build up the infrastructure in Afghanistan that could benefit all the countries around it.

An increased emphasis on developing bilateral relations with Iran, which has a long border with Balochistan, is yet another matter of crucial importance. After the prime minister has completed his planned visits to Saudi Arabia and China, which are Pakistan’s closest friends, moves to improve relations, as well as mutually beneficial cooperation, with Iran and other major Islamic countries, should be next among the foreign policy priorities of Mr Jamali.

Finally, the elected government is expected to lay greater emphasis on those aspects of foreign policy that contribute to the basic objective of economic betterment through greater international cooperation and support. Here, the promise of continuity of policies should mean that the initiatives launched during the last three years would be pursued to develop the economy, alleviate poverty, stimulate investment and reduce the debt burden.

With the WTO regime due for enforcement in three years, Pakistan has to move in concert with other developing countries to make sure that the system is modified and managed in a way that safeguards the interests of the Third World. Mir Zafarullah Khan Jamali has the temperament and the understanding to make his tenure into a memorable one by proving equal to the foreign policy challenges ahead.

HU JINTAO is a fortunate man. Unlike Deng Xiaoping, who had to rebuild China after the havoc wrought by the Cultural Revolution (1966-76), Hu finds himself at the head of a China bequeathed to him in a much better condition by his predecessor, Jiang Zemin. This China is booming economically.

Jiang had the benefit of succeeding Deng after the chaos of the Cultural Revolution had been left far behind, and Deng’s reforms had put the country back on the road to recovery. Thus, without Deng’s reform, both Jiang and Hu would not have found China what it is today — an economic giant with a GDP of 1.20 trillion dollars. In terms of purchasing power parity, China’s economy is second only to America’s. The volume of trade is 600 billion dollars a year and a rate of growth that has been 6.1 percentage point above the world average for the last two decades — a remarkable achievement for a country with a population of 1.30 billion people.

Jiang’s contribution to the building of China during the 13 years of his rule is enormous. He pursued Deng’s reforms vigorously and continued with China’s opening up to the world economy. But Deng was the path-breaker, for the “heretical” decisions made at the 1978 plenary session of the Chinese Communist Party Congress and their orderly implementation constituted what is often called China’s third revolution — after Sun Yat-sen’s (1911-24) and Mao Zedong’s (1949).

The choice before Deng was crucial: what was more important, finding pragmatic solutions to China’s deepening economic problems or blind conformity to a dogma that had outlived its utility and been taken to absurd limits by the Gang of Four? A sinking economy, he said, could not be salvaged by sticking to rigid doctrinairism and repeating the party cliche that solutions to all problems lay in resolving class contradictions.

Deng repudiated class struggle because he thought the Chinese revolution had crossed that stage. The party would still retain the monopoly of power, but the concept of the social ownership of the means of production had to undergo a change if the party were to build “socialism with Chinese characteristics” (a Mao slogan, wrongly attributed to Deng).

Party policies could be criticized and those opposing a given policy would not be accused of harbouring anti-party sentiments or called “capitalist roaders.” China must interpret socialism in the light of its 5,000-year-old civilization, and this was possible because Marxism-Leninism and Mao Zedong Thought contained ideas for renewal, change, growth and progress. The party must concentrate on drawing up pragmatic policies and serve as an engine of change for modernizing all aspects of Chinese life instead of wasting time and energy on ideological polemics. What mattered was not “right vs left” but “right vs wrong.” The litmus test of all policies must be results. The cat, he said, must catch the mice; it did not matter whether it was black or white.

The decaying agricultural sector received Deng’s first priority. The communes had long outlived their utility and farm production was stagnating. The feudal class had, no doubt, been eliminated, but the communes’ monopoly over production and distribution had robbed the peasants of all incentive to work hard and produce more. The only option, thus, was to give the farmers a stake in production by making them owners of the land they tilled.

Land was thus being given to the tiller of the soil and not to the feudal class. The formula was simple: it was called “the family responsibility system.” Every peasant would have a piece of land of his own. He and his family would till it and conform to a production target given by the state. The quantity produced in excess of the target would belong to the family. It could keep it or sell a part or whole of it or, perhaps, start a business with the money made by selling the extra produce in “open markets.”

This profit motive worked wonders. It boosted national food production, and soon village markets emerged where peasants could sell extra produce. Within a strikingly short time, the peasants’ quality of life changed.

Even worse were the conditions in the industrial sector. Like the communes, state-owned factories worked only to meet production targets. Once the target had been met, managers could not care less where the product went and whether it sold at all. Under the new system, the managers were made responsible for production, marketing and sales. They would not only produce but produce according to the market demands. The idea was to turn the state-owned factories into profit-making commercial concerns.

There were specific guidelines about what to do with the profits which a factory generated. It would pay income tax to the state and keep the profits for itself. The profit would be used for expanding the factory, setting up new units, pursuing research and development and for bonuses, higher wages and health care for workers. Good workers would be rewarded, while the bad ones would not lose their jobs but they would be punished in the form of being given harder and unpleasant jobs. The idea was to modernize China’s industry and run it on modern management lines.

Another revolutionary decision was to invite foreign capital. This would not only generate more jobs but also result in technology transfer. To the party old guard this constituted ideological heresy and met stiff opposition from those committed to a rigid interpretation of the communist ideology. However, Deng stuck to his guns. Time had come, he said, for transforming China into “a socialist capital economy.”

There were, of course, practical problems in inviting foreign capital, one of them being the tight bureaucratic control and centralization which had characterized all communist states. Approval for every project had to come from Beijing and this entailed delays. However, Deng took a most seminal decision: the central government authorized the provinces to get in touch with foreign multinationals directly. This cut down on the wasteful and delatory red tape of the bureaucracy that, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, is the world’s largest.

Yet, what helped boost foreign investment was the decision to set up five special economic zones in the cities of Zhuai, Shenzhen, Shantou and Xiamen and in the province of Hainan. Elaborate rules were made to provide legal safeguards to foreign investors to ensure a fair litigation process in case of a dispute, and there were concessions in taxes and import duty.

The SEZs have been a great success and have drawn investment from as many as 400 of the world’s top 500 multinationals, with the total foreign investment during the last 20 years reaching a figure of $510 billion (including $378 billion FDI). Also, banks started giving loans to individuals, thus helping in the spread of small private businesses throughout the country. Today, millions of Chinese have businesses of their own and contribute enormously to general prosperity.

Inevitably, this has given rise to a new class — millionaire businessmen. They are a new entity, and it was left to Deng’s successor, Jiang, to throw open the party to this new breed as part of his “Three Representations Theory” so as to strengthen “advanced social productive forces.”

In effect, what Deng did was to transform a “planned economy” into a “socialist market economy” smoothly and without chaos. Here we can see the contrast with the Soviet experience. Gorbachev’s glasnost and prestroika were basically political reforms which had no economic roots or objectives. They unleashed political as well as centrifugal forces which proved too strong for the Soviet state apparatus to control. Deng was far more practical: a gradual liberalization of the economy would itself unleash social forces that would lead to political and cultural liberalization.

The Soviets followed the other path, and the result was the USSR’s sudden collapse. China, on the other hand, thanks to Deng’s brilliant leadership, saw a smooth transition and has emerged as an economic giant that is playing its due role in world affairs.

THE grand climax of Makiya’s justification for the invasion of Iraq by the United States is his proposal that the new Iraq should be non-Arab.

(Along the way, he speaks contemptuously of Arab opinion which, he says, will never amount to anything. This obviously clears the board for his airy speculations about both the future and the past.) How this magical de-Arabizing solution is to come about, Makiya does not say, any more than he shows us how Iraq is to be relieved of its Islamic identity and its military capabilities.

He refers to a mysterious alchemical quality he calls “territoriality” and proceeds to build another sandcastle on that as the basis for a future state of Iraq. In the end, however, he volunteers that all this is going to be guaranteed “from the outside” by the United States. Where this has ever taken place before is not an issue that troubles Makiya, any more than he seems concerned about US unilateralism and needless destructiveness.

One scarcely knows whether to laugh or cry at Makiya’s posturings. Clearly this is a man with no recorded experience of government, or even of citizenship. Between countries and cultures and with no visible commitment to anyone (except to his upwardly mobile career), he has now found a haven deep inside the US government which he uses to fuel his amazingly speculative flights of fancy. For someone who has lectured his peers about intellectual responsibility and independent judgment, he provides examples of neither one nor the other. Exactly the opposite.

Perched on a pulpit that has freed him from any accountability, he seems now to be serving a master who has paid him well for his services — as Saddam employed him in the past — and his versatile conscience. I find it incredible that Makiya allows himself such sanctimony and vanity, but then why should not he? He has never engaged in a public debate with any of his fellow Iraqis, never written for an Arab audience, never put himself forward for an office or for any political role requiring personal courage and commitment. He has either written pseudonymously or attacked people who have had no chance to respond to his defamations.

It is sad that Makiya implicitly suggests that his is the voice and the example of the future Iraq. And to think that thousands of lives have already been lost to his patron’s cruel sanctions or that many more lives and livelihoods area about to be destroyed by electronic warfare wreaked on his country by George Bush’s government. But this man is untroubled by any of this. Devoid of either compassion or real understanding, he prattles on for Anglo-American audiences who seem satisfied that here at last is an Arab who exhibits the proper respect for their power and civilization, regardless of what role Britain played in the imperialist partition of the Arab world or what mischief the US dealt the Arabs through its support for Israel and the collective Arab dictatorships.

In and of himself, Makiya is a passing phenomenon. He is, however, a symptom of several things at once. He represents the intellectual who serves power unquestioningly; the greater the power, the fewer doubts he has. He is a man of vanity who has no compassion, no demonstrable awareness of human suffering. With no stable principles or values, he is typical of the cynical anti-Arab hawks (like Richard Perle, Paul Wolfowitz, and Donald Rumsfeld) who dot the Bush administration like flies on a cake.

British imperialism, Israel’s brutal occupation policies, or American arrogance do not detain him for a moment. Worst of all, he is a man of pretension and superficiality, flattering himself on his reasonableness even as he condemns his own people to more travail and more dislocation. Woe to Iraq!—Copyright 2002, Edward W. Said.

Concluded

I HAD the dream again last night. This time, it was about Orthodox Jews who were praying at the Tomb of the Patriarchs, ambushed in a narrow alley on their way back to their one-square-block ‘settlement’ in the middle of Hebron city Twelve Israelis are killed, mostly from the military escort that goes with them almost everywhere in Hebron.

That settlement was actually removed after the Israeli-Palestinian Peace Treaty of 1996, but in my dream it is still there today, and there is no Palestinian state. Israeli are still all over what we used to call the Gaza Strip and the West Bank, and their gunships are firing rockets into Gaza City in revenge for the Hebron attack. The whole Middle East is on the brink of war. Crazy, I know, but it comes every night.

I used to have another dream like this a long time ago, only then it was about World War Three. In that dream, John F. Kennedy was assassinated in early 1962, not late 1963, so Lyndon Johnson was already president when they found the Soviet missiles in Cuba. He blew it, of course.

Johnson was the best US president of the past half-century so far as domestic affairs were concerned, but he was unsafe at any speed on foreign affairs. Look what he did with the Vietnam war. Well, he did the same with the Cuban crisis, and the missiles flew, and everybody died. Bad dream, but I haven’t had it for decades now.

Recently, though, I’m having this weird, highly detailed dream in which Yitzhak Rabin was assassinated before the peace treaty with the Palestinians, not afterwards. Do you recall that incident when a Jewish right-wing fanatic was caught with a pistol at one of Rabin’s rallies in November, 1995, long before some of the settlers who were forcibly removed from the West Bank as part of the peace settlement actually shot him down in front of the Knesset in late 96? Well, in my dream, Rabin is killed by the first guy, before the peace was signed.

I knew Rabin a bit, in the way that journalists get to know the politicians they interview, and he clearly understood that he might be killed if he made peace with the Palestinians. Like Michael Collins making a peace with Britain in 1923 that left the Protestant Unionists in control of a quarter of Ireland, he knew that a ‘land for peace’ deal would enrage the no-compromise fanatics, and that they might take revenge by assassinating him.

As they did, both in Collins’s case and in Rabin’s, and it was only the luck of the draw that an ultra-right-wing Jew got Rabin before an Islamic militant from Hamas or one of the other Palestinian rejectionist groups did. The two species of fanatics totally agree that the land between the sea and the Jordan river should never be divided (though not about who should own it).

But I don’t think it ever occurred to Rabin that he might be killed just for talking about a compromise peace, even before he actually made the deal and closed down the settlements. In the dream, that’s exactly what happens — and there is no peace deal. Not then, and not later. It looks at first as if Rabin’s heir, Shimon Peres, will win the election after Rabin’s murder on a sympathy vote, but then Hamas deliberately pushes the Israeli electorate into the arms of the anti-peace candidate, Binyamin (Bibi) Netanyahu, by carrying our a vicious bus-bombing campaign.

Netanyahu stalls for three years, fending off the feeble pressure from some plump and greasy nonentity called Bill Clinton who occupies the White House for most of the 90s. (I forgot to mention that in my dream George Bush, who would never have let Netanyahu get away with it, lost the US election in 1992.) Then in 1999 a well-meaning but clumsy general called Ehud Barak wins power back for Labour in Israel and tries to restart real peace negotiations — but by then Yasser Arafat is even older, sicker, and more indecisive, and Barak’s own coalition cabinet threatens to fall apart every time he offers to trade concessions with the Palestinians.

Eventually his cabinet does fall apart, and the frustrated Palestinians explode into a new uprising that involves regular suicide bombings against Israeli civilians, and the frustrated Israelis elect Ariel Sharon, of all people, to deal with it. (Yes, I know, it’s unthinkable that Israelis would let Sharon near power again after all that he has done. But in the dream, they do.) There’s over 3,000 Palestinians and Israelis dead already, and a new Middle East war coming up.

Crazy, I know, and it’s just not plausible that one man’s premature death could change the world so much. (On the other hand, think what would have happened if Kennedy had died early....) The Middle East of the real world isn’t all that great a place, but at least the terrorism has died down and a couple of Arab countries are experimenting with some sort of democracy. It could be a whole lot worse.

In the dream, it is. And now I can’t wake up.—Copyright

GEORGE W. BUSH, who never set foot outside the US before the Supreme Court appointed him president, is terribly puzzled why any foreigner would be so foolish as to resist his wishes and, presumably, hate America too.

(The New York Times with unintended hilarity described his first “overseas trip” after taking office — to Mexico and Canada.) The White House has gotten into the lazy habit of labelling any opposition as “anti-American,” even when the opponents are US Senators.

The fact that a superpower’s president could be so clueless is itself an ample illustration of a good reason why so many people around the world are wary of his haughty policies. Unlike his predecessor Bill Clinton, who had his own well publicized imperfections, Bush junior gives the distinct impression that he would not dream of sharing anyone’s pain unless perhaps they were listed in the social register and wrote him into their will too. Bush surely reflects a considerable chunk of smug, conservative, suburban America, but every country has privileged sections who can afford to live inside a selfish cocoon of ignorance about the rest of the planet.

In the 1982 movie “Missing” an American embassy official tells a father searching for his son lost in the 1973 Chilean coup, which the Nixon administration had plotted, that “American interests are your interests” even when sordid things are done to serve them. Yet there is little evidence that ordinary Americans, given the choice, would trade blood for oil or fight for the right to exploit other nations. Those choices are made by foreign policy elites who usually are well insulated from public scrutiny or influence. It is rather difficult to argue that anyone but an influential minority relies on exploitation to gain higher living standards. In the 1980s, for example, America went on a debt-fuelled spending spree that relatively few enjoyed but which everyone, except the increasingly tax-exempt rich, eventually paid for. That is how it works in most nations.

American pop culture — music, movies, and clothes — is avidly devoured and imitated everywhere. The same fellows who speak critically against US foreign policy in the morning will by afternoon be queuing up at the American embassy for a visa for their sons or daughters or for themselves. In fact, a screenwriter of “Missing” told one of us that when he visited besieged Nicaragua in the mid-1980s people cursed Reagan’s Contras in one breath and, in the next, bragged about a local baseball player who was now a national hero playing in the American professional leagues.

To the degree it exists, anti-Americanism is a predictable product of the sheer strength of a superpower sending phalanxes of military and business people — like European colonialists did before them — whose vaunted sense of superiority and ignorance form an unpleasant combination. There is always resentment invited by those arrogant beings who refuse even to attempt to understand what others say and feel about them. Think of certain western government officials or business executives one has witnessed behaving like medieval satraps in Third World countries. It happens at home too. It was said of an imperious Pakistani politician not long ago that “the way he walks creates a few more opponents.”

When Churchill gave the famous Fulton, Missouri, speech in 1946 he warned that a communist “iron curtain” was being descending and so the US needed to take up the imperial mantle that weak post-war European powers let slip. Among the many seamy things America inherited at the time — in this case from the French — were a key role in illegal drug production in Indochina to bankroll local rightist allies. For similar reasons, drug trafficking in Latin America and Afghanistan were stoked by American secret agencies. The Afghan tribal leaders got an amnesty for exporting heroin because they obediently played the American game against the Soviets. (There is little doubt that ISI funnelled money to sympathetic tribal drug lords too.)

This ignoble trend goes way back. Several Kuomintang generals expelled from China by Mao Zedong in 1949 fled to Burma and paid their military forces with earnings from heroin production in what became the Golden Triangle. The CIA obligingly provided transport for drug distribution in order to keep these rugged forces in the field against the spectre of international communism. This was considered more important than choking off drug flow into American cities. Would common Americans have agreed with these priorities, if given the chance?

The American Marshall Plan to rebuild Europe after the Second World War was a brilliant exercise in enlightened self-interest, creating secure allies and prosperous trading partners. The American images abroad still ranges from smiling GIs liberating the world from fascism in the 1940s to the post-war visage of “The Quiet American,” — the classic in which Graham Greene acidly portrayed America as a clumsy, idealistic meddler in other people’s affairs. What brings that novel to mind is the spectacle of American officials today stoutly maintaining their pose as innocent parties despite wholesale interference in other societies in ways that create more troubles than they solve.

Americans condemn the Khmer Rouge reign of terror in Cambodia without any inkling of the role that “secret” massive B-52 carpet bombings exerted in bringing that crazy vicious regime to power. Nor do most Americans realize that their government backed Pol Pot, the mass murderer, and sought to punish the Vietnamese for ousting him in 1979. A country where such things can be kept secret for years is not as free and open as it pretends to be.

Americans often know nothing about the history of American collusion with vicious tyrannies in Indonesia, Chile, Vietnam and elsewhere, or that it supported oil region dictatorships. American officials pretend that the fiery fundamentalist movements merely sprouted and flowered naturally out of the evil soil of their homelands, rather than admit their own role in promoting them as alternatives to secular but leftist groups. The Bali bombing too raises the uncomfortable question of deep ties between the once US-backed Indonesian military and Muslim fundamentalists.

How would the US or Britain react if they were the victims of incessant interventions orchestrated by agencies in distant countries? The almost flippant way Washington goes about denouncing the “enemy of the day” while coddling corrupt but compliant dictators is not a particularly endearing trait. The people are the ones who suffer. Osama bin Laden, Saddam Hussein and Manuel Noriega served American interests extremely well before they fell foul of the capricious dictates and interests of Washington. They still serve American establishment interests today wonderfully well by offering useful images of implacable irrational anti-Americanism in the mysterious Third World — a virulent force whose origins and motives only an amateur theologian can appreciate and which must be stamped out.

The impetuous American labelling of foes as evil, whether the Soviets in the 1980s or Iraqis in the 1990s (switching places), is of course a venerable propaganda ploy to whip up domestic support. Few nationalities, if any, can resist depicting their opponents as degenerate, insane and damned. George Bush, Attorney-General John Ashcroft and several other administration figures more worrisomely talk this way because they are born-again Christians too. Yet the Taliban also felt that everything they did not like was evil. Exactly what is the difference between the two kinds of fundamentalists? Why endorse either brand?

The immigrant intelligentsia exerts a potent influence on America. The Nicaraguan exiles stoked the Contra war, the right-wing Miami Cubans feed the anti-Castro crusade, and the Iraqi Congress backs the rash venture against Saddam Hussein. These savvy opportunists bend the agenda because they gain highly receptive ears in higher American circles. Many American Jews seem to believe that in order for Israel to survive, the United States should not look too closely and critically at its policies. The US often took the wrong side. The Irish pressures helped Clinton strike a vital phase in advancing the cause of a just settlement in Northern Ireland.

Bush’s tiresome and disingenuous mantra is true that “they hate our freedom,” if by that he means the freedom of his bellicose administration to do whatever it wants. “We will not hesitate to act alone, to exercise our right to self-defence by acting preemptively against terrorists,” Bush ominously vows. But against which brands of terrorists? “Apparently Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein are terrorists who matter,” Salman Rushdie dryly observed. “Hindu fanatics [in Gujarat] and Kashmiri killers aren’t. This double standard makes enemies.” According to a CBS poll, Americans, despite being bombarded by truculent government propaganda, are split down the middle over this new and dangerous “right” of preemptive strikes, which is a good sign.

At a massive London anti-war demonstration on September 28, former US marine colonel and nuclear weapons inspector Scott Ritter scolded the few people there carrying signs inscribed with anti-American, rather than anti-Bush, messages: “Shame on you.” Ritter, a brave American voice of dissent, sensibly told the crowd: “We are against the administration of George W. Bush, not against the American people. The American people can be your ally, if you let them.”

Anti-Americanism ultimately sanitizes and excuses: it lets American administrations off the hook for its questionable activities and shields it from answering to anyone. If there were no anti-Americanism, the Bush administration would invent it, as it invents so much else.